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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
    • I'll shut up about Seven, certainly. I just wanted to drop in that TVTropes segment and then cross my fingers it was a topic worth discussing to validate my existence.
     
    So a while back I did a little bit of looking over at the numbers and running times for RWBY's length up to now, and I think it can help put some things in perspective about, say, treating Volumes of RWBY as the same thing as seasons of a typical anime.

    The average length after Volume 1 becomes about 12-16 minutes each from Volumes 2-4 with 12 chapters instead of 16, and then in Volume 5 it's more like 15-18 minutes with 14 chapters, though Volume 5 also has 3 of the 6 episodes of the series thus far that are longer than 20 minutes (the longest episode so far was 28 minutes for the Volume 3 finale).

    But even then, RWBY is incredibly compacted, and I don't think many fans actually recognize that. Your average 13-episode season of an anime (assuming all episodes are ~25 minutes in length) would come out to 5 1/2 hours to binge watch minimum. If you binged all 5 Volumes of RWBY that are currently out, it would only be 1 1/2 hours longer at about 7 hours even.

    RWBY calls these "Volumes" rather than "Seasons" for a reason. The directors have said that every 3 Volumes can be considered analogous to what would be a season in another show. And in terms of total runtime, binging Volumes 1-3 all at once would last you about 4 1/2 hours, which is still an hour less than a season of your average modern anime.

    Just to note: all of these numbers imply that you'd be watching the opening and end credits every single time, which of course most of us wouldn't. Cut that out and, for example, RWBY's total runtime drops by almost an entire hour to 6 hours, 10 minutes, which for perspective is still shorter than binging the Iron Man trilogy.
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    Delphisage said:
    If I can apologize for that gesture, I only brought it up because I thought it was an interesting topic to bring up TVTropers finding stuff like flirting and other probably lecherous behavior to apparently be a grudge of RWBY's, whether or not that was actually true or just a set of occurrences observed by Tropers as a cognizant pattern, et cetera - and yet Seven (not tagging out of fear) instead chose to respond with "Fuck Tropers for being so adamant in defending this show". I've had a similar history with ragemonster behavior that I very much wish to distance myself from, so I snapped at him for being overly negative and dismissive as a proxy for myself.
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    Yeah, that's not what happened. I pointed outthat if you watch the edit history of the tvtropes pages, you can see fans of the show going out of their way to instantly remove anything that could be considered remotely negative. Link to edit history of YMMV page here. You weren't even participating in the thread until you decided to insult me out of the blue. Here was Delphisage's first reply for those interested. You can go back through the previous pages and confirm my story yourself.

    @mistakenot As for my reappearance, as I have stated several times before in the LW RWBY thread, I'm 99% sure the permathreadban was a result of a clerical error, because the actions that lead to my threadban would have normally at most resulted in a week long temporary threadban. I just hadn't appealed the decision because I didn't particularly care. That the threadban was nearly 2 1/2 years ago shows how little I cared. Frankly I'd rather not be posting here right now. It's just @Delphisage tried to shut down discussion with whataboutism. And it's not the first time people have used that argument to try and shut down honest discussion. So I thought to prevent that from happening again, I would ask politely to correct the error. What do you know, a little politeness goes a long way, and my permaban was removed.

    I would rather not be posting this reply right now. But Delphi misrepresented what happened, and I feel it's my duty to correct people on what went down. Now please don't reply any further. I've said my piece. I don't wish to bring this argument into the other thread either. As far as I'm concerned this line of discussion is over and I would appreciate it if no one tried to start it back up.
     
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    This is not a reply in the sense of a response to the argument between @Delphisage and @thesevenwielder, but rather to echo what the latter said and reiterate what I posted earlier about not continuing this discussion from another thread. Tempting as I'm sure it is to get the last word in, I too would appreciate it if no one drags this on.

    I would also like to thank @Strypgia and @thesevenwielder for explaining the timeline of events that led to the lifting of the thread-ban and subsequent proof of restored posting privileges.
     


    Some of the RWBY skins and RWBY-based skins that will appear in Cross Tag Battle. I liked how the Persona characters with RWBY skins had their Persona/avatar/Stand thing in skins based on the partner of the character they were appearing as. Such as the Ruby skin coming with a Weiss Persona/Stand and vice versa. They missed the Disney Snow White skin for Weiss though. :sad:
     
    Just a thought I had as I was watching a Let's Watch of Hunter x Hunter: Aura and Semblance are basically Nen and Hatsu, just drastically simplified and thus much less versatile... which is probably why I prefer Aura to Nen.

    I've seen people claim that Nen is just like, the greatest power system ever invented for shounen, but I really can't agree because by my standards it's just so convoluted. There are way too many categories and terms and rules for every little thing and every possible way to apply it. My line is: If you're trying to explain how this all works to someone and you need to start using graphs, it's too convoluted.

