michaelb958
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Well, if that's what you're after, you've jogged my memory of some old news:
Drunk pony rescued from swimming pool
IWIW RWBY
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Drunk pony rescued from swimming pool
Chibi S3E13 Cousins of Chaos & S3E14 Nefarious Dreams
michaelb958
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Chibi S3E13 Cousins of Chaos
Today we will be playing up (flanderising?) Penny's innocence and naïveté: she skips into the clearing, sees a Grimm (gnawing on a bone), and declares it to be a "fluffy friend". Ozpin tries to stop her from patting it. Success TBD. How funny would it be if that were Zwei in a Grimm-suit?
Penny asks why. Ozpin begins a full-on Dr Seuss spoof, complete with striped Cat-in-the-style hat. The Grimm just lets him.
Minor transition to the stand-up comedy stage, where Penny appears to have given the Grimm the mic. I was thinking this might have been an instant subversion, but it's just a continuation.
After Ozpin's rebuttal he dumps Penny and Grimm both down the stage trapdoor onto the common room couch. Ozpin has decided to meet Penny halfway by matching his rebuttals to what she's saying instead of deploying blanket refusals.
And now to a lecture theatre. Poor Jaune, forever the chew-toy. Literally this time.
And now, in the library, the Grimm eats a very Seuss-esque book that Penny was offering. She looks disappointed. Also Ozpin was reading Ninjas of Love in the background, or some other book with a similarly sized fold-out illustration.
Back to the clearing, rendering it unclear whether any of this was actually happening, as opposed to painting the medium of the dialogue. Ozpin gets first line this time, brutally undercut by the Grimm offering Penny a flower. Penny takes Ozpin's advice, and they depart, in varying levels of sadness.
The Grimm gets some still-rhyming monologue, in a voice familiar from past talking-Grimm skits, and proves Ozpin utterly wrong. I conclude that most of that dialogue was definitely just medium-painting.
It is, in fact, those two Grimm, because here's the other one to try to repair the situation a little bit. It fails, and we finally get a tiny little lampshade hung on the rhyming.
{#18}
Jaune attempts to cross the street. It doesn't go so well, because episode title is a stereotypical biker gang of Sun, Neptune, and for some reason Ren. Jaune isn't run over, but he looks addled by his brush with death. Correction, he's just a massive fan.
Ren leaves the possibility open that the "cool gang" only formed today. Sun tells Jaune that only "bad boys" are eligible for membership, which strikes me as a callback to about two seasons ago and therefore implies Zwei in our futures.
Or maybe it's just a montage of (telling of) petty acts of rebellion:
At my local supermarket, sometimes when it's quiet, only the express checkouts are open, so you have to go through there regardless of how many you have. I don't think that's what Neptune means, though.
That's gross. Everyone else on set agrees with me.
Jaune scrambles to come up with his own petty act of rebellion. Eventually he goes with:
I reckon he might have a bad time riding a motorcycle if he's not. Anyway, Ren is intrigued by the extra layer of mystery on the rebellion, and they endorse him.
Jaune declines to shake Sun's hand. Sun reckons this is a "rebel move", either as a secret test of character or just something he didn't think of. I reckon Jaune just managed to remember Sun's preferred brand of petty rebellion.
The biker-gang atmosphere is soon punctured by Neptune reminding Sun about his "skin cream". I don't know if motorcycling around in the wind can actually dry out your face, but it wouldn't shock me if it were true. While the three senior members are over there moisturising, Jaune manages to accidentally push one of their bikes over, and it takes out the other two, domino-style. That's going to put a hole in the biker-gang image.
Oh, it got worse, the pushed-over bikes all exploded. Who did the safety testing on these things, Roman Torchwick? Surprisingly well-animated fire. For the cherry on top, Ren says his library book was in his bike. You're telling me those had storage? And what were his non-immediate plans w.r.t. returning the book?
No ad for Nomad of Nowhere at the start, but here it still is at the end.
{{Wiki says there was, apparently, a credits joke exclusive to the Rooster Teeth website. I guess that's lost forever.}}
Chibi S3E14 Nefarious Dreams
After the success of the skit from two episodes ago where Team JNPR were all dreaming, here's the Team CEM+R edition in their darkened dorm room. Where is this darkened room, anyway? Is it some back room of Torchwick and Neo's previously-seen hideout? Is it a Beacon dorm room with a dramatic lack of illumination? Is it something else entirely that I've forgotten about?
First, Torchwick. He strides (alongside Neo) through Vale wearing a hat made of gold and carrying an equally gilded weapon. Also money grows on trees (never mind the effect on inflation). Also here's Cinder wanting to help move the wagon containing his pile of money, and generally not being difficult like Cinder usually is. Neo still hates her. Mood. Torchwick is not obviously followed into the outside world by any evidence, but I might have missed it.
Poor Emerald has a dream-Cinder who has finally noticed her.
Mercury gets to dance (to the tune of Shine [V2]), and dream-Cinder appreciates it. I got a chuckle out of Mercury demanding a foot massage when both knew equally well how little use that would be.
Neither Emerald nor Mercury have manifested any dream-items either, so I think the show's not doing that any more. But there is this weird thing tucked in near Mercury's pillow. What is it? I've got no idea. Do I have to turn up the video quality? (squints harder) It's the h*cking sockpuppet. I really can't even.
Anyway, Cinder's dreamscape. Everyone else has had a less dismissive dream-Cinder, so I'm not sure whether Cinder will be extra-dismissive of her dream-companions, or comedically reveal that she subconsciously wants to let them in. Or something else funny I haven't thought of.
I'll file that under extra-dismissive: Cinder has dreamed herself up a team of three more of herself, and finally gained the full Fall Maidenship. One of them is wearing two sockpuppets: The cycle is probably about to repeat. Yeah, now they're all getting into a fight about being the most evil and dreaming-Cinder is going to Maiden them all out of existence, right? ...Apparently not. Being Cinder, all three agree to mutiny, and Cinder has to snap awake to avoid the beating.
"Maybe these guys aren't that bad," muses Cinder. Right on cue, Mercury sleep-talks. So much for that revelation.
{#40: Yang motorcycles. She's actually having a great time.}
Return of the escape room, last seen in S2E20. Ruby and Yang wait outside. Ruby is a little concerned about how long Tai's been in there; Yang just turns it into a self-deprecating joke.
The real joke here, aside from callbacks to Yang's escape style, is Tai refusing to ask for or accept help.
No, the real real joke is that this is the only way that Tai thinks he can get some time to himself. Based on what little I know about parenting, it might even be true, which is the best kind of joke.
Honestly I was impressed they pulled so many rhymes together so well.
This is one of those lines that kind of gives me the feels Ren thinks Jaune is kind of hot.
Also I agree on Sun being gross and our checkouts tend to be similar, the fact Ren is a member amuses me he's so bland but also so down for anything and committing to the bit.
Jaune: Why did I explode?
I always assumed their name was team cinnamon.
Also interesting how all their dreams relate to Cinder, but only Emerald's is not terrible XD
Also its funny that "Seeking mother figure" is not how I initially took Emerald's perceptive on the relationship, though the phrasing is hilarious even if the gag is sad. Also recalling a friends RWBY AU's where Cinder's backstory involved leaving behind a daughter to go serve Salem but being real sad about it and still caring about said kid even post series series and such. Keep in mind this was all conceived around V4.
Cinder's "Bleh!" is so expressive XD
That relies on him doing any parenting XD
Or he just has his original feet in his dream?
michaelb958
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Who even knows. Although this isn't even the same team, having Torchwick instead of Neo.
To be fair, Cinder's dream contains Cinder getting vanquished, even if it's more Cinders doing it.
Hmm. Does Mercury dream of biological feet? It would help him be a foil to Yang, so I can't rule it out.
Chibi S3E15 Play With Penny & S3E16 RWBY Dreams
michaelb958
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Chibi S3E15 Play With Penny
Team RWB+J freak out a bit at the sight of a giant monster. And by 'giant', I mean seriously giant. (It is seen only in shadow, and that shadow quite resembles the Chibi Beowolf, probably due to asset reuse.) Blake snarks at Jaune a bit as Yang wanders into view, which I initially misinterpreted as something very much antithetical to Bumblebee.
Yang, being chibi Yang, is all up for punching the giant monster even as she's fully aware of the likely ineffectiveness of doing so. ("I'm Yang! Let's fight!") Yep, it's not very effective.
Everybody but Ruby starts dropping hints about silver eyes. I am increasingly convinced that this is foreshadowing the Leviathan at the end of V6. I am even more convinced once Ruby says under her breath "Season finale, can't do it yet.", but with fewer spaces.
Jaune tries to invoke the laws of the narrative to summon help. Cue Zwei. Zwei is also not very effective: Weiss admires the wisdom he displays in fleeing immediately.
Next to appear from stage left is Penny, in the mood to play a game. Ruby takes a rain-check, citing giant monster. Penny is not one to be stopped by such petty inconveniences as giant monster, taking the thing down in six seconds flat. Yes, I counted. Ruby is dragged off to go play a game, in no mood to object to Penny about anything for any reason. I wonder why.
Jaune tempts fate, and gets Team WBY+J conscripted by the Shopkeeper to help clean up the mess resulting from the giant monster fight.
{#41: Oobleck blurs back and forth before settling in front of the camera to fix his glasses.}
Back to the lecture theatre, where Oobleck exposits to Team RW+J about "lifehacks". This can only go poorly for someone, probably Jaune.
Oobleck declares (after getting Ruby to shout "I'm sorry for thinking!", oof) that "there are no shortcuts in life!". To this I say, every time I have implemented an idea that I first thought of as a "lifehack", it's gone badly, so I'm with Oobleck on this one.
Oobleck continues on to (loudly) advise Weiss to do what she habitually already does, and tell Jaune to "laugh in [mortality's] face" while demonstrating on him how to grab it by the throat. This is literally a very in-your-face lecture. He then sculls some more coffee, reveals that this is the return of the PSA, then does an impression of a caffeine-powered rocket. Weiss muses that "he's not coming down". Oobleck zips past the windows to prove her right.
{#42: You thought you were safe from Cardin? So did I, but here he kicks Jaune off a skateboard. Jaune was succeeding, even.}
Cardin wanders through the clearing, batting rocks at innocent wildlife. What or who will he karmically anger?
Sounds like it'll be Qrow. ...Yep, here's the man to punch Cardin out. For added comedy points, the cartoonish animals circling his head to indicate being stunned are all Qrow-style crows.
The test pattern does not herald the end of the episode; instead we cut to one final shot. It is nighttime now, and Cardin is still out cold. Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.
Now we cut to an ad slide for unexpectedly not Nomad of Nowhere, instead it is Camp Camp's Halloween special episode. (checks upload date) 14 October, so it kinda makes sense.
Chibi S3E16 RWBY Dreams
A butler walks up to a noodle stand and orders one bowl of plain noodles. Shopkeeper provides noodles, and Klein savours the smell. Where is this going?
This is a joke where each of Klein's alters wants the noodles differently. I'm already tired of it.
