Okay, probably some more depth would be required than that. When V4 started, I had the impression that it would end in one of two places, either with the gang having reunited just in time to deal with some threat/conflict, or with everybody's individual plotlines wrapped up in order to send them off so that they could meet at the start of V5. From the opening theme music on out, this was clearly the "let's get the band back together" season. The overarching theme was going to be "your world has been shattered, now deal with the fallout and get moving again."
My expectations were fundamentally accurate, so, yeah. I'd say "yay, me" or something, but
RWBY's storytelling has never been particularly surprising. It's always been direct and straightforward, with the surprises coming in terms of specifics rather than in terms of generalities. This has, in fact, always been one of my pet peeves about the
fandom: they expect things that aren't there, were never promised, aren't implied by the story, get annoyed when those things are absent, and get confused when things that are terminally obvious are waved in front of them. They complain about everything when they aren't in full hugbox mode, and many places are toxic and awful. And that's not even getting into the shipping.
So, basically, Volumes 1-3 placed our cast in a "closed world" setting of Beacon Academy. Then, they blew it up, shattered the eggshell, and dumped them, and us, into the greater outside world. It's obviously a mere coincidence, but it works brilliantly that this was the season that they changed from Poser to Maya, because the
visual look of the show matched with the
thematic change. The World of Remnant segments for this year helped to emphasize this--we got the summaries of the kingdoms (
literally expanding the scope of the world), the Schnee Dust Company, the history of the Great War, etc. The first three volumes gave us our characters, with hints of what was around them; now, we were allowed to see the full depth of their stage. I have, in the past, been incredibly frustrated because Remnant seemed like an interesting anime-esque fantasy-with-scifi-elements setting and I wanted to know more about it, but having reached this point I now genuinely understand why the worldbuilding was held back on earlier on: it wasn't necessary for us to understand and appreciate what the characters were
doing and who they were as people, and it would have just eaten up time that they didn't have. This year, we got those snippets throughout the year, from news reports Yang watched to the exploration of villages and banditry RNJR went through to the Ironwood/Schnee political discussions to the glimpse into Atlesian high society to our first look at Menagerie to showing us sea, rail, and foot travel.
Meanwhile, the decision to split the party gave us a chance to see each character on their own. As emphasized by Episode 11, the issues experienced by WBY all boiled down to a single commonality: You are an adult now, so embrace the decision to act as one. Yang was forced to confront post-traumatic stress after losing an arm; her struggles are purely personal and psychological, her obstacles those of herself. Weiss has external obstacles in the form of her father, brother, and social role to confront, but the core conflict was, again, of her choosing to live her life on her terms instead of having her life dictated to her by externalities. And Blake, of course, had to deal with her own flight instincts and trust issues while directly confronting the White Fang. RNJR, on the other hand, are grouped together because their personal issues are centered more around "coping" than "control." None needs to change things
about their lives, but rather how they feel about being
in their lives.
(It will be noted that Cinder, our we-love-to-hate-her baddie, goes through this same journey on the villainous side. That was a nice touch.)
Was all of this handled perfectly? Well, no. I've expressed my feelings in this thread previously, and it bears repeating:
RWBY still has the same problem that it's had since Volume 1, which is that it just doesn't have the resources, as an animated show, to tell the story that it wants to tell and this makes them cut corners in order to jam everything into the runtime. We're not given enough time with any of WBY. We're given snippets for each, glimpses into their journeys, but they're not smooth. We're shown points A, B, and C, so that we see, for example, Weiss constrained by her father and her social role, her lashing out in frustration at those constraints, the blowback against that lashing out, and finally her decision to reject that role and live on her own terms. But we don't see the journey between those signposts; it's not a smooth flow. There's also that weird problem with Blake's timeline, with the implication that it took a
long time to get from Beacon to that ship, where it would have been much better to imply that she spent more of those intervening months in Menagerie (that is, that her progression was de-synced from the others even though they all end up at the same place in the same timeframe), which would also have made Sun's presence a lot less creepy and weird (he followed her for six months and didn't announce himself?
