I think the problem is really that RWBY is so fundamentally disingenuous in its own approach to storytelling that bad faith arguments are the only way to defend it. Which definitely puts people attempting to defend it in an unfortunate position on a site with SV's moderation policies.
Oh boy, if we're actually going to do this, let's do this. I mean, you had backed down yesterday, but I guess given the infractions against the parties who previously fought you to that position, the shooting war has started again.
No. While others may have devolved into insults, your arguments were the ones that were made in bad faith. In fact, given that the mod who made the ruling has been a frequent poster in your thread, and given their comment at the end of their ruling, their extremely one sided punishment (ignoring the post where you called
@Mook a 'pathetic liar,' for instance), looks somewhat biased. Let's take a more in depth look at one of your previous posts.
Your candle metaphor is lost on me. But sure! As a show of good faith, I will entertain the possibility that I'm completely off base with my reading of Yang. Based on your recent posts, I think that you legitimately believe that I'm arguing in bad faith, and so I'm willing to entertain the possibility that we've both badly misjudged each other.
And, as a further show of the same, I will respond to the above refutations and explain why I don't find them convincing, even though - like I said - I've already done it repeatedly in my own thread, and I doubt anyone is going to convince anyone else at this point.
A good start if a little condescending. An attempt to build bridges by making an argument again, and admitting that the other side's viewpoint might be valid. Good show, etc.
1. There's a big difference between hitting someone in the privates (possibly not even on purpose, if I recall the scene in question correctly) during a fight, and grabbing and squeezing them unprovoked. One is fighting dirty (again, assuming it was intentional). The other is sexual assault.
And we get right back into it. Ok, this isn't bad faith arguing, but it is a
bad argument - but given how many people are split on the issue, fine, we'll call it a point in favour of good faith debating.
I don't understand where you're getting this confident assertion that none of the mooks were dead, and that no one was acting as if there was deadly danger, because that's not what I saw at all. We saw Junior and the Twins getting up again after Yang beat them, but they were already established to be superhuman fighters with superhuman endurance, while the nameless henchmen were not. We don't see any of those henchmen getting back up, and honestly the fact that we see the superhumans being fine afterward but NOT the normal people is far more incriminating than just seeing a random selection of them getting up would have been. At this point in the show, we haven't had aura explained to us (and even now that I know about aura, its workings are inconsistent enough that its very hard to infer what's deadly and what isn't).
I think the bad faith part here is the use of the assumption that the mooks died (or that it's bad they did). We see Captain America start a fight and kill people, and we're ok with it, but Yang doing it here - even assuming you're right and she does kill people - seems to cause a much harsher reaction. On
top of that, while we don't see any henchmen get up again, we do see clear shots of the floor later in the fight when it should be scattered with bodies - now, I'm sure you're about to say that this was just lazy animation because the RWBY animators suck so much and you hate them, boo, but the clear
visual indication is the henchmen staggered off and left. Which you ignore completely, not even addressing, which leads to accusations of bad faith. Also the point about superhumans vs normals seems weird given that we don't exactly know what superhuman and normal IS at this point - we've literally only seen RWB fighting Grimm, robots and a giant knight up until this point.
reacted to Yang sucker-punching Junior across the room as if this was a deadly fight. The dancers panicked and fled. Junior's gang jumped to his defense using what certainly appeared to be deadly weapons, and they were willing to risk massive damage to their establishment in order to put Yang down. The only sign throughout the entire sequence that anyone wasn't taking it that seriously was the twins quipping to each other before engaging Yang...but I'd already seen Torchwick do that during what was definitely a serious engagement in "Ruby Rose," so I couldn't exactly take that to mean much of anything about the seriousness of the fight.
Again, the use of everyone here seems pretty dubious, in particular in regard to the dancers. Most people would flee from a
not deadly fight as well, so using them as evidence for the fight being deadly reeks of a certain level of confirmation bias (the fight is deadly, people are fleeing, they must be fleeing because the fight is deadly). On the other hand, good point on the quips. On the other other hand, virtually no-one in the whole show up until this point has been concerned about massive damage other than Blake's one line about the crew members in the Black trailer - even then, it's because it was people, not out of any concern for damage to the train.
Don't get me wrong. I'm sure that the writers INTENDED for this to be a scene depicting a roguish, but likable, action heroine bravely taking on the criminal underworld as she pursues her personal quest. I can actually point to just a few specific things that they could have done differently that would have brought the product much closer in line with their presumable intent. But, as far as I can see, they just failed to actually do it.
Every single person who I showed the Yellow trailer to had the same reaction, by the way, except for those who said it was too dumb to even assess on that level. So, even if I'm off base, I think the reason I ended up offbase is innate to the scene itself and not just my own biases.
Initially a cogent wrapup, veered off course by the use of weird personal anecdote as data. Everyone I'VE showed it to has thought it was awesomecool, and no particular sign of psychosis. I can also then point to numerous YouTube reaction videos showing the same response. Number of friends who say X is not a valid point for or against any position, and using it feels somewhat desperate.
2. With this one, all I can really do is repeat what I've already said. Yang implies that Ruby needs to make more friends, but then calls her away from the boy she was happily talking to (ignoring his dejected expression) to stand beside her at the assembly.
