A.F.S.A. ~ Blake and Yang vs Adam

*A.F.S.A. stands for: Awesome Fight Scene Analysis*

Apparently, six months to a year is how long is required to wait between installments of this article subtype, but in fairness I had to wait for a specific real-life time to cover this fight. Well, that time has come at long last, so I can finally brush off my inner choreography-nerd and dive into my favorite fight scene in all of RWBY! This fight is long, multi-stage, and absolutely bonkers, so there’s going to be a lot of ground to cover.

Without further ado, let’s jump in!

SETTING THE SCENE:

In the shocking and quite dark Volume Three finale, the heroes of the RWBY universe got knocked down over and over again. The villains completely outsmarted the protagonists in their assault on Beacon Academy, working in the shadows to destabilize the Huntsman system and wreak havoc. Our heroes put up a good fight, of course, but it’s clear that they are outmatched. After all, the majority of the heroic combatants are still high-schoolers.

Perhaps the worst defeat suffered by the main characters comes from Blake and Yang, who find themselves confronted by Blake’s possessive, violent, and controlling ex-boyfriend (and this is a simplification; more info to come later). Adam is, simply put, impossible for them to defeat at their current level, and it shows. Blake suffers a pretty rough stomach wound, and Yang loses her entire arm in the process of trying to protect Blake, sending her down a spiraling mental path for the next two volumes.

Adam continues to be a thorn in the side of the heroes in Volumes Four and Five, until he is finally laid low at the Battle of Haven. However, he escapes into the night, seemingly gone for good…until he reappears during the climax of Volume Six, revealing that he’s been stalking Blake ever since his previous humiliating defeat, and is intent on either making her his by force, or savoring the twisted enjoyment of taking her life.

Blake, understandably, is having none of this…and neither is Yang, who also has a bone to pick with the man who took her arm and is trying to kill her increasingly-more-dear friend.

THE COMBATANTS:

Blake is our primary fighter for the first half of this bout. A member of the Faunus race, she’s mostly humanoid save for her feline ears, night-vision, enhance hearing, and occasional cat-like traits. A core member of Team RWBY, Blake’s one of the team’s more battle-hardened members, having spent much of her childhood in the militant White Fang organization (in which she dated one of the organization’s core members, Adam). She eventually broke from the organization when it’s methods became too extreme. She uses a sword-and-whip combo (that also functions as a pistol), and can create temporary shadow clones of herself.

Yang, who comes in for backup at the halfway point, is certainly no slouch in fighting either. The most rambunctious and scrappy member of Team RWBY, Yang is always itching for a fight…or at least she used to be, before losing her arm to Adam and gaining a newfound reservation for ‘punching first and asking questions later‘. She can power herself up with immense strength, but the buff is short-lived and leaves her weary. Her hand-to-hand combat skill is incredible, and her shotgun punching gauntlets make short work of most foes.

Even fighting two-on-one, Adam’s skills more than prove that he can handle himself. Perhaps the best swordsman to ever grace the screen in RWBY, Adam is a deft hand at dominating his opponents with slashes so fast you can’t even see them. Storing energy in his blade and unleashing it in furious blasts, there’s almost no one who can stand up to him when he’s on the hunt. His speed and tenacity are incredible too, and his unhinged dedication to chasing Blake down make him a horrifying foe.

THE FIGHT ITSELF:

Here’s your listening for this fight: LINK

The fight begins with Adam ambushing Blake’s mission to disable a communications tower, beating her to the tower and slaying the hapless guards on duty there. Understandably, Blake panics. For this entire volume, she (and Yang too), have been having hallucinations of Adam stalking her across the continent, and she’d come this close to moving past him and believing the nightmares to be just that…nightmares. Instead, the real nightmare is that Adam has been stalking her, and he’s here to finish her off, once and for all.

In the beginning of the battle, Blake spends her time parrying, dodging, and running. Her attacks, few as there are, are intended to slow Adam down so that Blake can escape and make it back to Yang, who is waiting for her a fair distance away at the rendezvous point. After all, by this point in the show, Blake is far past feelings of rage towards Adam. If he dropped his sword and walked away, she wouldn’t follow. How he chooses to fade away, should he do so, is no concern to her. She wants nothing more to do with him.

But Adam wants everything to do with killing Blake, necessitating Blake fighting for her life.

