RWBY Criticism

Before you go on, however, the conversation and my commentary on it don’t have the nicest things to say about RWBY and I’m not going to be using the “rwde” tag in this case because I think everyone should be aware of this individual, so if you don’t want to see that, just move along.

(I’m MissRoseyRed, by the way)

(I’ve had a run in or two with KoB as well and…well that’s a whole ‘nother roller coaster but I jumped off that one quickly.)

But it’s weird that it’s happened twice. I don’t think telling me it’s happened twice makes the situation any better, you shouldn’t be doing it at all, let alone two times. 

And I was never following you. Like ever. I go into the rwde tag sometimes and follow like, maybe three rwde blogs. You are not one of them.

And, as I say below, snippets do not have the full context. That’s why they’re snippets. If I gave you a sound bite from a video game without telling you even what game it came from, you would have no idea what I’m talking about. You can’t just pick and choose. This reminds me of that time I saw someone (and some of us may know who) take the captioned screenshot of Ozpin saying “You brought your army to my kingdom, James”, like he was mad about it, and deliberately kept out the part where Ozpin then adds “Use it”, just because they always believed Ironwood was a bad guy deep down and tried using this scene to “prove it”. Pathetic.

And this “Oh this one person who said that thing you said turned out to be a racist” thing really grinds my gears. So is a hero who says the same thing as a villain also a villain? Why bring that up? And I literally could not follow what they were saying, these were just ramblings. What wildly odd, creepy and appalling viewpoints would your fellow critics have?

And yes, I did say “shitty fandom” because, as you know, I don’t have a lot of nice things to say about the general concept of “fandom”. I wonder why.

No, really, I wanna know. What odd, creepy, and appalling viewpoints do we have? You didn’t say what they were, you only said that they exist. Because from what I’ve seen, RWBY critics typically have the least depraved takes I’ve ever seen. You say “this isn’t rocket science” like I’m supposed to understand your mad ramblings that lack context and explanation. Am I just missing something here, you guys? And you have a very unusual sense of time if you think a few days is the same as MONTHS. And even if it was from months ago, that doesn’t change anything. Why are you stealing crits from, according to you, months ago then?

And no, RWBY certainly is not a magnum opus, none of us said it was. We literally talk about how it’s not but you take those posts for yourself and somehow manage to call us – the critics – stans and simps when we’re literally the opposite. How many times can I use “literally” correctly in a paragraph?

I don’t know what “basic human nature” has anything to do with the conversation. And as for who I am, I’m a RWBY critic and Ozpin fan who looks at other people’s criticisms of the show and I may agree with them or even expand upon them to the best of my ability, rather than take the critical posts for myself and accuse the OP of being a RWBY simp after taking just a snippet of their post where they might be, god forbid, giving the show the benefit of the doubt or might not be critical enough for you, and then give their criticisms as your own.

Again, it’s weird that it happened twice, why is it happening at all? And are you admitting it? I think you’re admitting it.

Oh yes, my favorite thing about talking to other people on Tumblr, when they call me a dude. My…my main blog…is literally called… It literally has the word “Miss” in it, followed by the name “Rosey”…which I’m pretty sure is a girl’s name. I mean, I know a username isn’t always an indication of someone’s gender, but surely it would’ve made more sense to assume I’m a girl?

And wtf is that last part? “You wanna preach to me?” Was I preaching? Is making an observation on your behavior towards other critics a form of preaching? “Let’s agree you won’t pretend you do, and you won’t, good?” What does that even mean? No really, I don’t understand this bit at all, like even less than I understand the majority of the conversation. This whole chunk of screenshots just baffles me. “A dude” (not a dude) “who doesn’t even know the story” (what story, RWBY or the story of you stealing other people’s criticisms and passing them off as your own while calling those crit blogs simps?) “and preaches that ‘we’re all a team’” (I didn’t say we were a team, I said I thought the critics were on the same side and why are fights being picked among them, but I see that it’s just you) “but I never see you preach this to the assholes who come in with chips on their shoulders” (who the hell are you talking about? The critics? The stans? I have no idea.)

Oh, and, your post? How about you get off and stop stealing other people’s posts? If you weren’t doing that, I wouldn’t have said anything.