As I expected, Shopkeeper gets fed up with him.
{#33}
It's time for the next instalment of Team Dreams, now featuring Team RWBY. And maybe Zwei, he's here too, for some reason trying to get onto Weiss' bunk instead of accosting Blake. Maybe he wants to be let up to Ruby's bunk?
Anyway, Blake is dreaming of a world where people swim through the air. This makes only slightly more sense in Neptune's case. Anyway, along air-swims a fish, and Blake takes a bite out of it. She should not have. Poor Blake.
Yang dreams of being a rebellious teenager. I psychoanalyse that she's feeling the aftereffects of needing to grow up really fast to basically parent Ruby. Fittingly, the lead authority figure who tries to stop her is Tai; Ozpin, Port, and Klein are also there, and for sister-parent reasons Winter completes the set. Somehow this culminates in Yang riding Bumblebee (the bike) through the air with a rainbow trail to the sound of air horns. Ah, the sound of air horns, that takes me back. Yang is clearly letting her memes be dreams. For some reason the fish accompanies her, also leaving a rainbow trail.
Blake only managed to manifest her nausea at the "bad fish", but Yang has manifested her sunglasses as she also sleep-talks.
Meanwhile, you will be shocked to learn that dream-Weiss is being the best at being in a lecture theatre (complete with Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy reference) - until it turns into a nightmare as Oobleck certifies that she's learned everything. Didn't we do this joke already? (checks) Apparently not. Anyway, his phrasing prompts all her fellow students to turn on her, including several behind the camera, two of whom I can positively identify as Sun and Nora.
As Weiss writhes in intellectual agony, we shift to Ruby, with a note that Zwei managed to climb onto her bunk. Dream-Ruby rides Zwei around the clearing like some kind of severely undersized pony, as has been extensively foreshadowed - until she's ejected and bounces off something. For maximum surreality points, the something is non-chibi Ruby, who looks extremely uncanny-valley when surrounded by chibi. All involved think that the other two are adorable. The situation soon develops not to chibi Ruby's advantage: non-chibi Ruby declares her intention to "squeeze you 'til you pop!", and chibi Ruby does not have the speed or firepower advantages and cannot escape this fate. In the background, Zwei has caught that fish; I'll have to recheck Weiss' dream for it. {{
Chibi Ruby awakens; her suffocation was caused by Zwei getting cosy on her face again. I'm told some folks have pets that do that. Personally, my family's cats never do, but they liked to get cosy on my legs, which woke me up, so I've been in the habit for years of shutting the door so that they can't - much better for my already-endangered sleep. Ruby might be having similar thoughts, admonishing Zwei on the frequency with which he does this. For maximum comedy, she'll unintentionally awaken the rest of the team? ...No.
The credits ad slide this time is more abstract, for RT First membership (now a dead letter) and the V6 trailer. I recognise its accompanying music from the Rooster Teeth post-credits outro from I think V6, which would have been around this time, and then we get the end of that to tie it together.
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I love normal Ruby's delight at Chibi-Crescent Rose.
The fish pokes up from the desk at 2:50 on Weiss's left side, our right.
Everything is foreshadowing XD
Love how expressive they made Zwei.
Penny aggressively friending Ruby >;3c
He tried those, they indeed did not work out.
I love how you can see how they stretched his arm so he can keep it around Jaune by looking between their heads.
Low key I almost would have wanted this to be Raven's Chibi Debut. If she'd had one!!! :'(
Yeah this is one of those jokes that is like, theoretically funny, but gets really repetitive and mostly relies on rankling others. Kind of feels like it might work better if he was preparing his own meal and constantly getting pissed off at the others ingredients.
People make terrible fish, but sadly, so did the fish.
existential intellectual ennui!
Love chibi Ruby's "I'll cut you!" and "Betrayed by my own cuteness!"
michaelb958
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Thank you very much! Post updated.
It's Chibi, it was funny, therefore it happened.
If I had a nickel for every Edgelord McEdgelord who was too much of an edgelord to appear in Chibi, I'd have two nickels. Which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice.
Happy to help!
True, though this is also just one of those 3D modelling 'thing', like that video which shows someone's lips being dragged a meter off their face to create the look needed to imitate 2D.
Adam: You dare compare me to this human.
Raven: You dare compare me to this dipshit.
Chibi S3 Checkpoint
michaelb958
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And so began the Great Chibi Hiatus. Folks were, I'm told, assured that Coco would be making her Chibi debut in Season 3, but nonetheless the season abruptly ended with S3E16 without Coco showing up.
People slowly went crazy waiting. It got to the point of the following author's note from mid-2020:
About fifty million years after that remark, in May 2021, Rooster Teeth announced a new content offering by the name of Neon Konbini - whatever the h*ck that means - and announced that it would contain more RWBY Chibi. And there was much rejoicing.
That video also does a lot to convince me that there was a jump in animation quality between S1 and S2, by juxtaposing them very sharply.
Muffled screaming about people foreshadowing themselves in my thread. How it started:
And finally, one of these games is not like the others:
The things I do for my special interest of the week.
People slowly went crazy waiting. It got to the point of the following author's note from mid-2020:
Of course, that turned out to be V09C08, wherein an illusion of Pyrrha helps send Ruby to recursive purgatory. The country did not need that. Anyway, I brought this up because I could have sworn that author made a joke somewhere in there about the use of the US National Defense Authorization Act to order more Chibi, but apparently I made it up in my head, which makes me kinda sad because that was absolutely a joke worth making.
About fifty million years after that remark, in May 2021, Rooster Teeth announced a new content offering by the name of Neon Konbini - whatever the h*ck that means - and announced that it would contain more RWBY Chibi. And there was much rejoicing.
It's not! It's not lost!! It's audible at the end of this ‹Without Context› video:
That video also does a lot to convince me that there was a jump in animation quality between S1 and S2, by juxtaposing them very sharply.
Muffled screaming about people foreshadowing themselves in my thread. How it started:
How it went:
Yes, the very same bit with the stray cats.
And finally, one of these games is not like the others:
The things I do for my special interest of the week.
What's A Konbini, And Other Japanese Facts
michaelb958
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So what's a konbini, anyway? As with many other bewildering questions, the short answer is that Japan happened.
After an extended hiatus, it is now time for michaelb958's Tangentially Related Storytime.
Japanese is an interesting language, which I can tell you with some authority because I learned it for three years back in school. For starters, it has three different commonly deployed scripts - or four, if you count the Latin script I'm using right now:
kanji . The kanji are used for information density. In a context that feels helpful, like this one, you'll see the hiragana above; this is called "ルビ" ("ruby", a hilarious coincidence wait, no, oh my h*ck, the etymology is that in typography it's a small font size [5.5 points], this must be why she's small), and serves as a pronunciation guide - unlike the other scripts, kanji do not have a single reliable pronunciation (as you can see from the second-last syllables of "hiragana" and "katakana" using the same kanji but different kana; Chinese - and English - are terrible at that). The exception is that the first 3/4 characters of the rendering of "romaji" are katakana, because that part of the word is borrowed from English: specifically, "Roman", because it was the Romans who pioneered Latin script. Generally, katakana are more angular than hiragana, and kanji are more complicated than kana.
Many people, including me, have described English as three languages in a trench coat that mug others for vocabulary in dark alleys. Japanese does much the same thing. It and many others do so to an increasing degree in this time of increasingly many technical terms being coined in English, but it always has. As an example, which is also an example of how it doesn't restrict itself to mugging English, English "bread" translates to "パン" ("pan"), which was borrowed from Portuguese - Japanese hadn't really needed a concept of 'bread' before Portugal came by, because Japan and China use rice as a staple crop rather than anything that needs to be milled and baked. (For some reason, this one is rendered in hiragana.)
The thing about Japanese mugging for vocabulary is that it doesn't do it by halves: it either drops troublesome syllables and adapts troublesome sounds, or just transliterates the entire thing complete with all its grammatical warts. The former can be seen with the term "romaji" itself, where the N traditionally found on the end of "Roman" is discarded, even though N is literally the only standalone consonant Japanese has. (Every other kana is a consonant-and-vowel pair, in that order; some of them just play games with elision, which on second examination is kind of what happened here: the N was elided.) The latter can be found in my favourite example from my first year of study, "フィッシュ・アンド・チップス" ("fisshu-ando-chippusu"), which has copied the English grammar as well as the words it glues together, despite Japanese having its own perfectly serviceable ways to say "fish" and "and". (You can also observe elision games in there, with four different vowel sounds that need to be elided for the pronunciation to resemble English as intended.) "romaji", a katakana-kanji hybrid, is an exception to this rule; I don't know why. My best guess is that字 somehow counts as grammatical glue, but that still doesn't explain why it's kanji...
I'm now going to take a moment to tell you my least favourite vocabulary-mugging story, which I promise is related to my point. Once upon a time, the Spanish had these things they called "asesina-ballenas", which translates to "whale killers", because that's what they did - kill whales. The English found out and mangled it into "killer whales", which is only half right and it's the less important half that's right, so I'll just call it wrong. Then Spanish borrowed it back wrong, so now they're wrong too. (So please just call them orcas.)
Modern Japanese has a great deal of influence from English that's actually older than most of the American cultural hegemony, mainly because said hegemony chronologically started there when they put Japan back together after blowing it apart (to be fair, the Japan of the 1930s was utterly horrifying). One of the words that got mugged into Japanese on the way there was "convenience store", which us Australians would call "milk bar" or perhaps "corner shop". It had inconvenient sounds adapted and ended up as "コンビニエンス ストア" ("konbiniensu sutoa"), which was then shortened to "コンビニ" ("konbini"). Now it's being mugged back into English. Such is life in etymology.
The "neon" is almost redundant.
And that's Good To Know!
After an extended hiatus, it is now time for michaelb958's Tangentially Related Storytime.
Japanese is an interesting language, which I can tell you with some authority because I learned it for three years back in school. For starters, it has three different commonly deployed scripts - or four, if you count the Latin script I'm using right now:
- hiragana (
平 仮 名 ). The usual home-grown script. Also used for most grammatical glue. - katakana (
片 仮 名 ). Used for loanwords not originating from Chinese, onomatopoeia, and emphasis (in the kind of way that Latin might use italics). - kanji (
漢 字 ), a script literally stolen from China (that's what "kanji" means, literally "China-letters"). Higher information density than either form of kana, and so used to compress hiragana (but never katakana). Also customarily used for Chinese loanwords if I'm reading the implications correctly. Being Traditional Chinese, there are h*cking thousands of these, which is why I stopped learning Japanese. - romaji (ローマ
字 ), the local term for Latin script. Used mainly when technical reasons make kana impossible.
Many people, including me, have described English as three languages in a trench coat that mug others for vocabulary in dark alleys. Japanese does much the same thing. It and many others do so to an increasing degree in this time of increasingly many technical terms being coined in English, but it always has. As an example, which is also an example of how it doesn't restrict itself to mugging English, English "bread" translates to "パン" ("pan"), which was borrowed from Portuguese - Japanese hadn't really needed a concept of 'bread' before Portugal came by, because Japan and China use rice as a staple crop rather than anything that needs to be milled and baked. (For some reason, this one is rendered in hiragana.)
