oh no, one town without visible damage in one of 2 volumes that is well known for having issues behind the scenes
oh no it somehow takes away from the visible change of things as the volume progresses
Look. It is established, both during that volume and through the Worl of Remnant stuff, that villages like them can and do fall in the blink of an eye. They were just one of the lucky ones. Sure the animators didn't but in any visible damage, but that is not the fault of the writting team. What did we see in the next town? Destruction and a death, showing our young heroes being to late. Further on they found a town that didn't work out. Then in the end of that volume they found the remains of the town one of their own came from.
As for the Giest, remember that those of Team RNJR are FOUR former first years that were at the top of their class. Given what we saw them able to handle back at Beacon we see how far they came by taking down a Grimm that can control inanimate objects, and then later manage to vanquish a terror that had been stalking the land for well over a decade. Both grimm posed a threat in their own right, but RNJR managed to get through and win. And it was more than just "hit it harder". For the Ghiest they had no way to get at the actual grimm so long as it had parts to cling to.
I'm sorry, based on your opening lines, you're agreeing that there are problems, but that it's not a writing issue? Do you want me to ignore parts of the show and its flaws because there were reasons for the issues?
Worldbuilding/set design starts with the writers. When you're writing for a visual media (comics, stage performance, anime, etc.) it is the writer's job to spell out what they are looking for. They need to explain where things are, what actions are being taken, and how things look. It is the responsibility of the writer to give an outline for how a given scene should look. The artists and the animators use that as a baseline to start the process, and ideally, for bigger projects, there can be a back and forth to get things right, but it starts with the writers. No idea how accurate a wiki
transcipt is, but going to assume it's good enough unless you've got a better source. Relevant passage:
Scenes of the idyllic life in the village are shown: people buy fresh produce from a cart, stand and chat on open balconies overlooking the roads, tend to their horses and generally go about their daily lives peacefully. The village has plentiful trees and green spaces and cobbled roads.
The writers are telling the animators to make the scene look like that. It
is a choice that they are making.
You conflating your personal taste for objective quality is not RWBY's problem, nor mine, but here we are I guess.
As has been repeatedly established villages can get wiped out in the dead of night and global communications are down. So if the Grimm got confident enough to actually try and destroy rather than plague them they'd either die by its hands, or the ensuing wave of Grimm that come after & can expect no help. I'd also note that we have seen Grimm outright eye small groups of people they could overwhelm and destroy and choose not to for strategic purposes, while also maintaining a vigilant patrol around said people's settlements which is what most people assumed the Geist was doing. Which, along with the dialogue, also aligns well with my next point; namely how in many shows, "Those monsters have been plaguing our town for weeks" rarely mean the monsters were raiding the town itself because if it did the town would not usually still exist.
Oh my its the the town of
Lindenfield from the acclaimed series
Castlevania coming in with a steel chair! IE, the town has been targeted by Night Creatures, demons explicitly made to kill humans hanging out in the woods outside of town for weeks. & unlike RWBY Lindenfeld was actually a long term and important enough location to get stuff like flashbacks showing some of the specifics, but the town RNJR passed through wasn't which is again, entirely normal for most shows. Hell, to note Castlevania again, the next season has two of the characters jump through several locations and battles with little context or set up for how any of its meant to be working of making sense. Because its just giving us a broad idea of life and dangers and overarching threats in the world, not spending expansive amounts of time on every little detail at the expense of telling an actual story.
In order to try and make this complaint land you need to blatantly miss-represent events and canonical factors, because RWNJR aren't just random first years. Ruby is a prodigy who got moved up two years and was personally taught by Ozpin's chief enforcer, the super elite Huntsmen Qrow Branwen and she spent the first three volumes fighting everything from Grimm to super criminals and terrorist plots. Ren was introduced to us as "The perfect student" & shown slaughtering a gargantuan King Taijitu in his debut fight; meanwhile Nora rides on Grimm that scared off a team of four normal first years and killed it for fun as a game. These aren't normal first years, they were finalists in the Remnant Olympics, they were already better than most adults as student and the fact you ignore that doesn't make your arguments stronger, it shows how weak it is.
Here's the actual plan for anyone who cares about stuff like facts in their discourse:
Jaune: No, seriously. It's trying to keep us from its face. If we kill the limbs, we'll have a shot to kill the whole thing!
I love that you switch on dime from having a go at the writers & animators to framing the characters as somehow bad people for (Checks notes) helping out a town that needed it, because somewhere else in the story, much farther away and at a different point in time... a different town would at some point come under attack through no fault of the characters own.
But hey, on the topic of characters looking bad and seeing as I already referenced it!
Castlavania has Belmont making snarky comments towards some humans who were about to be sacrificed and are clearly still chained up & injured. Damn, he's such a heartless bastard, a real monster for not focusing on the poor civilians & instead chatting with Sypha and making wry observations. Amazing how 'bad' this makes him look. Or, ya know, the story would be a mess of wasted time if they showed the pair gently freeing & comforting all the captives & then coming back to have their conversation about the Death Spirit and Vampire attempts to ressurect Dracula so the writers didn't do that.
