It seems I've kicked a hornet's nest.
@RedrumSprinkles may god have mercy on your soul, because the fans won't.
I felt a little concerned for Redrum.
I really appreciate your concern, but in the interest of keeping this discussion going
in good faith, I'm going to keep kicking. Gently, but still. I get that people are passionate about this show.
Let's get into it.
Barring Yang's hair not popping as much as it used to I really don't see this one at all and think that this is just a personal preference and not something you should be framing as fact which I feel you are doing when you make claims
There are a few things I said that are objectively true - the characters do not have black outlines anymore, and it causes some awful visual effects, most often with hair, as you said. The colors are also objectively more washed out. There are a few exceptions (Salem's Evil Palace of Evil being the most notable). It's my
opinion that this is a bad look of the show, because it doesn't play to the series' strengths, which are its characters and its action.
You make a lot of claims here but don't actually present much to back them up, 'Ruby is still bland' and 'Blake's character was assassinated' jumping out at me as statements that need analyse, comparisons to earlier volumes and examples to back up rather than just left hanging. Same for the agency thing.
You're right - the burden of proof is on me. Should we start with Ruby?
Ruby.
Ruby has always been the show's weak spot. Let's start with V1, and the stuff we're shown about her. She's a capable fighter, she's energetic and hopeful, but also naive and socially awkward. This is a great start for a main character. I will grant that she shed the 'socially awkward' thing at a believable pace, and how she got there. Otherwise, she hasn't changed at all. The show keeps putting obstacles in front of her, but they rarely slow her down for more than five minutes. When it was revealed that Salem is literally invincible, she digested that, then immediately whipped everyone into shape over the course of the Apathy arc. She gives a lot of speeches about hope and what not, but she hasn't fundamentally changed as a person over the course of the series. I'm not saying you need to have a radical departure from your original character concept in order to
have a good character, but characters need to grow and be challenged. Nothing Ruby has faced challenged her, her convictions, or anything else important to her. As a result, she's the same person she was in V1, but now she can turn into a stream of rose petals and has a bunch of friends. You could say that she's also a great leader, but that happened in V1 at pretty much the drop of the hat. We're told she's a great leader by the reactions of all the characters, and musical cues, but that isn't anything she hasn't been doing since V1 E10 (her speech to Juane). She doesn't make sacrifices, doesn't change, doesn't grow. I will grant that this is kind of subjective, since they clearly tried to improve her character, but everything fell flat for me.
Blake's Character Assassination.
Blake's character arc can be summed up by one word - 'Cowardice'. She has to confront herself and her actions, and that, when confronted by a difficult situation, her default reaction is to flee. This is a good outline, great even. We're shown time and time again that running away is how Blake faces her problems. Then V4 happened. It's clear that the idea was to force Blake to confront her fears, that even her home isn't safe. That Adam's reach is long and insidious. Got it. And she does learn her lesson - with literally zero personal cost to her or those she cares about. It's my
OPINION that this is a bad writing move, but I'll back it up with some explanations.
You can argue that Blake was insufferable to Sun during V4 and V5, but that's neither here nor there, the lack of ramifications is the worst part of her arc. Again, you don't have to lose something every time you want to evolve a character, but IN THIS INSTANCE, with THIS PARTICULAR ARC, it made everything cheap. Blake made good strides when she acknowledged what her problem is. But it never ends up being an issue, because everything works out for her in the end. This is equivalent to saying that her flaw is inconsequential. At the end of her arc, Sun and Ilya are still her friends, her parents are alive, and she's begun a powerful splinter faction of the White Fang. The only thing she actually lost was Yang's trust, and then only briefly. Having a flaw that doesn't cost a character anything is an informed flaw, the same kind fanfic writers staple onto their Mary Sues to make them more 'believable'.
The course of her arc was also fraught with questions. Why does her parents live in a huge house when she acknowledges that Menagerie is hard and squalorous? This isn't like, a stray observation, we're shown the cramped conditions of Menagerie, then TWO MINUTES LATER, we see her massive fucking house. And it's played as a joke. No one ever discusses how hypocritical this is, and it never comes up. Ever. Blake gives her speech in front of this very mansion as it burns. She asks her fellow faunus to look upon what the White Fang did. And expects them to... care? About her massive fucking house? What? I mean...
what?? I've strayed into opinion here but seriously,
what?? If she was giving that same speech over her parents' bodies, then I would have bought what she had to say, but as it is, the whole conceit of that arc made Blake look like a spoiled, petulant whiner, which was clearly unintentional.
you are just conflating personal opinion with fact like you did with the music.