The thing about Japanese mugging for vocabulary is that it doesn't do it by halves: it either drops troublesome syllables and adapts troublesome sounds, or just transliterates the entire thing complete with all its grammatical warts. The former can be seen with the term "romaji" itself, where the N traditionally found on the end of "Roman" is discarded, even though N is literally the only standalone consonant Japanese has. (Every other kana is a consonant-and-vowel pair, in that order; some of them just play games with elision, which on second examination is kind of what happened here: the N was elided.) The latter can be found in my favourite example from my first year of study, "フィッシュ・アンド・チップス" ("fisshu-ando-chippusu"), which has copied the English grammar as well as the words it glues together, despite Japanese having its own perfectly serviceable ways to say "fish" and "and". (You can also observe elision games in there, with four different vowel sounds that need to be elided for the pronunciation to resemble English as intended.) "romaji", a katakana-kanji hybrid, is an exception to this rule; I don't know why. My best guess is that
I'm now going to take a moment to tell you my least favourite vocabulary-mugging story, which I promise is related to my point. Once upon a time, the Spanish had these things they called "asesina-ballenas", which translates to "whale killers", because that's what they did - kill whales. The English found out and mangled it into "killer whales", which is only half right and it's the less important half that's right, so I'll just call it wrong. Then Spanish borrowed it back wrong, so now they're wrong too. (So please just call them orcas.)
Modern Japanese has a great deal of influence from English that's actually older than most of the American cultural hegemony, mainly because said hegemony chronologically started there when they put Japan back together after blowing it apart (to be fair, the Japan of the 1930s was utterly horrifying). One of the words that got mugged into Japanese on the way there was "convenience store", which us Australians would call "milk bar" or perhaps "corner shop". It had inconvenient sounds adapted and ended up as "コンビニエンス ストア" ("konbiniensu sutoa"), which was then shortened to "コンビニ" ("konbini"). Now it's being mugged back into English. Such is life in etymology.
The "neon" is almost redundant.
And that's Good To Know!
Well you did make it so there is that.
Solid insight there.
Hahaha, I foreshadowed my own actions hahahahaha XD
RWBY I assume?
& know is half the battle!!!
Seriously though fascinating stuff, kudos.
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I'd never noticed it before they were put side by side, but you're right. And it makes sense. After all, RvB and RWBY were pretty much the poster children of improving animation.
michaelb958
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Wait, I did! Go me!
A lone hack-and-slash in a sea of real-time strategy.
The other half is mechashift weaponry.
One of these days, we'll see if RWBY continues that trajectory under new management. Sometime. Hopefully.
Chibi S4 [1/2]
michaelb958
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Neon Konbini ran for 8 episodes, with a total runtime of 2 hours 21 minutes 40 seconds, and contained 10 Chibi skits with a total runtime of 13 minutes 35 seconds - in other words, Neon Konbini is 9.6% RWBY Chibi, and I ain't got time for that. Fortunately, 2023 brought reuploads of the Chibi skits on YouTube. Total runtime there is 13 minutes 44 seconds, which is close enough that I reckon they probably haven't left anything out. Hopefully.
I'll be using the YouTube episode classification and ordering. This means there are 7 episodes in Chibi S4.
I thought we weren't going to have an ad at the start, but it was sneakily hiding after the title card. It also drags on for half a minute of this not-even-3-minute episode. That's almost as long as I spent actually enjoying Arrowfell. (/s, but not too much...)
Today's exercise in 'what do these folks have in common?' is Winter, Ren, Cinder, and Neptune, standing around near the front of the lecture theatre. After a moment, Qrow springs up from behind the lecture desk to startle and address them.
Apparently this is the Council of Cool. I'm a bit concerned that Winter told Weiss to go jump off a bridge at some point. Ren and Neptune both wilfully misinterpret bits of what Qrow exposits about them. Less surprisingly, Cinder isn't impressed with the competence of her underlings. And of course Qrow operates under his own delusions.
"There is another," says Qrow. An existential threat to the Council, even. He refers to this person as an "upperclassman", which apparently makes them a singular threat, despite Cinder being established as an upperclassman in S1E21.
Cut to Coco Adel. Okay, Qrow was underselling the threat. Sun makes the terrible mistake of trying to skateboard in her presence, is overcome by her presence, knocks himself out on a lamppost, and has his skateboard appropriated.
Cinder is unique among the Council in not seeing a problem. Ruby convinces her: she announces Coco's return, which prompts Emerald and Mercury to join the ensuing celebration. (Among pretty much every other character ever seen in Chibi.)
While the camera wasn't on them, the rest of the Council has disbanded and gone to supplicate at Coco's coolness. It's just Qrow and Cinder now.
While the camera wasn't on Qrow and Cinder, and they weren't looking, Coco coolly materialised behind them. She proceeds to rub it in. Qrow has now begun the journey to accepting his uncoolness.
Some writer or another - I should remember who, but I don't - deliberately looks uncool in the outro.
Half-minute Arrowfell ad? Again? If this keeps up for all 7 episodes it might actually approach my cumulative time spent enjoying Arrowfell. (increasingly less /s)
The cringe starts now: Cinder is speed-dating. She hopes it won't be a waste of time.
Cue a montage of Oobleck (!); Port (!); Neptune with a noir filter (!!); Sun, which was going a bit better for a few seconds; and finally Coco, who must be bringing the punchline with this little time left. Yep, Coco's here for Velvet. I'm actually feeling a little sorry for Cinder at this point.
No, the real punchline was Cinder setting up a mirror. No, the real punchline was Klein set it up by accident.
Mercifully, the Arrowfell ad has been shortened to 20 seconds. Still up to an aggregate of 1:20, which makes me worry that my theory that every skit has been moved across from Neon Konbini might be off.
Team RWBY+R+V wait in the lecture theatre for class to start.
Class starts in the worst possible way for Ruby and Yang: Enter Tai. Yang panics and attempts to disclaim responsibility for some noodle incident, continuing a joke from S2E13.
Tai skateboards in as a substitute teacher. What, what did you think "sub" meant there, guttermind? Yang is relieved to escape responsibility for the noodle incident; Ruby thinks a step further and starts screaming internally at the thought of Chibi Tai teaching at Beacon. By the time Tai opens with a dad joke, Yang has visibly caught up to Ruby's train of thought. None of the six visible students acknowledge the joke. Some of them may be busy having S2E4 flashbacks.
Ruby retreats into the safety of her own mind as Tai starts the how-do-you-do-fellow-kids speech in earnest. Yang follows suit as she realises, moments in advance, what Tai has in mind:
Tai begins. It is as bad as we and his children expected. Ren, the choreographer of the group, declares it "an insult to dance", and Velvet looks like she'd like to also be safe in her mindscape but has forgotten how.
The Arrowfell ad has dwindled to 10 seconds. On the other hand, the video description has an outrageous typo.
Velvet lurks sadly, somewhere in Vale. Fortunately Coco's strolling into scene. The movement of that handbag is not the slightest bit reflective of the mass of a minigun hiding in there.
Coco isn't satisfied that there's no particular explanation for Velvet's blue mood, and starts guessing. It wasn't Cardin, probably, maybe, apparently Velvet might not tell the truth about that. Coco pivots to guessing what might help. Velvet dissuades Coco from trying to buy the problems away, promoting the importance of healthy recognition of emotional cycles.
I thought the joke here was going to be Coco being infected by Velvet's mood, or failing that, overplaying Velvet actually just wanting Coco's company; but here Chibi transcends its usual formula by not trying a joke, just a friendship moment. 8/10, good stuff.
The Arrowfell ad is now only about 9 seconds. ...wait a minute, the "collector's edition" it's selling had already expired at upload time! In fact, it only had one day to run back when S4E1 was uploaded. The rudeness is astounding.
‹CARDIN'S COOL CLUB› is one of those scenes where the longer you look, the more jumps out at you. Firstly, of course, the season's running theme of coolness. The club is set up outside - is this a super-advanced weather joke? (It's not cold, it's just cool!) The above sign is tied around one of those big decorative pillars; the font on the sign is very edgy, except for the S, which is that cool shape thing that all the cool kids in primary school could draw (no, I could not, thanks for asking), and the apostrophe, Cardin's emblem. On a table to one side of that pillar is a cake, some balloons, and some other things that I can't identify. Standing to the other side is DJ P3N-3 (reappearing from S2E24), which fills me with horror. All this from the first frame past the season's other running theme, the Arrowfell ad.
Anyway, Cardin has delusions to surpass Qrow's about his popularity. "Everyone loves my pranks!" he declares, swiftly followed by a montage of people very not:
Not the latter just yet. Cardin misnames Jaune, then blurs offscreen to fetch him. Jaune, after a great deal of prompting, talks faster than Ruby in the process of explaining to Cardin why he and his club aren't popular. I'm gonna need the transcript to work out the details of that last bit. {{...Something about Neptune still having lunch money.}}
Cardin says "I think you're on to something.". It's Chibi, so there is absolutely no chance that he's onto the right something. Chances dwindling as Jaune suggests the right thing. Yep, I hate being right, Cardin's wandered off to rob Neptune some more.
Penny blurs back in to provide the canned wah-wah sound. Really? Canned wah-wah? Is that what we're doing now? I think this season peaked in episode 2. I don't know how, but it did.
And now, trailing ad time: ...no, not an ad, it's something that passes for a Rooster Teeth 20th anniversary outro. {{The wiki tells me this upload was on the day itself, which explains it.}}
I'll be using the YouTube episode classification and ordering. This means there are 7 episodes in Chibi S4.
Chibi S4E1 Cool as Coco
I thought we weren't going to have an ad at the start, but it was sneakily hiding after the title card. It also drags on for half a minute of this not-even-3-minute episode. That's almost as long as I spent actually enjoying Arrowfell. (/s, but not too much...)
Today's exercise in 'what do these folks have in common?' is Winter, Ren, Cinder, and Neptune, standing around near the front of the lecture theatre. After a moment, Qrow springs up from behind the lecture desk to startle and address them.
Apparently this is the Council of Cool. I'm a bit concerned that Winter told Weiss to go jump off a bridge at some point. Ren and Neptune both wilfully misinterpret bits of what Qrow exposits about them. Less surprisingly, Cinder isn't impressed with the competence of her underlings. And of course Qrow operates under his own delusions.
"There is another," says Qrow. An existential threat to the Council, even. He refers to this person as an "upperclassman", which apparently makes them a singular threat, despite Cinder being established as an upperclassman in S1E21.
Cut to Coco Adel. Okay, Qrow was underselling the threat. Sun makes the terrible mistake of trying to skateboard in her presence, is overcome by her presence, knocks himself out on a lamppost, and has his skateboard appropriated.
Cinder is unique among the Council in not seeing a problem. Ruby convinces her: she announces Coco's return, which prompts Emerald and Mercury to join the ensuing celebration. (Among pretty much every other character ever seen in Chibi.)
