Doing another RWBY hatedom rant because people seemed to like the last one and I have more to say:
I absolutely despise it when people call Yang selfish and a terrible sister in Volume 9 when it came to Ruby’s struggles with her mental health. I have two main issues.
1. People seem to think that because Yang is Ruby’s big sister then she needs to always be at her beck and call. She can’t disagree with Ruby. She can’t let Ruby do things on her own. She can’t focus on herself or her happiness. She must always be focusing on Ruby. That’s not how relationships, especially sibling ones, work. People seem to think that Yang must sacrifice everything for Ruby and if she is anything less than that then she is a terrible sister. Do people forget how much Yang had given up for Ruby?! She raised her! She sacrificed her life for her! As soon as she was ready to went to go find Ruby in Volume 5 instead of her mom, which she had wanted to do for most of her life! I fully believe that if Raven didn’t have her portal semblance, which made finding/getting to Ruby MUCH easier, Yang would not have bothered. Yang loves her sister so much! But just because she’s a big sister does not mean that she isn’t allowed to struggle or focus on herself.
2. Here’s the big reason. As someone who has had to deal with a VERY similar experience in my life it absolutely infuriates me when people call Yang a terrible person and sister. I won’t go into too much detail because it’s not my place and I’d rather keep the information private but a couple years ago my sister hit a very low point mentally and it got very scary. (She’s doing much better now don’t worry). Here’s something that most people don’t realize when someone very close to you is going through something like Ruby did: You don’t tend to realize how bad it is. I knew that my sister had her struggles, but I genuinely thought she was doing alright. Afterwards I felt like such a terrible person because I wished that I noticed more and wished she had told me what was going on. This is exactly how Yang felt! She knew her sister was struggling, but didn’t realize just how bad Ruby’s mental state had gotten. She would try to comfort Ruby, not realizing that it was making it worse. She wished that Ruby had told her so that she could help her. It’s a really shitty situation to be in. This is on top of the fact that all of team RWBY were in a very stressful situation after having witnessed the fall of Atlas. I don’t think any of them were in great headspace’s, Ruby was just in a much worse place.
Honestly the entirety of Volume 9, in my opinion, was very realistic in its portrayal of mental health issues both as the person struggling with it and as the people around them. These situations are messy, complicated, and are never straightforward. Trying to treat it as anything else really shows that people don’t know what they’re talk about.
Yang is a good sister. She’s not perfect, but guess what? No one is! Remember we as an audience know so much more than the characters do. Just because characters don’t handle a situation perfectly doesn’t mean they’re garbage.
As a RWBY fan it can be really upsetting to see so many people criticize the show and try to undermine every little thing about it. Bumbleby being a prime example.
But I will always remember my mom watching volume 9 with me after the kiss scene. This wonderful woman is in her 50s, has zero FNDM involvement, is new to LGBTQ+ content, and has watched volumes years apart from each other with no refresher due to waiting for the next volume. Despite all this her response to me telling her that there were a large group of people who didn’t like that Bumbleby became canon, but also called it lazy writing was amazing.
She looked at me with a confused look on her face and said: “There are people who watched the show and didn’t think these two were going to get together since the beginning?”