May Zedong

May Zedong is a member of Team BRNZ. She fought alongside her team against Team JNPR as part of the Vytal Festival tournament in the episode "New Challengers...".

Appearance
May is a young girl with light tan skin, dusky rose hair and gray-blue eyes.

She wears a red and white hoodie with blue tracksuit pants and a distinctive black beanie that covers her left eye. She also wears a large black scarf and red canvas sneakers.

Powers and Abilities
She appears to be integral to the tactics of her team, providing covering fire to support her teammates with her sniper rifle. Whilst her shots are generally not very accurate, she does manage to force enemies to seek cover and retreat as her teammates give chase. She also interferes and distracts enemies when her teammates enter into close-combat.

She is very adept at climbing high areas to gain a better firing position, using her rifle as a climbing axe to gain leverage. However, she tends to be less effective when deprived of cover and a favorable vantage point.

Unlike the rest of her team, she is not shown entering into close combat with opponents.

History
May and her team are students at Shade Academy, from the kingdom of Vacuo. She journeyed with her team to participate in the 40th Vytal Festival combat tournament, hosted by the kingdom of Vale. They were defeated by Team JNPR of Vale's Beacon Academy in the team round of the tournament.

Trivia

 * She makes a brief cameo appearance at the fairgrounds during "Round One", just before Team RWBY are shown eating.
 * May derives from Maia, the name of a Roman Goddess that is identified with an ancient italic as the goddess of spring and the most beautiful as well as another name of the hawthorn flower that is most seen in white colors.
 * Zhidong, Zhi is the Chinese compound along with the the Chinese compound ling that forms Lingzhi, which is a name of a Chinese mushroom which occurs in other Chinese plant names such as zhima 芝麻 "sesame" or "seed", and was anciently used a phonetic loan character for zhi 芷 "Angelica iris". The term "zhi", which has no equal meaning in Western languages, it refers to a variety of supermundane substances often described as plants, fungi, or "excresences".
 * In the 1st-2nd century CE, Divine Farmer's classified zhi into six colors that acts as "life force" in different parts of the body: qingzhi 青芝 "Green Mushroom" for Liver, chizhi 赤芝 "Red Mushroom" for heart (which commentators identify this red chizhi or danzhi 丹芝 "cinnabar mushroom" as the lingzhi), huangzhi 黃芝 "Yellow Mushroom" for spleen, baizhi 白芝 "White Mushroom" for Lung, heizhi "Black Mushroom" 黑芝 for kidney, and zizhi 紫芝 "Purple Mushroom" for Essence.
 * Dong means 东 "east" or 栋 "pillar, beam" in Chinese. Ze can also mean "swamp" or "brilliance", and an alternate meaning of her name is "east of the swamp".
 * Her name also has similarity to the name of Chinese leader Mao Zedong.
 * According to Miles and Kerry on the AfterBuzz TV for RWBY Volume 3 Episodes 1 & 2 Review, they mentioned her name as Zhidong which Miles said "She's a purple mushroom I think".