Talk:Neopolitan/@comment-6003266-20160530083546/@comment-410526-20160530140705

When someone you deeply trust betrays you, you don't just stop trusting that one person. You begin to question the very value of your trust and where you're placing it. If an entire Kingdom, who you trusted to keep you safe and let them walk your streets, betrays you and slaughters your people indiscriminately... Yeah. Things will get messy.

Yang says this in V3E12
 * "No one outside of Vale knows what happened here. Before the tower fell, the last thing people saw was Atlas attacking innocent people and Grimm destroying the city. Everyone's scared. No one knows who to trust. So, Weiss' father came to take her back to Atlas, where he thinks it's safe. She's gone."

Read that again. It doesn't really paint the brightest picture. The mistrust is going in every direction, not just towards Atlas, not just towards the Faunus. And trusting only your own, to the exclusion of others? Yes, that is the textbook definition of xenophobia.

And to address another thing: I don't want pessimism. I don't know where you're getting that idea from. Darkness in Vale is merely a realistic response to the events that happened. Things getting bad in Vale isn't artificial darkness for drama or a diabolus ex machina. It's a very natural and expected progression of a debilitating disaster/terror attack.

And anyway as MiniDaggers brought up earlier, it's likely that Vale will have very little screen time in Vol 4 while we explore the other Kingdoms, so whatever happens in the city won't even have that huge bearing on the tone of the story.

It's similar to how the very real darkness lurking outside the Kingdoms had little to no impact on the more or less carefree tone of Volume 1 (and 2, to a lesser extent). We knew it was dark and scary outside the Kingdoms, but we never saw it. Likewise, with the darkness in Vale, it doesn't have to overpower the plot and take screentime, but it does have to be there to drive home the effects of Vol 3, or else it's unrealistic.