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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
    • Delphisage said:
    He wanted TWO self-inserts?
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    "A character I intend to voice" ≠ "A self-insert." It's true of Jaune for Miles, it's true of Neptune for Kerry and Gray for Torchwick, and it's true of Monty for Ozpin (who he initially intended to voice) and for Ren (who he ended up actually voicing instead of Ozpin or Qrow).

    That said, I wasn't aware of Monty ever saying he intended to voice Qrow at any point. Do we have a source for that?
     
    Delphisage said:
    You wouldn't be saying that if this was a fanfic.
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    Umm, yes?

    A self insert is where you literally insert yourself into the story. So the character in question has almost all of your thought processes, your beliefs and your hopes and dreams. Ren didn't recieve too many lines or story attention in the first two seasons partially because Monty wanted to avoid that issue, its the same reason why he didn't follow through with his original plan to voice Ozpin instead.
     
    Just pointing out, self-inserts are a pejorative in a fanfic context because the author is literally making a story about themselves, rather than about the original work. It takes a lot for a reader to care about the author's SI over the characters in the work that they're looking for fic about. In comparison, this is a literal non-issue for an original work.

    That's not to say it's the *only* issue with self-inserts--there are a huge number of potential narrative pitfalls with self-inserts--but then we could talk about the actual narrative issues, instead of using "self-insert" as a cheap gotcha.
     
    Psyga315 said:
    And some writers have wrote their OCs to have their voice.
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    This doesn't actually prove that they're a self-insert though? Like, I'm sure in many cases they are, but a self-insert is something that you tell through seeing how the character is actually written, their position in the narrative, and so on and so forth, and building an argument from there. Things like "Writers having the OC have their voice" could be a data point in the favor of that, but in actuality it doesn't really tell you that much.

    Not to mention that "A fanfic author that could pick literally anyone in the planet to voice a character chooses themselves" is a bit different from "a voice-acting project that is rather limited in reach and budget, with a moderate sized cast, that pretty much solely is using in-house amateurs as vocal talent, has the director voice a character."

    (And by "a bit" I mean "why on earth do you think these things are comparable")
     
    This is interesting.



    Long story short is that someone compiled the fight scenes in RWBY to see how long each fight in the episodes were, putting a bit of a lengthy debate to rest.

    Hiro Hei, a YouTuber who did a video on this, complied a TL;DR showing the total run-time of RWBY volumes (minus ads like the spam of Gen:Lock in Volume 6) and the percentage of the volume being a fight.
     
    Well, they did focus more on story later. Also, V6 being twice as long and having about half as much fight %, means about the same time with fights, right?
     
    Was there actually a debate over the fact that there hasn't been as many fights since Monty's passing? I thought that was pretty obvious and agreed-upon. Like, he was basically the guy holding up the fight scenes and choreography on his own, and the hardships they've had trying to keep up the quality after his death are both obvious and something they've freely admitted to.
     
    Quality of fights matters far more anyway. V3 has the most time spent on them but the first four tourney fights were bad with only Qrow vs Winter really being anything special.

    It isn't till Yang vs Merc that the fights jump in quality and stay that way for the rest of the volume.

    And even though V6 has roughly the same amount of time spent on fights as V5 they were spaced out far better and were drastically higher in quality then anything in V5. or anything from V4 besides Qrow vs Tyrian
     
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    I legit have no idea why I'm supposed to care about raw numbers regarding fight scenes. Is the argument that if Miles and Kerry just tossed in a bunch of fight scenes completely disconnected from the story, that add nothing to the characters or thematic elements, and they just exist because RWBY Should Have Fight Scenes... that'd have made the show better?

    Fight scenes should exist in service of the work, the work should not exist in service to fight scenes.
     
    Leingod said:
    Which, to be fair, was definitely a criticism that could be leveled at parts of early RWBY.
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    Oh, absolutely. I think Volume 3 had this problem quite a bit, actually; there was a bit of an overreliance on fight scenes when what was conveyed in them could have been conveyed more effectively through other things (The Qrow v. Winter fight looked cool but was kinda unneccesary and overlong to be honest), and in general the tournament was just hugely style over substance and didn't really make a strong enough case for much of its existence; it's somewhat necessary for the plot for it to exist, but the idea of it being an early sort of framing device was horribly misplaced. And it's far from a problem isolated to that volume.

    In many ways being more economical with its fight scenes merely helped RWBY, because it gives them more emotional weight and narrative emphasis, instead of just making them, yeah, a Thing That Happen.
     
    Broken Base said:
    Oh, absolutely. I think Volume 3 had this problem quite a bit, actually; there was a bit of an overreliance on fight scenes when what was conveyed in them could have been conveyed more effectively through other things (The Qrow v. Winter fight looked cool but was kinda unneccesary and overlong to be honest), and in general the tournament was just hugely style over substance and didn't really make a strong enough case for much of its existence; it's somewhat necessary for the plot for it to exist, but the idea of it being an early sort of framing device was horribly misplaced. And it's far from a problem isolated to that volume.

    In many ways being more economical with its fight scenes merely helped RWBY, because it gives them more emotional weight and narrative emphasis, instead of just making them, yeah, a Thing That Happen.
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    Volume 3 definitely has more fight scenes than it needs (and IMO it was kind of weird which ones it chose to cut for others), but I think the times it most directly hurt the show narratively were in Volumes 1 and 2, where multiple times fight scenes are inserted in such a way that they have actively dealt some minor damage to the narrative mostly because Monty wanted a fight scene and wasn't used to having to care about the narrative much.

    The finales to both Volumes were narratively dealt no favors by having Penny and CFVY respectively swoop in and essentially make the climax all about themselves, which in Volume 1 especially basically robbed the Weiss and Blake conflict of a properly satisfying closure by having Weiss essentially just show up after it's all over and have decided it's all good instead of, say, showing up to save Blake and Team RWBY re-uniting in a big fight. And to top it off, it makes Ruby look downright dumb for not guessing something was off about Penny and shut down any doubt for most viewers that Penny was a robot (which, to the contrary of what you might think, I've seen a lot of people not realize until she starts fighting), which also robs that reveal of some of the gravitas it could have had for those viewers.
     
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    This video went up yesterday, so someone's doubtlessly already posted it on SB. But hey, I'm not adverse to getting my e-peen through bottomfeeding:



    Somehow it manages to make Lindsay Tuggey's genki voice seem so easy but make Vic's stock hardboiled voice difficult.

    EDIT: I also found this Twitter exchange to add something unique to the SV thread:


     
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