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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/diamondsandglass on 2024-04-08 00:19:18.
Special thanks to u/Turret_Run for inspiring me to actually finish writing this with their excellent Rooster Teeth write-up. Additional thanks to the friends I’ve alienated by getting their help with editing this post.
Hello HobbyDrama, it’s good to be back. I normally pop up here bi-yearly to post about ballet drama. You may have read my last post about Olga Smirnova’s defection from Russia.
What is “RWBY”?
First of all, it’s pronounced “ruby.” The main character’s name is also Ruby. It’s not as confusing as you might expect. Ruby is a 15 year old mega-competent anime warrior with a scythe that is also a gun. Every weapon in this show can be described as “blank and also a gun”. And there are a lot of weapons.The show is ostensibly about a team of four girls, led by Ruby, who are all going to Beacon Academy to become warriors defending their world, referred to as hunters/huntresses. The main characters are Ruby (already discussed), Weiss (her rival/friend/confusing rival-friend), Blake (a reserved, mysterious huntress), and Yang (Ruby’s half sister and team’s leading pun machine). Each character is represented by a color- red, white, black, and yellow respectively.
RWBY has had a… messy production history. It was originally conceived by Monty Oum, a well–known 3D animator. He pitched it to his friends at Rooster Teeth, a small media company he’d worked with in the past for their show Red vs. Blue. They loved it and agreed to make it, but the men they appointed to write it hadn’t ever written a show before. They’d really only written for Red vs. Blue. This led to a lot of writing issues (that HBomberguy explored more than I can in his video- ) that were only compounded as the show got more bigger. That’s not really within the scope of this post, but it is important to keep in mind whenever we talk about RWBY.
What is “shipping”?
If you’re on the internet at all, you’ve heard of shipping. It’s the concept of pairing two (or more) characters together because you think they’re cute. At best, it’s harmless fun. At worst, it causes fandom-splintering drama, as is the case in this post.
What is Bumblebee?
As you can probably guess if you think back to the character’s color schemes, Bumblebee is the punny ship name for Blake and Yang. It is also occasionally stylized as Bumbelby (by at the end for Blake and Yang). There were a lot of popular ships from the show (Renora and White Rose stick out), but to me Bumblebee was by far the biggest. That’s possibly personal bias, but if we carefully sift through the dregs of Tumblr, DeviantArt, and Reddit’s own r/RWBY, we can find enough fan art of the two to wallpaper a teenager’s bedroom (which I may or may not have done). There are posts from today all the way back to the dawn of the show and everywhere in between about how cute they would be together.
If I had to break down the main reason this ship exists it would probably be one of four reasons:
- They share a lot of important character growth moments
- People love shipping the introvert character with the extrovert
- Black and yellow look good together
- People wanted to see queer rep in the show
This last point sticks out, as a good chunk of the people who shipped Bumblebee would cite this along with their other reasoning. RoosterTeeth has a reputation as being a progressive company (that we now know was certainly unearned, per Turret-run’s post and others) so people were hopeful that RWBY would include a diverse cast of characters. However in terms of actual representation there was a grand total of one person of color in the first two seasons. The first explicitly queer couple in the show didn’t confess feelings for each other until season 9 (more on this in the “Spoilers” section). As of this writing RoosterTeeth is in corporate death mega-hell, so there might never be a tenth season. People felt as though Bumblebee had a good chance at becoming canon, especially since there was a good amount of fan support for the ship. So imagine how they felt when Blake and Yang were ripped apart for Blake to be put on a literal ship with someone else.
What is Black Sun?
I don’t want to make it seem like Bumblebee was a universally beloved ship. In fact, there were people who hated it. Some just didn’t like the idea of these two together, many were sick of the deluge of Bumblebee fans drowning everything else out, and most chose to take up another ship in defiance. At first people jumped ship (so to speak) for Monochrome or Freezerburn (Blake x Weiss and Yang x Weiss respectively, although I prefer the ship name Yellow Snow for Yang x Weiss). However at the end of season 1 an alternative appeared in the form of a golden man with a monkey tail.
I need to take a brief tangent here to explain the concept of faunus. RWBY has a race of people called the faunus, who are humans with minimal animal characteristics. The faunus are discriminated against by humans, although this is handled really poorly in a way that would require its own separate post to explain. At the end of season 1 Blake is revealed to be a faunus with cat ears. She’s spent all season hiding these under a bow that looks suspiciously like cat ears.
This is all revealed when the gang almost literally runs into Sun, a faunus with monkey characteristics. After some brief tension which is quickly and unsatisfyingly resolved, Sun sticks around as a side character for the next 2 seasons. Some people turned to him as an alternative ship for Blake, and gave the ship the name Black Sun
Black Sun vs. Bumblebee
There were a number of relatively minor incidents that stirred up drama between the two factions early in the show. The first was Sun’s initial appearance, but in the second season there was an arc about a school dance. This dance was unimportant to the main plot, but very important if you care about petty shipping drama. Most relevant to this post, we get to see Yang and Blake dancing together, only for Blake to switch over to Sun mid-song. It’s not a super dramatic moment in the show, but it sure was to the fandom.
However even more dramatic were the events of season 4. The world starts going to shit at the end of season 3, and season 4 starts with Blake catching a ship to her parent’s house. Sun secretly slips aboard this ship, and surprises Blake. These two spend a season bantering and fighting sea monsters, while Yang is bedridden with trauma. Sun has been upgraded to a semi-main character at the worst possible time for Bumblebee shippers.
Black Sun has been Bumblebee’s main rival in shipping since Sun first appeared. Blake and Sun share a fair amount of screentime, even before sailing away into the sunset together. They also share being faunus, which doesn’t actually mean they have any shared experiences but people seem to think it does for some reason. Bumblebee shippers hated Black Sun because they felt Sun was taking up too much screen time, and were worried that RoosterTeeth were heading towards making these two get together instead of Blake and Yang. Black Sun shippers hated Bumblebee because Bumblebee shippers are annoying (self very much included). It was war.
Oh god oh fuck
June 2017. The RWBY volume 4 soundtrack is released. What would normally be a mundane occurrence suddenly explodes the RWBY fandom (or FNDM) thanks to track 8. The song is called“BMBLB”.Obviously this is an ode to the majesty of the humble honeybee, and not at all related to the ship of the same name. JK it’s a soft song about two women being in love filled with bumblebee and cat puns. You know who likes puns? Yang. You know who has cat ears? Blake. You get the idea.
Every RWBY forum is immediately flooded with posts about the song (ex- 1 2 3). Bumblebee shippers were elated. Black Sun shippers were FURIOUS. Everyone was confused.
No one working on the show had given any indication that a song like this was coming. The whole previous season made it seem like Black Sun was the staff’s preferred ship. So to go out of their way to release a song that had nothing to do with the season on the very end of the soundtrack seemed a little weird. One might almost say… suspicious.
Weird accusations and conclusions
This was meant to be a short, easy post while I was working on Ballet and Defection. I don’t know where I went wrong.
So, why was Bmblb written, and why put it out right now? Some people started to claim this counted as queerbaiting, since they were willing to hint at Bumblebee but never show it in the actual canon. Some people argued the songwriter/singer duo of Jeff and Casey Lee Williams had just gone AWOL and the writers hadn’t been consulted on the song at all. Some people vehemently claimed that the song was a love ballad from Yang to her motorcycle, which was named bumblebee. I’m not sure if anyone ever ac…
Content cut off. Read original on https://old.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/1byh7yz/anime_let_me_be_your_bmblb_one_of_rwbys_many_ship/
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