#mistral article

[sunder-the-gold]

Say, out of all the Kingdoms, which one do you think is the most likely candidate for it's common people to still pay lip-service to it's royal family, even though they technically hold no power? Such as with the UK or Japan.

Well, I think the Schnee are descendants of Mantle’s royal family through Nicholas Schnee’s unnamed wife. But even if it does get revealed as truth, no one seems to care because no one has mentioned it.

The Mistralian emperor’s name is likely a dirty word across most of the country, and we don’t know how well-liked he was at home in the capital, especially after he lost legal power to punish any criticism.

The last King of Vale might not have had any children. But if he had, wouldn’t that be awkward for Ozpin? ^_^

So by process of elimination, I’m going to suggest that Vacuo makes the biggest deal out of respecting the descendants of the woman who led them into victorious war against Mantle and Mistral for the sake of their freedom. Especially if she kept to her apparent strengths after the Great War, and decided to become headmistress of the new Shade Academy rather than join the ill-fated federal government.

If her descendants kept up her legacy by being productive warriors and effective leaders, then naturally the Vacuo people would continue to afford them the appropriate level of respect, with additional regard for belonging to a lineage of honor and glory.

Certainly this is an idea I’m using in my Black Rock Shooter crossover, where Irino Saya is the latest scion of that legacy, horns and all, and plans to become headmistress of Shade in the future.

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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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Mistral and air-ships

Mountains, chasms, rivers, forests… the same barriers that protect human settlements from the overland approach of Grimm also work against human efforts to explore new territory and make contact with other human settlements.

Sailing ships allowed Mistral to colonize anywhere and conquer anyone they could reach via rivers and coastal waters. But expanding over land had to wait until they discovered how to use Dust to lift their sailing vessels into the air.

Mantle cannot have developed everything first, and I think this first belongs to the kingdom of naval conquest. Even in the modern day, Mistral’s national symbol seems to be a sail-winged, Dust-fueled air-ship.

Air-ships would give Mistral a unique and overwhelming advantage to attack with impunity and without regard for the defenses on which other settlements relied. Mistral’s ships could carry soldiers over mountains, forests, rivers, Grimm, and the walls of other settlements. More terrifyingly, they could carry bombs to simply drop straight down unto people’s homes.

Like this, conquering the rest of southern, eastern, and western Anima was just a matter of time. But Mistral still lacked the ability to colonize the frozen north of their continent, and their primitive air-ships probably lacked the fuel efficiency necessary to cross the deep sea and reach other continents.

At least until Mantle returned to meet Mistral as an equal.

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Mantle and Mistral: “If You Can't Beat Them...”

When Mantle next met Mistral, they held the offensive advantage; Mantle’s sailing ships could cross the deep sea to reach Anima, while Mistral’s sea vessels could not cross the deep sea to reach Solitas and their air-ships could not fly that far. But Mistral held the defensive advantage, especially with their air-ships to dominate Anima’s skies. Stalemate.

Each eventually came to the conclusion that it would gain more from establishing trade with the other rather than waging a costly war. Though Mantle made sure to maintain this balance by never giving Mistral their best ships or weapons, lest their ally reconsider the costs and benefits. Mistral likewise would be loathe to give up the advantage of having the only air-ships.

Sooner or later, however, each acquired the other’s vehicular tricks. Mistral could send deep-sea vessels to Solitas with resources, then to Western Sanus with soldiers, and finally to Eastern Sanus with colonists. I’m willing to bet that Mantle also had air-ships before the Great War, though I have no clue when those ships achieved the fuel-efficiency to cross oceans.

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A Brief History of Ancient Mistral

Before Mistral was a Great Kingdom, it was an empire. Before it was an empire, it was just a single city-state whose borders did not extend far past its walls and the natural barriers of forests, rivers, chasms, and mountains. Those barriers, and the Grimm teeming beyond them, served to discourage traveling over land to make contact with other settlements, whether for trade or war.

But Mistral loved the wind and the sea, so they made sailing vessels which could cross the shallow waters of the ocean shores to the East, and the shores of the Anima’s inland sea to the West (“Lake Matsu”) to the West. With these vessels, they set out to find prime locations for building new colonies.

They found some, but naturally, most such locations already played host to established settlements. These settlements might have even made oversea contact with Mistral first.

Contact might have begun with trade, but at some point clearly turned to war. In the end, Mistral won.

Mistral’s soldiers occupied conquered settlements. Confiscating any weapons and forcing all of the local defenders to become solely laborers would reduce their ability to resist and increase the production of goods that Mistral would take as “tribute”. It also created dependency; if the enslaved settlement resisted too strongly, Mistral’s troops could abandon it to the Grimm drawn in by its unrest. A ruthlessly effective protection-racket.

Thus did Mistral become an empire; a vampire city growing strong and fat off the blood of its tributary settlements.

