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RWBY Thread III: Time To Say Goodbye

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Stop: So gotta few things that need to be said real quick.
  • Staff Post
    • so gotta few things that need to be said real quick.
    We get a lot of reports from this thread. A lot of it is just a series of people yelling at each other over arguments that have been rehashed hundreds of times since the end of the recent Volume. And I get that the last Volume - and RWBY in general, really - has some controversial moments that people will want to discuss, argue about, debate, etc.

    That's fine. We're not going to stop people from doing that, because that's literally what the point of the thread is. However, there's just a point where it gets to be a bit too much, and arguments about whether or not Ironwood was morally justified in his actions in the recent Volume, or if RWBY and her team were in the right for withholding information from Ironwood out of distrust, or whatever flavor of argument of the day descend into insulting other posters, expressing a demeaning attitude towards other's opinions, and just being overall unpleasant. That tends to happen a lot in this thread. We want it to stop happening in this thread.

    So! As of now the thread is in a higher state of moderation. What that means is that any future infractions will result in a weeklong boot from the thread, and repeated offenders will likely be permanently removed. So please, everyone endeavor to actually respect the other's arguments, and even if you strongly disagree with them please stay civil and mindful when it comes to responding to others.

    In addition, users should refrain from talking about off-site users in the thread. Bear in mind that this does not mean that you cannot continue to post tumblr posts, for example, that add onto the discussion in the thread, with the caveat that it's related to RWBY of course. But any objections to offsite users in the thread should be handled via PM, or they'll be treated as thread violations and infracted as such.
     
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  • Staff Post
    • Melancholeric said:
    Too many jump-cuts, uninspired enemy designs, horrendous backgrounds. I have some other issues, but I suppose they come from not knowing RWBY and lacking context.
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    To be totally honest. RWBY's appeal is built mostly on the geek cred Monty earned in the early days of youtube bashing together fights with barely more than a few cracked game ROMs and his desktop PC.

    If you weren't into or nostalgic for his Dead/Fantasy vids then then you probably won't be into RWBY and the plot itself can't really carry the show despite getting noticeably better with every season.

    Season four is really where the show reached the level of quality I expected from season one. And that bar, to be blunt, was not set high.
     
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    I never watched a dead fantasy video before watching RWBY. Then I got sick and binged the series into the middle of season 2 where it actually started to become half decent.
     
    Melancholeric said:
    Too many jump-cuts, uninspired enemy designs, horrendous backgrounds. I have some other issues, but I suppose they come from not knowing RWBY and lacking context.
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    That scene is from Volume 1 which if I remember correctly was basically made by like 16 people or so working on a shoestring budget. The show has cleaned up a lot since then.



    So far every previously established monster that showed up in Volume 4 has also got some redesigns that I personally felt worked pretty well and there are several new types that are far less generic and some that get really obscure.


    Don't know what to tell you about the fight scenes. Personally I liked Monty's action scenes a lot more than the usual anime style or western shaky cam but there was a noticeable change in the way they made the fight scenes after he died. Personally I liked it better before but there have been some great fight scenes even after he passed and the crew seem to be steadily improving with each passing volume.
     
    Yeah, the monsters' design greatly improved in season 4 when the new ones weren't basically animals painted black with bits of bony armor and the creator started to be more original in their inspirations, taking from little known mythologies and folklore for example.
     
    ElMariachi said:
    Yeah, the monsters' design greatly improved in season 4 when the new ones weren't basically animals painted black with bits of bony armor and the creator started to be more original in their inspirations, taking from little known mythologies and folklore for example.
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    The old ones look really cool as well. Sure they're still mostly just demonic animals but that glowing light coming out of their eyes and throat like there's a furnace of burning hellfire inside them really helps sell them as unnatural as does the black smoke that constantly surrounds them.

    Plus there's something to be said for simplicity in design as well. I've lost count of all the anime monsters that I've forgotten what look like the second they're off-screen or even when they're on screen simply because they're overcomplicated and overly detailed messes with no unifying theme or clear cut design.







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    Like what the hell am I even looking at here? There's something to be said for monsters that you can actually describe and instantly recognize.
     
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    Mook said:
    The old ones look really cool as well. Sure they're still mostly just demonic animals but that glowing light coming out of their eyes and throat like there's a furnace of burning hellfire inside them really helps sell them as unnatural as does the black smoke that constantly surrounds them.
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    Indeed, that's part of the upgraded design from volume 4, but before that they were kinda meh.
     
