RWBY Ice Queendom’s Finale Sends a Confused Message About Racism

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The following contains spoilers for RWBY: Ice Queendom Episode 12, “Best Day Ever,” now streaming on Crunchyroll.

RWBY: Ice Queendom aired the final episode of its Japanese run on Sept. 18 with the English dub set to debut on Sept. 25. While the premise of Ice Queendom is to address an inconsistency in Weiss Schnee’s earlier character development between RWBY Vols. 1 and 2, it goes the extra mile of addressing her relationship with Blake Belladonna, a Faunus and a former member of the White Fang. The most important question, however, is whether the series successfully tackles the topic of racism without playing into harmful tropes.

Ice Queendom correctly depicts that racism is a system of racial oppression that one dominant group imposes on a less powerful group. In the world of Remnant, humans hold the most power and are racist against the Faunus, who are largely human in appearance but also possess some animal traits. Some Faunus have cat or rabbit ears, others have tails, some have horns and others are known to be aquatic. While humans on Remnant are believed to be created from the God of Light and Grimm are created by the God of Darkness, it isn’t established in the main RWBY series who created the Faunus.

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What RWBY: Ice Queendom’s Depiction of Racism Gets Right

At best, RWBY: Fairy Tales establishes that a third deity known the God of Animals is responsible for creating the Faunus, though this isn’t confirmed in the main series and the idea is not revisited in Ice Queendom. What the confirmed deities in the main canon does establish, however, is the tendency of human beings to colonize groups they decide are less than themselves, resulting in a theft of resources, displacement, enslavement, exploitation, genocide and erasure from history.

In the main RWBY series, human colonization of the Faunus is only hinted at with the establishment of Menagerie as a “reserved island” for the Faunus, and Blake describing her homeland as a reminder of their unequal status in human society. When Blake allows herself to become possessed by a Nightmare Grimm as a means of fighting the Nightmare version of Weiss in Ice Queendom, she explicitly confirms the White Fang was founded by the Faunus in response to human colonization.

Blake clarified this to mean human theft of Faunus lands and their resources, and exploiting them for slave labor and cannon fodder in human wars. Repeat violence against the Faunus community also led to the radicalization of some White Fang members.

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Another way Ice Queendom accurately depicts racism as a system of oppression is that Blake is distrustful of her human friends and her school headmaster, Ozpin. Despite Ozpin presenting himself as an “ally” of the Faunus, in both Ice Queendom and in the main series, he interrogates Blake about her decision to hide her Faunus features despite being aware of the violent racism that exists against Faunus on Remnant. He also asks about her past membership in the White Fang the same way a police officer interrogates suspects at a crime scene, forcing her to justify her motivations for attending his school.

Though Ozpin goes through the motions of “reassuring” Blake that Faunus are accepted at his school, his police-like behavior does not convince her of his sincerity. Instead, her behavior validates her need to lie about her past as a way of protecting herself against potential expulsion from Beacon Academy. The fact that he threatens to fight anyone who “threatens the peace” in an intimidating voice does nothing to disprove Blake’s need for self-preservation. The involvement of her rejoining the White Fang with the knowledge she gains at Beacon to progress the group’s initiatives doesn’t fly over her head.

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What RWBY: Ice Queendom’s Depiction of Racism Gets Wrong

One thing Ice Queendom’s depiction of racism gets wrong, however, is how it presents Blake as being equally responsible for maintaining racial tensions by only focusing on her pain and not on Weiss’s. Misrepresenting Blake’s rightful anger at the violence Faunus experience by humans in positions of power like the Schnee family as “selfishness” plays into the myth of “reverse racism.” Misrepresenting Blake’s anger also harmfully argues “extremism goes both ways,” which fails to take into account that racism — like many other systems of oppression — thrives on power imbalance. Between Weiss and Blake, only Weiss has the institutional power to influence meaningful change, whereas Blake can only achieve it through protest.

While Ice Queendom does depict Weiss taking ownership of the fact her family’s violent exploitation harmed the Faunus community, how she acknowledges it also sends a confusing message. On one hand, Weiss recognizes that it falls on her to work with the Faunus to build a more equal society, but fails to acknowledge the need to make reparations with the Faunus community. She especially doesn’t question if her grandfather, Nicholas Schnee, was really the benevolent founder of the Schnee Dust Company she remembers. More specifically, she doesn’t question whether her grandfather actively stole Faunus land to mine for Dust — it’s implied to have started before her father Jacques.

At best, Ice Queendom does well at ending with Weiss committing to unlearn her internalized racism and coming to terms with her own past so she can move forward. When it comes to its handling of racism as a theme, however, it doesn’t quite stick the landing. As such, Ice Queendom is best enjoyed as a storyline that puts Weiss through a path of self-discovery that feels consistent with her later development in the main RWBY series.

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