(RWBY Is) Subverting Tropes with Ren & Nora

Hello again, 

Today I bring you an episode inspired by a conversation I saw on Tumblr that spiraled off into a whole script. 

Namely, about how Ren & Nora at first glance embody certain classic character archetypes, but over time are revealed to be extremely subversive. 

To kick us off, on the surface, Ren seems very much like the classic stoic, an emotionless, cool anime pretty-boy, or otherwise perceived to be as extremely serene and calm. 

Sure he has his moments of dorkiness, usually brought on by his red oni blue oni relationship with Nora, but that is by no means the depth of his character. 

Th fact of the matter is, that view on Ren was established at Beacon,. 

IE, a point in his life when nothing terribly disruptive was going on and it was easy for him to go with the flow so to speak. 

We see chips in the façade when things start come untethered however. 

 Sometimes its just a flash of terror like in his fight with the King Taijitu, or a reckless disregard for his own wellbeing as seen in V3. 

But when it truly started coming to the forefront was in Volume 4. 

This is when we see Ren with few safety nets, back against the wall, confronted with things that 'hurt' him and it only goes harder from there. 

The less control he has over the situation, the more perceived danger and chaos there is, the more Ren's calm façade peels away to reveal a boiling cocktail of emotional problems that he 'tries' to suppress. 

Unsurprisingly, forcing one's self to be stoic and repressing your feelings isn't actually a good thing and causes anger, bubbling resentment and tends to capsize fully into yelling and fighting. 

He's been making a turn in Volume 8, but this is being done, not by his stoic façade becoming his natural disposition but by him actually becoming more in tune with his own and others emotions and expressing them more freely. 

Now we move onto Nora! 

Introduced very much as a sort of classic manic pixie dream girl, with a sort of those two guys' back up trope role with Ren, Nora's waaay deeper than first advertised and much angrier. 

I love her for that. 

But I digress, we actually starting seeing some of Nora's depths more clearly than Ren's, with her usually showing a far better emotional insight than anyone on her team. 

Of course her frustration at Pyrrha and Jaune's antics is somewhat hypocritical given her and Ren's relationship at that stage. 

Emotional intelligence and surprisingly calm under traumatic fire, Nora's had a sharp and mature grasp of situations beneath her cheery exterior that is easy to miss. 

We of course saw flashes of Nora's anger both in her aggressive fighting style and more comedic scenes in past volumes. 

But RT is quite happy to use scenes like that and build depth onto them later, take Qrow's alcoholism for example. Its a joke when first introduced, but as the situations deteriorate its shown for the deeply unhealthy and damaging coping mechanism it is. 

But back to Nora, V7 and 8 is when all the layers start being torn back, from her insecurity in her relationship with Ren and hasty efforts to make headway. 

To her empathetic and visceral anger on behalf of the forgotten people in Mantle. 

And finally coming to ahead with her own narrative pigeonholed as a sort of extension/double act to Ren and realizing, thanks to their divergent goals, how much of herself she's poured into being a comedic accessory rather than her own person/character. 

Which culminated in the very mature decision to not enter a relationship with Ren just because he was finally ready, because she needs to sort herself out first. 

Shows have of course given characters like these depth in the past. 

But rarely do I think have they made the characters themselves, essentially commentary on those very tropes, or looked into the emotional implications of existing in such roles and using such coping mechanism from both a personal and narrative stand point. 

Which I think is neat. 

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