So I have promised to write a review of RWBY Seasons 1 and 2. I don't know why I've done this. But let it never be said my commitment to the bit is insufficient. I've got the soundtracks to seasons 1 and 2 queued up, so let's have some fun with it! For the bonus challenge, I'm setting a hard time limit of the length of these songs. Rock on!
Background
RWBY is a webshow you likely have heard of whether you recognize the name or not. It's made by Rooster Teeth, who you likely know from Red vs Blue. Or their Minecraft Let's Plays, I guess. RWBY was originally created by some of the Red vs Blue team plus Monty Oum, who is widely regarded as a legend in the animation community. I am not particularly familiar with his work. While other people were getting into early web animations and machinima and the like, I was in my big webcomics phase.
RWBY was very popular when I was in high school. Lots of the people I knew watched it. I tried the first season and could not get into it. However, I have picked up a lot more about it from two other sources in the interim. Hbomberguy's video covering the first three seasons and their myriad problems and Anime Slushie taking down the eigth season. They're both pretty good. I love the dedication in Hbomberguy's media analysis especially. My life will be complete when someone turns that much attention to my own works, whether for good or for ill.
I'm severely disabled and need "low effort" content a lot of the time to avoid draining myself. A few weeks ago, I thought RWBY might be something fun to put on for the pretty colours, so I gave it a whirl. It was a ride. I was not prepared for the full force of the racism plot. I don't think anything can prepare you for it. I stopped watching after season 2, half because it's not very good, and half because Dragonfable has begun to consume my life. But I can't stop thinking about the racism plot and as always, once I write my demons, they will leave my head.
Thus, a review of RWBY Seasons 1-2 with no structure or particular order. Here we go!
RWBY is about 4 girls, Ruby, Yang, Blake, and Weiss who go to Anime Fight School to learn to fight evil monsters called Grimm. Along the way, they do wacky hijinks, learn about themselves and others, and beat up a lot of racial minorities. No, really.
The main villain is Roman Torchwick, one of the very few characters whose style appeals to me. I'm a sucker for a pragmatic villain. Despite being racist to the point of throwing slurs at the in universe minority regularly, a "terrorist group" called the White Fang ally with him for, uh, reasons. It's not particularly clear why. The White Fang are made up of the Faunus, a race of catgirls who are discriminated against, despite having earned their "equality" in a war sometime before the show started. Also, in the same breath, the writers mention that most of the faunus have been exiled to an island and don't seem to understand at all how that contradicts the equality message. Characters throw what feel like in universe slurs around constantly? The White Fang are the villains, so our heroes beat them up in mass and it feels gross to watch. Their schemes are never made clear or explained. There isn't a cohesive vision of what they want or why they're there or why they're taking this abuse. It feels like watching a Pokemon villain team in action, except Pokemon gets away with it by being cartoony and silly. It's easier to laugh off Cyrus trying to hijack god to remake the world than it is "please stop the segregation".
All of this is to say that RWBY is badly written. There are a lot of layers to that. What stands out to me are two important observations that I haven't seen made before.
1) RWBY reads like a transitionary webcomic
2) RWBY reads like it was written by the people who wrote Red vs Blue
Both of those are connected. If you read a lot of older webcomics, by which I mean from the days where webcomics were shitty little things you wrote on your lunch break instead of super polished professional things that launched with monetization strategies and ads, you notice that there's a pretty common lifespan for webcomics that don't get abandoned. They usually start out as very silly gag-a-day or comedic type things. Eventually, lore starts to stack up and they become more serious and epic. At the same time they start to grow in quality. Eventually, they tend to turn into massive epics with complex plots. Schlock Mercenary did it, Zebra Girl did it, Irregular Webcomic did it, Order of the Stick did it, and so on. This is a natural part of the artistic process.
Webcomics fascinate me because they provide an effective journey through someone's artistic skills. The transitionary part is especially intriguing. It's usually quite rough, relying on established connections to the characters to get the audience through it. It often feels more like looking at the outline of a story. Pieces seem missing or just suggested at or sketched in. The author is learning how to structure a serious plot in real time and it shows. Building emotional investment, pacing satisfying arcs, creating interesting situations, and effectively worldbuilding are all skills that require development.