While the camera wasn't on them, the rest of the Council has disbanded and gone to supplicate at Coco's coolness. It's just Qrow and Cinder now.
While the camera wasn't on Qrow and Cinder, and they weren't looking, Coco coolly materialised behind them. She proceeds to rub it in. Qrow has now begun the journey to accepting his uncoolness.
Some writer or another - I should remember who, but I don't - deliberately looks uncool in the outro.
Chibi S4E2 Love Life
Half-minute Arrowfell ad? Again? If this keeps up for all 7 episodes it might actually approach my cumulative time spent enjoying Arrowfell. (increasingly less /s)
The cringe starts now: Cinder is speed-dating. She hopes it won't be a waste of time.
Cue a montage of Oobleck (!); Port (!); Neptune with a noir filter (!!); Sun, which was going a bit better for a few seconds; and finally Coco, who must be bringing the punchline with this little time left. Yep, Coco's here for Velvet. I'm actually feeling a little sorry for Cinder at this point.
No, the real punchline was Cinder setting up a mirror. No, the real punchline was Klein set it up by accident.
Chibi S4E3 Tai the Sub
Mercifully, the Arrowfell ad has been shortened to 20 seconds. Still up to an aggregate of 1:20, which makes me worry that my theory that every skit has been moved across from Neon Konbini might be off.
Team RWBY+R+V wait in the lecture theatre for class to start.
Class starts in the worst possible way for Ruby and Yang: Enter Tai. Yang panics and attempts to disclaim responsibility for some noodle incident, continuing a joke from S2E13.
Tai skateboards in as a substitute teacher. What, what did you think "sub" meant there, guttermind? Yang is relieved to escape responsibility for the noodle incident; Ruby thinks a step further and starts screaming internally at the thought of Chibi Tai teaching at Beacon. By the time Tai opens with a dad joke, Yang has visibly caught up to Ruby's train of thought. None of the six visible students acknowledge the joke. Some of them may be busy having S2E4 flashbacks.
Ruby retreats into the safety of her own mind as Tai starts the how-do-you-do-fellow-kids speech in earnest. Yang follows suit as she realises, moments in advance, what Tai has in mind:
And now it is my turn to disengage from cold hard hip-hop reality. Weiss has simply started a video recording; Blake actually looks enthusiastic, and are those her dancing shoes?
Tai begins. It is as bad as we and his children expected. Ren, the choreographer of the group, declares it "an insult to dance", and Velvet looks like she'd like to also be safe in her mindscape but has forgotten how.
Chibi S4E4 True Blue Friends
The Arrowfell ad has dwindled to 10 seconds. On the other hand, the video description has an outrageous typo.
Velvet lurks sadly, somewhere in Vale. Fortunately Coco's strolling into scene. The movement of that handbag is not the slightest bit reflective of the mass of a minigun hiding in there.
Coco isn't satisfied that there's no particular explanation for Velvet's blue mood, and starts guessing. It wasn't Cardin, probably, maybe, apparently Velvet might not tell the truth about that. Coco pivots to guessing what might help. Velvet dissuades Coco from trying to buy the problems away, promoting the importance of healthy recognition of emotional cycles.
I thought the joke here was going to be Coco being infected by Velvet's mood, or failing that, overplaying Velvet actually just wanting Coco's company; but here Chibi transcends its usual formula by not trying a joke, just a friendship moment. 8/10, good stuff.
Chibi S4E5 Cardin's Club
The Arrowfell ad is now only about 9 seconds. ...wait a minute, the "collector's edition" it's selling had already expired at upload time! In fact, it only had one day to run back when S4E1 was uploaded. The rudeness is astounding.
‹CARDIN'S COOL CLUB› is one of those scenes where the longer you look, the more jumps out at you. Firstly, of course, the season's running theme of coolness. The club is set up outside - is this a super-advanced weather joke? (It's not cold, it's just cool!) The above sign is tied around one of those big decorative pillars; the font on the sign is very edgy, except for the S, which is that cool shape thing that all the cool kids in primary school could draw (no, I could not, thanks for asking), and the apostrophe, Cardin's emblem. On a table to one side of that pillar is a cake, some balloons, and some other things that I can't identify. Standing to the other side is DJ P3N-3 (reappearing from S2E24), which fills me with horror. All this from the first frame past the season's other running theme, the Arrowfell ad.
Anyway, Cardin has delusions to surpass Qrow's about his popularity. "Everyone loves my pranks!" he declares, swiftly followed by a montage of people very not:
- Pyrrha, covered in reused cake-debris splatter assets, is uncharacteristically livid, chasing Cardin down a hallway at javelin-point.
- Neptune attempts to rescue a fake spider left on the main thoroughfare. Cardin takes the opportunity to wedgie him. Poor Neptune.
- Coco is very displeased to have had her sunglasses stolen, which is why she's chasing Cardin down the same hallway in the opposite direction at handbag-point (wait, it doesn't have a point... you know what I mean).
- Yang completely fails at situational awareness, giving Cardin the opportunity to trip her with his mace. Of course, it is rarely a good idea to simultaneously give Yang anger and Semblance charge.
Not the latter just yet. Cardin misnames Jaune, then blurs offscreen to fetch him. Jaune, after a great deal of prompting, talks faster than Ruby in the process of explaining to Cardin why he and his club aren't popular. I'm gonna need the transcript to work out the details of that last bit. {{...Something about Neptune still having lunch money.}}
Cardin says "I think you're on to something.". It's Chibi, so there is absolutely no chance that he's onto the right something. Chances dwindling as Jaune suggests the right thing. Yep, I hate being right, Cardin's wandered off to rob Neptune some more.
Penny blurs back in to provide the canned wah-wah sound. Really? Canned wah-wah? Is that what we're doing now? I think this season peaked in episode 2. I don't know how, but it did.
And now, trailing ad time: ...no, not an ad, it's something that passes for a Rooster Teeth 20th anniversary outro. {{The wiki tells me this upload was on the day itself, which explains it.}}
Chibi S4 [2/2]
michaelb958
(Verified Michael)
- Location
- Wherever I am, there I am
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
Chibi S4E6 MasterThief
As an Australian, I am uniquely qualified to comment on the title's allusion to reality television program MasterChef. Wait, no, I'm probably wrong: given Rooster Teeth's history, it's more likely to be alluding to "Master Chief", protagonist of the Halo video game series. Let's find out.
We return to the 20-second Arrowfell ad.
Coco strolls along a Beacon dorm hallway. Something green blurs past and steals her handbag; freeze-frame analysis reveals that it's Emerald, who sticks her tongue out in her last frame on-camera. Coco doesn't realise for a couple of seconds. Then she starts publicly threatening the unseen culprit, only to realise that her weapon has of course been stolen too.
Emerald ducks around a corner and congratulates herself.
Cut to Qrow walking down Beacon's main thoroughfare. Emerald blurs past and somehow steals his entire outfit. Qrow draws on long experience with functional alcoholism to be almost completely unfazed. I think this also doubles as a callback to that one quick joke in the middle of S2E17. Emerald, safely behind the fountain behind him, admires the outfit that is now hers by right of possession.
Cut to Nora and Pyrrha walking down the streets of Vale. Nora raises the spectre of the MasterThief. Both take the opportunity to transform into their Junior Detective forms, continuing to pile on the S2 continuity references (bonus one to Jaune's transformation sequences in S3E10). As I was expecting, Emerald blurs past and steals Nora's weapon.
Fortunately, Pyrrha was literally made for this job: applying Polarity to the surrounds turns up a bin (still not properly installed), a manhole cover, a spoon, and then the missing grenade-launcher-hammer, complete with Emerald not having let go of it in time. Emerald frantically attempts to brazenly lie her way out of it. Because this is Chibi Nora we're talking about, it works. Pyrrha facepalms.
So, really, neither allusion can be proven. Still probably the Halo one.
Chibi S4E7 He Does it All
Turn your volume down!
9-second Arrowfell ad. So we have totalled 2 minutes 8 seconds of Arrowfell advertising. This season of Chibi has been 15.5% Arrowfell ads by runtime.
Ruby is asleep. Grumpy Klein appears and steals her teddy bear. Ruby is intensely distressed for the second time this season.
Sneezy Klein makes it very difficult for Blake to read ‹Cold Heart | Hot [???]› in peace.
Yang emerges from the frozen yoghurt shop, and drops her prize (the success rate for frozen yoghurt in general is akin to Ruby's with cookies) when she discovers Bumblebee's gone. Cue Klein joyriding on it. His eyes are shut, so I can't prove which Klein it is. Also the return, after an extremely extended hiatus, of RWBY's sound effects team not understanding engine noises (see V02C01) - that is the sound of a motorbike accelerating continuously and increasing gears midway through, not humming along at a low speed.
Team RBY, in the dorm room, demand Weiss keep her cake butler under control. Cue Klein to enter and demonstrate that his issue was not malice but extremely poor communication: he's washed the teddy bear, dusted the bookshelves, and tuned up Bumblebee. Also he brought cookies. I hate to think what will prevent Ruby from enjoying them this time.
Weiss, who did not get the memo, starts on the demanded intervention. Team RBY flip positions in an instant, then carry Klein off for unspecified but doubtless benevolent reasons. (But it's Chibi, so maybe not...) Weiss, left alone in the room, pronounces a cookie "Not bad.". Weiss was the only one wielding a cookie at any point - please tell me Ruby didn't deny herself this time. On the other hand, it would be a new and original cause of no cookie, I guess...
This season of Chibi has also been 12.7% that writer being deliberately uncool in the outro. No 20th anniversary outro this time, but it appeared twice for 9 seconds each, and the title card took 5 seconds 7 times, between them chewing up another 6.4% of the total runtime. More than a third of the theoretical season has been channelcruft or ads.
-what's this in the suggested videos? Another episode! The wiki is incomplete! That's impossible!
It absolutely is impossible; I just needed to look in the other table.
Bonus initial uploads:
Intro ad for ExpressVPN, which is an interesting branch out that, in hindsight, may have foreshadowed Rooster Teeth's parlous financial state.
This being an upload at a completely different time, a completely different person is doing the outro. Let's see if I can pick who it is. ...It's Barb, which isn't a surprise, really.
Poor Barb has been stuck with shilling ExpressVPN today.
Chibi S4E8 Behind the Scenes
No title card (or Arrowfell ad), so I'm not sure if this actually counts. Anyway, weird visual effect on the camera as Ruby clutches Pyrrha's corpse and monologues about how humans (and faunus...? right...?) were the real monsters all along, capped off with "Metaphor!!!" in lieu of an actual metaphor.
Ozpin, still the director as previously depicted in S2E1, calls cut, and proceeds to play it all very cool. When Ruby reckons this is a good time to ask for a pay raise, he waves it off with:
A very Chibi Ruby response, and honestly it strikes me as something canon Ruby might say in that situation. I just hope she's not getting short-changed by her possibly-nonexistent agent.