    RWBY is an indie amateur work produced by folks whose expertise consisted of "making comedy machinima" and "making over the top frenetic action sequences in machinimas". As for the plot and worldbuilding, I think that "Anime as made by TV Tropers" was a harsh but true description. However it has improved a lot. Compare the original Ruby trailer (which predated RWBY entirely) to the Season 4 Character Short. Its really only with the latter that I could actually imagine playing on TV on some kid's cartoon channel some time in the last 10 years and not die of embarassment. And even then mostly because it combed over RWBY's rough CGI into something stylized.

    But TBH I have a soft spot for indie works. RWBY does not have a big professional team or a big professional budget or anything. Holding it to the same standards wouldn't be fair, and it is in often superior in some ways to typical CGI TV shows.
     
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    Triggerhappy said:
    To be totally honest. RWBY's appeal is built mostly on the geek cred Monty earned in the early days of youtube bashing together fights with barely more than a few cracked game ROMs and his desktop PC.

    If you weren't into or nostalgic for his Dead/Fantasy vids then then you probably won't be into RWBY and the plot itself can't really carry the show despite getting noticeably better with every season.

    Season four is really where the show reached the level of quality I expected from season one. And that bar, to be blunt, was not set high.
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    I never watvhed any of those stuff, and still liked It.
     
    Melancholeric said:
    That fight was a fucking mess. Was it intentional?
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    Funny, I thought it was one of the best in the entire series. Maybe the best. But then again, I value things like foreshadowing and having some loose relation to character development over spectacle or fidelity.

    Which sorta brings me to the reason I came here. As you may know, I wrote a fanfic called Shards, which was a crossover between Worm and RWBY. It was pretty popular, and I enjoyed it for a while. There are a lot of things that I planned for that story that I want to get to, and a fair number of people who want to see them. (I even ran into one of them IRL. It was weird for both of us.) But despite all of that, I haven't worked on it in months. There are a few reasons for that. The second-biggest is that I've completely lost all of my notes, which is frustrating, but I could work around that if I had to. If nothing else, I could just scrap what I've got and start over. (I've been thinking about some structural and pacing issues with the story thus far, and maybe getting a fresh start wouldn't be such a terrible idea.) But then there's the big reason; I just don't have the passion for Shards that I once did.
    Um, the next section sorta turned into a rant about RWBY, so...I'm spoilering it.
    When I started writing Shards, I was a big fan of both Worm and RWBY. Worm had been over for a year and a half, but it was still on my mind and I was enjoying Wildbow's other stuff; RWBY's second Volume was disappointing, but I had hope that it would find its feet again. It wouldn't have made the first Volume so character-focused and keep a whole set of characters unrelated to the theoretical-main-plot if it wasn't going to have some aspect of that, right? I still love Worm. But RWBY...geez. Volume 3 took everything I disliked about Volume 2 and turned it up to 11. The action setpieces and dumb jokes shoved out every remnant of character development and personality nuance. The plot continued to be more interested in creating and hinting at mysteries than trying to explain itself, and the worldbuilding got messier and more confusing. And then there's the tone.
    It's not that I don't like darker stories; I love A Song of Ice and Fire, Papers Please, and (obviously) Worm. But I also like Undertale, Konosuba, and the MCU. Some of those are darker in tone, some are lighter, most are dark in some ways and light in others, but each has a tone that it works hard to fit. Undertale wouldn't work if you tried to make it morally ambiguous, and A Song of Ice and Fire wouldn't work if you tried to force each character into either a "heroic" or "villainous" role. Papers Please couldn't be serene, and Konosuba couldn't be melancholy; they just wouldn't work if written that way. And I'm not saying that a work has to be either one or the other; Steven Universe and Avatar: The Last Airbender started out seeming optimistic and light-hearted, but kept taking on darker themes as the show progressed; that's part of what makes them work as coming-of-age stories. I expected RWBY to take that kind of path, but...it didn't.
    RWBY seemingly couldn't decide if it wanted to be serious and dark or if it wanted to be fun and light-hearted, and wound up with the worst of both worlds. Its "darker" elements were stripped of all nuance, rendering them pointless and cartoonish.* Meanwhile, its "lighter" elements fail to actually convey a sense of levity to the series, while making it even harder to take the "dark" parts seriously. RWBY is trying to be both a silly, light-hearted anime parody and an epic, serious tale, but in the process managed to miss what makes both of those worthwhile. Not to mention that it lost what made me like RWBY in the first place.
    The first episode of each of the first three Volumes works as a surprisingly good microcosm of how each played out. Volume 1: There was a fight scene, but most of the episode was focused around building the characters of Ruby and the people around her. The world was kept mysterious, vague enough that one could try to fill in the blanks, with enough material for someone to try extrapolating from (and to make me care about Remnant and its people in the first place). The characters weren't super-detailed, but they still managed to show a little nuance (E.g, Ruby "Normal-Knees" Rose wanting to be a Huntress because of how "romantic and exciting and cool" it would be). Volume 2: Villains are dicks, a little exposition about the characters' lives, episode-length food fight of ridiculousness, and then back to the villains for some vague stuff that builds mystery without laying down any hooks to let us start guessing what it might be. Volume 3: Exposition, an overly-long tournament fight with an inevitable result, villains are dicks, more vagueness, and then another tournament fight with an equally-inevitable conclusion starts up. Volume 1 was about characters, with some worldbuilding and seeding the plot thrown in. Apparently, Oum or whoever was running Volume 2 decided that they had fulfilled their character development quota; about half of the main cast had a flaw brought up as part of an arc, and we knew the other half well enough, now we can get to the fight scenes! Pew pew!
    I get that some people like that stuff. I've heard people praise the later Volumes for "finally" bringing the tone and focus they expected from watching the trailers. That's fine, but my expectations came from Volume 1, and with them I became more and more disappointed by every passing episode. Eventually, I just stopped caring. I got four or five episodes into Volume 3 and just stopped watching. I stuck around the subreddit and heard a bit about some lorey things, checked the wiki about them, and thought that it felt like they were just thrown in. Eventually, I was encouraged to finish the Volume; I managed a few more threads before I stopped caring even harder than I had before, and just read the wiki summaries. I hope the people who wanted a dark, action-oriented RWBY are happy.