After a flurry of cool maneuvers, Blake seizes a chance to slip away from the control tower, only for Adam to slice the cable in two. He grabs Blake by the neck, but she stumbles backwards towards a railing, forcing both of them to take a pretty severe tumble from the tower. Some tree branches and their overall aura shields most of the damage, but they both shakily stand up after the fall.

In a reversal from their scene in Volume Three, Blake gives Adam the choice to drop everything and run away, but the showwriters didn’t make Adam’s Faunus form a BULL just for show. He’s stubborn, he’s relentless, and he’s not going to walk away from this fight until either he’s gotten what he wants, or he’s brought down for good. He re-draws his blade, and Blake does the same.

Their fight now transitions to the forest, with Blake still trying to lure their battle closer to Yang and the rest of her friends. Blake uses her whip to swing from tree to tree, while Adam uses his blade to knock aside Blake’s escape attempts and continuously close the distance on her, trying to land a crippling blow. Blake’s expert use of her shadow clones keeps her safe, but Adam’s unflinching pursuit begins taking a toll on her stamina.

It’s worth noting how diametrically opposed their fighting styles are in this scene. Blake is all about acrobatics and using her environment to her advantage, allowing her to pull off some impressive maneuvers. Adam, meanwhile, practically seems to forget that they are even in a forest, his entire focus on Blake and Blake only, which is both a blessing and a curse. His inability to consider his surroundings keeps Blake alive and out of his reach, but his steely intensity prevents her from shaking him or dealing any blows.

A good example of this comes when Blake is flipping past a tree with her whip, out of Adam’s range…until he launches his sword from its sheath and knocks her whip aside in mid-air. This causes her to whiff her landing, but because of her attunement with her environment, Blake catches a secondary tree branch, flips backwards, and simultaneously sheds her jacket to intercept Adam’s blade. The result is Adam getting kicked in the gut while Blake is unscathed. However, when she follows up with a flurry of bullets, Adam blocks them all without breaking a sweat.

They’re evenly matched…on paper. Blake’s labored breathing and Adam’s measured stance make it clear that she’s faltering in energy.

They finally leave the forest, entering into a narrow land bridge across a raging waterfall, completely out in the open. With no more close-quarters to bounce around in, as is her wont, Blake is forced to engage Adam in close-combat swordsmanship. She does well at first, baiting him with her shadow clone and that pulling off an excellent move of sheathing and stealing his own sword when they cross blades.

She performs a few more hits and flips, pressing her advantage of having stolen Adam’s blade. With her speedy maneuvers and shadow clones, she lands a succession of blows, though the most are blocked by Adam’s sheath (which he still has), or warded off by his gun. Adam eventually catches onto Blake’s hand during her frenzied attacking, and that’s all it takes.

Pulling off a feint by tossing away Blake’s own sheath, Blake is distracted just long enough to be slammed in the temple by the hilt of Adam’s blade, flying backwards from the blow. Before she can recover, Adam is on her again, and she dodges too slowly to avoid a blow to her side. One more hit sends her rolling across the dirt, and a follow-up shatters her own blade when she tries to parry, breaking her weapon into pieces.

(This is especially heartbreaking because a Huntresses weapon is practically an extension of themselves, created when they are young students, tailored to their preferences, and given a name indicative of their purpose and power. And now, Adam’s shattered it, leaving only the pistol intact.)

Adam that enacts what proves to be is ultimate undoing: He monologues.

To be fair to him, he has every reason to believe that he’s bested Blake at this point, and she also isn’t just some new opponent. She’s his ex-friend, his ex-girlfriend, and someone that he’s been obsessed with for years. Though in no way a healthy or reasonable way to act, it isn’t wholly unbelievable that Adam would want to clear the air a bit before ending her life. Especially as, from his twisted perspective, he fully believes himself in the right and her in the wrong for leaving him and their fight against humankind.

The reason this is such a big mistake, though, becomes clear when Blake’s cat-ears twitch, and she hears the approaching sound of a very familiar motorcycle. Yang’s motorcycle. Help is on the way.

With the use of one more shadow clone, Blake avoids a fatal stab through the stomach, recovers her pistol, and clears the area right before Yang flies in from the top of the waterfall and crashes her ENTIRE FREAKING MOTORCYCLE right into Adam, sending him flying backwards! It’s incredible, and exactly how fist-pumpingly cathartic as it sounds!