Ozpin keeps walking, leaving Ruby behind. He passes Neo carrying two boom mics. Someone who doesn't vocalise probably has an advantage in operating sound-recording equipment. You might think being short would be a disadvantage, but not really - the boom already has to be pretty tall to get the mic up above the camera's sight, so the operator's human height variance isn't that big of a deal. Anyway, Ozpin now addresses us, the viewers, offering, well, episode title. Mercury wanders by and dramatically fumbles a bag of some sort that sounds like it contained something really breakable and/or Zwei. Poor Zwei.
"Here we see one of the stars of the show, going over his lines." Ren tries out the lines, isn't satisfied with them, and asks Ozpin to have them rewritten. Ozpin tosses the script, literally, claiming that nobody follows it anyway. Neither has noticed Nora being Nora, sneaking through the fountain to stalk Ren, and probably not following the script; she is bonked on the head by the discarded script.
Neptune decides that he's going to conquer his fears and dive into the pool. Right on cue, as Neptune commits, Ozpin tells us that the water is added in post. ...Or not really in post, it seems to be visible on set as well judging by Neptune's non-realisation. Anyway, he dives through the hardlight and winds up with Qrows circling his head. (A quick PSA to always check the depth of anything you're diving into: absent Aura, hitting bottom kills people.)
Now here's Jaune in front of a green screen wearing a motion capture suit. I wonder what indignity he's going to be put through. He feels a bit silly. "This is how animation works," says Ozpin, followed by "Release the hounds!", at which point Jaune is chased by two Beowolves and a Geist. Never mind Ozpin polluting the shot, or Jaune leaving shot, or anything else wrong here.
Ozpin calls everybody involved "professionals", just in time for Sun (in Junior Detective getup) to herald Zwei arriving in a limousine. He's best boy. The unseen cheering crowd knows it, and so does he. There's always "a prima donna", Ozpin adds, sounding put-upon. So probably not Zwei in Mercury's bag earlier. Or was it...?
This being part of the batch of bonus initial uploads, Barb does the outro.
And now I try to find the missing two skits - which the wiki tells me must exist - in Neon Konbini. Fortunately, between knowing that every episode has a skit in it, knowing the episode count, and having a list of skit airdates, I only need to search 2 of the 8 episodes. Wish me luck.
Chibi S4E-- Port's Fort
First segment of Neon Konbini episode 5 (0:05 - 1:01).
Jaune, Ren, Sun, and Neptune have found something.
A long time ago (S1E8), Team RWBY got in a lift, found weird destination buttons, and went to the lowest one: ‹SUPER SECRET VAULT / DO NOT ENTER›. Also scattered amongst the implausible number of basements were ‹Art Gallery› and ‹Fort Port›, the latter annotated by sticky-tape-label as ‹NO GIRLS ALLOWED!!›. After a very extended hiatus, we see the latter button again, tape label updated to ‹FOR MANLY MEN!!›. These four idiots think that this is how they can find the secrets of manliness or some nonsense like that.
Three of them egg each other on. Ren stops Jaune from pressing the button. (The buttons are mounted outside the lift, contrary to S1E8 where they were inside. Has Beacon invested in destination lift control?) Ren fears they might not be ready. Jaune brushes him off, or maybe we're getting a diegetic montage. The lift doors open up to reveal:
- Port being completely unbothered by being beaten up by a Beowolf. "That tickles!" he declares. The intruders panic, Sun taking refuge in Neptune's bridal carry.
- Port being completely unbothered by being eaten by a giant supernaturally-animate Cinder Doll. I'm quite bothered, as usual. Now it's telekinetically picked him up and is whirling him around in the air. "This got out of hand quickly!" he declares. The intruders panic, Jaune taking refuge in Ren's bridal carry.
- From the other perspective, all four go small-pupiled (except Jaune, who goes spiral-eyed) as Port declares they're "just in time" for doubtless something completely horrifying... Yep, the thankfully unseen Port wants help with a "foot fungus infection". The intruders panic, separately this time.
I misread where the gang were - I thought they were outside the lift. In actuality the lift is just a little more spacious than I thought and they were inside it the whole time. Now Port has opened it. "What are you boys up to?" he fairly reasonably asks. They, juiced up on mind-melting scenarios of him, panic and flee past him back into the halls of Beacon, with exactly the same screaming sound effect as the other three times.
Port declares his "manliness" too powerful for them to coexist with, and then wanders down to his Fort for "a fungal scraping", fulfilling the old Chibi pattern of the most worrying joke in the skit turning out to have been real. Good stuff.
We can know the skit is over by the Neon Konbini title card appearing. If you ask me, said title card overstays its welcome a little - it could have shown up for half as much time and lost nothing.
A fun note from Neon Konbini's credits is that RWBY Chibi, among other things, has migrated from Autodesk Maya to Unreal Engine.
Chibi S4E-- Bad Criminal
This time Neon Konbini (which I keep mistyping as Konibin) starts with its title card and then launches straight into some other segment I don't care about. What I'm going to do here is skip to the credits and use that to get an idea of where to look - I'm fairly sure segment credits appear in the same order as the segments did.
Look, I skipped not quite far enough and found Chibi, so that gives me a pretty good idea.
Okay, skit is the seventh and last segment in episode 8 (16:52 - 18:25).
Team NPR are in their dorm room. Pyrrha, sitting on the bookcase by the window because she can, laments that Jaune is always absent because he's eternally busy being a superhero, casually dropping the lore that his team all know his identity.
I predict that Pyrrha will do it anyway. Ren rationalises that Pyrrha's too nice to do crimes, then realises she's already gone. I called it, once again.
Ren was probably right about that. Pyrrha's first attempt is littering. She then very leadingly asks Zwei, who is in a stereotypical detective's cap to better sell the joke, "Who could be responsible for this senseless act of EVIL?!". And then answers: it is her. When not even Zwei bites, she moves her rubbish into the bin. Commit to the bit, Pyrrha!
Attempt two: Jaywalking. "Will no one put an end to this crime spree?" she asks. That car almost did permanently (depending on whether it would have been funnier for Aura to tank it). Pyrrha, of course, apologises to it.
Klein has bought himself some noodles, more successfully than S3E16. Pyrrha will steal them, and then either eat them and get no superhero response, or get no superhero response and then return them. Being a cinnamon roll myself, I'm hoping for the second, but I think the first is more likely from what I know of Chibi's writing. ...I'm entirely wrong: Pyrrha does not (by popular meaning) steal the noodles, she destroys them by wasting them on the footpath. "I'm not even sorry," she declares, before changing her mind very fast in the face of Angry Klein.
Even the Cereal-Rabbit-Signal looks sad as we tilt down from it to Pyrrha on the edge of a rooftop reflecting on her life choices. She gives up. Cue Jaune at this very moment? Yep, that was an easy prediction. He's angry at the misuse, and vandalism (!), of the Signal.
"I won't stop until I catch you!" says Jaune, just like S3E11, and then has to slowly climb up the building. Anyone who wanted to run away could have. Pyrrha doesn't, so she doesn't. Instead she has to snap out of her faked gloating to encourage Jaune to climb, as he has become stuck at the external ledge between floors. (Classic comedic juxtaposition, this entire paragraph.) That architectural feature must have a name, but I don't know what it is.
Haha h*ck me the archives really are incomplete, the wiki has no transcript for that last skit.
Being real for a moment, I feel like there's at least 5 weak skits in every season, and I explicitly include Season 4 which had a mere 10 skits in total. It felt like they lost a lot of institutional knowledge of how to write Chibi during the great hiatus. This bodes poorly for the main show if it ever comes back.
I'm also very slightly disappointed that we didn't see a chibi version of Neon Katt, what with sharing more than half the letters in her name with the framing show.
Anyway, happy Descript-Of-Your-Choice Seasonal-As-Hemispherically-Appropriate Holiday. That was the end of Chibi (with not a bang but a whimper), but there's still some more RWBY content to cover, which I'll get to when I have a spare moment, probably in the new year.
- Location
- Australia
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Honestly, I think it's less boding poorly, and more that s4 was part of a larger show that really, really didn't know what it wanted to do. It was during RTs era of throwing everything they had left at the wall and hoping something stuck.
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I always liked its aesthetic.
"So that's what it feels like" God I love that whole skit XD
Low key same, still fun overall and Cinder's unchecked egotism is great.
I loved Arrowfell.
I cannot tell you the number of jokes this title led to.
That just shows how strong Coco is XD Also loved the scene, very feelsy.
I mean, i thought it was funny XD
I NEVER SAW THIS ONE!!!
Love seeing Emerald, and low key wanna see fanart of her in Qrow's fit now, it works surprisingly well, also her dangling off Nora's hammer like a mischievous cat is adorable.
I quite enjoyed this one, but the shading/texturing was a bit weird; regardless the Zwei stuff was cute and I loved the nonsensical blend of digital effects and reality XD
Its not about unpredictability, its about delivery XD
The main writers would, as I understand it, still be involved so I'd be confident.
I too am saddened Neon would be great fun!
michaelb958
(Verified Michael)
- Location
- Wherever I am, there I am
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
Also plausible, and honestly I'd prefer it. But there's really only one way to know for sure. (expectant aside-glance)
It's not bad, it's just... if you divide the amount it cost me to buy it (on sale) by the time it took me to 100% it, you get almost $2/h, which is unusually high in my library even among games where I have anywhere near 100% completion. At full price it's north of $3/h.
I even made one of them.
Under vaguely realistic physics (which I admit may not be present in anything chibi), if the thing you're carrying has more mass, it will have more momentum, so it will behave differently when you're carrying it. Being personally stronger only changes that indirectly by letting you carry more massive things.
Well there you go, I've accomplished something.Viz! The rules of social conduct demand you say something in the fact of an expectant aside-glance!
I don't game much so I don't have a particular metric for that kind of thing beyond "Did I have a good time?" XD
XD
Damn you got me there, kudos!
It was so cute and fun, I'm a big Emerald fan so this was a treat! Much obliged for this accomplishment!
Fairy Tales [1/2]
michaelb958
(Verified Michael)
- Location
- Wherever I am, there I am
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
Surprise, I had a little more in my posting buffer.
Remnant has many fairy tales, most of which reflect its reality in some way (much like the real ones usually had some kind of point in their original formulation, but that's a different field of research). Ozpin and Pyrrha namedropped us four back in Volume 3: one was the Story of the Seasons, shortly to be recounted to us as explanation for the Maiden powers, and the other three foreshadowed the Brother Gods, (TBC), and Salem's origin. Let's learn some things!
Ozpin narrates us an introduction. Apparently this is a story about innocence, and recognising evil. Also "all good stories [...] are not what you expect", which makes some degree of sense - otherwise they'd be boring.
Once upon a time, someone named Poppy wandered into a forest, and derided her younger sibling (?) as a "coward" for not following her in.
Suddenly a swirling ball of darkness manifests, giving me big V1/V3 titles vibes, and chases her out.
Poppy wanders out and derides "Oak" further for being risk-averse. Risk-aversion sounds pretty good for a small-ish child in a place full of Grimm. Oak is unmoved by "double dare" and threats of social ostracisation, and can only be moved into the forest by Poppy (confirmed sibling) shoving them in. Why do I feel like this will end badly? Because I have basic pattern recognition, that's why.
