#rooster teeth discourse

[landeskinnon]

oh my god your tags abt rooster teeth 😭😭😭 this exactly. i only heard abt it second hand but it sounded WILD

Ohhhhhhh lord the rooster teeth drama dominated so much of my early to mid twenties

the guy who got exposed for being a creep of the highest order and cheating on his wife with fans had been my favourite guy in the company up to that point and even somebody I openly said I wanted to emulate as a husband and father so uhhh yeah that effectively scared me off parasocial relationships for life lmao

i stopped watching their content in early 2019 after having one of the worst weekends of my life at RTX UK a few months earlier but every time a new report of drama came out from 2020 to 2023 it was like a slap in the face like even the people calling out problematic behaviour were doing problematic shit too

the company death in 2024 was probably for the best let’s be real (although I am sorry to the hardworking folks who did nothing wrong and still lost their jobs, I hope they’ve been able to bounce back)

[matt0044]

Why do some seem to expect less from RWBY?

I don't think anyone expected T & A from RWBY but I do think a lot of Weebs expected the show to be just what it seemed on the surface. Flashing action scenes, amateur hour animation for slower scenes and a story that's ambitious but imperfect in presentation. All qualities of your average web series, something they like RWBY for.

Thus in their minds, RWBY was just... the dumb web show trying to be Anime. Like it or love it. The only reason it got hate to begin with was the whole thing with Crunhyroll. They hated that the show was rubbing elbows with what they felt was a top tier year for Anime circa 2013. Nonetheless, those who weren't looking to getting fussy engaged.

So when Volume 3 and onwards upend the magic school plotline for something more free form as well as deep, many felt cheated. Hence, many are hypercritical of a series that's "trying so hard to be deep and failing." To them, RWBY was suppose to be this basic web series that was fun cheese and now it's trying to be a refined dinner.

Of course, there's also the matter of wishing it was more like the Anime titles (with or without fanservice) they often cite as "What RWBY Can Learn From." While I don't think they're conscious about it, it's not wrong that there's this, "If you wanna be considered Anime of any kind, you need to fulfilled these requirements," kind of vibe Which... feels like a studio executive muscling in on a movie director's vision.

And they claim to value creativity. :/

Basically they want RWBY to be in this box of being a basic web series of no value and that if it wants to join the "professionally produced Anime" in the other box, it has to sacrifice aspects of what it is to be considered part of the medium.

[xoxo-ren-xoxo]

i feel like im always 100x happier when i straight up just block people who get negative about silly things i like. that being said im prepared to block a LOT of people after this wild life session 😭i dont care if u think it was bad/too brutal/not entertaining im killing u w my mind because i think it was lovely

[currantlee]

A few comments on a recent post about RWBY I made got me thinking about something. Basically, I think that Rooster Teeth – and possibly by extension its parent companies – have artificially inflated RWBY as a media project and franchise rather than letting it grow organically. Therefore, it became a bubble that was bound to burst at some point. RWBY might never have been a profitable IP, which might be very relevant for its future.

This is not a problem that arose after Monty Oum‘s passing, I feel like this was already coming before that. Shane Newville‘s open letter (which absolutely comes from an emotional, mentally unwell state of mind, but has had many of its contents confirmed over the years, even beyond being one of the first descriptions of the toxic work environment at Rooster Teeth) makes a few points that support this impression. Whether you agree with the letter or not, you cannot deny that the first two volumes of RWBY, while they also had merch accompanying them and stuff, were not produced following industry standards – starting with the 3D software used, Poser Pro (Monty Oum‘s preferred tool for animation). This led to some really creative animation work that, while not always high-quality by industry-standards, was certainly pushing boundaries. It was creative and it worked for what RWBY was: a passion project created by someone who saw animation as his strongest suit – as his preferred medium to tell a story. I‘ve seen a lot of people claim that Monty Oum wasn‘t a writer, and while that‘s true, I feel like the implication of that statement is always that he couldn‘t tell stories on his own. I don‘t think that‘s true. I think Monty Oum was a great storyteller when it came to expressing certain things through animated action scenes. It‘s just that he wanted to tell a story that included more than just that and a few lines of dialogue – which is where Miles Luna and Kerry Shawcross come in, two at the time very inexperienced writers (who possibly had a fallout with Monty Oum over creative differences later), as well as some talented folks – people like Shane Newville. They were chosen to work on this because Monty Oum acknowledged their potential and liked to work with them, and I feel like that created an environment where they were really allowed to flourish. Volumes 1 and 2 are certainly not flawless, but I feel like I can tell the people making it had fun.

