Love her or hate her, Cinder Fall is one of the most important characters in RWBY. She's the main villain of the Beacon era, appears in every volume, she acts as a dark mirror to the main cast, and plays a major role in every story arc after. Yes even V9 the entire reason RWBYJN are in the Ever After is because of her. With how important she is to RWBY she's as much of a main character as the titular team. Celtic Phoenix's approach to Cinder in Fixing RWBY is strange to say the least, and her treatment in the narrative gets progressively worse over time.
Given how involved Cinder is in the series this will be a very, very long post
In canon Cinder appears in the very first episode, acting as Roman's pilot turned backup once it's clear that Glynda's FAR above what he can handle. Goes to show how important she is when we see her in the show proper before WBY. It's also just nice writing to have one of the most important villains in your series appear early on. Makes the world more cohesive
In FRWBY Cinder doesn't appear at all until the post-credits. Hell she and Roman have never even met until said scene, probably to try and make Roman into the next Oz more believable since he hasn't worked with Salem until V2
The only real change of substance that Cinder got in V2 is that she's acting as Em and Merc's chaperone instead of a fellow student. Probably because Celtic considers it weird that she could pass for one. Out of universe it's been said that Cinder looks a bit young for her age. In-universe the academies are basically combat specialized colleges. Not that unusual for people IRL in their twenties or even far older to continue their education so I don't see the problem here
Cinder does spy on the food fight at the cafeteria and notices Pyrrha's semblance, but this is such a minor addition it doesn't really add anything because Mercury still scouts her out anyway
In Volume 3 Cinder is putting in extra work to make the Fall of Beacon happen compared to canon. She's rigging every match possible to stir up as much drama as possible to make more negativity for the upcoming Grimm. She has JNPR fight ABRN due to Arslan's grudge against Pyrrha, and sets up FNKI to fight RWBY due to Flynts's grudge against the Schnees
Cinder is also writing online articles under an alias, framing everything in the VYTAL festival in as negative of a light as possible to once again stir up more negativity for the Fall
On top of this she has Neo install one of Watts' viruses into Penny to make her try and kill Pyrrha for maximum drama and negativity
Similar to Watts in Atlas, all of this together ends up making the Fall of Beacon feel a bit over engineered when the villains are putting in so much more work to make it happen. ESPECIALLY considering the Fall already had quite a bit going on in canon. Albeit in this case it's nowhere near as egregious as the shit Watts pulls in the FRWBY Atlas arc while having the audacity to say he "barely lifted a finger" to make it happen
The part of the flashback involving CEM vs Amber is completely different. In canon CEM barely managed to beat Amber in a 3v1, and even then Amber's explicitly the weakest and least experienced maiden at the time. Cinder obtaining the power she craved was something she fought for and "earned" in a sense. She was the underdog having to beat a superior opponent with numbers and strategy, it plays into her beliefs in destiny
In FRWBY Qrow is right by Amber'a side so you'd think it would be even harder for CEM to take Amber's power if not outright impossible. Somehow it ends up far, far easier than canon. Mercury sends Qrow flying with a sneak attack and CEM pins down Amber. Cinder instantly uses the glove to steal her powers without any resistance. The only thing we see Amber do with her powers is creating a wind blast to send CEM away after Qrow cuts the connection
That's so unbelievably lame. It's way too easy. Amber is one of six people on the entire planet with magic and is one of the strongest people in the world, and she gets taken out with all the effort of a fodder mook. Not to mention it makes her and Qrow look incompetent what do you MEAN Amber doesn't put up any resistance when Qrow is right next to her
In canon after obtaining part of the fall maiden powers Cinder used her new strength to directly threaten Adam into submission. She wants his branch of the White Fang for her operations and if negotiations failed then threats will have to do. In FRWBY, she just gives the offer a second time and Adam accepts because Blake left. This is awful because it makes Cinder stupid for not changing negotiation tactics at all which runs counter to Celtic's direction for FRWBY, and this is completely out of character for Adam. ESPECIALLY his FRWBY version who gets written to be a much stronger extremist for the rest of the series AFTER this scene, and him being a faunus supremacist as he explains to Sienna was kept in FRWBY
The Fall of Beacon plays out pretty much identically to canon for Cinder so not much to add
