Food for thought: The Vytal Festival is held after the end of the school year.

Some number of young adults manged to graduate from Beacon, complete with a graduation ceremony, before possibly attending the Vytal Tournament where everything went to shit. So, while most other teams needed to go to other schools to finish their education, these students are now full-fledged hunters getting started right when the world needs hunters the most.

That's an interesting story seed.

Also, what about those Beacon students who tried to transfer to Mistral? Imagine their frustration when the second academy in a row is denied to them, though at least Haven is largely intact and might get started as soon as a new headmaster can be selected. (Likely by council members who aren’t aware of the conspiracy, but until Haven has a Maiden or Relic to worry about again, that’s a very low-priority concern.)

More sadly, there are certainly going to be students of Beacon who simply gave up rather than going abroad, though some of them may simply be waiting until Beacon is restored, and might be making themselves useful in other ways in the meantime.

On the positive side, we know that Shade Academy welcomes students from Beacon Academy. Team CFVY might not have been the only one to transfer there.

As for anyone wanting to transfer to Atlas Academy, it depends on whether Ironwood decided to trust that none of the students coming from Beacon might have been more secret agents like Cinder and her team. If he felt secure enough, he might have invited them all into Atlas before he closed the border. I hope we get an explicit answer to this mystery.

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The Steel Party wants to make Vale more like Atlas, by unifying their city militias together into a federal military, and establishing a specialist corp of hunters within that military. This party wants to ensure a balance of power with Atlas by achieving parity with Atlas’ ability to project force outside of their kingdom. Many members of this party want to use this projection of force to expand their territory against the Grimm, conquering nearby wilderness, reclaiming ruins, and holding the ground they take.

The conservative Emerald Party largely opposes the Steel Party. It prefers to keep Vale’s current system and focus more resources on the quality of the militias that defend their existing borders, as well as training and contracting more independent hunters to cull the Grimm beyond them. Some members of this party desire territorial expansion as much as the majority of the Steel Party, and vote together with them on such issues.

The Gold Party opposes federal efforts at expansion like the majority of the Emerald Party, but the Gold thinks that Vale’s defenders are more than strong enough to protect Vale’s territory, and therefore the government could stand to reduce taxes on the citizens so that the people would have more money to invest in non-combat trade schools, private businesses, and the free market, growing Vale’s economy and strengthening the kingdom’s power in international trade. The Gold Party is particularly interested in pursuing policies that prevent the Schnee Dust Company from putting local Dust companies out of business.

The Silver Party clashes with the Gold in practically every way, believing that taxes should be raised across the board to pay for a larger government, reducing the powers of the individual cities in favor of more universal federal regulations and laws. This party tends to find the most cooperation with the Steel Party, but most Silver Party members live in Vale City or the most affluent districts of the other cities, while Steel Party members are much more distributed across geography and economic classes. The members of the Steel Party in the middle-class districts of Vale’s other cities are wary about giving Vale City too much of either the money they earn or the rights that their grandfathers died to give them. The Steel Party is also divided on the Silver Party’s willingness to allow the SDC to kill off local Dust companies.

Smallest of all is the Faunus Party. Faunus and even human membership rose after the establishment of the White Fang following the Faunus Rights Revolution, but then took a nosedive after the Fang turned violent. Those human members who didn’t leave on their own sometimes fled persecution from Fang members who didn’t feel they supported faunus “enough”, before the Faunus Party officially disowned the White Fang. Adam Taurus and the rejected radicals would respond to this “betrayal” with attacks on peaceful faunus protests and their participation in the Grimm invasion of Vale that would kill faunus as well as humans.

The Faunus Party’s votes are modest in number but courted by all four other parties in different ways. The Emerald and Gold parties tend to argue that the individual opportunities offered by combat school and hunting academy education or lower taxes would enable faunus to improve their socioeconomic status through hard work. The Steel and Silver tend to promise federal reforms and financial aid programs that would provide restitution for past injustices.

There is no official Anti-Faunus party, because blatant racism is frowned upon in polite Valish society, which prefers to see itself as tolerant and fair and upholding the standards set by their noble Last King. Sadly, there are still openly-secret Anti-Faunus blocs within each of the four primary parties that oppose any cooperation with the Faunus Party except when they think they’re getting the faunus to agree to support something which won’t actually deliver the results promised to the faunus.