Y’all, I may have missed something here, but this is the wildest ride I’ve been on in a long time. I don’t typically get myself involved in drama (or at least try not to), but this was…something. Usually the only people who talk to me like this are the super-fans who can’t handle even an ounce of criticism towards the show, not my fellow critics. This is weird, right? I’m not the only one who thinks that?

This person did block me immediately after this…um, conversation, and I know they have a tendency to block and unblock for one reason or another (got that info from another source), so I played it safe by blocking them as well. I suggest you do the same, whether you’re a fan or a critic of the show, I think we can all agree that this is a toxic individual. Don’t go to their blog to harass them, just block them so they can’t come for you and steal your posts.

It's busy, there are so many characters they're trying to push into important roles that everything gets muddied and the actual main characters end up underdeveloped, they try to push so much stuff into the show that none of it's given the time it needs, it's repetitive and somehow simultaneously too busy, and when you try to watch it as a whole instead of bit by bit, the big picture becomes nonsensical and hard to watch.

False. CRWBY has gone out of its way to only show us tiny glimpses of Atlas, in an attempt to trick the audience into believing it would be okay to let it be destroyed.

‘Glimpses’ such as only ever showing us Atlas through very limited lenses: Jacques’ galas and parties, one or two closed-off locations in the Academy, a grand hotel, and a fancy park where fancy people have fancy picnics. The show was very careful to only show us these things, because CRWBY is relying on the audience’s perception of Atlas to carry their message that “RWBYJNR are right to abandon it.” They tried to portray Atlas as an advanced form of “Snob Hill.” They tried to pretend that Atlas is not a city, but is instead, a neighborhood, in which only the very wealthy live. This can be illustrated through the highly specific way in which Weiss and May talk about Atlas in their tea-party scene: “Our two families specifically have been harmful to us personally, therefore the city doesn’t deserve saving.”

But this clean-cut surface-level illusionary curtain of “Only the obscenely wealthy live here” is transparent and easy to tear apart.

Atlas is not a Rich-Folks Neighborhood. It’s a city. Atlas is a huge, heavily populated city, and it’s been established as one from the very beginning. Yes, it’s a highly problematic city and it does house the worst of humanity within it - but it’s still a real city. A city full of mansions, shopping districts, hotels, restaurants, parks, penthouses. A city connected by transportation options such as a city-wide underground subway system. A city housing the military headquarters and the Huntsman Academy of the region, as well as at least one prep school, along with presumably a combat school (common in the Four Kingdoms, according to Ozpin) and additionally, schools offering more basic education for the children of Atlas. Do you know what all these kinds of places have in common? Staff.

The city of Atlas presumably would have to house thousands of working-class people in order to even function. Teachers, janitors, butlers, housekeepers, cooks, busboys, waiters, dishwashers, window-cleaners, street-sweepers, valets, groundskeepers, sales associates, etc. you name it. People like Klein, or like the waiter serving drinks and hors d’oeuvres at Jacques’ galas. Also, by the way, literal child slaves like we have now been told exist via Cinder’s backstory. And yes, some people might decide to believe that every single working class person who works in Atlas all commute to homes in Mantle, but A. that is statistically improbable, and B. even if that’s true, there would still always be working class people physically standing in Atlas at all times, due to night-shifts running transportation services or hotel operations or garbage collecting or street sweeping or construction or manor upkeep at night during the off-hours of the rich people.

Additionally, there are the people working and training as Huntsman or military soldiers, who do definitely live in Atlas and don’t commute down to the city at night, as the military headquarters and Academy dorms are both up in Atlas. We see thousands of human soldiers lining the fields and being completely decimated by the Grimm Salem is unleashing upon them, and it is impossible to believe that every single one of those soldiers comes from a rich family, like Weiss and Winter did. In fact, we don’t even have to make assumptions to know that not all soldiers in Atlas are rich, because we have Neon and Flynt studying in Atlas Academy (a faunus girl and a kid from a working-class background) and we also know from Blake’s Volume 5 trailer that the Atlas prep schools also accept students from other cities (as Ilia was originally from Mantle before she began attending an Atlas prep-school and kept her Faunus heritage a secret to do so.) It is false to say that every single person living in Atlas is a rich person. Yes, Atlas is the home to Jacques and Weiss and Whitley and Henry Marigold. But it is also the home to Neon and Flynt and the literally thousands of soldiers from all walks of life that I mentioned.

