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kienava · 1 year

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So someone asked me to make a post about Blake’s development so far in order to discuss the question of where Blake’s character can progress at this point in RWBY given that her arc with Adam wrapped up in V6 and she didn’t really carry a plot line in V7-8. I do media and story things for a living, but I’m also an intimate partner abuse survivor - needless to say, Blake’s story is important to me. Hopefully my perspective helps answer concerns about Blake’s story being “over,” because I think it’s very much the opposite.

(Continued below the cut because this turned into an entire essay.)

I want to preface this by saying I understand why it might be difficult to picture what Blake’s story looks like going forward. I largely credit this to the relative dearth of compassionate, healing-oriented narratives about abuse survivors in media. A lot of what we see is either revenge fantasies or stories about facing the abuser and arriving at a point of ultimate catharsis. In some sense, this is a broader fault in the standards of western storytelling, which is oriented around that singular, climactic catharsis, but that’s another essay. In truth, a mostly linear progression towards a pivotal point of recovery isn’t how healing from abuse works. It’s a messy process, and life is rarely as linear as in fiction. I think RWBY incorporates that nonlinearity into Blake’s arc very well.

Speaking of Blake’s arc, let’s look at that.

When we first meet her in volume 1, she’s introduced as an aloof, independent loner who’s very resistant to getting closer to people. Most of her classmates perceive her as mysterious and alluring at best, callous and cold at worst. Once we start to understand more of her history, it’s easier to see her attitude as the defense mechanism it is. She wants to keep people at arm’s length because she doesn’t trust them not to hurt her – but she also believes that she will harm people she gets close to just because of who she is. That whole Beauty and the Beast dichotomy, you know? Adam told her that she ruins things. It doesn’t help that he groomed her into a terrorist organization and thus her surrounding community has also labeled her a threat. She’s got a few overlapping layers of distorted thinking to work through when it comes to her image of herself and others. The way she perceives people is, at first, overwhelmingly informed by her traumatic experiences with Adam and the White Fang.

It’s pretty strongly implied that Blake bent the rules in the forest and intentionally selected Yang as her partner. When we first see Blake dashing around in the shadows, Yang is taking down a Grimm while sassing it to death. Blake talks later about how Adam’s charisma drew her to him initially, so it’s no surprise that when she was choosing her next partner, she gravitated to the same superficial qualities. During the first White Fang arc, after her self-destructive spiral, Blake starts to genuinely trust her teammates for the first time. That trust is tested when Yang fights Mercury. In this moment, Blake is confronted with the possibility that a pattern might be repeating itself: what if she was drawn to Yang for reasons beyond the superficial? What if Yang doesn’t just share Adam’s positive qualities, but his negative ones, too? The impulsiveness, the violence, the abuse – but Blake stops herself. She chooses to trust that Yang isn’t Adam, and she says as much. She’s accepting that Adam is in her past and electing to move forward. How perfectly, neatly linear.

Then the end of volume 3 happens.

For an abuse survivor, the idea that an abuser you’ve gotten away from might come crashing back into your life is possibly the scariest thing in the entire world. This is exactly what happens when Adam shows up, and Blake’s worst fears come true. He makes a point of hurting someone she cares about simply because he can to prove that he still has power over her. Blake runs because she thinks the only way she can protect the people she cares about is to be away from them. That paradoxical duality of (1) fearing harm will be done to her by others and (2) doing harm to others herself rears its head.

One specific question I was asked is why Blake talks about Yang so little in volumes 4 and 5. If Blake isn’t talking about the people she left behind, is she even thinking about them? I say, well of course she is. It’s coloring her entire attitude.

When Blake returns to Menagerie, she’s back in the place where she met her abuser. She’s at her parents’ house, a place that has been a symbol of everything she left behind when she ran away the first time. Now she’s run from another home. Menagerie is riddled with traumatic memories for her, both interpersonally and on a structural, systemic level. Everywhere she goes could be a place where Adam said something awful to her, made her obey him in some way, asserted control. She also has to confront him in person again, too.

With Adam around, of course she’s not going to risk mentioning Yang. He got one inkling that Blake cared about someone else and cut their fucking arm off. The one time Blake mentions Yang by name, her voice cracks so obviously it’s like she’s forcing herself to get the word out. Through both of these volumes, Blake has other external goals, but she’s still trying to protect someone she cares about. At this point, she’s constantly struggling with two motivations: hope and fear. She wants to make the world a better place, but she’s terrified of what she’ll have to confront in order to do it because of what she’s already lost. Her choice to reunite with her team and fight shows that ultimately hope wins out.

