VTubing [1/2]
michaelb958
(Verified Michael)
- Location
- Wherever I am, there I am
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
This post brought to you after an interminable stay in editing h*ck.
You thought we were done? Not yet we're not, there's one more thing.
For one probably last time, it is michaelb958's Tangentially Related Storytime.
In 1985, some forward-thinking folks created a character (and eponymous TV show) called Max Headroom. Max was sold to the public as "the first computer-generated TV presenter", and that had been the design intent; but it wasn't practical with the tech of the time, so he was actually an actor in deliberately terrible costume and filming setup. This somehow did not forever poison the idea of CGI television personalities; more sprung up every now and then over the ensuing decades. Later on, they tended to be actual CGI.
The concept had migrated online by 2010, as some random visual novel company started uploading videos to YouTube (one moment while I have an existential crisis about remembering when YouTube was new) where an animated version of their mascot did their marketing-speak. That concept evolved fairly rapidly during the 2010s; by 2014, live motion capture was involved. RWBY first met this concept at RTX Australia 2016: on 24 January, a jury-rigged live motion capture setup was used to simulate a live Q&A session with Ruby and Yang. (This casual chat was awkwardly placed on our Earth calendar between the airing of V03C09 and V03C10, right about when everything was going to h*ck for the first time.)
Late 2016 saw the rise of "Kizuna AI", who popularised the concept of "virtual YouTubers" and coined that term, later shortened to "VTuber" (capitalise either or both of the first two letters as you please). Kizuna AI retired ("graduated") in early 2022 having spawned a genre, which grew in popularity explosively, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic as computer activities overall saw less competition. Can you tell that my sources got vaguer there? I don't actually know everything in advance; sometimes I have to read up on it, and some of those times, all of the reading material glosses over the same points at once.
Anyway, it wasn't too long after that that Rooster Teeth evidently decided to have another bite at the strawberry in a slightly less ephemeral form. Welcome to RWBY VTubing. Put your seatbelts on and set your cringe thresholds to maximum.
{{Apparently the episode title is a sneaky in-joke, being one of the phrases Lindsay Jones yells to get into character.}}
The episode title accurately summarises the first 5 seconds or so. Then Ruby says "Let me back up, way back." and while neither the VTuber avatar (a concept I am not used to watching) nor the background are exactly conducive to that, the camera does dolly backwards/zoom out (indistinguishable in orthographic projection) in a couple of steps to provide the visual punchline.
If I look more closely at Ruby's outfit, that is her Atlas arc outfit. If I look more closely at the background, it is ambiguous, but my first guesses are the Forever Fall Forest (a place Ruby has never been in that outfit, even simulated) and the forest in the King's Acre, Ever After (where it would make little sense for Ruby to be doing any of this - or, sadly, being this cheerful about it).
We are 4 from 4 for Team RWBY isekais in 2023 (5 if you include Ice Queendom from the year prior), because VTubing!Ruby has apparently paid a visit to {{the last}} RTX, on what she's pretty sure is called Earth. "I don't know, ask the aliens," she says, in maybe another reference to those 2 movies which I am counting as 2 separate isekais. The camera briefly zooms in on her here to punctuate the joke, in what I'm guessing is a well-worn part of the VTuber dialect of cinematic language.
Ruby making travel vlogs, what could go wrong? Let's find out over the next 35 minutes or so.
First time being a tourist in America? At least the guns probably didn't faze her.
Plenty more of the local cinematic dialect, with the pupil visual effects, and the greyscale with unsettling audio as another tool in the toolbox for emphasising one-liners.
"I've never actually been online before." Sounds like lies to me, unless they're really splitting hairs about whether that includes the late CCTS.
And now, Q&A. First up, basically the episode title again, now with added evergreen joke about confusion between the team name and the team leader's name.
And now, yes, once more for a 10th anniversary edition, it's also a gun.
I put it to you that not everyone in Remnant makes their own weapons, unless the Atlas military is particularly weird by our standards rather than by their standards.
We move on to Ruby describing her team, but mostly their weapons, because Ruby. And now I finally know how to pronounce Myrtenaster. Also here's lots of Gambol Shroud melodrama, capped off with the following indescribable line:
And I think I'm about to learn how to pronounce Ember Celica. ...Yep! See, it's worth watching this stuff! You never know what might be inside.
