It was once said that every villain is the hero of their own story, and that in itself is a very important piece of advice for any aspiring writers- make your villain believable and able to justify their motivations. While it can always be satisfying to see the cackling madman in his ivory tower get destroyed with pluck and grit, the villains that live on in our culture are the ones who had good reason for making the choices that they did- just look at this year’s Black Panther and how some people genuinely believe that Killmonger was right. Infinity War’s Thanos is also an example of a villain who genuinely believes that what he does is for a greater good.



The point is, you have to nail your villain. You can afford to go the route of something like Goblin Slayer and have the villain be a faceless horde that dies just for gratification, but if you want a wider narrative and a better chance at being remembered in a few years, a great villain is an easy place to start. In the case of RWBY, just look at how Roman and Neo have become part of the show, and both of these characters weren’t planned- Roman was just a one-off villain who the crew and fans loved enough to keep bringing him back, while Neo came around from Monty seeing a genderbent cosplay of Roman. Nowadays she’s one of the most popular characters in the show and we’ve not even seen her in three years.

So it intrigues me that glorified ad-lib villains have dominated the memory of RWBY’s fandom, while the ones specifically planned from the start have a bad record of falling flat on their face- hi Hazel. And no one embodies this more than Cinder Fall. We meet Cinder in Volume 1, the mysterious aloof villain who easily whips our protagonist around and has everything under control, and then… well the show really doesn’t know where to take Cinder. While her unpopularity largely came as a result of Volume 5 and its myriad of flaws, Cinder has always had a few naysayers. So much like I did with my post a while ago on reasons why people hate Jaune, today I’d like to examine why I think people hate Cinder Fall.

Part 1) She’s boring

There’s no nice way to say that Cinder is just a boring villain, easily the least interesting member of Team CRME. In Volumes 1-3, Cinder is just the manipulative uber-competent leader who exists to speak in her pillow-talk voice and be vague about coming threats. Cinder gets overshadowed quickly in everything that defines her; she’s out-done by Roman’s charisma, Mercury’s sheer raw unbridled sex appeal, Emerald’s Best Girl status and Neo having better fight scenes (and rocking the mute style better). Literally, everything Cinder can do, Team MENT can do better. This even extends into WTCH and Salem- Watts is more intelligent, Salem is better at leading people, Tyrian is more entertainingly insane, Hazel still uses Dust and Raven makes Cinder’s usage of Maiden powers look like a kid playing with a magic set in comparison.

Christ, she’s not even the most interesting “attractive abuser on the show,” Adam rocks that suit better than Cinder could ever pull off that dress.

Additionally, she’s just not interesting, primarily for some of the below reasons, but again, compared to the rest of the far more interesting villains, Cinder doesn’t have anything going for her beyond being attractive and having a mildly smokey voice, and in an anime, that’s the norm not the exception. She doesn’t have anything going for her, and since she’s the leader of the villain team, that’s a bad thing. The one potential bit of personality we can gleam from Cinder is that she adapted Salem’s technique of leadership- give all of your underlings what they want and play them along- for herself when recruiting Emerald, Mercury and Torchwick. There’s also the potential fan explanation that Cinder was some sort of abuse victim who is herself now beginning a cycle of abuse in her treatment of Emerald, but this is something with only fractional support in canon. That is one of the more irksome parts of Cinder- there is an interesting character here in the potential but the show currently not focusing on her means it’s left to theory-crafting to determine these facets. I’d love for the show to prove me wrong when I say she’s just kind of… boring.

Part 2) Weak backstory

Cinder, despite being the headline villain, probably has the least amount of backstory of any RWBY villain at the moment barring Neo, the literal two-scene wonder. In Volume 3 we hear Cinder say over a black screen “I want to be strong, I want to be feared.” While having villains who are just evil for the sake of being evil or gaining power isn’t an inherently bad thing, the plan does seem for Cinder to have some sort of backstory to explain her past. And at this point, nearly six volumes in, it may be too little too late for the people who have already written off Cinder as boring for her backstory to come back around.

Given how her fairytale inspiration is Cinderella, it’s easy to assume that she was raised by horrid people, but this doesn’t come up in the show itself and we have little to no further information on Cinder. Where’d she come from? How did she get into contact with Salem or what made Salem take interest in her? Hell if anyone knows since the show hasn’t even tried to hint at it. She’s just there, never explored or elaborated on barring the barest hints of a character arc forming in Volume 4. We’re meant to see Cinder as this unstoppable threat, someone with the power of a demigod who killed Ozpin and Pyrrha, but without any idea of what made Cinder the woman she is today, there’s no connection there unless you decide to make her a backstory. And down that way…

Well, down that rabbit hole lies only madness and ruin for any who attempt it. All Cinder wants that we know of now is power and the ability to make people fear her. You could make a good villain from this, but it would require work that’s not been put into her character yet.

3) Ruby? I hardly know ya

One of the most consistent targets of ire in the Battle of Haven episodes is how Cinder’s pre-existing hatred of Ruby is entirely ignored barring a single fluff line in Vault of the Spring Maiden. Cinder has been set up for two years in real life as being furious over what Ruby did to her- she snarls like a caged animal whenever Watts or Tyrian mock her, she makes it a point to flash-fry an illusion of Ruby whenever she can to try and get over her fear of the silver-eyed girl. Come Volume 5 and she’s itching for a rematch, at a chance to, as Tyrian put it, get “an eye for an eye.” Now that Cinder has that power she coveted so much, she wants to use it to spread havoc while getting her revenge. In fact, Cinder essentially sabotages her own plan to get the Mistral relic and throws the whole thing away at the sheer idea of a plan that could instead be used to get a shot at Ruby. The stage was set for a rivalry to span the entire show.