This transitory phase is the phase of artistic creation where I would place RWBY. You can see the edges of Red vs Blue poking through. Whenever the writers can't tell what to do, they fall back on sketch comedy. Red vs Blue, at the start, was a very silly show. Logic of comedy won out in almost all situations. It worked there. But RWBY is trying for a more serious tone. Relying on sending dogs in the mail, random slapstick, and pop culture references cause it to frequently give me whiplash when compared to the horrors of the oppression of the faunus.
Almost every critique I could make of the writing feels like an extension of this. It is obviously written by people who are new at this. This is not necessarily a bad thing! I support artists learning and growing. I did not have to pay any money to watch RWBY, so it's not like I'm mad about wanting a refund. I could complain about the characters being simplistic archetypes. Ruby is a nerd. Yang is a party girl. Weiss is spoiled and stuck up. Blake is quiet and withdrawn. I could point out the nonsensical pacing. Entire episodes where seemingly nothing happens are common. All of this feels strangely mean to me, as though saying that the "show is bad" should suffice.
And yet, I don't think I'm going to get my demons out until I rant. So let's talk about the school.
I don't think that the writers have every really figured out how their school works. I've spent two seasons trying to decipher it and cannot figure it out. For starters, I don't think they ever decided how big it is. Depending on the scene, it seems to fluctuate between 12 students and several hundred. The first season, for animation reasons, uses silhouettes for background characters which doesn't help anything because I think copy pasting those in without thinking about it was too easy. See, the classes seem to have several dozen students? But during the big launch everyone off a cliff scene, only about a dozen people launched. When Ruby says she needs to call for backup in season 2, her first pick is Jaune, a guy who is known to be awful at fighting. Nobody says "hey, let's call someone else". The actual professional huntsman standing there doesn't go "let me call for a professional".
This vagueness about size causes the classes to feel nonsensical. Even just a list of courses or a studying montage would've helped a lot. The only three classes we see them taking are history, grimm studies, and combat training. History is fine, except that it's only there to deliver lore drops about the world instead of to show that the school thinks it's important. Grimm studies suffers from the same problem. We don't know if they're learning math or science or social studies or anything else. Combat training is bizarre. All we see of it is characters taking turns having one on one or one on four duels in an arena while all the other students in their year watch. The teacher doesn't offer any feedback afterwards. There is no "here's how to improve". No "watch your defences". I acknowledge that not everyone has learned a martial art. But I have. This is not how you do it. They should be drilling constantly, practicing on targets, and so on. Practicing will teach them so much more than watching. It's not even practical with the size of the student body to do this kind of thing. It would take forever.
It also further asks what role the huntspeople serve in society. They're introduced as being entirely about taking down Grimm. Which, sure! I love an organization dedicated to hunting monsters. Fun stuff. But then they seem to spend most of their time not doing that? Half of the missions they got to go on are for stuff like policing, which makes them very unlikeable to me, although that may be a function of my politics. But the Grimm also don't seem hard to kill. Our heroes spend half their time running from them and the other half mowing them down without a single problem. The the climax of season 2, a group of average (robot?) soldiers with normal guns seem to do a fine job slaughtering Grimm and it makes me wonder why you need this whole hunter system and not a big wall and a bunch of guns. The season 2 climax is bizarre for this reason. The villain's scheme is to blow up a tunnel allowing for Grimm to attack at the heart of the city. Again, despite there presumably being an entire school with four years of students, all appropriate professors, and free roaming graduated hunters, we only see named characters who already exist. It's maddening.
Now, a lot of people say that the reason you stick with it through this is the fights. I'm not going to discount that a lot of people like the fights, but they're not landing for me personally. There's a few reasons for that. A large part of it is stylistic. Monty uses a lot of techniques that I'm not so fond of. They all feel slightly too fast, like they should be running 20% slower. But when you run them 20% slower, you see that it's running that fast to hide the rough edges. Characters just kinda spin things at each other to block this. Roman is especially guilty of this. I'm not convinced his cane should be block half the things it does. Characters all feel very weightless in a way that I find a little grating. They just fling themselves and each other around with little concern for gravity or physics. As well, RWBY inherits a lot from anime. Anime is very stylized in a way that helps it get away with this, but RWBY's 3d makes it look very strange. There's a lot of moments where someone swings a blade and it kind of turns into a coloured arc. In anime, it looks fine. In 3d, it makes me go "wait that blade clearly went through that guy, how is he still in one piece". Overall, I prefer my fights a lot more decompressed. As much as people mock reaction shots and inner dialogues, they provide important ways to communicate how the characters are thinking, feeling, and growing with the audience that doesn't make it into the animation. It causes the fights to feel really disjointed, like they're just separate from the rest of the show. According to Hbomberguy, it's likely that it was written that way.