    Now, people have complained that they dragged their feet way, way too long in properly explaining how even the most basic aspects of Aura worked. And they are completely, 100% correct. But still, the ways Aura can and will be used in the show, and the way Semblances work, are both very useful for telling a story and making good action that has a unique feel to it, and doesn't require me to consult the graph of Nen Types so that I know what kind of Nen user is good at what kinds of Nen use when I want to make an OC.
     
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    Leingod said:
    So a while back I did a little bit of looking over at the numbers and running times for RWBY's length up to now, and I think it can help put some things in perspective about, say, treating Volumes of RWBY as the same thing as seasons of a typical anime.
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    This also goes into what baffles me when people say the writing/the writers are bad. As in, watch not even the trailers but the first episode. In a relatively short amount of time we get a lot of information, specially the characters.

    As in, try to apply the Plinkett test to any named character in the show. For those that don't know what it is it consists of describing a character without naming them or mentioning their physical appearance.

    Very few of the characters fail, and all of them are either one-scene only people and the other teams on Volumen 3.

    The running time is another thing that they use well. I mean, from the top of my head I really can't think of any scene in the show that didn't serve a purpose or went nowhere with the exception of the NDGO and SSSN fight.
     
    Delphisage said:
    To be fair, a lot of characters in media can't stand up to the Plinkett Test.
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    "To be fair-?" Are you consoling him for RWBY having characters that don't stand up to the Plinkett Test? Because he's claiming that the vast majority of RWBY's cast does, in fact, pass the Plinkett test, because of their well defined and realized unique character traits.
     
    Delphisage said:
    To be fair, a lot of characters in media can't stand up to the Plinkett Test.
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    Uh, he just said that many of them pass that test. He's saying that the show has managed to have very well-defined characters with recognizable traits that go beyond the immediately obvious.

    Which of course is far too complimentary to the show to go unchallenged on any RWBY thread, so inb4 the inevitable rebuttal of "no they aren't they're all generic and flat and have no personality."
     
    Indeed, building sense of character personality is I'd say one of the strongest strengths of the show. I honestly think liking the cast is the number one reason people are into it- the fights are just a hook but couldn't keep people in, and heck, Chibi is based almost entirely on playing off that characterization.

    LancerisDead said:
    The running time is another thing that they use well. I mean, from the top of my head I really can't think of any scene in the show that didn't serve a purpose or went nowhere with the exception of the NDGO and SSSN fight.
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    Yea, and those were just, well, tourney fight filler and fun breather before the heavy hits.

    I can name a number of scenes that juggles a lot of stuff at once- like the board game scene is superficial fluff that worldbuilds who the major powers are in the world, that they've had a war, some stuff used in it, and furthermore shows how the characters have gotten closer since S1. Humor, worldbuilding, character development.
     
    I don't think the problem with the characters is that they're flat- I suspect more people would argue that they aren't always coherent. Like Pyrrha's hidden cowardice when not standing up to a group of bullies picking on a bunny girl isn't the act of a flat character, nor is it even the act of an otherwise brave and kind person letting social anxiety get the better of them, it's just an overlooked sloppy bit of writing that works counter to everything else about the character.

    It's in actions taken like these, or not taken perhaps, that leave RWBY with characters that certainly aren't flat, but are still messy and at times at odds with the writer's intended goals.
     
    Barnaby said:
    I don't think the problem with the characters is that they're flat- I suspect more people would argue that they aren't always coherent. Like Pyrrha's hidden cowardice when not standing up to a group of bullies picking on a bunny girl isn't the act of a flat character, nor is it even the act of an otherwise brave and kind person letting social anxiety get the better of them, it's just an overlooked sloppy bit of writing that works counter to everything else about the character.

    It's in actions taken like these, or not taken perhaps, that leave RWBY with characters that certainly aren't flat, but are still messy and at times at odds with the writer's intended goals.
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    The thing is that fans are more than willing to twist scenes and characters around to fit their narrative.

    It's why we have Whitley who's either a tortured soul, a manipulative prick, or some guy who barely did anything and let Weiss destroy herself.

    It's easy just to say something like "Ruby has lots of depth, you just don't see it because they haven't made it obvious!" because you can just spin one simple scene to make it as though it has a lot more meaning than the writers put into it.
     
    Barnaby said:
    I don't think the problem with the characters is that they're flat- I suspect more people would argue that they aren't always coherent. Like Pyrrha's hidden cowardice when not standing up to a group of bullies picking on a bunny girl isn't the act of a flat character, nor is it even the act of an otherwise brave and kind person letting social anxiety get the better of them, it's just an overlooked sloppy bit of writing that works counter to everything else about the character.

