free.

the ‘black’ trailer was the least exciting of the rwby trailers for me. that’s not to say it was bad, just that the ‘red’, ‘white’ and ‘yellow’ trailers caught and held my attention better. what did catch my attention, however, was adam. specifically when he sliced through the spider drone. 

adam taurus; a villain on the red horizon.

i was around nine or ten when i first got interested in rwby and started watching and i wasn’t really interested in colour theory until this shot. the stark black foreground overlayed onto the bold red background with the white, shattered moon really caught my eye. this was adam’s first demonstration of his semblance—moonslice—and it’s a powerful one.

he immediately destroys the drone, slicing through metal with one slash and leaving the audience waiting for more and that’s what we get.

his power is expanded upon in volume three. for my explanation of this to work, i’m going to need to go through aura since i know a lot of people are confused about what it actually is. i was super confused about it until i watched those outtake, supplement videos and grasped the gist of it ( p.s. if your viewers need to consult supplementary content to understand one of the core mechanics of your show/magic system, you’ve done a poor job at worldbuilding. ). 

aura is essentially a magical shield that coats a person’s body. it is an external forcefield generated by a person’s soul and helps prevent grievous injury. for example, preventing your opponent from chopping off a limb. aura has other purposes that i won’t list because it’s not relevant to the discussion and it’s such a convoluted mess that i don’t want to remember or talk about.

so, yang has a soul, so she has an aura. and we are told that nothing can slice through aura, it’s the ultimate defense mechanism. so when adam broke that defense mechanism by slicing through yang’s aura and chopping off an arm, many were shocked, including me. i was happy that the writers gave the series genuine stakes ( stakes that i believe are lost now ) and excited for how adam would advance.

volume four was straight hype and build-up, adam was the looming figure in both blake and yang’s stories and i was hyped up for adam vs blake and yang. then, volume five came and made adam look like a straight joke. he gets defeated by a bunch of rag-tag island natives and gets clocked by blake. no fight scene, no genuine conflict or struggle, just the beginning of the end for adam’s character.

adam taurus: an abuser from the start?

so, volume six was the death of adam ( both literal and figurative. ), the writers reduce him to an abusive, obsessive ex who just needs to be done away with. what happened to the strong, powerful mentor for blake who turned megalomaniacal and ruthless? 

i’ve seen a lot of people contend with the argument that adam was abusive by saying that blake drew a doodle of adam at the start of season two and victims don’t doodle their abusers. i just have to say that, that’s not necessarily rock solid evidence. a lot of victims of abuse sadly develop stockholm syndrome or a love for their abusers and it doesn’t negate their abuse, but i also don’t get the people who scream ‘miles and kerry said it was obsessive and a stalker so he is’.

what? j.k. rowling said that dumbledore was gay and in a relationship with grindelwald and that hermione was black; despite there being no evidence in the text for the former and contradictory evidence for the latter. by the way, in case anyone wants to pull the ‘straight, white, homophobic, male’ card; hi, i am a pansexual, black female—make a good argument instead of resorting to categorising people.

just because an author says something doesn’t mean it’s gospel, especially when there’s no evidence to say so. and, for the people saying that adam has been obsessive since the trailers, where? he was a megalomaniac obsessed with increasing power and crushing the human majority in remnant, that does not translate to crazy, obsessive ex.

could adam have been abusive? absolutely. 

was he abusive? quite possibly.

was he obsessive? obsessed with power and taking back control from the humans, yes. 

obsessed with blake? hell no, the writers pulled that shit out of their ass in volume four because they had no clue what do with his character. he should have been focused on regathering the white fang fragments, not chasing after blake for no reason.

adam snorus; plunging over the red horizon.

if the writers wanted to make adam abusive and obsessive, they were well within their means to. doesn’t mean it was a good decision or was written well, just that it was their choice and such but they could at least done adam some justice in his death.

for example, have him use his scabbard. i mean, blake and yang take adam’s sword, but he still has his scabbard/sheath and his scabbard is a literal gun. why has everyone forgotten this? why have the writers forgotten this?

he should have at least taken a shot at blake or yang, it doesn’t matter if those shots hit, just have him put a fight rather than him standing around waiting to be stabbed. in fact, adam waits around a lot in this fight—i don’t mean to dive into a long critique of this—but adam stands around allowing blake to spew exposition about his semblance to yang which robs the fight of any tension or stakes.

how about you have adam continuously bombarding yang with attacks whilst blake tells yang his semblance? it changes nothing except give the scene more tension instead of having it come to a halt for exposition. 

but anyway, blake and yang kill adam and i didn’t give a fuck. i’m not by any means an adam stan, the only emotional attatchment i had with him was the hope that he’d get a badass fight scene. i also don’t really give much a fuck about blake or yang or their relationship so don’t think i’m a bitter adam stan or a blind bumblebee stan.

there’s a difference between hating a character’s death because you happened to like that character and didn’t want them to die and hating a character’s death because it was unnecessary and had no reason to happen. 

in the end, adam’s death services bumblebee. yang gets over her shoddily-written ptsd arc ( i will talk about that another day ) and blake doesn’t really get over anything because she confessed that she had gotten over in volume five and everyone moves on. it still doesn’t negate the fact that adam had the most potential out of the villains and he gets killed because the writers didn’t know how to continue his story.

hint: maybe you should add him to salem’s inner circle instead of generically insane baddie tyrian; daddy watts; and petty, one-note fucker hazel. that way we have an already established, powerful villain who already has natural character foils in blake and yang.