Board Thread:News and Announcements/@comment-6493589-20150619172544/@comment-24891101-20150629032038

VedranTheII wrote: True, but what we DO know is that the Schnee do not trust them with anything short of slave labor, probably under surveillance.

I’d be shocked if any of the crewmembers where faunus, given how the twitchy Weiss acts around dust.

I'd doubt that. The racism that exists (which is admittedly poorly shown) doesn't really suggest that they'd be slaves. It doesn't jive with the society we're led to believe exists. Even with the FFR occurring probably a few decades ago, we clearly see that faunus have civil rights. I'm pretty sure the SDC has plenty of normal faunus employees, but they also have faunus employees who are abused, preferentially given dangerous and menial jobs, and generally mistreated, only continuing to work for the SDC because they have few options. Blake's exposition suggests that while still subject to discrimination, faunus are for a great part treated fairly equitably. That the White Fang in its peaceful days was organizing boycotts suggests that there are many companies which were fine in their eyes. Even radicalized, they aren't attacking indiscriminately, suggesting that the situation is not so bad as to have nigh-slave labor in one of the largest companies on the planet. Their social position, while still inferior, is probably nominally equal, which isn't congruent with actual slaves which need to be monitored.

In short, comparisons to Reconstruction/post-Reconstruction and general Gilded Age labor practices is apt. Outright slave/near-slave labor doesn't mesh with rallies and boycotts.

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As to death, I agree with others in thinking it is too early. Remember that we're still in the first season, effectively. Though they seem to have given up on two volumes comprising a season, plot-wise this is still true, and V2 spilled into V3. Given that it's unlikely that they'd change gears radically, they'd add more to this arc rather than begin a new one. And the first arc is too early to kill off a major character, especially when they persist in the notion that this is a show for children.