We also now suddenly have to accept that farmers live in Atlas. By making sure Monstra landed on farmlands outside the city on the floating island, CRWBY established that literal FARMERS live and work on the floating island of Atlas. FARMERS. You can’t get more “working class” than that.

Not to mention, we know that the military was already evacuating the residents of Mantle to Atlas before Team RWBY split off from the military. They repeatedly said things like “We’re not finished evacuating Mantle!” “We haven’t evacuated everyone from Mantle yet!” “There are still people left in Mantle!” The evacuations were already underway when Team RWBY split off from Ironwood! What, are we supposed to pretend he de-evacuated all the Mantle citizens who WE KNOW were already on the island before RWBY left? Team RWBYJNRO weren’t evacuating everyone from Mantle into the Crater, they were evacuating everyone who remained into the Crater. There are actually Mantle citizens on Atlas RIGHT NOW as Ruby, Weiss and Blake sit around drinking tea and wondering if they should care about the millions of people in the city because they have personal problems with the 1%. (Also, by the way, you’ll notice that neither Weiss nor May ever say ANYTHING about having a problem with the wealth gap. Weiss does not seem to see anything wrong with the fact that SHE’S SITTING IN A MANSION WHILE THE WORLD BURNS OUTSIDE. She’s only upset that she personally was blocked from inheriting said mansion. May boils it all down to the horrifically simple level of “My family mistreated me, so I’m okay with letting the entire city die.” Which… What?? Their problem with the wealthy is not that they are wealthy, they’re only mad at the individuals, not the system.)

When people say they’re okay with Atlas being destroyed, they’re not JUST saying “I’m okay with the 1% of Remnant being destroyed,” They’re actually saying “I’m okay with having millions of service workers, transportation workers, farmers, cooks, children, students, soldiers, refugees, and literal slaves all be killed, because they happen to presently exist on the same plot of land as Jacques Schnee.”

That’s why I’m so frustrated with RWBN-May right now. They don’t express any concern for the millions of innocent people who will die if Salem isn’t stopped. They decided that the Schnees and the Marigolds were beyond saving, stating personal reasons for this assertion while conveniently not mentioning their family’s true crimes in any meaningful way, and are now using their grievances against their parents as the reason why they shouldn’t try to save the other million people who happen to live in the same city.

Pretending that Atlas is peopled exclusively by the obscenely wealthy completely ignores not only the obvious way cities work, but contradicts everything we’ve been told about Atlas from the start. It’s bad enough to see the Main Cast buy into and propagate this lie; even worse to see it repeated by the fans of the show.

Also, I’m seeing people in RWBY comments say that the destruction of the City of Atlas would somehow fix the systemic racism and wealth inequality in Remnant?? Like, huh??? Removing a city off a map and taking a few individuals off the playing field wouldn’t fix systemic racism and wealth inequality. That’s not how these things work. If a major world system is set in place that keeps certain people groups elevated above other people groups, then wiping a specific location or individual off the map wouldn’t change the system. All that would happen is the transfer of power from that location or individual to a different one poised to accept it. Besides, it’s completely false and disingenuous to claim that every single rich and powerful figure lives in Atlas. Yes, Atlas is the one where we see it most obviously, but destroying the City of Atlas would just prime places such as Argus to take over. You know what exists in Argus? A thriving economy and heavy military presence. Would it suffer a great deal if Atlas fell? Yes, but it has already been established to be able to cope without the immediate assistance of Atlas (since, you know, the borders closed and the embargo hit them too). Additionally, the other three Kingdoms were also shown to be major world powers, containing technology the rest of Remnant doesn’t have access to (such as airships, which have so far been shown to be a Kingdoms-Only perk, and reliable communication, which the Elder in that village in Volume 4 claims “was already bad before the tower of Beacon fell,” implying that the CCT towers “Atlas gifted to the world” were only installed to the four Kingdoms and a few special places like Argus.)