In Volume 6, Blake and Yang facing Adam is essentially the B plot of the whole volume. He appears in flashes before the major confrontation at the end, but the damage he’s done to both of them is intrinsically tied into Blake and Yang’s relationship throughout.

The end of this volume offers the climactic moment of confronting and overcoming the abuser. Afterwards, Blake collapses and cries. Catharsis! Yay! We’re done now, right? This may be why, to some people, defeating Adam is the obvious “end” of Blake’s character arc. Again, I’d argue that this perception comes from how abuse is often depicted in media, but there’s also a very intense pressure in the real world for survivors not to speak out and share their stories. Even people who are abuse survivors might not publicly claim that label for a multitude of reasons. Namely, it fucking hurts to think about it, and also sometimes people are real weird about it. I don’t blame anyone who doesn’t want to carry that weight around all the time. We can see some inklings of Blake dealing with this challenge over the course of the show, though they’re subtle. Early on, she explicitly avoids talking about Adam until she absolutely has to, and even when she does start to unpack what he did, she often talks about it with visible shame (averting her eyes, etc). Unfortunately, shame is a very common sentiment for abuse survivors to carry, and addressing it is a major part of Blake’s journey as she starts to heal in volume 6.

Another point of interest posed was to look at Blake’s role in volumes 7 and 8. There’s an argument that she doesn’t really do anything or that her role is as a somewhat generic support figure within the group. I wholeheartedly disagree.

While Blake doesn’t carry a plotline herself during the Atlas arc, she and Yang embody polarized attitudes towards the global conflict the group is facing, and that contrast serves the larger narrative very well. Because she was raised by activists in a context where she was constantly thinking about civil rights, Blake wants to address the broader ideological conflict at play. Yang, whose childhood consisted of raising her younger sister, wants to help people in a practical, immediate way. Blake is an abstract, big-picture thinker, and Yang is more focused on what’s right in front of her. This isn’t a dig at either of them; it’s just a difference in prioritites. At first, Yang worries that these differing priorities will be a source of tension between them, but when she and Blake talk things through they’re able to understand each other without judgment. Blake is learning to reconnect with the idealist she used to be in her early youth, someone who fought for a cause purely because she wanted to make the world a better place. She’s able to embrace that side of herself around Yang even though they have different priorities, and they’re still able to support each other’s goals.

Furthermore, on a purely interpersonal level in V7-8, Blake has interactions with other characters that speak specifically to the healing journey she’s been on. Yes, these are significantly quieter moments than a fight to the death on a bridge over a waterfall, but that doesn’t mean they should be written off. Quiet and peace are part of healing, and that doesn’t have to undermine the story’s integrity. Dramatic tension is still possible amidst this, as we saw in Blake’s talks with Yang where they discuss their team’s split strategic approaches. When Blake talks to Nora about the importance of not losing yourself in someone else, that’s her speaking from experience. She’s lost herself in a relationship before, and she knows how hard it is to come back from that, but she survived. She healed. The asserted importance of self-compassion in relationships has a unique gravity coming from Blake. She has a strongly developed ability to balance interpersonal empathy with community- and global-level stakes, which we’re already seeing glimmers of at the beginning of V9 as she steps up to come up with a plan on the island.

In summary, Blake’s arc isn’t just about that final showdown with Adam. She faces her abuser, runs away, faces him again, and again, finally evicts him from her life for good - and after that, her story continues.

She goes on to find ways to heal from her past. That process involves renewing compassion for her loved ones, her community, and the world as a whole; learning how to love without fear; and reconnecting with who she was before she was forced to become aloof and detached to protect herself. Although the circumstances of abuse convinced her that she was a coward, she is, and has always been, an incredibly brave character. She’s finally recognizing that at the current point in the story. Ultimately, I think this is the thing connects her to Yang and the rest of team RWBY so strongly: they’re brave enough to love and have hope even when forces of adversity tell them they shouldn’t dare to. Blake is a courageous idealist with a heart full of compassion, and ultimately not even Adam could destroy that about her.

My serious answer to the question of where Blake’s character will go now is that I think she’ll be a sort of de facto leader on the island as Ruby spirals into existential depression. Hopefully that arc resolves in a way that’s consistent with the show’s overall message about hope winning out, and past this volume Blake will still carry that optimistic but grounded revolutionary spirit and continue to be a center of compassion and hope.

My catharsis-oriented answer is this: aside from being trapped on a magical fairy tale island, Blake is free for the first time in a very long time, and she can go wherever the fuck she wants.