Honestly the VTuber cinematic language is starting to blend into the background already. Basically just imagine some soundboard soundbite or random visual effect when a point is being made.
Classic Ruby describing fight scenes. The V01C01 nostalgia is real.
As Ruby winds into an outro, the jumpiness of her arm movements becomes particularly visible. Motion capture rig problems, or stylistic simulation thereof? Who knows. Well, RT did.
We finish on one more invocation of the unsettling audio background to make it quite clear that Ruby always has time for weapons.
It would be seriously remiss of me not to mention the top YouTube comment:
This is probably the closest I'm going to dare approach a convention of any kind in my entire life. Let's see how it goes.
And on the subject of 'how to pronounce things', now I finally know how to pronounce Eberle (as in Kara, voice of Weiss). Ruby is describing the person here because they don't have a weapon. Well, maybe they don't, this is the state of Texas we're talking about.
Ruby continues to rattle off the names and mugshots of several of the current (mid-2023) main RWBY voice cast, framing them as "good friends with" their respective characters. There is a conspicuous absence of Lindsay Jones.
And now here's footage of RWBY VTubing on a monitor, filmed and shown in an inset in RWBY VTubing. Recursion!
Ruby went to a panel but I can't tell what its name was. Maybe subtitles will help. ...No subtitles available. I am left to infer that it had something to do with (the shortly-to-be-defunct) Achievement Hunter. The animation camera here displays the capability to dolly/zoom smoothly as well as in discrete steps.
Hearing about the Animation panel is making me miss things that never existed. Ruby is glitched out and white-eyed in an attempt not to spoil us on anything. Welp, guess we'll never know.
Ruby goes on an extended (by the medium's standards) comedy routine about the existence of Red vs Blue, breezing through pointing at a YouTube annotation that no longer exists (how thematic), and culminating in wanting to be "Blueby", which pings the back of my mind as a meme from somewhere adjacent, while the camera plays up her excitement.
Onwards to cosplay. Ruby, being Ruby, is somewhat interested in the costumes but moreso in the weapons. Sadly there are no embedded photos.
A Yang cosplayer won the cosplay contest, which excites Ruby. I was about to joke about whether it was Barb, but their username gets splashed on screen and I'm pretty sure that's not Barb. Also that multi-layer joke hurt me. I shouldn't have mentioned Barb, I left an opening for the pun spirit to worm its way in.
So much camera and pupil and soundboard emphasis on Ruby being apologetic about not having recorded people speaking to her at the time. I think that's a cover for being safe about legal repercussions of recording people who might not have wanted to be, but I could be wrong, as usual.
Onwards to neurodivergence, which is a segue I was not expecting. Short story shorter, Ruby is all for it and that's great.
Ruby expresses the desire to attend more conventions. The noise of a dog barking is implied to be Zwei feeling similarly. 'Emotional support human' joke goes here. Ruby makes her excuses and goes to appease Zwei.
The generic forest backdrop is gone; instead, this one looks like the interior of an office. Context clues, including the still image taken at an RTX (the convention, not the graphics card) displaying on a TV, tell me that it's probably the interior of a Rooster Teeth office. The real question is whether any live-action people will turn up like the thumbnail unsubtly implied.
Ruby Semblances in from top of screen. Turns out, yes, this backdrop is from the office space of Rooster Teeth Productions. They proceed to assume that "that red guy" must also be a team leader, per the Law of Chromatic Superiority. I guessed that reasoning before Ruby gave it. This is not the kind of series where you need to switch your brain on much.
There's a saying about sausages and the law, which in IT (my field of work) is extended to IT standards, and for people (whether fictional characters or not) ought to cover their own depictions in media: if you like it, don't learn how it's made. Judging by this video, Ruby has never heard this saying.
The table behind Ruby bears a number of either copies of a DC crossover manga (there have been more than one) or promotional posters for the ensuing movies; I can't tell which.
"And I loved the idea [of a tour]," says Ruby, like anybody couldn't tell from the hearts in her eyes. She goes on to give a very thin explanation of what Rooster Teeth Productions does, complete with briefly being framed in a (probably fake) screen capture of a YouTube video of herself to further sell the point that they make YouTube videos.
