Volume 9 Beyond is a series of four short animatics covering events occurring, well, guess when. Apparently more than four were planned, but plans got cut down real quick when Rooster Teeth realised it was closing down. Also, in this case 'animatic' once again means something that went through
an animation pipeline, as opposed to the storyboard-with-audio of the Bonus Ending Animatic.
Sun narrates like he's in a noir film. Neptune, as usual, plays the straight man.
Oh, the "and Jaune too" jokes. Given three years in the fandom subconsciousness, they were bound to creep in.
Sun's being incredibly cringeworthy and I don't know whether to cringe, or be thankful that he's been having less trauma.
I just... this will be a short one, even moreso than suggested by its runtime of barely 3.5 minutes, because I'm busy half-cringing at Sun. Apparently the comedic tone of this piece isn't working well for me.
Yes, shocking, the two surviving Academy headmasters (if we can apply that word to Oscar) are meeting with the two known Maidens, who could have foreseen this. (Apart from the obvious 'what? Raven here? what?'. So much for my theory that she sat up and took notice when Yang reappeared - at this point Yang's only apparently died.) And possibly a third, heretofore unknown Maiden.
The two Junior Detectives turn chibi when Qrow picks them up by the scruff of the neck. One of these days I'll watch Chibi and be able to get all those jokes. Maybe. The latter does not necessarily follow from the former, because this is me we're talking about.
"And I hope they haven't given up either." Well, it was looking dicey for a while...
Most of the 'concept art' in the credits did not need further work before it was used as backgrounds in the animatic.
Somebody - probably Jaune, my voice-blindness has returned - is narrating a journal entry (the first one).
Yep, it is Jaune. Having had a lot more life than most people who haven't physically reached twenty (...this time), he's trying to keep things in perspective, and someone told him that a journal would help.
Team ALN is back together, about as much as it can be with Jaune now being as mentally old as the balance of the roster combined. Nora, being Nora, likes to tell everyone she meets that Jaune's the Rusted Knight. Jaune would rather leave that behind.
The journal advice was apparently given to him by Oscar (now increasingly merged with Ozma), the one person best equipped to sympathise with a drastic reversal in age, along with advice to put more emphasis on the positives of his time in the Ever After to try to remember what it was
for rather than depressively spiral.
First on that list, the early travels with Alyx and Lewis (I just checked, I apparently did guess the right spelling). Apparently they compared notes on Remnant; they learned that Jaune was from the future relative to them, and he learned that they were from (old) Vacuo. Old enough not to have invented days of the week, apparently.
The Ever After continues to be the Ever After: a farmers' market is where you rent farmers to grow stuff for you.
And around campfires Lewis would take copious notes on what would one day become the fairy tale, and Jaune would tell parts of his life. Imagine the increased timey-wimey shenanigans if any of that got into Lewis' notes.
Alyx and Lewis as replacement Nora and Ren. This is now made explicit. Also imaginary Pyrrha turns up as well.
Speaking of campfires, Vacuo is full of them right now. What are the people around them thinking? What kind of hope are they finding? Jaune doesn't know.
Jaune: "...Do you think we're gonna make it?"
Oscar: "Around that campfire, did it matter?"
Jaune: "... ...No. No, I guess it didn't."
The lesson here, I think, is that life can still be taken one day at a time. I've heard much worse lessons.
I think Ruby is narrating here. Yep, Somewhat's voice is noticeably different to the narration.
Drinking game suggestion: Take a shot every time Ruby says "somewhat". If you hate your liver. The writers must think they're hilarious.
Anyway, Somewhat's new purpose is to "find what feels wrong" in the Ever After. This reminds me of the Curious Cat's old purpose. I guess it still needs to be done, and with the Cat's well-overdue demise they can't do it anymore.
Somewhat's first stop is the Genial Gems, who are busy rebuilding their own infrastructure in preparation to help others later. They have not seen anything that needs to be brought to Somewhat's attention - they haven't seen much at all yet, because they've been busy.
At the marketplace from Chapter 5, Somewhat is informed that something bad did happen here, but they've rebuilt and recovered, stronger than ever.