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Borderlands manufacturers in RWBY: Maliwan

Given Maliwan's thoroughly artistic flair, I feel it's natural to suppose their Remnant version would be found in Mistral City.

But how are Maliwan guns different in RWBY compared to Borderlands?

Well, the RWBY verison of Maliwan is the manufacturer most different from the original Borderlands version, since Dust makes elemental properties inherent to ammunition rather than projectile weapons. Since Maliwan’s weapons were subpar in all other qualities, manufacturing art-piece hobbyist guns would be more of a side-venture next to the business of mining and refining Dust to make high-quality ammunition. There would seem to be a market for such goods, given the existence of firearms companies like Jakobs and Torgue, who are overly-selective about the kind of ammunition they manufacture, and those like Dahl, who don’t bother to produce any at all.

Unfortunately for Maliwan, the Dust market came to be internationally dominated by the Schnee Dust Company, as a matter of RWBY canon.

In desperation, Maliwan gambled much of their remaining capital on a bold new direction: They bought the licences to several of Hyperion's proprietary technologies, constructed brand-new manufacturing facilities, hired or re-trained teams of skilled craftsmen, and began to produce new lines of elemental-projection weaponry. Putting a positive spin on this abrupt departure from tradition, Maliwan adopted a new sales pitch, hypocritically claiming to believe in "honoring the past by embracing the future" while simultaneously framing the existence and use of older, more conventional firearms as shameful, embarrassing, and brutish.

This proved to be a massive success. While Maliwan sacrificed a portion of their future revenue to pay their dues to Hyperion, they pulled themselves out of a losing battle with the SDC, and their new weapons boasted great appeal to their Mistralian customers, as well as foreign markets. Even some student and professional hunters began to place orders for custom elemental weapons rather than go to the effort of designing and building them personally.

In fact, they have proven so successful that the SDC may have decided to muscle them out of that market, too.

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Borderlands manufacturers in RWBY: Vladof

Remnant’s version of Vladof would be likely be born in the frozen northern regions of Anima. The company’s factories need more land, raw materials, and poor, desperate laborers than the colder but smaller landmass of Solitas can provide, and Atlas is more like Germany than Russia. The people of northern Anima remember being caught and conquered between the military power of Mantle and the oppression of Mistral’s emperor, and the local kings of industry are keen on arming the proletariat to defend their current balance of power.But how are Vladof guns different in RWBY compared to Borderlands?

First of all, their rocket launchers don’t magically refund you every third rocket. Vladof launchers are simply designed to load as many of the smallest rockets possible, just as their guns are designed to fire the smallest caliber of bullets.

See, outside of the Borderlands franchise and its particular fictional technologies, ammunition isn’t one-size-fits-all. Vladof needs to manufacture and sell specialized calibers of bullets and rockets for its weapons, since everything else is too big to load.

On the positive side, small munitions are cheaper to manufacture and buy in bulk, which enables the company and its loyal customers to trust in sheer volume of fire to make up for sins of inaccuracy, and also really plays into the company’s philosophy of “quantity over quality”.

Owing to Vladof’s Russian inspiration, Vladof weapons are designed with extremely loose tolerances so that they can be mass produced in large factories for as little cost as possible. This makes them cheap in the best and worst ways.

Being so loose and imprecise in construction, the guns are inaccurate even in perfect working order, but also maintain a consistent performance even in poor conditions. Vladof weapons can survive a lot of mistreatment, repairing them is simple, and obtaining replacement parts is painless.

The low cost of buying, loading, and maintaining these guns makes them popular with people who don’t need high-performing firearms, and especially with buyers who simply need to put as many guns into as many hands as possible. Why purchase one hand-crafted, maintenance-intensive Jakobs when you could buy two or three serviceable Vladofs?

As for elemental damage, Vladof produces all varieties of special Dust-tipped bullets and rockets for its customers, so any Vladof weapon can shoot any kind of elemental projectile. But they’re relatively unpopular; Vladof dislikes the larger production costs, and their customers don’t like the higher prices.

Also, it becomes more difficult to keep different varieties of ammunition separate when they’re all so many and so small. Mix-ups can be embarrassing at best, and costly or disastrous at worse.

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Why Greeks in Remnant’s Asia?

I imagine that Remnant Greece existed on Anima somewhere, before they were conquered and absorbed by Remnant Asia. It’s a big continent.

Bam. Greece and Asia on the same continent, with the Asia side being more distinct because they swallowed the Greece side. Pyrrha was that much more awesome for being a minority in the capital city.

I know that the show has some actual faults to criticize, but this really doesn’t seem like one of them. Y’all might as well be complaining about Taiyang Xiao Long’s Chinese name clashing with his blond hair, blue eyes, and casual cowboy clothes in whatever Earth ethnic analogue Vale is supposed to be.

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