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MiracleGrow said:
What pisses me off is that you could make the series way better if you just change a few little things. And BAM the story is less arse.

We deserve our anime witcher.
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It's not really anime Witcher. It has a good set up for a mediocre Monster Hunter clone, though.
 
RoyalNoises said:
Lol my dude I don't know how to explain it any more clearly to you that your made up headcanon does not count as real quality or competence on the part of the writers.
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Yeah, I don't care what you think. No one who dismisses evidence because it conflicts with what they've already decided on has anything to say worth listening to.
 
Jcogginsa said:
Yeah, I don't care what you think. No one who dismisses evidence because it conflicts with what they've already decided on has anything to say worth listening to.
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...Am I talking crazy here? Like am I just not being clear what I'm trying to say or is this guy actually trying to say that thinking RWBY is dumb because I refuse to count fan theories as true means I'm "Discounting evidence"?
 
Things that are good in RWBY:
  1. Some of the fight scenes.
  2. Some of the music.
Things that are bad in RWBY:
  1. Almost everything else.
 
NSMS said:
Things that are good in RWBY:
  1. Some of the fight scenes.
  2. Some of the music.
Things that are bad in RWBY:
  1. Almost everything else.
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Let's talk about this RWBY episode in specific if only because I don't want this thread to turn into another pile of misery, especially since the RWBY thread is still locked.
 
RoyalNoises said:
...Am I talking crazy here? Like am I just not being clear what I'm trying to say or is this guy actually trying to say that thinking RWBY is dumb because I refuse to count fan theories as true means I'm "Discounting evidence"?
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How many times do I need to say "I'm not talking about fan theories" before people actually pay attention to it?

You weren't just talking about fan theories.

RoyalNoises said:
every time a fan comes up with some clever theory or interpretation I simply do not believe it, because believing that there's a good explanation for this shit requires me to believe the writers are smart
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You were talking about dismissing any kind of positive interpretation of the series. That is what I take issue with.

Suzu said:
Let's talk about this RWBY episode in specific if only because I don't want this thread to turn into another pile of misery, especially since the RWBY thread is still locked.
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Better yet, let's not talk about RWBY here at all, since the only thing that will come of that is a fucking echo chamber that reinforces the everyone's negative opinions without accomplishing anything of value.
 
I was about to say that if RWBY comes around and declares in the text that the genie lady was an unreliable narrator who told Ruby and the rest a bunch of propaganda and lies in order to manipulate them into accomplishing the evil god's insidious aims, then I would gladly admit that this episode at least accomplished something.

But then I remembered that RWBY retconned it's entire second volume out of existence, so no, it gets no credit and never will. It just tells lies and then makes up new ones when the old ones become inconvenient.
 
Okay, fuck this. RWBY is broken almost by design, and you actually can't fix it without making something different than RWBY. Trying to analyze it is futile, and whatever occasional flashes of brilliance you might come across are either coincidental or come from another, more competent work, which RWBY attempted to mimic.
 
RoyalNoises said:
I was about to say that if RWBY comes around and declares in the text that the genie lady was an unreliable narrator who told Ruby and the rest a bunch of propaganda and lies in order to manipulate them into accomplishing the evil god's insidious aims, then I would gladly admit that this episode at least accomplished something.

But then I remembered that RWBY retconned it's entire second volume out of existence, so no, it gets no credit and never will. It just tells lies and then makes up new ones when the old ones become inconvenient.
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What are you even talking about?

I cannot think of anything remotely like that.
 
Jcogginsa said:
What are you even talking about?

I cannot think of anything remotely like that.
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You know. The breach caused by the White Fang Paintrain that let a bunch of Grimm into Vale which were anticlimactically all easily killed by Coco and then the hole was nigh immediately sealed by Glynda, which in Volume 3 is described as a "Colossal failure to protect Vale"?

The ONLY event in the whole of volume 2 which is even worthy of note is treated as if it happened completely differently from how it actually unfolded on screen.
 
Rule 4: Don’t Be Disruptive - Respect other posters and the arguments they are making or just don't engage
RoyalNoises said:
You know. The breach caused by the White Fang Paintrain that let a bunch of Grimm into Vale which were anticlimactically all easily killed by Coco and then the hole was nigh immediately sealed by Glynda, which in Volume 3 is described as a "Colossal failure to protect Vale"?

The ONLY event in the whole of volume 2 which is even worthy of note is treated as if it happened completely differently from how it actually unfolded on screen.
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Oh, so it's just you twisting events into the single most uncharitable reading imaginable because you want something to complain about. Should have figured
 
Jcogginsa said:
Oh, so it's just you twisting events into the single most uncharitable reading imaginable because you want something to complain about. Should have figured
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Uh no, RoyalNoise was describing it accurately.

Fact: Instead of showing any actual consequences Monty chose to introduce Team Cofee (I don't care to find their acronym) and had them stomp all the Grimm and then Glynda fixed everything.

Fact: In Volume 3 the narrative treated it as some massive disaster when per the show the Grimm were immediately contained and the damage was repaired.

It's not uncharitable to describe exactly what happened. Nor is it "just wanting something to complain about" to point out how much of a failure Volume 2 was, it's just legitimate criticism. Though I have to say I enjoy the irony of you previously claiming that no one in the RWBY fandom extends charity to RWBY and then deciding to complain that RoyalNoise is being uncharitable, which is it? Do you expect charity or not?
 
