Growing Wolf Gains

ironwood: you know?

blake and yang:

Weiss, later:

friend wanted robyn throwin a chair

WEISS ARRESTS JACQUES

Yang: Woah. You can tell all that all with your semblance?

Robyn: No. I could tell as soon as I met you.

Something Adam fanboys often say is that Adam never had any romantic or abusive relationship with Blake before Volume 3 and that he was rewritten mid-development. While there are still issues with the White Fang storyline, Adam was always abusive.

Adam, like many abusers, tries to present himself as non-abusive, and in his particular case, puts on a mask(and is initially presented to us) as a noble, morally gray freedom fighter who walks the line of a liberator and a villain.

Starting with the Black Trailer, we see Adam leading Blake on an espionage mission. Note how when Blake questions what about the crew members on the car (along with the implication that Adam didn’t tell her they were going to kill innocents), he immediately replies aggressively “What about them?”.

Throughout the entire trailer he talks in a harsh and aggressive tone, but Blake is clearly distraught and nervous throughout the mission whenever she does(or is about to do something) she knows will upset Adam, she knows he’s lashed out at her before and is afraid of doing anything that might upset him in fear of punishment. Adam has a rage semblance like Yang, but he also seems to have anger issues and a short temper. If merely questioning him is enough to make Blake nervous, what did he do to her in the past to elicit that reaction from her? She does manage to leave him, but not by leaving him, but by leaving his group because she couldn’t tolerate their violence. Adam messed up, she wouldn’t have left him, he was too good at gaslighting her and making her believe she deserved it, but by making her think in terms of grander scale morality beyond just Adam and Blake, he gave her a different method to break away from him.

The next time Adam is mentioned in V2E10, after Blake’s gotten away from him and has only recently started to open up to Team RWBY, telling them about Adam for the first time.

She was his partner and pupil, and we see from her body language and voice when telling us that it’s a painful and uncomfortable memory for her and that she likely doesn’t want to tell them just how close they were together, or is at this point still too uncomfortable talking about it

We then see Adam in V3E7, away from Blake, and being talked to by Cinder, who wants the White Fang to ally for her cause. Adam in this scene is cold and calculated and with clear and seemingly “justified” anger at Cinder and her human faction.

He seems rational here, a bit aggressive but not someone you’d immediately think is an abuser. But an abuser doesn’t need to “seem” like an abuser to be one, and as someone raised by an abusive and manipulative father, abusers like Adam are VERY good at appearing “normal” to others, to the point of convincing people that they’re the fair and reasonable one in a relationship, and that whoever their victim is being emotional and unreasonable.

Then, we finally see Adam and Blake together again in V7E12, and the mask comes off. He’s cruel, and tells her she’s a coward for leaving him, and that he’s going to punish her(and implicitly, that she deserves what he’s going to do to her)

Notice Blake’s eyes, which have been the most telling about her emotions in RWBY so far. She’s never seen Adam this angry before, this is the first time he’s truly angry enough to kill her. The same emotion and fear that was present in as early as Black Trailer is there, just in a more extreme form.