Yang and Adam briefly exchange words, each having a reason for hating the other (Yang hating Adam for him terrorizing her closest ally for so long and for taking her own arm, and Adam hating Yang for the perceived slight of stealing Blake from her). Blake, too exhausted to join in the fight at the moment, moves aside to safety as Yang steps up to take center stage.

Adam makes the first move, and also makes it apparent to the viewer that he was holding himself back with Blake (understandable in a twisted sense, given how he wanted to end things with a speech). With Yang, Adam has no such compunction, and the sword flurries he throws her way are frighteningly fast and powerful. He swings his sword so quickly you can hardly see it, pulling off combos, sword throws, and energy blasts faster than you can blink. Almost nobody could stand up to him when he’s like this.

Except for Yang.

After weathering his blows for a while, Yang switches for the offense, utilizing her rushdown aggression to slip through Adam’s sword swings and attack him where he’s vulnerable. She blasts shotgun shells past his defenses, punching under and around his sword, and even grabs his arm to yank behind his back and rain free blows upon his chest. Yang is as, if not more relentless than Adam, and her ferocity forces him to take a multitude of hits before he even begins to turn things around by pushing her back.

Yang and Adam have similar special abilities when it comes to their Semblances, but with one key difference. The more Yang gets hit, and the angrier she is, the more powerful she can burst out her energy (though she burns out right afterward). Adam, meanwhile, behaves similarly, but it’s all focused in his blade. When his sword blocks hits, it stores energy that can be blasted out later. He himself doesn’t have to be hurt, which in this match-up gives Adam a huge advantage.

Yang gives it her all though, using her gauntlets and their shotgun recoil to blast herself left and right in order to avoid hitting Adam’s sword and land true punches and kicks on the man himself. She also blocks quite a bit herself, demonstrating true growth from when she used to blindly hit things with no consideration for her own safety. Her gauntlets reflect a fair few of Adam’s gunshots, and allow her to create openings she wouldn’t otherwise have.

Her luck runs out, though, when she goes for a headshot punch that Adam blocks with his sword, then he immediately discharges the energy to launch Yang backwards. Before she can stand up, Adam unleashes a blow with all of the energy in his sword, sending a fiery wall of dark energy towards the girl while she struggles to stand up. Blake screams out in panic as the energy hits Yang, and explodes into dust.

And when the dust settles…Yang is there, unharmed, and frankly quite unamused by Adam’s tricky attack.

She blocked the entire hit with her robotic arm, the one specifically built and given to her after Adam sliced her flesh-and-bone arm off. And, being mechanical, it not only withstood the energy blast but resulted in Yang herself suffering no damage. Adam’s gambit utterly failed.

By this point, Blake’s gathered enough energy to re-join the fight, and side-by-side she and Yang rush towards Adam. Adam, practically screaming with anger, storms towards them in turn, and both parties realize quite plainly that the end is coming soon.

As they have always done, Blake and Yang fight together perfectly, each of their movements utterly in sync with one another. Blake goes high, and Yang goes low. Blake baits a hit from Adam and fades away into a shadow clone, and Yang unleashes a shotgun punch right into Adam’s head. The two are a sight to behold, and it’s a good thing they work so wonderfully, because the stakes have never been higher. Adam is out for blood.

Yang narrowly saves Blake from getting a sword to the head, and then transitions into yanking on Blake’s whip to launch her feline partner at Adam in a particularly cool-looking team-attack. Unfortunately, Adam meets the blow head on with his sword, and the discharge of energy nearly tosses Blake off the waterfall. She’s launched onto a distant rocky outcropping, her Aura breaking (which, in the RWBY world, means the next hit one takes could be deadly).

Alone, Yang is distracted long enough for Adam to seize the opportunity to press his advantage, forcing her onto the backfoot. He also taunts her with a feint designed to look like the same attack that cut off her arm, and Yang’s hesitation confirms his belief that she is still scared of him. He goes fully aggressive in using his strongest attacks (including a really cool one where he spins his sword like a buzz saw, forcing Yang to block it, which in turn only charges up its dark energy faster).