The reborn Herbalist, on the other hand, has a quest to give to Somewhat. Not a vision-smoke quest, an actual quest that matches Somewhat's purpose.
Somewhat arrives at the Crimson
Castle Keep. (I really should have seen this coming.) It is almost entirely empty. After a meticulous search they finally find the Red Prince, who has dismissed His entire retinue in a fit of imposter syndrome. They find each other to be
somewhat passingly familiar, which Somewhat, being Somewhat, interprets to mean that they might have been friends.
It remains the Red Prince's purpose to win games. Somewhat accepts the challenge. Over the game, they attempt to convince Him that they can find a new purpose, with or without Ascending. Somewhat wins the game so easily I'm half-wondering whether the Prince lost deliberately.
The Red Prince does not throw a tantrum of any kind or scale. Look, they
can change!
Job done for the moment, Somewhat heads off into a dark Acre, only to be surprised to meet a portal. We do not see who emerges from it, only that Somewhat's reaction is "You're back!", which probably narrows it down a bit but we'd still be engaging in wild mass guessing.
(The drinking game counter stands at 8. Probably survivable.)
For those wondering what the h*ck is going on, "boba" usually refers to
tapioca pearls, aka balls, probably encountered as a component of
bubble tea, aka boba tea, invented in the 1980s in Taiwan and since popularised by various East Asian diasporas, most notably in California because of American cultural hegemony.
Chemically, it is a suspension - solids mixed into a liquid. What does this have to do with the world of RWBY? Let's find out, I guess.
The same shot of Vacuo proper that we've been seeing this entire series fades to a view of Ruby and Yang walking down a street somewhere therein. Yang apparently has a surprise prepared, but only a moderate one.
Ruby: "...why are you being weird?"
Yang: "I'm not weird! You're the weird one!"
That's hitting like Cars 3 right now. It shouldn't - it
really shouldn't - but it is. (Brutal political satire
in advance returns after an extended hiatus.)
Ruby goes chibi while emphasising how weird Yang's being. She's knocked out of chibi by a well-placed sisterly fist.
Uh oh, I think Ruby's about to meet her religion. Has such a thing ever gone well? Literally ever in the history of anything?
...It seems to have gone mostly okay. Yang takes the opportunity to call back to that "normal knees" line that was, out-of-universe, more than ten years ago. Have a seat and think about that.
The religion was not the planned surprise. The planned surprise was a bubble tea shop. Ruby disagrees with Yang's assessment that this is only a moderate surprise: she seems more excited than she was about the impromptu Beacon weapons gallery shortly after "normal knees", complete with what I'd swear are about the same chibi styles of excitement.
(checks) Yep. Bubble tea: best thing since bread slicers, apparently.
This shop apparently migrated from Patch sometime around when Salem happened to Vale, having previously been a fixture of Ruby and Yang's childhoods. This unfortunately brings the conversation crashing onto what Taiyang Xiao Long may or may not be doing, and where he might be doing it if not here. Ruby reckons they probably don't have enough information to know.
Yang decides that this is the opportune time to clear the air a bit about the mess otherwise known as the back half of the Ever After; she tells Ruby that she (Ruby) doesn't owe her an explanation, apologises for the part she played in Ruby feeling like she had to bottle up her problems, and asks her to remember that she isn't alone.
This episode can fit so much satire-in-advance in it. ...Anyway.
"We're not going back to the version of Team RWBY where you put everything on your shoulders. ...Where we put everything on your shoulders. From now on, we do it together."
Look, they're healing. Isn't it precious.
Ruby thinks that the hardest part of leadership is asking for help. Maybe that was on Beacon's second-year curriculum. Yang proposes a codeword. I'm certain that the codeword will be "boba". ...Someone better answer that Scroll, because
I called it.
(Most bubble tea uses milk tea as its dispersion medium. Milk tea is largely a
solution of tea and milk, exactly as it sounds. It's only taken more than ten years, but
finally, Ruby drinks milk! Good thing she had friends.)
