RWBY: The Villain Problem (Again)

so recently i had the craziest epiphany i think that that really old video of mine about how the ruby villains are bad you know one of the most viewed things i've ever created might actually kind of suck that isn't to say that there aren't any problems with the show's villains that would be ridiculous there absolutely are the thing is with ruby diagnosing one specific area of the show as the problem is difficult because the only thing this show is consistent about is being inconsistent sometimes the character work is compelling sometimes it very much isn't sometimes the fights rule sometimes they very much don't sometimes the voice acting is on points and other times they write in scenes where everyone laughs [Laughter] my argument here isn't so much that the villains don't have problems more that they're roughly as problematic as most other areas of the show so picking them out of the lineup of other problematic areas isn't really all that fair my original villains video was made by an idiotic high schooler who figured he could half-ass the analysis and legitimate criticism bit as long as he sounded smart and offhandedly funny and although i am still that same idiotic high schooler on the inside and shall be for the rest of my days today i plan to skip the edginess and just casually go down the list of major antagonists to figure out whether or not i would actually consider them a problem i'm also going to leave out the grim because they're kind of an entirely different topic when it comes to antagonists you can watch my apathy video if you want to hear more about my thoughts on them finally one last bit of housekeeping i'm going to be using the words villain and antagonist interchangeably in this video for the sake of variety even though depending on who you ask they might not technically be the same thing the distinction isn't really all that important to this video anyways let's get started i don't have too much to say about roman despite my bitching about how they killed him off in my original video i actually think that for what he was he was pretty well utilized from start to finish he makes a good charming face to the criminal goings-on of the beacon arc before cinder shows up and things get serious and the fact that he's actually pretty genuinely intimidated by cinder does a good job of humanizing him even though as a ruby character he's larger than life the way he reacts to everything makes him feel pretty down to earth and well-rounded and that's without actually knowing a whole lot about him just goes to show that you don't necessarily need to know a person's whole backstory from childhood till death to understand them i especially like how torchwick's motives contrast pretty starkly with his upbeat personality however as much as that motivation being revealed right when the story takes its dark turn makes a lot of sense i do still think it's generally more interesting for us to know that stuff while we actually watch a character operate rather than learning it moments before their death but at the end of the day his charm makes him engaging to watch anyway so i'd say that for the minor villain that he is torchwick gets an a minus strong a minus as for neapolitan i made a whole video about her so if you're wondering why she's definitely the best villain in ruby go watch that this is without a doubt the worst one like maybe you dislike cinder or adam more because they have more of an effect on the narrative but barring that nobody sucks more than cardin the suckiness of his design is rivaled only by the rest of his team and he has a single personality trait it is [ __ ] occasionally he does add slight modifiers to that trait such as racist [ __ ] or manipulative [ __ ] but those are really just different flavors of [ __ ] that sentence didn't come out right and now that i've written it i refuse to cut it from the script carden is really just here to have an effect on jean but what bugs me about him is that i can't even buy into that i've seen bully characters act as a genuinely tense source of conflict before but cardin has the personality of a generic bully character from our world even though he attends an extremely prestigious academy of superheroes who effortlessly toss around mechanical death machines like their plastic toys like how did he get through all of volume 1 without team coffee literally murdering him did they cover that in the books the idea of him even being a minor threat feels ridiculous in this world where teenagers fight giant scorpions on the first day of school and the one opportunity he gets to actually learn something makes it really clear how little he matters because he decides maybe i should leave this guy alone and then promptly does not become relevant to the story ever again and he never will i hope he doesn't he sucks and i hate him moving on the most common reply to my criticism of cinder from the original video was she does actually have a motivation you said it yourself she wants power i could argue that that's not what a motivation is but since no one can agree on storytelling terminology anyway i'll just say that that isn't what i mean when i say motivation desire is an extremely key part of motive certainly but nothing about the fact that cinder wants power helps me understand her on a deeper level like what kind of power and why in a way jean also wants power but you don't see him murdering teenagers for it what is driving cinder why does she pursue her concept of what power is