To Rooster Teeth however? I think RWBY (and by extension, Monty Oum as a creator) might have been little more than assets to them. RWBY was first created around a time when RT first tried to be more like, well, an actual company. At least from 2014 onward, but possibly even earlier than that, this included an effort to conform to industry standards more, mostly in order to be able to hire more people – very visibly so in RWBY in the form of the switch to Maya (my opinion about that is, the way they did it didn’t do RWBY any favors at all). I think they saw RWBY and Monty Oum as an opportunity to appear… More important, bigger, than they ever really were.

So what did they do? Again, I kind of have the feeling that they “upscaled” RWBY to a size where it appears like this big thing, but it became far too much to handle. Essentially, they created a mock giant, or a metaphorical quasi-star: something that can appear big from afar, but is actually very small / unstable (and if we go with the quasi-star metaphor, disturbs all of its surroundings). This is what I mean when I say that RWBY was a bubble bound to burst, because no star lives forever – and quasi-stars can only exist under very specific, very unstable conditions (I linked a Kurzgesagt-video in case you’re interested what exactly a quasi-star / black hole star is / was, cosmology is so fascinating IMO). Once these conditions exist no longer, they both fall apart and collapse into the black hole that is their core at the same time.

My main argument for this is that RWBY was essentially a huge money sink for RT (Source: Barbara Dunkelman’s unprofessionalism). They pumped so much money into this… Perhaps even more than they ever made from it. While this isn’t 100% confirmed, it is very much possible (and IMO not exactly unlikely) that RWBY was never profitable — which it might have been if RT hadn’t been so hellbent on creating the illusion of a multi-million-dollar franchise.

This is purely speculative, but this might also be why Volume 10 was never greenlit. We know that Volume 9 was to a significant part funded by Crunchyroll and in fact would not have been possible without them (probably because RT was already out of money at this point). They might have bought into this mock giant, then realized they had pretty much been scammed once Volume 9 aired. This might have led to Crunchyroll’s unwillingness to fund another season for something they knew now was effectively a money sink. Since RT at this point lacked the funds to produce Volume 10 alone and therefore was dependent on investors like Crunchyroll and Warner Brothers… Volume 10 was never greenlit, no matter how hard they attempted to get their fans’ hopes up and start a hashtag campaign on social media (as far as I remember, that was started by Rooster Teeth, not the fans. I don’t have my Twitter account anymore though, so I can’t check). Again though, this is speculation.

The worst part? This refusal of RT to just… Downscale RWBY again, this determination that it had to be this huge franchise… Was all put on the backs of the creatives working on it. We know at this point, from multiple sources, that RWBY and other RT productions have had an incredible amount of crunchtime, working overtime, employee abuse, … going on behind the scenes, which seems to only have gotten worse after Monty Oum’s passing. At the end of the day, all RT does and has ever done is blame others for their incompetence. Like, no shit, I’ve seen fans claim that it’s the FNDM’s job to “keep the show alive” (particularly in the light of #GreenlightVolume10), which… No, that’s not the fans’ job. It’s the job of the company who has been entrusted with this beloved IP, and said company has proven to be utterly incompetent on multiple occasions, which is unfortunate, but a sad reality for all those who love RWBY. And while Rooster Teeth has never directly said such a thing, they have certainly implied it and taken advantage of the existing sentiment within their fanbase, as well as their parasocial relationship with it (again, see #GreenlightVolume10 for reference).

