Anyway, Blake still doesn't need to be that important in killing Adam. Blake *believes* the best way for her to not feel like a coward is to define herself in terms of Adam and kill him herself. So she would go from "I'm controlled by Adam so I'm a coward" to "I killed Adam so I'm... idk, I'm better and strong".
Basically, what Naan said about Blake getting worse if she feels that she didn't contribute to killing Adam is true… in the short term.
She will feel horrible for it, Stella's job will contain a lot of explaining to her that this doesn't make her a coward. But long term, this is actually better, her best way to recover isn't to literally kill this particular demon, it's to leave him behind (metaphorically killing him) and live her best life.
You're both kind of fixating on me wanting Blake to kill Adam to prove her physical strength as equating to emotional strength, when I never actually said that. I don't want Blake to literally kill Adam, especially since she never wanted to kill him either, I want her to
overcome him (metaphorically killing him, as you say) in a way that isn't solely attributable to the out-of-context character being her savior. An essential part of that includes her working to prove him wrong in their divide on the issues of equality, faunus discrimination, vengeance, and violence, since those subjects are a core part of their backstories together.
While the most exciting and thematic way to symbolize that is for her to form stronger bonds of actual friendship and mutual respect with other people (teammates), who will be there to support her both in her continued activism and when the time comes to stand up to him and (non-lethally if it was just up to them) kick his butt when he instigates a climactic confrontation, I can accept his presence as an obstacle to surpass isn't strictly necessary.
However I'm not as much of a fan of all this emphasis I'm seeing on her being "a hurt 17 year old girl". Yeah that's a small part of what she is, but she's also already an experienced top-tier fighter for her generation, a guerilla survivalist of the Grimm-infested wilderness, and a passionate idealist. A lot of those things you said about Glynda's experience and toughness should also apply to Blake, even if it's to a lesser degree, she shouldn't just be treated as a broken bird.
Same with Cinder, sure in canon Ozpin died so there is a reason Pyrrha has to continue alone, but the students being the only ones defending the school seems… strange.
The students aren't the only ones fighting in the defense though? The adults are shown participating in the Battle of Beacon, they deployed to protect civilians further away from the academy, then were bogged down by the chaos when the villains assaulted the school directly. We just got brief glimpses of them because, well, they're not the main characters doing the important plot events. There's some examples of this "Adults are useless" trope that you hate where there isn't quite a good enough justification for it in-story (I believe the most egregious of which were rooted in unfortunate production issues in the background), but I wouldn't say this is one of them.
As for the trope in general, trying to minimize it is fair enough, but there's ways to do that without rendering the titular characters irrelevant to the plot. Adults don't have to be incompetent to just…not happen to be nearby based on the circumstances, requiring the prospective heroes (which is what they're trying to become as Huntsmen and Huntresses) to step up to the plate and either solve the challenge or at least buy enough time for the more experienced characters to respond. Especially if the enemies are purposefully trying to maneuver around the obviously powerful adults, and/or the students are independently involving themselves in the conflict, both of which were actually the main drivers behind most of the action in the early Volumes.
You mentioned being a fan of Devourer of Worlds, and that's actually one of the strongest aspects of that quest. There were hard limits on how the OP Eldritch God PC could exert its influence in the world, which helped to keep the overall character and franchise agency more balanced than it would've been otherwise.
When you get down to it, being a main character necessitates being involved in the main plot. If you're saying that the titular characters are going to be kept out of the conflicts with the villains altogether while the adults handle everything, then that can either mean,
A: RWBY, JNPR, and the rest are essentially being relegated to side characters at the kiddie table, while the adults are the main characters of this story as they deal with the actual plot. That's…one way to go about things, though not what I was looking for going into this.
B: The plot is derailed enough for the purpose of focusing on them as main characters, but only in the context of them being trainees going through school, shifting the story to such a degree that it kind of changes genres. Don't know what to expect from that.
Nope, Mister, Stella doesn't get what his rank really means, part of why she and Sable spend a lot of the conversation practically ignoring him.
Even if their impressions didn't give her that basic knowledge of what it means, wouldn't she still repeat it just for the sake of using the form of address she was given for him? I'd expect the "You may refer to me as Your Royal Highness." Princess to have more respect for titles in general like that.
