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RWBY Thread III: Time To Say Goodbye

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Stop: So gotta few things that need to be said real quick.
  • Staff Post
    • so gotta few things that need to be said real quick.
    We get a lot of reports from this thread. A lot of it is just a series of people yelling at each other over arguments that have been rehashed hundreds of times since the end of the recent Volume. And I get that the last Volume - and RWBY in general, really - has some controversial moments that people will want to discuss, argue about, debate, etc.

    That's fine. We're not going to stop people from doing that, because that's literally what the point of the thread is. However, there's just a point where it gets to be a bit too much, and arguments about whether or not Ironwood was morally justified in his actions in the recent Volume, or if RWBY and her team were in the right for withholding information from Ironwood out of distrust, or whatever flavor of argument of the day descend into insulting other posters, expressing a demeaning attitude towards other's opinions, and just being overall unpleasant. That tends to happen a lot in this thread. We want it to stop happening in this thread.

    So! As of now the thread is in a higher state of moderation. What that means is that any future infractions will result in a weeklong boot from the thread, and repeated offenders will likely be permanently removed. So please, everyone endeavor to actually respect the other's arguments, and even if you strongly disagree with them please stay civil and mindful when it comes to responding to others.

    In addition, users should refrain from talking about off-site users in the thread. Bear in mind that this does not mean that you cannot continue to post tumblr posts, for example, that add onto the discussion in the thread, with the caveat that it's related to RWBY of course. But any objections to offsite users in the thread should be handled via PM, or they'll be treated as thread violations and infracted as such.
     
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  • Staff Post
    • I've made no secret that I don't like Cinder as a villain. I don't find her as interesting as everyone else. But I do think her redemption is potential there, but that it would very much be a Darth Vader sort of redemption. You can make arguments for Emerald being very bad, but she went to find a way out. There was more done to set up that Emerald was at worst evil curious and very much gaslit by Cinder.

    Cinder meanwhile seems to double, triple and quadruple down on her worst impulses. To be fair Salem certainly doesn't help, but it seems to me at least that Cinder gave up on herself as a *good* person a long time ago. All that is left is power and ambition. So far there hasn't been anything in the show to show that she's changed that facet of herself. Maybe that'll change in future volumes but until Cinder shows a willingness in herself to change, then no she can't be redeemed.

    Even if it would be nice to show that you are more than one mistake.
     
    changing topic for a moment
    does anyone recall what each character had in the chibi battle of the bands?
    I recall;
    Yang with a double guitar
    Blake with a triangle
    DJ Penny (DJ PEN3, right?)
    Boy Pop Band with the 4 guys (Jaune, Ren, Sun, Neptune)
     
    GuestLurker said:
    Is it explicitly addressed or just not brought up? I don't recall the exact details.
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    It came up cos they looked for the missing villagers wondering why they didn't come back and then Vegeta gloated about killing them.
    GuestLurker said:
    Some people only count named characters as people, so "a million is a statistic" is driven to the extreme.
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    I'm aware, but its not a good argument when someone tries to play the morality card, especially when they are inconsistent about it, like the rando civilian killed counts as a person but not the randos Roman killed, for 'reasons'.
    gman391 said:
    Cinder meanwhile seems to double, triple and quadruple down on her worst impulses. To be fair Salem certainly doesn't help, but it seems to me at least that Cinder gave up on herself as a *good* person a long time ago. All that is left is power and ambition. So far there hasn't been anything in the show to show that she's changed that facet of herself. Maybe that'll change in future volumes but until Cinder shows a willingness in herself to change, then no she can't be redeemed.
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    This is true, but as noted that's kind of what the post was talking about.

    If Cinder was going to do better she'd need to do it all on her own which is not just scary, but hard to even conceive of when you've mostly been surrounded by evil all your life and only ever told you were worthless or evil. Especially when the only ways out ever presented involved becoming more like one's abusers over less like them. I still can't get the image of Cinder desperately polishing something for Madam and looking to he hopefully for approval while the woman waited to press down on the remote.
     
