Allow me to get on a soapbox.
Long story short - RWBY is completely unsalvageable.
Let me explain. Buckle in.
I loved the earliest Volumes (1-3), jankiness and all. I could spend hours nitpicking the first seasons, but as Gigguk said in his first video about the show - I don't want to. Despite all its flaws, the show was cohesive and engaging. It took just enough inspiration from anime, and neatly avoided all the stuff that's currently poisoning the medium (another post for another time). It wasn't blindingly original, but it didn't suffer for that. It had heart. There was a clear passion behind the project, and the crew worked around their limitations as best they could. There were dumb moments, awful animation, cliches, a dearth of character writing, etc, but it was fucking
fun.
Monty's death was an unmitigated tragedy, full stop. I won't talk too much about him because the things I have to say don't actually involve him and his amazing work. His passing was sudden, cruel, and unexpected, no two ways about it. But, as many classless people like to theorize, his death didn't suddenly make the show bad. In fact, if Monty was still alive today, the show would probably be as bad as it is, and I think people don't like thinking about that. The fights might have been better, and while they're an important aspect of the show, yet (despite what people believe), isn't everything RWBY had to offer. Let's move on.
Volume 3 was the best the show ever was. You could argue against that on the merits of some of the animation, but it's nearly impossible to deny that the writing, pacing, and character work was head and shoulders above every other season of the show. In fact, I'd go as far as to say it's some of the best YA TV ever made, up there with the first season of ATLA. It wasn't perfect, but it was pretty damn good. I have my own theories about why this is, but I'll keep them to myself (they're not super relevant).
As everyone already knows, Volumes 4 and 5 were just really fucking bad. I've seen the lion's share of blame for that to be placed at Miles and Kerry's feet, but they're capable of doing good - even great - stuff (see Volume 3 of RWBY and Camp Camp). Plus, writing is fucking
hard, and it's not the only issue with the show.
The problem with RWBY now (and what makes it unsalvageable) is that every issue it's ever had has compounded over the past three Volumes. The end result is a bland, bloated, and sluggish creature that is a pale imitation of what came before. When I've discussed this with other people, they often tell me "it's because it's not what you expected/wanted to happen". And this is pretty obvious, given how AWoBE begins, and my own thoughts and theories that developed over the years. In this very thread, even! But RWBY isn't bad because it isn't what I wanted, it's bad because it lacks the direction and focus that the first three volumes enjoyed.
The main problems:
1. The first thing I really want to talk about is the visual design of the show. Mostly because the response to it baffles me beyond belief. People love the look of the show now, and I simply don't understand it. Don't get me wrong, the switch to Maya was
absolutely necessary, but the visual overhaul that went with it was the first sign that things were going downhill. Poser is... not the best animation tool, and that's clear in the first three Volumes, but it did lend itself well to the show. The characters had pop and vibrancy, and they caught the eye easily. The backgrounds also improved drastically over the volumes, feeding into the visual focus on the character designs.
With the switch to Maya, I suspect there was a big push to make the characters look holistic, like they were 'part of the world', and the result is an absolute mess. Without sharp outlines and high contrast colors, they bleed over into the environment and themselves, cut into pieces by dynamic shadows and inconsistent lighting. The colors are bland, almost pastel-like. As a result, the characters look bland and flavorless despite the excellent work put into their actual design. The environments look... okay in some places, but they lack the vibrancy of earlier volumes.
2. The writing. This part of my critique is probably the most subjective, but if Miles and Kerry ever see this, I want them to know that I respect the hell out of them for trying. There was a big shift towards more character depth and development in V4, V5, and V6., something the show desperately needed.
I appreciated the attempt to move into more character-focused writing, but the end result was very much like bad fanfiction - there was too much telling, too little showing, and people stood around in circles and had explanatory conversations that either went nowhere, weren't relevant, or failed to show us anything new about the characters involved. We learned about Ren and Nora's history, but we didn't learn about them as
people. Jaune angsted over Pyrrha for two volumes before finally having the scene they needed at the end of V4 (and also one of the only good things about V6... I'll get into it later). Ruby is still bland, Blake's character was almost entirely assassinated, Raven turned out to be Ayn Rand with an anime sword, and the majority of the supporting cast was put on a bus with no brakes.