so relentlessly is the answer she's crazy i sure hope not because that's boring when it comes to these sorts of characters insanity should be a personality trait not a motivation or an excuse for inconsistency cinder's philosophy is pretty obviously self-contradictory she criticizes winter for hoarding power and says that she refuses to starve herself of it as if she isn't currently trying to hoard all the maiden powers to herself but self-contradiction can actually be a mark of powerful internal conflict so that's not a problem in and of itself the problem is that we don't see any of that internal conflict manifest externally and thus don't understand why she thinks that way it isn't really a matter of knowing her backstory although that's certainly one way to do it it's a matter of headspace she could be the most well-written character in the history of storytelling on the inside but it won't matter if the only parts of that were ever acquainted with are i want power or i want to torture ruby to death in short she just lacks depth which at first seemed like a result of the writers wanting her to be mysterious but now that we're this deep into the show and her story i'm starting to think that they aren't interested in exploring what depth may or may not be there and if they ever do it won't make up for all this time being intensely disinterested by one of the show's primary characters i also want to be clear about something right here so that i don't sound like a hypocrite later in the video cinder is definitely not the type of villain who can pull her weight with charisma alone without a three-dimensional personality or a motivation we can actually understand she just comes off like an off-brand version of lust from fullmetal alchemist side note nothing against jessica nigri i think she does fine with what she's given but if laura bailey played cinder rather than cameoing as one of her victims then i can see cinder capturing our hearts with charisma alone but as of right now she's no bill cipher if she's going to be engaging she needs some depth however before we move on i do want to send a little bit of praise cinder's way because she's definitely improved as a character a little she's an extremely active antagonist a surprising amount of the time and watching her struggle towards a goal is infinitely better than watching her slyly smirk at the heroes because she's just so much more powerful than them she's also demonstrated fairly consistent character flaws matter of fact they're kind of similar to robin's character flaws arrogance overconfidence recklessness and short-sightedness most of all a refusal to learn from her mistakes it ain't enough to make her a good villain but it's definitely better than nothing my claim from the original video that the best villain was emerald didn't really hold up at the time but also hasn't aged particularly well because since then she and merc haven't been especially well utilized but i think there's still a lot of potential not just for emerald but for mercury as well as much as their minuscule plot line in volume 6 feels about as tangential to the actual plot as that salem ozpin backstory it actually makes me really eager to see more of them it's amazing what clearly established motivations and struggling with flaws that constantly threaten to exacerbate or change the nature of the conflict can do for a character emerald has hardened herself over the years working for cinder but unlike mercury she isn't a monster she takes pleasure in outsmarting or outplaying others but not in causing destruction and death however she's been mostly blinded by cinder's manipulation and her endless gratitude towards cinder simply for offering her a life that wasn't constant torture and struggle what she wants more than anything is for cinder to truly care about her but now that cinder's not around and thus the pink haze spotted with hearts and glitter is fading away she's starting to see clearer and so she's more and more hesitant to help create salem's future mercury on the other hand is a monster but only because he was forcefully molded into that shape indoctrinated into violence he doesn't care about love loyalty or gratitude he's just doing what he does best because he doesn't know anything different and he's afraid to try anything different however he's not as unshakably evil as he thinks he is he doesn't react well to being taunted he's bitter about his lot in life and he makes a real effort to force emerald to see his side of things because in spite of himself he gives a [ __ ] about her mercury finding the right path on his own is extremely unlikely but there's still a chance he might follow emerald there and sure establishing what could have been interesting subtext by having the characters spend episode 9 of volume 6 shouting all this at each other was pretty heavy-handed but that doesn't mean it won't be fun to watch these dynamics play out in the future i'm not sure if volume 8 is the time for it but the continuation of merkin m story arc could be really cool or it could suck what do i know i'm just some kid with an internet connection flying by the seat of his pants why are you watching my stupid video why do i even do this why do humans even exist why does the steady march of time insist on guiding us into a bottomless abyss from which we will never escape why isn't there a third season of kekai sensen all very good questions [Laughter] so here's the thing i'm not very good at ideological criticism which is why i tend to