    Zam said:
    If Cinder was going to do better she'd need to do it all on her own which is not just scary, but hard to even conceive of when you've mostly been surrounded by evil all your life and only ever told you were worthless or evil. Especially when the only ways out ever presented involved becoming more like one's abusers over less like them. I still can't get the image of Cinder desperately polishing something for Madam and looking to he hopefully for approval while the woman waited to press down on the remote.
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    And some people can't get over her shooting Pyrrha in the chest. Not because she needed to, but because Pyrrha had dared to stand up to her. I think in a very real way Cinder uncritically absorbed the core lesson of the Madame and to extent Salem taught

    "The Strong do what they can and the Weak suffer what they must"

    In her desperation to never be *weak* Cinder has very much become the Madam in everyone else's story. Someone who can't be reasoned with, can't be appealed to, only stopped.
     
    gman391 said:
    And some people can't get over her shooting Pyrrha in the chest. Not because she needed to, but because Pyrrha had dared to stand up to her. I think in a very real way Cinder uncritically absorbed the core lesson of the Madame and to extent Salem taught

    "The Strong do what they can and the Weak suffer what they must"

    In her desperation to never be *weak* Cinder has very much become the Madam in everyone else's story. Someone who can't be reasoned with, can't be appealed to, only stopped.
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    Sure, that's fine but I wish they'd admit its a personal grudge over an issue of morality or narrative, lots of villains kill people they didn't need to and get redemption arcs, or at the very least get offered the chance to be better which is all that post was even arguing for.

    Oh Cinder definitely absorbed the core lessons of Madam and Salem, that's kind of her whole deal. She tells it to Madam's face and then later wears heels that make the same sound Madam's did and she's basically roleplaying Salem whenever Salem's not around to remind everyone she's a child playing dress up in mommy's femme fatale outfit.

    Again, no one ever said otherwise? I feel like there's this weird take some people have where they feel emphasizing with or viewing Cinder as a person the way we do other characters is some kind of permission to just let her be shitty, which I've never seen put out there by anyone.
     
    Zam said:
    It came up cos they looked for the missing villagers wondering why they didn't come back and then Vegeta gloated about killing them.
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    Huh, yeah, I did forget that was a thing. Seriously, that's a rare level of asshole.
    Zam said:
    I'm aware, but its not a good argument when someone tries to play the morality card, especially when they are inconsistent about it, like the rando civilian killed counts as a person but not the randos Roman killed, for 'reasons'.
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    Agreed, but that doesn't stop people from pretending like "only main characters matter" is any kind of standard.
    gman391 said:
    In her desperation to never be *weak* Cinder has very much become the Madam in everyone else's story. Someone who can't be reasoned with, can't be appealed to, only stopped.
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    Question is if she'll realize this, and what she would do if she did.
    Zam said:
    Again, no one ever said otherwise? I feel like there's this weird take some people have where they feel emphasizing with or viewing Cinder as a person the way we do other characters is some kind of permission to just let her be shitty, which I've never seen put out there by anyone.
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    I pity her, like one pities a rabid dog. Difference is there is still a slim chance she might still be recovered. If she becomes too much of a threat end her for the safety of everyone else, but giver her the chance to change first.
     
    GuestLurker said:
    Huh, yeah, I did forget that was a thing. Seriously, that's a rare level of asshole.
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    Vegeta had been hovering at that rare level for a long time and wasn't about to stop now XD

    GuestLurker said:
    Agreed, but that doesn't stop people from pretending like "only main characters matter" is any kind of standard.
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    Sure but I don't have to bind myself to their double standard XD

    GuestLurker said:
    I pity her, like one pities a rabid dog. Difference is there is still a slim chance she might still be recovered. If she becomes too much of a threat end her for the safety of everyone else, but giver her the chance to change first.
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    As noted, that's pretty much all the Tumblr posts wanted, yeah Redemption was referenced as a sort of possibly, maybe thing,. but the main thing they want is for Cinder to be treated like a person and not something inherently worthless or monstrous by the main cast.
     
