Talk:Blake Belladonna/@comment-43485709-20191125012919/@comment-35434444-20191126092717

I've probably raged somewhere about how terrible I think bumblebee is, but it' actually not that bad, especially in recent episodes thanks to, I suspect, the additional writing staff that have come on board since the start of the current volume.

I just think it's so criminally sub-optimal compared to all the other people Blake and Yang could plausibly be paired with -- both for the story and as their own self-contained romantic subplots.

The only thing that makes the pairing in any way workable is that Blake seems to serve as the yin to Yang's yang. Not just in the sense that Blake is quiet and stealthy as oppose to flamboyant and aggressive but in the original sense of those Chinese words.

If you look at 陰 and 陽 both character have this radical on the left that looks like the German ß. It is an abbreviation of 阜 meaning "hill." Yin is the shady side, which in China generally means facing towards the north, while yang is the sunny side facing south. Hence all this about Yang being the "sunny dragon." The opposite mythological beast to the dragon is obviously the tiger and Blake just so happens to be a cat faunus.

I've talked about these things ad nauseam but it really is uncanny in this case and I put it out here to show that I'll be the first to accept that this was probably planned since the days of Monty and therefore the canon legitimacy of this relationship as well as the creative intent behind it can hardly be questioned. (I'm not quite sure where the impression that the fans strong-armed RT into writing bumblebee into the story came from but there it is.)

In spite of that, I think it's a poor fit relative to its alternatives, but that's just me.

If the staff are dead set on putting them together, then the way the two characters complement each other has to be developed. Blake in particular has always felt rather featureless to me. M&K in particular don't seem to be very well adapted to writing a melancholic character without oversimplifying things and just making them edgy and insane like Adam. A possible angle is to make Blake more alert and intuitive, but overcautious, while Yang is more confident and easygoing, but also reckless -- and therefore they complete each other. In vol. six, both characters were extremely squishy and awkward for some reason and all the emotional and dramatic moments between them were damp and unappealing to me.

I've gone on long enough. I'll round this out by saying that the shipping situation is fine as long as it's written with sincerity.