Board Thread:Speculation House/@comment-27404492-20170918133425/@comment-4010415-20171006060217

71.190.228.45 wrote:

Those fights were action for the sake of action. And not even good action. They could have just told us who won and devoted that time to the important characters. At the very least, Yang and Weiss vs Flynt and Neon was part of them training us to associate Yang using her Semblance with Yang winning a fight. For a lot of people, part of the surprise when Yang lost her arm was that we were expecting Yang to kick some serious ass because she activated her Semblance. I even remember thinking "Oh, he's in for it now" when I saw the flames and Yang's eyes turning red. It was also part of Yang's development in Volume 4, where Tai pointed out that, after the qualifiers (the teams round), Yang kept using her Semblance to win, showing examples of her reliance on it. That was more significant because we actually saw it for ourselves, rather than just Tai telling us "Hey, she did that."

There's also the fact that the antagonists' scheme kind of revolved around the tournament itself, and they attempted to use JNPR vs BRNZ to hint to us that Cinder had been manipulating the tournament the entire time. Before JNPR's match started, Cinder and Emerald spoke as if they knew for certain which team was going to win. Lo and behold, we then find out that Nora's Semblance allows her to absorb electricity to enhance her strength, one of the opponents wields a cattle prod, and one of the biomes generates a lightning storm. How convenient. Cinder handed JNPR the means to victory on a silver platter. This would have been clearer if they had done a better job conveying that to us and if they had done a better job at making it clear to us that this is specifically why Cinder had Mercury and Emerald analyze the other students in Volume 2.

It's entirely possible that Cinder, Mercury, and Emerald came up with a plan for how Mercury and Emerald were going to take on Coco and Yatsuhashi ahead of time, with Cinder giving them the grassy plains and forest biomes that they needed to carry out the plan. This gave Merc and Em an advantage because, unlike Coco and Yatsu, they actually knew exactly who they were facing and what environments would be in play ahead of time.

And, honestly, it would be a bit odd to have a tournament arc without showing much of the tournament.

71.190.228.45 wrote:

Sun vs Pyrrha would have been a good fight to see but then the Yankees scrapped it. It wasn't Sun vs Pyrrha. It was Neptune and Sun vs Nora and Pyrrha. They were going to have Sun running around in the gravity biome. There was going to be an incident in a swamp biome where Neptune sets aside his obsession with looking cool to help Sun. He would've done this by equipping swim floaties to help him feel secure in the water. There was apparently even going to be a Sailor Moon esque transformation sequence for the swim floaties inflating on him.

When it came to Weiss, they skipped too much. We would have benefited from getting to see how she and her family usually interact with each other on a normal day for them. They tried to tell us Jacques is a bad father, but all we saw was him somewhat manipulating Weiss into agreeing to sing for a charity concert and then punishing her for screaming at guests and making a scene, which she arguably shouldn't have done. The narrative of "Jacques is a bad father, and Weiss is sick of his shit" would have benefited from us actually getting to see how Jacques usually treats her when she's not misbehaving. Instead, Weiss came off as a brat and Jacques a reasonable father.