RWBY Thread III: Time To Say Goodbye

[kokuenDG]

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.

 

[Zam]

It's not the weirdest set of props for musicians.

Consider the wrecking ball...

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That's for music videos though, and the singer... I think I took a joke too seriously here?

 

[Claudette Savagely]

Only the audience has to rely on coding, which is what coding is for. Characters in-universe are already familiar with the subjects at hand. Yang makes it clear that she knows who Junior is and what sort of business he's into.

Or did you want them to fit a complete recitation of the the criminal record of everyone there in a five minute short? The whole point of a trailer is to communicate as much as possible visually to save time.



With hatchets? When someone calls their guitar an ax, that's not what they mean.

A hatchet isn't even a real weapon. It's a woodcutting tool. The only reason to be using it as a weapon, especially in a modern urban environment, is because you aren't allowed to have access to real weapons, which is why they're associated with criminal gangs like the Triads in the first place, as a way to get around restrictions on weapons possession.

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Looking bad isn't actually justification for starting a fight, though.

Like, taking things at face value and utilising coding as heavily as the above post can also reasonably paint Yang as the sexually molesting red eyed sucker-punching vastly superior aggressor, which is what has people up in arms to begin with.

Your own approach produces multiple outcomes in the form of different working conclusions. I am at a loss to explain why you seemingly haven't noticed this, much less acknowledged that this isn't invalid just because people disagree with you about something you may or may not like (I don't know your tastes and they're as likely to be unobjectionable as not so whatever, I'm not your mother).

 

[Mook]

Apparently not allowing visual associations and similar tropic preconceived notions to dominate one's view of a work, much less applying any sort of moral framework to the actions of its characters, is "selective viewing" and "choosing not to understand something" and "overthinking".

I'm a little amused, but not surprised that "acting shady" and "dressing wrong" and "looking like a bad guy" does in fact justify being attacked without provocation in the plot or other setup for the benefit of the audience, and I think this ties into something rather interesting but ultimately unknowable except by inference.

To what extent does fiction affect our lives? Does a strong reliance on visual coding subtly and unintentionally prime us to associate modes of dress outside of the respectable with criminality? Does that linkage in turn make it easier to dehumanise characters engaged in criminal activity in other work? Perhaps this turn makes it easier to prejudge people in real life, especially if these visual associations are drawn from real modes of dress deemed less respectable?

We are, in no small part, what we consume, and fiction is food for thought.

E: edited several times for content, grammar, spelling

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Cut the crap will you. If you want to have a argument about whether or not being a violent criminal that robs helpless old men at gunpoint means you deserve to be beaten up by a vigilante then by all means let's have that argument. But don't give us this crap about how you're doing some deep analysis by pretending that the Yellow trailer exists in a vacuum (except when it suits you that it doesn't) and that there's some deeper flaw in people for recognizing obvious bad guys as being obvious bad guys.

The Yellow Trailer used "coding" to indicate that Junior and his goons were criminals but the Yellow Trailer is not a standalone work. Again the episode that follows directly afterwards confirms what anyone with eyes and a brain already knew, that the obvious goons were in fact obvious goons. Yang's willingness to fight them should be viewed in the light of that, rather than making up some arbitrary conclusion about them all being innocent little babies (with machine guns and axes) in order to swell ones own sense of self importance.

 

[Vindictus]

I think I took a joke too seriously here?

Click to shrink...

You may have.

Like, nobody is saying it wasn't obviously a mob bar. The question is whether we consider 'They were in the mob' as sufficient justification to beat them up for shiggles.

You can compare the situation to Batman roughing up mobsters for information all day, but the thing is, this wasn't actually roughing them up for information after they refused to talk; It was pre-emptive CBT, followed by beating the crap out of them as stress relief after getting the answer.

 

[Claudette Savagely]

Cut the crap will you. If you want to have a argument about whether or not being a violent criminal that robs helpless old men at gunpoint means you deserve to be beaten up by a vigilante then by all means let's have that argument. But don't give us this crap about how you're doing some deep analysis by pretending that the Yellow trailer exists in a vacuum (except when it suits you that it doesn't) and that there's some deeper flaw in people for recognizing obvious bad guys as being obvious bad guys.

