A Rant on RWBY

[spotto]

It is of no secret that the recent episodes of RWBY have been terribly underwhelming for me. Instead of being excited for Thursdays every week, I instead feel rather tense, anxious of what the episode may do to canon. I feel like every week that goes by something worse will either completely contradict established canon or a beloved character will act in such a way that makes utterly no sense to what we have been shown so far. In other words, I dread RWBY every week now because I truly don't want to see the bad writing get even worse. 

 

And the only reason I feel that way is because the phrase "It can't possibly get any worse!" seems to be proven wrong over and over again, and now any optimism I've had for this series has vanished into an unease. Whenever a new episode comes out, it's a slim hope that the episode will be good beyond just interesting and badass fight scenes, a slim hope that they don't ruin what I somehow liked earlier. Perhaps what I envisioned the show to be like was much more different from the creators or writers, but it seems to have deviated to such great extent I can't really explain it in anyway aside from poor writing.

 

Back in season one there were noticeable detractors of the show. A particular anime reviewer I occasionally watched bashed RWBY beyond levels of mere dislike. They were offended at the very existence of this show. That something with admittedly poor animation and poor pacing could drive such levels of hype, merely on the concept of the wonderful designs,  remarkable choreography, and excellent music. My reasoning for sticking around and seeing how this show would turn out was simple, potential.

 

Of course bias is always there, it always will be. The moment my eyes fell upon the White Trailer I was hooked. The music though did not have the greatest of lyrics, still reverberated with me. It was as if the soundtrack for this trailer matched perfectly for this scenes and matched perfectly for this mysterious character we were all just introduced to. I was fascinated. Whoever this Weiss Schnee was, I was already a fan.

 

But then the first few signs of trouble began. When the Black and Yellow trailers came out, there were a lot of people who questioned the voice acting. Well, Roosterteeth is known to hire their own employees to act and voice-act, which is a take-it or leave-it kind of thing. There are certain employees you wonder why they hadn't taken an alternate career in acting instead, and others who obviously fit more in their job titles, whatever vague title it may be. Sometimes RT hires actual actors, who may already work on the show in some way or have previously, with a similar job, say voice-acting in RvB, but the audience can obviously hear their experience in their work. A good example is Agent Washington and Ozpin or Locus and Roman Torchwick, the latter which I definitely know is a veteran voice actor.

 

At first you can chalk it up to the inexperience of many of the voice actors, but when someone who sounded fine as Agent Carolina in RvB started off sounding so robotic or stiff as Pyrrha, it feels to me that it's more like a problem of voice direction. I don't even know if there is a voice director. From some clips of the voice actresses doing their jobs however, it seems like the writers share the same job as a voice director, what with having written the show and all. So in a way you could argue that the voice-acting quality could lead back to the writing quality.

 

Ah yes, then the show itself began. It starts off fairly predictably. There's a fight scene; the main character's a badass; the villain is sketchy and got away, oh look mysterious lady! The plot kicks off and suddenly Ruby Rose, our young and optimistic protagonist, is shuffled off to Beacon! We get to see Ruby's sister, Yang as well because it would be weird for them to travel to their new school separately, what with being siblings. Otherwise no other protagonist is introduced in this episode until later, which is fitting because the first episode usually is reserved for our focus, the main.

 

Wait who's this?

 

A young blonde who is throwing up on the ship. That doesn't sound like a huntsman-to-be to me, what with the acrobatic feats required to fight as we saw from Ruby and the trailers before! But it is strange isn't it, how a non-villain non-faculty supporting-type character is also introduced in the very first episode, when all we had was Ruby and a mandatory Yang. He certainly wasn't in the trailers, though he did have a bit of a role in the opening so maybe he'll have a subplot among the plot and the intra-personal relationships among team RWBY, right?

 

BOOM. Seven episodes devoted solely to him in the first two seasons entirely unrelated to the main plot.

 

What the fuck?

 

No seriously, what the fuck?

 

Seven episodes unrelated to the main plot, when the first two seasons run a total of three or four hours or so? Seven episodes out of a total of twenty-eight? You get about twenty-one remaining and even if you divided all that among team RWBY, not only is it less than seven, the rest of the show has to be devoted to ACTUAL PLOT, not character development so a majority of the remaining episodes aren't specifically about any of the title characters at all!

 

Well that explains why he showed up in episode one, before Weiss and Blake, the other title characters. We already know his importance in the hierarchy of characters. Ruby and then Jaune because plot-related reasons forced Yang to show up early, leaving Blake as the final introduced member of the four. This never bothered me at first, even when we went through the month of the Jaune bullying-arc. I for some reason, with absolutely zero basis, assumed that each of the team JNPR members would get a few episodes every season devoted to themselves. Since Jaune is team leader, he's first up! The leaked opening of season two focusing especially on Pyrrha seemed to support my theory, so after that we'd get about 2-3 episodes devoted to Pyrrha and maybe season three will have Ren or Nora! 