So, pardon my French, what is this?! Who scripted events that Cinder spends the first act of the Battle of Haven fighting some nobody when Ruby is right there. For two entire Volumes, Cinder has been prepping to fight Ruby and get what she considers her just desserts after Ruby humiliated her at Beacon. And now, about to get that shot… she instead decides to go after this random guy.



I talked in my Jaune post about Jaune’s bad habit of stealing spotlight from Ruby, and his actions in Chapter 11 were a trifecta of stealing attention, since Weiss was forced to job again for the spear scene, while Cinder’s hatred of Ruby is tossed aside like a chocolate bar wrapper so Jaune can attempt to get vengeance for Pyrrha. Not a bad idea in itself, but Cinder never tries to go for Ruby, to cut the head off the snake before Ruby goes SEW again and blasts Cinder. Instead Cinder is content to let Emerald fight Ruby while she dances around Jaune like an ice-skater moving around a drunk pig that interrupted the routine and won’t get off the rink. The show’s called RWBY and Ruby does nothing for the entire Battle of Haven.

tldr stop treating Jaune like he’s the protagonist and stop having Jaune actively strip agency from the real protagonist in a season where she already had no agency.

If the show needed Cinder to fight Jaune, have her treat it like a brief diversion before blasting Jaune away and focusing on Ruby. Cinder’s supposed to be a smart girl, why not just throw a spear at Ruby while she’s distracted? Or better still, why not drive that spear into her heart while she’s unconscious?

Cinder walks straight past Ruby- while she is on the ground and not moving- and decides to hurt some other random person because she suddenly cares about hurting Jaune’s feelings, but not enough to go for his actual team leader.

And what happens as a result of Cinder not going after Ruby? Ruby survives the moment of weakness, gets back up, headbutts Mercury, shouts “Checkmate!” and suddenly the baddies all lose on the top-side of the battle. All because Cinder, on the mission she changed the plan for specifically to get revenge and a shot at Ruby, never goes after Ruby or even acknowledges her outside of a filler line in the next episode. Yes, you can argue that Cinder wanted to leave Ruby last so she could enjoy her suffering, but if Cinder did want to leave Ruby last, why still did she never at least acknowledge Ruby outside of the one-off line? No mocking call of “I wonder which of them you’ll fail to save this time,” or even just an acknowledgement of that hatred festering in Cinder? Why did Cinder leave her character arc back in the Branwen Camp? If there had at least been a scene of Cinder admitting she wanted to avoid Ruby in case her SEW powers flared up again it would be something, and an admission of fear would add a lot to her character.

4) Cinder’s a complete idiot in Volume 5

I hate repeating myself and I know I said it above, but let me say it again. Cinder sabotages her own perfectly functional plan for a shot at Ruby. The original plan is perfectly simple- Raven goes to Haven and meets with Lionheart. He opens the door to the elevator. Raven uses her semblance to make a portal to Vernal, her and Cinder go through the portal, down to the vault, take the relic, White Fang blow up the tower soon after to hide any evidence they were there. A perfect plan, one that would work without the heroes the wiser. But when it’s pointed out that Ruby is in Mistral, Cinder changes the whole plan on a dime and has Leo invite the heroes to Haven.

Watts even points out that Cinder’s compromising the mission for the sake of her grudge with a child, one Cinder can easily hunt down in the chaos after the White Fang blow up the CCT. But because the writers promised in the OP that there would be a big climactic fight, Cinder needs to take the idiot ball and dribble it like an NBA player. While yes, part of this does come down to Raven’s skill at manipulation and tricking Cinder into agreeing to the plan, alongside her wild-card of “I want Qrow dead,” shocking everyone present into letting her control the conversation, and yes, Cinder is a hot-head who would fall for such an obvious bit of bait, Cinder still takes an intellectual dive after her great plan to destroy Beacon and it just sucks to see.

The most character Cinder gets in the back half of Volume 5 is that she apparently has a fetish for seeing people want their family members dead, given how she smirked like this when she saw Mercury kill Marcus.

To conclude, Cinder is disliked by portions of the fandom for several notable reasons, chief among being that she’s quite boring compared and one-note to the rest of the villains, and is one-upped in every category by each of her comrades. Cinder has remained largely the same character across five years and most of the potential for an arc in V4 is somewhat scrapped by V5 with her regaining her voice and still being focused on power and strength. With her being confirmed back from the not-dead in Volume 6, to the surprise of absolutely no one with basic skills in narrative comprehension, it seems that the show isn’t done with Cinder yet, and at the very least she’ll be due to get her backstory revealed before she takes her last bow. But whether or not she can regain the fandom’s interest remains to be seen. What I will say is that if Cinder hasn’t fundamentally changed after her crippling loss at Haven, the fandom will be merciless upon her return. Cinder has now hit rock bottom after Raven tore her to shreds, and if there was ever a time for more facets of her personality to be revealed, now would be the time. Who knows, it might make Cinder skyrocket in popularity once another side to her is shown. But in the meantime, Cinder may be one of the more unpopular villains in the entire show, someone whose downfall in-universe was her pride, and who in meta lost the fans due to apathy.

Ultimately, Cinder has potential to be a great villain, but as of Volume 5 that potential is largely relegated to background setting, the treatment of other characters around her or just straight-up is not information we have been granted yet. She could be a great villain, an Azula of her time. But at the moment? She’s just another hunk of ice falling down a hole, her spark having run itself out.

Thank you for reading.

Oh also the bitch killed Amber and Pyrrha, I think that helps explain why people hate her.