Talk:Emerald Sustrai/@comment-27350660-20160124103156/@comment-27350660-20160124121806

Urano, sure you can. Even the good guys would want to be strong and  feared by their enemies. It keeps them from attacking, preventing loss of life. I haven't really done an in-depth analysis of who, objectively, the Good Guys are in this story, but neither side is exactly squeaky clean. That's partly what makes this story so interesting. The Four Kingdoms may come out on top, but what compromises will they have to make?

Remember the scene on the train where Yang gives her opponent a wink and a happy smile before punching him out right next to a bomb that's about to explode. Does she realise that that person will most likely die? Now that's the heat of the battle, but... "Why do they have to be so happy all of the time?"

In the first scene with Ruby in the dust shop, she is fighting Roman's mooks with a very sharp and deadly weapon, and later we learn that "They never came back". Maybe they just went home, but maybe Ruby killed them all. In self defense, of course, but still.

As it turns out, if Mercury had wanted to kill Ruby, he'd have had the perfect opportunity to shoot her in the back of the head while she was sitting on the ground crying over Penny, but he didn't. Just slunk away. So it would appear that he only wanted to prevent Ruby from interfering in their plans, which he did. He didn't need to kill her, so he didn't.

Nobody on the RWBY cast (including everybody) is exactly innocent anymore, not even Ruby. We like the people on the Four Kingdoms' side because they're our violent psychopaths. And the real over-arcing story could be the slide of the Four Kingdoms into a "morally grey area", and then the Grimm take over. The real role of the Maidens could be to prevent that from happening.