My biggest pet peeve in the RWBY fandom is when people take Taiyang "shutting down" and Yang having to "pick up the pieces" as meaning that Taiyang stopped raising his children and Yang had to do the physical housework of keeping the home intact.
That's not what it means, and it's shown to us in two very clear ways.
First, we see a Xiao Long shutdown first-hand in Volume 4. It's Yang doing it instead of Taiyang, but with how much Yang takes after Taiyang, it's pretty clear that what we see in Volume 4 is a case of history repeating.
And Yang doesn't lay in a bed and do nothing. We're shown her going through the everyday motions, but without her passion, without her fire.
Second off, Yang outright says in Volume 5 that Tai was "busy with school".
The man was physically and emotionally capable of work. Maybe he was throwing himself into his work to distract from his soul-crushing depression, but work he did! And if he was capable of that, it's just character assassination to claim he didn't look after his children's physical needs!
What Taiyang failed at, what Yang had to pick up the pieces for, was the emotional needs of Ruby and Yang. He couldn't give them the emotional support they needed to get through the pain of losing their mother. That was the role Yang was forced to take on from a young age, that is the way she acted as a mother to Ruby. Taiyang kept them fed and in clean clothes and in school, but Yang was the one who read to Ruby at night and held her when she woke up from nightmares.
And that did make Yang grow up fast. And that did make Yang long for freedom and adventure, to figure out who she was outside of her relationship to Ruby.
But a good chunk of this fanbase believes appreciating Yang means demonizing her father, when they are two incredibly similar people.
I mean, the idea that Yang took on the running of her household is so pervasive a headcanon that when the DC Comic said that Yang couldn't cook, there was a rejection of the idea across the board. Because people believed Yang had to be able to cook. Otherwise their understanding of Yang's childhood was wrong.
And people think that Yang ran the household for years. That's the idea that really confuses me, the idea that Yang was doing that for years.
Do you really think Ruby would have a good relationship with her father if he neglected them like that? If he caused Yang pain like that?
If you answer "yes" to that, you don't understand Ruby either.
Ultimately, Taiyang Xiao Long is a good dad. But he failed to emotionally support his daughter when she needed it most, and that only served to strengthen her problems with abandonment. That's what he failed at. That's how he screwed up.
There's no need to claim it was worse than it really was.
