DarthOne
☦️
In my defense, I just saw it before I went to bed and was half-asleep. I just wanted to post it before I forgot about it by morning.
But you are right in that I should have posted a summary.
Anime & Manga RWBY General discussion thread.
- Thread starter Zachowon
- Start date
In my defense, I just saw it before I went to bed and was half-asleep. I just wanted to post it before I forgot about it by morning.
But you are right in that I should have posted a summary.
Carrot of Truth
War is Peace
I just picked up Kaiju No.8 the animation is absolutely beautiful.
DarthOne
☦️
The what now?
Carrot of Truth
War is Peace
DarthOne
☦️
Carrot of Truth
War is Peace
The series is a action comedy sort of like One Punch Man
Can I just bring up how some of the World Building in RWBY makes no sense? My main gripe being "The Great War" and Atlas development to present day.
So let me get this straight...
Mantle (Atlas) while not the direct instigator of the war though the Great War fought on Mistrals side and lost yet somehow post war they still were allowed to have a military and the abillity to have Huntsmen folded into it...
Why? You think Ozpin would have barred any country in the aftermath from having military because a centralized system of Huntsmen is less susceptible to Salems manipulation of having one of her covert agents seizing control.
So let me get this straight...
Mantle (Atlas) while not the direct instigator of the war though the Great War fought on Mistrals side and lost yet somehow post war they still were allowed to have a military and the abillity to have Huntsmen folded into it...
Why? You think Ozpin would have barred any country in the aftermath from having military because a centralized system of Huntsmen is less susceptible to Salems manipulation of having one of her covert agents seizing control.
Doomsought
Well-known member
The war likely did not end in an unconditional surrender, instead a ceasefire and negotiating terms of peace. Atlas would have found disbanding their military unacceptable, and trying to force it would mean restarting the war.
Instead, lets say Atlas accepted terms that made them limit the number of men in their military. Then they figured out how to make robots.
Circle of Willis
Well-known member
The worldbuilding in RWBY is pretty bad, yeah. I notice that some fics & rewrite projects tend to focus waaaay too much on it to the point where they're basically creating a whole new Remnant and forget to actually do characters or the story, like uh...RWBY Alternate I believe? (Aside from the extreme attention to worldbuilding, I also remember that it died some years back.) But while I wouldn't go as far as they have, it definitely could use some fixing. Aside from the ideas I've floated myself re: things like the SDC/Faunus conflict, making the Branwen Tribe an actual tribe with its own interesting history, culture & customs rather than the most generic bunch of bandits imaginable would be nice, and so on.
As far as militaries go, that only Atlas bothers to still have a military is definitely one of the most nonsensical things in the setting as far as I'm concerned. An advanced society without a military only makes sense if they've been at peace for a long time, like how the Old Republic got ~1,000 years of peace between the New Sith Wars & Ruusan Reformation and the Clone Wars - then sure it's fine to demilitarize, but the situation in Remnant is about as far from such a state of affairs as can be imagined. Canonically, since time immemorial humanity is supposed to be under constant threat by the monstrous Grimm, who are as plentiful as weeds and to whom negative emotions are a magnet - something everybody will go through at varying points in their lifetimes unless they've all been lobotomized, and which are especially likely to cluster up when humans are packed into cities (as they may well have to for their own protection in Remnant). It would be suicidal to not have a standing army on hand to fight off the Grimm and to instead contract protection out to the mercenary Huntsmen, even though they are by definition superpowered elite fighters trained in special Academies so there can't be that many of them - certainly not enough to always be there when you need them.
What if there are more Grimm attacks ongoing than there are Huntsmen nearby? Are they supposed to prioritize the targets to defend, potentially leaving neighborhoods or districts to die at Grimm hands if they don't rate as sufficiently important in their own eyes? (Who decides what's important anyway, the government of the Kingdom they're contracted under? What if the Huntsmen themselves disagree, say they decide to focus on saving the neighborhood where their leader's wife & kids live over a power plant or the city hall, who's going to make them follow orders without an army?) Or should they risk stretching themselves too thinly by trying to defend everything? If they fail and die, they'll end up succeeding at defending nothing. Etc, etc. Jontron puts it better than I can. Conversely, you'd think the Kingdoms would also have army guys capable of doing mundane guard duties and such instead of having to contract even the most basic of defense jobs to the Huntsmen so that the latter can focus on the big flashy jobs instead of wasting their time and potentially not being where they need to be in case an emergency happens. If the job can be done by 20 armed men + a machine gun, then surely we should get 20 armed men + a machine gun to do it instead of wasting an elite Hero Unit that could be deployed elsewhere, right? And would it not make the most sense to have those 20 guys with a machine gun be a regularly trained standing force with a fixed base rather than militiamen who might not all be present & available for duty when called up? Again, etc., etc.
