Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-94.8.59.184-20140809221526/@comment-25353464-20150525235120

Honestly, the chance of Ironwood being a bad guy is unlikely. He is a large part of Atlas' infrastructure, and I don't believe that Atlas has reason to mistrust Vale as a country yet, but things could change for the worse in the future. My theroy is that Ironwood is actually being manipulated by Cinder.

I think that the major part of Cinder's plan was to lead Ironwood to the city. Let's face it, Cinder up to this point has been setting things up like a chessboard. Her original plan was to flood the city with Grimm, 'at the right time. 'The only reason Torchwick was forced to play his hand was because he was discovered by Ruby's Team. I bet that Cinder's original plan was to wait until all the huntsmen and huntresses, graduated or otherwise, were in one area: The Vytal Festival. With that, she'd trap/eliminate them all with one fell swoop. And while the Grimm have demolished the town, she'd use the virus she planted in the Cross Continetal Transmit system to make it impossible to get communications out in time for other Academies and Hunters to react before they can efficiently save anyone.

Ironwood's purpose in her plan? What do you think? They were most likely stealing from the military shipments that Ironwood brought along with him. Ironwood has shown some very large trust issues, questioning Ozpin and Qrow's actions (or rather, lack of them), so it wouldn't be illogical to assume that he would have kept some things, like the Atlesian Paladin, under his belt until he felt it neccesary to deploy them. We already know that he has brought a lot of things along with him, or as Glynda describes, 'taking his work along with him,' so it wouldn't be surprising if some of those ships contained Atlas' newst mech-suits. Even if he didn't take them intentionally, Cinder could have easily have some of her people infiltrate or bribe Atlesian dignitaries enough for them to make some... 'Mistakes.'