Zzzzzz....
whuh? someone bring up RWBY?
I for one thought the inclusion of a black Faunus dogman working for the "fascist secret police" with a weapon that is a pun about him being a dog in addition to being a steryotypical weapon for primitive black people, while his unique magic power is also "magical dog puns" was both stunning, and brave.
Aesop would unironically approve.
TBF, I don't think it's even that bad in-regards to Grimm attacks given that there look to be pretty well built or complete housing with those villages or small towns
Probably just the whole stereotype of people from the province or outside the cities almost all being a bunch of backward, stupid, uneducated and bigoted morons who are dangerous
there are provincials who have the spare time to give a fuck about anything but being ready for the next grimm attack?
dafuq?
Yeah the white Fang/Faunus plot is frankly a complete mess. As for V7, I have very little to say about it that is remotely positive.
If I might throw in my own two cents about how I would have handled the issue (assuming I wasn't allowed to just drop it entirely and make the WF a purely criminal group), then allow me to copy/paste an idea from my RWBY fanfic
Faunus Racism:
“
The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation' — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.”-Aldous Huxley
One of my biggest issues with the Faunus racism plot is how in canon we almost never see any Faunus being treated different then any other human. Neon, for example, is from Atlas and no one ever comments on it or makes a big deal that she managed to get into a Huntsmen academy despite being a Faunus. The only exceptions of this come from Cardin (whose a bully), Cordova (whose an ass) and Roman (whose a criminal) and Weiss, whose got some very good reasons to have a grudge against the Faunus.
So in my version of the story, I intend to show how the Faunus are still being treated unfairly, even if it’s not as bad as they once where. Now, I don’t intend to or need to go to overboard and show Faunus being assaulted at random or having extreme slurs being thrown at them. Instead it’s from background characters, un-informed well-meaning characters and even some old people who are just stuck in their old ways.
The Faunus blacksmith from v4, or a character like him, would be a good example of this. Have some human who’s from out of town walk in, see the Faunus, make a face and leave. Or have the blacksmith mentioned that he doesn't get many customers since the people are kind of wary of him. We also get some character(s) with Weiss’s original mindset. Also, Weiss takes a bit longer to lose her suspicion of the Faunus due to various butterfly effects.
Even subtle disdain would be just as effective. Such as in Volume 2’s dance; I could easily show a one-shot character who’s polite and even nice to Blake and Sun but would rather sit closer to the humans in the party.
Another idea I’m toying with is to have oppression or racism from within the Faunus. Because in real life,
minorities discriminate against each other too. So, maybe winged Faunus think of themselves as superior to other Faunus. Maybe warm-blooded Faunus think cold-blooded Faunus are weaker. There might be discrimination towards Faunus who can hide their animal traits easier- as well as a degree of envy. Maybe some Faunus have slurs for other types of Faunus. Maybe there are even some Faunus that think that they
should be oppressed and hate all Faunus (aka Uncle Ruckus).
That said, besides the White Fang, all this will be more of a thing that crops up from time to time then something the story really focuses on. Something of the occasional side quest, if you will.
My reason for this is simple; if Faunus oppression really was as severe and as widespread as the current White Fang and the narrative of RWBY would have you think, the world of Remnant would look considerably different. And changing Remnant to reflect that would require drastically retooling the setting, as racism against Faunus would not only need some form of story justification. But also giving it some form of real history in RWBY's world building, one that needs to show some places and some people with reasons for said discrimination outside of the tidbits we get in canon and the occasional scene I’m adding in for my story.
All of which would additionally create issues for the plot and storyline if we have to keep diverting away from Salem and the machinations of her minions (aka the main plot) to the Faunus equality plot. As I’d have to do
a lot of work to do the Faunus Equality issue justice. Rather than the canon version which,
if I might be frank, really comes as some Middle Class White Liberal's idea of what racism is and how it gets addressed.
Because even ignoring real life, dramatically speaking there has to actually be
shown some sort of widespread oppression or clear goal to explain why the White Fang went from peaceful protest group to terrorists to a cross between the Nazis and ISIS. Especially in a setting like Remnant, where that much negativity would draw the Grimm like flies to garbage and also make Salem’s job much, much easier then canon. On top of that, all this becomes more convoluted as the audience isn’t sure how much sympathy they should have towards the White Fang. Not to mention how it means that Sienna and the Fang can be seen as doing nothing wrong.