    Zam said:
    Sure, that's fine but I wish they'd admit its a personal grudge over an issue of morality or narrative, lots of villains kill people they didn't need to and get redemption arcs, or at the very least get offered the chance to be better which is all that post was even arguing for.

    Oh Cinder definitely absorbed the core lessons of Madam and Salem, that's kind of her whole deal. She tells it to Madam's face and then later wears heels that make the same sound Madam's did and she's basically roleplaying Salem whenever Salem's not around to remind everyone she's a child playing dress up in mommy's femme fatale outfit.

    Again, no one ever said otherwise? I feel like there's this weird take some people have where they feel emphasizing with or viewing Cinder as a person the way we do other characters is some kind of permission to just let her be shitty, which I've never seen put out there by anyone.
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    Zam, you don't know their life experience. Speaking personally, I've seen more than one rl situation where a person was a complete piece of shit but it was excused because 'they had hard life' or 'but there parents were mean to them' and so on. In that context, well it's not hard to see people going 'but Cinder was sad baby once' as apologism for her current actions and behavior. That doesn't mean it is, but it does mean that it's easy to *perceive* that way. Everyone has baggage, but that doesn't really entitled trying to make other people carry it. Some people are very sensitive to things that remind them of being forced to carry someone else's baggage. Is that the case here? I don't know, but it's something to think about at least.

    I get why you want to push back against CINDER IS AN IRREDEAMBABLE MONSTER position. There is often a very clear double standard that emerges in RWBY regarding both the villains and the heroes that's very frustrating. As villains go, Cinder isn't particularly worse than Punisher, Venom, Deathstroke, Deadshot, or a dozen quasi 'anti hero' male characters that get up to some heinous shit and then get it swept under the rug for the aesthetic. If MAGNETO MASTER OF MAGNETISM can get a redemption arc or...three? I dunno, I haven't paid attention to X-men in years. Then there's nothing that Cinder's done that has pushed her beyond that pale.

    That said, I don't think it particularly likely.
     
    gman391 said:
    Zam, you don't know their life experience. Speaking personally, I've seen more than one rl situation where a person was a complete piece of shit but it was excused because 'they had hard life' or 'but there parents were mean to them' and so on. In that context, well it's not hard to see people going 'but Cinder was sad baby once' as apologism for her current actions and behavior. That doesn't mean it is, but it does mean that it's easy to *perceive* that way. Everyone has baggage, but that doesn't really entitled trying to make other people carry it. Some people are very sensitive to things that remind them of being forced to carry someone else's baggage. Is that the case here? I don't know, but it's something to think about at least.

    I get why you want to push back against CINDER IS AN IRREDEAMBABLE MONSTER position. There is often a very clear double standard that emerges in RWBY regarding both the villains and the heroes that's very frustrating. As villains go, Cinder isn't particularly worse than Punisher, Venom, Deathstroke, Deadshot, or a dozen quasi 'anti hero' male characters that get up to some heinous shit and then get it swept under the rug for the aesthetic. If MAGNETO MASTER OF MAGNETISM can get a redemption arc or...three? I dunno, I haven't paid attention to X-men in years. Then there's nothing that Cinder's done that has pushed her beyond that pale.

    That said, I don't think it particularly likely.
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    Which again, doesn't work when said people shrug off the equally horrible things other villains do be it from this show or other shows. Also again, literally no one, ever, has said anything to the effect of Cinder's backstory vindicating her or meaning others have to suffer for her, the only people who say that are the people who hate Cinder and want to invalidate any reading on her that is more complicated than "Monster". So don't put words in my mouth.