Ruby muses that the RTP YouTube channel is "where I live now! Wait... where do I live?", complete with grayscale, blank white eyes, and slightly empty-echoing score just in case somebody missed that it was a joke. The joke definitely gets less funny (if it was ever funny) when you remember that the place had about nine months to live at that point. (And of course Remnant's Kingdoms were/are dropping like flies.) Oh, the joke keeps rolling. The visual effects folks pulled out every stop available to them.
"Okay, okay, uh, existential crisises aside," Ruby pronounces "video production" with a mock French accent to sound pretentious, which is another one of those little cultural things that strains my suspension of disbelief. Or perhaps she was fed that pronunciation as a prank. Anyway, here's showrunner (another word VTubing!Ruby verbally trips over and lets VFX earn their salaries) Kerry Shawcross, the prophesied live action, to help list the elements thereof. I hope he's only appearing by voice, otherwise the juxtaposition of live-action and VTuber 3D animation is going to seriously strain the visual coherence of the scene.
Shawcross, voice-only, explains some key things about YouTube videos:
And then we burn the last 15 seconds on a glorified selfie. (shrugs)
The shortest episode begins with Ruby speaking over a background of the Paper Pleasers' village. Clearly I was not incorrect when I guessed the forest-y background was part of the King's Acre. I have so many questions that will probably never be answered: Is this a fake background in-universe? If so, why? And why was this one chosen? Is Ruby actually back in the Ever After? If so, why? And so many layers of how?
"something that our worlds have in common" is going to be moons. I'm sure of it. ...Yep. Suddenly that famous Tumblr post of Moon Moon the werewolf is popping back into my head.
Here we see Moon (Earth) and Moon (Remnant). One of them is in more pieces. Oh they did not just superimpose Weiss' face on both of them.
(They did.)
Ruby states that Moon (Earth) has phases. She then works in a joke about 'just a phase' to cover up the fact that she implied Remnant's doesn't have phases when it canonically does (see V05C03 and C09).
We continue on to why Remnant's moon is physically a bit of a mess, conveniently gloss over it because it's too heavy for this light-hearted spinoff, and get lost in the weeds of moon dust vs Dust vs mundane dust. I can't have much fun with this discussion because the video very, very explicitly spells out in captions ‹*speculation-non canonical*› [sic]. Everything is not foreshadowing? No wonder Rooster Teeth doesn't exist any more, they forgot their core value proposition.
Ruby finally gets to episode title. (Relatedly, try not to imagine Ruby with her idea of diplomatic immunity.) Let's list some problems that would happen if Earth's moon were stolen without replacement:
Continuing, Remnant is going to initially borrow the thing "while [we're] sleeping", which displays a profound ignorance of time zones.
"Who really need to think about your moon anyways, come on," says someone who has spent way too much time thinking about our moon as a side dish to spending way too much time thinking about her moon.
The briefly-audible version of Weiss bursts the bubble, saving the world. Ruby gives up. For now...
The last 5 seconds of the video are channelcruft, in a very different microphone and/or accent. It's fair to say that this is the episode that really took the shine off this series as far as I'm concerned.
Complete with another slightly mangled link on the wiki! Anyway, what horrors await herein?
We're still on the Paper Pleasers' Village background as Ruby announces that she has bamboozled us: this will not be another Earth travel blog, this will be episode title. Now is it going to go better or worse than Chibi S2E3? I'll go with worse.
Ruby waits for audience applause. Not a sausage. Anyway, she got this idea from seeing a magic show while walking around an unspecified (but probably Austin, TX) part of Earth. Oh no, it's Inspired™, just like the ASMR thing (see Chibi S1E11).
Judging by Ruby's incomprehension of what a magic show is, and what 'magic' is on Earth, nobody's shown her any Chibi. I swear Ruby the VTuber has one brain cell and Weiss is borrowing it like Ruby wanted to borrow our moon.
‹ONE MAGIC SHOW LATER...› is some of the most ominous text to ever appear on this show. Sure enough, we learn that Ruby has not learned nearly enough by a single observation of a magician to repeat their tricks to a Remnant audience...
Picture of Velvet, screencapped from probably V3. Oh my gods you didn't.
