The Impact of Clover
I’ll probably get flack for this, but honestly I don’t care. This is something that has been eating at me for roughly two weeks now and if I don’t get something written down and out into the ether, I might lose it.
(Cut due to longish rant and possible spoilers)
I had no emotional response to Clover’s death. It didn’t affect me.
I mean, I get why it was a big deal for Qrow and I felt bad for him. In fact, I’ll even go so far as to say that Jason Leibricht really sold the emotional impact the moment had on our favorite birb uncle. As the season progressed, I wasn’t entirely sold on Jason for this role. To me, it felt as though he was holding back or playing it safe and as a result had fallen into the Generic Older Male Voice (also known as Dad Voice) that I’ve heard a thousand times before. But this moment, that guttural yell of “I’ll kill you!” after Tyrian skewered Clover with Harbinger, followed by the quiet oath to bring Ironwood down really brought out the emotion of the scene. It all underlined how Qrow, who was just starting to crawl out of his rock bottom, has had his footing outed from under him again and is prepared to cross a line he may not come back from. Kudos to Jason for bringing that kind of emotion to the role.
But I’m not here to talk about Jason’s performance. I’m not really even here to talk about Qrow. I’m here to talk about Clover as a character and why his death (rather than Qrow’s response to it) didn’t hit me as it seems to have hit so many others.
The main reason is that I don’t feel as though we were given anything about Clover to make us care about him as a character. At the end of the Volume 7, all I took away from Clover as a character was:
1. Elite Soldier (Huntsman?)
2. Follows Orders (loyal to Ironwood)
3. “Good”
And I’ll admit, I wasn’t even sold on that last point until literally the end of the volume. Why? Because we were told nothing about him and it felt as though it was done on purpose, like something was purposefully being kept from us as an audience. I think that’s why so many people (myself included) didn’t trust Clover.
This brings me to the concept of character motivations. Motivations (why a character does or says the things they do or say) are paramount to a character. Those three traits I listed above are a good base for a character, but they aren’t in of themselves motivations. How did Clover become a member of the Ace Ops, much less their leader. Why is he so loyal to Ironwood that he would risk arresting his ally and supposed “friend” (while in the middle of transporting a known serial killer), just to follow his orders? What is his interest in Qrow? Does he remind Clover of someone he was once close to? Does he not like seeing people so down on themselves? Does he feel some kind of connection to him because of their semblances or because they share the unique position of knowing the Truth?
These are all questions that could have easily been answered in any of the interactions between Clover had with Ironwood, his team or Qrow. I’m not saying we need an in-depth backstory or anything close, but a couple of lines here and there that give the audience a little insight into his character.
An example of some established character motivations and is the insight we were given for Ironwood. I don’t agree with the decisions he’s making by the end of the volume (in fact, I think they’re absolutely terrible decisions), but I at least understand why he’s making them. We are shown repeatedly the motivations that are currently driving Ironwood. As one of the few people who know the truth about Salem, he feels an immense responsibility to keep Atlas safe. However, because of the growing tensions between Atlas and Mantle, he feels increasingly overwhelmed and isolated. Penny’s father observes that Ironwood is tired and we see that ourselves within the first few minutes of the first episode. Ironwood also feels a sense of responsibility for what happened to Vale. He says that it was his machines that were used against them and that he isn’t going to ever let that happen again. In a way, even with Penny and Winter at his side and the Ace Ops backing him up, Ironwood has taken his kingdom’s survival onto his own shoulders and his shoulders alone.
I could go on dissecting Ironwood’s character and his motivations, but that’s a different paper for a different time. The point I’m trying to make here is that by establishing Ironwood’s motivations and giving an insight into his character, the audience is given a reason to care about him and the decisions he makes, regardless if we think them to be good or bad. We don’t get that with Clover.
Because we don’t know anything about Clover’s motivations, the fact that he tries to arrest Qrow while in the middle of transporting Tyrian, not only makes him look foolish, but far from the elite soldier he’s made out to be. You would think that an elite soldier would come to the reasonable conclusion that getting the very dangerous serial killer in his custody to a secure location would be the bigger priority than arresting a possibly rogue huntsman. I remember staring at my screen dumbfounded when Clover got up to attempt to arrest Qrow. I even said out loud: “You idiot! Get the killer behind bars first! What are you doing?!” If we had been told (or better yet shown) that Clover has the same sort of blind loyalty to Ironwood that Qrow had to Ozpin, this would have made more sense. Don’t get me wrong, it still would have been stupid, but at least we would have understood why his priorities were skewed the way they were.
Similarly, we don’t know Clover’s reasoning for befriending Qrow in the first place, therefore his attempts to arrest him and the resulting fight don’t carry the weight I think it should have or was meant to have. And here I’m going to say something that is probably going to be very unpopular: I never bought the friendship (or budding ship, if you’re into shipping) the plot was trying to set up between them. To me it felt incredibly one-sided. Clover said a couple of nice things to Qrow for Reasons and suddenly the two of them are besties? Potential lovers? That’s not how that works! I don’t know, maybe coming off of Volume 6 Qrow was so starved for positive attention from someone that literally anyone could have said something nice to him and he’d immediately be eating out of the palm of their hand. This “friendship” reminded me so much of Caboose’s one-sided friendship with Church in RvB. However, where Caboose and Church is played for laughs (mostly), Qrow and Clover is played perfectly straight and I couldn’t help but cringe every time the two of them interacted on screen. As I mentioned earlier, if it had not been for Jason bringing his A-game in that final fight between them, the whole thing would have fallen so flat for me.
Again, it didn’t have to be this way. Clover could have easily said “hey, man, I’ve been where you are now…” or “you remind me of a someone I knew…” or “my semblance has isolated me too…” or something that would have explained why he decided Qrow needed to hear what he had to say. We could have learned about Clover as a character. Hell, if we had learned more about him we could have drawn parallels between him and Qrow, their semblances of good and bad luck and their relationships with and to their respective superiors. Through learning about Clover, we could have seen their bond form and grow. Then when the two of them found themselves facing off against each other, weapons drawn, prepared to fight each for their own reasons it would have had a more significant impact. Clover’s death then could have been gut-wrenching, not just for Qrow, but for us. It could have meant so much more. Clover could have been so much more than simply a tool used to further someone else’s story arc.