Strange, and only really explainable by him following her but never actually catching her, like he was a day or two behind the whole way until he finally caught up because the boats leave on a schedule). And while the ending episode finally gives us a bit of a look into the mind of Ruby, we don't get enough scenes with RNJR to really get shown that she's hurting inside. The decision to have her reveal her sense of grief, loss, and confusion-at-the-world-changing through her actions instead of her (like Jaune) words wasn't necessarily a bad one, but we don't really get to
see it because of the storytelling limitations put on them by time--her "recklessness" is only really shown where she flings herself into the Qrow/Tyrian battle out of a
people I love will not be hurt because of me! sense even when it's tactically foolish and gets Qrow hurt.
tl;dr on that: These sort of parallel plotlines work just fine in books where there are functionally infinite pages to tell those plotlines, and all you have to worry about is the patience of your audience (for all those people who complain about these things...well, George R.R. Martin sells a damn lot of books, so there's plenty of people
not complaining). In a visual medium, the effectiveness of the storytelling depends on the time available to tell that story.
So as to pacing, I had
no problems at all with the pacing of the season, because it started in the place where I expected and finished in the place where I expected. I had
definite problems with the pacing of the individual plot sequences, because time limits made them choppy "hit the highlights" pathways instead of smooth roads through the storylines.
As to action scenes, I enjoyed the fight scenes throughout, and I honestly don't understand what some people have been complaining about. They looked fine to me and did their jobs. Nothing in V4 matched the sheer exhilaration of V1E8 ("Players and Pieces"), but frankly nothing from the other seasons did as well, not even the V2E4 fight with the Paladin and the V3E12 fight between Pyrrha and Cinder. The best action sequence in the season was actually the character short with Ruby fighting the gorilla Grimm. That said, I think the battle between RNJR and the Nuckelavee (or however the heck it's spelled
) was well-crafted and good storytelling (though I wasn't in particular fear for RNJR, I did have worries that Qrow might be found dead at the end--or that he might be
missing when they went back to get him), and Ren and Nora were treated well in it.
I'd hypothesized that the Haven headmaster was actually one of the bad guys (Watts or Hazel) earlier on, because it made thematic sense to me that Haven would not be a real place of refuge in V5 and onwards. I was wrong about that in specifics (
@Sunder the Gold made some good points as to why that didn't work), but as it turns out I was right in the generalities, in that Leo
is being leaned on/working with Salem's people. This fits with his "Cowardly Lion" character inspiration. I suspect that there'll be a subplot over the "Mistral arc" where he finds his courage and stands up to them at a key moment, possibly only after he's managed to do some serious damage in his fear.
It has to be emphasized that in my opinion, V4 firmly stuck the landing on its finale. It tied up its plotlines properly. Unlike V1, it wasn't a blatant "midseason finale" that wrapped the current episode subplot but nothing thematic about the season (well, okay, I must give it credit if we take "RWBY meet each other and become a team!" as the the volume's underlying theme, but even so it did it badly, without key dialogue between the characters). Unlike V2, it didn't completely fail to deliver key moments of its own plot (GAH! That still stings even two years later; V2 was such a huge improvement on V1, and then they completely faceplanted a landing that they'd set up brilliantly). Like V3's ending, it functioned
as an ending to the themes and issues of the volume, while leaving the story in a place where it can take off properly to start V5. Also, "Armed and Ready" is a much better song than "Divide." Just saying.
Right now, in the afterglow of the aftermath, I would have to say that V4 was the best season of the series yet. It didn't have the power and impact of V3, and it didn't have the "so much better than the previous season" of V2, but it did take a solid step forward into character-based storytelling and world development that just weren't there before. As a fan, I'm happy about the direction they're taking and looking forward to next fall. I just wish that they could get the time, cash, and staff to expand each episode by even 5 minutes (though they need even more), to help them deal with the show's one huge Achilles heel.
