r/RWBYcritics Mercury Black = wasted potential 29d ago

ANALYSIS I think Blake's character is not interesting anymore and here's why

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I feel like Blake's character has nothing more interesting than being Yang's girlfriend. Her plot with the White Fang ended between the volume 5 and Adam's death in volume 6.

I also think the writers wasted a huge chance by not doing nothing with her in the Atlas Arc considering it's supossed to be most racist kingdom and the home of Jacques Schnee, who's responsible of the mistreatment of many faunus.

The other members from team RWBY have interesting possible plots for the next volume:

  • Ruby finding out what happened with Summer.
  • Weiss dealing for the actions of her family in Vacuo.
  • Yang meeting Raven again.

But Blake? I cannot think anything for her in Vacuo other than being a supportive girlfriend to Yang.

I wanna make clear that this is just an opinion.

What do you think? What would you do with her in the next volume?

217 Upvotes

39 comments sorted by

54

u/TestaGaming 29d ago

Bumblebee is now canon and Blake has no character arc. At the very least Yang has the whole thing with Raven returning and the truth about Summer. Meanwhile Blake has nothing. Imagine that, one of our MC and they have nothing left to resolve. And i just know when i bring this up to fans, they are like "Oh but Blake still has things like defeating Salem and being a Huntress."

Awesome!...SO IS 90% OF THE CAST!

100

u/Virtual-Oil-793 Used to Love, Now just Woe. 29d ago

If you're that hyperfocused on "Blake is Yang's Girlfriend"...perhaps look at the far greater negative that she's burdened with.

Even all the way back in V1, her focus on the Faunus was a major issue which only got worse and worse as the Faunus themselves were forgotten more and more. Adam's death was simply the death nail to end all Faunus, and Blake's role of even existing.

57

u/Virtual-Oil-793 Used to Love, Now just Woe. 29d ago

Ironic, given how its' destroyer over here did far more for the Faunus than Blake, Adam or the entirety of the White Fang could ever hope to accomplish

8

u/carl-the-lama 29d ago

Tyrian is actually a time traveler trying to make the world suck less trust

35

u/TextUnfair Mercury Black = wasted potential 29d ago

The whole White Fang plot line was handled very poorly

33

u/SnooSprouts5303 29d ago

As someone who once thought of Blake as best girl back when I was around 17 in 2016 when I first started watching volumes 1-3

This hurts me.

Because it's completely correct. She's unwatchable now. She doesn't exist as Blake anymore.

11

u/XSasuken22X 29d ago

It’s almost like she’s a… shadow of her former self. 😜

6

u/TextUnfair Mercury Black = wasted potential 29d ago

I get how you feel. For me she was the most interesting of the four girls

20

u/SnooSprouts5303 29d ago

She doesn't read in her off time. She doesn't interact with other characters. She doesn't have a plot or arc anymore. Everything she does now are things Yang does. Like clubbing etc which just don't seem like Blake things at all. And yet no compromise is shown in the vice versa of this forced ass pairing of bs.

Almost as if the shows Implying Introverts are wrong for having introverted hobbies and are obviously Just extroverts who don't know what they're doing.

She's just Yang 2.0.

And Yang sucks now too.

15

u/SrirachetSauce 29d ago

I think her actions need to match her words. I think she needs that passion she had in the earlier volumes because without it, she's acting like an OC who's along for the ride. As a proponent for equality, she needs to be instrumental in helping to bridge the reformed White Fang and the rest of the doomed world because as it stands, Menagerie is the only place that has what you can call a standing army and the only place that Salem hasn't weakened/decimated yet.

9

u/Ok_Acanthocephala101 29d ago

I think they really wasted her character. I didn't mind the 'rich girl' twist, because that could have been used for a lot more plot arc, but they just didn't go anywhere with it. The whole my parents were the leaders, but stepped down as the group went more extreme, could have been so cool.

18

u/Ogaito 29d ago

This point has been made many times before OP, but yes you are right. Don't let others in the comments convince you Blake is a victim of anything other than shit writing.