The light fades to golden hour, to sunset, to twilight, and still Oak has not returned. Poppy is belatedly concerned, and decides to mount a rescue mission. The time to do that would have been earlier while there was still daylight, and have I mentioned what a bad idea it is to attempt a rescue by yourself while you are the only person who knows that either of you are there? They're both in severe danger now.
Against the odds, Poppy finds Oak. But Oak now has a Grimm mask, and Grimm-looking arms, that remind me very much of Salem. And also apparently no body temperature. Something blurs past in the night, Geist-style.
Both somehow escape the forest - it is left offscreen - and Poppy leads Oak back home, the latter capable of walking but declining to do it without being pulled along.
Poppy pulls Oak aside to avoid these other people seeing their Grimm-looking state. Sibling protectiveness belatedly kicking in. The other folks are understandably a bit worried that Oak might be under the weather, and moreso when Poppy mentions the forbidden forest while brushing them off.
Back at home, Oak is shivering even under blankets, which is probably a sign of deeper physical health concern (hypothermia, shock, some kind of infection, and that's just what I can think of off the top of my head). Poppy does not attempt to treat any of this, or even sound particularly concerned. Combined with the other obvious physical effects, I'd be 200% concerned. Which would probably leave me so distressed as to be equally nonfunctional, but still. The snow visibly falling outside the windows may muddle the issue.
Poppy blows out the candle providing illumination. Fade to black. Immediately, but possibly a lot later for them given this episode's tendency to timeskip, the sound of glass shattering snaps Poppy awake. Oak is gone, and the windows appear to be broken.
The score is telling us to be 200% concerned as Poppy searches inside the house for Oak. There are multiple possibilities. Maybe the windows aren't broken, and I've seen some other status effect and misinterpreted it. Maybe Poppy has discounted the possibility that Oak, visibly cold, would have done something so silly as to go outside. (Bad move: Feeling overly warm is a mid-stage hypothermia symptom.) Maybe she's doing the low-cost thing of checking inside before gearing up to check outside, which might or might not be a good idea given how fast Oak could leave and their tracks be obscured...
Poppy has decided that the situation rises to the level of involving their parents. So they do have parents, previously unseen and unreferenced. Um. Had parents. They sure look dead now. I blame Grimm!Oak.
The noise of the front door opening. Poppy investigates. There are tracks leading out - and into the next house. This has gone from zero to full horror movie right quick.
Inside that house, those other two characters are also dead now. Further in, Oak lurks in their bedroom (the same set), unresponsive. Poppy presumes him to be dead as well, and begins grieving. This is the part where we start reciting the horror section of the Universal Genre Savvy Guide at the screen, if you weren't already. Ah h*ck, those were the same words she said just before the real horror started. Sure enough, there's the black briefly-camera-obscuring blur again, flying out the window and shattering it in the process.
Poppy looks out the window. Then she looks down at the pair of glasses at the bedside table - it took me a moment, but those are the now-dead kid's glasses.
Poppy's going to be the sole survivor of this town at this rate. Here's a little montage of her finding all the dead people. All are frozen in poses that imply they didn't move much between being fine and being dead. This lot are in front of a still-blazing fire, telling us that it can't just be mundane cold or even moderately-supernatural cold.
That is not a corpse, it just opened its eyes. Those are not the eyes of a human. This thing (I shall call it a Chill, based on how Poppy described Oak's condition to their now-dead friends) breeds, it's killing and reanimating everyone, it's a cold night. Poppy's already dead, she's just being toyed with first. Or maybe this is her death hallucination?
Well, it certainly is now. Poppy flees, aiming to reach a house at the edge of the community. Was it hers? Was it the last one left to check? I'm not really sure, and there may not be enough evidence to know (or maybe I'm just half-blind as per usual). She does not reach it: With the camera in side-on, another Chill blurs past it; then the camera switches to behind Poppy looking over her shoulder, and everything else recedes away and disappears into an iris in front of her, somewhat as if she failed to outrun a black hole; then, as the score crescendoes, she herself Apathies out and black-holes out.
Or maybe not - this is her house and she's just reached it. She starts packing a bug-out bag. Oh h*ck, now I'm waiting for the reveal that she's caught her own Chill and is going to spread the plague.
Poppy has some survivor's guilt, then for some reason reaches under Oak's bed, and finds them there (still Chilled). She gets up, and yep, she's abruptly Chilled now. As she stares blankly out the open window - will she walk into the forest, never to be seen again? - Ozpin returns for closing narration, reminding us that evil does not have an obligation to advertise itself as such, and could hide anywhere - even "within ourselves".
I then went and read some of the comments, which prompted me to realise that the other lesson here is not to shove younger siblings into dangerous forests.
One standard channelcruft outro, selling us the RWBY books, including the one with the fairy tales in it.
Only this episode has been reuploaded:
We get an intro ad for this one, for the crossover movie that very few people asked for.
Surprisingly, the outro is identical.
The dude from the outro has been stuck with the task of shilling ExpressVPN for this intro.
Ozpin's narration is probably a recurring framing device. "Long ago," he says, which is about half a step from 'once upon a time', there was a hunter in Mistral, probably not the Grimm kind of Hunter if it's fairy-tale old - I think those only came about in the aftermath of the Great War, which wouldn't be that long ago to Ozpin. ...Okay, maybe I'm very wrong. Although I think the implication is that it's not at all a common profession at that point.
The hunter vanquishes several Grimm, and there was much rejoicing from his community.
Later, at home, one of I presume the titular children asks their father why only he fights Grimm. The answer is that he has a Grimm-detecting Semblance, and then he has a duty to fight them. "One day, all of you will use your Semblances to help others too." Ominous line, what with the implication of their duty.
The four children have a little argument about which of their Semblances (enumerated) is best for the Hunting job. The one with the invisibility gets ganged up on. The father makes disappointed words at them all and then leaves for yet-unexplained reasons.
Cut to a later day. The two older children exposit that their father has gone out further than usual on a fact-finding mission. I pronounce him already dead. Yep, there's no other reasonable way to interpret this next bit.
The four children have four different opinions about what to do next: continue the status quo ante, spread thinner to protect more ground, fort up and focus on research, or abandon the mission. (Interesting bit of characterisation that Aura-share-Semblance recommends staying put to research and invisibility-Semblance recommends fading away.)
Ozpin drops back in to narrate the middle stretch: The children couldn't agree, and went four different ways. The older daughter (Semblance: getting what she needs, which is like Clover's if you squint) inherited her father's job, to decreasing success, people leaving as the village was increasingly targeted by Grimm. The older son, Aura-share-Semblance, found nobody else left to protect, and wasn't strong enough even when he did. The younger daughter, Ren-Semblance, couldn't and didn't fight well enough to actually learn anything about the murderfauna; and the younger son, invisibility-Semblance, "set off to find adventure; but, having never left home, soon became lost and afraid...". In short, they split the party. Never split the party.
Three of them now reunite: the latter two run into each other as invisiblity-Semblance hides from several Grimm. Both recover their courage, and vanquish the Grimm, that got distracted by the convoy evacuating their old village under the barely-adequate-anymore protection of their older sister. The second wave of Grimm is taken down fairly easily by the three of them. The third wave is framed as more trouble than that, until Aura-sharing-Semblance arrives with his own convoy. They unsplit the party and everything went fine again, see?
The four smooth out their differences and resolve to work together from now on - it's safer and more effective. And that's why the Academies train teams of four, right Ozpin? Yep, there's no other reasonable way to interpret this last bit.
Same channelcruft outro as last time. I'll tell you if it changes.
The other one Pyrrha mentioned.
ExpressVPN clearly did not pay enough to get more than one intro ad.
This one is a faunus origin myth, says Ozpin. Nice visuals of the footprints transitioning to pawprints as the camera moves up the beach. (It's difficult to describe the movements of a top-down camera: On its axes, it pedestals. On gravity's axes, gimbal lock makes it difficult to say whether it dollies or trucks.)
Chosen, apparently, by the God of Animals, who is giving off massive creepy cult vibes from my admittedly unqualified position. Some were more eager than others to "wash [their] old life away". The others were deemed "shallow" and sent away for good. I fear this may be an opening to be twisted into 'and those are the humans' by an Adam-esque figure. Ozpin doesn't think so, seeing instead a valuable reminder for all faunus children to internalise "that their own lives have value". I'll defer to his wisdom while I'm sad that that's necessary.
Fade through white to something probably closer to the truth. Once upon a time, "there was a war between humans and animals". I'm already concerned. The God of Animals stops them, vaguely Organian-style, putting everybody in timestop and asking a representative of each what the h*ck they think they're doing in a not-mad-just-disappointed kind of way. Both first ask the God if they are like themselves; "I am neither, and both." says the God, and reiterates its question.
The warring sides give the same reasons for warring: "They are not like us. We worry about they might do to us.", which is very much a thing in the real human psyche. The God points out the irony in this sameness. Now the warring sides really start arguing, which quickly gets out of hand. I predict unimpressed God.
Not really: They search for a way to get the warring sides to see the best instead of the worst in each other, and as I was expecting, decide to (with uninformed consent) merge each pair of combatants into a single being. And that's how the faunus were made, except maybe not because there's still a third of the episode to go. At least they soon overcome their now-internalised racism.
And here's some Grimm who hoped to capitalise on the aftermath of the battle but are instead going to get curb-stomped. Good stuff.
Less good stuff: They no longer have human homes to go back to. Thanks racism! Look, they've already forgotten how racist they were, which is both heartwarming and heartbreaking.
Over a slow montage of the first faunus retreating to make new lives as the sun symbolically rises, Ozpin tells us that history probably didn't go exactly like that, but it almost certainly rhymed, and wouldn't it be great for everyone if we could all fight each other less? Absolute mood.
(This is some extremely belated ambiguous Pyrrha characterisation, and I am here for it.)
Fun fact: A majority of the faunus were voiced by Kdin Jenzen.
Remnant has many fairy tales, most of which reflect its reality in some way (much like the real ones usually had some kind of point in their original formulation, but that's a different field of research). Ozpin and Pyrrha namedropped us four back in Volume 3: one was the Story of the Seasons, shortly to be recounted to us as explanation for the Maiden powers, and the other three foreshadowed the Brother Gods, (TBC), and Salem's origin. Let's learn some things!
Fairy Tales E1 The Grimm Child
Ozpin narrates us an introduction. Apparently this is a story about innocence, and recognising evil. Also "all good stories [...] are not what you expect", which makes some degree of sense - otherwise they'd be boring.
Once upon a time, someone named Poppy wandered into a forest, and derided her younger sibling (?) as a "coward" for not following her in.
Suddenly a swirling ball of darkness manifests, giving me big V1/V3 titles vibes, and chases her out.