skirt around ideological issues in my videos and that's only in the cases i'm not too ignorant to even notice them when it comes to politically charged topics i treat my thoughts occasionally but they've never been something i'm comfortable writing at length about and i don't want to be a performative activist so i usually just avoid bringing those issues up entirely however it would be irresponsible of me to pretend like ideological issues don't exist simply because i'm not good at talking about them so here's the deal ruby's depiction of racial oppression and protest has some really serious issues and honestly kind of [ __ ] up real world implications that being said diving into all of that would take an entire video written by someone with a level of awareness i'm not confident i could attain even with a ton of research luckily that video exists unicorn of wars video on the white fang is a superb exploration of this show's multitude of problems that i could never hope to match i highly recommend you go and watch it meanwhile i might echo a few of that video sentiments but the following paragraph is only going to skim along the edge of all those ideological problems in order to talk about atom in a way that won't take several hours cool cool so adam taurus relentlessly awesome design and fight scenes but written as a combination abusive ex-boyfriend violent revolutionary and all-around evil guy oh boy abusive relationships are one of many topics i'm not qualified to speak about with any kind of authority but if adam was just an abusive ex and not a revolutionary i don't think i'd mind him too much his possessive attitude towards blake the emotional spiral he experiences when she leaves him and the obsession with both controlling her life and hurting her long after he should have let her go all track psychologically his one hit ko in volume 5 definitely did make his reappearance in volume 6 as a genuine threat a little hard to buy into but nonetheless watching the bees finally get on the same page just in time to triumph over him was pretty fulfilling but that's speaking as someone who failed to notice the ideological implications of killing off a character in adam's position at that point in the story he was just an abusive x to me the problem is that i'm an idiot and so are the writers evidently because not bringing a bunch of white fang bowling pins with him to resolve this personal issue of his doesn't just wash away all of his political charge but looking at adam's death on a micro level feels like a moot point because the real issue here is that adam and the white fang were kind of [ __ ] from the word go ruby has an exaggerated view of morality that it adopts as part of the grand fantasy tradition there are good guys and there are bad guys the bad guys are blatantly evil from their aesthetic design to their willingness to kill people this isn't necessarily a bad thing obvious and over-the-top morality can be pretty fun when it's utilized right but it's the people and groups that ruby chooses to codify as evil and good that are the problem adam is a revolutionary fighting against racial oppression his first time really dipping his toes into true evil was when he killed a racist person but that racist person was also seconds away from killing one of adam's allies gira this group of racist people were attacking a group of minorities unprovoked gyro was not fighting back and adam saved him literally the definition of self-defense is codified as evil these faunus are just supposed to lay down and die because fighting back is violent and violence is wrong said the show about cool fight scenes and from that point in his character story onward adam just keeps getting brought to more and more ridiculous levels of evilness maiming beloved protagonists working with the dark lord killing his allies for not being evil enough seeming to revel in death and destruction in the end they're forced to put him down like he's a rabid animal his rightful anger twists him into an insane unreasonable and inconsolable monster he also gets twisted by his deeply problematic attitude towards blake but that's not what we're talking about meanwhile in the same [ __ ] span of three episodes the gang makes friends with a blatantly racist military commander who is for the most part played for laughs she eventually lets them through her blockade despite her stubborn resistance to hearing out our protagonists before because i guess she isn't that bad after all do you see the problem i'll spell it out before this show even existed the writers chose to write a story where adam and the white fang revolutionary members of an oppressed minority written in a manner that whether you like it or not is evocative of racial issues in america are the villains when they could have instead vilified the people who are actually doing the oppressing the argument here isn't that adam as he's written should have been redeemed the argument is that adam should have been written so that he could be redeemed from the very beginning a version of this story where the good guys fight against oppressors rather than protesters where adam could have been a true hero has never existed and that's the problem the moment in time i was most interested in salem as an antagonist was her appearance at the end of volume three mostly because of what she represented at the time the true darkness the mature potential that ruby had been hiding up its sleeve for those first two and a half volumes she was the true horror of reality