I don't mind the ship, but honestly didn't care too much either (honestly I gave up after around the fall of Beacon)? I thought the big problem with Blake's character wasn't the relationship with Yang, but the worldbuilding around faunus racism.
Quite bluntly, if your going to have a violent revolutionary terrorist group that large, you are going to need a ton more racism to justify it. And there simply wasn't that. Weiss was completely reasonable because "White Fang killed my family", and there wasn't much else.
But then I could totally see there being a hypertoxic fandom around a character/ship. I remember something similar happened to Steven Universe. Sure, it was woke, but oh god it had nothing on the toxicity of the fandom.
Either that, or you need to explore why the violent revolutionary terrorist group exists, even though the racism they claim as justification does not; which, now that I think of it, could have paralleled what's been happening in the real world quite nicely.
As far as Bumblebee goes, I think the problem was with both the ship itself (in that it jammed together two of the most personality-incompatible members of Team RWBY, the conflict-averse Blake who's supposed to have escaped an abusive relationship with another hothead and is prone to running from her problems + the temperamental, increasingly violent Yang who has abandonment issues and who Blake abandoned once already) and with how it warped the show & other characters around itself. It had a weak foundation that could have been improved on by better or even just average writers, but how CRWBY handled it made it far, far worse than it should have been even with such weak & unstable foundations.
The former could have been made to work with extensive character development to get the component characters to evolve past their flaws, but this never happened and arguably would have taken up far too much time (and the mad rush to Bumblebee already ate up too much of their screentime together as is). I don't think any ship among Team RWBY would have been a good idea because as the Bees demonstrated amply it throws the team dynamics out of whack, breaking it down from a team of four into one pair of lovers who will then do almost nothing with the non-lovers, but this fundamental incompatibility and the steps necessary to address it was not a problem with White Rose (Ruby x Weiss), Monochrome (Blake x Weiss), Freezerburn (Yang x Weiss) or even Ladybug (Blake x Ruby, who funny enough interact the least out of all combinations of the titular four), at least not the same extent.
The latter...well. Black Sun, a ship with far more organic buildup, was thrown to the wayside and Sun (a cool character in his own right) benched pretty much immediately after he got Blake's first on-screen kiss to clear the path for the Bees. Adam was turned from a potentially interesting revolutionary leader with a unique iaijutsu-based fighting style and who was originally described as Blake's mentor into a cringe psychotic incel who supposedly abused Blake in a past romantic relationship. Even the component characters were ruined, Yang was reduced to a caricature of her old self and Blake was left with literally no arc to justify her continued presence in the story since the White Fang stuff was wrapped up with Adam's death. For that matter Yang's PTSD was dealt with unnaturally quickly and I don't even remember how her dealing with her abandonment issues & Blake's return after abandoning her was dealt with at all, if it was even done on screen in the first place (RT liked to do that, resolving tough conversations that they didn't know how to write off-screen, it apparently happened with Penny's final death and Jaune's role in it in V9 too).
Bumblebee really felt like a relationship based on nothing beyond physical attraction, ie. a fan author who thinks these two would look hot to each other and never really broadens their concept from that, and once it was done it left a bunch of other characters in ruins (including the components themselves), in particular the equivalent of the author's waifu after she gets together with the OC in a bad self-insert fic - now she's just eye candy who doesn't do anything and doesn't really have anything to do in the story anymore, besides coming up every now & then to remind the audience that she's together with said OC. And this would have been bad enough, but the damage Bumblebee caused wasn't contained to itself, it was a cancer that actively ruined adjacent characters and story arcs. Plus the fans were rabid enough to cause problems out-of-show for anyone who disagreed that it was anything less than the best thing since sliced bread (hence why they even got an unflattering nickname for it, 'Wasps').
As to the WF thing, honestly, I think RT was just too cowardly to try going any further. If they were to attempt any serious depiction of racism within their work around 2015-16 onward when modern intersectional BS was really starting to pick up steam, they would probably get annihilated by that 'depiction = endorsement!' crowd of rabid wokies they were cultivating, and they knew it. Worse still if they tried to depict the White Fang as terrorists with no redeeming virtues, then they'd get hit with the 'minorities can't be evil you unironic racists!' ax instead.
The result is the really wishy-washy depiction we got where we're told the White Fang are supposed racial revolutionaries in a Black Panther vein, but no actual racial injustice more serious than Cardin pulling on Velvet's ears can be shown. What makes it really funny & strange though is that not only did they show that Adam got an SDC brand on his face (only for it to then amount to nothing in-story, it's not even seen by Weiss! Imagine how she might have reacted to the realization that her enemy was scarred over his eyes by her father's indirect will just like she was, or how this would affect her opinion on the WF vs. SDC struggle), but Miles Luna actually implied he deserved it in the Volume 7 commentary.
Miles: Mhm. Man yeah, this was- we had to cut a lot of stuff out of this episode. I think we talk a little bit about it later in 6 so I won't get to deep into it now but there was a bunch of things that we kind of still needed to touch on from the previous volume. Obviously, Yang and Blake had a really traumatic event that they went through together that, you know had this idea that the SDC, you know, brands and labels a lot of their cargo and stuff and this idea that, although you know it's- we never say it so I guess technically it's not canon or whatever but.. We had this idea that, you know Adam, as a terrible of a person as he was, when we was younger, potentially got into an argument with someone at an SDC place and someone grabbed a brand and just let him have it and that lead to the injury that we saw on his face in volume 6. So we wanted to be very sure to plaster the SDC logo all over this area, to really put that in the forefront of Blake's mind and Yang is kind of the only person that notices. Setup a conversation for them later.
Which, wow, OK. I've said as much before but considering that the WF were intended as an analogy for the Black Panthers early on, I'm not sure you could get away with joking (much less seriously suggesting) that like, Fred Hampton or Huey Newton actually deserved to be mauled by police dogs when they were 12 even in the less politically correct & cancel-happy 2000s-early '10s.
For what it's worth, I don't think Adam and the White Fang would have been treated this terribly if Monty had lived. At the very least, IIRC Monty was very interested in the iaido fighting style which he used for Adam and had no intention of retconning him into Blake's ex-boyfriend when he had first described the character as her mentor, that was all on Miles/Kerry and quite possibly Arryn/Barbara (the VAs for Blake/Yang respectively). He was also more strongly opinionated than Miles/Kerry I feel, what with him bulldozing them to cram more scenes & characters in based on his whims, and more likely to stick to his guns under outside pressure. I don't know if he could have handled the racial angle with more grace than the writers did but I imagine he would at least
actually try, and it would certainly be very difficult to cock things up harder than they did anyway.
