#menagerie article

[sunder-the-gold]

The White Fang is separate from Menagerie

It has always been an international organization.

The faunus fought and won a war for the right to remain citizens of the Great Kingdoms rather than be exiled to Menagerie. Afterwards, those who settled on Menagerie banded together with the faunus who remained in those kingdoms in order to establish the White Fang.

As a peaceful international organization originally intended to continue suing for equality, the White Fang has never been the military arm of Menagerie. Menagerie’s only known village, Kuo Kuana, has a completely separate institution of guardsmen, with a unique uniform, who answer to the village’s chieftain rather than to the White Fang’s high leader.

Likewise, no one in the White Fang answers to the chieftain of Kuo Kuana. As political entities, they are close allies, but separate. Ghira Belladonna can disagree with Sienna Khan’s actions, but he has no responsibility to stop her because he has no power to do so.

This is likely the reason why Atlas never declared war against Menagerie after the White Fang assassinated members of the Schnee family and Dust Company board-members. The murderers were likely not foreign agents, but faunus citizens of Atlas itself. That makes it a nationally internal matter of domestic terrorism.

Even so, there would be no denying the international chain of command leading back to Sienna Khan. So I hypothesize that Sienna Khan protected Menagerie from potential reprisal from the Great Kingdoms by renouncing any citizenship she might have enjoyed on Menagerie; effectively declaring herself an outlaw with no legal rights in any kingdom. Her followers might have done the same.

I also hypothesize that even before the attack on Beacon, the new White Fang filtered any news that managed to reach Menagerie, to hush news about the assassinations they carried out except to deny any accusations as propaganda and lies. Otherwise, I don’t think Ghira would have allowed them to maintain an unmonitored diplomatic presence in his village.

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[sunder-the-gold]

What do you think the Grimm situation is like in Menagerie. Since it's been a Volume and a half and we've yet to see any(unless you count the Sea Dragon.) I imagine it being pretty bad since Menagerie is Faunas Australia(where regular Australia everything can kill you.). And on top of problems like overpopulation and lack of farm land and resources.

I don’t think Kuo Kuana attracts nearly as many Grimm as Vale City, simply because it’s harder for Grimm to randomly stumble upon a fishing village than a mega-city. Also because there are fewer souls sending out negative vibes.

I think a single one of the Grand Goliaths marching around Vale City could probably destroy Kuo Kuana and would definitely take the chance. The village’s borders hopefully have artillery stolen from Mistral towns and cities during the Faunus Rights Revolution, along with anything that the faunus were able to buy honestly, but I don’t think it would be enough to stop a Grand Goliath.

I am not really sure how the Grand Goliaths even came to be at Vale’s borders. I think Vale would have hunted any Goliaths before they got that big, but if they’re hundreds of years old, we’d need to know more of Remnant’s history.

Maybe Menagerie has a lot of brave faunus hunters who find titanic Grimm like those things, taunt them, and lead them on terrifying chases back into the depths of the wilderness to keep them from ever finding a settlement?

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[sunder-the-gold]

Menagerie: Is it really worse than Vacuo?

It’s part of my headcanon that after Menagerie was “gifted” to the faunus in the Vytal Accords, experts from Vacuo went to help the immigrants make a home there... either out of the goodness of their hearts, or because someone paid them. The Last King of Vale, in particular, might have spared some personal funds to pay for the job.

So when Blake says that Menagerie's desert is different from Vacuo's, and that the wildlife is more dangerous, I don’t think this is an uninformed opinion. It’s probably an opinion passed down to her from her parents or grandparents, who personally met survival experts from Vacuo. Experts who might have thrown up their hands and said, "Fuck this continent. I'm going back home to Vacuo where it's safe."

However, this still doesn’t make the notion of greater danger an objective fact.

By the time of the Vytal Accords, people had already been living in Western Sanus for hundreds of years. Whatever dangerous wildlife existed there, the local people had long understood intimately. New and unfamiliar wildlife is always the most dangerous; the people of Vacuo and Menagerie get by today because of the ancestors who survived by learning from the tragic examples of those who became lessons.

But even setting aside the wildlife, Vacuo is objectively better off in many other regards. Even before the Great War, the people of Western Sanus had established infrastructure: cities, walls, outposts, fortresses, smithies, mines, livestock, trade routes, and maps to all known sources of water. That’s what allowed them the strength to prove a threat in the Great War, such that Mistral and Mantle feared Vacuo joining forces with Vale.

The faunus exiled to Menagerie had none of that, and no expertise in how to start building it.

Since the faunus of Menagerie naturally wanted to pursue the developmental path that would lead to the fewest deaths, they stuck to the more hospitable coastline. Mastering Menagerie’s desert can wait until Kuo Kuana becomes strong enough to project a colonizing force without risking as many lives. The time spent waiting is also time that volunteer scouts can spend gathering vital information for those future colonists.

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[sunder-the-gold]

If not Menagerie, why not Vacuo?

Okay, so Vacuo is generally a better and safer place to live and doesn’t discriminate against faunus. There’s also my headcanons that Vacuo didn’t exile any of its own people to Menagerie, and that elements of Vacuo attempted to establish positive diplomatic and economic ties with the faunus being sent there by other kingdoms. So, why did anyone get sent to Menagerie at all? Why not Vacuo?

Well, as a matter of sovereignty, the other kingdoms could not demand that Vacuo accept a bunch of refugees, especially not people made refugees by those very kingdoms. Since many of those refugees were probably being exiled on the pretense of being convicted criminals (via spurious charges and kangaroo courts), it would have looked especially bad from a political standpoint.

Practically speaking, Vacuo also couldn’t afford to take in that many people. Even in the best of times, Western Sanus simply doesn’t have as many hospitable locations to establish new towns compared to Vale and Mistral's territories.

Even if Vacuo hadn’t just got done fighting a war, the surviving settlements which could still manage comfortable security in terms of water and food supply could not necessarily maintain that stability in the face of a sudden influx of mouths to feed. Especially not mouths that don't come with heads that know how life works in the desert.

It’s an open question whether any of the exiles would have wanted to go to Vacuo, themselves. Most of them likely came from Mantle and Mistral, whose governments might not have been painting the most flattering image of the desert kingdom to their citizens.

Many of the faunus exiles might have held more hope for rebuilding their lives in a place without any humans at all. How many of them would really believe that humans and faunus lived equally in Vacuo?

So, even if Mistral had cared to spend even more resources exiling the faunus to a place farther away, and Vacuo had cared to let them all in, the faunus themselves may not have cared to make the longer, riskier journey to a place that propaganda made seem even worse than Menagerie.

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