 

Now season two isn't over yet, so maybe the next few episodes will actually focus on Pyrrha as a character and not as a love interest, but pile Pyrrha's arc on top of yet another Jaune arc and suddenly there's even less episodes for not only plot, but for oh...I don't know, OUR TITLE CHARACTERS? When we've been spoon-fed Jaune's backstory of how he cheated his way into the school and now how he must overcome his romantic life, or lack there-of, meanwhile we get a tiny tidbit of Weiss' family life which we previously only could assume from her character and from a scrapped early version of the opening, an exposition dump of Yang and Ruby's backstory which only showed up thanks to the main plot, and a whole bunch of Blake which is also thanks to the main plot due to the White Fang being bad guys or manipulated by the bad guys for whatever reason.

 

So what have we established so far then? Team RWBY's role is to do the fighting and advance the plot. Team JNPR's role is to introduce cliche high school tropes all revolving around Jaune himself. I mean even in team RWBY, a lot of the plot seems to revolve around Blake so far and not Ruby because of the nature of the plot, while JNPR is purely to stroke Jaune's ego or something because we HAVE To establish how some guy who can't fight well at all got into the top combat school and then HAVE to establish a date for him at the dance because if we didn't, Cinder could not possibly knit her catsuit or infiltrate the communications system! WHATEVER WOULD WE DO!? 

 

It's very sad that RWBY is shoehorned in such a role. I mean obviously fighting and plot would follow our so-called main characters but when the show is named after the TEAM name and not like a specific character, it's not really all that much of a stretch to assume these four girls would develop friendships and teamwork among one another. What do we have so far you ask? We got to the point where say, Weiss or Blake had to be convinced or forced to START interacting/working with their team, but we never see the interacting and team-building itself. Wouldn't it have been amazing to see how much Weiss has warmed up to Ruby, by giving us a glimpse of how they came up with those very shippy attack formations? Nope, that part isn't important at all!

 

And even at this dance, we have four girls who are presumably friends. Friends who support one another as we can see from Yang slapping some sense into Blake so she'd actually attend the dance, which everyone is completely fine with. There isn't a single person who might not enjoy dances or might be too introverted or serious to skip out or anything. Everyone conforms with the cliche high school drama standards and our only comeuppance is a joke about Ruby and Sun disliking their formal wear. Anyway these so-called friends leave their perhaps heartbroken (do we know for sure? No! Because god forbid we see the point-of-view of a main character!) other friend all alone, sitting there, not dancing at all. Both Yang and Ruby are at the balcony staring at this entire event, doing nothing of the sort to give Weiss company or anything like that. The only person that could cheer up Weiss is a boy! Only the guy she asked out can cheer her up or be with her!

 

I mean from the background shots of the constantly dancing teens, everybody is super-glued next to their dates and are FORBIDDEN, likely from Ozpin misunderstanding how adolescence works, from ever leaving their dates' sides! BECAUSE IF THEY DO THE DANCE WOULDN'T BE FUN, would it? Oh wait, but here's a shot of Weiss talking to some random dude. Now, if she were so heartbroken why is she mingling with the guests, strangers mind you and not even her so-called friends, so well? Is it because he's the opposite sex and is therefore asking a member of the other gender to dance with him at this very mandatory event? Is that the only reason they are talking!?

 

Who fucking knows, we never get to see Weiss' point-of-view even once. We don't get to see her side of the story. The fact that we see nothing from a main character's view at what I assume is supposed to be an important arc, and solely from Jaune/Neptune's point of view really shows me the priorities this damn show has. All we know is Weiss is a bitch and that's why she turns down people. Oh, she mentioned a reasoning for her never accepting dates due to people only being after her name, but that's all we're told. We're never shown the emotions or what is underneath the cold exterior that is Weiss Schnee. All we can do is assume and glean from the subtle tiny little crumbs while Jaune's sobstory is plastered all over our faces. And because we get nothing on Weiss' side and only Jaune's side, all we can assume as an audience is that Weiss is wrong. Because if a guy asks you out on a date and you say no, that is wrong.

 

Because a show starring four girls can't have a show about four girls being friends or anything, or if high school dramas must exist, can't give us the perspective of the girls or anything despite these same girls being the main characters. Who the hell is the demographic of this show!? I assumed with four girls as the lead a lot of girls would flock to the show for some awesome badass role models, but from these many episodes of Jaune it's like the writer is still writing for the general teenage boy audience of Roosterteeth, which isn't all that surprising sadly.

 

And it's so disappointing because I enjoy Red Vs. Blue, I enjoy Achievement Hunter and I enjoy all these other shows despite not being the target demographic. The moment I think something is actually aimed at me, it isn't. Even when the main four characters are girls. Their role is just to fight, be eyecandy as they fight, and advance the main plot. The only reason Yang had to get Blake away from worrying herself to death isn't because they're friends, god forbid that. It's because they're a team and if they don't stay relatively healthy mentally and physically their team will suffer. You know why I can say that so easily? Because what beyond that scene was there any evidence that those two girls have acted as friends and not just as members of a combat team fighting monsters in a combat school? So many Bumblebee fans rejoiced because FINALLY, the two girls who ended up partners did SOMETHING together. It only took two seasons and one-and-a-half Jaune arcs to get to that point!

 

This has been Spotto, stuck on the runaway trainwreck that is RWBY, and if I try to fling myself off I'll die. 

do not get me started on what they've done to Weiss, that is a rant for another day