that which would divide humanity and divide the team that we'd come to love then she was more formally introduced in vol 4 and pretty quickly became this generic dark lord who is apparently really powerful but spends all of her time sitting in a castle ordering lesser minions about like seriously what does she do with all the free time on her hands make grim doesn't that happen naturally does she like knitting maybe she spent all that time making her new atlas arc outfit then volume 6 came along and although it definitely didn't fix everything it did give us a little bit more salem to dissect there were a couple of things that i liked here firstly she's suddenly actually [ __ ] scary to the point where i feel like i can understand lionheart a little bit better in retrospect especially with salem's intimidation factor carrying over to volume 7 i find myself reminded of a certain character from the promised neverland which i'm being vague about to avoid spoilers because if you haven't had that show's premise spoiled for you then dear cthulhu you need to go watch the first episode immediately however if you've seen it you know who i'm talking about salem has that same kind of motherly attitude towards both her minions and her enemies like they all just don't understand and they're just children so she can't hate them for it she's just doing what's best for them and she's gonna make it as painless for them as possible however this is all just addendum to her surface level personality stuff that i think could have been better established earlier in terms of exploring salem on a deeper level volume 6 showed us some good old-fashioned backstory and it's interesting enough a love for someone a manipulative prideful nature and a dark punishment twisting her into a monster who wants to be the new god now that the old ones she hated so much are gone but it just seems so irrelevant to what's going on right now especially since this was apparently like a bazillion years ago it's odd that her goals haven't wavered or changed since her final battle with osma she wants to control the world she refuses to learn the value of life and because she fell into a pit of grim creation juice she's just kind of evil of course dark lords representative of pure unfettered evil aren't exactly uncommon in fantasy writing and they can be an interesting addition to a story's moral argument and since ruby is about evil in the hearts of men shattering their unity from within it's fitting that the sauron of this story is really just another flawed human who fell into the evil machine and is trying to take advantage of humanity's flawed nature to get what she wants in that regard she makes a good foil to ruby rose the embodiment of all that is good and pure about mankind who wields a weapon of the god of light to oppose salem's weapons of the god of darkness her role as both the moral opposite to the entire concept of goodness and as an antagonist with human sentiments and inclinations isn't always very well balanced but overall i can't really dislike salem we'll have to see if volume 8 changes that talking about jacques is hard because i want to criticize the fact that he's not a complex layered character and is in fact a one note irredeemable bastard but i can't not acknowledge that people like him do exist sometimes people are truly the worst and sometimes those people happen to be your family sometimes abuse isn't subtle what's complicated about jacques isn't jacques himself it's the fact that he's weiss's father and winter and whitley's father and willow's husband and the ceo of the schnee dust company as recent events have proven repeatedly like seriously world we get your point you can stop now it isn't exactly impossible for shitty people to end up in places of power neither is it uncommon for us to end up relying on them after all the schnee children had no choice but to rely on jacques and willow to raise them so when their parents did a shitty job of it they were forced to either declare independence and go raise themselves or stay and embrace their parents worldview which brings me to wheatley whitley who just barely meets the qualifications to be a villain yeah he's a little [ __ ] and he antagonizes weiss but the only reason whitley is following in jacques footsteps is that he's also a victim of abuse honestly i can't find a way to say it better than willow does whitley wants nothing to do with me of course not you left him alone with us whitley never left all he ever had was jacques and willow so of course he's turning into another jock someone in his position doesn't deserve hatred they deserve pity of course with jacques in prison whitley has now been forced to re-examine his choice of role model so if they can deliver on that setup in later volumes whitley could be another addition to this show's small list of good villains oh man what is there to say about tyrion other than i love him josh grell brings this character to life with such incredible vibrancy every line every laugh every battle effort he just oozes presents plastic soldiers and pawns my heart and body belong only to our goddess cinder only in her wildest dreams he isn't particularly complicated but he doesn't need to be in fact i think he'd be a lot less fun to watch if they tried to delve into the backstory of a man whose whole gimmick is that he's cartoonishly psychopathic it doesn't really need an explanation the idea of growing up with constant access to a potentially lethal venomous stinger is evocative enough not