In canon V4, we see the effects that Ruby's Silver Eyes had on her. She's been heavily scarred, has one of her arms entirely covered up now, and she can't even speak, it takes her an entire volume just to regain the ability to talk like she used to. She even gets mocked for this by the rest of Salem's round table due to "losing to a novice." Hazel questions the logistics of how this happened to her, Tyrian makes fun of her losing an eye, and Watts openly mocks her
This does a pretty good job establishing her grudge against Ruby for the rest of the series. We see the process of her recovery with Salem giving her the grimm arm, and Salem forces her to speak on her own without Emerald. We also see her actively pushing her limits and training her maiden powers, wordlessly communicating that yes indeed magic users can become stronger. It even acts as a mirror to Winter saying that semblances are like a muscle, the same applies to magic
Cinder also serves as a parallel to Yang in V4. Both of them are the strongest members of their respective teams, both got disfigured at the Fall of Beacon, both lost arn arm that night, and the process of their recovery is the focus of their screen time in Volume 4
Yang's prosthetic felt completely natural to her, she got a hang of it very fast, and it's just a part of her now. She can even take jokes at her losing the arm in good fun in Volume 9. Cinder's grimm arm by comparison was slow, painful, agonizing, she had to fight to eventually gain control of it. It's so unnatural to her body that she can't protect it with her aura, although it can regenerate and has new abilities she never had before so it's not a strict downgrade. On top of this her new arm has been eating away at her body over time. In Mistral it stopped about halfway up her bicep. By Atlas it's grown all the way up to her shoulder, and I'm certain it'll progress even further when we eventually get to V10 and Vacuo
Tai trains Yang to make sure she's still in shape and able to defend herself, as well as to make sure she can use her prosthetic in a fight. While they train hard, he makes sure they take breaks so they don't overextend. Salem by comparison is training Cinder to the point of exhaustion that she can barely even stand, pushing her far past her limits to speed up training her magic. Taunting her that if she seeks power then she needs to go even further than this
In FRWBYV4 Cinder doesn't even get name dropped. According to Celtic the only thing that the scenes at Salem's castle do is "shove Cortana in our faces" so he removed them entirely to forcibly increase Salem's mystery factor. Celtic Phoenix is VERY stupid if that's all he got out of those canon scenes
Because all of Cinder's scenes this volume take place at Salem's castle, she had all her screen time erased in FRWBYV4. This makes her grudge with Ruby a lot weaker than canon, the grimm arm comes completely out of nowhere in V5, and the Yang parallels are a lot weaker now. Due to her training being cut, and it never even being stated that she's trained, there's no precedent of maidens getting stronger in the FRWBY universe. This makes Fria's strength utterly nonsensical in FRWBY
In comes Volume 5 and we finally see Cinder again. She's roaming the general area the Branwens are at trying to hunt them down. She Em and Merc are wasting their time doing this because somehow Watts uses his hackerman bullshit to figure out where they are. The negotiating between CEMW and Raven happen more or less the same as canon
In canon, Cinder impaling Weiss was a direct response to Jaune. Jaune made it clear that he doesn't care about his own life, so she decides to make it hurt for him by attempting to kill someone he cares about
In FRWBY Jaune's grudge was completely cut. Instead he and Ruby have a 2v2 against her and Emerald. Somehow, Ruby and Jaune aren't getting destroyed by Cinder here. Is she just feeling lazy right now? This is the person that disfigured her so why isn't she going full force? FRWBY doesn't make it clear that Ruby's off limits to her like canon did so what gives? When Emerald gets taken hostage during the battle Cinder doesn't care and impales Weiss because EVIL
This also seems to be taking Mercury's assessment that she doesn't care about him or Em at face value. When she saw Jinn's vision of what RWBYJNR were planning in Volume 8's climax, she looked shocked and even a bit hurt that Emerald was with them. She doesn't openly show care for them, but she does, even if only a bit. It plays into her backstory of the one positive influence in her life in Rhodes betraying her, now she's being abandoned again. Making Cinder so blatant about not giving a shit about Emerald to the point she doesn't care about her life being taken hostage detracts from this because yeah, no shit she'll eventually leave you
In canon Raven did a good job covering her tracks on her being the real spring maiden. Vernal was about the expected age that the previous Spring Maiden would be by now and her making the storm happen was "proof" of her being legitimate. Before the Battle of Haven Raven tells her not to "waste her power" to make the lie more believable. Raven and Cinder's alliance is shaky at best so having Vernal "save her strength" is a good idea and pulls double duty for her cover.
