Thread:BlizzardDragon/@comment-25936766-20190210225610/@comment-25936766-20190211034735

BlizzardDragon wrote: 1) All valid points, but it still reinforces my argument that those calling her a Mary Sue are misusing the term...

2) with the complaints leveled at her in Volume 6 in particular being a result of the writers trying to turn her into a Shonen Lead, but going too far and turning her into a bad shonen lead ala Natsu or Naruto.

3) Ruby honestly doesn't work as a Main Character because not only is she one of the least interesting of the major cast....

4) Sun - A young man trying to help his friend as she drowns in negativity while admitting he hasn't been a proper leader to his own team.

5) Cinder - A woman's lust for power and revenge drags her further and further into darkness as she loses more of her humanity with each passing minute.

6) Each of them have the potential to lead stories of their own, and while some of them were botched like Blake's and Cinder's....

7) Jaune's and Blake's arcs only really continued when they were away from Ruby.

8) Before, others developed at her expense, now its the opposite, Ruby is "developing" at the expense of others.

9) If anyone should have been the Main Character, it should have been Weiss, Qrow, or Oscar.

10) I won't say Jaune should have been the main character, as that would have caused a bigger issue of people proclaiming Jaune to be Miles' insert.

11) So to have her see Penny again but different from how she once was, to see Ruby struggle to come to terms with the idea the Penny she knew is truly gone and she'll have to start over, possibly even breaking down at one point... 1) It's not quite "misusing", since she does have clear Mary Sue traits, she is on the line towards official Mary Sueness, all she needs is to hog more of the spotlight. You could say that right now they're not wrong, just exagerating.

2) Can't comment on Natsu since I DGAS about Fairy Tail, but Naruto isn't that bad. Yes, the Talking-no-Jutsu is obnoxious and stupid, fuck whatever aesop it's delivering, but that aside he's.....not the best protag in shonen anime, sure, but at least decent enough compared to others in Shonen Jump.

Besides, it didn't take him 6 years to show any real growth, and his growth is one of the most noticeable in the Shonen Jump long-runners, not being merely "got stronger" but going from "idiot kid who just wants attention" to "man who tries so hard to protect his family (village) that he ends up abandoning his personal family but still tries to be a good parent/husband" to whatever happens after Ep 57 of Boruto's Dad's Son, I kinda stopped watching at that point.

But my point there is....Naruto grows more like an actual person, even if just relatively, which is a good point for him compared to other shonen protags in and outside of Shonen Jump. Ruby, meanwhile.........hasn't. You could say she's worse than Naruto, I guess.

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3) Nah, she does look like a main character. Just, not one that works in this setting or premise.

She's the vanilla type, that is bland and uninteresting on purpose. Problem is, she's a terrible one. The vanilla protag's main goal is to make everyone else stand out more. It works in works where the protag isn't that important, like harem shows, dating sims, or some RPGs. Or all of them combined.

The problem is....like I pointed out, she's not really bland, she's a special snowflake. She does her job as a vanilla protag but only because the writers fail or refuse to capitalize on the things she does have that are interesting, like Silver Eyes. Which took them 5 years, with 5 and half Volumes where other characters got fleshed out in her stead.

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4) Wait, he admitted it?

5) ....When you describe her that way, I wouldn't mind a version of RWBY where she's the main protagonist.

6) I wouldn't say Cinder's story got botched. I mean, it got ultra-skipped in Vol.4 but that aside it went in a natural direction for a sadistic bitch who has one of the blandest, cheapest motivations out of all the villains, beaten only by "MY GODDESS" Tyrian and "Sounds like fun, ok" Mercury.

7) To be fair on Blake's though, from the start it was quite separate from Ruby. Both her deal with Adam and her deal with the WF had nothing to do with her or even needed to. They were never going to go forward beyond "let's fight the WF" if she just stuck around and followed Ruby, at least not with the direction the writers were taking.

8) That can be said of any character in this show. When someone develops, someone else will not, sometimes even if they were part of the same plotline.

9) Weiss I can see and indeed it would make the show more interesting; instead of a girl who was just great and became a Huntress just to be a heroine, have a girl who still has much to learn at the start, who became a Huntress to help restore her family's honor, and who aims to become the CEO of a large company but needs to learn that she can't just tantrum her way through.

Oscar I can kind of see too, not too different from shows like Yugioh. Qrow though......having him as a main protag feels too weird for me to imagine.

10) Eh, they just need to shut down the haters with "it was Monty's plan all along!" (which is true in this case, Miles himself said so). Jaune already feels like the usual shonen protag that didn't come out of Shonen Jump.

11) Eh, you lost me at "breaking down". Remember that Ruby "didn't know her very long". She might have enough fucks to feel bad about something like that, but not enough to break down.