The Yellow Trailer used "coding" to indicate that Junior and his goons were criminals but the Yellow Trailer is not a standalone work. Again the episode that follows directly afterwards confirms what anyone with eyes and a brain already knew, that the obvious goons were in fact obvious goons. Yang's willingness to fight them should be viewed in the light of that, rather than making up some arbitrary conclusion about them all being innocent little babies (with machine guns and axes) in order to swell ones own sense of self importance.

Click to shrink...

When I first watched it, it certainly did exist "in a vacuum" for me, which is to say without reference to prior material from the same project. I didn't know anything about the show or its world or its cast, and the show wasn't out yet.

(also armed robbery is not unarguably just as bad or worse than actually attacking many people without provocation but I'm not here to engage your likely firm moral certainties so think what you like I guess?)

It is, however, odd that you're presenting the "act" of not sharing your assumptions about interpreting media as a self-important and disingenuous one, because that basically massively reduces the likelihood that any given interlocutor will want to continue talking with you.

I'm not judging you as a person for
liking the show, to be clear.

Edit: at this juncture, I'm not judging you as a person at all.

 

[The Narrator]

Looking bad isn't actually justification for starting a fight, though.

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Are you actually reading other people's posts?

I just said:

Yang makes it clear that she knows who Junior is and what sort of business he's into.

Click to shrink...

Deliberately disregarding how visual storytelling works while discussing a visual medium does not somehow make you smarter than everyone who understands how visual cues in filmmaking work.

There could certainly be room for a discussion of whether Yang's actions are justified (in the real world they would not be, but action movies do not operate on real-world logic... but you're not wrong that if the creators were trying to make this fight seem like it's not Yang's fault then they went about it poorly), but claiming that we don't know that she's fighting mobsters is pure poppycock.

Like, nobody is saying it wasn't obviously a mob bar.

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That appears to be exactly what Claudette is arguing. That the audience somehow has no way of knowing that these are bad guys and would reasonably think that Yang was just attacking random club-goers.

 

[Zam]

Looking bad isn't actually justification for starting a fight, though.

Like, taking things at face value and utilising coding as heavily as the above post can also reasonably paint Yang as the sexually molesting red eyed sucker-punching vastly superior aggressor, which is what has people up in arms to begin with.

Your own approach produces multiple outcomes in the form of different working conclusions, and I am at a loss to explain why you seemingly haven't noticed this, much less acknowledged that this isn't invalid just because people disagree with you about something you may or may not like (I don't know your tastes and they're as likely to be unobjectionable as not so whatever, I'm not your mother).

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Except as has been noted repeatedly its way more than looking bad and Yang clearly went in there well informed as to who Junior was and what he did and that he and his goons were, ya know, criminals.

Again, its a threat, not sexual.

You may have.

Like, nobody is saying it wasn't obviously a mob bar. The question is whether we consider 'They were in the mob' as sufficient justification to beat them up for shiggles.

You can compare the situation to Batman roughing up mobsters for information all day, but the thing is, this wasn't actually roughing them up for information after they refused to talk; It was pre-emptive CBT, followed by beating the crap out of them as stress relief after getting the answer.

Click to shrink...

Again, Junior did threaten Yang, so it likely wasn't just for shiggles but to drive home that seeking to deliver reprisal was a bad idea, plus, ya know, beating up mobsters is kind of a freebie in most series XD

I saw no elements of stress relief.

When I first watched it, it certainly did exist "in a vacuum" for me, which is to say without reference to prior material from the same project. I didn't know anything about the show or its world or its cast, and the show wasn't out yet.

(also armed robbery is not unarguably just as bad or worse than actually attacking many people without provocation but I'm not here to engage your likely firm moral certainties so think what you like I guess?)

It is, however, odd that you're presenting the "act" of not sharing your assumptions about interpreting media as a self-important and disingenuous one, because that basically massively reduces the likelihood that any given interlocutor will want to continue talking with you.

I'm not judging you as a person for
liking the show, to be clear.

Edit: at this juncture, I'm not judging you as a person at all.