Speaking of problems inherited from anime, the character design drives me crazy. Nobody, and I mean nobody, would fight in a corset and heels. Weiss should have a billion broken ankles. It's also very sexualized in a way that's slightly uncomfortable given their ages. Gotta have that titty bounce on Yang! Once you see it, you can never unsee it! Butt shots on Emerald! Mm, shake those hips, baby!
And speaking of character design, and believe me I know this is a dead horse, but a scythe is not a weapon! The blade is on the inside! Look at how Ruby swings it! It shouldn't be cutting any of the things that it does! HBomberguy suggests they borrowed heavily from other anime and it seems likely they got the scythe from Soul Eater. Now, Mr. Bomberguy didn't talk much about Soul Eater. But I can. That's one of my favourite anime. It's so good. It's stylish, fun, and (past a couple of anime quirks), a great ride. It even features a canon nonbinary character! And the main character wields a scythe and it looks it awesome. But Soul Eater gets away with it for three reasons: 1) Death is a real character in Soul Eater, so symbolism, 2) Maka's use of a scythe shows a lot about her relationship to her father and her traditionalism in following death thus serving as an important character trait, and 3) Maka and Soul's finishing move involves conjuring a giant ass blade of energy, which doesn't care at all if they're cutting with the inside or the outside. Ruby does none of this. They gave Ruby a scythe because they thought it would be cool. And sometimes it is! But a lot of the time it shouldn't be working anything like how it does.
This weaponry is also strange. The characters all seem to have really personal weapons and are all locked into them. It's stated that they made them themselves in prep schools. And without getting into the idea that there are multiple prep schools for anime fighting university which just adds more questions to how this whole system works (how many schools are there? are there licences? what do you do if you don't qualify for fighting school? are you saying that you have to start training for fighting school at like 12? do you know any 12 year olds who have a dream like that strong enough to commit to it the moment it becomes hard?) We don't ever see characters questioning their weapons. It feels like it would be so easy to treat weapons like majors, to have characters bonding with mentors who specialize in their style. We don't see them mastering multiple concepts, practicing hand to hand, or just trying anything new. Assuming it's analogous to university, that's very strange. I can count on one hand the number of people I know who went to university and graduated doing the same thing they were doing when they started. It feels nitpicky, but it's also representing all the things that are missing from this show. It abandons the school so quickly for chasing down racial minorities that it misses out on all the important ways it could be furthering their characters.
There's a few other problems. The music is strange. I can't quite put my finger on it. The lead vocalist is excellent. I love her. But the way the instrumentation folds around her just feels off in a way I can't quite put my finger on. Mary Cagle calls it "butt rock" and I think I'm inclined to agree. It feels like the composer was juggling too much when trying to create vaguely punky rock tracks and the result is a mess. It's all over the place, the guitars and the drumming collapsing in on themselves. If I'd listened to it a decade ago, I might've really liked it. Now, I just wanna listen to some punk artists who really understand how to make this kind of thing work. There are some really good bits bracketed by a lot of mediocrity. The lyricism also needs a lot of work. It's very "rrrrrr i'm sad, things suck, anime, anime, anime!"
The animation is a little messy, but not in any interesting ways. Just in a "computers used to be weaker and the tech used to be worse" kinda way. I don't know a lot about 3D animation, so I don't have a lot to say about it. It's hard to describe by text and really, you don't need me to. Just watch episode 1 and you'll see what I mean.
Conclusion
RWBY feels like a sketch of a show. It has all the pieces a show is supposed to have but just not quite assembled. If you're interested in how tv shows can go wrong, it's probably quite enlightening. Towards the end of his review, HBomberguy says that he thinks it's important for the next big web animation to learn from the lessons of RWBY. Four years later, we got Hazbin Hotel. I leave you to draw your own conclusions.
May your tits be anime and your fights be easy, my friends! Stay cool and rock on. See you next time, whenever that ends up being.
Today's link of the day is DragonFable, the fun little webgame that's eaten too much of my time lately.