The mysteries of Shade Academy's initiation process explained!
As a reminder, here are the very simple rules for Shade Academy's initiation:
“…they usually transport students in windowless airbuses to random spots in the desert and wait for them to come back. They’re assigned to teams in the order they appear in, and the manner in which they survived.”
Or at least, that's what the professors of Shade want the initiates to believe. But now I am certain that Shade's professors are lying as much as Beacon's did, and that Shade's initiation process serves as a multi-layered Secret Test of Character.
Know Your Audience
Recall that modern Vacuan culture highly prizes physical strength and competition. The strongest and most competitive of Vacuo's children enroll at Shade Academy, either to prove themselves the strongest or to grow stronger by challenging the strongest.
If you suggest to a bunch of headstrong, hormonal teenage warriors that "the order in which they return" will have an affect on their placement within the academy, what will they naturally assume?
Most of them will assume that First Is Best and Last Is Least. They will see the whole exercise as one big race to the finish, where the first and only rule is "Survive".
For mere mortals like Headmaster Theodore and his professors, who lack Ozpin's millennia of experience with judging character, every step of the test reveals a wealth of information about each potential student.
First Test of Character: "Who first?"
Shade likely doesn't try to control which candidate disembarks from the air-bus first. The professors let the candidates decide. They might even (as they did for reinitiation) leave the candidates unsupervised in the air-bus, without even the visible presence of a professor to discourage hostilities or to remind them they're being watched.
This way, the test proctors get a very unfiltered show of which candidates feel confident enough to let their competitors go first, with the intent of overtaking them on the way to the goal. Which candidates put victory ahead of pride, and want to go first. Which candidates timidly step back, afraid to take the first step.
And oh, the fighting. Even before the candidates get off the air-bus, they might break into fighting over who gets to depart next. So the professors get to see which candidates will more readily resort to intimidation or outright violence to get their way, which candidates will back down and conserve their strength, which candidates will step forward to try and make peace.
All of this must be more important than the order in which the students actually reach the goal, but none of the candidates would take the matter so seriously (and therefore reveal their true, authentic selves) unless they had been told otherwise.
Even if a candidate knows the truth, it might not matter. After all, impressing one's peers has a value in and of itself. Who could resist the prestige of coming in First Place, and who could survive the shame of arriving Dead Last?
Second Test of Character: "How do you survive?"
Young Vacuans might assume this part of the test involves their Semblances, weapons, and chosen skills, because those are the tools they use to survive on a personal level. And while the test proctors might want to take those abilities into account when forming teams, I think this test concerns strategy more than tactics.
While feeling the pressure to finish the race as fast as possible, who chooses to try surviving on their own? Who attaches themselves to a stronger, smarter, or more confident candidate? Who tries to take control of others and use them for their own benefit? Who chooses to protect and lead others?
If four candidates meet and naturally form what seems to be a cohesive and functional team, as happened in the Emerald Forest with Ruby, Weiss, Blake, and Yang, Theodore wouldn't need to worry about what chess pieces or playing cards they might have chosen; he can simply declare them a team because he said so.
Stubborn loners can be plugged into incomplete groups to bring them up to the standard four, or saddled with leadership of three teammates to learn responsibility, or just bundled off with three other stubborn loners to teach them the value of teamwork (because the other teams at Shade will crush them if they don't figure it out).
Of course, when assigning the spares and pairing the pairs, some care is taken not to put too many of the most aggressive students into the same team, with the knowledge gleaned from the first step of the test. Shade does encourage competition between teammates as well as between teams, but the professors still want the teammates to work together in the end.
Comparison to Ozpin's methods
To share the words of Spacebattler "Potates":
It's an equal and opposite of Ozpin's method. Ozpin's method leaves the outcome to seem outside of the student's hands with 'the first person you make eye contact with is your partner' but a student could easily just not look at people's eyes so could, in theory, have complete control over their fate.
Shade's, by contrast, emphasizes your individual actions determine the outcome but really, it's the teachers who determine where you go in the end.
This also reflects their circumstances. Oz is stuck in a reincarnation cycle set to seemingly fight a never ending war but if he plays it right, he can end the war. His destiny is in his hands. Shade meanwhile always has in the back of people's mind, no matter how you fight, your morality, or beliefs, who you help or kill, the desert will claim you in the end.
Here on Tumblr, @random-french-girl wrote a post titled Fate and Choice, in which she explains that Ozpin designed Beacon's initiation policy to present the candidates with a series of challenges that would force them to make choices and take responsibility for themselves.
However, Theodore seems to assume that Shade's candidates already came prepared to take responsibility for themselves, and that they already accept the chaotic and hostile nature of the world. Theodore only wants to know how each of his potential students intends to survive, so that he can learn what he needs to do to help them succeed.
Ironically, Shade's more direct control over team-formation resembles Atlas's authoritarianism than Beacon's libertarianism. But merely mortal headmasters don't have Ozpin's experience to make judgments and manage chaos, so they err on the side of caution. Even someone as flighty as Theodore.
Partners?
We have no confirmation that Beacon is the only academy that assigns partnerships within teams, but Beacon is the only Huntsman academy which we can confirm does so.
It bears mentioning that Ozpin is the only headmaster we know who has been married at all, let alone multiple times, and that's leaving aside how, every reincarnation, the previous Wizard and current Wizard need to learn to get along. So of course Ozpin, as a headmaster, had a unique perspective on two-person partnerships.
But for Shade, partnerships within teams would probably discourage internal competition between teammates; or worse, make such competition personal.
If any Huntsman academy allows the students within a team to compete among themselves to decide a new leader, it would be Shade. Partnerships could complicate that, if the partner of the current leader cares more about their status as Number Two than about who would be the better leader, and if the partner of the challenge cares less about the better leader than about gaining the status of Number Two.
Smaller Details
Theodore and Rumpole needed four air-buses to transport all four years of Shade's student body. One bus should be sufficient for the candidates of a new school year; two at most.
Therefore, rather than splitting the candidates up among three or four different regional sites, the professors probably drop them all off in one general location, one at a time in randomized spots.
The lack of windows on the air-bus means that the air-bus's current location in the desert won't affect the initiates' decisions about when they want to disembark. They can't simply look out a window to recognize whether or not the air-craft has arrived at a location favorable or unfavorable to them.
Fortunately, Shade doesn't demand that all initiates must come with a "landing strategy". It seems that the air-bus normally lowers close enough to the desert floor for the combat students that the lack of trees for slowing their fall won't pose a deadly problem.
If Shade's students normally have the floor pulled out from under them at potentially crippling altitudes, a repeat during re-initiation would not have surprised them the way it did. Even the youngest students would have trained at Shade for most of a year, so Theodore didn't risk newbies with that stunt. Even under mind-control by the Crown, Rumpole didn't want to kill any of her students, not even Team CFVY who opposed the Crown.
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