I should have clarified that the show was unsalvageable
TO ME, and that's my bad. However, I did lay out my opinions and attempted to explain why I felt that way.
But you're going to defend the BGM? I'll admit that Casey's songs are still pretty good, but the actual score is pretty awful. I'm not musical by any means, but I don't understand how you can defend it. It was so bad, it actually ripped me out of the scene (the Apathy Chase, to be specific). I had to pause the video because I thought I had accidentally opened a tab that was playing stock music.
Ozpin, Qrow and Maria as the new mentor could face some deep troubling revelations about their mission, secrets, relationships, the overall plot and grapple with them, themselves and each other.
I'll admit I liked that the MacGuffin was actually an item that had a use besides moving the plot forward. The Djinn twist was actually pretty well done. They had a lot of revelations and discussions, but they shouldn't be having these conversations away from the dueteragonists. And that they had them out in the wilds (again) did absolutely nothing for the story. I get that the Apathy connection was tied to the revelation that Salem is invincible, but it's a lazy shorthand that forces these characters to fight. An opinion - Blake and Yang should have fought NOT because the Apathy were lurking in the well but because they have legitimate grievances with each other, amplified by the sudden hopelessness of their mission. Having the apathy amplify everyone's animosity makes all the relationship drama forced and unearned. It cheapens the actual drama and pathos that previously drove their relationships.
you seem to basically want them to just skip travelling across half the world because 'reasons' what would make skipping Mistral and instead redoing these plots in Atlas accomplish, if you dislike the stories literally nothing changes, you'd just be making travel look easy, miss out on the chance for placing the characters in new situations and using those to explore said characters and the world they inhabit while weaving it with the story.
They never made travel look easy in the show, but making the characters march through the wilderness for entire seasons is not the way to do this. If RWBY was more rustic and gritty in its presentation, then it would be fair, but this is the second season we've spent out in the woods, for no other reason than to force characters to talk to each other and do drama things. I'm not saying you have to 'skip' travelling, but it doesn't need to be so drawn out. You could have cut out four episodes of V6 by making the train battle a little more damaging to the characters, but keeping everyone together. Have an episode with the airing of the grievances and introducing Maria. Throwing Djinn in there wouldn't be the hardest thing either.
whole thing seemed pretty sharply paced to me
It was not. I do realize that this is subjective, but I fundamentally do not understand how you have this opinion. This was Episodes 6-13 of AoT level of stretched out. The problem isn't that these things happened, it's that they were drawn out to fill a season.
(Qrow's drinking, Yang & Blake's relationship, Weiss's fear of going home, Ruby feeling isolated and learning about her Silver Eyes from Maria ETC)
Yeah, but why did it take 5-6 episodes to cover? We knew everything except the silver eyes going on the train, and that only needed a half-episode to get to the bottom of. The Haunted Cabin story was some decent worldbuilding and a passable thematic connection, but it did NOT need to exist.
Or they fought Corvo cos they needed to step up in the face of the various adults who had billed themselves as the solutions collapsing into heaps and not knowing what they were doing, needed a boss fight of their own to set up the finale, and generally establish themselves as heroes and MCs who will take the risks and defy the powerful if it means doing what they think is best and or they have something worth fighting for.
Okay, so they took risks, stood up to adversity, and declared that they had something to fight for. This is literally stuff we learned in V1. We learned nothing new. And it bears repeating - I wasn't expecting RWBY to be Citizen Kane, but this is still wheel-spinning. The Adam fight was important, I'll admit, but the Corvo fight is inexcusably ancillary. We know RWBY/JNR can fight as a team. We know that they're a brave bunch of kids. Also, it was entirely unnecessary. Qrow is personal friends with Ironwood. One scroll call would have made the entire plot not happen. Weiss could have leaned more into her authority, or played some clever bureaucracy games to get Corvo on her side. It's literally a case of 'Cell Phones Could Have Solved This Plot' when it's
been established that they have cell phones. Forgive me if I find that a bit lazy and unnecessary.
I don't feel stands as it's own argument because while it does use fairy tale stories and figures as a basis, that doesn't make it a fairy tale in of itself and once they introduce an overarching plot which they spent three volumes setting up, we kind of, you know, need background. Maybe keeping things mysterious or changing the creation myth could have led to a better story but those I feel are separate issues.
