#matte skye

[marcmarcmomarc]

RWBY Volume 10 predictions

Voice cast: Ship crew

Captain: Bruce Carey

Matte Skye: Derrek Ziegler

Crew Members: Chris Kokkinos and Yunhao Zhang

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[dragynkeep]

rwby’s queer representation.

opening out of the way, i’m a queer nonbinary bisexual & have been out for over a decade, blah blah, let’s get to the meat & potatoes of this post. i want this to be a fairly nuanced post but let me just be honest & say it’s not going to be kind to rooster teeth, rwby or mkek. if you don’t want to see that, scroll ahead.

the queer cast.

out of over 250+ named characters  —  while including the novels which has to happen to include half the rep on this list  —  we have “16″ queer characters ranging from confirmed to word of god. those are;

blake belladonna ; bisexual. appeared in 2012, however not confirmed in canon yet. was “confirmed” by writer eddy rivas in a reddit comment that didn’t really confirm it & has been pushed by her va arryn zech for years.

coco adel ; lesbian. appeared in 2014, was confirmed as a lesbian in the rwby novel after the fall in 2019.

ilia amitola ; lesbian. appeared in 2016, was confirmed as a lesbian in 2017 while confessing to a bound blake.

scarlet david ; gay. appeared in 2014, however he was confirmed in a non canon manga by miles on twitter to be gay in 2018.

sapphron & terra cotta arc ; unspecified wlw. appeared & were confirmed in 2019, however what sexuality they are is unconfirmed.

may marigold ; trans woman. appeared in 2019 & was said by her va to be trans in a tweet, this was further confirmed in 2020 in the episode war.

the noncanon / questionably canon queer characters we have are;

yang xiao long ; unspecified wlw. yang has been teased to be in a relationship with blake belladonna for the past half a decade & was confirmed to be attracted to men in the earlier volumes of the show. she has also been featured on pride merch both solely & related to the ship bumblby, yet with no canon confirmation of either her relationship or sexuality, she remains in the void.

team ndgo ; ace. this team was a fan creation submitted & used by crwby for the vytal tournament, their creators & va’s have said that they headcanon the girls as on the ace spectrum but that it’s not canon as they have no further creative control over them.

matte skye ; nonbinary. the va says that they headcanoned matte as nonbinary like themselves, but there has been no canon confirmation from any of the writers.

nolan porfirio ; unspecified mlm. the wiki says that nolan is gay, however there is no confirmed relationship between him & scarlet in the novels, nor is there any confirmed sexuality for him that has been put into the text itself.

mistral gays ; unspecified mlm. these were two background characters from the montage that took place during volume 5 in mistral. there is no confirmed sexuality for either of them but they are holding a heart shaped bamboo plant together for 2 seconds on screen.

taking away the non canon / questionably canon characters out of rwby’s queer roster; as they have not been confirmed by either the writers or on screen, canon material; this brings the number down to 7. meaning out of 250+ named characters in rwby, we have less than 10 that are queer. & out of them, they only fulfil 4(?) of the sexualities / genders in the queer community.

& then there is the question of if these characters are still on screen. out of the 7 confirmed queer characters we have, only 2 are still actively on screen or contributing to the plot; which are blake belladonna & may marigold.

the treatment.

scarlet & coco have been written off to the novel land until we potentially see them in vacuo, ilia was written off to go be with the white fang, & saphron / terra were only ever side characters who weren’t meant to feature more than the three episodes they did.

mkek + monty when he was still alive have been on record saying that “queer rep needs to be earned”, an inherently queerphobic statement considering not only the preferential treatment of mlw / heterosexual couples in the show that far outweigh queer couples with little to no development; but also because of the fact that 4 / 5ths of mmkek are straight men. the only queer writer is kiersi & her own writing about queer people is questionable at best & harmful at worst.

& i would be remiss not to mention the favouritism towards wlw in both terms of how representation is handled & what characters are given as representation. in the almost decade rwby has been running, mlm have had only scarlet as their representation while being continuously queerbaited or overlooked time & time again. while mkek realized how they didn’t want to contribute to the queerphobic trope of bury your gays by making pilot boi gay, miles was then also on record wishing that they had done it anyways because of how popular he’d become. miles was then also the one to talk about the potential of jaune, a popular character in the main cast, being queer before quickly shutting that down after the fact.

there have also been plenty of arguments back & forth about the queerbaiting during the fairgame situation; however the fact remains that eddy himself acknowledged it was queerbaiting & that the writing team regard sexualities as “spoilers” to be earned, before changing his statement. both clover & qrow were heavily coded as queer & as it is, neither have been confirmed & the former suffered the most gruesome, graphic death on the screen so far.

