My RWBY Rewatch: Part 2

I felt really sad today about how I gave Volume 1 a 4.5/10. I’m not changing it, but that’s what makes it sadder. At the time when I first watched it, it was something special to me. A neat little show lined up with a bunch of other shows and content I watched from Rooster Teeth, led by a cast and crew of names I was familiar with and was a huge fan of. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t really my kind of genre or kind of animation. For a brief time, the people behind the show encouraged me to watch something like this and expand my horizons. Now looking back, it feels like a relic of another time gone by. A life I no longer have. I used to recommend RWBY to everyone, regardless of their knowledge of the company behind it. Now, I rarely talk about it anymore.

In an ironic twist, I listened to an episode of So…Alright today, a podcast hosted by Geoff Ramsey, one of the original founders of Rooster Teeth. In it, he shared stuff that he used to love that he can’t revisit because they just don’t mean the same thing to him that they used to anymore. At the time, that book he read was special and he loved it. Now, he can’t bring himself to reread it. It made me think of my relationship with RWBY, and how it has changed year after year.

I actually really enjoyed my rewatch of Volume 2. It was much more fun, the animation was improved, there was more action in the first hour than there was in the entire first volume, there were stakes, an actual plot driving the narrative, and the many, many characters were nicely juggled and balanced out (this is all true for at least the first two and a half acts). Ruby takes center stage a bit better in this volume, and the motivations of the other teammates are explored and fleshed out in ways that feel organic. The voice acting—in most cases—is a lot better, with everyone feeling more comfortable and less awkward in their roles. Some of the new characters like Mercury and Emerald chew the scenes they’re in, and their back-and-forth is entertaining. Other new characters like Neptune, on the other hand, don’t offer a whole lot and feel like they were invented so that crew members can get roles of their own. Who cares if they contribute nothing to the overarching story?

One thing I judged Volume 1 on was the arc in the middle centered around Jaune that took away from Ruby getting necessary character development and time to be properly fleshed out. While I still stand by my opinion of that, it can’t be denied that the arc did play an important part in furthering the relationship between Jaune and Pyrrha in the second volume. The Jaune arc in the first volume would’ve benefited from possibly being done from another perspective like Ruby’s so that she still has the ability to learn and grow, but the Jaune-Pyrrha relationship is simply wonderful. Jaune is a dorky, clumsy guy who is sometimes slow in progressing his way towards being an effective huntsman (and he’s definitely slow at figuring out how much he means to Pyrrha), and Pyrrha is one of the top students in the world of Remnant (I don’t like the name of Ruby’s world, it doesn’t make much sense even with the other volumes in mind) and she’s one of the best huntresses within her age range. Despite this, Pyrrha never gloats about this nor does she shove this down Jaune’s throat. She’s humble, she doesn’t care about how good everyone thinks she is, and it’s important to her that Jaune learns how to be good too. In fact, we learn in this volume that Pyrrha views her status as more of a nuisance than anything else since it puts her on a level that others think they can never attain, and it keeps people from wanting to connect with her like any normal person. All Jaune had to do for Pyrrha to like him was to treat her the same way he treats everyone else. She’s sad when Jaune shows more interest in Weiss than her, but instead of going a selfish route, she chooses instead to be a good friend and encourages Jaune to be himself when he asks Weiss to the school dance. It’s easy to root for Pyrrha and we want to see her happy, while it’s easy to get frustrated with Jaune for being so blind to what’s so obvious in front of him. It’s one of the show’s strongest examples of good writing and excellent characterization.

Another thing this volume finally does right for the show is set up an arc for Yang, who was given almost nothing to do in the first volume. The way she uses her desire to find her mother in order to teach Blake the importance of slowing down in her own pursuit to stop Torchwick is written well and shows us a new side to Yang. She’s more than just the party girl always seeking out the next fun thing to do.