Cinder had no reason to suspect anything was up other than there being no fire in Vernal's eyes when Raven made the storm, but that could be attributed to her closing them no doubt to make the cover stronger. In FRWBY Cinder gets aggravated during the Battle of Haven and tells Vernal "if you're a maiden then act like it," implying she has some suspicions on Vernal's legitimacy as the spring maiden. Despite this, she still falls for Raven's plans exactly like canon
Cinder kills Vernal just like canon, and her battle with Raven plays out almost identically to canon with only two major differences. According to Celtic the fight is a ripoff of Advent Children but he kept it mostly untouched because of it being unique choreography. My only experience with Final Fantasy is Stranger of Paradise so I can't confirm or deny how accurate that assessment is, but even if it's true that's an insanely dismissive thing to say
Instead of having a big magic sword anime clash, Raven uses Omen's dust chamber as a makeshift gun and shoots a barrage of blades at Cinder as she's making the huge sword. At the end of the battle, Raven stabs Cinder in the torso before freezing her
How does Cinder survive you may ask? Aura sucks at healing people in this universe after all and people already call plot armor on Cinder surviving in canon so what gives? FRWBYV6 even goes so far as to show her getting thrashed by a river current after falling out of the vault. Her grimm arm regenerates the wound even though it's not connected to the arm at all, but it corrodes more of her body in the process
Cinder's grimm arm making more progress across her body as the series goes on is a clear visual metaphor for the path to power she's taking destroying her. We don't need to see the exact moment it grows to make that clear. Hypothetically let's say she doesn't have the arm but the result of her battle with Raven happened the same in FRWBY. She would have bled out and died. The fact that her grimm arm actually saved her life actively detracts from this metaphor
We then see snippets of Cinder's backstory over the course of Volume 6. But instead of showing us FRWBY's equivalent of Midnight, we learn how she met Salem. The scenes were spread out throughout V6 but I'll just clump them together for simplicity
Cinder's backstory was changed to take place entirely within Mistral, which completely guts her canonical hatred of the Atlas elite and makes her grudge against Watts more petty. We see the very tail end of Cinder burning down her house, and Tyrian arrives. Apparently Rhodes was a target of Salem's assassinations which is why Tyrian was heading there. He's impressed that Cinder killed him and burned down her family'a home so he knocks out Cinder and kidnaps her, taking her to Salem's castle
Our next scene in Cinder's flashbacks is her waking up on a wooden boat sailing over a grimm pool. Wait what the fuck? The grimm pools disintegrate anything non-grimm that touches it, how the hell is this normal boat floating? Tyrian and Cinder should be dead from this
Tyrian takes Cinder to Salem. Salem can tell by looking at Cinder that she hates life itself and asks who hurt her to make her this way. Cinder tries to kill Salem by repeatedly stabbing her in the torso but of course it doesn't stick due to her immortality. Salem asks if Cinder seeks control or power, and gives her a hug telling her to find her purpose with her. Cinder doesn't say a single thing once she and Salem are face to face by the way
This seems to be trying to address the "why didn't we see how Cinder met Salem" criticism when Midnight came out, but that criticism misses the point of the flashback. Midnight's purpose is to show us how Cinder became who she is today and to show the utter depravity of certain Atlesian elites. Her meeting Salem was completely unimportant to this flashback
I don't know if FRWBYV8 will give us Midnight. If Celtic doesn't then it's yet again another thing that makes FRWBY unrecognizable from canon for no reason. But if it does then Celtic is missing the point of the original. Cinder's backstory takes place in Atlas, so it's only natural we learn of it in the ATLAS arc that takes place in that nation. Cinder's FRWBY backstory takes place entirely in Mistral now. If we get Midnight in V8 then it's entirely disconnected from the current storyline. And if the V6 stuff was meant to be Cinder's entire backstory and he'll never touch on it in V8 then he entirely missed the point of what Midnight's going for
Cinder's canon backstory also acts as a dark reflection to Weiss. Both have an abusive Atlesian parent, both have two siblings. However, Cinder had it much worse. Jacques was rarely if ever physically abusive, Weiss' shock when he slaps her says as much, he was much more emotionally manipulative. Weiss is close to Winter and distant to Whitley, at worst Winter takes the tough love approach and Whitley's an obnoxious ass to her. Madame mentally and physically tortured Cinder on the regular, beating it into her head that she's nothing while using a shock collar on her over the slightest misstep, while also treating her as a slave. Cinder's step-sisters were abusive bullies that did what they could to make Cinder's life even more of a living hell while laughing at her misery the entire time
