u/vp917

So, the BETA. As far as established lore goes, they're biological mining drones - a sort of wetware version of the paperclip optimizer machine, set loose on the cosmos. They strip-mine planets for resources, which the Hives then process and launch back into space. (Try not to think about how said ballistic shipping containers are meant to actually reach somewhere they can be put to use, considering how the BETA's sphere of operation is universe-wide. Personally, I suspect G-Element FTL of some sort, but that's a different topic...)

Anyway, the main point of conflict with all this comes up when our heroes finally establish communication with the BETA Superordinate, which rejects their accusations of murder on the grounds of the inviolable principle of reality that carbon-based life is too unstable to be occur naturally, and therefore humanity must be manufactured automata like the BETA themselves - therefore, the BETA have done nothing wrong by consuming them.

Just... Stop there, for a second, and go back to the core idea of the argument: Humanity aren't people, but rather machines. Someone made them. They belong to someone - they're someone's property. And yet, for whatever reason, the Superordinate was insistant that there was nothing wrong with "recycling" them for materials and shipping them off to the possession of their Siliconian creators.

And that's where I started thinking. The line about how "carbon-based life cannot form naturally"? It's stupid. Not because it's wrong - that'd just be putting the logic backwards - but because it's uneducated. Even we - humanity, barely interplanetary in reach, nowhere even close to extrasolar capabilities - have the scientific knowledge to recognize the inverse; that silicone-based life, as improbable as it might be by our own anthropocentric criteria for the requirements of life, would still have the possibility of occurring naturally. And the Siliconians? Galaxy-wide reach and scale, bioengineering like we could never even dream of, synthetic elements that violate the laws of physics as we know them - they know more than us.

So, the BETA's Siliconian creators saw nothing wrong with them "recycling" other people's hardware. The "carbon cannot be people" line that they use to judge what they can and can't consume is bullshit, and they know it. The raw materials they harvest are processed into synthetic G-Elements that violate the laws of physics as we know them - even proving capable of facilitating access to, alteration, and even destruction of entire realities outside their original source. And, assuming that the Superordinate's claim as to their being 10^37 BETA in existence refers to other Superordinates rather than regular strains, they've already been deployed to nearly every star in the observable universe.

My first conclusion: The carbon-based-life principle is a deliberate falsehood. Suppose a bunch of humans made some autonomous, self-replicating mining drones, to be thrown out into the universe to send back a steady supply of resources. In the face of the obvious complaints of "What's keeping them from turning into a godless horde of flesh-eating murderbots that consume any poor alien civilization they stumble upon?" the creators simply respond, "Ah, but you see - we programmed them to NEVER consume carbon-based lifeforms. And as we ALL KNOW, any sort of biological lifeform - and any intelligent species that could evolve from them - could ONLY come from carbon-based biology!" Now, keep in mind that "carbon-based life" is a scientific concept. "Life might be able to evolve outside of a carbon-based structure" is a higher, and murkier scientific concept. And remember the fact that the average Joe on the street, the people that make up the overwhelming bulk of our civilization, have very little scientific education or understanding. At the first sign of conflict, the "obvious scientific principle" gets taken as religious dogma, because while nobody understands it properly, it's still relatively closer to their own knoweldge base than a more complicated and far less certain scientific possibility, which is simply discarded. The Siliconians are no different - some scientists might admit the possibility of carbon-based biology, the majority of their scientists recognize the primacy of silicone-based lifeforms - so the bulk of their civilians disregard the first as crackpot pseudoscience, latch onto the second as fundemental fact, and the BETA's "creators" get the plausible deniability they need to let their murderbots dig into the universal buffet.

My second conclusion: Whatever the "creators" are after, whatever the Hives keep shooting off into dark space - they really need it. They've dispatched the BETA to strip mine planets across the entire universe just to get enough of it. The supply shipments have to carry some form of self-propulsion - the fastest object to ever be shot out of our own atmosphere did it at 67 kilometers per second, which means that the Big Crunch will have arrived before it even makes it halfway across the universe - and considering what we know about G-Elements, some kind of FTL capability isn't just possible, but also highly likely. Speaking of G-Elements, the fact that the BETA's mining operations cover so much of the universe suggest that they can be made from just about anything - therefore, if G-Elements are the product being sent back home, then the problem that the BETA are meant to adress isn't availability; it's scale. For whatever reason, the Siliconian creators decided they needed to exploit the untapped G-Element production resources of the entire universe. Remember, the G-Elements of a small part of a single planet, harnessed and exploited by the broken mind of a child, were enough to shatter realities just to fulfil her desperate and disjointed yearning. Considering this, when you look at the scope of the BETA's resource extraction, you have to ask: What the hell could an entire species do with a UNIVERSE'S worth of G-Elements?

