Board Thread:Speculation House/@comment-35941743-20190304195312/@comment-33467404-20190713190815

Wilfred J. Pemberley wrote: That's the thing that's so frustrating about Cinder as a character. All great villains have a way of convincing themselves that they're the hero of their story. Vader's heroic motivation is obvious. But Cinder just baffles me. I don't know how she even could convince herself that she's a hero. She seems to relish being evil so much, that she's fully accepted her role as the bad guy in this story.

And this is exactly why I hope RT doesn't keep her around as the main villain for the entire series. It would be better, in my opinion, to have her usurped by a new villain, one who has heroicly mislead motivations, and preferably one with an interesting personality. Keeping Cinder around as the main antagonist throughout the series would severely damage RWBY's legacy, because villains often define the success or failure of a series. And Cinder is an objectively terrible villain.

If CRWBY killed off Cinder in Vol. 5, that would somewhat subvert the audience’s expectations (that phrase is a cliche), and for Emerald to fall further down into villainy.