The Atlas Arc did Penny dirty. Ever since we were introduced to
Penny back at Beacon, it was pretty obvious there was something different about her.
“Are you okay?” “I’m wonderful! Thank you for asking!” “Do you wanna get up?” “Yes!”
So it didn’t exactly come as a shock to anyone at the revelation of her being not like other girls…
no literally, she’s made of metal. As an allusion to the living puppet Pinocchio,
Penny was created by her father Pietro and General Ironwood in an effort to create a living weapon to
fight against the Grimm. That’s right. Penny has TWO DADS… I think? She never really interacts with
James all that much so who knows? As long as Ironwood pays that robot child support.
The point is, it’s easy to see why Penny’s story would involve becoming human, given the resolution
of Pinocchio’s story is the Blue Fairy turning him into a real boy of flesh and blood. However,
no one ever said every fairy tale retelling had to follow the steps of the original exactly.
Especially in RWBY, where most of the time the fairy tale allusions are merely superficial,
metal girl Pinocchio doesn’t have to become human if we don’t want her to,
especially if there’s another message that we wanna tell. Plus let’s be real: if every
retelling went down exactly the same as the original, what would be the point of retelling it?
This is all made odder by the fact Penny has died not once,
but twice. Her death in Volume 3 was the catalyst for the Fall of Beacon, though unfortunately,
it seems her loss was quickly forgotten by everyone, including Ruby, not the least of
which being her death was also overshadowed by Pyrrha’s murder at the hands of Cinder. And yeah,
Jaune will never let you forget that, and he will never let anyone else feel as sad about it as him.
So when Penny is revealed at the start of Volume 7 to have been rebuilt because “her core was left
intact,” it definitely raised some red flags. When a character is brought back from the dead, it can
be used as a twisted way of forcing characters to grieve what they’ve lost; a Monkey’s Paw,
where you really oughta think twice about what you wish for. However, Penny’s death and return felt
more like what happens in a lot of anime where death quickly becomes meaningless. A character
is brought back to life solely for fan demand, and to draw viewers back in after pissing them off and
potentially losing their precious dollars. At first, I was convinced this would be
the former, but I grew more and more wary as Volume 7 progressed, and Volume 8 cemented that
this was indeed the worst of both worlds. So today, we’re gonna discuss why Penny’s return
and second death were completely unnecessary and added nothing valuable to the story.
But before we begin, I do wanna mention for those who might not know that my debut novel…
IS OUT! That’s right, De Cineribus: From the Ashes is finally published! Why did I say it like that?
PUBLISHED! If you’re interested, there’ll be more information and sales links down in the
description, but suffice to say I’m super proud of how far I’ve come, and I hope you all enjoy!
And if not… well, live and learn, they say. And very quickly, I also wanna say that I am
indeed working on the second half of the Volume 8 rewrite. I had to put it on the backburner for the
book release and other things going on, but I’m hoping to get it out before the end of the year.
Anyhow, let the shit show begin. Penny may be made of metal, but she’s not a robot…
well, not technically? She’s more akin to an android: a robot that’s built to look
just like an ordinary human. And it goes beyond just her outward appearance. Penny herself says
she’s the first synthetic person capable of generating an Aura, which also implies there
could be others just like her down the road. People who, yes, were “made” rather than born,
but who are still people with souls. Ruby affirms Penny’s validity even when
Penny says she isn’t real. “You think just because you’ve got nuts and bolts instead of
squishy guts makes you any less real than me? You’ve got a heart. And a soul, I can feel it!”
Just because Penny is different from most other people, that doesn’t invalidate her.
It doesn’t make her less valuable than anyone else; it just means she’s different. That’s it.
Twiins covered the issues with Penny being made human, along with the rest of the show’s ableist
rhetoric, in her video about Ironwood. Because of the writing, Penny can read as
anyone who’s ever felt different from others because of who they are, which can include
marginalized and neurodivergent people. It wouldn’t be the first time an android like Penny
has been used as a stand-in for real-world groups, especially neurodivergent people.
That itself can be quite contentious, given this suggests neurotypical people
can only understand neurodivergent people through things that aren’t real, like androids,
and that neurodivergent people are more likely to see themselves coded as a robot than actually
represented as a regular person. It’s akin to how queer people will often see themselves coded
in media rather than outright represented. But given I myself am neurotypical, I don’t
feel fully qualified to discuss the matter beyond mentioning it for further thought and discussion.
But beyond even that coding, this idea that Penny needs to be made human is
never once established. She herself doesn’t even express a desire to become human,
nor does she talk about the struggles of having a robotic body, nor dream about what it’d be like
to be a gross meat sack. Typically if you wanna go for something like this, you wanna establish
it ahead of time as a motivation for the character in question, but they don’t.
It could’ve been basic things, like sensations. Maybe as a robot, Penny can’t smell, or she can’t
feel things through her hands. Maybe her clothes are just part of her robotic body, and she wants
to enjoy the basic joy of picking out her own clothes and dressing up. Is that a jab at how
the girls are probably modeled with their clothes instead of their full body with the clothes on
top, thus resulting in wildly different body types and models between outfits? Maybe. Maybe it is.