to mention the scars of his i don't think he needed more than that but the way they did incorporate tyrion's background into the show was the best way they could have done it nothing that distracts from the plot but rather a short little scp file you can read if you want skip it and the character still functions perfectly but stop to read it and you get a story about a crazed serial killer encountering something destructive and otherworldly something that a normal person is terrified by but that he views as beautiful not only does this story paint tyrion's state of mind in a ghastly light it also imbues salem with a kind of eldritch horror that she doesn't always achieve on her own like i've said in previous videos tyrion's insanity isn't an excuse for him to do whatever the narrative requires it's portrayed with consistency if not real world accuracy but hey this clearly isn't supposed to be a deep and sobering exploration of mental health but what's so great about him as a narrative element is that although his devotion to salem supersedes everything but self-preservation this doesn't prevent him from doing whatever his murderous heart desires within whatever parameters she sets for him he gets really excited about killing ruby until salem tells him she wants her alive but then his excitement returns when he comes up with the poetic idea of bringing cinder ruby's eye on a platter as if to say hey since you aren't healthy enough to do this yourself right now i went ahead and got some revenge for you which is just the ultimate passive-aggressive gesture in atlus his job seemed to just be work with watts and get in ironwood's way but outside of that he's free to go be a pretty little psycho it isn't really a problem for their plans if he gets captured but if he wants to use that as an opportunity to manipulate crow into getting his buddy killed for kicks then [ __ ] dude go for it combine that unpredictability with josh grell's performance and you get a character that i will never get tired of watching when he inevitably dies i'm going to be [ __ ] [Music] saluting [Music] i'd wager that raven would be on a lot more people's favorites list if she wasn't suffering from vol 5 itis and it's a damn shame because underneath all the poor pacing and delivery she's one of the few characters in that volume with a semi-coherent character arc raven believes in ideals of ruthless survival instilled in her by years of living as a bandit but her and crow's foray into the world of huntsman academy training and working with people capable of love offered them an opportunity for something more friends and eventually family i think part of the reason that everyone is so keen on getting a team stark flashback at some point is that these two clearly went through one hell of an emotional arc what with raven and taeyang having had a child together and crow deciding to abandon the tribe for good but when raven starts to really get a grasp on what she's signed up for what ozpin is up against she throws away what she's learned about camaraderie and hope for the future and no doubt something about victory being in a simple soul and reverts to her old mindset one focused utterly on survival like a cornered animal but now she's carrying all this emotional baggage from her years with team stark back into the world of banditry and thus she's forced to come up with a defense mechanism from all of the guilt weighing her down often when writing characters it's said that character arcs should center around the lie that the character believes the lie that raven believes is that what she's doing is strength that it's necessity that it's moral that it's what they always planned on that it's because she loves her bandit family that it's because ozpin is a liar that it was the only way she'll tell herself anything to avoid facing the fact that she's running away out of fear because that would mean she left all the people she cares about behind to fight in her stead but the arrival of yang and salem's minions on her doorstep forces her to acknowledge that her actions don't make sense she hoards power to save herself only to eventually realize she's being an idiot and making herself an even bigger target and that's not even mentioning that nothing about these bandits is worth being loyal to and despite apparently loving them like family she abandons most of them without a second thought you could say she abandons them any meaning we ascribe to this meaningless universe shall one day succumb to entropy so when the person raven is most guilty about leaving behind eviscerates her entire mindset right in front of her there's nothing left for her to do but break this is all really good stuff but the problem is that most of it is delivered through exposition that's so clunky and uninteresting it's almost funny so all of that character work kind of goes to waste but on the bright side the foundation for raven as a character is there and hopefully that means she'll have another chance to shine in the future [Music] i was very quick to praise elia in my volume 5 review mostly because she is in fact a well written character but also undoubtedly because in a volume full of absolute [ __ ] any bright spot at all is going to look like helios himself has descended upon the earth ilia is similar to raven in that her story is very solid but the way it's expressed is severely lacking for one thing important plot information should not be external content isn't that right destiny 1. which is why it's so annoying that