    As. Noted. Multiple. Times. This isn't exclusively even about a redemption arc, please read the things I am saying and respond to those. Though yes, the double standard both just when it comes to RWBY or when comparing her to other villains is annoying, but that's not even the main goal here, I'd be fine not discussing it if people didn't need to shit up every single discussion about Cinder and themes with "She bad. NEED DIE."
     
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    Alright, take five everybody.
    *pulls out a bag of Snickers*
    I think at this point we all need them.
    So everyone grab a snickers, some water, and take a breather at this point.
     
    Do you think we'll ever go back to Vale in the main story? My instinct says no, but I kind of hope they do get a home coming arc all the same.
     
    I feel Glynda being the crown doesn't work very well, like she rarely ever makes choices herself, never really expresses any unique knowledge outside the same stuff everyone on her team knows and no one really listens to her either.
     
    Zam said:
    I feel Glynda being the crown doesn't work very well, like she rarely ever makes choices herself, never really expresses any unique knowledge outside the same stuff everyone on her team knows and no one really listens to her either.
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    And she is not Blue
    plus if she was The Crown Spirit then by jeez this would be the biggest retcon/retroactive fitting this series has ever done, considering that CRWBY weren't even sure if all the Relics would have a Spirit like Jinn up until they were actually getting to that part of the Atlas story.
     
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    GuestLurker said:
    Huh, yeah, I did forget that was a thing. Seriously, that's a rare level of asshole.
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    Vegeta in the Saiyan and Namek saga was an especially awful level of asshole, even Freezer managed to be slightly more sympathetic in that he was willing to enlist anyone regardless of their species or eccentricities as long as they were strong, ruthless and willing to bend the knee to him. (yeah, the bar was that low, and Vegeta didn't even clear it)
    Even his emotional death scene wasn't about how Freezer turned him into a monster or whatnot, but about how he made him and the Saiyans slaves to his empire and then killed them when they got too powerfull to his liking (retconned by Super into Beerus ordering Freezer to do it, but whatever), but from what we saw of the Saiyans as a culture, it was clear that they would had still been the same mass-murdering thugs even without Freezer, and that what Vegeta was really angry about was how Freezer prevented his race from freely being Space Mongols with him at their head.
    The only reason Vegeta didn't immediately fly to take over Freezer's empire after his resurrection (which was completely by accident since he technically counted among the people killed by Freezer and not part of his forces) was because he became obsessed with the Super Saiyan power as he was butthurt that Goku, a low-level Saiyan, could reach it and kick Freezer's ass while he was completely curb-stomped by the sale white and purple gremlin, so he shifted all his efforts to reaching Super Saiyan and then flaunt it in front of Goku to show that he is the superior Saiyan, as it befit for the royalty of their race. (then at some point he and Bulma boned because they were bored r something like that:ninja:)
    Then the androids attacked who kicked his ass, so he shifted his attention to defeat them to prove his superiority, and from here his motivation entirely shifted to defeat the Z Fighters' enemies to prove his superiority to Goku, which gave him fights that scratched that Monkey brain constant itch for combat common on every full-blood Saiyan so in the end he completely forgot what was happening in the rest of the galaxy.
    Which is also why after Goku's sacrifice to kill Cell he just stayed on Earth to live with Bulma an Trunks, because in the end couldn't prove his superiority to Goku and building a space empire lost its appeal to him. And without him realizing he started to actually kind of like the peaceful life on Earth with his family and deep down would be ready to fight to protect it. Which is why he completely lost his shit when Goku came back from the death and actually became stronger (reaching SSJ3), because it slammed his inferiority complex button with the force of a Genkidama and did made him do an introspection... from which he came with all the wrong answers: that his weakness and the turmoil in his soul came from his desire to settle down and that he should excise all of it to become the unrepentant mass-murdered that he was under Freezer because back then he didn't had any doubts about his purpose in life (enjoy the killing and one day kill that pink and purple smug fucker), and thus became ready to do anything (even becoming Badidi' slave) to become stronger and surpass Goku so he could be free of his inferiority complex.
    And it's only at the very end, that he finally came to peace with the realization that being evil doesn't make him happy nor strong, and that he did came to love his family, that he did the first really selfless thing in his life by sacrificing himself to try to kill Buu. (the same thing Goku did without hesitation to save everyone from Cell's kamikaze attack)

