User blog:Imosa1/Why even Beacon

Does the Hunter's existance even make sense in light of what they seem to want to accomplish?

Thus far the show has established Beacon as a place to train students to become hunters. Hunters serve the purpose of fighting Grimm and can also play some auxilerary rolls in law enforcemet. Essentially they seem to be like a special operations group which can deal with a lot of stuff but mainly Grimm. The thing that wonders me is how well Beacon trains students to become hunters, and what conclusions we can draw about hunters from the way Beacon trains them.

Lets take a short detour to talk about some resource allocation. When you have reasonable knowledge of an enemy you can organize your resources to best counter the enermy. Lets do a simple example in the case of Grimm. Of all the Grimm we've seen thus far, only one of them has flown, the Nevermore. Lets say we've observed the Grimm and now know that 1/20th of them fly. All other things being equal we can say that it makes sense to devote only 1/20th of our resources to countering flying Grimm. Alocating less resource would not make sense because then we would be feeling too much pressure from the air, as we deal with more flying grimm then we have resources to counter. Alocating more resources would also not make sense because we'd have resources going to waste, targeting enemies that don't exist. So if we can draw these comparsons we can do so in reverse. If 1/20th of resources are going toward fighting flying Grimm then, all othe things being equal, 1/20th of all Grimm should be flying. Note that the use of "all other things being equal" is very imporant in this hypothetical. The conclusion that I would like to stress here is that we can make judgements about the Beacon Academy's enemy based on how it destributes its combative resources.

Given this conclusion, we can now make judgments about Beacon based on the kinds of students that it has to work with. As we step out of our hypothetical situation, things become instantly more complicated. In comparison to our hypothetical, resources that are used to counter flying Grimm are also applied to non-flying Grimm. Yang is a perfect example of this, defying preconceptions of her knuckles and staying air born longer then anyone else durring her initiation. Examples beyond Yang show us that many students opt to become something more akin to a one man army rather then a specialized combatant. Most every student has both a ranged and melee component to their weapon, after all. With this average of a Beacon student, what does it seem like a Beacon student is prepared to do?

The answer seems to be just about everything. A Beacon student is just as comfortable fighting Gimm, as they are fighting humans, as they are being launched off a cliff, as they are navigating a forest. Hunters are all around badasses ready to take on a myriad of situations with the same level of confidence. However, this raises somewhat of a contradiction.

If a hunters job is primarily to hold off the forces of Grimm, why do they need to feel comfortable in all of these situations. Humans in the RWBY-verse are not clueless as to the capablities of Grimm. In Professor Port's class on what appears to be Grimm studies, he displays posters about Grimm which include all the Grimm we've seen thus far in the series. This is perfectly reasonable because it would be foolish to launch their students into an area with unkown dangers. The Grimm we've seen so far in the series are not the threat that requre the resposne of the Hunters. The Grimm we've seen so far have been studied and are expected and if someone wanted to kill those Grimm they wouldn't send one man armies of generally trained individuals to fight them, because it would make much more sense to send more speicialized, less valuable fighters with specialized gear to take on the threat.

I'd like to make a reference to a popualr anime that dealt with a similar issue, Shingeki no Kyojin, more commonly known as Attack on Titan. In much the same way as RWBY, Attack on Titan is about humans living in a world dominated by a threat, mainly the Titans. In response the first line of defense, the Recon Corps, develops a strategy well fit to their situation based on the fact that they aren't ignorant of their enemy. The result is that they are able to survive in a very hostile world and against an overwhelming enemy. In addition, unlike Beacon in the RWBY-verse, the Recon Crops does not consist of the best combatents in society. The Recon Corps shows that a group of more average people can be trained to handle a special situation and then be organized to survive a threat.

We can make one more judgemnt about Beacon and it's goals based on what we've discussed here. The true identity of what Hunters and Beacon students are training to fight. In what case would the arsenal of a Beacon student be useful. The immediate answer is an overwhelming enemy. As seen durring the fight against the Nevermore and Death Stalker, the aresenal of a Beacon student is not set to deal with every threat on their own, and they do need to team up to fight a larger enemy. It seems entirely plausible that the wilderness of Vale holds enemies that a single student can not face. However, this is more an issue of scale rather then a new problem to solve. As I've been trying to push with this entire article, once humans know that a creature like a giant Nevermore exist precautions can be taken and the combatants can be equipped with more suitable equipment. The crewdest solution is simply to scale up existing strategies to combat the larger, stronger, threat. In this way, fighting the big Ursa is really no diffirent then fighting the small Ursa.

The more likely danger to me would be brand new Grimm, with brand new and strange abilities requireing some more unconventional thought. However the most likely enemey to me would be human enemies. Ozpins interactions with Qrow, and Glenda's fight with Cinder convey to me that Beacon is already aware of more troublesome enemies and it seems natural to me that they'd be preparing their students for these enemies. Even if they didn't know about these enemies, there is a certain philosophy in education where you prepare a student for a job that doesn't exist yet and so it makes sense to prepare students with a more general set of skills and abilities to combat a currently unkown threat.

If my ideas here are correct I think we can expect a few things in the next volume of RWBY. The announced tournament provides a great oppertunity to see the state of the rest of the world and specifically get a broader sense of what Hunters and Hunters in training are like. If Ozpin actually has unique knowledge or even just more forethought, then we should see other Hunters in training show much more specialized behavior. Otherwise it is possible that the entire institution of Hunters exists to address a more mysterious threat.

The goal of Beacon and the Hunters is not entirely known as of now, but it seems almost possitive that it is not just to fight the kind of Grimm we saw in the series so far, or if nothing else, it is less to fight these Grimm then we would currently be lead to believe. It doesn't make sense to train one man armies to fight the creatures that we've seen so far. It is simply more sensible to fight the creatures we've seen thus far with a combatant with less skill and more specialization. Things like the behavior in Attack on Titan only support this. Finally the mysterious nature of the Grimm, and knowledge that Ozpin must have, suggest that students at Beacon are preparing for much more powerful enemies then what we've seen so far. The full runing on these ideas is unfortuantely yet to be addressed in the upcomming 2nd volume and subsequent seasons.