User blog comment:Jkphantom9/RWBY clip on Lazer Team Livestream/@comment-10317392-20140622171955/@comment-9090085-20140625012834

I will confess that I am basing my thoughts on who might win this fight on "the plot"(or rather, what I think the plot might be like); and as I am an amateur writer, such narrative conceits tend to dominate my mind. But to be fair, I don't have much else to go on - I have only a limited idea of Pyrrha's combat capabilities beyond her stellar history, weapons, and semblance. And as for Mercury, I only know his weapon and that he started the fight holding back; how much is he holding back? What is his semblance, and how does it match up against Pyrrha's? How much is he holding back now, if anything? I don't know, so I'm falling back on narrative tropes.

On that note:

DiegoAnime3000 wrote: Mercury made the not bad face so he is ultimately powerful and he is just toying with Pyrrha and he is going to win so that Yang can be the one to defeat him

I honestly don't think Yang is going to defeat Mercury on her own... at least, not this volume.

I'm basing this mostly off of two thought lines:

1) There are enemies characters cannot defeat on their own. Periodically in RWBY, characters have faced threats that took more then one person to defeat: The Spider Droid in the Black Trailer; the Deathstalker and Nevermore in Players and Pieces; and Roman Torchwick in Black and White(remember when he laughed at how ineffectual Sun's attack was?). This is, on one hand, to enforce the importance of teamwork, but also to help show growth; to me, there is no more obvious way to show someone is stronger, then to have them soundly defeat an enemy that previously took much more effort to defeat(like how Taokaka form Blazblue got her tail handed to her by Hazama in Continuum Shift, but is able to match him blow-for-blow in Chronophantasma).

Speaking of growth...

2) Our heroes are less experienced then the villains right now. I am operating under the assumption that RWBY will run for many seasons, and we're still in season one; as such, teams RWBY and JNPR probably have quite a bit of growth ahead of them, while Cinder and her, ahem, "allies" have done most of their growing already(they're also older,a nice visual shorthand for "more experienced").

So, when I think of Yang's last fight with Mercury in Vol.2, I envision her teaming up someone else to take him down together(it might even be Pyrrha who she teams up with). And, latter in the series, she becomes strong enough to fight him one-on-one and win.

On the other hand... Since there is a possibility that that the villains will "win" in vol.2, Mercury could "lose" against Pyrrha here, but pull out all the stops against Yang later(you know, a little like how Roman ran away in Ruby Rose, but smacked Blake around in Black and White).

Or it could be something else; I'm shooting in the dark here.