The way the Atlas military is set up has the best of both worlds. They've canonically got regular ('fodder' if you will) forces plus Huntsmen as special operatives. You can use the weaker but more numerous regular forces to quickly respond to Grimm attacks & protect civilians until an evacuation can be pulled off or help arrives, they can fight the Grimm off entirely if possible and contain them for a Huntsman or four to deal with later if not. The spec-ops Huntsmen would be the people sent in to deal with overwhelming threats, and prioritize destroying Grimm once they're on the scene while the regular guys assist in evacuating civilians (and then themselves) in the background. Loads of settings have a divided 'fodder' and 'elite' armies (Imperial Guard/Space Marines from WH40K, clones/Jedi from SW, UNSC Marines/Spartans, etc.), and anyway there should be no need to involve random superpowered mercenaries in matters of national security when you can and should just integrate such supermen into your system right out of their Academy.
(Speaking of which and on the subject of iffy worldbuilding, I'll add that the Academy system doesn't make a whole lot of sense if you think about it either. Are these academies private institutions? Because private combat-training institutes churning out supersoldiers with little to no accountability, and certainly no obligation to serve the kingdom they're from, seems like an idea that would go sideways fast - you're basically just hoping these freshly graduated young men & women with all sorts of asskicking superpowers won't screw with everyone else, become warlords, etc. out of the goodness of their heart. There should be many more cases like Raven, and apparently there are in side materials like the novels or Eddy Rivas' RWBY-themed D&D campaign, though I don't pay attention to either. Are they public institutions? In that case it really doesn't make sense that the Huntsmen aren't recruited by their respective kingdoms as soon as they graduate, so as to perform the public service of being specialized Grimm exterminators.)
Everyone should be copying the Atlesian example, but they don't because...well, I've never seen any satisfying explanation as to why, the closest is 'pacifism became popular after the Great War' (OK, I could buy that if the chronic & existential threat posed by the Grimm also disappeared with the war's conclusion, but they didn't so...) For whatever reason, the Atlas military is generally portrayed as either inept or evil (or both) and everyone else kinda just does fine for many years on end without armies. I can't think of any reason why this should be the case besides the writers believing 'armies bad, mercenaries gud' out-of-story in line with the rest of their politics, because it certainly doesn't make any sense in-universe.
DarthOne
☦️
Yes but you forget @Circle of Willis:
‘Military bad.’
Because these are neo-liberals we are talking about here.
‘Military bad.’
Because these are neo-liberals we are talking about here.
SoliFortissimi
Well-known member
More like Lolbertarians. Lolbertarians who make deliberately bad arguments where doing what has always worked in history is only going to bring trouble, while individuals and heroes do all the real work.
The show is made by Texans, after all.
Can we discuss the franchise on its own merits for once without RL political dickery? The Joker should have had the death penalty but if he did, we wouldn't be reading or watching DC Comics would we?
It's the same here and while I wouldn't argue all of RWBY's world building is great or even makes sense, some of it does have a method to its madness, Ozpin wanting a world that has been in decentralized and put into a state of slow advancement and peace makes partial sense when you know the variables.
DarthOne
☦️
We can’t completely discount that the ideology of the producers didn’t have an effect on the story or the world building. Especially given how prevalent that ideology blatantly was.
That said, I completely agree that it makes no sense within the world of Remnant. But then again, the world building of RWBY isn’t the best.
Circle of Willis
Well-known member
That RT was based in Texas in no way guarantees that they're libertarians of any stripe. They're from Austin after all, the bluest city in that state, and besides the various individual members ranting about their support for left-wing causes and hatred of right-wing ones from time to time, the company itself has repeatedly and overtly aligned themselves with decidedly non/anti-libertarian social justice movements like BLM in public. They also fired Joel Heyman (voice of Caboose in RvB, Oobleck in RWBY, and one of their own co-founders from all the way back in '03!) back in 2020 for being a conservative who was loudly critical of the BLM riots.
