Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-32129321-20170528014915

I'm fairly sure that, as observations go, this is more than a bit late and potentially obvious. But, I've never seen anyone discuss it since I first noticed it way back when. I am of course refering to the absence of Vacuo presence during the battle of Beacon.

There could be several reasons for this: there could have been (and most likely were) time constraints on the animators and/or the relevant voice actors, perhaps the writers simply forgot about the shade students since none of them had much plot relevance beyond being punching bags, or (and this is what I personally believe) they were intentionally excluded and could indicate that something is rotten in the state of Vacuo.

Exhibit A:



With the exceptions of Weiss, Blake, and Yang, who are all previously established to be somewhere else, and Ciel who was probably more Penny's handler than an actual student and may very well have been on one of those battleships that got shot down, nearly every semi-significant student is present here (Ruby, Jaune, Pyrrha, and what's left of Penny are there but out of shot) except for Teams BRNZ and NDGO. As mentioned, maybe their low plot relevence made them expendable, but the same could be said for Team ABRN or FN(KI), hell Fox is never seen fighting in the entire volume and Neo makes more noise than him. I don't even want to mention Yatsuhashi and Scarlet.

So, I'm throwing that argument out to wallow in the mud. What about voice actor contraints? Well as I recall, Jessica Nigri had to do every single one of Cinder's lines in Volume 3 is one session due to time issues. As for Team BRNZ, only two of them even have voice actors and both of them work at RT (it's Blaine and Aaron for Brawnz and Nolan respectively). As for NDGO, they have simultaneously more and less that BRNZ. as a fan created team they are of course voiced by their creators, though this mostly amounts to effort noises with a couple people brought in afterwards to have a couple of them actually talk.

To top it all off, it hardly mattered since very few of the people who were present even talk during the next few episodes. RWBY, JNPR, Coco, Velvet, Sun... and maybe Neptune, but that's it. To the mud with you, flimsy argument.

As for animation, I don't like saying it, but even if they just sat in the background in t-pose, the would have done only slightly less than enyone else. Besides, apparently Nolan's model was present in one scene being carried off by a Nevermore, so I doubt that a cat walked in and knocked over the hard drive containing all of their models.

There could be other, less conspiracy-y(?) reasons, but I'm moving on.

Exhibit B



We can see that Ironwood's ship is recieving transmissions from Atlas and Mistral (even if the Mistral box seems a bit misaligned), but there doesn't seem to be a transmission from Vacuo. I noticed this after rewatching the episode a couple times and this is ultimately what made me think that something was odd. It's one thing if the Shade students just decided to bugger off and leave Vale to fend for itself, but this lack of official communication seems to indicate (to me at least) that there's something deeper going on. It could be said that Vacuo didn't send a message because they're too far away to do anything so why bother, but Mistral sends a message and they're in about as useless a position.

This could mean nothing, but this combined with the noticeable absence of any Shade students duing the battle makes me think that this is all deliberate. Vacuo is the Kingdom that we know least about and partly because, with the exception of Sun, none of the major characters are from Vacuo.

I'm not entirely sure what all of this means, if anything at all, but I'd like to discuss it if it's worth discussing. Again, this is really old and may very well have already been discussed to death while I wasn't looking.  