To clarify, I’m not saying none of this would have happened if RT didn’t insist on making RWBY this big franchise (and biting off far more than they could chew in the process) – again, RT was far too notoriously incompetent at everything a company should manage – but I do think it might have played a role. It also isn’t an excuse for all the employee abuse. Again, what they should have done is downsizing the project, not inflating it further and further.

If I’m not somehow completely in the wrong (because IMO this just makes way too much sense to not be at least partially true – but let’s face it, a lot of this is just me connecting dots, and there is always a chance I’m connecting them wrong, even though I don‘t think so), then it kinda blows my mind that there are still people who believe in this scam. Though I will say, emotional attachment can do that to anyone. If anything, I’m honestly sorry that those folks lose something that means so much to them, and that false promises were made to them.

At the end of the day, the story of RWBY (the “franchise”) is twofold. It’s a story about an incredibly talented creator who passed away far too early, who was given the incredible opportunity to make his dream come true. It’s a story of people he trusted taking up his torch, and maybe getting lost in the dark along the way. It’s an inspiring story regardless, and I hope to see it continued at a downsized scale so it can grow organically, preferably in the hands of an indie animation studio like Dillon Goo (🤞)

But it is also a cautionary tale to both creatives and companies who employ them, a tale about false promises, abuse of both employees and fans, as well as how to not run a project. Don’t blow your thing out of proportion too early, don’t create a mock giant / metaphorical quasi-star. Let your ideas and projects grow and flourish organically and sincerely.

[lunaefall]

IT'S TIME FOR THE 'ROOSTERTEETH IS OVER PARTY'

Came back to this fuck ass fandom for a second just to celebrate 🥳🥳🥳

[sir-adamus]

Seeing Death Battle release a new episode today makes me feel like Viz acquiring RWBY was a mistake.

IMO, RWBY should have gone independent like the rest of Rooster Teeth IPs (Death Battle, Red Web, Tales from the Stinky Dragon, etc.)

ah i see, i'm being botted with discourse bait

[ironwoodprotectionsquad]

Okay I 'm that one anon who prefaced that I wasn't attacking and I mention that because I didn't know how to re-identify myself

Anyway I agree without you on how poorly they handled Ironwood's downfall but what else you said continues to baffle me as a writer and as one whose trying to grow and trying to incorporate more characters how would you suggest going about topics of emotionally "throwing away ones humanity" if said character has prosthetics?

Like...and understand I'm trying to figure out how to word this. If you were to take...let's keep rolling with James. As he was before the absolutely asinine commentary on what him sacrificing his arm meant. If his prosthetics are just that and not meant to symbolize anything. Can you talk about him or any character or original creation under the idea of what they could be doing to themselves emotionally or mentally?

I'm really trying to find where to go cause it just seems that with disabled characters writing certain things for them is heavily limited as to what can be done because certain attempts at things could be labeled as ableism when that wasn't the intention either in an a stumble at the execution of an idea or because the audience (and I'm not saying this is Rooster Teeth cause holy shit is it not them) took something about what was being done and applied it to an aspect of the character that the creator wasn't even looking at.

On that note what they did in general with Penny and whatnot was odd but what would you do about a character that if they had the choice didn't want a disability? This is a more of an out of somewhere questions cause typing this I always think of the Spirit Fairer discourse where there was apparently a character who had a wheelchair and I guess at someone point didn't have it anymore and was happy about that. But people got so mad that the developers rewrote the story so the character remaind wheelchaired bound, but that just makes me ask is it wrong for a character to want to be able to not have a wheelchair? Like is it wrong to write a story where a character wants to be able to walk? Like how would you go about having a character having a disability and not wanting their disability anymore?