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So like how Blake decided to commit crimes existed in a vacuum? Also there were three trailers leading up to it as noted so it didn't exist in isolation regardless. Each of the color theme characters got into fights with something menacing and dangerous and won and its framed as a triumph, the girl from the red trailer who fought wolf monsters is on friendly terms with the yellow girl who beat up some mobsters who just like the girl from the black trailer, started a fight over being attacked. Which all comes together to imply the red, white, black and yellow trailer girls are all allies of some form and given series rarely side with the villains and the only two who could be considered remotely villainous (if one largely ignores context, scene building, ETC) are, in one case, allied with the first girl, means they are going to be heroes.

Also its late so I will likely not respond for another... I don't know, nine hours? Sorry, busy morning.

 

[Claudette Savagely]

Are you actually reading other people's posts?

I just said:


Deliberately disregarding how visual storytelling works while discussing a visual medium does not somehow make you smarter than everyone who understands how visual cues in filmmaking work.

There could certainly be room for a discussion of whether Yang's actions are justified (in the real world they would not be, but action movies do not operate on real-world logic... but you're not wrong that if the creators were trying to make this fight seem like it's not Yang's fault then they went about it poorly), but claiming that we don't know that she's fighting mobsters is pure poppycock.



That appears to be exactly what Claudette is arguing. That the audience somehow has no way of knowing that these are bad guys and would reasonably think that Yang was just attacking random club-goers.

Click to shrink...

Oh dear, old chap.

What I'm saying is this.

Why does looking like a mobster mean you are a mobster who must be beaten right now without provocation?

Why does beating someone who looks like a mobster and quite likely is a mobster place said beating beyond moral considerations?

Why do visual totems trump thinking about depicted events?

These are the points of mine that are of any moment; address them if you want idk

Also
>grabbing someone's genitals can't be both sexual and threatening

What is sexual violence for 500, Alex?

 

[Squirtodyle]

Again, its a threat, not sexual.

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If Junior had been a woman and Yang grabbed this hypothetical female Junior by the breasts and squeezed hard enough to hurt, would that be considered sexual assault?

 

[Vindictus]

That appears to be exactly what Claudette is arguing. That the audience somehow has no way of knowing that these are bad guys and would reasonably think that Yang was just attacking random club-goers.

Click to shrink...

The issue is not whether or not the people at the bar hit some criteria of 'being bad' or not.

The issue is why violence ensued.

Was it instigated by the mobsters? Well, no. It was instigated by Yang. Then, after the mobsters de-escalated, she re-escalated it right back up.

Well, surely she had some reason for initiating violence? Uh.. Well, again, no. She didn't ask for information, get rebuffed, then turn to intimidation; She started off with an unprovoked assault and demand for information, immediately got the information, and then turned around and escalated further- For no more apparent reason than because she enjoyed the violence.

Like, I'm surprised that I have to explain that there are contextual differences between how people interpret 'Roughing up thugs to stop them from shooting a shopkeeper,' 'Roughing up thugs to gather information,' and 'Roughing up thugs because you think it's fun.'

 

[Nicholai]

Cut the crap will you. If you want to have a argument about whether or not being a violent criminal that robs helpless old men at gunpoint means you deserve to be beaten up by a vigilante then by all means let's have that argument. But don't give us this crap about how you're doing some deep analysis by pretending that the Yellow trailer exists in a vacuum (except when it suits you that it doesn't) and that there's some deeper flaw in people for recognizing obvious bad guys as being obvious bad guys.

The Yellow Trailer used "coding" to indicate that Junior and his goons were criminals but the Yellow Trailer is not a standalone work. Again the episode that follows directly afterwards confirms what anyone with eyes and a brain already knew, that the obvious goons were in fact obvious goons. Yang's willingness to fight them should be viewed in the light of that, rather than making up some arbitrary conclusion about them all being innocent little babies (with machine guns and axes) in order to swell ones own sense of self importance.

Click to shrink...

Um, you do realize you're using evidence that happened after the Yellow trailer in support of Yang fighting the goons in the Yellow trailer, right? Episode one, which you have linked above, came out a month later.