As I already mentioned, the main cast in RWBY doesn’t seem to think the systems set in place are actually wrong. Everything they’ve ever fought for has been the preservation of the status quo; challenging both the individuals who oppose it, and the individuals who block them from participating in it. Removing one city from the network of cities that benefits from wealth inequality doesn’t remove wealth inequality. And removing a select few individuals from the network of individuals that benefit from systemic racism doesn’t remove systemic racism. This idea that “Remnant, minus Jacques and Atlas, equals better Remnant,” is blatantly flawed and an incredibly naïve and ignorant view of real-world problems. Classism, racism, wealth inequality, and other things like this can’t be solved as simply as removing a chess piece from a game-board. The City of Atlas, and by extension, families such as the Schnees and the Marigolds, are byproducts of a flawed system, not the singular flaw itself. The destruction of Atlas would not be a victory for the poor and the oppressed; it would be a catastrophic event that kills millions OF the poor and oppressed, and also happens to knock out a couple of their oppressors along the way.

If the system that created these problems remains in place, then the only thing that changes with the destruction of Atlas is who’s in charge. If all the problems in Remnant stem from the fact that Atlas is the richest kingdom, then removing Atlas doesn’t solve the problems in Remnant, because the second richest kingdom will just become the richest and inherit them.

You can call me a bootlicker, but one of the problems in RWBY is that they’re not calling the system of militarism bad, they’re just calling every individual person in that system bad, which doesn’t work and is kind of counter productive. You realize if the Ace Ops were all killed, the system would continue on and be just as corrupt? James Ironwood’s life could end in any way, and the system would continue? 

But the show has never portrayed any of these systems as bad, there are just bad people, and it’s the people that have to be stopped. And I’ll add this; RWBYJNR benefits from this system. And they never take issue with the system until it’s them being ignored or harmed by it. 

And look, in a world full of nightmare monsters that are drawn to negativity, and the primary role of the military is to fight these nightmare monsters, what actually makes that military inherently evil? Because I’m going to say something that might make people upset to hear, but a soldier is going to be held to a much bigger area of scrutiny than a hunter who can flash a badge and avoid all questions. 

We’ve seen hunters use excessive force with other hunters without any due reason, we’ve seen hunters taking civilians money, Qrow openly says he was in a seedy Inn and encountered “-a few Huntsmen that [he] could only assume had been hired by less than reputable people for less than respectable jobs.” When Qrow’s getting arrested for stealing an airship and crossing into Atlas illegally, he protests by saying that he’s a licensed huntsman, as if that will prevent him from being held accountable for the actions he’s undoubtedly committed. There is literally a lack of any sort of structure or accountability for hunters. But they can arrest people. (See; Weiss arresting her father.) And James sent Blake and Yang, two ambiguously aged but eighteen at the oldest huntresses to go and arrest Robyn, too.

If RWBY is going for acab, they already have an allegory for that, and it’s the huntsmen and huntresses. And you don’t want to villainize your heroes by portraying the system they thrive in as bad? Okay. Just don’t make them a part of that system anymore. Have them outgrow it. Have them see that it’s a bad system, not just a bad Ironwood + Ace Ops. Heck, you’re already crapping on Qrow enough, leave him a huntsman and call it bad. 

And I’m going to say this, too. This is a fantasy. You don’t have to have this problem at all. If you want this to be a, ‘down with the system’ type of story, why is no one talking about systems at all? Why are the heroes reaping benefits of this system? Overall bad take. 

The systems in Remnant are deeply flawed, and RWBYJNR benefits from the system. Even with characters like Blake and later with Leo and Marrow, the show went out of its way to carve out a place for them individually within the systems, as if they earned the right to rise above their ‘station’ by leaving it behind and embracing the systems in place, rather than ever address the fact that the rest of ‘their kind’ aren’t welcome. In the first season, Blake is accepted into the rest of the team after she apologizes for daring to be a faunus and keeping secrets. In Volume 5, we see Leo, who runs the Huntsman Academy in the Kingdom where we see “No Faunus” signs in bar windows. And in Volume 7, Marrow is allowed to live and work in Atlas because he became a soldier, while the majority of Faunus in Solitas don’t even get to live in Mantle, instead relegated to the tent city slums in the crater! But none of our heroes ever try to change or fix or even challenge these systems, and the only thing they ever fight for is the preservation of the status quo that benefits them in the first place!