They did. They pulled the punchline straight out of a Chibi episode that was past its 7th birthday, and also they did the appalling rest of it. Also, could somebody explain to me how the h*ck Remnant has rabbit faunus without having rabbits? How does that work? How do they know what they are?! {{The wiki explains that Remnantian rabbits were previously mentioned in a novel, even. Speculation non-canonical.}}
Okay, at least Velvet didn't actually get pulled anywhere this time. But still. Weiss definitely had the brain cell that day. This thing here says that Yang didn't send the video evidence to avoid embarrassing Ruby further, but I don't believe that on either level: Doylist, they didn't have the budget; Watsonian, embarrassing Ruby would probably have made Yang more likely to send the video evidence.
Ruby proceeds to go mad with desire for power and we cut to test pattern.
So. That happened.
The channelcruft got a second longer, and slightly funnier.
You thought we were done? Not yet we're not, there's one more thing.
For one probably last time, it is michaelb958's Tangentially Related Storytime.
In 1985, some forward-thinking folks created a character (and eponymous TV show) called Max Headroom. Max was sold to the public as "the first computer-generated TV presenter", and that had been the design intent; but it wasn't practical with the tech of the time, so he was actually an actor in deliberately terrible costume and filming setup. This somehow did not forever poison the idea of CGI television personalities; more sprung up every now and then over the ensuing decades. Later on, they tended to be actual CGI.
The concept had migrated online by 2010, as some random visual novel company started uploading videos to YouTube (one moment while I have an existential crisis about remembering when YouTube was new) where an animated version of their mascot did their marketing-speak. That concept evolved fairly rapidly during the 2010s; by 2014, live motion capture was involved. RWBY first met this concept at RTX Australia 2016: on 24 January, a jury-rigged live motion capture setup was used to simulate a live Q&A session with Ruby and Yang. (This casual chat was awkwardly placed on our Earth calendar between the airing of V03C09 and V03C10, right about when everything was going to h*ck for the first time.)
Late 2016 saw the rise of "Kizuna AI", who popularised the concept of "virtual YouTubers" and coined that term, later shortened to "VTuber" (capitalise either or both of the first two letters as you please). Kizuna AI retired ("graduated") in early 2022 having spawned a genre, which grew in popularity explosively, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic as computer activities overall saw less competition. Can you tell that my sources got vaguer there? I don't actually know everything in advance; sometimes I have to read up on it, and some of those times, all of the reading material glosses over the same points at once.
Anyway, it wasn't too long after that that Rooster Teeth evidently decided to have another bite at the strawberry in a slightly less ephemeral form. Welcome to RWBY VTubing. Put your seatbelts on and set your cringe thresholds to maximum.
VTubing E1 Hi, I'm Ruby!
The episode title accurately summarises the first 5 seconds or so. Then Ruby says "Let me back up, way back." and while neither the VTuber avatar (a concept I am not used to watching) nor the background are exactly conducive to that, the camera does dolly backwards/zoom out (indistinguishable in orthographic projection) in a couple of steps to provide the visual punchline.
If I look more closely at Ruby's outfit, that is her Atlas arc outfit. If I look more closely at the background, it is ambiguous, but my first guesses are the Forever Fall Forest (a place Ruby has never been in that outfit, even simulated) and the forest in the King's Acre, Ever After (where it would make little sense for Ruby to be doing any of this - or, sadly, being this cheerful about it).
We are 4 from 4 for Team RWBY isekais in 2023 (5 if you include Ice Queendom from the year prior), because VTubing!Ruby has apparently paid a visit to {{the last}} RTX, on what she's pretty sure is called Earth. "I don't know, ask the aliens," she says, in maybe another reference to those 2 movies which I am counting as 2 separate isekais. The camera briefly zooms in on her here to punctuate the joke, in what I'm guessing is a well-worn part of the VTuber dialect of cinematic language.
Ruby making travel vlogs, what could go wrong? Let's find out over the next 35 minutes or so.
First time being a tourist in America? At least the guns probably didn't faze her.
Plenty more of the local cinematic dialect, with the pupil visual effects, and the greyscale with unsettling audio as another tool in the toolbox for emphasising one-liners.
"I've never actually been online before." Sounds like lies to me, unless they're really splitting hairs about whether that includes the late CCTS.
And now, Q&A. First up, basically the episode title again, now with added evergreen joke about confusion between the team name and the team leader's name.
