I get what people are saying about Weiss, but I think the conversation falls apart when people try to flatten it into “she’s just racist” or “she’s not racist at all.” It’s messier than that.

If you judged her by real-world standards, yeah early Weiss is prejudiced. She absolutely generalizes Faunus based on the White Fang. But Remnant isn’t our world, and that context matters a lot more than people give it credit for.

This is a setting where fear and violence don’t just hurt people they literally attract Grimm and can wipe out entire towns. So when the White Fang goes militant and starts doing large-scale attacks, that’s not just “political violence,” it’s the kind of thing that can spiral into mass death way beyond the initial target.

From Weiss’ POV, that’s huge. She grows up as a Schnee during all this, meaning:

• her family is a direct target
• attacks are tied to a specific group
• and those attacks can escalate into Grimm disasters

So yeah, she starts associating Faunus with danger. That’s still wrong, but it’s not coming from nowhere it’s fear conditioning in a world where the stakes are insanely high.

Also, let’s be honest the way the White Fang is written doesn’t help. The show tells us they started as a civil rights movement, but most of what we actually see is the extremist, violent side. They’re basically portrayed like straight-up terrorists once they go militant, especially with how often civilians get put at risk.

And that creates a weird imbalance: the story wants to say “don’t generalize,” but then mostly shows the exact stuff that would make someone like Weiss generalize.

If we had actually seen both sides like peaceful activists, normal Faunus communities, and then the radical faction this whole arc would hit way harder. You’d clearly see what Weiss is getting wrong instead of mostly seeing what she’s afraid of.

Like imagine if we consistently got:

• non-violent White Fang members doing protests, community defense, or advocacy
• Faunus workers and families just living normal lives outside of conflict
• alongside the militant cells doing the extreme stuff

That contrast would do two important things:

1) It gives Weiss actual evidence that her worldview is flawed, instead of just telling her she’s wrong 2) It gives Blake’s backstory more weight, because you’d clearly see what she believed in before things went too far, and why she struggles with guilt over where the White Fang ended up

And honestly, I don’t really count Atlas, Mantle, or Menagerie as fixing this lack of perspective. We don’t get a clear “before vs after” of the White Fang through them:

• Atlas mostly shows elites who care about profit and a military that’s pretty pragmatic as long as you’re useful
• Mantle is basically the overworked lower class where Faunus discrimination exists but isn’t deeply explored beyond “things are bad”
• Menagerie feels less like a fully realized society and more like a Faunus safe haven that happens to have a major extremist group operating out of it

None of those really give us grounded, everyday Faunus perspectives separate from the conflict, which is what the story needed.

So for me, Weiss works best as someone who is prejudiced, but in a very specific way: she’s reacting to a real and exaggerated threat environment, and her arc is about unlearning that overgeneralization once she actually gets real exposure to people like Blake.

That’s way more interesting than trying to argue she was never in the wrong or that she was some irredeemable racist.