Board Thread:Episode Discussion/@comment-26512661-20200118161649/@comment-217.149.166.204-20200121095819

Just a few thoughts that have been swimming around in my head, mostly about Ironwood:

For one, I really liked the fight scene between him and Watts, including the conclusion where he practically flays his own arm and scrapes Watts' face across the floor to win. The arm makes me thinks it's a possible fairy tail reference to the Tin Woodsman in the original story; if I remember correctly, the Wicked Witch enchanted the Woodsman to miss every time he swung his arm so he would chop off one of his limbs. It was a gradual process. Here, Watts and Salem (indirectly) force him to cast off more and more of his human side just to get a better chance of winning.

Ironwood already made it sound like he was starting to consider humanity a weakness easily exploited when he showed Oscar the Vault in Atlas. Even during their last conversation, he (albeit jokingly) asks Oscar, "No more surprises, allright? I'm not sure I could take it." In hindsight, Ironwood himself may have been aware of how powerful his more negative traits could be and was honestly hoping he could keep things from getting drastic, but now his paranoia and trauma from seeing that chesspiece (kinda like the PTSD shown here, reminds me of Yang's symptoms) is pushing his good judgement down and convincing him to make a decision no one is happy with.

I can't say I agree with the general's plan, seeing as it seems short-term more than an actual solution, but I appreciate the logic behind it. As for Team RWBY, yeah, they've made a couple of mistakes and I really hope that if Ozpin comes out, they can at least appreciate his secret-keeping wasn't malicious, just him trying to work with what he had.

Sorry for rambling