But the point is they never do any of this, so it never feels urgent that we find a way
to make Penny just like everyone else. If anything, Penny’s story is more about
agency. She wants to be free of the control of her “puppeteers,” if you will. For most of the show,
that’s Ironwood’s orders as the general, as well as her father Pietro, who’s very loving but also
overprotective. This escalates in Volume 8, where Watts’ virus forces her to fulfill his
designs before exploding, initiated by Ironwood losing his brain cells along with his arm, WHY
WOULD YOU WORK WITH THE GUY WHO TRIED TO DESTROY YOUR WHOLE KINGDOM JUST YESTERDAY YOU NITWIT?!
But here’s the thing: she doesn’t HAVE to become human to achieve her agency.
If anything, this idea of having to change who she is fundamentally to achieve freedom is…
kinda gross? At least to me. You know how people would argue in bad faith about Ariel giving up her
legs for a man, even though she’d always expressed a desire to be human and explore the land?
It feels like Penny’s story is actually that bad faith critique, except replace a man with…
I don’t know, having bare feet instead of big stompy boots.
Penny’s desire for agency was never tied into a desire to be human, so when Volume 8 rolls around
and she has to be made human to be free of the virus, it’s made to feel exciting and magical when
really it’s kinda sad. The fact Penny doesn’t have mixed feelings at least about it all bothers me,
because no one even bothered to ask Penny how she felt about all of this. We never hear from her
how she feels about being a robot and how she feels about the idea of being human,
so jumping the gun to make her human feels like we couldn’t be bothered asking for her input;
we just wanted her to be exactly like everyone else, and the virus was a convenient excuse.
As I mentioned, I was initially willing to give the writers the benefit of doubt when Penny
returned… which seems to be a common theme with me back in the pinkwashing era. But my thought
was they’d have Ruby deal with the grief of Penny’s death properly, given she’d never actually
reckoned with it in the first place. Instead, Penny simply becomes the new main character
before she gets mercy-killed by Blonde Miles. And to be honest, no one besides Ruby ever
really cared about Penny to begin with. RWBY in general struggles with character interactions,
as most of the time, characters feel like they’ve been forced together and are pretending to be
friends rather than actually feeling close with each other. And that’s how it feels with Penny.
No one besides Ruby can be bothered to express any feeling about Penny’s return aside from,
“Oh I guess that’s nice.” “I thought you--” (Pietro) “Died?
I guess in a manner of speaking, she did!” “This is…” “Strangely wholesome.”
Almost as if when she died, they all blinked and missed it.
So we’re not doing anything with the grieving process…
cool. Fine. Whatever. In that case, why even have Penny be brought back at all?
She doesn’t even seem to have any feelings about her death. She mentioned she was the first
synthetic person with a generated Aura, so why not just have another one be built between Volumes 3
and 7? A Penny 2.0, if you will, looking similar, but being a completely different person with
no attachment or memories of Beacon whatsoever. Personally, I’d go the Tales of Xillia 2 route.
Spoilers for that game, but Xillia 2 follows the characters of the original destroying alternate
timelines which pose a threat to their own existence, it’s great. And we often meet alternate
versions of the characters had they gone down different roads and made different choices, one
of which being a kickass woman I call Alt. Milla. The original Milla Maxwell is the Lord of Spirits.
She loves humanity, but is incredibly cold and detached, often stoic and awkward. This Alt.
Milla, by contrast, has none of her counterpart’s elemental powers or spiritual prowess.
She’s actually a hothead, quick to drag some bitches and speak her mind without fear.
I would’ve loved something similar with Penny, especially if this Alt. Penny would be completely
different, making her even more jarring for Ruby to interact with. A bit mean-spirited,
cynical, and not friendly at all, but warming up to the characters as the story progresses..
In any case, if we really were gonna bring OG Penny back to begin with, why kill her
off all over again? Bringing her back at all is a questionable move, but by killing her again, it’s
just cementing the fact that nothing has changed. “THEN NOTHING HAS CHANGED!”
It’s a retread of everything we’ve already seen. And the more that I think about it,
why wasn’t Penny chosen to be the Winter Maiden in the first place? She’s meant to
be Atlas’ little war machine with a soul, but why give her a soul in the first place unless
you could benefit from it in some way? Not only superior intelligence, but also getting
an immortal war machine with Maiden powers. Something Pietro hadn’t planned on, but Ironwood
couldn’t resist. Oh, that would’ve been cool. And no, she wasn’t made human just so she could
perma-die. That would’ve been lazy to begin with, but Pietro had already established back
in Volume 7 that he couldn’t bring Penny back again if she were to be deactivated.
“If the people get their wish and she’s destroyed, I won’t be able to…”
He has to give up chunks of his Aura just so she can live,
and it’s suggested he doesn’t have enough for Penny to come back. I know I toyed with the idea
of Pietro sacrificing himself so Penny could live in my Nora video, but really, I’d rather Penny
just not die at all. It’s pointless and cheap; if Penny must be brought back from death, then
don’t send her back to death just one volume later and make the entire Atlas Arc pointless.
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I’m the Unicorn of War, and Penny’s writing was a shit show.