- Adam suffers the most for this in canon because we aren't allowed to see what could actually turn him into the monster he was today - in fact, Blake outright says "no, you're just evil because you're evil and equal rights is just an excuse", which is cringworhty when he's the only radical Faunus who gets any focus at all without rapidly repenting everything. Sure, people like that do exist - there's plenty of people in any radical movement who are really only there to bust heads - but making him the face of the movement and allowing almost no time to characterize eg. Sienna as a counterpoint is drastically oversimplifying the real-world issues they're trying to address.
Plus, making Faunus racism worse wouldn’t do the RWBY characters many favors. As by not showing them taking care of the supposedly massive Faunus racism problem, it makes them look uncaring and just trying to uphold the status quo. And as mentioned before, actually having them deal with this Faunus issue would divert too much away from the central plot. Which one would have to do to give those elements the depth and seriousness they arguably deserve. Even toning down the difficulties of fixing these sorts of problems in reality, fixing society's problems is depressing, hard, soul destroying work with few successes and many failures. You need full-time professionals, for whom this is a job, and who are well trained to do it and have massive emotional wellsprings to support them.
This goes doubly for Blake. As the main plot of both canon and
Shadows and Silver Eyes necessitates her rejoining and traveling with the rest of Team RWBY. At which point one gets the same issue as in canon, where Blake...sort of amounts to this Uncle Tom or Moral Coward who runs around on a giant fetch-quest with humans over actually constructively providing for Faunus-kind once the White Fang are defeated. Which in turn also creates a disconnect between Blake’s stated goals and her actions.
Fortunately, I think I may have a solution to all this; one that would even work within canon. We’re told that the previous iteration of the White Fang-which, given the Faunus War took place sometime in the 70 year period after the Great War, likely existed some time before Ghira took over- was mostly peaceful. Given what little discrimination we see towards the Faunus in the modern era, I’d argue that their efforts were
largely successful leading up to and as the White Fang came under Sienna Khan. True, there are still some issues and assholes and racists still exist, but those will always be around to some degree short of mass-brainwashing. But due to the timing of the White Fang radicalizing, it looked like these peaceful methods weren’t successful.
Anyway, this apparent success with violence created something of an illusion that it was the path that was actually working, at least within the White Fang. In reality, most of the real problems are solved and most people don’t care anymore. So the White Fang are now not only a grievance group chasing a goal that’s already been largely solved, but going around causing problems for everyone else and hurting the people they think their helping with their behavior. Cycle of revenge and all that. Not to mention fostering a genuine belief among faunus (and to some degree humans) that things are much worse for the Faunus then they really are. Much like in reality, saying that all the bad things that happen in your life are really
someone else’s fault and not your own makes that pill easier to swallow.
All this in turn makes it easier fot the Faunus and White Fang to belive it’s okay, if not good, for them to cause havoc and destruction because
they’re the victims and are being oppressed. Which means i
t’s okay to take whatever steps that are necessary to smash the evil human oppressors. All of which increasingly feeds into a collectivized perspective within the White Fang and segments of humanity. Where one is either part of the collective, or you're the enemy. So in reality it's not anti-Faunus prejudice so much as stuff like that which makes people hate and fear Faunus. Which does somewhat match up with Blake’s conversation with Sun in Volume 1.
(“And the worst part was, it was working. We were being treated like equals. But not out of respect... out of fear." V1 ep 16)
Of course, the humans aren’t entirely blameless as I hope I’ve made clear. Plus, they would have taken a harder stance against the White Fang once they started really radicalizing. Of course, this would run the risk of providing ammunition for the White Fang about how ‘oppressed’ the Faunus are.
- that said I’m not entirely happy with this solution, but it seems to me the least bad of several awful options.
In case it’s not clear, the upshot of all this is that it refocuses Blake’s character motivation on fighting Faunus extremism with a less one on human racism due to this not being as large of an issue in Remnant. Which in turn keeps the story focused on the main plot; as well as keeping Blake’s characterization intact and gives her more of a reason to stick with the main plot against Salem.
(And yes, I understand that this could be passed off as canon Blake seeing Salem as a greater threat and more pressing then human racism. However, since this is never explained or covered on screen it creates a jarring disconnect between Blakes’s actions and stated goal).