the rooftop scene from blake's volume 5 character short doesn't actually appear in the show the only allusion to it is an awkwardly inserted reference to how ilia's parents died in a dust mine as if that explains everything but what was so touching about that story wasn't just that her parents died but that she was passing for human at the time and was galvanized by her human friend's reaction to the news which made her decide through first-hand experience that human lives aren't worth sparing however genuinely caring about people tends to clash pretty spectacularly with the path of vengeance and through blake's council she gradually comes to the conclusion that avenging her parents is not the only way to honor them it's pretty straightforward stuff but it works plus i am the wrong person to ask whether this is good or bad lgbt representation but the fact that elia was in love with blake injects the center of this arc with a surprising jolt of potent and messy emotion ah love always springing up on you when it's least convenient such as when the person you like is dating someone else or when your friends are trying to murder their parents my problem with ilia isn't really a problem with ilia but more of a problem with the ideology surrounding her arc the dramatic function is there but the way blake pacifies her rightful anger from a place of privilege and the way her character coming over to the good side means joining the people who are more interested in fighting their fellow faunus revolutionaries than they are their oppressors is pretty yeesh in a way that i can't explain better than unicorn of war just please go watch his video this character is based on the cowardly lion and so they decided to make being a coward his only defining character trait seriously his life gets threatened by salem and he's willing to drop literally everything he stands for to obey her every whim and despite being a follower of ozpin he seems to be under the impression that it's gonna work out for him here's a question though what does he stand for mistral haven huntsman and huntresses does he have a family he wants to save or see again what's it like being a faunus headmaster in the same country that has no faunus signs hanging outside restaurants none of that comes up in any meaningful way because the only thing that's important to this character is his own life he exhibits a lot of guilt about what he's doing but never enough to make him seriously consider changing sides he's also not particularly close to anyone but ozpin who's too busy being inside oscar's head to react much and thus there's no real drama regarding his betrayal he's just a pawn upon who gets unceremoniously punished for the only character trait he has cowardice does not need to be this flat raven is a coward and she's fascinating but leo feels like he's here only because the plot demands it no one was dying to dive into his character psychology and it shows i'm glad he's gone vernal is so lame like most of the bandits her only redeeming quality is that she's loyal to raven for some reason that is never established other than that she's not much more than an arrogant scumbag specifically towards weiss because volume 5 was extremely determined to set up an appropriate sparring partner for every single one of the heroes what a brilliant idea i'm sure having 30 showdowns at once each of which is designed to be somewhat important to their respective characters mind you will work out beautifully wow lots of volume 5 shade this video it's almost like that volume has way too many villains in it to reiterate from my volume 5 review if you're going to turn a character into a noble sacrifice and make her the key to winning an otherwise evenly matched fight you should probably give us a reason to care about her but i'm not even sure raven cared all that much when vernal died i mean she probably did but the fact that i have to say probably kind of proves my point anyway imagine if those two had some kind of character relationship you know like any at all other than master and servant then we could have been invested in seeing the two escape together and might have felt something when one of them dies but instead vernal serves her function as a decoy and if raven is at all sad that it came to this the story doesn't bother to express it in a way that the audience can empathize with yet another vol 5 exclusive character who i do not miss [Music] i'm gonna go ahead and mostly put aside the way this character was handled because i already ranted about that in the volume 5 review long story short the way they decided to convey hazel's backstory is like the precise opposite of functional storytelling but ignoring that is hazel himself a good character depends on whether or not ozpin is present when he's just going about his business for salem's court he's amazing on one hand he exudes this aura of quiet menace so you can instantly tell he's been through some [ __ ] and is not to be messed with he doesn't even really react to the darkness he surrounds himself in he's used to it but at the same time he mostly just seems like a good dude who's been forced by circumstance to work with the bad guys that little interaction with oscar where he goes out of his way to help him but does so in an incredibly intimidating manner sums up what was so compelling about him perfectly i was deeply interested in finding out what it was that had forced this seemingly decent person into a cabal of murderers trying to take over the world which is why i