Poppy wanders out and derides "Oak" further for being risk-averse. Risk-aversion sounds pretty good for a small-ish child in a place full of Grimm. Oak is unmoved by "double dare" and threats of social ostracisation, and can only be moved into the forest by Poppy (confirmed sibling) shoving them in. Why do I feel like this will end badly? Because I have basic pattern recognition, that's why.
The light fades to golden hour, to sunset, to twilight, and still Oak has not returned. Poppy is belatedly concerned, and decides to mount a rescue mission. The time to do that would have been earlier while there was still daylight, and have I mentioned what a bad idea it is to attempt a rescue by yourself while you are the only person who knows that either of you are there? They're both in severe danger now.
Against the odds, Poppy finds Oak. But Oak now has a Grimm mask, and Grimm-looking arms, that remind me very much of Salem. And also apparently no body temperature. Something blurs past in the night, Geist-style.
Both somehow escape the forest - it is left offscreen - and Poppy leads Oak back home, the latter capable of walking but declining to do it without being pulled along.
Poppy pulls Oak aside to avoid these other people seeing their Grimm-looking state. Sibling protectiveness belatedly kicking in. The other folks are understandably a bit worried that Oak might be under the weather, and moreso when Poppy mentions the forbidden forest while brushing them off.
Back at home, Oak is shivering even under blankets, which is probably a sign of deeper physical health concern (hypothermia, shock, some kind of infection, and that's just what I can think of off the top of my head). Poppy does not attempt to treat any of this, or even sound particularly concerned. Combined with the other obvious physical effects, I'd be 200% concerned. Which would probably leave me so distressed as to be equally nonfunctional, but still. The snow visibly falling outside the windows may muddle the issue.
Poppy blows out the candle providing illumination. Fade to black. Immediately, but possibly a lot later for them given this episode's tendency to timeskip, the sound of glass shattering snaps Poppy awake. Oak is gone, and the windows appear to be broken.
The score is telling us to be 200% concerned as Poppy searches inside the house for Oak. There are multiple possibilities. Maybe the windows aren't broken, and I've seen some other status effect and misinterpreted it. Maybe Poppy has discounted the possibility that Oak, visibly cold, would have done something so silly as to go outside. (Bad move: Feeling overly warm is a mid-stage hypothermia symptom.) Maybe she's doing the low-cost thing of checking inside before gearing up to check outside, which might or might not be a good idea given how fast Oak could leave and their tracks be obscured...
Poppy has decided that the situation rises to the level of involving their parents. So they do have parents, previously unseen and unreferenced. Um. Had parents. They sure look dead now. I blame Grimm!Oak.
The noise of the front door opening. Poppy investigates. There are tracks leading out - and into the next house. This has gone from zero to full horror movie right quick.
Inside that house, those other two characters are also dead now. Further in, Oak lurks in their bedroom (the same set), unresponsive. Poppy presumes him to be dead as well, and begins grieving. This is the part where we start reciting the horror section of the Universal Genre Savvy Guide at the screen, if you weren't already. Ah h*ck, those were the same words she said just before the real horror started. Sure enough, there's the black briefly-camera-obscuring blur again, flying out the window and shattering it in the process.
Poppy looks out the window. Then she looks down at the pair of glasses at the bedside table - it took me a moment, but those are the now-dead kid's glasses.
Poppy's going to be the sole survivor of this town at this rate. Here's a little montage of her finding all the dead people. All are frozen in poses that imply they didn't move much between being fine and being dead. This lot are in front of a still-blazing fire, telling us that it can't just be mundane cold or even moderately-supernatural cold.
That is not a corpse, it just opened its eyes. Those are not the eyes of a human. This thing (I shall call it a Chill, based on how Poppy described Oak's condition to their now-dead friends) breeds, it's killing and reanimating everyone, it's a cold night. Poppy's already dead, she's just being toyed with first. Or maybe this is her death hallucination?
Well, it certainly is now. Poppy flees, aiming to reach a house at the edge of the community. Was it hers? Was it the last one left to check? I'm not really sure, and there may not be enough evidence to know (or maybe I'm just half-blind as per usual). She does not reach it: With the camera in side-on, another Chill blurs past it; then the camera switches to behind Poppy looking over her shoulder, and everything else recedes away and disappears into an iris in front of her, somewhat as if she failed to outrun a black hole; then, as the score crescendoes, she herself Apathies out and black-holes out.
Someone Else's Tangentially Related Storytime:
Article: Simultaneously, the black patch of sky that is the event horizon seems to grow strangely. You know from basic geometry that, at this distance, the black hole should subtend about a half a degree of your view — it should, in other words, be about the same size as the full moon as seen from the surface of the Earth. Except it isn't. In fact, it fills half your view. Half of the sky, from notional horizon to notional horizon, is pure, empty blackness. And all the other stars, nearly the whole sky full of stars, are crowded into the hemisphere that lies behind you.
As you continue to fall, the event horizon opens up beneath you, so you feel as if you're descending into a featureless black bowl. Meanwhile, the stars become more and more crowded into a circular region of sky centered on the point immediately aft. The event horizon does not obscure the stars; you can watch a star just at the edge of the event horizon for as long as you like and you'll never see it slip behind the black hole. Rather, the field of view through which you see the rest of the universe gets smaller and smaller, as if you're experiencing tunnel-vision.
Finally, just before you're about to cross the event horizon, you see the entire rest of the observable universe contract to a single, brilliant point immediately behind you. If you train your telescope on that point, you'll see not only the light from all the stars and galaxies, but also a curious dim red glow. This is the cosmic microwave background, boosted to visibility by the intense gravitation of the black hole.
And then the point goes out. All at once, as if God turned off the switch.
You have crossed the event horizon of the black hole.
Or maybe not - this is her house and she's just reached it. She starts packing a bug-out bag. Oh h*ck, now I'm waiting for the reveal that she's caught her own Chill and is going to spread the plague.
Poppy has some survivor's guilt, then for some reason reaches under Oak's bed, and finds them there (still Chilled). She gets up, and yep, she's abruptly Chilled now. As she stares blankly out the open window - will she walk into the forest, never to be seen again? - Ozpin returns for closing narration, reminding us that evil does not have an obligation to advertise itself as such, and could hide anywhere - even "within ourselves".
I then went and read some of the comments, which prompted me to realise that the other lesson here is not to shove younger siblings into dangerous forests.
One standard channelcruft outro, selling us the RWBY books, including the one with the fairy tales in it.
Only this episode has been reuploaded:
We get an intro ad for this one, for the crossover movie that very few people asked for.
Surprisingly, the outro is identical.
Fairy Tales E2 The Hunter's Children
The dude from the outro has been stuck with the task of shilling ExpressVPN for this intro.
Ozpin's narration is probably a recurring framing device. "Long ago," he says, which is about half a step from 'once upon a time', there was a hunter in Mistral, probably not the Grimm kind of Hunter if it's fairy-tale old - I think those only came about in the aftermath of the Great War, which wouldn't be that long ago to Ozpin. ...Okay, maybe I'm very wrong. Although I think the implication is that it's not at all a common profession at that point.
The hunter vanquishes several Grimm, and there was much rejoicing from his community.
Later, at home, one of I presume the titular children asks their father why only he fights Grimm. The answer is that he has a Grimm-detecting Semblance, and then he has a duty to fight them. "One day, all of you will use your Semblances to help others too." Ominous line, what with the implication of their duty.
The four children have a little argument about which of their Semblances (enumerated) is best for the Hunting job. The one with the invisibility gets ganged up on. The father makes disappointed words at them all and then leaves for yet-unexplained reasons.
Cut to a later day. The two older children exposit that their father has gone out further than usual on a fact-finding mission. I pronounce him already dead. Yep, there's no other reasonable way to interpret this next bit.
The four children have four different opinions about what to do next: continue the status quo ante, spread thinner to protect more ground, fort up and focus on research, or abandon the mission. (Interesting bit of characterisation that Aura-share-Semblance recommends staying put to research and invisibility-Semblance recommends fading away.)
Ozpin drops back in to narrate the middle stretch: The children couldn't agree, and went four different ways. The older daughter (Semblance: getting what she needs, which is like Clover's if you squint) inherited her father's job, to decreasing success, people leaving as the village was increasingly targeted by Grimm. The older son, Aura-share-Semblance, found nobody else left to protect, and wasn't strong enough even when he did. The younger daughter, Ren-Semblance, couldn't and didn't fight well enough to actually learn anything about the murderfauna; and the younger son, invisibility-Semblance, "set off to find adventure; but, having never left home, soon became lost and afraid...". In short, they split the party. Never split the party.
Three of them now reunite: the latter two run into each other as invisiblity-Semblance hides from several Grimm. Both recover their courage, and vanquish the Grimm, that got distracted by the convoy evacuating their old village under the barely-adequate-anymore protection of their older sister. The second wave of Grimm is taken down fairly easily by the three of them. The third wave is framed as more trouble than that, until Aura-sharing-Semblance arrives with his own convoy. They unsplit the party and everything went fine again, see?
The four smooth out their differences and resolve to work together from now on - it's safer and more effective. And that's why the Academies train teams of four, right Ozpin? Yep, there's no other reasonable way to interpret this last bit.
Same channelcruft outro as last time. I'll tell you if it changes.
Fairy Tales E3 The Shallow Sea
The other one Pyrrha mentioned.
ExpressVPN clearly did not pay enough to get more than one intro ad.
This one is a faunus origin myth, says Ozpin. Nice visuals of the footprints transitioning to pawprints as the camera moves up the beach. (It's difficult to describe the movements of a top-down camera: On its axes, it pedestals. On gravity's axes, gimbal lock makes it difficult to say whether it dollies or trucks.)
I see we're starting the horror early this episode. /s???
Chosen, apparently, by the God of Animals, who is giving off massive creepy cult vibes from my admittedly unqualified position. Some were more eager than others to "wash [their] old life away". The others were deemed "shallow" and sent away for good. I fear this may be an opening to be twisted into 'and those are the humans' by an Adam-esque figure. Ozpin doesn't think so, seeing instead a valuable reminder for all faunus children to internalise "that their own lives have value". I'll defer to his wisdom while I'm sad that that's necessary.
Fade through white to something probably closer to the truth. Once upon a time, "there was a war between humans and animals". I'm already concerned. The God of Animals stops them, vaguely Organian-style, putting everybody in timestop and asking a representative of each what the h*ck they think they're doing in a not-mad-just-disappointed kind of way. Both first ask the God if they are like themselves; "I am neither, and both." says the God, and reiterates its question.
The warring sides give the same reasons for warring: "They are not like us. We worry about they might do to us.", which is very much a thing in the real human psyche. The God points out the irony in this sameness. Now the warring sides really start arguing, which quickly gets out of hand. I predict unimpressed God.
Not really: They search for a way to get the warring sides to see the best instead of the worst in each other, and as I was expecting, decide to (with uninformed consent) merge each pair of combatants into a single being. And that's how the faunus were made, except maybe not because there's still a third of the episode to go. At least they soon overcome their now-internalised racism.
And here's some Grimm who hoped to capitalise on the aftermath of the battle but are instead going to get curb-stomped. Good stuff.