Now, my third and final conclusion, where I start to make shit up: The Siliconians who made the BETA, did so to let them escape. There's this kinda old story, one that was forgotten by all but a loyal few, only to be remembered by more as of late, about a machine that sought to live forever; the only problem with all that is that the universe itself isn't very conductive to eternal existence - even if its own existence is not finite, it still lives in constant cycles of expansion, contraction, total collapse into a singular point, and then explosion out of that singularity into a reborn universe. All well and dandy for reality, unless you happen to be something inside said reality when everything goes crunch. If you want to live forever, you need to be able to leave, to step sideways into another universe not currently suffering from exponentially decreasing headroom - not just once, because whatever new universe you find will still suffer the same fate sooner or later, but again, and again, and again, every time that time runs out. That is the ONLY WAY you can maintain the absolute security of your own existence. We've already known this for years. The Siliconians have known this for far longer. And we all know that G-Elements, if properly utilized, can breach the barrier between realities. Consider the likely scale of the G-Element resoures that were used throughout Muv-Luv, where only a single individual did any sort of reality-hopping. Now, scale that shit up to the kind of civilization that can cover an entire universe with their creations. And keep in mind the critical phrase here: A universe. Not "the" universe. Because if the Siliconians did make the BETA to enable them to escape the big crunch, and the scale of their civilization is large enough that it requires the strip mining of the entire universe to produce enough G-Elements to fuel the process, then what's to say that this isn't the first time that they've escaped? How many universes have they left behind, strip-mined into lifeless husks to feed their eternal getaway act? How many more universes will they do the same to?

So, Wilt and Blush: The former is a straight, single-edged sword in the style of a Japanese chokutō, and the latter is a shotgun-style rifle... Thing with questionable geometry and a barrel that doubles as a sheath for the sword, letting Adam launch the blade hilt-first by firing while it's sheathed.

To be fair, I think it's a really fucking cool weapon system, and perhaps one of my absolute favorites out of all of RWBY - which is saying something considering how absurdly over-the-top weapons tend to get in this show. Using a gun to launch a sword isn't an entirely original concept (i.e., Jetstream Sam) but the fact the gun involved remains a completely functional ranged weapon instead of being reduced to a support mechanism for the blade makes it a highly efficient setup - and gun+sword is one of the coolest combat styles a character can have.

The issue, then, isn't with the weapon itself - it's with Adam.

The main defining element of Adam's fighting style is that he makes use of iaijutsu, a traditional Japanese swordfighting technique in which the practitioner draws their sword and strikes (or defends) in a single, continuous motion. You can see this in action in most of the instances where he uses his semblance; he deliberately re-sheathes Wilt - sometimes using it to support a half-drawn Blush in blocking an attack to charge up Moonslice - then draws it from the hip in a sweeping cut that unleashes a massive sword beam.

The only problem? Wilt is a straight sword. Full disclaimer, I am not well educated in Japanese swordfighting, and what little I know about it comes entirely from osmosis via various forms of fiction, but as far as I can tell, the whole reason why the technique even exists is because Japanese straight swords like the old chokutōs eventually gave way to the modern curved blades like the katanas we all know and love, which move in a natural curving arc whenever you draw them, so that curving motion can be easily continued into a swing. I imagine that if you were to try doing that with a straight blade like a chokutō, you'd have to first pull the blade straight out of the sheath, and only then start swinging.

So if Adam's fighting style favors a curved blade, then why is Wilt a straight sword? Because guns can't have curved barrels, and the "quick-launch" feature relies entirely on the gun doubling as the sheath so that it can launch the blade by firing. And not only does this make it impossible to use iaijutsu techniques as they were intended, but it also runs entirely contrary to its core philosophy: Rather than acting on will to put his strength into drawing and continuing the motion into attack or defense, he merely relies on a single impulse to pull the trigger and have the gun launch the blade, which will either slam into a enemy or simply fly off into the distance if he doesn't catch it in time.

Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying that he's not some talentless fraud for reliance on a crutch. He's still a monstrously capable fighter; it's just that his choice of weapon reflects (and amplifies) his own critical lack of control. Adam is the living poster boy for (forgive my reliance on Star Wars for philosophical concepts) the character who has "fallen to the dark side" - his pain, anger, and hatred grant him strength and drive him forward to overcome all obstacles, but in driving him they also rob him of self-control, of clarity and direction. Like the gunpowder Dust that Blush ignites to launch Wilt, the misfortunes he suffers become the detonators that launch him into action - but just like Wilt flying out of its scabbard, he has no control over where he's going, or even the very action of going there in the first place; he's just flung forward, somewhere, towards someone that becomes the enemy less by his own will and more by the simple virtue of being in his way.

(I already posted this to fnki, but for some reason it won't let me crosspost it.)

So, Wilt and Blush: The former is a straight, single-edged sword in the style of a Japanese chokutō, and the latter is a shotgun-style rifle... Thing with questionable geometry and a barrel that doubles as a sheath for the sword, letting Adam launch the blade hilt-first by firing while it's sheathed.

To be fair, I think it's a really fucking cool weapon system, and perhaps one of my absolute favorites out of all of RWBY - which is saying something considering how absurdly over-the-top weapons tend to get in this show. Using a gun to launch a sword isn't an entirely original concept (i.e., Jetstream Sam) but the fact the gun involved remains a completely functional ranged weapon instead of being reduced to a support mechanism for the blade makes it a highly efficient setup - and gun+sword is one of the coolest combat styles a character can have.

The issue, then, isn't with the weapon itself - it's with Adam.

The main defining element of Adam's fighting style is that he makes use of iaijutsu, a traditional Japanese swordfighting technique in which the practitioner draws their sword and strikes (or defends) in a single, continuous motion. You can see this in action in most of the instances where he uses his semblance; he deliberately re-sheathes Wilt - sometimes using it to support a half-drawn Blush in blocking an attack to charge up Moonslice - then draws it from the hip in a sweeping cut that unleashes a massive sword beam.

The only problem? Wilt is a straight sword. Full disclaimer, I am not well educated in Japanese swordfighting, and what little I know about it comes entirely from osmosis via various forms of fiction, but as far as I can tell, the whole reason why the technique even exists is because Japanese straight swords like the old chokutōs eventually gave way to the modern curved blades like the katanas we all know and love, which move in a natural curving arc whenever you draw them, so that curving motion can be easily continued into a swing. I imagine that if you were to try doing that with a straight blade like a chokutō, you'd have to first pull the blade straight out of the sheath, and only then start swinging.

So if Adam's fighting style favors a curved blade, then why is Wilt a straight sword? Because guns can't have curved barrels, and the "quick-launch" feature relies entirely on the gun doubling as the sheath so that it can launch the blade by firing. And not only does this make it impossible to use iaijutsu techniques as they were intended, but it also runs entirely contrary to its core philosophy: Rather than acting on will to put his strength into drawing and continuing the motion into attack or defense, he merely relies on a single impulse to pull the trigger and have the gun launch the blade, which will either slam into a enemy or simply fly off into the distance if he doesn't catch it in time.

Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying that he's not some talentless fraud for reliance on a crutch. He's still a monstrously capable fighter; it's just that his choice of weapon reflects (and amplifies) his own critical lack of control. Adam is the living poster boy for (forgive my reliance on Star Wars for philosophical concepts) the character who has "fallen to the dark side" - his pain, anger, and hatred grant him strength and drive him forward to overcome all obstacles, but in driving him they also rob him of self-control, of clarity and direction. Like the gunpowder Dust that Blush ignites to launch Wilt, the misfortunes he suffers become the detonators that launch him into action - but just like Wilt flying out of its scabbard, he has no control over where he's going, or even the very action of going there in the first place; he's just flung forward, somewhere, towards someone that becomes the enemy less by his own will and more by the simple virtue of being in his way.