Honestly anon as I said before I just….wouldn’t. To put it another way, what does having someone throw away their humanity add to the story? Why do you feel like you need it? And why does it need to be the disabled person? All people have humanity because they’re human. Trying to have someone throw away their humanity is…dangerous territory because more often then not those stories tend to rely heavily on either disabilities or mental illness to “justify” that and for obvious reasons that is extremely ableist. And even without using either of those things it still can be interpreted by audiences to be the disability or mental illness’s fault and what made them lose their humanity. It’s…far too tricky a subject for me to think ever is worth it to be in a story.

If you’re asking how to make a disabled character evil that’s entirely different because evil people can still have their humanity because they’re human. They just happen to be an evil person who does bad things. Making Ironwood evil isn’t inherently a bad thing, but CR/WBY saying that losing his arm is a symbol of his lost humanity is. Then repeatedly having the villains be disabled is a problem. It’s important to ask “why does the disabled character have to be evil” when making them a villain because so often disabilities are used a short hand for villainous traits which is ableist and harmful and tells disabled audiences that their disabilities are seen as villainous.

It is generally the job of the author to really think about these things and the tropes that they are relying on for their story. As a society so many people view more metal = less human which just isn’t true and is actively harmful towards disabled people. Do you remember at all the Mars Rover Opportunity? How emotional people got when her last words came out “My battery is low and it's getting dark”. My friend from my discord group put it perfectly: Oppy is all metal but she’s human. She wasn’t born, she was created but she was alive. We loved her to humanity. People mourned when she passed. NASA played a love song for her. Her being metal didn’t matter, just as James being half metal shouldn’t matter, just as anyone having prosthetics shouldn’t matter. They are still humans with humanity, and I just don’t see any reason to write a story about someone willingly throwing away their humanity.

So Ironwood "wanting" to throw away his humanity and becoming more monstrous is ableist. Doing this to any disabled character is ableist because their disability will inherently be used as a shorthand for said monstrousness either by the author or audience.

Here are a few good videos that discuss the topic further and really discuss the issues with disabled villains:

Some great points the video discusses:

A lot of villains motivation is being "cured" of their disability which stems from this idea that disabled people are miserable and hate being disabled and can only be whole and happy if they are cured. Yes some people would like to have a curse for their disabilities, not everyone wants that and having most villains want that is a problem as it stems from the idea that being disabled is inherently tied to misery and suffering which just isn't true.

It also makes the point about how oftentimes disabilities are used as a visual shorthand for inhumanity in their villains and them merely being disabled and looking "other" is a clue to the audience that said person is evil and even inhuman in far too many cases. We repeatedly see this in RW/BY with Tyrians tail, Cinders Grimm arm, Salem, and James's new prosthetic. All are framed as evil and monstrous to show us how evil they are.

At the end of the day, I think it is crucial to talk to someone who has the disability you want to represent in your work about how you are portraying them. I cannot and do not speak for all disabled people in this discussion and can only really discuss my feelings/the feelings of those I have talked with. When writing disabled characters it is critical to include people with those disabilities in the discussion of how the characters story should go.

[cc-nerris]

so anyway now that rooster teeth is dead and gone i was always pirating that shit before it came out on youtube. do you remember when that used to be discourse. hold my hand

[confusedpandabear]

Looks like Rooster Teeth shut down. So all that RWBY discourse and ship wars are pointless now.🙃

That's sad to hear, I hear it was a good show with a big following. I hope those who were there for the story have the manga to read at least? Hopefully, the shippers will move on to other fandoms, too!

[matt0044]

I feel like it's because of a status quo compared to Volume 4 through 9 where the plot is always going somewhere and never in the same place. Even if Volume 2 had more of an overarching plot, it was still able to come back to Vale at the end of the day.

I find this stems from how Volume 3's Fall of Beacon was a double edged sword. It not only shattered the status quo but also forced the characters on the move, into a world where anything could happen and where nothing was truly certain.

That's not even getting into the discourse surrounding the post-Vale seasons being increasingly intense. Thus we think back with rose-tinted glasses to a time when RWBY's fandom was chill.