And CRWBY’s fix for this is by turning everyone they fight into Mega-Evil Kitten-Eating Monsters, so that the heroes will look good by contrast. Adam was written to be an abusive, psychotic monster, because CRWBY needed to make sure the audience knew Team RWBY was right to stop him in his efforts to end Faunus Child Slavery. They got called out for this, so they wrote the White Fang out of the story, only to immediately replace them. Now they’ve changed Ironwood into an enraged, irrational monster, because CRWBY needed to make sure the audience knew Team RWBY was right to stop him in his efforts to save millions of people from Salem.

Do our heroes ever talk about the fact that the SDC is engaged in child slavery? No. In fact, they violently oppose Adam and the White Fang for daring to oppose ‘too violently’ themselves. Let me say that again: They violently oppose the White Fang because the White Fang was ‘too violent’ in opposing the violent oppression of the SDC. They’re saying “You are wrong to use violence to escape violence, so we will use violence to punish you for using violence to escape violence.” Do they ever try to stop the SDC from being violent? NO! We just have Weiss whine about wanting to ‘restore the family name’ and calling herself a victim of the White Fang because her childhood was difficult and then graciously telling Blake that she’s allowed to remain in the team because she stopped protesting the SDC. And then we have Weiss throw an individual person in the dumpster, and arrest her father for rigging a political election. No mention of his crimes against the Faunus. Blake even has a speech in Volume 5 where she blames faunus oppression on the faunus, claiming that the reason humanity is racist against the faunus is because of Adam, and convincing the people of Menagerie to go to the kingdom that lets business owners put “No Faunus” signs in their windows, and save the Kingdoms-Only technology the rest of the world isn’t allowed to have, from the evil people daring to oppose violent treatment.

Or, let’s look at Cinder, Emerald, and Mercury. We know that Mercury was violently abused by his father, an assassin who lived outside the Kingdoms. Then we have Emerald, abandoned by society and left to live on the streets, unloved by everyone. And then finally, Cinder, another literal child slave who was horrifically abused by her owner. And have any of our heroes done anything to change the environment outside the kingdoms in which people like Marcus Black could thrive? No. Qrow even tells ‘exciting’ stories about such people and places, acting as though he’s welcome among them and making the ‘dark, seedy’ places of the world and the ‘disreputable’ fallen Huntsmen seem cool and mysterious and fun. Have they done anything to address the wealth gap that left Emerald out to hang in the first place? No. They just yell at Ironwood for a hole in the wall in Mantle only, and for considering martial law, as if he specifically is responsible for the fact that wealth inequality exists. Which, by the way, they didn’t have any problem with back when they were hiking through pre-technology villages on their way from futuristic Vale to the city of Mistral where they were told “the bad stuff is on the bottom” and got super excited that they personally were going “to the top.” And what about Cinder and her child slavery? Do they ever do anything about child slavery in Atlas? Nope. In fact, Rhodes even tried to arrest Cinder for - again - daring to fight against the person who’d been literally torturing her for years. And in the present day, the rest of our heroes sit around in a manor drinking tea and audibly wondering if they should even try to save Atlas, through the singular lense of “are the rich people we know personally even worth it?” Not paying any mind to the working class people of Atlas (such as Klein and the rest of the staff or the literal slaves like Cinder or the unseen farmers who work on the farms that got randomly added in for the whale to land on) or the “evil” soldiers giving their lives to stop the Grimm from attacking the people in Atlas, or the other students like Neon and Flynt (despite the racist depictions they used for Flynt, he still exists and can’t be ignored), or the thousands of people they had already evacuated from Mantle to Atlas before changing their minds about Atlas.

The heroes don’t do anything to fix the actual systems in place, instead always blaming the problems of the world on a handful of individuals, while working to preserve the status quo that lets them do whatever they want free of consequence.

