but they clearly put a lot of care into the show, characterization, very much the character designs, fights, etc., and while some stuff takes too long to flesh out, they do flesh it out. They make mistakes because they are winging it,
As someone who both puts a lot of effort into things and wings it a lot, I have to say, the bolded sections are basically back to back contrary statements.
My quests, my RPs, my forays into user fiction writing... These are amateur works I am not trying to sell, they are things I might aspire to, one day, make money off of, but in the here and now are practice and more to entertain myself than anything else.
RWBY is a professional product selling material goods off its brand.
And it doesn't even seem to know what it wants to be on a
basic level.
Like, again. Going back to my own works, because that's where I can speak with experience, some of my ideas are very off the cuff, and are basically nothing but making things up as I go. I flail, and do whatever sounds good. Perhaps I even do a good job, but they are fundamentally my plunging in carelessly, and putting forward fairly minimal effort into areas like planning, with the primary goal being to get better at writing through sheer practice. I've historically had a lot of trouble with the metaphorical pen to paper at all.
Others are me trying to do stuff with settings I have worked on for
years, where while my concepts of exact details evolve with time, I've had broad strokes of both setting facts and also setting
themes laid out to follow in advance. My Vampire setting has a bunch of root concepts going into it that guide my efforts with the RPs I run in it, even though even there I make up a lot of stuff as I go. I've never been that good at laying out long lists in advance.
RWBY has been a professional product for years, with the budget to hire professional, big name voice actors, and sells merchandise. It has a team, rather than being the work of one man with no editor. And yet it looks like my sloppiest, most casual and unserious efforts in areas like consistency and thematics and so on... While having the money to hire professionals and having a crew of people working on it. Oh, certainly, I am working merely with written text, and not needing to deal with voice acting, sound, and animations, but again, this is a professional work with specialists for those areas.
They might
care in the sense of having big emotions about it, but they do not put
great care in, in the sense of due diligence processes. If they did, flaws like it being so directionless and having episodes with glaring errors would not be so intrusively and dramatically present. We can see the lack of professional care put into this product sold professionally, regardless of what else you might think. It is a distinct and dramatic lack.
Then there are shows where the lore and continuity is key -- they're trying to do a through-line or an epic fantasy or whatever. From what I've heard, I have the impression that Avatar: The Last Airbender (and Korra) is like this. I would also include NGE.
Avatar: the Last Airbender is indeed very lore and continuity focused. While I've seen shows that are more so such, most episodes tie pretty directly into the overarching narrative and plenty of events have fairly permanent visible repercussions, allowing you to order many of the episodes without needing an official order because the evidence is simply there.