Except... it never was. Even when Monty was alive, I remember a lot of Volume 2 discourse within the fandom AND how Crunchyroll streaming it got those who ignored the context of Rooster Teeth to dunk on the amateur web series.

I think Dust Queen and Evermorrow chase after that false past and try to capture the RWBY they wanted. I think the crew are generally good people who might do story decisions that I personally might not agree with but will hear them out on. That and they have the decency to not claim their AUs are the "real RWBY" unlike some people.

The obsession with Beacon Era RWBY when it only accounts for 26% of the runtime of the show will never not bore me.

[breakingarrows]

Introduction to 'X' as Literature Series

For some time now I have had the idea to approach writing about games in a way more akin to literary theory. Video game “reviews” come from a history of games as consumer technology, where technical performance was prized above all. A game had to be “fun” to be worthwhile, and the price-per-hour ratio was ever present. As the medium grew older, and the question of “are games art?” became more a topic of conversation, things finally started to shift, though has reached a rut for some time now.

Games writing and discourse is stuck in a circular cycle of rephrasing, rehashing, and relitigating the same subjects and topics seemingly every few months online in social websites such as Twitter or in forums and on podcasts. The largest games media outlets performing reviews rarely cite each other or any other writing in their own works, and the culture at large is worse for it. Obviously there will be no Council of Nicaea in which games media can come and put together a canon of thought and ideas, but I think a different intent behind games writing can hopefully push the conversation forwards even if by an inch.

There are many writers doing this work and have been doing so for a long time. During my research into 2009 for a different project I’ve found the “Brainysphere,” an informal collection of video game bloggers who were talking and writing about games distinctively different from your G4, Rooster Teeth, IGN, or Giant Bomb. While these blogs may have died down in favor of the YouTube “video essay,” you can still scrape Critical Distance’s weekly roundups for new blogs. Most attention is on YouTube, and while I do enjoy throwing on a random hour long video talking about Patapon and Planescape: Torment, they more often than not fall into the trap of recapping the plot beat by beat and continuing to adapt the breakdown box of graphics, sound, gameplay, etc, that was so often the basis of game magazines and online outlets.

The breakdown box is gone, yet you can still find it within the structure of the text of a review when it hard pivots into suddenly talking about the music or multiplayer. My hope is to approach each subject as a piece of literature, a piece of art that has thematic value that rises above so many others, that holds multiple possible interpretations of its text and its expressive qualities, the kind I find myself thinking about and returning to time and time again. Not just what we refer to as “narrative” but mechanical systems of interaction and restrictions.

Everything and anything can be literature, it is up to the people that read and write about it that make it Literature. To me, one of the approaches to literature I find most fulfilling is under post-structuralism that comes from Barthes’ analysis of Balzac’s Sarassin in S/Z (1970) and explained by Terry Eagleton in Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983):

“The most intriguing texts for criticism are not those which can be read, but those which are ‘writable’ (scriptible) – texts which encourage the critic to carve them up, transpose them into different discourses, produce his or her semi-arbitrary play of meaning at the work itself.” 

A video game like Disco Elysium is literature to me due to its ability to evoke and imprint an emotion, a feeling of place, of people, of history, of sound and speech and lines of dialogue that summoned laughter and sadness. In it are reflections of our own world and it adds its own ideas and innovative mechanics to the genre it occupies. It has created a large base of dedicated artists who add onto its presence their own varied contributions via interpretations and conversations.

A video game like Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies is also literature to me, due to its execution of the trope of the silent protagonist, of the player occupying that space of both viewer and participant so unique to games, how it leverages that position for its emotional ending. For its own sights and sounds that are so deeply imprinted in my mind. It may occupy a significantly smaller space in the culture comparatively, but that does not make it any less a work of literary significance in my mind.

This series is my attempt at performing readings of these texts, and not just games too, to show that they are writable and literary. Due to my lack of study underneath any formal literature critique program this is less about form than intent. I’ve already somewhat tried this in my replaying essays and videos but hope to make it a more formal statement under this series and keep the word count a bit lower than the comprehensive replaying essays tend to run.