That said, I do think the discussion about "coding" is worth having. It is especially important when you're dealing with media that is forced to be what I would call "information dense." RWBY Volume 1 had a total run time of 120 minutes according to IMDB. The staff just didn't have the time to go into great detail about everything. Thus they use coding.

Note you see similar things in, just for example, the Harry Potter films. Transferring from books to film means the team behind the film had new options to convey detail. For example Harry's introduction to Diagon Alley in the book has a lot of description. In the film it has a few minutes - but wait! They cram as much into those minutes as they can. Storefronts displaying things, people talking in the background about brooms, and so on.

 

[The Narrator]

Why does looking like a mobster mean you are a mobster who must be beaten right now without provocation?

Why does beating someone who looks like a mobster and quite likely is a mobster place said beating beyond moral considerations?

Why do visual totems trump thinking about depicted events?

These are the points of mine that are of any moment; address them if you want idk

Click to shrink...

Do you understand the difference between a movie and real life? Why movies have to communicate through visual shorthand because they can't lay out an entire lifetime's worth of context that people have available to them in reality?

You seem to be trying to forge some kind of link between recognizing how a movie depicts someone as a villain and real-life profiling. That's an interesting social issue to examine with a long history, but it's not relevant to the current discussion. Unless they're exceedingly oblivious, the audience is aware through common storytelling shorthand that these are mobsters and the character makes it clear through insinuation that she knows by other means that these are mobsters. Building an argument on feigning ignorance of their mobster status is dishonest.


Interpreting visual cues is a crucial part of thinking about any work in a visual medium. Trying to examine a work without any regard to visual storytelling is excluding a huge amount of the available information. Deciding to do so doesn't mean that you're thinking more deeply than everyone else. It means that you're ignoring relevant facts while building your argument.


The scene's not without its issues. Without more information on Yang's motivations, we're not really given a good reason to understand why she's resorting to such extreme measures. Action stories, especially stories about vigilantes, operate on a someone more ambiguous moral framework than real life does and audiences will accept a lot from a protagonist that they wouldn't from a real person, but we're not really given any ends to justify these means. She didn't come here to shut down this mob operation or make them pay for their wrongdoing. She came for information and used dubious methods that basically achieved nothing. It would have been better structured from a storytelling standpoint to have the mobsters be the ones who escalated things; she could still be a little too eager to give them the fight that they're itching for while still being in a position where it seemed that a fight was inevitable.

 

[Mook]

Um, you do realize you're using evidence that happened after the Yellow trailer in support of Yang fighting the goons in the Yellow trailer, right? Episode one, which you have linked above, came out a month later.

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Yes. Because its part of the same series. It does not exist in a vacuum.






Oh no! This comic strip doesn't give a explanation for why those orcs are chasing the heroes and the next strip didn't come out until weeks/months later! That must mean that those orcs literally have no reason for chasing the heroes! Nevermind that we can easily infer that there is a reason and that we're later given that reason because if at one point it was unconfirmed then we should treat it as being unconfirmed forever afterwards because that's artsy and context is for losers.


The whole reason this whole stupid argument even exists is because the people behind the dumb as fuck "Yang is a psychopath" argument try to either act like the Yellow trailer is the only time she ever appeared in RWBY or that every thing that happens in RWBY that contradicts that dumb as fuck theory doesn't exist. So stop trying to pretend that the freely available scene that you can see just a few minutes later these days while binge-watching where one of the guys coded as a criminal commits a clearly criminal act is not somehow relevant to discussions about whether or not those guys were coded as criminals.

That said, I do think the discussion about "coding" is worth having. It is especially important when you're dealing with media that is forced to be what I would call "information dense." RWBY Volume 1 had a total run time of 120 minutes according to IMDB. The staff just didn't have the time to go into great detail about everything. Thus they use coding.

Note you see similar things in, just for example, the Harry Potter films. Transferring from books to film means the team behind the film had new options to convey detail. For example Harry's introduction to Diagon Alley in the book has a lot of description. In the film it has a few minutes - but wait! They cram as much into those minutes as they can. Storefronts displaying things, people talking in the background about brooms, and so on.

Click to shrink...