mkek have also spent almost half a decade teasing the potential couple of bumbleby, blake & yang; however they have gone back & forth on romantic moments for them while heterosexual couples like renora have been able to have far more development in less time to confirm their relationship. all the while, mkek & the company have seen fit to use the ship to promote merch & entice people into buying it; a queerphobic action & something that is the definition of queerbaiting.

on a final note; there is also definitely the issue of intersectionality when it comes to the queer representation in rwby. nonwhite representation in rwby is fairly problematic already, but when looking at the landscape of who is queer in rwby, it paints a very white, conventionally attractive picture with barely any poc or genderqueer people. the queer face in media is already very whitewashed, it would do rwby well to not further contribute to this alongside their other issues.

conclusion.

rwby has definitely never been at the forefront of queer representation, despite a fair amount of their fans being queer & just wanting to see that done well. with other shows now coming up behind them & overtaking in terms of genuine rep made by queer creators, all while fighting homophobic networks & people  —  something rt has never had to do as an independent company  —  it’s very clear that rwby isn’t even in 2000 & late anymore in terms of their queer characters, they’re in the 1500s comparatively.

they either need to do better by their queer fans or just admit that they don’t really care about us beyond the dollar signs they can see burning a hole in their pocket.

[musings-from-mars]

Fiona, Ruby, Terra, Matte, Penny

-get drunk with: Fiona because I want to witness what drunk Fiona would be like

-make out with: Penny. Idk I just wanna kiss a robot girl?

-date: Ruby again!

-marry: Matte Skye 🥺🥺🥺 enby spouse

-punch: I guess Terra? Only because she’s the odd one out

[maxiemumdamage]

Trans Characters in RWBY

May Marigold

Matte Skye

Penny Polendina

Cinder Fall

Robyn Hill

Fiona Thyme

Joanna Greenleaf

Nora Valkyrie

Lie Ren

Jaune Arc

Pyrrha Nikos

Ruby Rose

Oscar Pine

Sun Wukong

Velvet Scarlatina

Neopolitan

Roman Torchwick

All of team FNKI

[owletarc]

OK when RWBY was first made, was it meant to be the poster child for lgbtq lesbians, because when I first started watching it, seeing these group of girls kicking ass and being friends, not once did I think, yep this is definitely a show about lesbians, like was I just seeing it wrong or was this the plan from the start.

iirc crwby said from the beginning that there would be lgbt characters but they wanted to do the story naturally. however as a bi woman i will say that the main girls were written as straight girls ; crwby can say what they want now but there has been no inkling of same sex interest from any of them and the only interest 3 / 4 girls in rwby had was towards men. that might change now but people who say certain ships or sexualities were planned from the start are talking out of their ass and seeing things that aren’t there. rwby were written as straight girls with only male aligned interest. the only reason bi blake came about was because arryn said she wanted her to be bi (bc arryn herself is bi) and that was it. any moments that’re “queer coded” can easily be read as platonic ; unlike the blacksun flirting, weiss thirsting hard after neptune or yang’s perving after the boys.

i would love for any of the girls to be wlw but / shrugs. it would’ve been so easy to do it from the start, crwby just didn’t.

but also the shows handling of lgbt peeps is just ... not great. we didnt have a confirmed in universe lgbt character until volume 5, in ilia. and every lgbt character after her has been put on a bus and / or confirmed in outside media / sources.

coco adel : introduced in v2 / 2014, but not confirmed until she’s used as a marketing ploy to hook people into buying after the fall in 2019. no longer in the show.

scarlet david : introduced in v3 / 2015, but not confirmed until the manga anthology until 2018. confirmed by the mangaka but not by miles himself. no longer in the show.

team ndgo : introduced in v3 / 2015, said to be asexual by their voice actresses but not confirmed by the writers. no longer in the show.

matte skye : introduced in v4 / 2016, said to be nonbinary by their voice actor but not confirmed by the writers. no longer in the show.

ilia amitola : introduced in v4 / 2016 and confirmed to be a lesbian in v5 / 2017. no longer in the show.

saphron & terra cotta arc : introduced in v6 / 2018, confirmed in the show to be unspecified wlw. no longer in the show.

may marigold : introduced in v7 / 2019, said to be trans by her voice actress but not confirmed by the writers iirc. currently in the show.

i’m not saying that rt isnt trying with their rep, but when all of it is either gone or minor characters that’re so minor one doesn’t even have their own wiki page and the thing most memorized about them is their sexuality ... it’s not good. you don’t get to claim you’re such a woke lgbt show and then do this with your lgbt characters.

[yangsmash]

happy pride - matte skye (voice actor confirmed)

[sketchhungry]

Cresent Rose gushing

Commission

[catgirlkirigiri]

Misc. RWBY cat designs

exactly what it says

Oof its all villains other than Matte... Salem(the second one) is a bit of a wip,, but I’m calling it good enough to post.