Here’s a fun ask instead of all the harassment you’ve been receiving! What are 5 things that you would change about the show creatively to make it personally satisfying and indulgent to you? It can be anything. Excluding stuff like no racist/ableist/queerphobic/etc. writing cause that’s a no-brainer to most people.
Oooooo fun! Thanks bestie 😘
I would like to explore the effects of Semblance on a user, like Quirks changing the user's personhood in BNHA, and challenging Remnant as a society even further with exploration into its structure surrounding Semblance.
For example, Qrow's Semblance is extremely volatile and dangerous even to himself, so how would Remnant react to that? Especially when he's part of the legendary team STRQ, and how did he navigate life with his Semblance? Anything other than "boo hoo I'm so sad" even though most of the shit was his own doing ugh.
Another concept I want to explore in my own reimagining of RWBY is how different Grimm reacts to a certain emotion. Sure, they all love negative emotions in every form, but each specializes in different ranges of those negative emotions: Nevermores and sorrow, Beowulves and solitude/loneliness, Ursas and rage, Death Stalkers and fear, and so much more. Maybe that's how they evolve along with being alive for a very long time, by consuming prey with those specific traits in large quantities.
I know you say no racism, but I would lean the whole Faunus thing to more Beastars territory or even Zootopia: "when other bunnies call each other cute, it's okay. But for others...." or "predator type Faunus aren't dangerous but Remnant condemns them for not being 'cute' or 'safe looking' enough". It removes that whole thing from the narrative, and actually propose unique issues for a fantasy race. And that the Faunus on Menagerie are much more comfortable with their traits, adapting and overcoming the terrains of the island and building a culture about their traits. Not that weird inconsistent shit or even the allegory shot. Because remember kids, comparing fantasy races to black people is fucking stupid.
Number 4 on the list is the cultures of Remnant. I've been thinking about Vacuo lately, and I can see in the 80 years post war, their cuisine are heavily based on fermentation, preserved food, and heavily spiced dishes in order to prevent spoilage and ensure a stable stock when needed. Menagerie is also another one my co-wroter brings up, where the Faunus popularized seafood and raw food like sushi due to their reliance on the ocean when land is limited. Diversify that shit up man, there's more than one nation!
And finally, MAKE MORE FLASHBACKS.
Seriously, give us flashbacks of shit we need to know prior to the current timeliness. Give me STRQ, give me Oz's previous hosts and their experiences other than that one sequence, give me character depths outside of the constraints of the fucking current timeline. Seriously, be like Naruto just this once instead of the bullshit misogyny yall got, CRWBY.
Clearly, Yang standing there and doing nothing while Ruby drank the tea is a representation of her finally learning the lesson to not rush headfirst into battle without thinking. She was assessing the situation. She has grown uwu. /j
Can we please talk about how awful and lacklustre RWBY's MLM rep is. Like, Pilot Boi technically isn't gay but it's real telling that their first consideration for MLM rep was gonna be a nameless minor character who dies in the same episode he gets focus. What about the gays in Mistral with the bamboo shaped as a heart? These aren't fleshed out characters or rep. We deserve better rep beyond forgettable no-names and insulting stereotypes. As flawed as the WLW rep is they're at least characters.
yes we can (ignore that this is super late). it is interesting to me that mlm have had little to no rep in the show (the main ip, i should add). for all the cries about how crwby and rt care about lgbt people, they sure don't care about the g. mlm exist, they deserve to be represented by more than just literal background characters or harmful stereotypes.
we need more MAIN mlm characters, whether they're gay, bi, pan, etc. it could've qrow, it could be tai (bi tai rights 💛), it could be oscar, it can be sun. i'm tired of only having headcanons. mlm deserve genuine rep.
PLEASE elaborate on Seteth/Sylvain. I need ALL of the details.
All right. Listen. Bear with me here. There are times, when I write fic, where I'll have two characters carry out a conversation and I think to myself, "Huh. I could do something with that."
Such is what happened here skgjsfdlg
I just like the idea of the combination of naturally-and-incredibly-perceptive Seteth and evasive-and-barely-holding-it-together Sylvain. Old dragon dude dealing with Asshole of the Year. I would like to see it actually. Almost all of their fics on ao3 are varyingly depraved p.rn, but that doesn't bother me. If I have time I might crank out a fic of my own; I would like Sylvain to confront His Shit, you know? And I think a dragon DILF is the way to do it. (At least, it's the most fun way I can think of.) I also entertain the idea of Seteth trying to emphasize that his Crest bears more meaning than shackles (I mean, it's such An Idea, what Seteth would feel when he hears someone bad-mouth Crests knowing what had to happen for that power to be passed down, you know? but that's just me running my mouth without much thought). As of right now, though, that's a (non-shippy) matter for Princes.
no but in all honesty, my genuine feelings about kataang boil down to three major points: 1. it's boring, and does not jive thematically with either of their character arcs, to the point of, 2. actively hampering character development on both sides, and 3. katara deserved better.
points expanded under the cut. (please, if you're a kataang shipper and you see this, just keep scrolling. i've tagged it appropriately and put the bulk under a cut and at this point that's literally all i can do lmfao.)
send me a ship and get my (brutally) honest opinion!