One thing I failed to mention in my overview of the first volume but am not too late on due to the character’s heightened relevance here is Joel Heyman as Bartholomew Oobleck. For those of you who are old Rooster Teeth fans, Joel Heyman was the voice of Caboose on Rooster Teeth’s flagship series Red vs Blue and a fan favorite, known for being oblivious and lovably dumb. Here, Joel plays the complete opposite (with the exception of one major knee-jerk in the script that hurts the character’s credibility). Oobleck is loud, hyperactive, and comically hard to keep up with, but he’s also intelligent and passionate, with some well handled exposition explaining more how the creatures of Grimm operate and why he is a Huntsman. That’s what a lot of the volume—particularly in its third act—focuses on. Why do the characters do what they do? Most of this exploration is well done, and the chemistry between the main teammates are much better here, allowing for scenes to slow down and explore these characters in new depth. Unlike Volume 1 most of the fight scenes and the conversations here work. One fight scene in particular that’s great is when Pyrrha is challenged to a fight by newcomer Mercury, who’s here to analyze Pyrrha’s techniques for reasons we learn about in the next volume. It’s a smart, well-paced fight, where Mercury reads Pyrrha’s every move and finds her weaknesses. It’s one of my favorite setups for one of the best payoffs next volume (I honestly can’t talk about this volume without referring to the next volume once in a while).

What doesn’t work is a multilayered problem, and while they don’t take too much away from the overall experience, the issues are still glaring enough that they need attention. When I talked about the first volume, I mentioned that the writers don’t know how to pull off plot twists. That still rings true here in this volume with its “reveal” that Penny, a robot lady built by a mystery man and used by the Atlas military…is a robot. The writers don’t even set the scene up in a way that functions. It’s a victim of what we call ‘and then’ storytelling because the writers have no idea how to draw the connection between Point A and Point B with believability. Allow me to set an example that happens here:

Ruby and Weiss are heading to the communications center so that Weiss can contact her father’s company, the Schnee Dust Company, in order to get information vital to learning the whereabouts of Roman Torchwick and the White Fang, the organization of Faunus extremists fighting for equality with violence. Enthralled to see the center outside, Ruby takes out her scroll (their word for ‘phone’) to snap a picture, but she accidentally drops it and it clatters across the ground until landing near Penny’s feet. Penny picks it up and courteously offers it back to Ruby, happy to do it. Naturally, Ruby recognizes her immediately, thanks to their time with each other near the end of Volume 1. Ruby even got to see the way Penny combats others, using impressive but strange skills against White Fang goons. After the fight, however, Penny was berated by a man from the Atlas military for exposing herself to others when she’s not ready and she’s driven away. Now the Atlas military has a presence in Vale, and Penny is part of that presence, just so happening to randomly be near the communications center right where Ruby and Weiss are. No reason for this is given, and not only that, but the second Ruby recognizes Penny, Penny freaks out, embarrassed to be recognized. She attempts to walk away, pretending that she doesn’t know Ruby despite her insistence that she does. She keeps pretending until Ruby begs her ‘just right’ to be open with her. Penny drops the act, and the two of them talk until Atlas soldiers see Penny and chase after her, forcing Penny to have to stop a truck before it hits Ruby as they run across the street. The impact of the truck skins off the artificial flesh on her hands, revealing metal.

Nothing that happens in this scene happens naturally. Penny happens to be right where Ruby and Weiss are so that the scene can happen. Penny, for some reason, decides to be courteous somehow thinking that Ruby won’t recognize her, and while it can be believed that the military doesn’t want Penny interacting with normal people right now, why let her wander around the city on her own? Especially since this has already happened before? If we’re supposed to believe that the Atlas military doesn’t want anyone to know who or what Penny is, there’s no way Penny would be allowed to explore the city, period. The idea that she was able to sneak away the first time makes sense, but the second time makes her protectors look incompetent. The twist that Penny is a robot doesn’t work because it was so blatantly obvious from the very beginning that everyone else watching knew this. The twist confirms our suspicions more than it surprises us, but the way the scene plays itself out and the way the bombshell is dropped suggests they wanted us to be shocked. No shocker here.

