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itsclydebitches · 3 years

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Um one thing i wanna ask is why do you want penny to stay a robot? She would have been hacked again as it wouldn’t make sense for someone not to try it again... ignoring the pinnochio allusion thing cause of course RWBY shouldn’t follow fairytales like a script, but just thinking about practicality as the problem would just occur again.

Also, people complaining about how its a problem they cured her illness (having the virus)... why would you want her too keep the virus when its literally about to kill her and the cure is right there???? I dunno some of the complaints have me a bit confused and i need clarity on them.

Like, If they didn’t grab the relic for themselves, they would have been hunted by ironwood for penny, she would have been killed for the powers to open the vault etc... if they went to the vault with penny without their plan, she would have died... its all a lose lose for penny to me at least

Questions are genuine and I’m not trying to be rude or anything :)

Happy to explain, anon! :D

I’m going to break this up into three parts: The claim that people are upset about Penny’s virus going away, the idea that she’s in more danger as a robot, and the assumption that she had to be made human to fix this problem.

The first is the easiest to tackle simply because I haven’t seen any of this myself. I don’t know why someone would “want her to keep the virus when it’s literally about to kill her.” My guess would be that there’s been some miscommunication at play. I’m not saying just because I haven’t seen these takes doesn’t mean they don’t exist, but rather that I have seen a lot of critical takes since Saturday and they all boil down to the fans being upset that Penny’s android identity was removed, not that the virus was removed along with it. Of course we’re happy about that additional outcome, we just believe it would have been possible — even easy — to achieve that same outcome without taking a core part of Penny’s identity along with it (more on that below).

Secondly, if one of the main arguments for Penny getting a human body is “It’s less dangerous” then I personally don’t find that persuasive. Yes, it means no one can try to hack her again... but it also means Penny can die all the horrible, messy human deaths that she was previously immune from (within the boundary of how long Pietro can give her aura, anyway). We saw it happen on screen. Penny was able to go from this

to this

purely because she was an android. Penny, due to her synthetic body, was able to be torn apart and then — pretty casually it seems, based on Pietro’s comments — be put back together, given more aura, and booted up with absolutely no downsides. Penny shrugged off death with a smile! No human body can do that. So yes, she’s vulnerable to hacking as an android, but she’s vulnerable to everything else as a human, things like Nora’s scars and Yang’s lost arm, things that android!Penny would have shrugged off. Each body has its benefits and its downsides, with my personal belief being that, from a combat standpoint, a synthetic body has far fewer downsides and far greater benefits. But that opinion aside, objectively I don’t think a human body is intrinsically safer for Penny in the long run, especially not after her biggest moment in the series was coming back from the dead. She can’t do that anymore.

Which then touches on our third topic with the question: Why couldn’t the show have fixed android!Penny in a way that ensures she can never be hacked again? See, we have to remember that RWBY is a constructed, fictional story. Nothing “has” to happen. Or rather, nothing has to happen until the writers impose limitations on the text that the viewer expects them to adhere to. For example, if you impose the implied rules of 1. “Our four main characters will make it to the end of the series” and 2. “A character, without aura, will die from a spear through the gut,” then RWBY has to find a way for Weiss to survive Cinder’s attack (rule #1), but that solution can’t be, “Weiss is just randomly okay after a deadly injury, I guess” (rule #2). Hence, we get the solution of “Jaune unlocks his semblance and heals Weiss for her” and it works! It’s a solution that viewers like because it obeys all the rules, both overt and implied. Meanwhile, the problem with Penny’s solution is two-fold. The first is that it contradicts the entire journey she’s been on of “Android girl learns that she’s real and human just the way she is,” which I’ve already spoken about extensively (there are other posts on that), but the second problem is that the show ignores other possibilities and makes up new rules solely to reach this ending.