1. It's Boring: This is the most subjective point on the list (I mean, in fairness, it's all subjective, but I have evidence from the show and post-canonical materials to support my other points; this one is just preference), but there's just... nothing to kataang. It's cute (when it's not actively aggravating), and... that's about it. It's not even that I dislike friends-to-lovers as a shipping trope (though it's not my overall preference), because there are a lot of friends-to-lovers couples that I do ship (kanej comes to mind, also will/elizabeth from potc, karolsen from supergirl, romione and hinny from hp, among others), but one thing that I think all of those couples have that kataang doesn't is that both sides of the pairing are teens or adults when they get together, with teen/adult dynamics and issues and stories to deal with, rather than one half being a teenager and the other being literally prepubescent.
And don't get me wrong, I have no problem with age gap ships in general. And as far as atla goes, Katara, at 14, has the same age difference from Zuko (16) as Aang has from her, and it's never stopped me--because both Katara and Zuko are well into puberty when they meet and I have no problem picturing them being into one another and growing together as they enter adulthood. Aang, on the other hand, is a child. And he acts like it. Which wouldn't be a problem, if the show weren't expecting me to believe he is a) ready for a romantic relationship, and b) ready for one specifically with Katara, who is not only older and far more mature but is specifically cast as his caretaker in a very maternal role for the entire show's run.
This show asks me to believe that a teenage girl well into adolescence is going to be attracted to and develop romantic feelings for a pre-adolescent child--and it asks me to believe this while showing us otherwise that Katara's type is actually older boys with fabulous hair and angsty pasts in all of her other potential romantic dalliances--and then enter into a relationship with him, all while ignoring the elephant in the room that is the fact that she was basically acting like his mother for the entire series to that point. (Something that is heavily lampshaded earlier in the very same season.) That just stretches the bounds of credulity way too far for me, especially when there's no evidence that Katara herself would get anything out of their romantic relationship.
There's nothing there for me to sink my teeth into. No delicious development, no parallels where they help each other grow, no internal conflicts that they have to work through together, nothing. Certainly no reason for me to actually believe Katara feels (or would grow to feel) anything for him other than the platonic affection of a caretaker. I can easily believe she loves him dearly, as a friend and quasi-little-brother, but I just can't see that developing naturally into romantic love--not the way it's presented in the show.
And even if they did manage to at least make the development of Katara's feelings believable, unless they changed something fundamental about the nature of their relationship, it'd still be boring, so.
2. It Actively Hampers Their Character Development--On Both Sides: I've written before (extensively lol im so sorry) about how kataang is actively detrimental to Katara and to Aang. In short (because ye gods this post is already getting long enough), Katara is narratively harmed by being shoved into a relationship that completely ignores her stated feelings--a relationship that had been presented as a one-sided puppylove crush for the vast majority of the series--and it inhibits her growth as a character in ways that become far more obvious in the comics and lok, where the very same creative forces that lead to her beginning a relationship with Aang in the first place reduce her to 'the Avatar's girl' and very little else, all the way through to the end of LoK (where she is a Healer and the Avatar's wife and, again, very little else).
As for Aang:
As to how this relationship is detrimental to Aang (other than the comics and LoK nonsense)? Just take a look at book 2, when he’s trying to learn Earthbending from Toph. Katara constantly coddles him. Much of the time, she’s afraid to be anything other than gentle and understanding with Aang--partly because of her fear that if she pushes him too far, he’ll run away. (Which he does, several times.) But sometimes, what Aang needs to grow is a sharp kick in the slats, which Toph was more than willing to provide--and which worked. Katara was great for teaching Aang to waterbend, but he needed more than that to grow as a person. And he can’t get that while he’s in a relationship with someone who will apologize for getting upset when he was very explicitly neglecting her.
In addition, it is pointed out by Guru Pathik at the end of Book 2 that one of Aang's chakras is blocked by his attachment to Katara. Aang takes this to mean (incorrectly) that he has to stop loving her in order to become fully realized as an Avatar, but this is actually part of the problem--because the issue isn't that he is in love with Katara, it's that he's possessively attached to her. He believes himself entitled to her love in return, rather than selflessly loving someone regardless of whether or not they return that affection. (This is obvious come the EIP episode, where Aang demands to know why he and Katara aren't in a relationship already--because he kissed her without asking [or even checking to see if she'd be ok with kissing him], which he phrases as mutual even though it very much was not, and he gets angry and violates her boundaries when she says that she is confused and doesn't want to think about it right then.)
