Board Thread:Off Topic/@comment-86.152.12.193-20200221114123

So one theory I've seen making the rounds on the internet is the possibility of Cinder Fall getting a redemption arc at some point in RWBY's future. Justifications for this range from Pyrrha's soul awakening inside Cinder and opening her eyes to all the evil she's done to Salem kicking Cinder out and leaving her for dead and everything in between. And I'm not beating about the bush: This. Will. Not. Work. While I am by no means an expert in writing, I do like to think that I have enough knowledge to point out flaws in people's pet theories that have little to no justification in reality. So I'm going to do exactly that by picking apart the concept of Cinder getting a redemption arc one fragment at a time, until the theory is destroyed at my feet. Okay, let's dive in!

Item One: Write With Purpose

When somone says that it doesn't make sense for a villain to get a redemption arc, people who want that villain to get a redemption arc will almost always bring up Zuko from Avatar: The Last Airbender as an example of how redemption arcs can be done really really well. And they're right on that front. Zuko is, in my humble opinion, one of the best, if not the absolute best reformed villain we've seen in recent times. Actually, that's not just in my opinion, that's in everyone's opinion. But Zuko deserves better than being a 'redemption arcs for villains can work well' card. What people don't realise about Zuko is that his redemption arc worked so well because it was planned for him right from the word 'go'. If you look back over the series with the benefit of hindsight, Zuko is almost tailor-made for a redemption arc. He's got a tragic past that provided him with a solid motivation for his villainy, a wise and caring mentor figure in the form of his uncle Iroh (who, by the way, IS THE BEST MENTOR IN ANYTHING EVER), and personal connections to almost all of our main cast. This is without even mentioning the fact that Zuko is only attempting to capture the Avatar so that he can return home with his 'HONOUR' restored, complicated by the fact that the exact moment it's revealed that the Avatar is still alive, everyone in the Fire Nation is gunning for him to ruin Zuko's chances of returning home. Zuko takes a back seat as the first season's main antagonist the moment Admiral Zhao shows up, and he graduates from 'sympathetic villain' to 'semi-anti-hero' the moment his crazy sister Azula shows up. And another reason Zuko's redemption arc worked so well is because it was so slow. He doesn't fully graduate to Team Good Guy until episode 51... of 61. It's halfway through the final season before he's officially a hero.

Now, I know what you're thinking: "86, you said this was going to be an explanation of why a Cinder redemption arc doesn't work, but so far all I'm seeing is a wall of text gushing about Zuko. What gives?" Well, remember how I said that Zuko's redemption arc was planned for him right from the word 'go'? That's the first big problem with a Cinder redemption arc. Characters are written with their intended purposes in mind. If you want to write a Disney-style villain, you write them as a Disney-style villain. If you want to write a paragon hero, you write them as a paragon hero. Zuko was written with the purpose of a redemption arc in mind. Cinder, however, was not. Cinder was written as a straight-up antagonist - a petty, vindictive power-hungry woman who will burn down everything in her path to get what she wants. Now, answer me this: How is one supposed to take a character who has routinely demonstrated that they are an absolutely despicable human being and turn them into a hero? The usual answer to this is snapshot redemptions, which are one of the worst examples of bad writing I've ever seen, but more often that not, if a writer wants to avoid audience backlash, the answer is...

Jinn: You can't. 

For Cinder to get a redemption arc, she would need to be pulled completely out of the character archetype she was written to fill, in doing so painting either her actions going forward or her actions looking back as disturbingly out-of-character, and rewritten as a completely different character with different moral values, and that doesn't work because your audience will call bullshit and call you out for being a hack writer. Yes, this is coming from me, the guy who just wrote an entire paragraph gushing about Zuko. I do hear myself.