And now, yes, once more for a 10th anniversary edition, it's also a gun.
I put it to you that not everyone in Remnant makes their own weapons, unless the Atlas military is particularly weird by our standards rather than by their standards.
We move on to Ruby describing her team, but mostly their weapons, because Ruby. And now I finally know how to pronounce Myrtenaster. Also here's lots of Gambol Shroud melodrama, capped off with the following indescribable line:
And I think I'm about to learn how to pronounce Ember Celica. ...Yep! See, it's worth watching this stuff! You never know what might be inside.
Honestly the VTuber cinematic language is starting to blend into the background already. Basically just imagine some soundboard soundbite or random visual effect when a point is being made.
Classic Ruby describing fight scenes. The V01C01 nostalgia is real.
As Ruby winds into an outro, the jumpiness of her arm movements becomes particularly visible. Motion capture rig problems, or stylistic simulation thereof? Who knows. Well, RT did.
That is a question that I will have to consider in more detail, keeping in mind my noodle arms.
We finish on one more invocation of the unsettling audio background to make it quite clear that Ruby always has time for weapons.
It would be seriously remiss of me not to mention the top YouTube comment:
I had a good laugh. Out loud, even. Sadly there was nobody around who would get the joke without enough explanation to kill the joke.
VTubing E2 My First Convention! RTX 2023
is the visual accompaniment to Ruby telling us she has more to say about it. Of course they use the American hemisphere of Earth.
This is probably the closest I'm going to dare approach a convention of any kind in my entire life. Let's see how it goes.
And on the subject of 'how to pronounce things', now I finally know how to pronounce Eberle (as in Kara, voice of Weiss). Ruby is describing the person here because they don't have a weapon. Well, maybe they don't, this is the state of Texas we're talking about.
Ruby continues to rattle off the names and mugshots of several of the current (mid-2023) main RWBY voice cast, framing them as "good friends with" their respective characters. There is a conspicuous absence of Lindsay Jones.
And now here's footage of RWBY VTubing on a monitor, filmed and shown in an inset in RWBY VTubing. Recursion!
Ruby went to a panel but I can't tell what its name was. Maybe subtitles will help. ...No subtitles available. I am left to infer that it had something to do with (the shortly-to-be-defunct) Achievement Hunter. The animation camera here displays the capability to dolly/zoom smoothly as well as in discrete steps.
Hearing about the Animation panel is making me miss things that never existed. Ruby is glitched out and white-eyed in an attempt not to spoil us on anything. Welp, guess we'll never know.
Ruby goes on an extended (by the medium's standards) comedy routine about the existence of Red vs Blue, breezing through pointing at a YouTube annotation that no longer exists (how thematic), and culminating in wanting to be "Blueby", which pings the back of my mind as a meme from somewhere adjacent, while the camera plays up her excitement.
Onwards to cosplay. Ruby, being Ruby, is somewhat interested in the costumes but moreso in the weapons. Sadly there are no embedded photos.
A Yang cosplayer won the cosplay contest, which excites Ruby. I was about to joke about whether it was Barb, but their username gets splashed on screen and I'm pretty sure that's not Barb. Also that multi-layer joke hurt me. I shouldn't have mentioned Barb, I left an opening for the pun spirit to worm its way in.
So much camera and pupil and soundboard emphasis on Ruby being apologetic about not having recorded people speaking to her at the time. I think that's a cover for being safe about legal repercussions of recording people who might not have wanted to be, but I could be wrong, as usual.
Onwards to neurodivergence, which is a segue I was not expecting. Short story shorter, Ruby is all for it and that's great.
Ruby expresses the desire to attend more conventions. The noise of a dog barking is implied to be Zwei feeling similarly. 'Emotional support human' joke goes here. Ruby makes her excuses and goes to appease Zwei.
VTubing E3 Ruby Learns About Video Production
The generic forest backdrop is gone; instead, this one looks like the interior of an office. Context clues, including the still image taken at an RTX (the convention, not the graphics card) displaying on a TV, tell me that it's probably the interior of a Rooster Teeth office. The real question is whether any live-action people will turn up like the thumbnail unsubtly implied.