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As I’ve said before, we know perhaps the least about Ancient and Classical Vale compared to the other three Great Kingdoms. But I’d like to expand on that earlier post and speculate a little, by examining its national emblem and what it might have been chosen to symbolize.

The main feature of the emblem is a pair of axes, which are either tools of carpentry or warfare; creation or destruction. The two axes are crossed together, their bladed heads facing outwards; a pair working as one. The secondary feature is a victory laurel beneath the axes.

I think this tells a history of two predecessor kingdoms, each of which arose on a different side of Vale’s ridiculously massive river. Axes would have been extremely important as forest-clearing tools, as humans fought nature to build homes for themselves and remove places where Grimm could hide. These tools could also be used as weapons when confronted by those Grimm, or by other humans looking to cause trouble -- sometimes bandits, but sometimes strangers from another village, town, or nation.

At some point, the northern and southern kingdoms made the choice to turn away from war and embrace peace. Despite their geography, neither representative ax is placed below or above the other; they stand even, and equally share their underlying wreath of victory.

Some fans have been speculating that Mistral’s national emblem is a representation of the Relic of Knowledge, which is a winged lamp with an inner flame. While I would hesitate to suggest that the Relic of Choice, hidden in Vale’s Beacon Academy, is two axes and a laurel, or even just a single ax, Vale’s emblem does seem to represent Choice on various levels.

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Well, I think the Schnee are descendants of Mantle’s royal family through Nicholas Schnee’s unnamed wife. But even if it does get revealed as truth, no one seems to care because no one has mentioned it.

The Mistralian emperor’s name is likely a dirty word across most of the country, and we don’t know how well-liked he was at home in the capital, especially after he lost legal power to punish any criticism.

The last King of Vale might not have had any children. But if he had, wouldn’t that be awkward for Ozpin? ^_^

So by process of elimination, I’m going to suggest that Vacuo makes the biggest deal out of respecting the descendants of the woman who led them into victorious war against Mantle and Mistral for the sake of their freedom. Especially if she kept to her apparent strengths after the Great War, and decided to become headmistress of the new Shade Academy rather than join the ill-fated federal government.

If her descendants kept up her legacy by being productive warriors and effective leaders, then naturally the Vacuo people would continue to afford them the appropriate level of respect, with additional regard for belonging to a lineage of honor and glory.

Certainly this is an idea I’m using in my Black Rock Shooter crossover, where Irino Saya is the latest scion of that legacy, horns and all, and plans to become headmistress of Shade in the future.

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Talking about making adjustments to RWBY’s story is all well and good, except the first people standing in line to make impossible changes would be CRWBY themselves. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.

Still, let’s remember that Volume 1 told us that the White Fang disrupted a peaceful protest being held by other faunus. That was a big clue as to the organization’s current character, particularly in the Vale branch.

Blake also left the White Fang entirely. She didn’t leave Adam specifically, or even just the Vale branch. She could have gone to join the Atlesian branch… y’know, the ones likely responsible for murdering members and friends of Weiss’ family. She could have gone back to the Mistralian branch from which the whole White Fang likely sprung, but she didn’t do that either. She just broke clean away from her very identity as a faunus in order to become a huntress separated from the White Fang, even though she’d been part of it her whole life. She couldn’t even stomach going back home to her parents, that’s how bad the White Fang had gotten for her.

We also saw the White Fang turn their back on their principles to work together with Torchwick, a wanted human felon who verbally abused them with every second word. This moral compromise became even worse when we finally saw what heinous thing they planned to do with all of that stolen Dust and equipment.

Oh, I think we saw plenty to establish the character of Vale’s White Fang. Including the willingness to overlook (if not condone) the murder of one of their own members who simply tried to leave.

As for the Valish faunus who didn’t belong to the White Fang, we know that some of them were unhappy enough with matters in Vale to stage a protest at the start of the show… and that one semester later, some others (and not necessarily a different crowd) joined the increasingly radicalized White Fang.

However, I like to think the new Valish recruits were not actually told that the plan involved letting the Grimm devour their own home. Because that’s just dumb.

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Not enough data.

Vale’s authorities and hunters aren’t in the best shape to crack down on the local White Fang. The loss of Beacon is demoralizing at least, and that’s assuming none of the professors died. The border defenses kept the parade of Grand Goliaths and most of the accompanying Grimm army away from the kingdom, but at the cost of how many lives? Whatever strength Vale has left over needs to be spent cleaning up the last of the intruding Grimm, protecting the borders from new Grimm, and trying to take back Beacon.