    It's in actions taken like these, or not taken perhaps, that leave RWBY with characters that certainly aren't flat, but are still messy and at times at odds with the writer's intended goals.
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    While I agree that there are issues like that, especially in the early volumes (Jaune wants to become a huntsman and doesn't know what Aura is. Really show?) I think that from Volume 3 onwards they got a lot better in regards to keeping the characterization consistent.

    I mean, I can't think a moment in Volume 5 where I went "no, there's no way that this character would act this way", not even in the "BIRDS" scene since I thought Yang was simply expecting something way worse from the way Raven phrased the whole thing.

    Psyga315 said:
    It's easy just to say something like "Ruby has lots of depth, you just don't see it because they haven't made it obvious!" because you can just spin one simple scene to make it as though it has a lot more meaning than the writers put into it.
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    As I said a couple pages back, Ruby is boring, but that doesn't mean she's a bad character. A few things from the top of my head:

    -She has a strong sense of morals.
    -Has a tendency to repress trauma.
    -Is way more mature than one could say at first glance.

    You can say that the show the past volumes did nothing interesting with her and you'd be right, but that's a far call from her lacking any depth.
     
    LancerisDead said:
    Volume 3 onwards they got a lot better in regards to keeping the characterization consistent.

    I mean, I can't think a moment in Volume 5 where I went "no, there's no way that this character would act this way", not even in the "BIRDS" scene since I thought Yang was simply expecting something way worse from the way Raven phrased the whole thing.
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    Sure. I don't know if I'm entirely on board with that sentiment, but there's definitely some improvement.

    My larger point was that saying the critics are "railing against the flat characters in RWBY" probably isn't entirely accurate. If we're talking about the critical response to the show, we should look at it clearly.
     
    That Cinder Dust thing makes tons of sense now.

    But yeah, that aura thing is definitely the point of contention. I was playing a RWBY RPG with someone and the GM had us be in a position to take Roman by surprise. I proposed the idea that, because he doesn't have his aura up (because I'm going with the V5 logic that aura is supposed to be activated), he rebuffs me and says "Aura. Is. Always. Active."

    So yeah, I'm still gonna use a nickname to differentiate Monty!Aura and Miles!Aura, either with that or 5th Edition Aura and 2nd Edition Aura.
     
    Mook said:
    Its certainly made me think about how some people need to learn the definition of the word retcon.
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    noun
    noun: retcon; plural noun: retcons; noun: ret-con; plural noun: ret-cons
    1. (in a film, television series, or other fictional work) a piece of new information that imposes a different interpretation on previously described events, typically used to facilitate a dramatic plot shift or account for an inconsistency.
      "we're given a retcon for Wilf's absence from Donna's wedding in 'The Runaway Bride': he had Spanish Flu"
    Dunno, seems like it's direct.
     
    Psyga315 said:
    noun
    noun: retcon; plural noun: retcons; noun: ret-con; plural noun: ret-cons
    1. (in a film, television series, or other fictional work) a piece of new information that imposes a different interpretation on previously described events, typically used to facilitate a dramatic plot shift or account for an inconsistency.
      "we're given a retcon for Wilf's absence from Donna's wedding in 'The Runaway Bride': he had Spanish Flu"
    Dunno, seems like it's direct.
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    Most of those are more plot threads and hooks that were later dropped or ignored then retcons.
     
    Psyga315 said:
    That Cinder Dust thing makes tons of sense now.
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    It does, but it still works post-retcon.

    "What does Roman want to do with all that Dust?"

    1. What could you not do with that much Dust?
    2. Hey, all those explosives they wanted to use to blow open a hole into Vale had to be made of something. I imagine they probably used some of it to help move all the earth needed to reopen the blocked-off tunnels, too. In fact, this comes to a bit of a hole that was created by limitations of animation and time: there were going to be barriers and blocked-off rubble in the train's way that the Paladins were going to be destroying with explosives, which is why they had those on the train in the first place.

    But yeah, that aura thing is definitely the point of contention. I was playing a RWBY RPG with someone and the GM had us be in a position to take Roman by surprise. I proposed the idea that, because he doesn't have his aura up (because I'm going with the V5 logic that aura is supposed to be activated), he rebuffs me and says "Aura. Is. Always. Active."

    So yeah, I'm still gonna use a nickname to differentiate Monty!Aura and Miles!Aura, either with that or 5th Edition Aura and 2nd Edition Aura.
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    I don't feel like that one really counts as a retcon, since Aura was never particularly well-defined in how it worked either way and there was never a situation that conclusively proved that it was always on or needed to be activated, especially since Volume 5 brought up that enough training can make it nearly reflexive and there were some hints from the beginning that they have a bit of a passive sense for danger. The video points to the use of the phrase "Passively coating the user...", but "passive" and "always on" aren't necessarily synonymous, especially when someone is drawing so much inspiration from video games as Monty Oum repeatedly admitted to in describing RWBY.