Ruby Semblances in from top of screen. Turns out, yes, this backdrop is from the office space of Rooster Teeth Productions. They proceed to assume that "that red guy" must also be a team leader, per the Law of Chromatic Superiority. I guessed that reasoning before Ruby gave it. This is not the kind of series where you need to switch your brain on much.
There's a saying about sausages and the law, which in IT (my field of work) is extended to IT standards, and for people (whether fictional characters or not) ought to cover their own depictions in media: if you like it, don't learn how it's made. Judging by this video, Ruby has never heard this saying.
The table behind Ruby bears a number of either copies of a DC crossover manga (there have been more than one) or promotional posters for the ensuing movies; I can't tell which.
"And I loved the idea [of a tour]," says Ruby, like anybody couldn't tell from the hearts in her eyes. She goes on to give a very thin explanation of what Rooster Teeth Productions does, complete with briefly being framed in a (probably fake) screen capture of a YouTube video of herself to further sell the point that they make YouTube videos.
Ruby muses that the RTP YouTube channel is "where I live now! Wait... where do I live?", complete with grayscale, blank white eyes, and slightly empty-echoing score just in case somebody missed that it was a joke. The joke definitely gets less funny (if it was ever funny) when you remember that the place had about nine months to live at that point. (And of course Remnant's Kingdoms were/are dropping like flies.) Oh, the joke keeps rolling. The visual effects folks pulled out every stop available to them.
"Okay, okay, uh, existential crisises aside," Ruby pronounces "video production" with a mock French accent to sound pretentious, which is another one of those little cultural things that strains my suspension of disbelief. Or perhaps she was fed that pronunciation as a prank. Anyway, here's showrunner (another word VTubing!Ruby verbally trips over and lets VFX earn their salaries) Kerry Shawcross, the prophesied live action, to help list the elements thereof. I hope he's only appearing by voice, otherwise the juxtaposition of live-action and VTuber 3D animation is going to seriously strain the visual coherence of the scene.
Shawcross, voice-only, explains some key things about YouTube videos:
- The channel watermark, which previously only showed up for the first 6 seconds or so of the video. Explaining to Ruby its function to anchor the viewer doubles as wryly informing the audience that they're meant to be so anchored. Ruby focuses on the 'water' part of the name and drops (heh) one last Neptune joke. Shawcross (Neptune's VA) attempts to recover with the synonym 'bug', which admittedly makes a little more sense given that 'watermark' suggests something that's not very brightly coloured like this one is, but Ruby of course misinterprets that further, not helped by the thing growing wings and hovering annoyingly about the viewport. When I said the VFX folks were earning their salaries today, I was apparently very right.
- The end cards, further video suggestions. (The watermark is very gone.) It is Ruby's turn to wryly allude to things, in this case the two previous episodes. I'm starting to think that they have no actual content for this episode with the way they've spent two-thirds of it being meta. ... ...I was sure as h*ck not expecting a Linkin Park joke today. This just raises further questions! How does she know?!
- Thumbnails. If you somehow don't know what those are, you've just learned. On second thought, this episode is decently educational.
New heights of medium awareness from VTuber!Ruby.
And then we burn the last 15 seconds on a glorified selfie. (shrugs)
VTubing E4 Can We Borrow Your Moon?!
The shortest episode begins with Ruby speaking over a background of the Paper Pleasers' village. Clearly I was not incorrect when I guessed the forest-y background was part of the King's Acre. I have so many questions that will probably never be answered: Is this a fake background in-universe? If so, why? And why was this one chosen? Is Ruby actually back in the Ever After? If so, why? And so many layers of how?
"something that our worlds have in common" is going to be moons. I'm sure of it. ...Yep. Suddenly that famous Tumblr post of Moon Moon the werewolf is popping back into my head.
Here we see Moon (Earth) and Moon (Remnant). One of them is in more pieces. Oh they did not just superimpose Weiss' face on both of them.
(They did.)
Ruby states that Moon (Earth) has phases. She then works in a joke about 'just a phase' to cover up the fact that she implied Remnant's doesn't have phases when it canonically does (see V05C03 and C09).
We continue on to why Remnant's moon is physically a bit of a mess, conveniently gloss over it because it's too heavy for this light-hearted spinoff, and get lost in the weeds of moon dust vs Dust vs mundane dust. I can't have much fun with this discussion because the video very, very explicitly spells out in captions ‹*speculation-non canonical*› [sic]. Everything is not foreshadowing? No wonder Rooster Teeth doesn't exist any more, they forgot their core value proposition.
