Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-98.235.154.24-20130913002452/@comment-11687-20131031003821

173.60.95.163 wrote:

The fact is, Professor Oobeleck explicitly stated "we only accept the best of the best". An out of control libido/desire for sex will hamper combat operations and overall effectiveness in the field. One thing that causes an operation to fail before it even starts is if an operative is emotionally compromised. If an operative has a broken heart, like if (I'm borrowing a shipping theory here) Pyrrha was (and she was) mad with Jaune for rejecting her help, it could lead to negative consequences, which it did, she was grumpy, and didn't move to help Jaune when he was being dragged off by CRDL. That was another one could be CRDL as a whole, they all have issues with controlling their fear, which while it isn't related to the libido/desire issue at hand, it's an emotional compromise, they ran off, when they could have in theory, put up a defence against the Ursa Major.

In theory, when Oobeleck said "best of the best", this means the best at controlling emotions, studying, fighting and working with others. While an operative can be effective in the field, if their main off-field desire is to get laid and not to lead/work with their team to defeat the enemy, then they compromise the group as a whole. A team is like a hand, with each member being a finger, alone, a finger can't grasp, make a fist, block, or do anything. But when joined by the others, they can do anything. If one of these fingers is broken, hurt or otherwise incapacitated, the others lose collective strength as a whole. With this loss of strength in mind, the operatives themselves will lose something of value. If Ren was emotionally compromise/incapacitated, the team loses his talented skills in combat, if Pyrrha is emotionally comprimised/incapacitated, her semblance powers and offensive/defensive abilities are lost, if Jaune is lost, the team is leaderless, and if Nora is lost the team's main damage dealer is lost. It's like a finger and a hand, each one lost weakens them. In this case, the lack of Ren results in the team losing his aura powers and strength as a whole, and his ingenuinity with the Death Stalker is lost, if Pyrrha is gone then Jaune would have been wounded/killed with the fight of the Ursa Major, if Nora is gone the Death Stalker would have been almost imposible to bring down collectively and if Jaune is gone no one would have had a plan for taking it out.

Anon, thanks for the long and thoughtful response! I hope you don't mind that I'm breaking up your quote into several sections. I wanted to respond to several points that you brought up, and this seemed like the best way to keep a tight focus on each one.

Professor Oobleck's quote in episode twelve about Beacon only accepting the "best of the best" struck me as being purely a reference to scholastic ability. Primarily, this was because he was lambasting Jaune and Cardin for their poor performances in his class. Jaune also inferred later in the episode that testing was required to get into Beacon ("I didn't go to combat school, I didn't pass any tests..."), which was also presumably scholastic in nature, and how the school measures the aptitude of potential candidates.

It seems fairly safe to say that avoiding emotional problems isn't part of this distinction. This is self-evident because the points you raise (Pyrrha's hurt feelings, Team CRDL's willingness to abandon Cardin) are ones that do happen to students that have already enrolled in the school, the "best of the best." Even leaving aside the fact that there's no practical way to stop such situations from occurring, the faculty members don't take proactive steps to try and fix things...primarily since they're not even aware of them to begin with (which is another issue of practicality).

Simply put, there's no real way to measure, or enforce, the idea that Beacon's students are the cream of the crop because they can avoid emotional entanglements. This undercuts the idea that Beacon's students are held to a higher standard regarding sexual interactions, which I presume was the main point you were asserting.

173.60.95.163 wrote:

Which most likely means that any operative with any sort of issue endangers their team as a whole. Jaune's incident in recent episodes left the team lost, and when he came back they were glad. Similarly, Weiss's belief she is superior to others led to Ruby becoming emotionally frustrated and unhappy, and until Ozpin and Port intervened, things were bad between the two of them. CRDL as a whole are cowards, whcih meant that the spirited defence they might have otherwise brought into play never materialized, forcing Jaune's hand.

Again, you're not wrong in that emotional instability between teammates weakens the team as a whole. However, I don't believe that this offers any major disincentive to prevent teenagers from having sex.

Leaving aside the above link regarding how well teenager's brains have matured in the areas regarding delayed gratification and risk analysis, I don't think that the possibility of what might happen at an indeterminate future (e.g. that sex could lead to hurt feelings, which leads to a reduction in teamwork, which leads to an injury in the field) is, as a generality, enough to defeat the urges that come with the possibility of an immediate (and desired) sexual encounter.

173.60.95.163 wrote:

Combat training really offers nothing in the way of defusing sexual tension between operatives. The only real way to diffuse the tension is to get the two operatives to have a heart-to-heart talk. It's like Miranda Lawson and Subject Zero/Jack in Mass Effect. Those two are at each others throats the entire trilogy, and Shepard can even suggest they blow it off by kissing each other. Simiarly, Ruby and Weiss have some tension between them, and while no operative in-universe has suggested they hook up and blow it off, Ozpin and Port both insinuated the two of them settle their differences.

