(i feel i should clarify that this isn’t criticism it’s one of my favorite things abt the show)
i don’t disagree, per se, but when i say rwby is cynical what i mean is this:
the good guys—these kids who care so much and try so hard to make the world better, to do the right thing even in the most awful circumstances—are on the wrong side of the broader ideological conflict. the heroes are huntsmen, and huntsmen are the institutional keystone of the postwar society ozma designed; their literal stated purpose is to train children as soldiers in order to use them as cannon fodder in a never-ending shadow war against the human being ozma views as the root of all evil. they are glorified mercenaries operating with zero meaningful oversight and the authority to act as international law enforcement agents, and rwby as a narrative has made a deliberate point of emphasizing the many, many failures of this system—from rampant corruption and outright criminality to using an enslaved child’s suffering as recruitment material instead of enforcing the laws against slavery to the trauma inflicted on the children who sign up to become heroes and get drop-kicked onto the frontlines of a war zone instead. & then v6 comes out swinging with the revelation that the ultimate purpose for ALL OF THIS is to placate a god who has condemned humanity to death unless they collectively ‘redeem’ themselves for the (nominal) wrongdoing of one person, for which all humankind is evidently guilty by association as far as the gods care. we have three whole volumes and counting of narrative arc about the kids struggling with the trauma of that discovery, yeah? like this is a major pillar of the story.
the notional big bad—salem—meanwhile, explicitly positions herself in opposition to this system and the ideological beliefs undergirding it. the story opens with salem waxing poetic about how fucking awesome she thinks humanity is in one breath and eviscerating ozma for his reliance on isolated guardians and hollow symbols of strength to prop up his ‘so-called free world’ in the next—and then the beacon arc’s like “so all the adults in this school are cultists and instead of dealing with the problem they’re going to manipulate and put so much pressure on this seventeen year old girl to let them cram a comatose woman’s soul into her that the girl in question has a nervous breakdown and then commits suicide by heroic sacrifice” and follows this up with salem delivering a second monologue in which she bluntly spells out that ozpin failed because his secrecy and unwillingness to trust anyone are corrosive to the ideals he nominally upholds. one of the things that makes rwby so fascinating is how it turns the “evil cannot comprehend good” trope on its head: salem speaks tenderly of human bravery, resourcefulness, passion, and ingenuity; describes hope as an indomitable force and warns ozma that strength will not save him when hope is lost—and he is so consumed by fear and so blinded by faith in his mandate that her point sails entirely over his head and he retorts that actually victory is found in simpler things, like hope, that she’s long forgotten. kshdkf like! it isn’t just that salem is correct in her assessment of ozma’s character and the failings of the society he built—it’s that salem values humanity. it’s that ozma believes that the universal fundament of human existence is fear and salem looks at humankind and sees courage and passion and hope. her absolute disdain for ozma and the scornful critique she makes of the society he built arises from her staunch belief in the intrinsic value of human nature.
rwby is an unabashedly humanist narrative in which the heroic characters are ultimately enacting the will of a god who thinks humanity deserves to be wiped from existence, while the villain is a woman who despises that god with every fiber of her being and glowingly tells the story of how humans defied fate itself to survive and thrive in a cruel, unforgiving world. salem is evil—but her ideological stance is right.
and this is where rwby is a cynical narrative, see, because—the villain is right. the villain is fighting a desperate war of resistance against genocidal gods because she rejects the divine perspective that humans are worthless, and her opponent is the chosen one who folded like wet cardboard when his god told him that humans deserve to die. the villain is the cosmic scapegoat. the villain is a woman who has been abused and persecuted and rejected for two hundred million years and still believes that humanity is good. the villain is a character whose villainy is created and enforced by dehumanizing propaganda. rwby is hopepunk and rwby is also a story blatantly setting the stage for the villain’s villain -> hero arc to involve the heroes taking her side against the gods and rwby is also a story that interrogates the simple ethos of hopepunk and finds that it isn’t enough to be kind, it isn’t enough to just fight for a better world, you have to also be critical of what you believe, your preconceived biases, your assumptions about what “better” means; are you taking a stand against injustice or are you actually defending a status quo that benefited you at the expense of someone else? (think abt how the heroes read into salem’s narrowly-focused campaign against the huntsmen academies a desire for total destruction of civilization itself; and how this subconscious idea that humanity and huntsmen are one and the same has locked the kids into thinking of the conflict as a problem that has to be solved by force even though salem cannot be forced to stop.)
the heroes are a bunch of children who were never taught to do anything except kill monsters, trying to figure out what the hell to do in a war that cannot be ended with violence, and the villain is a deeply traumatized immortal woman brutally ripping apart the cult of her tormentors after two hundred million years of not being treated like a person. the narrative appears to be setting up for THE VILLAIN to be the one who initiates peace negotiations and is structured such that the villain has to win because her ideological stance is that humanity has the right to exist.
rwby is not cynical in the sense that it disdains optimism or sneers at the idea of believing in things—quite the opposite, it’s hopepunk—it’s cynical in the sense that the narrative grabs the simplistic good-vs-evil moral conventions of its genre by the throat and goes this is the problem actually, this comforting myth of clean dividing lines between the good people and the monsters. it’s cynical about the tidiness of fantasy conflict, the easy moral resolution, the allure of the simple answer. & it’s this cynicism that gives the hope its teeth, bc the hope has got this underlying rage burning through it.
2087
turnnoffyourmind
pixelskylines
romaincrisis
blakekathryn
vaporwave
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dailybridgerton
