![]() No one cares that Weiss is ignoring the very real chaos in Mantle, or that people in Atlas aren't dying (the soldiers are dying protecting the people), or that she tries to emotionally guilt May into choosing her position ("Don't you have family in Atlas?"), or that she likewise tries to disagree with May's lived experience - "I don't think -" before everyone is distracted by the term "sides," Ruby insists there are none, and. Then May is framed as the one in the wrong here because she dared to use the term "sides," supposedly aligning her with Ironwood's philosophy. The group acts as if this is a standard horror people have to deal with on the regular without, again, there being any evidence for that in the rest of the series. Yet simultaneously she makes it sound like her parents actually disowned her because of her support of the lower class, with no bridge made between those two subjects (AKA, the poor, faunus, and other minorities would support a queer individual for a variety of reasons - intersectionality). So May drops the reveal that she has transphobic parents in a world that up until now has never dealt with that kind of bigotry (and through the rest of Volume 8 won't deal with it either). Mantle class issue, she chose Mantle, her Atlas parents hated that, so they rejected their son, except they got that wrong because she's actually their daughter - a correction that's presented as kind of incidental to the actual heart of the matter. It's a really strangely constructed speech where though the transphobia is intimately obvious - I believe 100% we're supposed to read May's parents as transphobic here - what she actually says makes her gender sound incidental to the rift. The city presumably in opposition to Atlas, where her parents reside. Saying the Happy Huntresses needed her would have made perfect sense here, but May says it's Mantle. May notably does not say the Happy Huntresses needed her, a group made up of all women, a team that, by default, tells us something about May's identity the moment she joined them. Those are two messages that aren't easy to reconcile, but now toss in May's comment that "Mantle needed me and to the Marigolds, that meant I wasn't their son anymore." The way it's actually phrased, it's presented as a class issue. Yet the rest of RWBY - literally everything except this short exchange - implies that this is a one-off situation unique to the Marigolds, akin to someone announcing their parents' rejection for an identity marker that almost no one else on Earth has an issue with, something there isn't really a term for. May's admission and the group's reaction implies a transphobia akin to what we have in real life: wide-spread and systematic, to the point where people are no longer surprised by that kind of horror. ![]() Weiss' look down is a very sad, but accepting, "Yeah, I know how awful people can be in that regard". ![]() Yet here, suddenly, May announces that her parents are transphobic and no one in the group reacts to that with surprise, disbelief, or anger. Their problems lie in an allegorical form of racism, not who you're falling in love with gender-wise, or what your pronouns are. Whether it's overt (Saphron and Terra being married) or a complex gesture towards the diversity of humanity (Penny's existence, two presumed men sharing the same body and raising kids together with a wife), RWBY is a world that for seven and a half years implied a total acceptance of queer identities. ![]() The focus is entirely on her potential as a weapon, not on her complex identity. Penny is a synthetic human created from the soul of a man and literally no one cares. Blake has a problem with Ilia's politics, not her crush. Saphron and Terra's explicit relationship is never commented on (and they were able to adopt a kid). ![]() No one has an issue with Blake and Yang beginning to approach one another with romantic overtones. Though queer rep in RWBY is still lacking in numerous respects, everything we have gotten points to a culture that treats gender and sexual diversity as a given. However, the problem for many viewers is that as far as we've been shown, this is an isolated incident. ![]()
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