RWBY Volume 5: Blake Character Short Hints at a More Politically Conscious Plot

This Fall may bring to mind scarves and pumpkins to the average person but RWBY fans know it can only mean one thing: the premiere of Volume 5. For those unfamiliar, fellow RWBY enthusiast Willie Young has an excellent summary of volumes 1 to 3, but let’s just say after a rough start this action-packed American-made anime has certainly earned an excited following. Back in July it was announced that the season would start on October 14 but to be honest, while beautiful, Weiss Schnee’s character short didn’t tell us much more than we already knew coming out of volume 4; TLDR, Weiss sucked at Summoning, now she doesn’t. All of that changes with Rooster Teeth’s recent character short featuring Blake Belladonna:

Sweet Bast look at all the dark skinned characters!!! For all the racial allegories Faunus seemed to be meant to invoke, RWBY has always struggled to really convey an understanding of the impacts of racism beyond a general sort of “they bully us and we’re angry about it” sentiment rather than structural implications (yes, I think even Weiss’ early prejudice was undercut by its unbelievably easy resolution). It doesn’t help that our two main examples of Faunus are an unbelievably pale cat girl and a blue-eyed blonde boy, or that the group most concerned with Faunus civil rights, the White Fang, are basically a terrorist group for the majority of the time in which the series takes place. I’m sure there’s some poignant comparisons to revolutionary leaders buried somewhere if…