What reignites Yang’s focus is seeing Blake in the distance, clambering up the side of the waterfall to get into position for another team-attack. And Adam, yet again, fails to take into consideration his surroundings, his blood-red fury only letting him see Yang right in front of him. Exhausted but determined, Yang stands her ground and baits Adam into a colossally destructive downward slam with his sword…

…and she catches it with her robotic hand, choosing this exact moment to supercharge herself with her own Semblance and counterattack!

(Narratively, this is probably the best moment in the fight, as it’s the perfect encapsulation of both Yang’s character arc thus far, and also a terrifically satisfying bit of Adam being defeated by a Chekov’s Gun that he himself gave to Yang by taking off her arm. No mortal arm could have stopped a sword, after all! And Yang’s decision to be smart about her powers after the heart-to-heart with her dad in Volume 4 is such an amazing moment of growth for her.)

THE FINISHING BLOW:

Having caught Adam’s sword and ripped it out of his hands, Yang now holds all the power over the fight, and what she chooses to do next solidifies the outcome.

A stunned Adam can’t even begin to react fast enough to stop Yang from yanking him closer and delivering a megaton punch to his midsection that sends him flying back into the ground, the momentum of his body digging a crater into the earth as he flies back. When the dust clears, his Aura breaks, and so does Yang’s when her power-up fades away.

All three combatants are thoroughly exhausted and now scarily vulnerable thanks to their Aura’s being depleted. And yet, as Adam slowly stands up, it still isn’t over.

Yang, of course, is still holding onto his sword, and it’s this moment where she puts her trust in Blake that their silently communicated team-attack will pay off. She turns and tosses the sword straight off the waterfall. As it is practically the source of Adam’s power all on its own, Adam foolishly dives towards the edge after it…running right into Blake, who climbed up from the bottom of the ledge to uppercut Adam right in the jaw!

Adam stumbles backwards, trying to catch his balance, and his feet end up tripping over two sharp, severed pieces of Blake’s broken sword. All at once, Adam, Blake, and Yang’s attentions are drawn to the blades.

Not even a full second passes before each combatant leaps towards one of the pieces, Adam and Blake moving for the same one, and Yang going for the open one from behind.

It’s impossible to say how much clear, rational thought was going through Blake and Yang’s minds in this moment. Did they know what they were about to do? Did they know that it was the only way to stop a man who clearly would never stop pursuing them across the world? Or did their bodies act on their own, driven purely by adrenaline and determination to see the fight ended.

This is all dissected more in later Volumes, of course, but for now, it’s impossible to say.

What isn’t impossible to say is how decisively the fight ends a second later.

Blake grabs her piece before Adam, and Yang does the same, and neither girl hesitates in plunging their improvised daggers right through Adam’s chest. Blake’s goes in through his stomach and out his back, and Yang’s vice-versa. A double impalement, and one that is decidedly fatal the moment the strikes ring true.

Adam only has enough life in him to utter a single word, ‘Oh‘, stumble forward, and fall off the ledge into the churning waterfall below (even clipping a rock on the way down).

Blake then, crushed by the enormity of what she’s just done, bursts into sobs and collapses into Yang’s arms as the scene draws to a close.

FINAL THOUGHTS:

Like I said at the beginning of the article, this showdown is my favorite fight in the entirety of RWBY. It is also (and I know I say this a lot, but I really do mean it) one of my favorite fight scenes of all time. It does everything right without making any missteps, and it does it with splendor, spectacle, and joyous catharsis aplenty!

Some fight scenes prioritize the story or dialogue, the exchange of blows an afterthought to moving the plot forward. Other fight scenes do the opposite, opting for incredible choreography and frenetic set pieces in exchange for any spoken characterization or plot development. Obviously, examples of either of these categories are great in their own rights. My previous A.F.S.A. article (Yang vs Neo) was of the latter category.

Blake and Yang vs Adam, however, manages to do both, and it does it with an effortless ease that puts hundreds of thousands of other similar anime battles to shame. A culmination of four seasons worth of character development for all three combatants, stellar soundtrack underscoring the action, fantastic vocal performances, outstanding and creative choreography, and one heck of an unforgettable finishing move all add up to elevate this masterpiece even higher.

For those so inclined, here’s a link to the fight: BLAKE AND YANG VS ADAM

You won’t regret it!

But hey, that’s just my opinion!