Now that you guys mention Blake, I think my opinion on her so far is that she is a character that is a lot more interesting in concept than in practice.
It's like Monty threw every dark fantasy anime trope at her. She is a cat lady, a former terrorist, that cool kid that sits next to the window alone etc. So I get why she is popular, but in practice I think she has the least interesting personality of all team RWBY.
Her natural state seems to be complaining about racism and politics, but outside of that, she doesn't seem to have that much personality or interests compared to the other 3. And frankly she would be the most boring to have a conversation with.
I'm gonna take a moment to actually advocate for Blake's character cause I did genuinely like her in the beginning of the show. It's when Miles took over that everything I liked about Blake's character went out the window and we're left with an empty husk of a character that is desperately pretending to still be relevant.
Blake at the start of the show is the only character in the main group that actually has any relevance to the plot being a former member of the White Fang. Weiss comes in second in that regard considering her family's business has history with the Faunus and she has personal history with the White Fang being caught between the crap they did and the crap her father did. Ruby and Yang barely have any relevance to the plot and sadly not much was done to fix that. But having one of the main characters be a former terrorist who left the group and her mentor who she greatly admires because she became jaded by the violence and swung the pendulum in the other direction wanting to accomplish the same goal but in peaceful ways really added a lot. And it set up what should have been an interesting ideological conflict between her and Adam where they both have the exact same goals but completely disagree on how to go about making it happen.
You can even see at the end of Volume 1 that despite Blake having left the White Fang due to her distaste for the constant violence she was adamantly refusing to believe they'd do something like petty theft, which is ridiculous cause they're terrorists but Blake was looking at the group through rose tinted glasses. It takes her seeing it with her own eyes to break out of that mindset, which then affects her in Volume 2. She's eager to go after the White Fang, and her history with and knowledge of the group gets used to infiltrate a White Fang rally to investigate. (quick side note this is also where one of the only successful moments of foreshadowing comes up with Faunus being able to see in the dark). And then Blake becomes so obsessed with trying to make up for what she had done and stop the White Fang she runs herself ragged and needs Yang to get her to chill out and relax in what is one of Yang's best scenes and one of the better written conversations in the series.
And later in Volume 2 when Oobleck is questioning everyone in RWBY about their motivations he forces Blake to realize she didn't know what she was doing and didn't have a plan to actually accomplish her goals. It was rather nice to see a main character literally be called out on something like that, and you'd logically think that it would lead to Blake taking things more seriously and using her eventual Huntress status in a real way rather than just spouting ideals. Cause all Blake had were ideas about what she wants but she hadn't put any thought into how she'll do it. Solid set up for her arc moving forward where Blake would have to make a definitive choice about what she'll do.
But then Volume 3 happens. Then Adam being randomly turned into a stalker ex happens. Then Blake starts to become annoying and her two Volumes of development get pissed on because Blake just runs away from her team refusing to even tell them she's leaving after the show went through painstaking effort to make that the primary lesson she learned. So after two Volumes of establishing a bond with her team and that she'll stop running away.... she runs away and leaves everyone. Then Volume 4 happens and Blake's arc somehow trips and shoots itself in the head with a shotgun by establishing that Blake's parents are not only alive and well, they're both in the picture and perfectly loving of Blake. That completely conflicts with the implication from Volume 1 that she was either an orphan or her parents weren't in the picture, and conflicts with the implication from Volume 2 that she had lived a hard life outside the comforts of the Kingdom because she lived a happy life on a literal tropical paradise. And adding to that her dad is the chief of the whole tropical island and her family lives in a mansion and she's practically royalty, which throws a huge wrench into her scene from Volume 1 where she accused Weiss of being the stuck up rich girl cause wow apparently Blake was a freaking princess from a tropical island and only suffered because she decided to leave her home to fight in a terrorist group despite making it sound before like she grew up in it and was forced into a hard life. That Weiss was merely adopted into the tragic backstory while Blake was born in it, molded by it. But she's nothing but a hypocrite now and that's what Volume 4 gave us for Blake.
And it's a sad state cause they took a character I liked and had a lot of potential and then flushed everything down the drain [LookHowTheyMassacredMyGirl.JPEG]. The writing of the early seasons wasn't perfect but it had a number of good things. As long as they fixed the few issues with Blake's character (like there not being enough anti Faunus bigotry to justify how intensely she wanted to hide that she was a Faunus) Blake could have had a great character.