#it's time for KIE'S OPINION #blake belladonna #rwby v9 #rwby spoilers #cw: abuse #tw: abuse mention #i have a lot of thoughts about blake. if you couldn't tell.#i went full english lit minor #anyway if anyone starts clowning on this post i will not hesitate to block your ass

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stxr-slut · 1 month

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Was thinking about who out of the pogues has the biggest dick and all of a sudden I just went "kie, its 100% kiara." Cos like u can't tell me she wouldn't.

I'm a firm believer of kie being either les or bi (leaning towards les cos like it just fits !!) So u can't tell me she doesn't have at least one dildo..

So yeah, out of all the pogues, kie has the biggest dick, and I'll stand by that.

#kiara carrera #kie #kiara #john b #john b routledge #pope #pope heyward #pope obx #jj #jj maybank #jj obx #obx #outer banks #obx thoughts #cassies thoughts !! ☆▪︎☆

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prophecysgirl · 9 months

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like, i love you dude! JIARA WEEK: shipping story

#jiaraedit #obxedit #jjmaybankedit #kiaracarreraedit #jiara #jj x kiara #outerbanks #obx #jiaraweek2023 #**#*#like i love you dude is seared into my brain #i just thought it was a perfect love confession for kie #she's so steadfast in her beliefs so its like yes i love you and i care about you!! let me!!

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myinfluencerboyfriend · 16 days

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IF I WAS A ZOMBIE, I'D NEVER EAT UR BRAIN!

I'D JUST WANT UR HEART! <3

taglist (PLEASE ASK TO BE ADDED OR REMOVED! i cannot look at your ass and read your mind! <3)

@horromcom @mouseship @wisp-herr @roseyjustice @fle4floves

@jocelynships @gible-love-nibles @vampiiric @kaibaspuppy @sparky3tears

@qilinkisser

#zombie au (?) idk if this is canon to the ship or not i just thought it would be fun and cool #any way. my silly boyfriend i love him a LOT!!!!!#kie's art #selfship #self ship #selfshipping #self shipper #selfshipper #self insert #s/i #self insert art #s/i art #bipoc selfship #latine selfship #autistic selfship #s/i: 🧪💜#r: i need a doctor!

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dedtoot · 3 months

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#space channel 5 #thought that this meme was them so #lame edits time weeee #(actually originally i wanted to put in roo and kie there instead of ulala but then it wasn't as funny to me so yeah)#and sc5 vr plot or somethingidfk #my doodle

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petorahs · 3 months

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what are your headcanons about Juliana and Florian?

oughhghghg where to begin

Both

-Juliana (Jules for short) and Florian (Flori, Flor, etc) are twins! Juliana is the older one. This is inspired by the fact that... they look so similar in their official art! All the recent protags all do but these two take the cake. It's so funny to me. -they look so similar in fact, that they could be body doubles! but that's totally wrong and unethical they'd never... right? -I like the HC that they're both from Galar (their mom having Skwovet and using a British term early-game, the Galarian pokemon stickers in their room, etc). They're both Paldeans, but were raised there before moving back to their hometown with mom.

-Fun thing about Scarlet/Violet is that they're such huge games that it's totally justifiable to have dual protags doing different things. Because of this, I decided to have Juliana handle the 'battle-heavy' routes like Victory Road while Florian, who is more research-focused (and has main character syndrome) features more in The Hidden Treasure arc. -I can't decide on who really does Starfall Street yet, but I'd like for Path of Legends to be the both of them helping Arven since it's the most plot-heavy and has to do with endgame. -Don't ask how but both Koraidon and Miraidon exist at the same time and the twins are their trainers. -In my recent art of them, you'll notice Juliana and Florian's eyes get all blue/crystal-like! this is an effect of their time in Area Zero/being exposed to that much Terastal energy. just them though, no one else...

Florian

-additionally, Flo's hair turns from a purply-brown to pink post-game because he's named "Haruto" in Jp, meaning spring. this carries over across all languages! I wanted to evoke a sense of a blossom coming to life over the course of his journey.

-hates battling because his sister will always be better at it than him, so he vastly prefers pokemon catching instead. (Galar's League-focus/prominence made him sickkkk. he was glad to move) -helped Jacq complete the Paldean, Kitakami and BB pokedex because of that. they're tight, the both of them. -his smile never reaches his eyes, early-game. -he is not naturally kind, nor does he see himself as the 'hero' of the story (that was always Juliana, not him), but he fakes being a main character to make people think he's just as good (this is also a byproduct of Galar's culture tbh) -that's why he seems like the more extroverted of the two, but really, he's just as quiet as her behind doors. -tbh even the fact that he has one beauty mark under his eye instead of two like his twin sis bothers him... blud thinks he'll never be enough! -Koraidon's trainer

-after meeting Kieran, Florian tried to be kind from a genuine want instead of to impress people. he wanted to be the 'hero of the story' that Kieran saw him as... and not because he needed to be out of his sister's shadow. Kieran made him want to try. -like the only way I see him winning during BB League wasn't because he was the main character who always wins, but because winning was the only way he could be friends with Kieran again. -his arc will conclude when he learns to be kind and do things out of selflessness :) which is why he takes a Tera Blast during the Indigo Disk's climax, the ultimate act of selflessness. help. sorry man it was for character development...