(Now, what's baffling about that scene is why Jaune couldn't have just followed Ruby, and all three of them stood together. It really doesn't make much sense at all, as written and animated. What I suspect is that there was a miscommunication between the writers and the animators, and the scene was supposed to be in an assembly hall with a finite number of seats. I could be wrong, but that's the most plausible explanation, and the alternative is that its just pure nonsense.)
Yang's line is literally 'Over here, I saved you a spot'. Interpreting that in any way as 'You must come over and sit near me' feels like a real reach, even with your earlier interpretation of Yang as a blood knight. This is, I think, one of the clearer spots of 'bad faith' - you completely ignore the actual literal text of the show to talk about some made up text where Yang said 'Come over here, I saved you a spot'.
The same thing basically happens again with the locker room scene being followed by Yang hunting down Ruby in the forest test. We see her telling Ruby that she needs to stop relying on her and go make friends of her own, but then calling Ruby BACK to herself and getting in the way of that.
Hunting down Ruby in the forest is literally everything I just said only worse. When we see Yang she's literally just walking through the forest - she could be hunting for Ruby, she could be searching for a pair of trousers. She then says 'Hello' (in an exaggerated and drawn out fashion) clearly attempting to attract the notice of
any nearby students, not one in particular, further backed up by her saying 'Is anyone out there?' afterwards. In fact, when she first hears the noise she goes 'Is someone there?' then and
only then does she mention Ruby, hypothesising that the source of the noise might be her sister. I'm - I'm actually struggling to see any way at all to see this as Yang trying to hunt down Ruby. Literally any way at all. This is the most egregious bad faith interpretation I've ever seen anywhere. I'm trying to think of an equivalent...
Ok, it'd be like me saying that Frodo is clearly sexually abusing Gollum in the Lord of the Rings movies. Because he's all controlling of Gollum and shares affection rarely and Gollum's all weirdly sexualised what with him being half-naked and oddly muscular. Like - I guess if you really squint and bang your head against a wall you could think that, but it ignores literally everything the work is trying to tell you.
The show seemed to be trying to communicate that Yang is a popular girl that has many friends of her own. However, not a single friend of hers ever comes up in the show again after she disappears into that one crowd of shadow people, and - going by the scene where she and Ruby try to befriend Blake during their first night at Beacon - she definitely comes across as the more socially awkward of the two.
Agreed - the Yang's friend thing is stupid, and this is a clear and well made point with good use of evidence.
Now, if I just saw these scenes on their own, I'd have concluded that Yang has some minor abandonment issues and doesn't realize that she's getting in Ruby's way of making friends even as she tries to encourage her. But I saw them following on the heels of the Yellow trailer, with all of its aforementioned issues, so a pretty consistent picture of who Yang is as a person was coming together.
How? The Yellow trailer in your mind portrays a violent Blood Knight - Punisher meets the Joker, effectively. How on earth does that mesh with 'socially awkward, bit clingy of sister'? I'm genuinely interested how you link the two to get 'abusive and controlling'.
You seem to have skipped a couple of numbers here, but I'll just go to the next integer provided.
5. The scene you linked is from several episodes after the one where she wants to leave it alone. So, yes, if I had known at the time that the dog had any supernatural powers beyond the ability to be mailed, I probably would have taken Yang's actions there differently. As it is, in light of the previous events, I took Yang's assertion that the dog could use the can opener itself to be facetious. The fact that Ruby decided to take the dog with her instead of leaving it to fend for itself suggested, at the time, that she knew that the dog COULDN'T fend for itself, and her silently doing that without confronting Yang about it was hilariously in line with my previous reading of their interactions.
Ok, so the Zwei comedy scene is awful (I do not understand people who like Zwei, he's the fucking worst), but somehow this argument has it beat for sheer obstinacy. No evidence is allowed from later on in the show - yet earlier on in this same post you used the fact that Torchwick quips in the first episode as evidence against the trailer that came before it. Whoops. Then you're basically just saying that Ruby's taking of the dog with her - a clearly childish action, look at the way her face scrunches up looking at the dog then lights up as she comes up with the idea of the backpack - is somehow evidence that it couldn't survive on its own? In fact, I'm more surprised you're not shouting at Ruby, given that we have no evidence she takes the dog food with her at all, meaning we're going from a situation where a dog of unknown weird abilities (it was mailed with a comically large number of dog food cans and a can opener) is left alone with food to one where it is taken into danger
without food.
Like I said, I very much doubt that either of us are going to convince each other about Yang's portrayal at this point, and I think it would be best if we agreed to disagree. However, I hope I have at least convinced you that I came to my interpretations honestly and am not arguing in bad faith. If I have, then please, answer the question of mine that I asked before:
After arguments so poorly put together, would should be a live and let live line feels more like an insult - agree to disagree because you know your argument's poor. I know you likely didn't mean it this way, but it's the impression that comes across.
What makes you think I was motivated by self-reinforcing hate-koolaid early on when most of the Yang stuff happened, when most of my feedback during the early episodes was from people who actually like RWBY?
And I already answered this one. Fun.
So no, defending RWBY doesn't require arguing in bad faith.
