sometimes I'm convinced that the hatedom is just watching a fully different show
because i just saw a tweet with someone complaining that volume 8 turned Ironwood into "a Disney villain" when "volume 7 left it up in the air who was right, him or RWB/Y"
my guy, he made it clear he didn't care who he hurt so long as he won before he decided he was going to abandon thousands of civilians to the cold and the Grimm because he got scared and decided to run away when he found out the mean scary witch was coming, and then he shot a child for calling him out on it
there's no ambiguity, there's no "well i dunno maybe he had a point in abandoning the poor to save the rich", the show is flat out clear that he's in the wrong, what are you talking about?
Abandoning his duties to protect a city of civilians from man eating monsters, overthrowing his legal government, and ordering the murder of an innocent woman because she essentially has the car keys he needed to run away. These are all things he did before he even knew Salem was coming.
Then, after finding out she was coming, he ordered the arrest of anyone who disagreed with him or who MIGHT disagree with him, and attempted to kill a teenage boy for politely trying to talk him out of it.
James Ironwood was a coward and a traitor before Volume 8. And he was wrong.
the writers do a good job in obscuring just how bad Ironwoods actions are when you look at them in a vacuum by having their main critics be people you're not inclined to agree with
Jacques Schnee is a scummy self-serving abusive asshole, you're not supposed to like him and you don't want to listen to him - so when he starts making good points about Ironwood's poor handling of things, he's easy to ignore, even though he's right
We're introduced to the Robyn and her Happy Huntresses through Forrest, who seems to be an overly enthusiastic but ultimately inept protestor whose accusations of Ironwood being a tyrant are framed in a way that makes him seem like an idiot that is over-exaggerating things, with RWBY and the others not taking him seriously or even really remembering the encounter; we don't meet Robyn personally until a few episodes later, when the story has spent some time showing Ironwood at his most affable (to people he considers important)
unfortunately this clever writing trick of hiding how callous and casually heartless Ironwood's actions really are unless you're directly paying attention, and not really spelling it out directly until later in the arc, leads certain people to completely misread how this arc plays out and act like his turn came out of nowhere (and then refuse to go back and check when making claims of "ambiguity")
