genuinely do not get how people watched midnight and came away going "🥺🥺poor rhodes uwu he was just doing his best 🥺🥺🥺"
like did we not watch the same episode? all the art of happy rhodes and cinder honestly just creeps me out like. THIS IS NOT A GOOD MAN. hot take but if rhodes was a woman none of you would be woobifying him like this. the FNDM really needs to stop obsessing over men in a show about women tbh but that's a rant for another day
as an avid cinder stan, i could not disagree with you more. rhodes wasn't a bad person. he was a person who made a bad decision in the heat of the moment. rhodes was a huntsman, so it's implied that he would've travelled all over remnant, carrying out missions & helping people. think about how many children he would've come across that were the victims of poverty, homelessness, slavery. you cannot expect one man to take on the burden of so many lives, whilst also risking them in the process. cinder & rhodes are the victims of circumstance. the madame was a rich woman, who owned an establishment frequented by other rich individuals. whose to say that if cinder was taken away by rhodes that it wouldn't put her in more danger? rich people in the universe of rwby hold a lot of power; the madame could have ordered the authorities to arrest rhodes, could have him assassinated, among many other things. & what would happen to cinder then? returned to the madame & abused even further, without the hope of escape that rhodes initially gave her, or she could just outright kill cinder & find another child slave. to put into perspective: how many homeless people do you come across & think to yourself "i wish i could put them in a home." so you drop them some money & hope they can put it to good use. but giving them money will not change the fundamentals of the society that has put them there in the first place. most people aren't homeless by choice, they're victims of circumstance, of a society that couldn't care less about the poor. rwby has never been a show solely about black or white, there's a lot of grey area. rhodes is the prime example of this. after cinder's aura shattered in her fight against rhodes, he tossed his weapons aside in a bid to help her & she acted defensively, killing him. yes, he made the poor choice of expecting a child to face up to crimes that were, in cinder's mind, very justifiable but he's not an inherently bad person.
please show me where I said he was an inherently bad person
“this is not a good man”
So, thing is, saying someone is not a good man does not inherently mean he's a bad man either. He was a flawed huntsman, one who acknowledged that he saw what Cinder was going through, stood by until his swords were stolen, then opted to train her instead of trying to get her to a better spot. This isnt saying he needed to help out every child he stumbled upon, but when a child actively steals your weapons with the intent of using them to free herself, telling her to "stick it out a while longer" and train her isnt exactly the best decision he made. Nor was him immediately drawing his weapons to arrest Cinder after she finally did break.
"this isn't saying he needed to help out every child he stumbled upom" "telling her to "stick it out a while longer" & train her isn't exactly the best decision he made" so which argument do you want to go for? either you wanted him to be literal saint who took in every abused child he came across or you accept that regular people are regular people & can make poor decisions.