Item Two: Villainous Resumes

Now let's get into the big problems. Cinder is an absolutely despicable person, and she has done some horrible, horrible things in the time she's been on the show. She framed Yang, is confirmed to be abusive to Emerald, orchestrated Penny's death, killed Amber, Ozpin and Pyrrha directly, destroyed Beacon, impaled Weiss, killed Vernal, and most recently, sent Neo to kill Oscar and take the relic and attempted to kill Winter, Fria and Penny, the latter for the second time. That's a lot of bad stuff. And this is a core difficulty when writing a redemption arc, especially one for a prominent antagonist: the more despicable your antagonist was when they were a villain, the more stupid and/or out of character it will seem if the heroes convienently forget about all the horrible things they did. In the case of Cinder, half of Team RWBY currently holds a grudge against her and the other two want her dead on principle, while Team JNR are still holding a grudge about Pyrrha's death and Qrow is all too familiar with her actions, having stopped her from aquiring the full powers of a Maiden. Even for the notoriously optimistic Ruby, it would the single biggest writing mistake ever made on this show if they didn't spend the first month holding Crescent Rose's gun mode to Cinder's head if she showed up claiming that she was a good guy now. Cinder is a cruel, spiteful person, and Team RWBY knows this, which is why it is going to be difficult for them to move past all the horrible things and even start tolerating her nearby if the redemption arc route is taken, which it should not be. Circling back to Zuko, he didn't really do much that was truly evil. I mean, yeah, he was trying to capture the Avatar, which is kind of an objectively evil thing to do, but at least he had a reason to try and capture Aang, rather than the rest of the Fire Nation, who were just doing it to spite Zuko. Heck, he even spoke out against a plan to use new recruits to the Fire Nation army as meat shields against the Earth Kingdom, and he got that famous scar of his because of that. He burned down, like, one village - and that was quickly put out by Aang in any case - and showed remarkable restraint when trying to find the Avatar in the South Pole. He honoured his word to leave the people alone when Aang came with him willingly. He was a very honourable antagonist, which is why his redemption arc worked. Cinder is kind of the antithesis to Zuko - she has no honour, routinely uses underhanded or sneaky methods to get what she wants, has burned down multiple areas and treats her subordinates as expendable. Thus it follows that she isn't compatible with a redemption arc, since she is everything Zuko is not.

Item Three: Justifications

Motivations are a key part of any good villain, and RWBY is... decent at it. Some of the villains have decent motivations, like Hazel, Merlot and Roman, others have... less than sound ones, like Emerald and Watts, and others just don't have a stated motivation, like Tyrian and Cinder. And there's the problem. If you're going to redeem a villain, they need an understandable and non-Freudian excuse for their villainy, one that puts it into perspective and makes it seem like it was... well, perhaps not the right thing to do, but an understandable thing to do. In Zuko's case (this is the last time I mention Zuko in this, I promise), his motivation was that he wanted his father, the Fire Lord Ozai, to respect him and restore his honour. This becomes especially tragic when one recalls that the first time we see Ozai (albeit in a flashback), he burns half of Zuko's face off for speaking out against a plan that would have led to dozens of deaths of new recruits to the Fire Nation army. Maidens, he's an even worse father than Jacques Schnee... So Zuko was sent out on a fool's errand by an uncaring father who fully expected him to never return and is only trying to capture Aang because it will bring him favour with his father - who he comes to realise over the course of the series is a horrible person who cares for nothing but himself. This is ultimately what spurs him to redemption - he's not convinced by a heartfelt chat with the good guys where he learns their side of things, or his evil family doing something extra-super-evil to push him over the edge, he just reexamines his priorities and realises that the life he thought he wanted is not the life he actually wanted. Cinder, not having a stated motivation (yet - I have hope after her comments to Winter in the Volume 7 finale), does not have this chance. The only way I could possibly begin seeing a Cinder redemption arc being possible is if we got a non-Freudian motivation for her villainy in a coming Volume, and even then it would be a stretch. And if her motivation is just something like 'I want more power than I already have', then all chances of a redemption arc gets flushed down the drain because that is not the sort of motivation that serves a redemption arc.

Conclusion

So, with all these points put together, Cinder has almost no chance of getting a redemption arc unless some truly godlike writing is pulled next season to give her a good motivation, and even then it would still be nigh-impossible to craft a good redemption arc for her without A) sabotaging her character and B) sabotaging Team RWBY's characters. So while Zuko (I LIED!) may remain the 'villain redemption arcs can be good' card for years to come, Cinder is one of the characters that card does not and will probably never apply to. I bid you goodnight.

PS: The reason I kept bringing up Zuko was because it just struck me that Cinder is like an eviler, genderbent version of him - they both work(ed in Zuko's case) for the main antagonist, they can both shoot fire and they both have scars on the left side of their faces. Yes, I did in fact check the sides. 