    More to the point, the video is making a lot of assumptions about what changes were specifically made by Miles and Kerry, and in what constitutes a retcon.

    To start with, the assertion that "Grimm predate humanity and kill everything" vs "Grimm attack humans and human creations only" could very well be a retcon by Miles and Kerry... or it could have been a retcon from Monty. Or, it could be an intentional discrepancy and something actually changed about the Grimm at some point; we don't know enough to be sure. We sure as hell don't know what Salem is at this point, and given that she can control Grimm and has made her evil lair outside a bunch of Grimm spawning pits in a blighted hellscape and is so important that the gods tasked Ozpin with stopping her and then punished him for hundreds if not thousands of years after he failed until he could get it right, I'd say that's a pretty critical piece of information we'll need to have before we can really say it's a retcon.
    I get that the real kicker here is supposed to be that Ruby doesn't question this, but we see what happens to an environment where the Grimm are entrenched enough to start making spawning pools from in the form of Salem's castle and the Nuckelavee's cave, and it doesn't look like it's particularly amenable to any form of life. The very existence of the Grimm seems to eventually kill off everything else; humans are just the only things around with the presence of mind to organize and fight back against an existential threat and so would be the priority target, either by some instinct in the Grimm or as a result of Salem's machinations.

    "Not many people are super-religious these days," an offhand statement made by Qrow, is not conclusive evidence that nobody's religious anymore, that organized religion is no longer present in peoples' lives, or that the truth of the Maidens and their origins would not upset some or many of their doctrines. I could make similar statements, if not about the world as a whole, at least the particular part of it that I live in, and you can damn well be sure that if it turned out Jesus was some dude who shanked a magic glowing chick to perform miracles it would upset a few peoples' beliefs.

    Then there's the fact that it was never stated that the "more than just a man because Aura" thing was referring to Ozpin being immortal, and thus it's not certain if the divine curse being the cause it a retcon. It might very well be a retcon... or it might just be intentional misdirection and this was the plan the whole time. After all, the gods wouldn't trust just anybody to stop Salem, nor would they be so invested in some random nobody as to force him and him alone to keep trying until he got it right, so the one could easily have led to the other. In short: we don't know enough about Ozpin to actually say that that's a retcon, because for all we know he discovered magic through his mastery of Aura or something. After all, there is a connection between the Maidens and Dust, and Dust interacts with Aura. The Maidens' power was originally Ozpin's, meaning that Ozpin's magic, whatever it is or wherever it comes from, it linked to Aura and Dust in some way.

    As for the gods "abandoning" Remnant meaning they shouldn't have cursed Ozpin or care what Salem does... eh? I mean, there's all kinds of stories in this and that mythos, real and fictional, of the gods "abandoning" people or "turning their back" on the world and etc. and then they just go right back to interfering without a second thought at some later point. It's nothing new. It's even an in-universe joke in Dragon Age where people who aren't part of the Andrastian religion will point out how their Maker only seems to bother showing up to let them know he's abandoning them even harder this time.

    As an aside, Miles and Kerry are "actively avoiding fights" and "forgetting" that "choreography is the main selling point of the show?" Yeah, they're forgetting that Monty's action was a huge draw, it's totally not the fact that the guy's dead and trying to keep doing what he did hasn't been working. No, they just forgot. Given all the complaints about how they should be writing around their limitations instead of trying to push on anyway, you'd think people wouldn't then turn around and start bitching about them not continuing to futilely try to recapture Monty's abilities at fight choreography and animation.

    And that last "retcon?" The rest all actually have a point and are within the realm of possibility as being legitimate retcons, they just make some unfounded assumptions and then act as if their conclusions are totally, 100% true. I'm not calling them wrong, so much as I disagree with what looks like false certainty to me. That one, on the other hand, just makes they think they're missing the point and not really getting the characters and the dynamic between Cinder and Salem.
     
    Psyga315 said:
    noun
    noun: retcon; plural noun: retcons; noun: ret-con; plural noun: ret-cons
    1. (in a film, television series, or other fictional work) a piece of new information that imposes a different interpretation on previously described events, typically used to facilitate a dramatic plot shift or account for an inconsistency.
      "we're given a retcon for Wilf's absence from Donna's wedding in 'The Runaway Bride': he had Spanish Flu"
    Dunno, seems like it's direct.
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    Yeah. So which parts where retconned exactly?

    Cinder was still shown to use Dust-clothing in the flashback to her stealing the Maiden powers and it was never stated that she was stealing Dust for her clothing business. The Maiden reveal did not actually contradict any previously established information. That makes it a plot twist, not a retcon... And I see :ninja:@Leingod:ninja: has already covered this.
     
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