Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-35979206-20180919210906/@comment-26018514-20180922183808

Arkantos95 wrote: 73.Anon.52 wrote: ...We know however that she has committed evil acts and acted selfishly, both of which point towards evil more than neutral. That's not how alignments work.

Raven falls in the Neutral end of the spectrum because her motivations fall into the category of Lawful Neutral. She obeys a code of conduct, even if it's just a personal one...

...Her motivation to protect the tribe is to protect her family. But because ... concept of moral grey areas... everyone lumps her into the evil category.

1. That's exactly how alignments work, If I don't give a fuck about performing evil acts to achieve my goal, that does not make me evil or neutral, but depending on what my motivations/goals are, I am then one of those 2.

2. Can we really say that? We know very little about her motivations at this point, except that her motivation for joining Ozpin's academy was also either Neutral or Evil, we only know of a few precious examples of her actually following her own code, and have many examples of her breaking other social codes/contracts she has pretended to embrace.

3. Can we truly say she gives a fuck about her obligations to said family? She stayed with Ozpin and STRQ for at least a year after graduating... as someone who can teleport to someone's side at the drop of a hat, she could have gone back anytime.

She's had over 10 years to make combat ready bandits on the level of Huntsmen in training to protect her clan... she's made 1, and that one was only that advanced to pretend to be the maiden whose powers Raven personally stole, ostensibly(but not confirmed) to be meant to help the tribe.

IF Raven is doing all of this simply for her own personal gain and survival(which is pretty much how all EVIDENCE presented paints her character), she is Evil(LE or CE, most likely LE), if Merry are just being craptastic with writing Raven's character and presenting her motivations poorly by merely telling us her motivations are neutral through questionably biased conversations while her shown actions speak more to evil, then yes, she is lawful.

My personal headcanon is that the WORDS they used were true and she is in fact neutral, but the evidence simply is not there at this time.