tbh after all the Nazi and Putin jokes, I can't say I'm surprised. RWBY is a show built upon surface-level progressivism; they might know that they're supposed to say "racism is bad, folks," but really it's just a thinly veiled smokescreen they use to deflect from the deep-seated bigotry and hate they baked into the series from jump. A lot of its fans fell for it; because a lot of its fans share the same faults.
They consider themselves to be progressive. They consider themselves to be socially conscious. They're juuuust aware enough to know, generally, which side they're supposed to be on, in the really big widespread events that went viral enough to drift into their bubble. But beyond that initial, shallow, surface-level understanding of "I'm supposed to be on this side of this specific situation," they don't know shit, and they always let their ignorance lead them into actual wrongdoing
This person is like the many fans who knew, generally speaking, that Nazis are bad - so despite clearly not bothering to so much as read the Wikipedia page on what Nazis actually believe and do, they all got together to make that 'joke' article about how everybody who liked the fictional character of Ironwood was a literal arm-band wearing Nazi, or they wrote and drew that one "Holocaust AU" where they made the rwby villains into sexy Nazis including Cinder, who they decided to turn into a 'Jewish Nazi' traitor, or they spammed the Ironwood tags with post after post after post talking about how Ironwood was Remnant's Hitler and everybody who so much as said "you should have at least Googled Nazism before speaking about it because it's obvious you have no idea what you're talking about" was accused of being a Nazi irl
This person is like the many fans who shared that 'meme' of Ironwood sitting across from Putin and all the posts about how Ironwood totally would hate Ukraine and how everybody who says "this is a serious situation and you need to fucking stop" was actually just a "Dictator Simp" who "got mad at them for holding up a mirror" and that sort of thing. This person is like the rwby fans that relentlessly harassed a Lithuanian viewer for daring to say that Ironwood's villainy was, *by definition*, not even remotely fascism, and that when RWBY fans angrily accuse everybody who criticizes their precious cartoon of "simping for fascism," they're contributing to the trivialization and misunderstanding of the word and it disempowers the people who *actually know what it means* and are "actually struggling under constant threat of it* - soooo the rwby fans dogpiled him and accused him of wanting to be oppressed and laughed that anybody who says rwby is imperfect *deserves* to be oppressed and then eventually showed their true colors and said that it was people like him that made them side with Putin sometimes, and also got pissed when the literal dictionary definition of 'Fascism' got posted because it didn't mean what they thought it meant so they announced that the dictionary was wrong and 'Fascism' actually meant 'doesn't like rwby'
Seeing a RWBY fan take a real and deadly serious situation like this and completely trivialize it while also baring their whole asses and inadvertently revealing that they don’t even know the first thing about what's actually going on, just so they can make their shitty little meme about how they can't tell the difference between a fictional Cartoon Villain and a real-life genocide, is unfortunately nothing new.
This is what happens when people don't fucking learn real world history and exclusively consume content with villains that borrow their aesthetic from the Star Wars Empire. They see the *aesthetics* and they say "oh this must be fascism or nazism with a side of genocide" and then they fucking run with that horrific misunderstanding right off the nearest cliffside screaming the whole way about how smart and progressive they are, and when anybody with half a brain tries to stop them and say "that fictional villain actually has nothing whatsoever to do with fascism or nazism or genocide, and by confidently conflating his coat and boots to an ideology you very obviously know absolutely nothing about, you're trivializing and obfuscating real-world dangers and the harm they cause to the very people whose side you claim to be on - not to mention the memes you made are blatantly bigoted in nature, and are offensive to multiple groups of marginalized people, including - again - the very people whose side you claim to be on," the fandom-rotted bigot just decides that this guy must also be a fascist nazi genocider "or else you wouldn't 'defend' the character."
(Because also, the people who are too ignorant to tell the difference between "a Bad Guy in Big Boots" and "actual ideological fascism or nazism or genocide," are usually additionally too ignorant to tell the difference between "correcting someone who doesn't know the difference between a Bad Guy and Fascist Ideology" and "Defending a Fictional Character" and that usually gets them into even more trouble.)
Anybody with even a bare minimum understanding of what Nazi ideology even is would know that Ironwood doesn't qualify
Anybody with even a bare minimum understanding of what Fascism even is would know that Ironwood doesn't qualify
Anybody who so much as knows the simple dictionary definition of genocide would know that Ironwood didn't attempt one
BUT EVEN IF IRONWOOD *WAS* A NAZI FASCIST GENOCIDER IN CANON....
Anybody with enough social-awareness to understand the serious nature of these real-world problems and the true depths of the horrors being committed against actual, real, living people who actually exist, would NEVER stoop so low as to fucking make meme posts about it, nor would they weaponize these events and the millions of deaths therein to 'win' some stupid little 'fandom war' they're waging against strawmen they invented because they swallowed Rooster Teeth's propaganda and aren't willing to consider that maybe their favorite web cartoon might have done a whoopsie
RWBY is very very good at training their viewers to put up with obscene amounts of bigotry while hiding behind the thinnest smokescreen of 'I'm Progressive Actually' that you ever did see, and the screenshot above is just one more example out of many showing Rooster Teeth's target demographic putting their teachings into practice
Betcha anything the person who wrote that blatantly cruel and ignorant post unironically believes they're a Good Guy, when they sport their Official Rooster Teeth Store rwby merch and loudly sing along to 'Trust Love.'
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