#...grey teases her about the food thing but doesn't actually reveal it to anyone.

[lconoclasts]

is agent black a gym rat. Where has she been working out for hundreds of years. He barren ass apartment. I would say greys living quarters but does she actually go anywhere. I think she walks everywhere. She counts her steps

#text that should be about royal #This is completely headcanon bait #Like I have a really hard time imagining her going places #Actually yeah a gym would be very fucking loud... #As established her home is barren... But I think having workout equipment no top sheet no bedframe is good #She drinks black coffee. As we all know. She absolutely takes like a fuck ton of supplements. As we know. #I think she eats certain foods before she works out but hides it from other people because she doesn't want to talk about it #Like I can't imagine her as a coworker I just see her as a spectre #...grey teases her about the food thing but doesn't actually reveal it to anyone. #What does she eat actually. Does she cook? She can. She definitely can. I just imagine her with so much anhedonia #No.... She has a favorite meal............. It's a secret tho. It's the one luxury she allows herself. #Is this angst. Agent black breakfast angst. #I gotta go take out the recycling

[invested-in-your-future]

Did you want Raven's backstory and background to be more complex and morally grey? I personally was expecting the revelation about why she left Yang to shift the audience's feelings from negative to more ambiguous.

Raven was built up as an absolute mystery box of sorts. Appearing in a middle of WF operation, coming out of a strange portal wearing a strange mask and schooling one of strongest characters in the show to date. On top of that she is tied to the show's biggest mystery (Summer's fate).

Every bit of the info we learn about her in the first three volumes positions her as someone who holds an answer to a lot of questions about what is going on. What is Ozpin up to? What happened to Summer? What does Raven know that makes her not go along with Ozpin? Even when Qrow talks about her in V3 he doesn't completely discount her position merely framing it as a point of view.

She's built up as a huge chance for actual moral ambiguity within the story and for some actual genuine answers of what is going on.

Then the show wastes all of that because it doesn't know what to do with her.

Raven's reveals to this date are some of the most anticlimactic things in the WHOLE show only topped by the awful reveal of how the moon broke.

I didn't expect them to exactly "justify" her leaving, but expecting a character tied up in so many mysteries to be treated as a priority and to be done with respect and depth is only normal.

Giving her a genuinely well thought out reason for going against Ozpin would have done A LOT in making the story more interesting.

I don't necessarily think one would need to justify what she did to Yang (leaving and all), because portraying her as conflicting and ambiguous character would be enough if her story arc is done well. Doing a coherent and interesting story arc about Raven that actually answers a lot of teased questions is extremely important part of the overall narrative upon which a LOT of story threads hinged on. In fact her having interesting and complex motivation for leaving WHILE not having an excuse for it and what it did to Yang's life only would have made her all the more interesting. She should not be excused but she SHOULD be an ambiguous and flawed person.

Personally when trying to redo her story, the first thing I did was write down the overall "offscreen" arc that her character walked till the start of the show - a vague idea of how she and Qrow grew up, how did they get mixed up with Ozpin's crew, what was Raven's worldview back then, how and why did it change enough to work for Ozpin and how and why it all changed enough for her to leave to an outright another continent for years.

In my draft, Raven and Qrow don't quite remember who their real parents were. After a house fire, as toddlers, they were taken by a shady local merchant running a sort-of-orphanage. The said merchant would force the orphans in his care to pickpocket and act as beggars. The siblings spent their childhood fighting for food and survival only really having each other to rely on. Both drew pretty different conclusions from such life as Qrow learned to extremely value friendships and relationships one builds and Raven - the importance of standing up for oneself when you can't rely on anyone else. Both were scarred by the life they led, but Qrow inadvertently found himself more willing to trust people who he thought "deserved it", while Raven found it hard to connect to people at all.

As teenagers, they, fed up with it all, ended up stealing the old merchant's money and, as stowaways in a cargo ship, escaping to Vale, where they, as thieves, eventually were found by Ozpin who offered them a second chance at a better life at Beacon. There both of them would eventually meet Summer and Tai and slowly start working as a team. Eventually, due to silver eyes, Summer ended up at Ozpin's inner circle and so did Qrow and, begrudgingly, Raven. What ended up happening between then and Summer's fate, broke the team apart and shook Raven the most. After all, someone who finds it hard to trust others, would have a far more adverse reaction when that trust is broken. In her eyes, Ozpin's path is just more lies and while, with all the information available to her, she could understand why, she found herself no longer able to trust his judgement, viewing his overall course of action as nothing but a mistake. Instinctively and spontaneously, in the heat of the moment, Raven made the decision to leave, to be somewhere other than in the middle of Ozpin's domain, bound by Ozpin's rules, ideas and (intentional and unintentional) manipulation and before she knew she ended up back in Mistral retracing the steps back to where her and Qrow's paths started, searching for a path she felt comfortable in walking. Qrow on other hand still stuck with Ozpin - while he could understand Raven's point of view, he simply still saw no other way than following Ozpin.

In the end the relationship between siblings right now is "complicated" - they don't agree with each other, but they don't really hate each other and they can see how each of them arrived at their conclusions. The Fall of Beacon felt like a sign to them - for Raven it reaffirmed the path she is walking and for Qrow, it left him with a heavy burden and a sense of desperation, thus leading both to act.

So yeah, both Branwen siblings deserved better arcs and better plot relevance that would have fit their build up.

#rwby #rwde #raven branwen #qrow branwen #obligatory THEY DESERVED BETTER