    In the end, Vegeta's redemption arc was the polar opposite of Emerald: he wasn't someone who saw the errors of his way then decided to change and took the first opportunity to do it, he was an unrepentant monster who by a several circumstances ended in a peaceful life that made him forget his initial evil motives to shift them toward more "chaotic neutral" ones (prove that I'm superior to Goku) and only saw the errors of his ways and decided to change at the very end, at the moment of truth (which, this being DBZ, happened after several missed moments of truth that were nullified thanks to the Dragon Balls)
    But until the very last part of the Buu saga, Vegeta was treated at best as a circumstantial ally and a wild card, and indeed, how many times the plot could be boiled down to "and then Vegeta threw a tantrum and made the situation worse"?

    To go back to the case of Cinder, a "Vegeta-like" redemption would be her ending stranded somewhere far away from the war between the heroes and Salem, living a normal life for a time because she lost the drive that moved her all of her life, and after a while realizing that she came to like this kind of life and would be ready to fight to protect at least this, even if it means fighting against Salem. (hopefully without intermediary relapses leading to more mass-murders)

    Also, I wonder if one of the reasons Vegeta's heel-face turn is more "accepted" is because by now it's an old story and a well known one, so even people just seriously getting into DB knows that Vegeta will join the good guys in the end, which help forgiving all the horrible shit he does in the first arcs. But if you go back in time when the end of the Namek Saga was released in manga and told a reader that Vegeta will totally be redeemed and join the good guys, you'll probably be met by incredulity.
    Maybe that's what is happening with Cinder: we only see her at her worst (and even at her best/more vulnerable she's awful, except in her flashback), so it's harder to imagine a redemption for her, but in the future with the full picture of the story, it'll be easier to see it.
    Or maybe the writer won't give her a redemption as she continually reject everything on how she was wronged and how it entitles her to all the bad things she does, as a lesson that you are more than your upbringing and that it doesn't excuse everything, only time will tell.
     
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    Zam said:
    Oh this is fun: (Works for Haven too, given it was only a haven for some, not for all)

    View: https://maswartz.tumblr.com/post/676847669882339328/
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    So instead of Shade providing shelter. They would just leave the Atlas kingdom refugees to their fate? Since their seems to be a lot of revanchism in the academy against Atlas and Vale that some students where happy that Beacon fell. The headmaster himself had to step in and stomp out any kind of talk like that in his academy.

    So I hate to see their reaction when they learned that the nation that took a major part in turning their country into an ecological hellhole was destroyed.

    Doubts they would put much difference if they where from Mantle or Atlas since it was during Mantle Kingdom period that destroyed their Oasis kingdom.
     
    Adding to that, I don't think RWBY and Co will trust Theodore's words because they've been through three Headmasters who had betrayed their trust in some way. Even with Ozpin returning, they still had to deal with Ironwood's shit, especially since it led to this exact situation.

    "But CFVY and SSSN can vouch for Theodore."

    Like how Winter and Penny vouched for Ironwood?
     

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    It's nice but I think that if Cinder is to get redeemed she'd have to utterly loose and have nothing to fall back on. Even in Atlas she had the possibility that being cruel would help and the finale seemed to validate that. Falling even farther and loosing everything would in my opinion be what's needed to break her delusions
     
    If Cinder is redeemed I don't doubt that her life would be living alone as a hermit and chased by numerous "you have killed my ___ prepare to die" type people throughout her life till someone gets lucky.
     
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