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On reddit there was a discussion about Cinder's love life and people were naming characters they'd ship her with. One mention was Adam.

Adam is not the first person I'd ship her with. I'd ship canon Cinder with Jax Asturias and ship reboot Cinder with Jaune (making her so that she was only a year older than him). But I'm going to discuss the choices in alphabetical order, so Adam is first.

How would I write Cinder x Adam? First, in order to make this ship work Cinder would be a phoenix faunus. She'd have a missing wing because the madame cruelly cut it off to keep her from flying away as a child. Cinder would genuinely care about faunus rights.

The rest would depend on if I wanted to make this a toxic relationship, a fling, or true love. For these two, I'm leaning mostly towards a toxic relationship. This would be for my AU where Blake is the main character instead of Ruby and Blake is the daughter of Ghira and Sienna Kahn. Cinder was infatuated with Adam ever since she learned about him and quickly hooked up with him after recruiting him to Salem's cause. Adam, meanwhile, only hooked up with Cinder because she's attractive and looks like Blake. Adam's obsession with Blake would be a problem in their relationship- one that drove Cinder to hate Blake and want to hurt the people she loves. Cinder would be a pick me girl who helps her man torment his ex out of insecurity.

Does anyone else find it weird that Cinder is in her 20's and still hasn't had a known boyfriend, girlfriend, or sex partner in the story yet? Especially since she's not religious and is unlikely to be aroace representation (since if she was aroace she would be a toxic stereotype). Don't get me wrong, I know there are real people in that same situation and that not everyone needs to be paired off. But Cinder is a fictional character based on Cinderella. The prince was a huge part of Cinderella's story. Cinder's perpetually single/virginal status feels less like a deliberate and thoughtful choice on the writers' parts and more like them just not knowing how sex and dating could fit into Cinder's story. It's just one of the things about the writing around Cinder that makes her feel underdeveloped as a character.

One argument I see people make defending Cinder's perpetual singleness and likely virginity is that Cinder is too evil and selfish to feel attracted to someone or sleep with someone and repels everybody. I think that's a bad argument because 1.) In the same story, we have the selfish and evil Salem who, while fully grimmified, reunited with, slept with, and had 4 kids with Ozma, who wasn't initially repulsed by her, 2.) in other works of fiction, characters just as evil and selfish as Cinder have had partners and even procreated (see Darkseid and Vegeta), and 3.) In the real world bad people still get laid.

To me, Neo's life wasn't tragic enough to warrant her being saved by the tree after everything she did. She was basically a poor little emotionally neglected rich girl who killed her parents and turned to a life of crime with her older boyfriend, and then became vengeful when he died. That's only a little sympathetic. I don't entirely hate the tree, I just think the writers are using it to give second chances to the wrong villains: Neo and Salem. Salem would be an especially terrible choice for the tree since she's a villain who had so many advantages in life, from her father's wealth and protection, to the love of her life, to her kingdom, her magic, and her children. Too much to be sympathetic.

Both older women are willing to put their 'daughters' in harm's way to get what they want. We saw this in volume 5 with Yang and on a larger scale Salem has been putting Cinder in harm's way throughout the entire show. There are differences of course- Raven actually seems to care about Yang, whereas Salem doesn't care about Cinder and will likely torture her, take her maiden power away, and then offer her up to the people of Remnant to be brutally slaughtered as punishment for the lamp. Their relationship also seems to be mirrored in the fact that both Salem and Raven almost certainly both saved their 'daughters' once- Raven saved Yang from Neo and Salem likely saved Cinder from a bad situation when she found her.

Whenever there's a complaint about how evil Cinder was written and concern is voiced about the male writers writing her that way just so they'll have an excuse to give their most abused female character a horrific ending, there are people who say Cinder's suffering does not justify her actions. While that's true, that response misses the point. I don't think Cinder is justified, but I do think Cinder has been through too much in life for her gruesome death to be the happy event the writers want it to be, and that they've run the risk of attaching too much suffering and negativity to this one character. This girl was orphaned, neglected and exploited in a shady orphanage, emotionally and physically abused by the person who adopted her, went through god knows what for survival during her days as a fugitive teenage girl with no adults to protect her, and was then 'rescued' by a violent and controlling immortal sorceress who groomed, exploited, and abused her. That's a lot.

The way the writers revealed Cinder's backstory was a little suspicious to me. We meet her as a 10-year-old being neglected in an orphanage, but aren't given any info on who her parents were or what happened to them. I thought that was the writers' sneaky way of hiding who Cinder is related to. Then I rewatched RWBY and noticed that Cinder and Ozpin had similar eye colors and thought, "wait a minute, are they father and daughter? Is this why her backstory didn't reveal anything about her parents?"

My belief in this theory only increased when I rewatched volume 4 where Salem is suspicious that Cinder is lying to her about killing Ozpin. I thought, "is Salem worried that some of Cinder's loyalty might still be with her father? Is Salem literally Cinder's evil stepmother, worse than her adoptive mother? Did Salem have Cinder kill her father partially as a test of loyalty?"

Then I got to thinking of who Cinder's mother could be and landed on the summer maiden. I thought it made sense because fall comes after summer, and Cinder being the child of both a maiden and Ozpin would explain why she feels so entitled to the maiden powers, literally calling them "what is mine". Plus Ruby being the daughter of Summer Rose and her enemy Cinder being the daughter of the summer maiden works nicely together.

I assumed that either the summer maiden failed to tell Ozpin that she was pregnant with Cinder and gave her up for adoption before disappearing to Vacuo because she found out about the Salem stuff, or Ozpin and the Summer maiden both agreed to give Cinder up for adoption to protect her from Salem. Only for Salem to end up weaponizing Ozpin's daughter anyway.

With the exception of Ozma dying, everything bad that happened to Salem after she escapes her father's tower is her fault. How are we supposed to empathize with a character like that? They've set Cinder up the same way, with the difference being that they don't want us to have empathy for her, but some of us end up having empathy for her anyway because unlike with Salem they forgot to include love in Cinder's life to balance out the negativity of the things that happened to her. Cinder is already set up so that everything from whatever happened to her as a homeless, unprotected teenage girl after escaping the glass unicorn, to her being found, groomed, experimented on, and exploited by Salem, to her disfigurement, to the brutal death Salem is going to directly or indirectly bring to her, are all her fault.

There's a similar problem in how they wrote Adam- they even made his branding his fault.