Uh, yes. Exactly. Unless you're actually conceding the point I don't really get where you're going with this. RWBY is indeed a visual and auditory medium that's frequently strapped for run-time so visual and audio cues are used to help tell the story and are just as important as explicit exposition.

Or are you trying to argue that RWBY should have had more details like the million dollar budget Harry Potter movies? Cause uh, details are just as time consuming as just adding exposition or run-time. More so in many cases. That's why the first volume is so bare aside from the actually important details/people and even then there's still plenty of set up in the details. Such as the run down/shady looking neighborhood that Junior's bar is located which @Zam pointed out earlier.

 

[VolantRedX]

Ok again for the people in the back: RWBY IS AN ACTION CARTOON. EVERYTHING IN THE SHOW REVOLVES AROUND THAT CORE CONCEPT. IF A CHARACTER ENTERS A LOCATION GETS WHAT THEY WANT AND THEN LEAVES THIS FAILS TO ACHIEVE THE CORE END OF ACTION. SO A FIGHT HAS TO BREAK OUT FOR THE SAKE OF ACTION.

Fuck people how is this a hard concept to grasp. Like this is what I mean when I say you people are over thinking this. All that matters is that Character A enters a location and starts a fight to show off the character's fighting style. It's a simple action cartoon dealing with a simple concept of "teen girls fight monsters and criminals." You're not supposed to care who these people are or why the fight broke out. You know the guys are bad guys for the same reason you know the people Batman beats up are bad guys. Because he's the hero and he fights bad guys. Same here, you're supposed to recognize Yang as a hero due to the central conceit of the show and thus understand that the people she's fighting are the bad guys. Stop trying to dig deeper. It's not this deep concept that needs to be explored from all angles.

 

[Sworl]

One might say that this draws into question the character of a great many action show/comic/manga/film/saga protagonists, and might further beg the question as to whether or not they are good people (in as much as a fictional construct can be considered a person).

Perhaps it should.

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I hope not.
Genre conventions aside, Whataboutism is already way too prevalent in this Trumpian era.

Also all this talk about the Goddamn Batman makes me picture Yang acting like Duff Man (assuming anyone still remembers/watched that Simpsons episode) and asking herself what would Jesus (Batman) do, when ever she faces a moral quandary.

 

[Richardson]

Controversial Opinion Time:

It is entirely possible for 'someone on the side of good' to go too far. Actions are not just a binary good/evil. However, it is entirely possible to go too far. Yang getting into a fight is tolerable and acceptable by the genre conventions, Yang sexually harassing Junior by literally twisting his balls was not when she had other means of persuasion.

Let's not kid ourselves, before Yang's future issues we're violently and permenantly dis-armed, she was on track to become someone in the same general vein of her mother, the raider scumbag chief. Raven didn't start out as a darwinist murderous scumbag either, Tai once found her to be someone outstanding enough to bang like the fourth of July. But Yang has changed. Perhaps not enough, perhaps more than we think. However, it is entirely possible to look at the Yellow Trailer and say, "What a bitch" while looking at end of Vol. 5 Yang and see someone who has committed to being a good guy, and working towards unfucking herself after getting a concentrated dose of Total Perspective Vortex and seeing her mother for the violent bitch she truly is.

 

[Claudette Savagely]

Do you understand the difference between a movie and real life? Why movies have to communicate through visual shorthand because they can't lay out an entire lifetime's worth of context that people have available to them in reality?

You seem to be trying to forge some kind of link between recognizing how a movie depicts someone as a villain and real-life profiling. That's an interesting social issue to examine with a long history, but it's not relevant to the current discussion. Unless they're exceedingly oblivious, the audience is aware through common storytelling shorthand that these are mobsters and the character makes it clear through insinuation that she knows by other means that these are mobsters. Building an argument on feigning ignorance of their mobster status is dishonest.


Interpreting visual cues is a crucial part of thinking about any work in a visual medium. Trying to examine a work without any regard to visual storytelling is excluding a huge amount of the available information. Deciding to do so doesn't mean that you're thinking more deeply than everyone else. It means that you're ignoring relevant facts while building your argument.


