Board Thread:Episode Discussion/@comment-29684190-20191116162010/@comment-24994749-20191119231813

73.Anon.52 wrote: It might Seem contradictory Mega, but the thing is there is a narrative time and place for relationship building, and RT REALLY missed it, Beacon arcs were laid-back "daily lives at school" that was the time to show it, what were we shown of BB in those volumes;
 * Blake pimped out by Yang as Ruby's first friend
 * Yang helps her partner Blake through what essentially was an after-school project... something anyone driven insane by a roomie should do, much less an outright partner with grades riding on the person performing at 100%
 * Yang asks to dance with blake to encourage the latter getting out of her funk and being functional
 * Yang and Blake aren't here... they must be doing x together... the problem being we never knew the teams full class load so this always sounded related to being school partners, and was never once intimated to be about even the most casual shared interest.

Now the cast has pretty much been at "we fail it's the end of the world" time crunch, so taking time out of a combat mission to flirt when it's kind of time sensitive is annoying, yes people wanted to see it, but taking chunks of time for awkward silences is rather vexing to people, it's one thing if it's done in an elevator or somewhere they're trapped/forced to wait, but after dropping into an active combat zone yet not around actual action just comes off as a bothersome and somewhat lazy/insensitive way to do it. The thing is, they did romantic relationship building for Blake during the Beacon arc... but with Sun.

- Blake openly talked about her WF past to Sun before doing it with her team. Sun also got to help Blake work through her Adam issues during the Menagerie arc, without which she would have never really been able to have that talk with Yang at the Farm.

- Yang only intervened and talked Blake into attending the dance after Sun failed to break through to her and went to her friends about it. Even thought they shared the first dance, Blake spent the rest of the dance with Sun (and later they were joined by Neptune and Weiss).

- V3 had Blake blushing at Sun.

- V4 and V5 gave Sun the "meeting the parents" moment.

I have had people throw me Sun's reply to Neptune in V6 as proof the Sun has no romantic interest in Blake, to which I respond: any other reply would have been a HUGE RED FLAG. Maybe I am naive, but I do not think you should help people just because you expect sth in return, specially if that person is your friend and/or crush. Relationships, platonic or romantic, shouldn't be purely transactional, it's not a business.

I have nothing against BB happening either, it damn well looks like it's going to happen. I did take a lot of issue with it in V6 (and I am still iffy about it right now) because it doesn't seem like they are going to address that Yang projected a lot of her abandonment issues (which esteemed largely from Raven) onto Blake. And, as far as I can tell, Yang has given no signs of trying to understand why Blake left or that it wasn't a personal affront to her (except for when Weiss pointed it out to her) or getting involved in the faunus issues that are so important to Blake.

Unless those things are properly addressed, I feel the BB is en-route to becoming really toxic.

I have had the issue that when I say this, people think I am accusing Yang or Blake of being like Adam, so I want to clarify that toxic =/= abusive.