Despite their poor relationships the worst Weiss ever does to Jacques and Whitley physically is block Jacques' escape when he gets outed for stealing the election, and she threatens Whitley with Myrtenaster when he's blocking RWBN from entering the Schnee manor while they have a critically injured Nora. Cinder's abuse from her so-called family caused her to eventually snap and rightfully kill them all
Not showing Midnight completely destroys this parallel. If Celtic doesn't plan on giving us Midnight for V8 and is expecting his viewers to insert that episode into FRWBY he can go fuck himself, that's incredibly lazy storytelling
Just like Penny potentially getting hacked in FRWBYV8, it's lose-lose-lose no matter which path Celtic takes for Midnight. This time he has absolutely zero excuses because Midnight had aired almost exactly two years before FRWBYV6 started, he was fully aware of Cinder's backstory at this point
Back to the present Cinder's V6 storyline plays out similarly to canon. She arrives at the Spider's to broker intel with Ms Malachite. However, she gets impatient unlike in canon and arrives early demanding that intel as fast as possible after only a few days
Cinder gets into a fight with Melanie when Ms Malachite lays out that she found out she's the key cause for the Fall of Beacon and Miltia's death. Cinder's suffering a lot of health problems for this fight. She's still recovering from fighting Raven, has a concussion from the battle, starving due to poor nutrition the past few days, her grimm arm is eating at her health, and she's cold from the rain. Despite all these nerfs she's beating Melanie far easier than Neo in canon, she doesn't even turn up the juice on her maiden powers here
Right before she can kill Melanie Arslan pops up wanting to beat/kill her to prove her superiority to Pyrrha. Cinder doesn't care and easily kills her in less than twenty seconds of narration. Arslan was so unimportant to Cinder's story that she was less than a speedbump in it
Ms Malachite gives Cinder the intel on where the main cast is heading begging her to spare Melanie. Melanie wants to go with her to hunt down Roman, and Cinder comments "that look in your eye," implying that she's in the same headspace Cinder was when she met Salem
Volume 7 is where shit really starts hitting the fan for Cinder
Cinder pretends to be a member of the White fang and strikes a deal with Robyn. In exchange for sinking a Schnee supply ship so that Mantle can raid it due to a food shortage Watts started, Cinder is given access to an Atlas server room so she has an in to Atlas academy and Robyn acts as a mole for her
Cinder succeeds pretty easily given her maiden powers, but this isn't exactly subtle. Unknown to Cinder, Watts has been covering her ass throughout V7 by scrubbing any camera footage of her under Salem's orders. After sinking the ship Watts barges into her hideaway with Tyrian at his side and rants how she's doing a shit job at the Fall of Atlas due to said lack of subtlety. Cinder initially isn't taking any of this, but then Watts pulls out his scroll with a recorded call from Salem
Salem voices her disappointment in Cinder and considers her trying to prove herself a complete and utter failure. Under Salem's orders Cinder now has to obey everything Watts commands so he can "mentor" her because Cinder can't be trusted to work on her own
I hate this. A ton. This completely strips Cinder of all of her agency and independence for almost all of Volume 7's remaining runtime so that Celtic can jerk off Watts even MORE than he already has. While Watts' rant to Cinder was the wakeup call she needed to start using her head again, she didn't need to be fucking mentored by him. Hell they hate each other, one being forced to work for the other should be the last thing either would do Salem or not
Cinder's arc in canon for Atlas is having a return to form after the failure at Haven. Things didn't go perfectly for her obviously there were problems along the way. But Cinder ended up being a major contributor to the Fall of Atlas and was playing Watts and Neo like a fiddle by the end of V8. She didn't need Watts to teach her how to be a better villain or anything like that
Cinder in canon genuinely knew to be subtle when needed. She laid low and had Neo scout things out until the time for her to strike was perfect. She waited until the Mantle riots started and everyone was away from Atlas before she put down the queen chess piece in Ironwood's office
On that topic, her putting the chess piece there was a major contributor to Ironwood deciding to abandon Mantle, it caused his paranoia to spiral. Salem's agents were here. If they're here what if more are in Mantle? Can't risk it. Stop the evacuations. Abandon them. Atlas is all that matters. Cinder putting down the chess piece genuinely did more to cause the Fall of Atlas than Tyrian and Watts combined because it had a massive domino effect that alienated Ironwood from his own allies. Cinder did this entirely on her own. She had nobody but Neo to act as a scout, someone who she allied with on her own terms