Plus, I just think it’s really uncomfortably familiar that Team RWBYJNR were perfectly content with straight-up murdering White Fang members by the dozens back in Volume 2, before they had done anything bigger than thievery and property damage, but now that the government they’ve supported blindly for seven seasons is doing something they don’t like, they’re violently overthrowing it. Too close for comfort, tbh.

Like sure, there’s a suspension of disbelief, but put enough weight on that, and the whole thing falls apart. 

The thing that snags me on this like the paper towel from the Last Day of Summer episode of Phineas and Ferb is that it’s an open admission that there are things that you need to know in order for the show to make sense, and it’s not there. 

It feels like RWBY was a TV show adaptation of a book franchise that a lot of people didn’t read, and everyone who is telling us that we’re purposely missing things that aren’t ever shown to us, have read all of the hypothetical books that we haven’t and are telling us that if we read the books, everything would make sense, but the books were never written. 

This isn’t even the MCU relying on the audience to not only watch all of their films in order to know anything about what’s happening and also to watch the Agents of Shield TV show, because RWBY doesn’t have info-dumps in a spin-off TV show. (There’s an unrelated book series which I won’t pay money to read because I’m broke and I haven’t looked for a free way to read it because I don’t want to read punching bag!Sun)

Listen, the first DC movie I ever watched was the 2017 Justice League movie. It was terrible for first time viewers. Apparently, it was terrible for DC fans too, but this isn’t about that. I struggled to know who some of the characters were, there was like, a fifteen minute montage at the start of the film about how everyone missed and needed Superman, there were weird one-liners from the characters, everyone was underdeveloped and disconnected from their actual mission, there were onscreen deaths of characters that I didn’t know, and weird allusions to things that I’m confident were from past movies, but I didn’t have the necessary knowledge to watch a hyped up box-office mainstream movie, because I didn’t know my homework. 

And I genuinely think that that’s better than RWBY because at least it was written down somewhere.

On the heroes side, we have Ruby, Weiss, Blake, Yang, Jaune, Nora, Ren, Oscar, Oz, Penny, May, Qrow, Robyn, Pietro, Maria, Fiona, and Joanna. + Whitley, who may not be a hero, but we’re still supposed to care about him (don’t get me wrong, I do.)

And on the villains side, we have Salem, Watts, Tyrian, Emerald, Mercury, Cinder, Neo, Hazel, Ironwood, Winter, Harriet, Marrow, Elm, Vine, and Jacques

Like, I know some of these characters are more side characters so we aren’t meant to get a lot from their storyline, and the show put Mercury in for some reason only to immediately pull him right back out. But that’s eighteen people to keep track of in the heroes section, and fifteen villains! And I’ll remind you, some of the characters we started with in the first few seasons like Nora and Mercury still aren’t properly developed.

RWBY has a severe problem with having so many characters that some of them seem pointless, some of them seem boring or forgettable, and some of them haven’t had actual character arcs in seasons. I literally forgot to put Hazel in with the villains originally, despite him having a pretty big role with Ozpin and Oscar and the possibility that he’ll be redeemed, because he’s that forgettable. I really feel like CRWBY needed to do some scaling back here. And I really hope that rather than continue to stuff more characters into their story, they actually work on the ones they have from here on in.

You know, maybe they could have time to develop even half of these characters if they hadn’t decided to make season eight take place in only two days. So any big character moments (like Ren doubting their team at large, Yang questioning Ruby, Weiss taking a step towards mending her relationship with Whitley,) all seem selfish or foolish for wasting precious time on their own personal problems.

In hindsight, his name alone is a dead give away, and I guess… Gun, fancy clothes with the three piece suit, moustache… The gimmicks were all there. But he was so far removed from anything to do with Watson’s character or story that I had literally never thought of it. This is one of my problems with RWBY’s Fairy Tale inspiration, they took away anything that made Watson Watson, left a couple of gimmicks, and thought that was good.

