Board Thread:Speculation House/@comment-30834975-20170917082551

I was wondering if anyone knew the canon reason that Cinder planned the breach.

There are 2 main reasons I could see, that might describe why this happened.

1) To cause more destruction and chaos during the Attack on Beacon and Vale. This is a reasonable assumption, and would make sense, seeing as they carried Mechs and lots of soldiers on the train.

2) To get Roman onto Ironwoods airship to control the Atlas Millitary. For this to work however, a couple things would need to happen, such as get Ironwood in charge of Vytal tournament security (which only happened in canon because of the breach), and to have Roman on the airship (which also only happened because of the breach).

I think the second option is the most viable to be Cinders plan, as it causes a large distrust of Atlas after the attack, which, as Qrow says, is Salems ultimate goal (to separate the humans). This leads me to believe that Cinder's original plan was to have the breach happen before the attack either way. This would mean that team RWBY did very little to alter Cinder's plan except to prevent much of the damage to Vale (which would have been superficial anyways).

Another fact that leads me to believe this is that Emerald states that the breach was only meant to happen a matter of days after team RWBY forced it to happen, while I believe that at least some amount of time, longer than a matter of days, the festival would begin. This is because there would need to be a fairly signifigant amount of time to transfer security of the festival from one party to another. There is also no indication that the festival was delayed for this, thus meaning that there was originally at least that amount of time left without interference from outside forces. 