In FRWBY Cinder putting the chess piece in Ironwood's office is completely meaningless. Ironwood's trauma from the chess piece imagery doesn't exist. It's just a "the villains were here and they're taunting us" moment. Instead it's Roman and Neo's actions that cause Ironwood to turn on the main cast due to Neo's disguise making it look like Ruby's betraying him. On top of this Cinder putting the chess piece in Ironwood's office was 100% Watts or Roman's ideas because Cinder is their servant now
When Roman goes off script of the plans and heads to Atlas' vault on his own Cinder chases after him. She manages to take the lamp out of it as it's closing but Roman and Neo take it from her and escape because Cinder can't have anything in this arc. Winter and Penny arrive and Fria is pissed so Cinder's in a 3v1
During the battle Cinder pushes her powers to the point she starts burning her own face with the intensity of her fire, but is still unsuccessful in taking Fria's powers. This is rather odd. In canon it's pretty obvious from the way she dressed and acted in the Beacon era that she took a lot of pride in her appearance. It could even be read as a direct response to her enslavement forcing her to wear those insanely bland worker uniforms. I'm not sure she would intentionally disfigure herself like this, even if it is to obtain more power. Maybe V10 or beyond would prove me wrong but for now, no. I don't believe Cinder would do this
Given how Fria by herself completely overwhelmed Cinder to the point of forcing her to instantly retreat in canon you'd think that she would get destroyed in a 3v1 against her. Somehow it's the complete opposite. Despite the fact that Fria'a clearly the strongest person in the room, even with just FRWBY's context, Cinder is holding her own against all three at once and only retreats when Ruby arrives. Ruby doesn't even use her silver eyes Cinder almost retreats on sight
On top of this due to Cinder's backstory taking place entirely in Mistral and her hatred of the Atlas elite being completely gutted, she has no dialogue or dynamics or anything with anybody here. Hell nobody talks during the fight period which makes it so much worse than canon. Not even any pre-fight banter either. This also cuts some of Cinder's best lines in the whole series and a personal favorite: "You Atlas elites are all the same! You think hoarding power means you'll have it forever, but it just makes the rest of us hungrier! And I refuse to starve."
Our currently final scene of Cinder is her meeting back up with Melanie outside, sharing disappointment at themselves for their failures at the volume's climax
Cinder's rewrites in Fixing RWBY seem to apply to both sides of what her haters say of canon. Together they simultaneously say that she's stupid and incompetent, AND has plot armor at the same time. And that's exactly what happens. She takes Amber's powers without a fight, she holds her own in the 3v1 against Penny Winter and Fria Atlas despite it REALLY not making much sense, and yet she's also way less competent in general, especially in the Atlas arc
In complete contrast to nearly everything in FRWBY, Celtic seems to have intentionally taken Cinder in a brasher, more reckless, and dumber direction than canon. On top of this she had a good chunk of her screen time gutted, and her treatment in the Atlas arc has been diabolical. I'm pretty sure I know exactly why too
Unlike Watts, Celtic Phoenix doesn't like Cinder, that's pretty obvious. The way she's been rewritten, especially in Atlas, reads like spite for her character. She's treated so much worse by the narrative it's absurd. Cinder isn't the blatantly "smart" one in Salem's faction, she's definitely made mistakes along the way, and Watts' rant about having to be smart could be interpreted as her being stupid this entire time if you want to be bad faith about her. I dread what Celtic has in store for her in Volume 8, especially whatever verbose garbage he'll have Watts monologue about when he gives his rant
There's a statement that Celtic makes in FRWBYV4's finale that stuck with me, for all the wrong reasons. Word for word, it's this: "Cinder is best when she doesn't open her mouth." Not only is that an incredibly close-minded thing to say about a character he clearly doesn't like, it's downright misogynistic. It really does put all the rewrites at the expense of the women in the series into a far more malicious light
You want to know the funny thing too? The video that this statement came from, FRWBY V4EP18-22, aired on November 7th, 2020. The very same day that Volume 8's first episode aired, the volume that gives us Cinder's backstory
I don't know if Celtic still holds this opinion, it's been nearly six years after all. But I suspect his opinion hasn't changed much given the title of a stream he made a few months ago calling Cinder "smart" in clearly sarcastic fashion. But even if it has changed I don't give a damn either. Between having a lot of time to mull over that statement about Cinder, and really analyzing Fixing RWBY's treatment of women in detail, I'm done just calling his writing sexist or misogynist. It's blatantly obvious that the man himself is those things and it's not just a poor writing trend
Just, fuck you Sexist Phoenix. Fuck your rewrites, fuck your attitude on Cinder, fuck your treatment of the women in this show, fuck your deepthroating Roman and Watts, fuck this whole damn project. Fuck. Fixing. RWBY