I read on the RWBY wiki that Watts was meant to be ‘John Watson if he’d connected with Moriarty instead of Holmes.’ Even if Watson had connected with Moriarty, he’d still be nothing like Watts. Watts acts like a twisted version of Holmes, with all of Holmes’s bad tendencies - showing off, being flippant, believing himself superior, prioritizing his work over others’ feelings, etc - and none of Holmes’s redeeming qualities of justice and righteousness. A Holmes without his better traits (and without his better half in Watson) is easy to imagine falling into jealousy, cold-heartedness, and violence in pursuit of recognition and in pursuit of his interests. Instead of using his skills to aid the world and stop the person responsible for the criminal underground, he uses them to attack the world and aid the person responsible for the criminal underground, staying where his skills are appreciated. Watts shows only a vague interest in Salem’s group and her end goals (if I recall correctly,) and it seems he’s only there to be able to better do what he wants, and has rivalries with other members of Salem’s circle, which is kind of reflective of Holmes’ interactions with Scotland Yard and its members, only without growth into respect and comradery. Watts even faked his own death and fell off the map, hiding out until the time was right and then making his return in a secretive way and even revealing himself to a friend before really getting started. Like…

And then they say he’s Watson? Are they trying to trick us? Watson, the military man? Watson, the loyal follower? The more social one? The ordinary one? Watson, who spent years of his life documenting others’ successes with little regard for his own fame? The one who balanced out Holmes because he was humble, at least partially understood and cared about physical and mental health, and wasn’t as gray, so was able to be a moral sounding board?  Watson lacked real brilliance, and his true qualities had to do with the depths of his emotions, like his bravery and love. He was open and honest and countered Holmes’ more secretive and sly tendencies (which are also more in line with Watts.) Watson was the one with a grounded life and stability. The only real reason Watson ever did anything criminal was either because he thought it was the morally right thing to do or because he was simply following and supporting Holmes. Watson thought it would be worth it to be wounded over and over again just because he saw that Holmes loved him during a time where he got injured. He was quite literally just an army doctor, who dearly loved and was there for his friend, and took it upon himself to document their adventures in pursuit of making that friends’ brilliance known to the world. There’s interesting things you could do to alter this kind of character into an evil villain role, but instead, Watts doesn’t connect with any of it.

Could you argue that Watts is a completely flipped version of Watson, where basically all of his traits are turned into the opposite? Yes, I guess you could, but it makes him seem pretty not Watson. Instead of being a military man and war vet, he hates the most military and war vet coded character in the series. Instead of having to mourn a death and continue his life, he faked his own death. Instead of being grounded and kind hearted, he’s an overly dramatic, remorseless killer. Instead of being humble and open, he’s arrogant and crafty. Instead of being a supportive, loving friend, he has no real friends, uses everyone, and is very selfish. Instead of being based on loyalty and what he could do for others (which might actually be doable, with Salem,) he seems only out for himself, and only seems to submits to Salem because it’ll get him what he wants. Most importantly, instead of being an everyman who lacks the talent of the people around him but makes up for it in other ways, Watts is a total genius who actually seems better than Pietro, who was just overlooked. 

Watts has no allusions to writing, no friend to help, no military background, no quality of character, seemingly no recognition of his flaws, no humility, not even Watson’s dumb ‘ladies man’ title, and he’s the opposite of anything Watson was. You could say he’s the anti-Watson, but an anti-Watson actually isn’t Watson at all. An anti-Watson is basically just an evil Holmes.

Even then, the ‘Watson if he’d connected with Moriarty’ line makes it seem like 'anti-Watson’ wasn’t what they were going for, either, so I don’t feel like I can even give them credit for that. Are they saying that if Watson hadn’t had Holmes, he’d have been an evil crafty mega-genius? It doesn’t connect to me.

Personally, I’d usually think that Watts not being like Watson at all was just unintended, and that they either did think they were doing something clever without taking away from the Watson allusion or they just gave their Watson allusion a couple of Watson gimmicks and then just built their own character around it. Except that Watts faked his own death, one of the most iconic Sherlock Holmes storyline things. I’m being totally genuine when I ask if they just said he was meant to represent Watson for some reason when really, he was meant to be Holmes with a dark twist, or maybe Moriarty, who already is basically Holmes with a dark twist. 

RWBY Chibi: Blake has moments where she just turns into having cat personality and does cat things, but it isn’t racist if it’s chibi and cute.