Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-3391158-20170904153455/@comment-4010415-20170907064811

Basically, Faunus discrimination is suffering the same problem as "Grimm are dangerous!!!", though for different reasons. The initial reason "Grimm are dangerous" got so much telling and no showing is because... it seemed like Monty just could not stand to make a scene where the protagonists aren't even able to put up a good fight. He wanted Yang vs Adam to be an actual fight. How much do you wanna bet that his version of Yang vs Adam would've had Yang actually going toe-to-toe with Adam and standing a chance? The final version made Adam actually look fairly dangerous because Yang didn't stand a chance. She didn't even land a hit on him. It showed you can't just rush straight into a fight with Adam, you have to actually be cautious.

Now, as for the Tell, Don't Show on Faunus discrimination...

Part of SYUTK's issue is that characters can be biased, so when we haven't actually seen any serious discrimination from otherwise normal people but we keep hearing about it from someone who has been part of the White Fang literally since childhood, it's kinda hard to believe.

One thing they could do with Blake is give us flashbacks to her early days in the White Fang before it turned violent, where she actually witnesses discrimination going on and tries to help.

With Ilia's story, the things that can be taken as fact or mostly as fact are:


 * She grew up in Mantle, with Faunus who worked the mines.
 * She considered Atlas to be the "City of Dreams", a notion that lines up with the fact that there's an economic disparity between Mantle and Atlas, according to one of the richie rich guys at the Schnee charity ball.
 * Her parents sent her to a school in Atlas and demanded that she pretend to be Human.
 * The girls she hung out with called Faunus animals and dirty and said that Faunus lie.
 * There was a mining accident involving a chain reaction of Dust explosions that led to a cave-in, and Ilia was extremely upset about it.
 * Ilia accidentally exposed herself as a Faunus, perceived her friends as being afraid of her, and assaulted them.

We don't exactly know if her friends were afraid of her or just startled like Weiss was when Blake revealed herself as having some kind of association with the White Fang. Though, an interesting note, WoR: Faunus cited one reason for Humans' dislike of Faunus in ancient times being due to how startling it was to see someone who looked Human and then discover they had scary fangs or something of the like. It's like a bit of a parallel. However, unlike ancient times, Humans now understand Faunus a little more and know that they're not too different. But it's possible that what still breeds discrimination is the Humans who are still being raised to see Faunus as being inherently different from Humans, as just being no different from animals.

Also, I'm still really disappointed with how little they did with Weiss' time in Atlas. Not only did they barely show how Jacques usually treats Weiss when she's not misbehaving, they also didn't show anything outside of the Schnee manor.

I think I've described this before, though note quite in-depth, but I came up with an idea a while back for something they could have done with Weiss' storyline: When she was sitting alone in her room, they could have had the camera panning over areas of her room while we hear a local news report on a TV, indicating she is listening to the news while she stares out the window. The news anchor is talking about how there has been a cave-in, in a Schnee Dust mine, with many Faunus workers trapped inside. The situation is currently being investigated before Mr. Schnee makes any decisions on how to tackle the situation.

Later, we see Jacques discussing the situation with a Human secretary. The section that the Faunus are trapped in doesn't have much Dust left between the mining and the explosion. Due to instabilities in the structure of the mine, attempts to rescue the trapped Faunus could cause them to lose access to a section that they have only just begun mining out. Jacques tells the secretary that there will be no rescue attempt and to tell the public that it's just too dangerous. He then tells the secretary that, in about a month and a half, he would like the secretary to send out hiring ads for the SDC mines. The way that he words all of this makes it sound like this is his usual course of action when rescuing or helping Faunus workers could potentially lead to a decrease in profits, even if the decrease is only temporary. He chose to wait to hire more so the public wouldn't view him as insensitive, hiring new miners so soon after a tragedy leaves current miners trapped and dying.