Why is Penny made human? Because of Ambrosius’ rules. Why do those rules exist? Because the writers said they do in this episode. It’s not that they introduced these rules episodes or even whole volumes ago, thereby requiring that they adhere to them once Penny’s life is suddenly caught up in them (like with the Jaune example). Rather, the viewer only learned these were limitations while Penny was being fixed. So the writers could have just... not included those. There’s no reason why, in developing Ambrosius’ abilities right then and there, the show couldn’t have made them into something a little different. Have Ruby go, “We want you to magic up an anti-virus program that will heal Penny completely, with no chance of the virus returning. Thus, when you create something new, it doesn’t matter if that program disappears. The virus is already gone!” If the response to that is, “But Clyde, Ambrosius can’t create something he doesn’t understand” that’s a rule that the writers just made up. No one forced them to suddenly impose that limitation. It was a choice. Or even if we have to have it for some reason, you’re telling that the group gets to have the schematics for their escape route — essentially inventing a teleportation system because Whitley looked at airship flight paths for a few minutes — but they can’t have Penny or Pietro draw up an anti-virus program? There’s no reason why these rules couldn’t have been tweaked to cure android!Penny.

There’s also no reason why Ambrosius needed to be involved at all. As just mentioned, Pietro exists and many fans (myself included) thought he would be the solution. Imagine for a moment we had a slightly different version of these events. Penny’s virus is briefly halted by Jaune and, finally given a moment to breathe, she asks where her father is. Last she saw, he was floating in a dead Amity after Cinder’s attack. This reminds Ruby that hey, Pietro made Penny! He’s just as smart as Watts and is far more knowledgeable of her systems. Maybe he can help? So the group heads to Amity and, due to the same techno mumbo jumbo that launched Amity in the first place, or had Klein heal Penny after her crash, Pietro says yes, he can get rid of the virus. Better yet, he can slightly redesign Penny so that she’s made un-hackable in the future, using (again, mumbo jumbo) parts from the now useless Amity. But it will take time. It’s then that the group receives Ironwood’s message and learns that they don’t have time. The reality that Penny will not be cured before the hour time limit necessitates that they come up with a creative way of dealing with Ironwood. Enter Emerald. Her semblance can make it seem like Penny is there, despite her being fixed by her dad miles away. We get an extended fight with Ironwood and, at episode’s end, the new and improved Penny catches up, ready to open the vault for them, this time of her own free will.

Now, obviously I just made this up off the top of my head — far from perfect — but a scenario like this:

Remembers that Pietro exists and lets him/Maria as an assistant do something for the plot

Re-uses Amity now that it’s just a floating pile of junk metal

Creates a scenario where we get to see Penny and Pietro confront the fact that she was created to be a tool (sorry I originally made you so easily hackable/put a self-destruct in your brain)

Maintains all the main story beats like Penny’s near escape, Ironwood’s message, and using Emerald’s semblance

Makes space to tackle other issues like the complaint that Ironwood was taken down too quickly

Achieves the desired result of healing Penny without taking away her android identity

Proves that, because we can easily come up with another solution, the idea that she “had” to become human is inaccurate. There were always other options

Hell, we can even ask why the story bothered with a self-destruct threat in the first place. Seriously, why did Watts do that? I have my own headcanons, but the show never says. This act is the entire BASIS for Penny’s conflict and the show didn’t bother to a) say why he’d do this or b) explain why he’d do this when Salem would presumably like having a Maiden to control. It’s counterintuitive and the show never grapples with that. We have no canonical answer here. More importantly, what else changes if Penny’s self-destruct order is taken out of the narrative? Absolutely nothing. She’s still hacked and struggles to keep Amity afloat, still flies to Ruby, still wakes up and needs to be calmed down by Nora, still tells Whitley her order, still fights the Hound, still tries to escape, still tells Ruby to kill her so she doesn’t open the vault, and Ruby still realizes that opening the vault might be the answer. They could have taken Penny to the door and nullified the virus by letting her do what the virus ordered. Penny is fine now, they snag the Relic, and the group proceeds to save all of Mantle and Atlas. The only thing this self-destruct sequence brings to the narrative is a reason to give Penny a human body. That plot-point was introduced solely as an excuse to give Penny a human body. That never had to happen. It’s not that the writers had a story where, by the rules already in place, they truly had to change Penny to ensure they didn’t lose her, it’s that the writers carefully crafted a story that existed to justify their desire to change Penny. That was always the end goal. They decided they wanted this to happen and that’s the problem here. That they took a character who has spent her entire, fictional existence learning to love herself as she is and crafted a bunch of unpersuasive, needless, and contradictory scenarios specifically to get Penny to a place where they could erase all that.

There’s no version of Penny that exists who truly had to get a human body to survive because Penny is a fictional character. Everything she does and experiences is thought up by our writers. Thus, at some point they thought up the idea to erase her android identity for a completely human one instead — the part a lot of people are upset by — and then made some messy attempts to write a story to justify getting that ending.