was so disappointed that the answer ended up being as basic as karen from mean girls someone who seemed so interesting is just here for revenge against one guy who he unfairly blames for the death of a family member his actions don't make any logical sense but humans both real and fictional act illogically all the time so that isn't the problem the problem is that i have trouble buying into his emotional state the idea that hazel an apparently smart and composed man is so obsessed with spending his entire comparatively brief time on this planet being a thorn and ospin's side that he's willing to work with the dark lord to create countless deaths just like that of his sister is a hard sell with this little justification it'd be one thing if these emotions were something that made him briefly lash out while they were fresh but no he's been doing this for years and still hasn't reconsidered things a more interesting twist on this backstory would be if his sister was like summer rose and he was like crow bronwyn gretchen reinart dies fighting ozpin's extremely important shadow war against salem only for hazel to meet salem in the midst of his grief and learn that ozpin's been lying to him and that this war is pointless so gretchen died for nothing that would be an adequate reason for him to give up and pick the side where at least he can repeatedly kill the liar who dragged him and gretchen into the conflict rather than the woman kind enough to tell him the truth but instead of that we get hazel teaming up with the person who controls the creatures that presumably killed his sister so that he can get back at the immortal man who what let his sister decide to try to be a huntress i still enjoy watching him be stoic and kind in the face of salem's overwhelming evil but damn what a waste of what could have been a much less simplistic character also they take a really unique semblance and turn it into a boring fighting style which seems like a microcosm for all the problems with this character [Music] caroline cordovan is insufferable a comically nationalistic military zealot who idolizes the upper class as evident by her personal interest in what school why schnee chose to study at not to mention how many times she refers to weiss returning to her father as coming to her senses and who relishes in the strength of atlus simply because she's in a position where she can wield it or more accurately sit atop it and judge that the rest of the world is not up to her personal standards most of the time it's difficult to really hate her because she's so pathetic and the show does a good job playing up the fact that despite her over-the-top grandiose way of speaking this is a sad old woman with no one to blame but herself and her stubbornly narrow mindset for her lot in life and by latin life i mean being relegated to argus rather than atlas despite clearly loving it so much and probably being without any real friends however even though she's pathetic that doesn't necessarily make her someone you want to see pitied and redeem quite the opposite in fact if i were to write cordovan into one of my dnd games not only would my players steal an airship from her without a second thought there's also about an 85 chance that she'd end up dead and dumped into the ocean which is why it's so weird that this fun but overly long battle against cordovan ends with the narrative guilt-tripping the characters for fighting her and by proxy guilt-tripping the audience for rooting for them cordovan is the one who used the grim fighting robot to instead fight a group of teenagers that she could have attacked with fighters or just let through ironwood's authoritarian blockade it's really her fault that it's rendered inoperable by the time an actual threat shows up and then to have her show up at the end of the arc and demonstrate an ounce of humanity it's not that it wasn't earned we see her repeating the phrase it's your fault until it's clear she doesn't believe it anymore and it's not like it wouldn't make sense for her to be grateful towards the team for saving her town when they could have just left but this type of stubborn intolerant arrogant zealous racist sdc supporting and worst of all mean character didn't deserve sympathy or redemption she deserved a comeuppance to be toppled from her throne leaving the characters triumphant but also wondering if the rest of atlus is going to be filled with people like that honestly they treat this final battle like it's a victory but the fact that argus is still the responsibility of this crazy old lady should not be reassuring and as i touched on earlier the fact that cordovan is the one they come to a mutual understanding with worries adam is the one they're forced to kill is just a bad look [Music] arthur watts has been around for a while and although we learn little bits and pieces about him throughout the anima arc he spends most of that time as nothing more than a mustache twirling [ __ ] and he serves that role pretty well he's never so big a focus that we find ourselves wanting for detail but when volume 7 comes around and he steps into the spotlight we start to actually dig into what watts has going on behind the scenes and that's great it's always more fulfilling watching a villain work when they have a personal connection to what they're doing it certainly makes his fight with ironwood 10 times more epic than it already is i also adore that everyone thinks he's dead and is all stunned to see him return it's just a really fun detail but he isn't