The scene's not without its issues. Without more information on Yang's motivations, we're not really given a good reason to understand why she's resorting to such extreme measures. Action stories, especially stories about vigilantes, operate on a someone more ambiguous moral framework than real life does and audiences will accept a lot from a protagonist that they wouldn't from a real person, but we're not really given any ends to justify these means. She didn't come here to shut down this mob operation or make them pay for their wrongdoing. She came for information and used dubious methods that basically achieved nothing. It would have been better structured from a storytelling standpoint to have the mobsters be the ones who escalated things; she could still be a little too eager to give them the fight that they're itching for while still being in a position where it seemed that a fight was inevitable.

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You keep saying words to the effect that they look like mobsters as if that on its own means anything with respect to questions of force. When the series started it turned out they were incontrovertibly organised crime. That's as may be. You still haven't suggested why that makes them fair game for an unprovoked beating from someone who they cannot physically harm, and moreover why questioning this idea is bad or dishonest or whatever. Is it the case that you take the connotations of their appearance at face value to such a degree that you've categorised them as acceptable targets of violence irrespective of who starts it and how?

I'll repeat myself so you can answer the question this time: Why does beating someone who looks like a mobster and quite likely is a mobster place said beating beyond moral considerations?

This is only one of four points in the post you quoted, but let's assume you missed it. Now that it's been singled out, are you willing to answer it?

I hope not.
Genre conventions aside, Whataboutism is already way too prevalent in this Trumpian era.

Also all this talk about the Goddamn Batman makes me picture Yang acting like Duff Man (assuming anyone still remembers/watched that Simpsons episode) and asking herself what would Jesus (Batman) do, when ever she faces a moral quandary.

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Extending a question to cover other things that are exactly the same as the first thing is not whataboutism, it's...extending the question.

Is the collective position of however many people insist that this is totally fine and can't make Yang look bad, that, "it's an action Thing and it doesn't matter what they've done in this scene, they're Bad so they can be hurt without a qualm"?

 

[Nicholai]

Yes. Because its part of the same series. It does not exist in a vacuum.

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Mook, you are being willfully oblivious to the point that myself and others are making.

Something not existing in a vacuum means looking at it through the lens of the genre it belongs to. So things like in, say, Batman comics / cartoons / movies villains and criminals getting beat up is a thing you should expect. In the MCU someone in an Iron Man suit getting shot out of the sky can survive when in reality they'd be shattered on hitting the ground (assuming the impact of whatever hit them didn't kill them outright.)

Great!

That's not what you are doing in the example of the mooks holding up the Dust shop. What you are doing is using evidence that had not happened at that point as retroactive evidence in support of your position.

Also note you appear to be utterly failing to get my point in the latter half of my post. I was agreeing that coding is important and is something that should be considered. That's not "conceding an argument" as you seem to want to make me do. That's agreeing that the point is worth looking into.

Ok again for the people in the back: RWBY IS AN ACTION CARTOON. EVERYTHING IN THE SHOW REVOLVES AROUND THAT CORE CONCEPT. IF A CHARACTER ENTERS A LOCATION GETS WHAT THEY WANT AND THEN LEAVES THIS FAILS TO ACHIEVE THE CORE END OF ACTION. SO A FIGHT HAS TO BREAK OUT FOR THE SAKE OF ACTION.

Fuck people how is this a hard concept to grasp. Like this is what I mean when I say you people are over thinking this. All that matters is that Character A enters a location and starts a fight to show off the character's fighting style. It's a simple action cartoon dealing with a simple concept of "teen girls fight monsters and criminals." You're not supposed to care who these people are or why the fight broke out. You know the guys are bad guys for the same reason you know the people Batman beats up are bad guys. Because he's the hero and he fights bad guys. Same here, you're supposed to recognize Yang as a hero due to the central conceit of the show and thus understand that the people she's fighting are the bad guys. Stop trying to dig deeper. It's not this deep concept that needs to be explored from all angles.

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Yep, for the people in back - you're missing the point.

Note, to be totally fair and honest, that I don't believe in the "Yang is a psychopath" argument. I think she, like many other young people, makes mistakes. The thing with the laser pointer was incredibly insensitive given how important race relations are to Blake. Do I think Yang meant it that way? No. I think Yang, like so many other young people, didn't stop to think because young people can be idiots.