#rwby #rwby spoilers #rwby volume 8 #mymetas #Anonymous

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soktaykilic · 7 years

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The alphabet, for instance, is a technology that is absorbed by the very young child in a completely unconscious manner, by osmosis so to speak. Words and meaning of words predispose the child to think and act automatically in certain ways.

Our “Age of Anxiety” is, in great part, the result of trying to do today’s job with yesterday’s tools - with yesterday’s concepts.

Students of media are persistently attacked as evaders, idly concentrating on means or processes rather than on “substance.” The dramatic and rapid changes of “substance” elude these accusers. Survival is not possible if one approaches his environment, the social drama, with a fixed, unchangeable point of view 0 the witless repetitive response to the unperceived.

Too many people know too much about each other.

Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense perceptions. The extension of any one sense alters the way we think and act - the way we perceive the world. When these ratios change, men change.

The eye - it cannot choose but see; we cannot bid the ear be still; our bodies feel, where’er they be, against or with our will.

This feeling is an aspect of the new mass culture we are moving into - a world of total involvement in which everybody is so profoundly involved with everybody else and in which nobody can really imagine what private guilt can be anymore.

Electric circuitry profoundly involves men with one another. Information pours upon us, instantaneously and continuously. As soon as information is acquired, it is very rapidly replaced by still newer information. Our electrically-configured world has forced us to move from the habit of data classification to the mode of pattern recognition. We can no longer build serially, block-by-block, step-by-step, because instant communication insures that all factors of the environment and of experience co-exist in a state of active interplay.

We have now become aware of the possibility of arranging the entire human environment as a work of art, as a teaching machine designed to maximize perception and to make everyday learning a process of discovery. Application of this knowledge would be the equivalent of a thermostat controlling room temperature. It would seem only reasonable to extend such controls to all sensory thresholds of our being. We have no reason to be grateful to those who juggle these thresholds in the name of haphazard innovation.

It isn’t that I don’t like current events. There have just been so many of them lately.

Professionalism is environmental. Amateurism is anti-environmental. Professionalism merges the individual into patterns of total environment. Amateurism seeks the development of the total awareness of the individual and the critical awareness of the groundrules of society. The amateur can afford to lose. The professional tends to classify and specialize, to accept uncritically the groundrules of the environment. The groundrules provided by the mass response of his colleagues serve as a pervasive environment of which he is contentedly unaware. The “expert” is the man who stays put.

The discovery of the alphabet will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves... You give your disciples not truth but only the semblance of truth; they will be heroes of many things, and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing.

We’re visually biased that we call our wisest men visionaries, or seers.

It was the funeral of President Kennedy that most strongly proved the power of television to invest an occasion with the character of corporate participation. It involves an entire population in a ritual process. In television, images are projected at you. You are the screen. The images wrap around you. You are the vanishing point. This creates a sort of inwardness, a sort of reverse perspective which has much in common with Oriental art.

The motion picture industry has provided a window on the world, and the colonized nations have looked through that window and have seen the things of which they have been deprived. It is perhaps not generally realized that a refrigerator can be a revolutionary symbol - to a people who have no refrigerators. A motor can owned by a worker in one country can be a symbol of revolt to a people deprived of even the necessities of life. Hollywood helped to build up the sense of deprivation of man’s birthright, and that sense of deprivation has played a large part in the national revolutions of postwar Asia.

You see, Dad, Professor McLuhan says the environment that man creates becomes his medium for defining his role in it. The invention of type created linear, or sequential, thought, separating thought from action. Now, with TV and folk singing, thought and action are closer and social involvement is greater. We again live in a village. Get it?

Marshall McLuhan, ‎Quentin Fiore, The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects December 17, Phi Phi Islands

#marshall mcluhan #The medium is the message

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silvokrent · 6 years

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Can I pick 5, 12 and sneak another 21 out there? ALL OF THE HEADCANONS! 😁

5. Pyrokinesis all the way! Having the ability to spontaneously generate and manipulate fire would be fucking sweet. As far as limitations go, I guess my Semblance wouldn’t work in low- or no-oxygen environments (high altitudes, vacuums), underwater, or in extreme cold. The other downside would be a lack of flame-retardancy, so unlike Nora, who’s basically immune to electrocution…yeah. I’d still burn like a s’more. On the plus side, I could do cool things like jet propulsion, so no complaints there. (Basically my Semblance would be a ripoff of Firebending from A:TLA and A:LoK and I have no shame whatsoever.)