I still have a lot of love for the written word. My cover sheet for a never used application to Giant Bomb was based around the argument that there was still a lot of value behind text writing, and most all videos I have created begin as text-focused works. If anything this will just be another umbrella of an idea under which will rest multiple unfinished drafts, though I’ve grown more accepting of that as time has gone on.

“‘Mass culture is not the inevitable product of ‘industrial’ society, but the offspring of a particular form of industrialism which organizes production for profit rather than for use, which concerns itself with what will sell rather than with what is valuable.”

-Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983)

[cowboy-sixer]

Cowboy's Abomination of Tags

Personal Tags

Cas Tag

Epic Cowboy Friend Discourse OR /j discourse OR Cowboy Discourse (there’s a lot I’m sorry)

Fave

Oomfie Tag

Remember

Movie Tags

007

Bullet Train

Dead Poets Society

Godzilla

Gran Turismo

Guardians of the Galaxy

Hellboy

Kingsman 

Knives Out

Marvel

Men in Black

My Best Friend is a Vampire

Pacific Rim

Sonic

Spiderman / ITSV / Spiderverse

Venom

Video Game Tags

Alan Wake

Bioshock

Death Stranding

Detroit Become Human

Doom

Genshin Impact

Half Life

Persona

Pokemon

Portal

Psychonauts

Red Dead Redemption 2

Splatoon

Show Tags

911 fox / 911 abc

911 lonestar

Arcane

Ben 10

Camp Camp

Danny Phantom

Daredevil

Gen:Lock

Gravity Falls

HLVRAI

House MD

London Spy

Loki

Monarch Legacy of Monsters

Mystery Science Theater 3000

Neon Genesis Evangelion

RWBY

Stranger Things

Ted Lasso

This is Going to Hurt

Trigun / Trigun Stampede

Music Tags

Eurovision

Michael Buble

Mika

Will Wood

Misc Tags

Achievement Hunter

Frutiger Aero

Jerma

Morbius

Reptiles

Rooster Teeth

RTVS

The Glass Scientists

[matt0044]

I often feel like the FNDM, especially Anime fans, are odd for trying to whitewash Ironwood’s actions or claiming they came out of nowhere. When frankly, a lot of the appeal for Anime growing up was how it was animation that depicted types of characters that even adult animation weren’t known for.

For all the memes, what made the likes of Death Note fascinating was how Light and L were very much people you would never wanna be friends with but were infinitely fascinating for how their minds works. How they each saw themselves in the right and why. It among other gateway Anime were appealing for their character writing being challenging at times.

But we also have to contend with the whole “Wow, cool robot” side of fandoms where Ironwood’s “cool” battles and swagger make many overlook that he’s… not exactly a guy you’d see a movie with.

I LOVE characters that are not easy to like or they kind that I’d punch in the gut if I had the nerve. One of the rewarding things about RWBY was seeing how the usual likable cast of archetypes being fleshed out into people who asked you to look beyond initial impressions.

Yet it seems like fandom is constantly paying lip service to this type of character that they dilute in their mind. I don’t know if it’s Social Media itself or something that’s always been there but getting worse but we need fandoms to practice what they preach when they asked for “more complex characters.” Especially when they’re not white and/or guys.

[drfranklangdon]

The fact that they had to cancel this week’s live shows because the chat was so racist and sexist is absolutely disgusting. Some of you so called fans should be ashamed of yourselves. I’m super proud of AH and RT for limiting the chat to first members and upping moderating the chat. Even though they really shouldn’t have to. This shit is getting really old. If you don’t like the lineup of a video - it cost $0.00 to close out the video and watch something else. Be better.

[illusory-torrent]

i thought… i thought we all knew weiss was into men??

[sir-adamus]

Besides RWBY, why is everything else from Rooster Teeth worthless?

...if this is an attempt to incite discourse i'm afraid you've lost me, what?