Board Thread:Speculation House/@comment-4830106-20130810030606/@comment-10390252-20140606090229

@Zolnir,

I'm not sure he's been shown to have that authority. Remember, most of his 'army' are trainees - enough to man roadblocks, perhaps, but not fully-qualified by any standard. The exercises in the Emerald Forest don't really count as I suspect it's a Grimm reservation maintained for the explicit purpose of giving the students something on which to practice their live-fire drills. This would include the culling of an beasts that get too high-level (and considering how powerful the Giant Nevermore and the Giant Deathstalker were, I shudder to think what 'too high level' might look like).

I still suspect that Ozpin's line at the end of the prologue was a recorded lecture to which Ruby was listening on her headphones before it switched to the next track (which was This Will Be the Day). So, he's famous and considered an authority on history and possibly modern sociology. Certainly, he's an experienced and capable warrior and his influence over generations of hunters which gives him a certain degree of power because his students tend to apply his philosophies in their careers and I'm pretty sure that Hunters are free to refuse assignments on the grounds of conscience; and who shaped that conscience? That's right!

That said, I'm not sure he has formal power and I think that the politicians who think that they ought to be the arbiters of what is 'right' and 'wrong' in terms of Hunter missions (call them 'Hunts'?) resent his influence a bit.