It is his attachment to Katara--the need for her to return his love, the belief that she will and it is only a matter of time before he gets what he wants--that he was supposed to let go of, not his feelings for her in general. Unfortunately, while he pays lipservice to doing this (far too late for it to be useful--if he'd stayed with the Guru for five more minutes and unlocked his chakra there, that battle would've gone very differently), he almost immediately backtracks on that development come book 3, and there isn't another single whisper of Aang maybe growing up and moving past his one-sided and possessive crush and realizing that even if Katara doesn't feel the same way, it doesn't mean she loves him less or that their friendship is less important.
What really needed to happen, for Aang to grow as a person and become fully realized as an Avatar, was for him to grow up. To realize that his feelings were not of paramount importance, and that even if he was in love with Katara, he was not entitled to her love in return. He should have been able to move past his need for her to love him back, in order to get past that stumbling block, unlock his chakras, and regain the Avatar State in time to face the Firelord. But he didn't. As a result, they had to find some other way to just give him the Avatar State (a well-placed rock) and the means to defeat Ozai without killing him (the deus ex lionturtle) and his entire character arc just fell apart in the third act rather than reaching a satisfying conclusion.
3. Katara Deserved Better: This really ties into how her romantic relationship with Aang hampered her own development, but I'm still bitter enough about it that it gets its own bullet-point. And the biggest single reason I could never ship kataang--the thing that would've turned me off even if there were substance and a halfway decent storyline for them--is the fact that Aang kisses her without her consent (for the second time) in Ember Island Players, Katara gets angry at him and storms off, and then..... she walks out onto the balcony to make out with him.
With nothing to bridge that gap.
It's bad enough that a show aimed at children had a scene where the child protagonist kissed the object of his affections without her consent when she didn't want him to (made explicit by her angry reaction)--and this is absolutely an issue when the show is aimed at children and it may well be the first experience they've had with consent issues portrayed in media--but this moment is never addressed again. Katara just decides--completely off-screen--that she does love him Really and walks out to make out with him in the epilogue. There's no conversation, no apology for violating her boundaries, no discussion of why that was wrong or any indication that Aang understands what he did and why it upset her. They don't have a single one-on-one interaction between that kiss and the epilogue, and the only other time they are on screen together, Aang yells at her and storms off.
So, even leaving the comics and lok aside, Katara deserved much better from her own romantic plotline. In fact, she deserved to have one, rather than simply being the oblivious object of Aang's affections, given a couple moments where she blushes but otherwise remains completely ignorant of his feelings (she looks shocked and upset when he kisses her prior to the invasion, and then she completely forgets that even happened because she's confused as to what Aang is even talking about during EIP until he brings it up; that's not the behavior of a fourteen-year-old girl who was kissed by someone she was developing romantic feelings for), before the epilogue where it becomes clear that she figured all of that out off-screen and had feelings for him after all.
She's a main character, not a side-character written in solely to give one of the mains a love interest. She deserved a romantic plotline of her own. (She could have had one with someone else, with very few changes made to what was actually on-screen prior to the epilogue, but that's another conversation entirely.) She deserved to have her feelings considered at all important by the person she was going to be paired with in the end, rather than having him just assume she felt the same way and then get mad at her for never giving any indication of it when he'd never asked about her feelings to begin with. She deseserved agency in her own romantic narrative, and she just didn't get that with Aang.
So yeah, at the end of the day, my biggest issue with kataang is that it involved doing Katara dirty, and she's my favorite character and she deserved so much better damnit.
you’re just too good to be true ... can’t take my eyes off of you ❤
➤ ... wishbone [clover / marrow] from rwby.
➤ ... commissioned by @invincibleweasel!
➤ ... twitter version found here.
➤ ... do not edit, repost or redistribute without permission.
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both were just very ... negative for each other. zuko was consistently lying to her (as a side effect of lying to himself that this was the life he wanted, that he wanted to be this genocidal prince who used & abused with no care) & mai just. didn’t understand him. she shut him down whenever he tried to open up, she didn’t know how to handle his self doubt. zuko didn’t know how to handle the way she closed up on herself & didn’t let him in; & his jealousy was off the walls with her (see: the beach episode.)
this is all just brushed over come the end of the series, just like the issues with k/ataang are, but that’s just par for the course with most of the romances in the show. zuko & mai were supposed to be childhood crushes yet we only see it from one side, mai’s side while she’s being used by azula to mock zuko & tease him. overall, they really just work best as friends.