Not every story has to be vague and a mystery. RWBY was never really meant to be a show where the background was shrouded in myth and darkness. The reason the lore was never spelled out before was that the writers didn't have the lore written before. This volume seems to be the point where they sat down, decided what exactly the background was, and then decided to communicate that to the audience so we'd have a better understanding of the conflict and the stakes involved rather than leaving us wandering in the dark with nothing to go on. Like your point about the draw of Fairy Tales being their mystery, their dark allure and uncertain, timeless origin are all well and good but that's never been the draw of RWBY. RWBY is at its core an action-adventure show not really dark fantasy.
I'll tackle these points together.
RWBY has a lot more in common with things like Comic Books, Shonen Anime, or even modern YA cartoons than it does anything close to fairy tales.
The comparison to GOT is pretty weird since they're two totally different sorts of stories in two totally different genres.
I will start out by saying that you're both right, RWBY doesn't have to be a fairy tale. It wore its inspirations on its sleeve, and was stronger for it. I never once expected RWBY to be
Symbaroum levels of dark fantasy, and people telling me I don't like RWBY because I don't like the direction it took is a lazy argument. There are some things in a story you absolutely have to keep ambiguous, and the creation myth is almost always one of them.
I fundamentally disagree that 'keeping things mysterious' and 'changing the creation myth' aren't inherently tied to storytelling failures. By answering all the questions we had about the world in one episode - from an unequivocally trustworthy source - there's nothing more to learn about the world that will ever be interesting. Sure, you can color in some more details, but what's the fucking point? We've seen how the world was made, how it got this way, and every angle of its most important characters. What else is there to learn, lore-wise?
I'm not saying this because I wanted RWBY to be more like a dark fairy tale, I'm saying this because it was a quick and dirty way to kickstart the plot that didn't consider the ramifications. I've seen a lot of people put blinders on when it comes to shows (not just RWBY), and they don't seem to think about how things are done, and why. That approaching things differently might have yielded better results.
Grounding the conflict and explaining how shit works in the show's favor.
It didn't 'ground the conflict' at all. It wrapped the characters up in a centuries-long feud that they had no personal involvement in. There's nothing grounded about Salem's goal, and it only raises questions about why anyone who isn't totally batshit insane follows her at all. They touched on this a little with Emerald and Mercury, but only in the broadest strokes, and Mercury being a nice strawman nihilist to justify him being such a shitty person.
What the creation myth did was explain - in no uncertain terms - Salem's motivations and the overall conflict of the show. Now to go into some opinions real quick. Though it actually feels unfair to say, V6 is too late to explain it. These should have been at least adequately explored, and only much later seasons revealing Salem's true nature. Again, you don't need to keep everything shrouded in mystery, but delineating everything in one episode makes her even less interesting than when we knew literally nothing.
You know I've seen more posts by you two and others who constantly call out the fandom as defensive, uncritical, and attacking anyone who thinks bad about the show than I've seen the fandom being those things.
To be fair, the r/RWBY board isn't defensive so much as it is unquestionably positive. It brings uncomfortable comparisons to the Star Citizens fandom.
That's a completely different argument.
That's a completely different argument. "This show is objectively bad" versus "This series has progressed in a way I can't stand."
stray into the Criticsm I hate, the people who are clearly just butthurt that this Volume went in a direction they didn't like
"This series is Unsavlagable" and "I hate the direction this show is going." Are two very different things.
Yeah, that's my bad for not clarifying, although I don't think saying 'it didn't go the way I wanted' is a valid argument. I keep my mind open while watching shows, and I look at everything as constructively as I can. The main thoughts shouldn't be 'but why did they do that' and 'that doesn't make sense'. RWBY could have gone in a billion different directions, but the way they presented this one fails on almost every level.
I mean credit to Redrum Sprinkles she did spell out a pretty insightful series of reasons for why she no longer feels invested in the show. I disagree on a lot of those points but at least she explained everything well
Thank you for saying so. I appreciate you taking the time to say so, as I do enjoy fiction discussion, and I prefer to keep everything 'above the belt' so to speak.
But there are a number of people who like Adam and they're freaking creepy and weird.
Yeah I absolutely do not get this at all. Adam is a black hole of charisma, from which nothing good or interesting can escape. Ever since the Black trailer, I have referred to him as nothing but Shadow the Edgehog. There's nothing about his character that is well done or engaging.
Preaching to the choir, man.
Some of the choir are throwing tomatoes.