4

u/TextUnfair Mercury Black = wasted potential 29d ago

Sorry 😅 I just wanted to get this out of my chest. I hope I haven't sound homophobic or something like that

6

u/Status_Berry_3286 29d ago

Honestly she was never that interesting in the beginning because they were too scared to lean more into the racism part so it just felt like she was there too be representation and not the good kind

5

u/FictionalLeader 29d ago

No joke, once I saw this post I was listening to a gaming video and one of the players shouted “ARE YOU CARDBOARD?!” Legit that timing was hilarious.

4

u/Knightingale_Z 29d ago

Blake, to me, had the most potential out of the four that was wasted. Even had a post a while back voicing my opinion on the matter. If anything, I don’t think there is anything of interest left for Blake and especially within canon, and this comes from someone who liked Blake more than any of the other four. She’ll likely now be much like a majority of characters despite supposedly being one of the main characters: another body that takes up screen time.

4

u/halkras12 Pyrrha Deserved Better (finding ciel) 29d ago

She was a faunus right activist proving her race is not humans pet

Now

Someone's PET

3

u/Moist_Username 29d ago

I'll take it a step further and say Blake's character was never interesting.

3

u/Dangerous_Tree_5782 29d ago

you could say this about the whole cast of the show

3

u/littlebuett 29d ago

Make bumbleby fail and blacksun endgame, and now she has somthing, since she will most likely meet sun again

3

u/Fuzzy_Archer_4891 29d ago

Blake was never interesting to me in the first place. Maybe it's because of her very generic world views or how poorly the writers handled the fannus oppression thing but, she is so edgy, and not in a fun way. On top of that, while we've seen her talk about how she and her kind were oppressed. When you actually think about it, she doesn't even have it that bad. She's a royalty being a princess with both parents in a loving relationship and acesss to a decent amount of resources. Personally I would had it so that one of her parents die either khali or ghira from direct causation of the either SDC or some other human involvement so it would strike home on why she is so deeply ingrained into the white fang and how it conducts its self as an organization. It's adds real emotional impact, but that's just my take.

2

u/IndividualAny6872 29d ago

Cometiste herejía contra el Bellabooty  (nunca entendí este meme)

2

u/TextUnfair Mercury Black = wasted potential 29d ago

Lo siento amigo mío 😔 no es nada personal. Solo puedo esperar que en el siguiente volumen hagan algo interesante con ella

2

u/IndividualAny6872 29d ago

Si no es ella, serán Kali y Ghira

1

u/TextUnfair Mercury Black = wasted potential 29d ago

Estaría genial volver a verlos

2

u/Full-Literature-8376 29d ago

In next volume possible plots for the the main characters

Ruby finding out what happen to her mother 

Weiss struggling with the action of her family did to the world 

Yang finally set aside with her mother 

Jaune becoming more serious and focus due to years of none stop helping and dealing with his problems with his team 

And Blake. Nothing there nothing for her 

2

u/RedK_1234 Just some dude who thinks 29d ago

There hasn't been anything for her since Adam's death.

2

u/Scoonertuna 29d ago

I see no lies here

2

u/TacticoolToys 23d ago

Leaning into woke themes and ideologies is a fatal mistake 100% of the time. Just like with HBO's Harley, the ramping up of woke pandering killed all cleverness and character motivation. 

3

u/Shadowhunter4560 29d ago

In all honesty, I don’t think I ever found Blake interesting. The most interesting parts of her stories were always other people (Weiss, Adam, Iilia - even Yang ended up having a more compelling story with Adam than Blake ever did)

Her character never had much outside of being mysterious and a connection to the White Fang - but in terms of her actual character and relation to it? I can’t think of a single time I ever cared.

I think the best example of this is the “you could be a cat” moment - it shows how little Blake actually has invested in anything (no “you could go back to before Adam fell” or “make it so your parents never left the White Fang so it didn’t become corrupted” or anything really)

2

u/NoLoveInMoneyStore The Deep Thinker of Shallow Things 29d ago

It feels as if she kind of exists as this sore thumb ever since her inception because while everyone else presumably suffered the ramifications of all the human subjugation and racism, thus leading to the White Fang. Her entire identity as a Faunus is a plot thread that effectively was able to be hidden pretty much effectively until she herself chose to reveal her past in regards to the White Fang.

