RWBY: With Friends Like These (2020)
Season 7, Episode 12
1/10
Out Of Character
1 February 2020
Warning: Spoilers
Most of the volume was amazing, up until this episode. This shows main goal ever since Monty's death was to create a story of death not being the end. A story of people being able to move past tragedy, find that life has meaning with those who are still around, and to let the love for those you've lost drive you to keep moving forward. This death had no meaning, no build up and no resolution. Clover was killed off purely for his connection to Qrow, destroying the healing arc Qrow was partway through. They created a character to perfectly compliment his negative aspects, and then decided to trash any hope Clover may have given Qrow by killing him in the most gruesome way this show has ever done.

Besides the characters having to go extremely out-of-character for any of these actions to work (Qrow teaming up with a serial killer to fight his friend, Clover forgetting all his professional hunstmen training and letting a serial killer run wild, etc), there's also the problem of what kind of relationship was destroyed here. This was the first hint of gay representation that this show could have canonically had. They knew what they had been doing as well, with the staff making teasing tweets about the relationship and having many parallels to another almost-existing relationship in the show. Clover and Qrow flirted, back and forth, many times. The creators claimed they knew better than to "bury their gays" and follow the tragic tropes gay relationships follow, yet they still betrayed their MLM fans with, again, the more gruesome on-screen death that has ever been on this show. They built up a healthy gay romance with some amazing potential, only to destroy any bit of hope their LGBT+ fans had left for them. THey've been dangling hints of LGBT+ characters in front of their fans for 7+ years, yet they have never canonically delivered.

TL;DR This story of hope died with this episode, gruesome and unfixable. RT does not care for their LGBT+ fans at this point and the writers had to force the characters into the most OOC they have ever been just for some "angst."
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