    *To pick an egregious example: the White Fang and anti-faunus racists were both nuanced in Volume 1, each having legitimate grievances while still taking actions which were clearly in the wrong. But then both sides managed to turn into one-dimensional villains; the groups' actions became more obviously Wrong, while the main characters with ties to the groups rejected the groups and managed to get rid of their flaws and prejudices that might have made them interesting characters. The White Fang suffered most from the former, and Weiss/the SDC most from the latter, but it was bad for both.
    Anyways. If you read the rant above, or enough of the posts I'm sure I made in the Shards thread that mentioned the same general issues, you probably have an idea of why I liked RWBY at first and then stopped liking it. My question is: Should I watch Volume 4? Not "Should you watch Volume 4"; I don't have the same tastes as all RWBY fans, which is why I have to ask this in the first place. Not "Do you want me to watch Volume 4"; I can guess that a lot of people will probably want me to watch V4, whether to give it another chance or to kickstart Shards or whatever. What I want to know is if Volume 4 takes a step back towards that Volume 1 feel, or if it just kept trodding down the path Volumes 2 and 3 took, away from the reasons I once cared about Ruby, Weiss, Blake, and Yang.
     
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    *shrug*

    Don't care about Chibi.

    Having to wait a week before nonsubscribers to watch it kills any chance I'd have of enjoying it.
     
    Sucal said:
    *shrug*

    Don't care about Chibi.

    Having to wait a week before nonsubscribers to watch it kills any chance I'd have of enjoying it.
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    Okay, I have to ask: how?

    I mean, I understand how it could cause you to pull your hair out in frustration if you were already a week behind in the main show or RvB or anything else of that sort. Going on the Internet to discuss episode events, debate where the narrative is going, and complain about what minor gripe has expanded into a nightmare of epic proportions ("Sun's abs aren't as defined in his new character model! The show is RUINED FOREVER!!!") is part of the fun.

    But Chibi is...four-minute blobs of gag comedy? I mean, where does the time pressure come from?
     
    Jorlem said:
    Often this kind of comedy is dependent of surprising the audience, and knowing parts of what happen ahead of time can drain away some of the humor?
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    I've never seen any Reddit threads or whatever discussing the jokes in RWBY Chibi and, I dunno, laughing at them or trying to figure out Cinder's plans or pointing out that the worldbuilding implies something contradictory to what most people assume about the setting or whatever. Even if those were there, it seems like it would be easy to avoid. Spoilers for RWBY Chibi jokes aren't going to be relevant to discussion in the way spoilers for RWBY Primary plot points and whatnot could be.
     
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