I don't believe that the two are comparable. When tension is caused by antagonism, resolving the enmity can be enough to dispel the tension. When the tension is fueled by mutual attraction, however, having a heart-to-heart is not going to make that go away - if anything, it's more likely to bring those feelings out into the open and give them greater immediacy.

Ruby and Weiss have trouble relating to each other because each sees things that they don't like in the other. Mutually resolving to work on the things that the other tells them are upsetting is enough to solve that problem, and start them on the path towards friendship. If the issue were that they were attracted to each other, however, then there's no comparable way to solve that (short of them trying to minimize acting in ways that they knew the other one found attractive, which would be highly impractical). Ergo, the tension mounts until those feelings of attraction are dealt with.

This isn't so suggest that the only method of resolving a mutual attraction is sex, of course, but it's a highly probable one, particularly where teenagers are concerned.

173.60.95.163 wrote:

Sexual violence against other students is most likely something that would be theoretically probable there. It's a large school, all a student has to do is drag someone off to some relatively isolated alclove and...well. It works both ways, a student who really is desperate and decides to use violence/is a yandere could just drag another person off for said...desires, while by the same token another pair of operatives could find an area in which they could express their love for each other in peace. The fact that everyone has combat training there most likely is the main deterrence against the act in itself. It's not the threat of what you do, it's the threat of what you CAN do. Pyrrha make look really appealing for others, but fact is, she has a powerful set of weapons. It's not about what she does with them that gets the people who could otherewise be tempted to assault her to back off, it's what she COULD do to them. As Dwight D. Eisenhower said, "The hand of the aggressor is stayed by strength, and strength alone." In this case, the sheer physical strength that Pyrrha, Ruby, Nora, Weiss, Yang, Blake and Ren all have prevent them from being victims. Jaune on the other hand is victimized by CRDL because of his lack of any force shown.

My best bet with the assault issue is that because "only the best of the best" are recruited in (bar Jaune), this may insinuate that even if someone wanted to do another operative, it would go down to this: Do you really want to try and forcibly lay with someone who got into the school for most likely killing several other people on their own? While the operatives may be about 17 and in theory, overwhelmed by hormones that give them their desire, attempting to do so becomes a hazardous affair unless the operatives both desire this. Like an example would be Cardin trying to lay with a member of RWBY/JNPR. Fact is, despite his brute force strength, we haven't seen him personally dispatch multiple targets. He may have won a fight against Jaune, but Jaune's incompetence at the time was the reason for the win. Ruby was able to hold her own against several henchmen and Roman all at once, and was only stopped by Crimson, of whom she fought to a draw. Yang wiped out an entire nightclub of operatives singlehandedly, Weiss fought a robot and multiple beowolves and other Grimm on her own, Blake defeated several robots and and Ursa, while Ren singlehandedly defeated a King Tatiju on his own with his bare hands, Pyrrha held off the Death Stalker and crippled it, and Nora personally killed the Death Stalker. Unless the operative themselve wanted to be laid by him (and fact is, everyone in RWBY/JNPR hates him) they'd gladly break his legs and everything else.

I'm not sure what point you're making here, as you seem to start off saying that sexual violence is more likely among the student population at Beacon than among the general population (which I disagree with)...and then seem to come around to say that sexual violence is less likely among the students at Beacon than among the general population, which I agree with.

173.60.95.163 wrote:

It's a school, while some people have indeed got it on at school (and once at a waterpark, if I remember correctly), it's still a school. There is undoubtably (although it will most likely never ever be shown) a class for Sex Education, with the intent of helping the students recieve some help in controlling their...urges, while at the same time showing them that their urges are purely natural, and it's okay to feel the desire to satisfy these urges with someone else, but it's not okay to satisfy said urges with that someone until the time is right (in most circles, it's after marriage,), or at the very least, said person wants to satisfy their own urges with you. They probably teach the people in said classroom various things about it that you can look up on your own, and how to wield their...weapons responsibly. While I have no evidence that such a class exists, if the teachers failed to give such a class, then they are doing it wrong. The calculation is quite simple: Boy+Girl/Boy+Boy/Girl+Girl x Room Shared Together/More or less abandoned area/locked room + Lack of education on Sex/Lovemaking and when its appropriate/not appropriate + Gigantic School with Teenagers= Chaos

Said calculation in mind, the only available counter to the problem is education on Sex/Lovemaking and protection. Better to give the men and women items they might need now rather than later.

As a wrap up, the idea is that if the School doesn't adequately prepare for the undoubtable amount of desires and lust that several operatives may carry, it'll have negative field and off-field consequences. Whether it be a broken hearted student refusing to help the one who broke his/her heart, or another one traumatized by a failed assault by another student, it has consequences.

Again, from a philosophical standpoint (the philosophy being "look at the issue and respond logically") I agree with this line of reasoning. However, as I pointed out previously, we have real-world examples of that philosophy being eschewed in favor of ideology. Simply put, just because a course of action is the best idea doesn't mean that it'll necessarily be the most favored one - and if a majority of the population prefer a different alternative, even if that alternative is less viable towards achieving a particular (set of) goal(s), then it's likely that they'll find a way to make that alternative happen.