Ruby finally gets to episode title. (Relatedly, try not to imagine Ruby with her idea of diplomatic immunity.) Let's list some problems that would happen if Earth's moon were stolen without replacement:
- Firstly, "it's only there when you're sleeping", which I shall translate to 'only at night', is an alarmingly common misconception based on Luna being used as a visual counterweight for Sol in symbol-based clock designs. The things aren't locked to colinear through Earth at all times. On the rare occasions when that does happen to be true, that's called an eclipse. Moonrise and moonset are completely unrelated to sunrise and sunset. And even if Luna's absence is only noticed at night, that's culturally a big deal: many a lunar calendar remains in use for assorted purposes.
- Then we have to think about tides. Tides are majority-powered by Luna's gravity. Oversimplifying, ocean water accumulates under the moon because it's pulled in from sideways, producing the sublunar high tide; is pulled from the perpendicular great circle, producing the low tide; and accumulates opposite the moon because pulling it 'around' the Earth would take more effort, producing the antipodal high tide (generally a bit less than the sublunar high tide). The Sun also contributes, and would continue to run a tide system in the moon's absence, but it would be about ⅓ the strength and far less complex, tipping off any scientists who hadn't bothered to look up. The lower-strength tides, and lower illumination at night, would mightily mess with the ecosystem.
- And then there's Earth's axial tilt, which Luna stabilises. That's why we have predictable seasons, and sunrise/sunset times. This would probably be a longer-term problem, but the longer-term absence of moon would lead to highly variable seasons and daylight hours, which sounds like exactly the kind of agricultural disruption we really don't need, assuming any agriculture survived the massive ecosystem disruptions of not having tides or moonlight.
Continuing, Remnant is going to initially borrow the thing "while [we're] sleeping", which displays a profound ignorance of time zones.
"Who really need to think about your moon anyways, come on," says someone who has spent way too much time thinking about our moon as a side dish to spending way too much time thinking about her moon.
The briefly-audible version of Weiss bursts the bubble, saving the world. Ruby gives up. For now...
The last 5 seconds of the video are channelcruft, in a very different microphone and/or accent. It's fair to say that this is the episode that really took the shine off this series as far as I'm concerned.
VTubing E5 The Amazing Magnificent Magical Ruby
We're still on the Paper Pleasers' Village background as Ruby announces that she has bamboozled us: this will not be another Earth travel blog, this will be episode title. Now is it going to go better or worse than Chibi S2E3? I'll go with worse.
Ruby waits for audience applause. Not a sausage. Anyway, she got this idea from seeing a magic show while walking around an unspecified (but probably Austin, TX) part of Earth. Oh no, it's Inspired™, just like the ASMR thing (see Chibi S1E11).
Judging by Ruby's incomprehension of what a magic show is, and what 'magic' is on Earth, nobody's shown her any Chibi. I swear Ruby the VTuber has one brain cell and Weiss is borrowing it like Ruby wanted to borrow our moon.
‹ONE MAGIC SHOW LATER...› is some of the most ominous text to ever appear on this show. Sure enough, we learn that Ruby has not learned nearly enough by a single observation of a magician to repeat their tricks to a Remnant audience...
Picture of Velvet, screencapped from probably V3. Oh my gods you didn't.
They did. They pulled the punchline straight out of a Chibi episode that was past its 7th birthday, and also they did the appalling rest of it. Also, could somebody explain to me how the h*ck Remnant has rabbit faunus without having rabbits? How does that work? How do they know what they are?! {{The wiki explains that Remnantian rabbits were previously mentioned in a novel, even. Speculation non-canonical.}}
Okay, at least Velvet didn't actually get pulled anywhere this time. But still. Weiss definitely had the brain cell that day. This thing here says that Yang didn't send the video evidence to avoid embarrassing Ruby further, but I don't believe that on either level: Doylist, they didn't have the budget; Watsonian, embarrassing Ruby would probably have made Yang more likely to send the video evidence.
Ruby proceeds to go mad with desire for power and we cut to test pattern.
So. That happened.
The channelcruft got a second longer, and slightly funnier.