The local faunus may be stuck in an awkward place; those who might have supported the White Fang before might be aghast at using the Grimm as a weapon to murder the entire kingdom, human and faunus alike. But the humans of Vale might be turning against all faunus and thus leaving many faunus with few other options besides banding together with the White Fang.

Those Vale faunus who joined the White Fang before the catastrophe might have wanted to leave, but could they really expect to be forgiven by the other faunus, let alone the humans?

The pressure from all sides is made worse by the total shut-down of outgoing aerial traffic for any purpose but sending foreigners back home. Some foreign agents of the White Fang (the ones most likely to be “in” on the plan to murder Vale) could take off the masks and make a legal flight out, and Adam Taurus can use special resources available only to the higher ups, but everyone else is left stuck in the kingdom they betrayed.

One way or the other, Vale is a big mess, right now.

All of that probably seems like a major victory to Adam, but we’ll have to wait to see how much of the White Fang agrees with him.

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I think the FNDM tends to view Vale as the "vanilla" kingdom; the most boring one, with the least amount of character.

Some of it has to do with Vale's biome. I believe more of the FNDM live in temperate climates than in tundras like Solitas or deserts like Western Sanus. Likewise, part of it has to do with the fact that we spent the first three Volumes of the story in Vale. Familiarity breeds contempt.

More of it has to do with the fact that we've learned the least about Vale's history compared to the other three Great Kingdoms, and an absence of evidence seems like evidence of absence.

But part of it definitely stems from the standards set by the Vytal Accords, given that the Last King of Vale set those standards and apparently made sure that Vale obeyed them. At least, as much as he could, considering that he'd given up the authority of his crown to establish a democratic republic as the new form of government.

All four of the Great Kingdoms are likewise supposed to have such federal governments, which treat faunus the same as humans, and also hunting academies, which do not groom their students to become warriors for their kingdoms but rather protectors of humanity at large.

But while Vacuo destroyed their federal government, Mistral [continued to treat faunus horribly], and Atlas [began to indoctrinate its students to become specialists in the Atlesian armed forces], Vale alone has held to all the standards set down in the Accords.

Which is not to say that faunus in Vale face no discrimination or unfair hardship; the Last King could only do so much to change his people’s minds. The only kingdom to wholly embrace that part of the Accords was Vacuo, which was already doing it even before signing an agreement. Even in betraying the spirit of the standards, Vale merely reinforces its image of "the average kingdom" by becoming a middle ground between Vacuo's egalitarianism and Mistral's bigotry.

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As of the end of Volume 4, we might paradoxically understand less about the history of the Kingdom of Vale than any of the other Great Kingdoms. Aside from joining the forces against Ancient Vacuo, and its actions during the Great War, what else do we really know about Ancient or Classical Vale?

The shallow coastal waters to the west and the mountains to the south and east do much to curb the arrival of Grimm, but as in the modern day, Grimm circle around the mountains to approach from the north, through the Forever Fall Forest. The classical kingdom of Vale had the ability to construct and defend a massive, far-spanning wall to deal with that problem.

The ancient kingdom of Vale did not. Therefore, any Grimm who emerged from Forever Fall could freely stalk the lands of Vale, greatly curbing the growth of its population and driving the survivors to stick to their existing settlements. This prevented people from clearing forests, which gave Grimm further places to hide and presented yet more barriers between human settlements.

Rather than a single, united kingdom filling the entirety of the land, the peoples of Vale would have formed their own separate city-states and cultures. People even built homes in the Emerald Forest, either because being on the wrong side of Beacon’s protective plateau seemed no more dangerous than the right side in those days, or because they were exiled from the lands of Vale.

Before bridges and air-ships, the truly massive river cutting Vale in half certainly would have isolated the northern lands from the southern, allowing two separate kingdoms to emerge and quarrel. Further, without the concerted effort of a Great Kingdom to prevent Grimm from entering the river from the ocean, monsters prowling the waters could make that dividing barrier even more daunting.

It’s possible that, like Mistral, the Great Kingdom of Vale began as single city-state which grew powerful enough to begin conquering its neighbors, becoming an empire that united all settlements within the land by force.

Or perhaps Ozpin’s predecessors lived in Vale even that long ago, acquiring positions of power and authority to guide the people in making wise and compassionate decisions. Certainly, this seems the case with the Last King of Vale.

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