That said, consider the goal of the scene. The writers wanted to intoduce Yang, give her a fight, and in general try to build hype for their upcoming series. They chose to have a series of events happen that opened them up to the criticism that Yang is overly violent and went looking for a fight.

Why? Because of the sequences of events. As others have pointed out Yang had an opportunity to walk away with her goal of obtaining information achieved. Instead the writers had Yang choose to start a fight that did serious damage to the club. And that was a fight that Yang obviously enjoyed at several points. That opens her up to accusations of being a blood knight who is cruel or wants to harm people. (Again, not my interpretation but it gives that argument evidence.)

But wait! They didn't have to do that! Imagine if they had gone with the same series of events that Batman usually goes through. Specifically something like this:

1. Yang shows up to ask questions.
2. No one is willing to answer questions. In fact their response to Yang even asking is violence.
3. Yang fights her way through the mooks, fights her way through the lieutenants (the twins and arguably the DJ), and then faces down against the criminal boss.
4. Once Junior is defeated or intimidated into surrender he is forced to answer Yang's questions.
5. Information in hand (or certain that the criminals didn't have the information she needed) Yang leaves.

By re-arranging the order of events (fight before answers) Yang looks a lot more reasonable. It also plays out like the kind of "comic book violence" that many people are used to seeing. Thus they will apply the same genre rules to Yang - she is a hero, she went looking for information, she got into a fight. For Bat-Yang this is just another day and she's going to be perceived as a heroic figure.


Now do me a favor. Consider, for a moment, how Batman would handle someone who got violent after getting the answers they went looking for. Let's judge Yang as she appears in the Yellow trailer by the genre you seem to be arguing she belongs to - action cartoons. Point of fact there's a classic example of an overly violent female characters that's fairly well known these days. Anyone who watched the Justice League Unlimited series should be familiar with the character of Huntress. Other heroes were looking into her conduct as a hero - or was that misconduct? She was effectively put on probation and then later thrown out of the League.

Did Huntress behave like a hero most of the time? Sure. Was she dating another hero? The Question, very much so. Did she help out when she got the chance? Absolutely. She even fought to protect the League that had kicked her out! But that doesn't mean her overly violent actions were treated in-media as good things. In fact they were very much treated as bad things which should be discouraged.

Setting Yang up like they did in the Yellow trailer could easily have been the beginning of another Huntress-style character arc. I can absolutely understand why people believed that to be true. The real question here is can you admit that such an interpretation at that point in the media is a valid one? Or are you going to continue insisting that people just shouldn't think about something?

 

[VolantRedX]

That said, consider the goal of the scene. The writers wanted to intoduce Yang, give her a fight, and in general try to build hype for their upcoming series. They chose to have a series of events happen that opened them up to the criticism that Yang is overly violent and went looking for a fight.

Why? Because of the sequences of events. As others have pointed out Yang had an opportunity to walk away with her goal of obtaining information achieved. Instead the writers had Yang choose to start a fight that did serious damage to the club. And that was a fight that Yang obviously enjoyed at several points. That opens her up to accusations of being a blood knight who is cruel or wants to harm people. (Again, not my interpretation but it gives that argument evidence.)

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I mean I'll agree it was poorly scripted, but that's not the debate. Had the intention been to paint Yang as a violent and thuggish brute that'd be one thing, but it is very clearly not. It doesn't take a lot of effort to understand what the goal was. RT was clearly going for a sort of Dragon Ball Z style brawler who relishes a chance at a good fight. Thus they set her in a situation full of targets that the audience is meant to understand are people who deserve what she does to them.

Being pedantic about this issue is just painting people as insufferable blowhards that are looking for any chance to show off how cultured they are by turning this into some larger debate about fiction and real world issues. Fuck that game in the eye socket. There are no broader themes being expressed, no greater message to understand. It's a simple action sequence from a simple action show. No more No less. Can we please move on now?