Yes, it does become difficult to separate the art from the artist when the artist's political views color their art as strongly as RT's did RWBY in its last few volumes. It'd be like trying to judge Atlas Shrugged on 'its own merits' while also attempting to pretend that promotion of the Objectivist ideology isn't intended as one of said merits. In fact since you mention DC, such blunt and hamhanded insertion of authorial politics definitely something that's been a huge and fast-worsening issue for them (and the Western comic industry in general) too for the last decade or more, helping tank their whole industry while manga continues to eat their lunch & boom beyond the wildest dreams of the '90s-mid 2000's manga fans (myself included).
But I will try to do so regardless. Still, even if we are to completely discount whatever RL politics may have motivated their poor choices in worldbuilding and storytelling, in this case what RT came up with was still bad. I've said as much before, but a mass demilitarization of the kingdoms and a switch to the Huntsman system only really works if the Grimm have apparently become much less of a threat in the past and are only starting to show up in overwhelming numbers again around the start of the show. Then it could be sold as a case of humanity being so sick of fighting one another in the aftermath of the Great War, combined with the Grimm no longer being the sort of threat whose scale requires actual armies to deal with, that they agree with Oz that said Great War should've been the 'war to end all (inter-human) wars' and that they should collectively turn their swords into plowshares so to speak, similar to the spike in popularity of disarmament & pacifism among the Entente Powers after WW1.
But while the Grimm are still an ever-present and numerous threat? And Atlas gets to keep its standing army despite being the instigator and loser of the Great War? No. That just plainly doesn't work on its face, especially since we know the humans fought at least one more full-scale war (with the Faunus) some time afterward. At least the post-WW1 Entente powers had some reason to believe Germany wouldn't rise again (and the other Central Powers lay in complete ruin), this just makes the other kingdoms (and Oz) come across as suicidal idiots without a hint of foresight.
Speaking of the Great War, the idea that it was fought because Atlas & Mistral decided to ban art weirds me out as well. The Grimm are attracted to negative emotions, and art & creative works in general has been known to uplift people's spirits or at least serve as an outlet for such negativity since ancient times. Banning it to control people's emotions as they're said to do seems not only unenforceable, but aggressively counterproductive. It would be far more sensible for such conflict to arise because Atlas decided to use art or some other means to forcibly paint smilies on people's souls (to use TvTropes terminology for a second there) because after all, people who have been made 'happy' even against their will don't attract Grimm, or something like that.
Also on this subject, I'll add that RWBY has the opposite problem GRRM does - their timeframe for major events is rather too short. The Great War apparently happened only 80 years ago, and the Faunus revolution happened at an indeterminate point in time after that. We're also led to believe that the Schnees are this well-established aristocratic powerhouse (Weiss herself & Winter were clearly both designed as graceful aristocratic warrior princesses), but then it turns out that their founder Nicholas is only two generations removed from Weiss. Even relatively 'new money' families like the Rockefellers and Rothschilds are older than that, to say nothing of actual nobility and royalty (they're still around today and even have some money to play with, they just don't rule kingdoms anymore for the most part). Ironically this actually makes the Schnees much more like the Trump family background-wise, very very nouveau riche (their fortune started with Donald's grandpa Friedrich, who benefited from the Klondike gold rush).
I'll chalk this one up not to politics, but to the RWBY writers knowing how to write aristocratic dynasties about as well as they know how to write plots about racism. There's definitely no need to go too far in the opposite direction and make the Schnees into an 8,000-year-old dynasty that has endured since time immemorial ASOIAF-style because that's just stupid in a different way, but 500-600 years is usually regarded as the latest cutoff to qualify as 'old money' true nobility. (The Rockefellers are ~300 years old, the Rothschilds a bit under that, and both are regarded as 'new money'.) I'd also push the Great War back at least another hundred years, ideally even further back than that, since otherwise Oz looks like a very dumb scrub whose plan only bought the kingdoms less than a century of peace before everything turns to shit from V3 onward. The Faunus revolution can stay a modern conflict due to its importance to Blake's storyline & background.