Do you see why I don't take your critiques seriously when this is the level of loops you need to contort things into in order to complain about the show?
You know, I can't help but notice that you failed to mention one of the team members. Almost like he doesn't fit in with the superhero-esque narrative you're trying to sell. Could have at least done "And... Jaune!" for the reference.
Maybe I am projecting my personal tastes on to this, and trying to disguise. Are you saying that there are no problems with this scene? Are you saying that RWBY as a whole doesn't have any issues? Call me crazy, but that doesn't seem likely. If I'm wrong, I'd love to hear your take on how this was as good as it could be, and why. (Being Honest/Sincere about this. I genuinely enjoy engaging in this kind of discussion.)
Anyways, first off, you're wrong about me complaining about the characters. These are not Watsonian critiques, they are Doylist. I'm not complaining about how the characters weren't perfect beacons of perfection and virtue, and how dare they not adhere to an impossible standard for the situation they're in. I'm complaining that the choices made by the writer's don't mesh well because of cause and effect. Having the last person alive die right as they arrive says that this JUST happened, that if they had been there a day before, even an hour, they might have been able to prevent it. That's a plot point they chose to introduce, and they should address it. (see below.) (Should have saved that line for another post, but I have ADHD, and if I don't make a note of a stray thought when I have it, it goes away.)
You mention that towns can be wiped out overnight, and you also say that they've been plaguing the town for weeks. Yes, these can both occur, but you can't have both of these be true at the same time. Either this is an immediate threat that needs to be eliminated, or it is something that is pressing but not urgent. Either way, it doesn't make sense for Jaune to be unarmed. If it was an immediate threat, then they should go in at 100%, and he should wait for the upgrade. If it was a long term threat, then there's not reason not to wait for him to get his upgraded weapon.
If it were a long term threat that suddenly became urgent, yes, not having a weapon makes sense. They thought they had time for the upgrade, they were wrong, and they had to rush to battle down one set of weapons. We do not see that this is the case. Again, damage to the town could be used to show it, their could have been a traveller running from it and RNJR swoops in to save them. During the fight scene, have the village visible in the distance, so you're implying that it's very close and has become an immediate problem.
If the Gheist was not a major threat, then sure, why bother with arming the weakest link in the team, we can definitely handle it. This emphasizes the skill and ability of most of the team, like you were saying, but it downplays the actual danger of the Gheist, whose presence may necessitate teh abandonment of the town, leading to the death of a number of its citizens. (Mayor straight up says that his people would not survive the trip, even with Team RNJR accompanying them.)
Or play it another way: The mayor was distrustful of strangers, and insisted they deal with the Gheist before Jaune could have his upgraded weapons, things make sense. There's even a setup for this, because Nora's already gotten an upgrade. Maybe it was half now, half later, , and it would make sense for them to choose the effective fighter to be handicapped. There are a lot of possible situations that could explain this, but none of them were applied to the scenario we were given.
Back to the actual fight, and Jaune's strategy:
First off: The missing middle line between our two quotes!
Jaune: Guys, I got it! We hit it harder!
Ren: (
confused) Is that it?
Jaune: No, seriously. It's trying to keep us from its face. If we kill the limbs, we'll have a shot to kill the whole thing!
They're hanging a lampshade on how... not impressive the plan is.
When my D&D party encounters a troll, and decides that since they're outdamaging its regeneration, they don't need to use fire to negate it, it's brute force, not strategy. Noticing the Magical Weak point because the Gheist reacts/gets stunned when its hit there? Not strategic inight, just an important cause/effect. Breaking off the replacable limbs is a brute force solution, not a brlliant strategy. Having a bigger gun or hitting them harder is not strategy. There were a lot of different ways this could have been handled that would better demonstrate Jaune's tactical abilities:
-Outline a plan that goes to hell. Demonstrates Jaune planning ahead, and when it goes awry, his realization is fast thinking when things don't go how he expects. Have him sitting back (because no weapon) and catch the weakness on the second hit, because he can actually sit back and think, instead of reacting on instinct.
-Show them knocking the limbs off and keeping them off. Ruby and Nora bulldoze through one limb and land the killing blow as a followup. Have them take out one limb, and prevent it from grabbing new ones while they take out the rest.
-Lead it somewhere without material to attach to itself. Since this would require designing another set, might not be a reasonable option because of budget.