Juliana

-The actual main hero of the story. Really insanely strong in battles. like just straight up a beast -Juliana's names mean "youth", so she stays the same, forever a young battle prodigy Florian tries to match (but can't...). Also, youth to me can mean the future, which is why she's the Miraidon trainer! -Another reason why she's Miraidon trainer is because she can't express herself how she wants... she can't emote easily and speaks monotonously, like a robot. -Her arc would conclude when she learns that the people worth keeping in life are the ones that get her even when she doesn't feel "normal" :]]] true treasures. -big eater -read once that having beauty marks under your eyes means you'll have "trouble in love" and tried to scrub hers off... really envies Florian for having just one and thinks Flo's some kind of romance genius. goes to him for love advice one day and it freaks him out (he's having just a complicated time as any teen!!!)

-Heavily inspired by Pokemon Special's take on her. like look at her she's so cool.

#if you couldnt tell uhmm. im shamelessly a juli/nemo truther and flori/kie ambassador. like theyre the endgame ships to me #but i like multiship for juliana too :]#anyways #aishi.docx #ans #anon #TYYY FOR ASKING ABOUT THEM and if any of you read this longass...thing... thank you so much. i just needed a place to put my thoughts tbh #more asks always welcome <333 i love. scarvio.#and their protags <333 it took a while but i def warmed up to them 100%#pkmn

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awwkie · 14 days

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I'm trying to make some MCR stuff and I would rly like to know the community's favourite lines/quotes/lyrics!! If you have the time please leave yours in the tags, comments or send me an ask : ) I'm mostly looking for song lyrics or slogans like "art is the weapon", but iconic quotes from the members work as well!! TY :D

#mcr #my chemical romance #kie types #this is either getting 2 notes or blowing up my notifications. No inbetween LOL #i thought about making a google form but. this is not THAT serious

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lydiaas · 1 year

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No why did they have to say the scene of the boat was weird I don't think they think it at all it's just being back in the OBX and what her parents said to him made him do this JJ no just kiss her

Oh god you've done it now, you've got me writing an essay about the word "weird". That whole scene is insanely good, maybe the best written jiara scene in the season imo, and I'm still processing it because there is so many layers there. I think I could analyse the jiara scenes in episode 4 until the next season comes out and not run out of material to talk about.

I totally get why JJ used the word weird and don't take it negatively at all. JJ does not know how to talk about his feelings so this is very on brand for him. I talk about how layered this entire scene is and there is so much alone in him choosing to say "it was weird". On one side, you've got the fact that he has had a crush on Kie for years but never considered she would return his feelings so he's somehow trying to process that they almost crossed over into something he never though possible before. Kie is throwing herself into his arms, looking at him like he hung the moon and almost kissing him? That is absolutely weird (and if you look at the fishing scene when he catches her checking him out you can see on his face how he's trying to process what the fuck he just saw) But then on the second side of it, he has that conversation with Pope hanging over his head which tells him that pursuing anything with Kiara is a bad idea and a betrayal to their friendship. You've also got the fact that he's been ripped out of what he thought was an island paradise and dumped back in the Cut where the differences between he and Kie's circumstances becomes blinding. So I think part of him uses the word weird here to put some distance between them again. He throws that out there BUT (and this is the best part of that moment for me) Kie doesn't just let it stand. She counters with "not bad weird" (so BOLD of her) and of course he agrees and falls back into that moment with her because it's not bad it was just new and scary (and the attraction and chemistry is constantly pulling them together).

AND THEN TO MAKE THIS SCENE EVEN BETTER it parallels directly with Kie calling her relationship with Pope weird (derogatory) in S2. So her saying "not bad weird" in this scene acknowledges that everything is different with JJ. In that scene where she breaks things off with pope she says "I just wanted things to go back to the way that they were" but she never wants that with JJ. She keeps trying to have the conversation because she knows the connection they had is something more that a fleeting crush and that it is worth the risk. Only when he turns her down and act out does she actually back off.

Anywhooo....those are just some very casual normal thoughts about a 30 seconds of dialogue.

#obx spoilers #jj x kie #jiara #is anyone else plagued by these thoughts or is it just me? lol #ask #asks

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