 

[The Narrator]

You keep saying words to the effect that they look like mobsters as if that on its own means anything with respect to questions of force. When the series started it turned out they were incontrovertibly organised crime. That's as may be. You still haven't suggested why that makes them fair game for an unprovoked beating from someone who they cannot physically harm.

I'll repeat myself so you can answer the question this time: Why does beating someone who looks like a mobster and quite likely is a mobster place said beating beyond moral considerations?

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And you keep trying to apply real-world standards regarding use of force to what's essentially a superhero action movie. The entire conceit of the genre is built on the idea that the protagonist mostly solves problems through violence and the audience doesn't need to feel any concern for the defeated antagonists--most of whom the hero has badly outclassed--as long as they're clearly "bad guys."

Fictional genres don't map very well to real life. Slapstick comedy wouldn't be funny in reality, it would just be painful and dangerous. Dramas are all about everyone making themselves as miserable as possible because they can't cope with their emotions. Romance films are terrible at depicting functional relationships. And action movies don't teach you how to best use force in real life, they create reasons for action scenes to occur.





(Leila, why does the bottom of the screen say that you're viewing this thread? There are spoilers here.)

 

[Claudette Savagely]

I mean I'll agree it was poorly scripted, but that's not the debate. Had the intention been to paint Yang as a violent and thuggish brute that'd be one thing, but it is very clearly not. It doesn't take a lot of effort to understand what the goal was. RT was clearly going for a sort of Dragon Ball Z style brawler who relishes a chance at a good fight. Thus they set her in a situation full of targets that the audience is meant to understand are people who deserve what she does to them.

Being pedantic about this issue is just painting people as insufferable blowhards that are looking for any chance to show off how cultured they are by turning this into some larger debate about fiction and real world issues. Fuck that game in the eye socket. There are no broader themes being expressed, no greater message to understand. It's a simple action sequence from a simple action show. No more No less. Can we please move on now?

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"there is one truth and I decide what it is", isn't grandiose puffery?

Amazing.

 

[VolantRedX]

"there is one truth and I decide what it is", isn't grandiose puffery?

Amazing.

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Or more accurately "there is one truth and reality decides what it is." Like so far most of your posts are claptrap about real world context and violence in media, which has no relevance to this discussion. RWBY is a pretty basic and shallow action cartoon. You trying to assign a ton of messages about the real world to it makes you look a bit pretentious.

 

[Claudette Savagely]

And you keep trying to apply real-world standards regarding use of force to what's essentially a superhero action movie. The entire conceit of the genre is built on the idea that the protagonist mostly solves problems through violence and the audience doesn't need to feel any concern for the defeated antagonists--most of whom the hero has badly outclassed--as long as they're clearly "bad guys."

Fictional genres don't map very well to real life. Slapstick comedy wouldn't be funny in reality, it would just be painful and dangerous. Dramas are all about everyone making themselves as miserable as possible because they can't cope with their emotions. Romance films are terrible at depicting functional relationships. And action movies don't teach you how to best use force in real life, they create reasons for action scenes to occur.





(Leila, why does the bottom of the screen say that you're viewing this thread? There are spoilers here.)

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You've basically answered the question I asked in the affirmative, and that's all I wanted to know.

It's not a gotcha, I just wanted to clarify your position.

Now that you've been kind enough to do that, I'm pretty well satisfied and more than willing to drop the issue.

 

[Sworl]

Extending a question to cover other things that are exactly the same as the first thing is not whataboutism, it's...extending the question.

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I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with you with regard to Yangs actions; I'm saying that what another character from another work of fiction might or might not do under similar circumstances is irrelevant.
And since you didn't specify, I'm do not know what you are 'extending the question to' when you say 'other things that are exactly the same as the first thing'; but Batman of all characters/pop culture icons certainly isn't one of them.

​

 

[Claudette Savagely]

Or more accurately "there is one truth and reality decides what it is." Like so far most of your posts are claptrap about real world context and violence in media, which has no relevance to this discussion. RWBY is a pretty basic and shallow action cartoon. You trying to assign a ton of messages about the real world to it makes you look a bit pretentious.

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Your definition of pretention makes anyone considering creative stuff beyond "wow, sure is pretty/ugly!" pretentious.

I don't know what to say to this lol