exactly drowning in depth like if you really break it down this dude is helping to overthrow every major government and take over the world because he lost the atlas science fair and there's obviously probably more to it than that but we haven't seen much of it and with everything going on i'm starting to wonder if we even will given the nature of his decisions and general attitude about the whole thing it's odd that vol 7 presents him as the more complicated foil to tyrion's pure evil because watts is also pretty straightforwardly evil if a more refined civilized variety of it it feels very similar to castlevania's methodology of establishing villain motivation people treated me badly my whole life and those people were humans so now i'm gonna commit genocide against the entire human race but with somehow even less justification sure more justification can come later but if it ends up coming 10 seconds before he dies or is removed from the story then what was the point we could have been watching an interesting character that whole time and instead we only get them for 10 seconds at the very least the gentlemanly evil scientist trope is admittedly fun and chris sabbat is doing a great job playing it up so we aren't quite running into the cinder fall problem of this character is so boring i use their monologues to help me sleep but all the same i don't love watts he's just okay you know what's not okay though the fact that our existence is an absurd coincidence a mere drop of water in an endless ocean of star stuff our lives insignificant in the face of the vast eons that have passed before us and will continue to pass long after we're gone whatever achievements we've struggled to attain shall vanish into nothingness so soon on the cosmological scale that they are as meaningless to the uncaring void as a grain of sand so why worry go ask out your crush if it doesn't work we're all going to die anyway so it doesn't matter nothing matters and life has no purpose so we get to pick one for ourselves who needs another season of kikai since then i talked pretty extensively about ironwood in my volume 7 review so i'll keep this brief basically ironwood is a textbook example of that old bit of writing advice that one about how the villain should view themselves as the hero his intentions are almost entirely altruistic and during his transition from hero to villain they remain unchanged his intentions aren't the problem but like the protagonist of a shakespearean tragedy he spends the entire story battling against his fatal flaws only to eventually succumb to them right when it seems he might escape them it's a moment that feels both tragic and cathartic an ultimate release of all the work that the show had done making him teeter on the edge of what is just there is no other antagonist in this show with such human instincts and such a coherent philosophy his problems feel poignant and real and yet so understandable in the face of such terror it was fascinating watching him fall off the deep end but now that he has i hope he doesn't stray too much further from the light i know this is a fantasy story with exaggerated morality but we have plenty of straight up evil characters in this show what makes james interesting is just how close he is to being a hero i want to see him continue to wrestle with the ideals he's given up on even as the battle forces him to grow even more desperate i also want to see him prove that he's not completely gone even if in reality he is having the characters decide okay ironwood is now public enemy number one let's kill him is a lot less interesting than forcing them to confront his philosophy maybe even start to understand it and gravitate toward it as they realize that they can't save everyone i hope those expectations aren't too high but even if they are even if ironwood just turns into a flat dictator whose war with his own morality has ended he'll still be far and away preferable to most of the other villains in this show okay that video ran way longer than i thought it would so let's wrap this up quickly i went into the writing process for this video thinking ruby's villains aren't even that bad anymore and i'm gonna prove it and then went on to kind of prove the opposite point by being mostly negative sometimes i worry that i'm being unfairly nitpicky because i pay especially close attention to ruby compared to other media but every time i take a step back and try to imagine i'm someone without a close personal connection to the show i'm struck by the fact that it really does have some massive crunchy flaws and the villains are no exception however when i think about how many tangents i cut out of this script i can't help but feel like focusing on one specific area of the show at a time while fun for a youtube video aimed at an audience for the purpose of entertainment probably isn't the best way to go about criticizing it ruby doesn't have villain problems it has writing problems and that's not something adding a couple of well-built antagonists to the cast can fix [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Blizzic

Views: 131,629

Keywords: blizzic, thoughts, analysis, criticism, volume 8, volume 7, cinder fall, arthur watts, hazel rainart, salem, ilia amitola, adam taurus, roman torchwick, james ironwood, the problem with rwby's villains, RWBY: The Villain Problem (Remastered), theory, ruby, atlas, arc, neopolitan, neo

Id: i3ezh8DC2UM

Length: 44min 6sec (2646 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 04 2020