Blake Belladonna

"“Everyone thinks they can help me, but they can't. You saw Ilia last night and she's not even the worst! No. No more. They're better off without me. I made my choices and I'll deal with the consequences because they belong to me.”" —Blake to Sun in Taking Control. Blake Belladonna is one of the protagonists of RWBY. She is a Huntress, having been trained at the now-defunct Beacon Academy.

Why She Rocks

 * 1) Despite her past of being discriminated for her race, she's a very righteous person, always respects others' lives, Faunus or not.
 * 2) She's incredibly badass and proficient in combat, performing many stunts as she fights.
 * 3) Speaking of combat, her Semblance, Shadows, which allows her to create clones of herself for defense, are super useful and trusty to have in battle.
 * 4) Her weapon, Gambol Shroud, is incredibly cool, as, unlike most other characters' weapons, it functions as 3 different weapons all in one: a cleaver-like sword, a katana, and a gun.
 * 5) Despite looking up to Adam all her life, she didn't let it hold her back from leaving the White Fang upon realizing that they were a terrorist organization.
 * 6) While she is aloof, antisocial, and can be callous about the feelings of those around her; all the same, she clearly cares deeply about helping people and protecting those she loves. She has severe self-doubt over her tendency to abandon people and her fear of getting emotionally close to anyone.
 * 7) Despite constantly pushing Sun away, it's clear she does care for him. As shown in the trip to Menagerie, despite the friction caused between them, when Sun is badly wounded by a White Fang spy, Blake rushes to his side, tearfully crying out for help and telling him to hold on. In a call-back to Adam maiming Yang, Blake is upset it's happened again, blaming herself for her friends' injuries at the hands of the White Fang.
 * 8) While she normally has a stoic and no-nonsense personality, she has a humorous side, For example, when Ruby starts connecting with her over books, she seems to warm up a bit, even smiling and chuckling. And in the ninth episode, she goes along with Ruby and Yang when their team gets their own room. And as the series goes on, she becomes more cheerful and upbeat.

Bad Qualities

 * 1) In Volume 2, she becomes so obsessed with stopping Roman Torchwick that she neglects her studies, sleeping and her friends, even coldly turning down Sun's offer to go to the Beacon Dance with him.
 * 2) In Volume 4 where when she returns to her home in Menagerie with Sun after the fall of Beacon, she spends the entire volume acting very callous and rude towards Sun despite his efforts in trying to help her, even becomes physically abusive towards him and rather than act concerned for Sun when he's injured, Blake angrily berates him for following her in the first place. It takes Sun finally standing up for himself and calling her out for Blake to finally realize how awful she had been to him.
 * 3) At the end of Volume 3, after being treated for her injuries and apologizing to Yang for dragging her into her battle with Adam, she ran away for undisclosed reasons, leaving her Team behind.

Trivia

 * Blake Belladonna alludes to Belle and The Beast in many ways:
 * Blake loves to read, much like Disney's version of Belle.
 * In the episode "The Shining Beacon, Pt.2", Blake is seen to own a candelabra, which references Lumière, the living candelabra from the Disney adaptation. According to Miles Luna, this was part of an attempt to surround her with lots of "Belle-related items".
 * Red Like Roses has the lyric "Black the Beast descends from shadows."
 * Like The Beast, Blake has animal traits and is ostracized for them
 * Gambol Shroud's asymmetrical dual wield form is inspired by her duality of being both Belle and The Beast.
 * In BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle, Blake's two Distortion attacks are called Untouchable Beauty and Ferocious Beast.
 * When asked about her bow by a fan during the Blake Week AMA, Arryn answered that Blake has a closet full of bows all neatly aligned on the walls.
 * In the episode "Field Trip", Blake is shown to be uncomfortable around, or even scared of, dogs, most likely because she is a cat Faunus. This aspect is played up for comedy in episodes of RWBY Chibi.
 * On the first night at Beacon, Blake tells Ruby her book is about a man with two souls. The first line of the right-hand page of the book reads, "He raised the glass to his lips." - a direct quote from Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
 * Blake, alongside Ruby, Nora Valkyrie and Jaune Arc, is one of the characters who owns an object sold in the Rooster Teeth store: her backpack.
 * It is possible that Blake's Shadow Semblance was inspired by C.T.'s hologram armor enhancement from Red vs. Blue which functioned and was used very similarly to Blake's Semblance.
 * Blake's Huntress license number is 63600-23412-56709.