And I don't really blame the writing staff for any of it. They had a big goddamn job to do, and a difficult one at that. But it did't help when confronted with the next biggest writing flaw.
Namely the lore and worldbuilding. They packed a ton of it into Volumes 4-6, and almost none of it worked. I've talked about this in conversations with
@Always Late, but I'll reiterate it here - there was too much that was explicitly revealed, and what they revealed was... undercooked to say the least. The premise of the show was good enough to spawn hundreds of thousands of fanfic and fanart of speculation about the world of Remnant, but the answers we got were explained in explicit detail with zero hints of ambiguity, in a way that utterly contradicts the show's presentation. RWBY is quite explicitly inspired by fairy tales, which have always been mercurial, ambiguous and shrouded in hand-me-down folklore. So why did we literally see the main villain's backstory? Why did we get explicit confirmation about the gods?
Because the writers think we needed it in order to remain invested. But that clearly wasn't the case, as evidenced by the fandom's explosive growth over the first three volumes. The answers we got in Volume 6 explained the entire plot and everything and everyone important related to it. Now what? Now nothing. We learned about the grimm, Salem, Ozpin, the moon, everything. Actually seeing it helped alleviate what was actually happening, but the end result is the same. There's nothing left to learn or explore. And now that we have all the answers, there's little reason to speculate or investigate. Part of the draw of fairy tales is their mystery, their dark allure and uncertain, timeless origin. In this respect, RWBY utterly jumped the shark. If we had gotten these answers, it should have been near the end of the show. Getting Ozpin's origin story was like getting a POV chapter in Game of Thrones from Varys or Petyr.
It also robbed the main characters of most of their agency. It helped develop them a little, but not in a satisfying way. The big reveal is that they're just the latest in a series of dupes Ozpin's recruited into an unwinnable war. It damaged their optimism, but they got over it almost immediately. Nothing was gained, nothing was learned.
3. Volume 6 was the nail in the coffin.
I've seen a lot of praise for this volume, which, like the visual design, has utterly confused me. Are we watching the same show? Am I taking crazy pills?
IS THE WARP OVERTAKING ME
Volume 6 wasn't... horrible. It was leagues better than V4 and V5, but ultimately, it wasn't enough.
@fistofsoup said how the last three episodes got a lot of criticism... what about the rest of the volume? It was just as chocked full of filler and bloat as the previous two volumes, but no one's talking about it. Much like the ending of Mass Effect 3, Volume 6 was the thread that got pulled and made the whole sweater unravel.
Why did they spend most of the season trapped in the wilderness? What happened there that couldn't have happened in Atlas? It was pure filler, evidenced by its plodding pace and pointless developments. Why did they have to fight a giant robot piloted by Some Lady? So stuff could happen and not move the plot forward too much, and the other characters could have something to do while Yang and Blake got development.
And holy shit the music. What the actual
fuck happened? It's so bad I literally don't understand how it happened. Don't know what I'm talking about? Watch the 'fight' with the Apathy again. It's so generic and dull I'm almost certain it was purchased from a stock music collection. I bet Jeff was busy composing for Gen;Lock, but that doesn't make it any better to listen to. And then
it happens again during the mech fight.
There's a bunch of other problems, but I won't get into them. Why? Because taken together, they collectively doomed the show. Everything I listed through all the season has compounded to the point where I struggle to imagine RWBY ever being as fun and engaging as it was originally. V6 showed me that it isn't going to improve. Again, people have told me "it's because you wanted things to be different". But even if Rooster Teeth hired me tomorrow, I am completely at a loss at how to 'fix' RWBY. Too much as happened, and I struggle to imagine changing anything other than damn near everything.
TL;DR: There isn't anything that can be done to make RWBY interesting to me again. A death of a thousand cuts rendered it into a bland and bloated version of itself.