12. Fuck me. I have no creativity when it comes to weapons, so my answer’s gonna be kinda lame, but I guess I’d want a weapon whose function compliments my Semblance. Maybe a pair of wrist-mounted claws that can be used for close-range melee attacks (slashing, impaling, gouging), but also double as mountaineering equipment, so I can climb vertical surfaces. And instead of the claws having a gun configuration, they’d have miniaturized fuel reservoirs for storing highly flammable liquids, that I could use for dousing my opponent/the terrain in order to more easily ignite it with my Semblance. But this begs the question, do combustible fuels exist in Remnant? Most of RWBY’s post-industrial technology seems to rely primarily on Dust, which we’ve only seen in crystalline and powdered forms. So unless there are liquid forms of Dust–and things like petrochemicals and liquid hydrogen don’t exist–then I guess I could always fill the fuel tanks with alcohol. My claws would have the added bonus of doubling as canteens, but I’d constantly be resisting the temptation to drink my fuel supply. (Good thing no one told Qrow that booze-based weapons were an option. He’d be unstoppable.)

21. You say that as if I wouldn’t jump at the opportunity to share my headcanons with a captive audience. Pfft. Like I need an excuse.

21.1 The unofficial language of the Faunus is called Arcadian. The same way Atlas was named for the eponymous Greek Titan, Arcadian’s namesake is a province that in Greek antiquity was celebrated for its harmonious, unspoiled wilderness. Arcadia was believed to be the homeland of Pan, god of the wilds and patron deity of the satyrs/fauns. Out of all of Remnant’s languages, Arcadian has the largest number of spoken dialects due to the widespread presence of Faunus on nearly every continent. Arcadian is the only extant language of the Arco language family that managed to survive the systemic erasure of Faunus culture over the last three centuries. Other names for Arcadian include Zooglossia (lit. “animal-tongue,” which is somewhat derogatory) and Caterwaul (which is highly derogatory and a good way to get yourself decked in the face).

21.2 Penny and Ironwood used to do maintenance together. Being a robot, Penny had to run frequent systems diagnostics, and replace parts whenever they got damaged or underwent enough wear and tear. The same went for Ironwood’s prostheses, given how extensively they were integrated into his body. They liked to sit together in the evening, especially because it gave Ironwood the chance to make sure Penny was doing okay (“And you’re sure that they’re treating you well?” “Oh, yes! Yesterday, Ruby taught me how to fill out something called a captcha!”). Plus they could trade off on tools and give each other tips when it came to the best way to replace frayed wires, or hammer out dents in integument panels. Ironwood doesn’t like to admit it, but he appreciated having someone to talk to as optimistic as Penny, who understood the stigma that came with being more machine than man.

21.3 Peter Port once acquired a fair bit of infamy with a paper that he published, shortly after he was hired as a full-time professor. Within academic circles, it’s generally accepted that Grimm undergo something called cognitive metamorphosis–basically, the longer a Grimm lives, the more complex its thought process becomes. Every time a Grimm survives an encounter with people, its mind adapts, no longer relying on impulsive rudimentary behavior, but instead on a form of strategic thinking analogous to neurological patterns found in certain mammals. The discussion on Grimm sapience typically ends here, as most researchers believe that this change in their behavior is just a more advanced version of their base instincts. Port is RWBY’s version of a Kaiju Groupie–he loves studying them as much as he loves killing them. The paper that he wrote proposed the idea that long-lived Grimm displayed emotional intelligence. His research was supported by anecdotal evidence from Huntsmen that had witnessed behaviors such as Grimm taking trophies, or Grimm holding grudges against specific individuals or kingdoms (like in the instance of a Nevermore that preferentially attacked airships donning Mistral’s coat-of-arms). To say his research was controversial is an understatement. A lot of his peers publicly denounced him, and he was even called before Vale’s licensing board because enough people demanded that his Huntsman’s license be revoked. The only reason he didn’t lose his job is because Ozpin went to bat for him. Anyone who says that Ozpin doesn’t have a temper need only ask the eye witnesses from Port’s hearing. They’ll tell you differently.

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