Another example of lazy writing to let plot happen is when Oobleck takes Ruby and the team to the abandoned ruins of a city to investigate White Fang activity. We learn how the city was overrun by Grimm and the city itself ultimately given up on. Oobleck shows a clear understanding of the city’s history and the tragedy that befell it. We know that he has a great handle on history in general. The problem is that the writers needed to establish that the White Fang had set up camp beneath the city to prepare for the next phase of their plan against Vale, and in order for this to be a surprise, Oobleck needed to conveniently not remember about the tunnel system that had been carved out underground until Ruby had already fallen through the street thanks to concrete randomly breaking apart under her for no reason. Why this detail isn’t important enough to Oobleck that he doesn’t remember it and suggest investigating underground somehow mostly falls on ‘because the script’. This hole in logic even (not fully, but somewhat) taints the character development the teammates go through in the ruins as they’re exploring their own motivations and why they’re training to be Huntresses, because these scenes can’t happen if Oobleck remembers important stuff at the right time.

Yet, despite this massive hiccup, the sequences following it are pretty entertaining. Each of Ruby’s teammates, Yang, Blake, and Weiss are given unique opponents to fight. Another great addition to the series (though this becomes questionable later) is Neo, Roman’s protege. I’ll admit to some bias here. My wife and I went to a local Comic-Con together in 2016 while we were still ‘just friends’ (that radically changed quite a bit) and we dressed up as Roman Torchwick and Neo when we went. I don’t think Neo is particularly deep as a character, but she has a fun design, proved to be a match for Yang, and my wife has cosplayed as her several times.

Okay, bias over. On to the next thing to pick apart. The sequence that I feel was the most offensively bad sequence in the volume. Roman Torchwick and the White Fang’s plan was to use the tunnel system by driving a train through it, detaching cars with bombs attached to them so that they can explode and sink the ground above, bringing down creatures of Grimm that would then follow the rest of the train that’s going to create a hole in the ground in Vale, thus unleashing the Grimm on the city. Whether or not this plan doesn’t make much sense isn’t really relevant to me. It barely functions, but it functions enough. The problem is that we go from some great fights on the train involving some fantastic one-on-one choreography and snappy editing to some pretty looking action in Vale with almost no character, no stakes, and zero structure. There’s no tension, no idea of how dangerous exactly the situation is with all these monsters here, and there isn’t even an ending to it all. It’s a collection of showy isolated fights at first involving characters we’ve been following throughout the volume and then new characters we haven’t seen before or haven’t been able to connect with in any meaningful way. There’s some animation that looks cool in some places and looks lazy in others and fun music, but no soul, no character, and no heart. It feels like watching a music video on YouTube. Eventually, we cut directly to the next scene where everything is fine now, the Grimm were killed, and Torchwick is magically taken in without any connective tissue to explain how he was found and arrested in the first place. One can’t help but wonder if they actually had a much more plot-driven through-line in this sequence that got cut due to time or budget restraints and they had to make up a bunch of random action to substitute it. This would’ve been a great opportunity for Ruby’s team to work off each other to fight the Grimm, similar to how they fight Torchwick in his mech earlier in the volume, which was an impressive scene where the team show for the first time why they make a great team. They have their own names for different moves, and communicate constantly with each other on what to do next. We get none of that here, even though it would’ve been nice to bring that dynamic full circle in this volume. With the exception of Jaune being able to take on a monster without needing Pyrrha’s help, we get nothing for the characters to really do. Nothing to bring the themes and stories of this volume full circle. They fight some and they win the day. (Sort of) the end.

Finally, in this volume, we’re more properly introduced to Cinder, Roman’s boss and the mastermind (at least for now) behind the evil plots running throughout the story. A lot of setup is done here without payoff yet, but at least there’s more here than in the first volume. However, we learn nothing about who Cinder really is or what she really wants. These are mysteries I already have answers for thanks to my memory of future volumes that I’ll get into later, but her reveal here and her deeper involvement makes the fact that her face was hidden from the audience in the first volume come off as silly. Hiding half of Director Church’s face in Red vs Blue had a purpose. Hiding Cinder’s face did not.

Overall, this is a significant improvement over the first volume. While the writing is still not as strong as RvB’s finest seasons, it’s still better. The animation is better, there’s more fights brimming with creativity and diversity, characters get more time to shine and we learn essential things about them. While a lot of that should’ve been a focus in the first volume, we still get it here and it’s mostly good stuff.

My memory tells me Volume 3 was always my favorite volume. I’m eager and hoping that that still stands today.

7.5/10