Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-3391158-20170904153455/@comment-25936766-20170907012519

KingFubuki92 wrote: The show don't tell rule doesn't always work though. What was there to show in the short? Ilia's backstory itself is sad, but seeing it doesn't really work in this case. You're missing the point though.

While it's true that sometimes, it's better to Tell than to Show, on a general level it is better to Show and not Tell, let the viewer see things for themselves instead of just being told X and Y and expecting us to take it for granted without any reasonable evidence.

Since Volume 1, the "Faunus Discrimination" has been mentioned and talked about, for years it's been described, and Blake's almost-entire character is basically founded on it. But, in the 4-5 years RWBY has existed, we have not actually seen anyone discriminate Faunus.

1) No one in RWBY or JNPR seems to have any remote issues with Blake being a Faunus, or with Faunus in general. Neither does anyone else, minor or major, in the cast.

2) The only discrimination we've seen, actually seen, has been Cardin basically calling them animals and bullying Velvet for a single scene, and Roman calling a Deer faunus "Deery". And even then:

-Cardin is an equal-oportunity bully, who is not only an asshole, but actually spends 95+% of his screentime bullying Jaune, a human, for no reason other than to show that Cardin is an asshole and Jaune is a noobish pussy.

-Roman is a sadist, laughing big when he pretty much blew up Ruby in her face back in V1, on top of being a wanted criminal and, overall, not really the nicest person in the cast, even among the villains.

In other words, only Roman and Cardin have actually mistreated Faunus, and both of them are assholes, people who no one would be surprised if they did something racist, either because they're actually racist or just because they're jerks.

2.2) We have never seen anyone more "innocent" than those two actually be racist towards Faunus. We haven't seen on-screen any Faunus being mistreated in any way for their race by people who besides that would be considered "Normal" or "Nice".

Because being racist doesn't mean someone is an asshole in general; people are not black and white, we are grey.

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You are right, that in this case, showing Ilia's backstory in Blake's character short instead of just having her narrate it to Blake, would make what is really Ilia's Character Short even more Ilia's and even less Blake's. Overall, not a very good idea.

But, you are ignoring the core of the problem: Once again, they talk about how horribly Faunus are treated, and once again, they only talk, never show.

This is something that's been a problem in the show for years, and yet it seems GMK hasn't grown any balls in all that time even after deciding to kill off beloved characters.

It's very, very hard to actually believe all this talk about "Oh, the poor Faunus suffering so much", when we haven't actually seen it except, momentarily, at the hands of a jerkass and a bully. The fact that the one who talks the most about it is Blake, who spent most of her life in the White Fang before and after they became terrorists, only makes it even harder to believe due to the bias.