Board Thread:Speculation House/@comment-69.236.73.165-20130927001234/@comment-11188061-20130929154229

XDex wrote: PuffDragon wrote: Well - Velvet is a Beacon student, whether first year or older is unclear, but that means she's part of a team herself, so the conflict building up could also be beween CRDL and that.

I'd be curious how Velvet's team reacts and who is on it. An 'all-faunus-team' would be a little too much coincidence for my taste. I have a suspicion that the reason she was eating alone was because even her own team didn't invite her to eat with them. Not that they said she couldn't, but after having been discriminated against most of her life, she might not have even thought they wanted her around.

Ah, I like this. It is true that she was seen eating alone at a table, though I would like to argue that maybe her teammates saw Team CDRL coming for them, got scared and ran away (or was threatened) with Velvet too late to follow, and hence resulting in that kind of situation.

This still doesn't necessarily mean that her teammates were discriminating against her. It's actually terrifying to be approached by a gang of people who wasn't afraid to publicly humiliate or even hit you for their ego. It's no surprise that no one - not even Team RWBY and Team JNPR, though I guess that if Cardin persisted in humiliating Velvet even more Phyrra would stood up and done something - was willing to stand up and put a stop to things, especially after they've seen Cardin's combat prowess on stage (like exeggerated by Jaune's own incompetence, but still). I believe someone mentioned about the bystander effect, and that's exactly right.

It's the classic psychological question, really: If you see a person getting robbed on the streets, would you help them? A majority of people would say yes (especially the younger ones), but when you actually encounter this in real life there's a high probability that you would not help him out of fear. Nowadays people don't do crime without at least a lethal weapon with them, and the simplest knife would deter most people from even trying to stop the criminal.

Just a little bit of private talk here. This is definitely not the first time I've seen such a situation. I've experienced one myself, although hilariously I was on the phone and in a foul mood discussing some private matters, so without noticing how dangerous the situation actually was I literally shook off an idiot who tried to hold me down and walked away, until my other friends told me what happened and was like, 'it could've gone really bad' and stuff. Then the facts started to sink in, then I started looking behind my back, but well, thank god nothing bad happened. They outnumber us, but thankfully it's daylight and there's a lot of people around too. If a brawl did happen it would've just been plain ugly.

Point is, it's probably acceptable that Velvet's companions abandoned her the moment they realize she was Cardin's target, if that was the situation. Even if it wasn't, the moment Velvet became Cardin's bully victim, they very likely would not want to have anything to do with her for fear of getting bullied. Of course since RWBY isn't an anime where things would end too horribly for the victim (especially since it's just Season 1) Velvet should be redeemed in the future, with her teammates actually backing her up and protecting her from the 'Winchester threat'.

... Or Velvet could be such a saint that she redeemed Cardin himself from being a bully and the two live together happily ever after. XDDDDDDD