Bad writing example: Ren's semblance allows him to mask his presence from Grimm. It is a reasonable plan to have Nora and Ruby stage an assault, and Ren uses it as a distraction to assassinate the Grimm while it's attention is elsewhere. From a Watsonian perspective, this is a good plan. Ren and Nora know his semblance, and it's reasonable for their team leader to know about it for tactical reasons. Doylist: bad idea. We've never seen his semblance on screen, and it would feel like a Dues Ex Machina to have it revealed to suddenly solve a problem like that. If the writers had done that, I would be complaining about that instead, because again, it's a writing issue. Could be done without the semblance, where Ren and Ruby act a a distraction so Nora gets an opening to take out the body.
Another option: CHANGE NOTHING in the episode, and build off it in the next one! Some options:
When the Hunstman dies in front of them, have Jaune blame himself for it. Point that needs to be made: IT IS NOT HIS FAULT. If he had omniscient information, OF COURSE he would have said deal with the Gheist later, there's a major bandit/Grimm attack about to happen at the next town! That needs to be dealt with immediately. He doesn't have this, and acted based on the information he had available. HOWEVER, given that Pyrrha died last season because he wasn't good enough to fight Cinder head to head, it's easy for him to blame himself for, because that's still fresh, and it's easy to project it onto this situation.
This leads to an easy follow up where Ruby says that he's wrong for feeling that way, that there's nothing they could have reasonably done (which is true)
Or remove the dying Huntsman or have him already dead, that makes the timeline ambiguous enough that it's not reasonable to say "they could have just moved faster".
Or show the Huntsman's dead team, and emphasize that even a fully trained and experienced team couldn't do anything to save them.
Have the Huntsman in the process of burying the last of the victims. Easy to have Tyrian off him later, or the Grimm, or wander off, or something.
Add a Grimm attack from a straggler, if you want to emphasize that this just happened, and that there's danger out there. Hey, you could have the episode one town just having them wrapping up a extermination mission on the standard Grimm, and have the Gheist ambush them in the dead town.
Again, a lot of different options that could ties the story together a bit better.
On to the topic of Castlevania to compare to RWBY...
Lindenfield was the S3 town, and there is one glaring different between that and the RWBY town, that really undermines your comparison, mainly that it was a generic fantasy town in a relatively stable country, until Dracula came, burned down everything, and released hordes of monsters, unlike RWBY where the monsters have been around and a problem for hundreds of years, and are a fact of life that people should expect.
Even so, Lindenfield had a number of things that would have made survival a lot easier, such as:
-Walls (at least on the wiki image)
-Guards
-Militia they could call up to defend against monsters
-(Theoretically) priests who could turn water into deadly acid to weaken them. Didn't happen for plot reasons, but it was something they could have relied upon if things had gone differently.
-Weapons (RWBY's town does have this, but we only see them in the blacksmith's store, instead of being worn/used by anyone)
You know, basic things that would make it easier to deal with bad things when they show up, even though up until the show started, they might not have needed it. None of which are shown in RWBY's town. Closest they have is a waist high wooden fence. If you live in the bad part of town (or world) why are you leaving your front door unlocked (or village undefended)? You don't need to go into an elaborate backstory to explain why these things are there, but if it's basic safety/common sense for the situation, you absolutely should have it. If you don't, the people just look like naive fools.
Haven't seen season four in awhile, but from what I recall, Trevor has a lot of backstory reasons for being an asshole.
-Having his family killed
-Having his childhood home burned down
-Being cast out of society by the church
-Being reviled by basically everyone he meets for being born a Belmont.
-Seeing the world turn to shit because his family is not around because of the aformentioned death
In the previous season, we are explicitly told/shown how things usually work out for him. Monster is killed (yay), a lot of innocent people die, and the people you thought were good are actually an entirely different type of monster. And in the intro to season four, we see a montage of him and Sypha fighting the same damn fight again and again, and getting frustrated that their job is essentially to fight psychotic vampire zealots to prevent the resurrection of their king, who may still want to murder all of humanity. He's tired, he's stressed, and he has bigger concerns than making people like him (they'll probably treat him like shit anyways, that's how his life goes) The scene playing out the way it did makes sense. I could go back and rewatch the season to see if there are any little details I could pick apart like I'm doing here, but off the top of my head, nothing stands out egregiously enough for me to remember.
And for the record, I don't remember Trevor ever deciding to go into a dangerous situation and leave his weapons behind. Lost them a few times, found a backup, but intentionally going without one? Seems like basic battle 101 to me. At least borrow one of the many weapons the blacksmith had on display in his store.
Yes, this is nitpicky, this is finnicky. If this was the biggest complaint I have about RWBY, I'd be an asshole, but the devil is in the details, and it's a representation of an issue that pops up again and again. If this scene were a quiz/test, it would be enough to change the grade from a B to B minus, or C to C plus. It's not going to wreck the season/series/GPA on its own, but enough of those happen, it's going to have a detrimental effect, and RWBY has a
lot of those moments.
For the record, I like to look at things, pick them apart, and put them back together. RWBY has a lot of issues that I can pick apart. It's not a bad show, but it could be better than it's been. If there's a better thread for that, let me know.
