Y’know, I think I know why the writers added the Schnee family abuse storyline and the Faunus racism subplot.
They wanted to have issues with the world that weren’t tied to the grimm and/or Salem. And credit where it’s due, that is interesting. There are problems that you can’t pin on one issue. And credit to that. Like… legitimate credit to that. That stuff is actually interesting.
And I think I can get what they’re trying to do with the Faunus Racism storyline, “Violence isn’t the answer.” and all that. But the problem is that while the X-Men go out of their way to say that both Magneto and Professor X have valid points for their own sides, this show kinda only says “Blake is right, and anyone who says that fighting works is wrong.”
Unlike the X-Men, where Magneto says that “Humans won’t accept us, we must fight for our future” and Professor X is saying “We must teach humans that we are like them”, Blake is basically only spouting the things that Professor X is saying, but doesn’t consider what Magneto is saying at all. Now, should the show just go beat-for-beat what X-Men did?
No. Of course not. But the show could have taken inspiration from these other media that has done this sort of storyline. X-Men had their own issues. They were an allegory for racial minorities, but their members were prominently white until they added Storm in the 70s. Every racial allegory story has issues, but there are many understandings of what is and what isn’t the right solution. The fact that they keep having to fight for their rights (aside from the fact that they’d have to stop selling comics) is because those that are in the majority will never want to relinquish power.
Sienna Khan was arguably the best Magneto equivalent that we could have gotten. In fact, she was a similar Faunus type to Blake, so the annalogy would have been really interesting to see.
Plus, Blake, like Professor X, is a passing person who has never really had to face discrimination in her life. Even if we assume that her parents only got that mansion after they stepped down, Blake hasn’t needed to really face any racism in her life. It’s what lets her dismiss the suffering of other Faunus in such a way that makes her seem really entitled. She declares that other Faunus have to protest “the right way” in order to make any progress.
If the discussion came down to “How much violence is too much violence?” Then we would have something interesting. Because at the very least, we would know that Adam is the area where it’s “too much.” But as Blake herself points out in Volume 1, Sienna got results. So clearly Ghira is the area where it’s “too little.” Instead, we ditch the discussion completely and we get “Any violence is too much violence.”
Okay, then why not stop the grimm by sitting around a campfire singing the Remnant equivalent of Kumbaya? If any amount of violence won’t work against racism, then clearly any amount of racism won’t work against the grimm.
Onto the Schnee abuse subplot, that’s clearly there to give the daughter of one of the world’s biggest racists a sympathetic angle to her story. If her dialogue with Blake had her admitting that she was using the Faunus as a scapegoat to try to excuse her father’s abuse, then we would actually have a discussion, and it would have served as great character development for Weiss. It would have made her line in Volume 2, where she claims that she “always knew” that her company was racist feel less forced, and more genuine. Because it would mean that, deep down, she knew that it was wrong of them to do it, but she was trying to make excuses for her abusive father so she thought nothing of it.
If we had to bring in a media equivalent for this, think of it as, and I honestly can’t believe I’m making this comparison, Zuko from Avatar. He also had an abusive father and a mother that was not always there, similar to Weiss. They even both have scars that were given to them by their fathers. Zuko is a prince. He is the next heir to the throne, and he is basically trying to stop the hope for the rest of the world simply because he was in an abusive situation.
In a sense, Zuko was basically justifying his own actions in part due to his father’s abuse towards him, and how it has ultimately caused him a great deal of distress. Once he realizes this, he calls out his father to his face and tries to make amends. Something that a lot of people were upset that Weiss didn’t get to do.
Weiss not being able to call out her father is a massive missed opportunity, and the fact that she came to the realization that her company is horrible off-screen, compared to how Zuko found out how the rest of the world viewed firebenders from his own experiences through well-received episodes is honestly a no-contest. Zuko wins out each and every time. He is simply more developed.
This was all done to try and give Weiss, and by extension the rest of the Schnees not named Jacques, a sympathetic angle to their story. Except the writers never really got why Zuko and the Fire Nation’s story worked. Now, I doubt that they intentionally made these parallels between Weiss and Zuko, but Weiss’ whole story is her trying to redeem her company, similar to how Zuko is trying to find his nation’s honor and restore it.
But with Weiss coming to these realizations off-screen, it makes rooting for her to redeem her company hard to do. We don’t get these realizations because… I guess the writers thought that four whole episode dedicated to some generic white kid whose initial isn’t in the title was more important…
Without these realizations, Weiss’ character is ultimately divisive. And really… We need to have actual in-show confirmation that she actually apologized for her racism. Then everything else can be interpreted. Maybe in Volume 9, while she’s separated from the rest of her team, we can have her agonizing over her past mistakes. And if anything, all of the characters can be doing that. With questions of self-doubt and the intrusive thoughts that they only make things worse, the realization of that may lead to the revelation of how they can actually emerge victorious can come about.