Less good stuff: They no longer have human homes to go back to. Thanks racism! Look, they've already forgotten how racist they were, which is both heartwarming and heartbreaking.
Over a slow montage of the first faunus retreating to make new lives as the sun symbolically rises, Ozpin tells us that history probably didn't go exactly like that, but it almost certainly rhymed, and wouldn't it be great for everyone if we could all fight each other less? Absolute mood.
(This is some extremely belated ambiguous Pyrrha characterisation, and I am here for it.)
Fun fact: A majority of the faunus were voiced by Kdin Jenzen.
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Fairy Tales [2/2]
michaelb958
(Verified Michael)
- Location
- Wherever I am, there I am
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
Fairy Tales E4 The Indecisive King
ExpressVPN ad returns. Then turn your volume up.
Ozpin suggests this one is about overchoice aka decision paralysis, which is a thing I struggle with all the time.
The presumably-titular king holds court, and is intelligent and wise at settling disputes. Less importantly, the writers only think they know royal terms of address: The king is addressed as "Your Grace". That is for dukes. Kings are "Your Majesty".
Later that day, as visiting hours are almost over, one more petitioner arrives. She is the last survivor of a village now destroyed by Grimm. (I see we're back to normal RWBY hours: come for the "pretty anime girls", stay for the Lovecraft-lite setting.) The king assigns her a room in the castle, which is very nice of him.
At an uncertain time but probably later still, a hooded figure with ram's horns drops by to offer the king a gift: the crown prominently featured in the intro. I can feel the dread setting into me. The king, like a fool, puts it on and sinks into a violent abyss of possibilities. Fortunately he retains the strength to soon take it off. He throws it away, but the hooded figure is gone.
Later still (I seem to be mistaken about petitioning hours - or perhaps the crown was gifted in the morning), a petitioner arrives seeking advice with the classical romance-orders dilemma. The king advises her to follow her heart. Then he has a flashback, helpfully coloured by the gifted crown on a stand next to him (why did you keep it where you could see it???), and changes his mind. This is going to suuuuuuuck, I just know it. I don't know if I want to keep watching.
The king abruptly reversing his decision sends shockwaves through the court. Petitioning is closed for the day.
Or maybe for longer: The woman he put up in a room - or at least I think this is the same character - is just as dismayed as anyone else to discover written notice that ‹The King is no longer holding court.›. This is generally fatal to a king's legitimacy: rulers need to be seen fulfilling cultural expectations of rulership. The courtier-in-charge explains that the king "has summoned the wisest in the land to solve" some high-grade dilemma. Immediately cue a couple of those wise men being shouted out of the building. She joins the end of the queue of the wisest. Fade to later, when it is finally her turn to go in.
Ah, I see, this is a crossover aesop: a favour coming back, and getting a fresh pair of eyes on the problem. Our deuteragonist insists that the king let her at least think about whatever the problem is. Uh oh, the phrasing she used was:
and that's going to be interpreted as the cursed crown. Yep, it is so. Unless he changes his mind...? No, welcome to the choice abyss.
Get my insulin (derogatory), it's showing her a vision of the king's dilemma and the dilemma is whether or not to propose to her. I get the callback to the romance-orders dilemma, but still, this is how you know it's a fairy tale. Somehow this is a worse ending than my expectation of a perfectly-rational-donkey kind of fate for the king, which would have better fit the dark tone established by The Grimm Child. Admittedly this ending better fits the more upbeat tone established by The Hunter's Children. But still. One of the gifts I received for Christmas 2023 was some honey-coated popcorn, which proved better than I expected despite my ambivalence for both of those things; if I somehow still had any left, I'd be throwing it at the screen.
Now watch me have jumped the gun as the fairy tale subverts all of my expectations that I outlined in the previous paragraph, wouldn't that be funny?
No such thing occurs. Instead, our deuteragonist puts forward an alternative theory of what the gifted crown does: "It gives a glimpse into the future, to a decision that must someday be made.". {{I've heard it theorised that this thing is the Relic of Choice. It would seem to fit.}} The king disagrees, but his theory is the same thing from a glass-mostly-empty view. He has devoted himself to finding the best answer to the coming greatest dilemma. She retorts that he's missing the present on his way there, and then throws his first line to her back at him. Critical hit! It's super effective! (It's a fairy tale, that's why it worked.)
And then they lived happily ever after, the end. (washes hands with the good soap)
Different outro today, for a new merch run. Welp.
Fairy Tales E5 The Girl In The Tower
Turn your volume back down a bit and let's see how Ozpin's retelling differs from Jinn's.
We start with a quick view of the mechanisms running the visual framing device. How appropriate that part of Ozpin's origin story, as narrated by Ozpin, starts with gears.
This scene of the tower starts with the castle a bit ruined, and then clockworks quickly to it not ruined. Is this the construction process viewed in fast-forward, or the destruction in rewind? Probably the latter. We might find out later.
The girl's father was not always cruel, we hear. He just got way, way too overprotective when her mother died giving birth to her. The cycle of abuse is real.
It's even worse, he only sees her as a "possession" to be kept safe from all harm. Look, I get it, I really do, but nothing in life is without risk. e.g. Have you, reader, thought lately about the multi-ton speeding objects you share roads with on a daily basis? I frequently do, but that doesn't stop me going walking. Senseless risk is senseless, but a life with no risk at all is no life at all.
I like how we never see the king's face; it stops us from humanising the antagonist who refuses to humanise the protagonist.
Anyway, the girl became a voracious reader to pass the time and learn about the things she couldn't access. (Absolute mood. Look at me over here reading all this dumb wish-fulfillment fic.) Having discovered previously that she's stuck in the tower by a magic force field, one time she gets mad and throws a book out the window, and the force field doesn't object. Hold up a minute, the emblem on her bed bears an uncanny similarity to Jaune's emblem. No idea what that's about. (You can see it in the YouTube thumbnail. This is either a big ol' coincidence, or the harbinger of more of the unholy fanfic union of 'the show but Jaune's singlehandedly the protagonist' and 'the show but writing an authoritarian monarchy one-handed'.)
Anyway, look at me, a fool, as we now see the king's face. Does this symbolise some evolution in his daughter's relationship with him? Probably, seeing as she's played him into gifting her a large amount of valuable stuff. She follows up by requesting supplies to write her own books now that she's read them all.
And so she wrote her own biography. And sent it out as paper planes. Oh, clever girl, she's summoning help through the loopholes.
Ozpin's narration kicks back in to tell us how that went: Many an adventurer attacked the castle to free the girl. It went poorly for them, because the king was a master of evil magic and vaporised the lot of them.
Enter Ozma. You know the rest.
But there's still more video! We zoom out of the book into Ozpin's office, as Ozpin flips pages to clearly remind us that this is Salem. He then reminds us not to believe everything we read, while reinterpreting the story:
It's times like these you remember how old Ozma really is.
For maximum feels, imagine that The Girl in the Tower is a sequel to The Indecisive King. Yes, I know that the Crown of Choice (if that is that crown) wouldn't exist before the gods left, the point is that I thought of it and I'm not about to suffer alone if I don't have to.
Fairy Tales E6 The Warrior In The Woods
Ozpin does not narrate this one - Taiyang does. Ruby and Yang are audibly being slightly difficult about bedtime, both already showing major signs of their future personalities. This was uploaded during the V8-9 hiatus, meaning that one more time, everything is foreshadowing.
Once upon a time, there was a village in a forest that hadn't been attacked by Grimm in approximately forever, and thought that it never would as long as nobody ventured into the forest. Right on cue, visuals of a kid strongly considering venturing into the forest. Tai teaches Yang (I think that's Yang's voice; I could be wrong, as usual) what "complacent" means, and it's really a fitting adjective for the situation. Let's go, in and out, 20-minute adventure.
Our protagonist finds his missing kite in the forest - lucky it ended up on the ground somehow - but is distracted by some funny flying creature and leaves it behind. By nightfall he's gotten really far out. The moment he catches his breath and realises the situation he's in, a Grimm appears and pounces - and is intercepted by presumably the titular Warrior. "Go home," she says at length, "you never saw me.", honestly sounding very much like Blake. I'll have to check the credits. Anyway, he delays only long enough to thank her. I reckon she's fending off all the Grimm by herself somehow.
Upon his safe return to the village, our protagonist makes no mention of the Warrior, only of a narrow escape from a Grimm. Everyone interprets that in ways that confirm their existing views. He whittles himself a wood carving of the Warrior, and then appears to sharpen a dagger. Is he trying to imitate her? How badly will this go? Probably not too badly, seeing as it's a bedtime story.
Yep, he's ventured into the forest again. Despite carrying supplies and a 'weapon', he is no better prepared to be accosted by a Grimm. The Warrior rescues him again. She's not happy he's placed himself in danger again, but accepts the pack of supplies, warning him that he'll have to fend for himself next time. Two things: Firstly, that framing already assumes there'll be a next time. Secondly, I don't believe her for a New York minute.
The kid gives his dagger a meaningful look, then sheathes it. Match cut to him, but older, unsheathing a sword in the face of multiple Grimm. The previous two resembled Beowolves, but these ones are different. They have wings, like giant bats or some such nonsense. No, wait, they must be Nevermores. He kills the first one easily because they weren't expecting it, has more of a duel with the second but comes out unscathed as it dies, wasn't attacked by the third yet because it was nice enough to wait its turn, but is now overwhelmed and wounded by it. Cue the Warrior? Yep.
The Warrior is not pleased to have to deal with our protagonist again. He retrieves her sword that she threw, then has a question for her. Well, more like five questions, but they boil down to 'why live like this?'. The answer is saddening: the Warrior lives alone because everyone she ever knew is dead or permanently out of contact.
Now this is the part where our protagonist tries to graduate to 'person she knows'. First he puts his foot in it by assuming that Grimm murdered her old life; it turns out to have been "other people". And yet she still protects other people, e.g. the village.
Mission success. Now she asks why he keeps coming back, and is figuratively floored by his answer of "I thought maybe it would be nice if someone looked after you for a change.". She still tells him not to do it again.
A[nother?] year later (which, to be fair, is a while), he does it again. Another kid loses her kite in the forest and is immediately confronted by three Beowolves, which is a lot. The Grimm are back - because nobody is culling them unseen any more. Our protagonist finds the Warrior in the Woods' home - deserted. He takes up the mantle, but no longer unseen, telling the village of its former and current protectors. When asked why he kept finding the Warrior in the Woods, he says nobody else was doing it so it had to be him.
And then it got worse. At no point prior have the visuals shown us the Warrior's eyes. Now they do:
Wham. Match-cut out of the book to Ruby uncomprehending, not to mention Yang asleep and Taiyang who's just remembered all his trauma again (
). The latter offers another story, so rattled he forgot his promise to only read one ( ); Ruby declines, calling that one "perfect". That kid's gonna go far.A slightly, but not meaningfully, different outro. And the voice of the Warrior is... Nobody I recognise in the slightest.
- Location
- Australia
- Pronouns
- She/Her
It could be a sequel anyway. There were magic artifacts back then...