Board Thread:Speculation House/@comment-26417457-20190905232433/@comment-43757330-20190912024855

The Devil&#039;s Advocate WP wrote: I think this is being hopelessly technical. By rights, no one "has" to do anything. Ruby doesn't have to fight back against Grimm. She could let them eat her.

True, but Grimm aren't people, and don't have souls. So harming them isn't an evil act. This is kinda what I was talking about before with regard to logic and morality being a balancing act. You don't have to destroy yourself to help others, and you don't have to kill people to help yourself. You can find a healthy middle ground. It doesn't have to be a choice between letting monsters eat you, and destroying the world.

Cinder can be the villain without executing defenseless opponents and civilians. I think there's a difference between her competence as a villain and her ruthlessness as a villain. And I think it's important to evaluate her ruthlessness as well.

The Devil&#039;s Advocate WP wrote: I don't think we have clearly seen anything suggesting she only cares about herself. She doesn't care about her enemies, but, well, duh. The Mistral woman was definitely not her enemy. That was a civilian. I mean, she could have had children for all Cinder knew. That's not an enemy combatant, that's just a human being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Unless, of course, Cinder's enemy is humanity; in which case, I think that elevates Cinder to an entirely new level of evil.

The Devil&#039;s Advocate WP wrote: We haven't quite seen enough of Cinder's interactions with Emerald to know what she thinks of her exactly, but I don't think we can rule out that she may care about Emerald for some reason. We certainly haven't seen anything that resembles fondness for Emerald from Cinder. Their relationship has always been demonstrated as the archetypal 'master and servant' type deal. I believe Cinder's words were, "Don't think, obey". Certainly not something I'd like to hear from my husband, or my friends; but hey, maybe Emerald is into being denigrated. Haha

The Devil&#039;s Advocate WP wrote: Sure, but she is still trying to be semi-logical by looking for a loophole. Oh~, trust me, you don't ever want to do that. It just makes it worse. When somebody asks you to do something, and you skirt it by looking for a loophole; what you've actually done is confessed your intent to subvert that person's directions. It's also insulting to that person, because it insinuates that you don't care about their needs or desires, and are treating the exchange like a game. I mean, surely you've tried this at some point; with a teacher, or a parent, or some kind of authoritative figure, right? It just makes the consequences even worse.

The Devil&#039;s Advocate WP wrote: We don't know what counts as legal adulthood in Remnant. True, but in the absense of specification I'm just going to assume it's the same as in our world. Until they say otherwise.

The Devil&#039;s Advocate WP wrote: For one, given how basically every other villain has received some kind of backstory to give us some hint as to their life before Salem, I would like to think the withholding on Cinder is not just them being lazy or uninterested in exploring it and rather them holding it back for the most opportune moment. It could very well just be laziness, but I like to think that you're right on this one. But I caution you not to expect any kind of sprawling, in depth backstory. Most of the villains in this show get backstory in the form of half-hearted exposition. Hazel and Emerald, for example, have only had their backstories mentioned in passing. Mercury had one short scene showing how he lost his legs and we still don't know anything about Neo, Watts or Tyrian's backstories.

I expect Cinder's backstory to be short and comprehensive, like Adam's. I don't think they'll go as in-depth as Salem's backstory because Cinder isn't as important to the longterm story of this show, and Salem's backstory doubled for Ozpin as well.

So, I don't think we're going to learn all that much about Cinder from her backstory, and I don't think it will really change her as a character. It will just offer an explanation as to why she's so power-mad.