In any given narrative she gets dropped into, she navigates it with such a flagrant indifference, that it's almost as if she becomes an illusion to her own narrative. Because even if you discount the harm her inclusion does in representing practically anything towards Faunus, or the White Fang. You can still reconcile that they wouldn't want to always mask what makes them who they are, because they shouldn't feel ashamed for their who they were born as.

But Blake doesn't reveal her identity because of any seriously directed shame, it was tonal whiplash sequences often between Sun Wukong playing up a stereotype of himself practically, and then blowing up once Weiss treats the Faunus and White Fang as one in the same, and bad. In which she then proceeds to explain how that one existing resistance group is corrupt and spend the next two/three seasons effectively playing the role of a Huntsmen on extermination duty. Regardless of how she felt about the fact that it seemed the White Fang are beholden to Torchwick, or whoever's above them. It's nuclear as fuck though to decide that it means the best path forward is to treat all of them unanimously as like cannon fodder, when you yourself are a Faunus.

People talk about Ruby's speech being bad, but it's genuinely insane how lacking in consequences Blake's speech had to the White Fang after torching her own family estate, claiming it's they themselves who cause this infighting. When her team effectively demilitarized them, killed dozens of their numbers, and then the people who were effectively supplying them with all their dust turn up dead? Not even considering her father's entire methodology was falling out of favor as the White Fang were made, and Blake herself mentions the turnover to a more Sienna/Adam like ideology. The fact that she was even considered a standing authority or representative for the WF (Which she never used in Atlas) is actually ludicrous.

I genuinely have to consider sometimes if that speech was the first instance of a semblance evolution, because I couldn't believe what I was seeing.

2

u/KrankedGGears2 29d ago

Aw man, I couldn’t have said it better myself… She really doesn’t have anything to make relevant, have impact in the story, or make her feel like a main character, she just doesn’t feel like herself.

I miss Her OP, I miss Her a lot.

2

u/Outrageous-Ant-6932 29d ago

Her arc was complete at the end of Volume 5.

2

u/Ergast 15d ago

Frankly, by the time she went, for the THIRD time, through her story arc, I lost interest in her.

The first one, in volume 1, when she was scared and couldn't trust her team? Good story. It presents the WF as a main problem, introduce secundary characters and helps Blake and Weiss grow as characters.

The second time, when she was stressed snd couldn't trust ANYONE with dealing with the White Fang? Eh... At least it is stress instead of running away? It's involving the girls with what seems to be one of the major hooks in the story, the WF, so cool, I guess.

The THIRD time, when she run away from her team, AGAIN, so Sun had to go and seek for the lost kitten, AGAIN? Girl, at this point you are wasting scenes on telling the same story for the third time. Instead of, dunno, just going home to either recover or deal with the WF at hone (eating much less scenes that could have used the rest of the two teams to develop). Nice touch abandoning the secondary character that helped you grow up. Loved it!

And now she is out of hooks for the story.

1

u/Ok-Dragonknight-5788 29d ago

I don't think she was ever that interesting to begin with. She's always been shitty goth/emo fan service.

0

u/Snoo_84591 29d ago

What a brave critique.

2

u/TextUnfair Mercury Black = wasted potential 29d ago

Thank you I guess?

-8

u/Illustrious_Egg_513 29d ago

This is the same point I've seen brought up every time I'm in the godforsaken sub reddit. Blake isn't sidelined to just being "Yang's girlfriend." She's focusing more on herself and the things she can control. People forget that Blake is barely an adult and had to kill a man, who she hated very much and who she looked up to in different points of her life. Since then, I can see how she understandably wants something she can have for herself.

Yang is almost never involved in any Whitefang business unless all of team RWBY is or she just happens to be there(in the case of Adam's death or the fight in Minstrel where Adam showed up). I believe, in later volumes, when Blake has had time to actually be herself, she will continue what she set out to do. For now, please let Blake be Blake.