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Fourthspartan56 said:
Uh no, RoyalNoise was describing it accurately.
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No, he isn't. He is acting like the event was instantly contained even though it wasn't, and ignoring all the reasons why a breach is still a big deal even if it was contained.

Like, imagine if the Capitol building is targeted by a terrorist attack. Even if all of congress survives, that's still a major incident because those kinds of attacks are supposed to be stopped before they ever get launched. To let things progress to the point where the attack gets launched is still considered a failure.
 
Okay, everyone, let me join the 'please, please don't turn this into the fight about RWBY thread Mark 2' train, and beg you to stop turning this into the fight about RWBY thread, Mark 2.
 
Leila Hann said:
At the halfway point of this episode, I said that it felt like a fairy tail told by someone suffering from dementia. Having now finished it, I've revised that assessment. It's more like a fairy tail that was written by a computer. Like someone fed a bunch of mythological story beats to an algorithm, and it arranged them in a way that aligned to the not-specific-enough parameters it was coded with. Everything follows from the thing that happened before in the basic sense of "we ended with the characters in this situation, and now the next story beat takes them from there to somewhere else," but there's no sense of why. Like, it can arrange the pieces and find+replace the names of the characters, but isn't smart enough to do any editing beyond that. It's plotting a la Harry Potter and The Portrait of What Looked Like a Large Pile of Ash.

I don't think that that's what actually happened. Coding an algorithm to make a story for you sounds like a lot more work than just writing a damned story, after all, and if there's one thing that RWBY's writing team dislikes, it's work. So, what WAS the creative process here, then? Did they put on blindfolds and reach into a hat full of story beats? Did they throw darts at a board? Did one of them write a Mad Libs thing for the other to fill out? I don't know.

I guess that this is why I've always had such an extreme reaction to RWBY. It's not that it necessarily fails worse than other really bad shows. It's that the way that it goes about failing often seems so downright alien. This episode is one of the clearest examples of what I'm talking about out of the whole show. This isn't what it looks like when the authors are hacks. This isn't what it looks like when the authors are stupid. It's not even what it looks like when the authors of a story are stupid hacks (which is all that they seem like, when you see the interviews and such). RWBY defies my understanding of the human condition.
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illhousen said:
Everyone, please calm down and remember: true RWBY cannot be known. RWBY that is known is not true RWBY.
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Describing RWBY as TV Tropes: The Anime has never felt more apt. If some were to go to TV Tropes looking for mythologic background stuff, then just throw in everything they come across in their wiki walk with no regard for coherence, you'd get something like The Lost Fable. Its why people can see so much potential... RWBY is built out of the rotting carcass of tropes scavenged from works of legitimate quality, often leaving the impression that there was something better.

For example I can imagine a "humans abused magic and blew most of themselves up, so the gods took it away until humanity learns to find victory over the Grimm through unity rather than raw power, but Salem managed to avoid the magic purge and just wants to return to the Good Old Days of tyrannical magocracies" or something. There is a lot of ways they could've tied the Salem and Remnant's background closer to RWBY's vague message of unity with individual expression over brute power with hierarchical order.

And frankly the vast majority of RWBY is extraneous from the raison de'tre of "Monty Oum wanted to do his cool anime girl team fights with an original work he could call his own, full of nerdy anime stuff". I mean yeah they'd need some sort of expendable enemy its ok for them to violently murder wholesale, as well as an excuse for getting into nonfatal anime girl teamfights too that works well with the former, which covers the two kinds of fights Monty Oum does, but there are a lot of ways you could work that.
 
Some of it is like that yes, but some of it is just REALLY raw cringe, like everything to do with the Faunus.
 
RWBY in my mind, is an example of the perils of trying to be anime instead of being anime, if that makes any sense.

Like, it's not something impossible. Avatar was anime. She-Ra, was basically anime. Steven Universe was probably anime though I haven't gotten around to it.

This is something like those old lazy parodies of anime from years back, just done completely unironically.
 
tankdrop24 said:
RWBY in my mind, is an example of the perils of trying to be anime instead of being anime, if that makes any sense.

Like, it's not something impossible. Avatar was anime. She-Ra, was basically anime. Steven Universe was probably anime though I haven't gotten around to it.

This is something like those old lazy parodies of anime from years back, just done completely unironically.
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RWBY as a setting actually has a lot of potential, and has produced quite a lot of good fanworks based on it (so long as you ignore most of the ones that use Jaune as the main character). RWBY as it's actually implemented in the show itself, however, is largely a trainwreck, and this episode appears to be a perfect example of why. The writers don't seem to properly understand the implications of what they're showing, and as a result it comes across as disjointed and structurally and narratively incoherent. The stuff with Salem's lack of hostility after grimming herself despite it apparently making her thirst for destruction, Creator wanting Ozma to 'unify' humanity when a lack of unity had nothing to do with why they attacked the gods in the first place, etc, show this pretty clearly. Not helping this is the 'tell, don't show' approach the show takes to a lot of things, like faunus mistreatment, or the casualties on both sides during in the breach.

Basically, I don't think the problems come from RWBY trying to be anime. I think they come from the writers just not being very good at what they do, with the problems being most obvious around their failures to tell an internally consistent story and build a myth arc.
 
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