#RWDE I guess

[archer3-13]

What you consider a dumb fun time is obviously different for everyone, a lot of people have their limits and different tastes draw ya to different things and all that, but it does fascinate me how little tolerance certain strains of people have for excess [the primary definer of a dumb fun time ultimately], that they will rationalize the fuck out of something that appeals to their tastes to make it sound more impressive then it actually is.

its rwby, i was thinking about rwby again and how it was always just a bad soul eater ripoff that fundamentally did not get what made soul eater work, but over the years it lost what little life it had poking around its cheeks in an effort to be as blandly boringly palatable as possible in an effort to appeal to people who hate fun.

seriously just watch or read soul eater instead of rwby, its a million times more competently constructed, plays with some genuinely fascinating concepts especially in the manga, and pulls off a flashy action look so much more efficiently with a unique visual style and evocative imagery.

[diaryofamadsunwukongfan]

There is a lot to unpack here, so let's just throw away the whole suitcase.

[astronnova]

hands you a redesign of cinder's butt ugly alternate outfit from v3

[kitkatopinions]

The RWBY writers: *Writes five seasons of Blake being stubborn, feisty, active, and passionate, standing up for herself, calling out Weiss when she's anti-faunus, speaking her mind, doing what she wants and only changing her mind if she's been given a good argument, being willing to call out others, trying to take a more realistic approach, has broken away from a toxic and controlling person she's stood up to repeatedly since then, yells "he's mine" while attacking someone she thinks is actively hurting her people, has opened up about her feelings repeatedly, doesn't back down from a challenge, acts openly exasperated when her friends or acquaintances are being stupid, is mature enough to recognize that even when her friend is reminding her of Adam that it doesn't mean that she is Adam and calmly explains her initial hesitance and explains what reassurance she needs before deciding to believe her friend anyway, saw her horrible ex trying to kill people and jumped into a fight with him while proclaiming she wouldn't run away, and then when her friend got hurt gave him this look

And only ran away when it was Yang's life on the line after tricking him and saving Yang despite having been suffering from a stab wound, etcetera, etcetera.

The RWBY writers: *Writes Weiss to say she'd been used to Blake being 'the quiet one' at the end of V5, implying that the writers want us to think that Blake's behavior in the early seasons had been muted and that now that she'd had a growth arc in V4 and V5 (badly done or not) that she would be more feisty, more outspoken, more self-assured, more passionate, and even more action driven than ever. Which would make sense considering that we saw her take Sun's words to heart concerning the personal growth she needed to do, and seemed to start moving in the direction of shedding her self-hate and blaming herself and start learning to accept love and care instead of pushing people away. And the writers also seemed to want us to believe that she was becoming more of a leader and V5 seemed to mark her finally fully moving on from what had happened with Adam.*

Also the RWBY writers: *Proceeds to write Blake to randomly turn into a meek wallflower who doesn't usually stand up for herself, needs frequent help in fights, gets insecure when she thinks people are unjustly mad at her, plays peacekeeper with her friends while trying to manage their angry moods with soft tones like a mother attempting to corral toddlers in the middle of temper tantrums, doesn't fight or argue when people make anti-faunus cracks at her or call her cat ignorantly or otherwise, flinches and grimaces when Yang gets angry, hides behind Yang when she feels threatened, doesn't really talk things through, is no longer active and is content to wait for her friends to tell her what they should do, the closest she's gotten to active has been in V9 where she was telling her friends about a story they all already knew, hasn't called out or even casually argued with her friends on anything iirc since V6, doesn't care to attend rallies against Jacques Schnee, is characterized like a sweet, caring, shy girl who needs reassurance when her romantic interest goes on a different mission than her, has no problem at all with Yang going red-eyed at the mere suggestion that they should ever take missions apart, acts like she thinks she's going to be hit all the time and wouldn't be able to do anything if she was hit.*

Some RWBY fans: "I am just so happy that Blake is healthy now and gets to be her true self now."

Like, Blake prior to the end of V5 was not "the quiet one" who was so so so super not confident and wasn't her true self. Her relationship with Yang didn't "fix" her and make her confident. The writers haven't actually shown her to be better and healthier and stronger and more sure of herself than before. If anything, they've given us the exact opposite.

How the hell am I meant to think Blake has gotten better when the writers specifically now write her to act this way ever since the beginning of V6? How am I meant to take their 'you used to be the quiet one' seriously when it isn't true? When the opposite is true and she becomes the quiet one in V6? It really just feels like they and a lot of their fans literally forgot who Blake was and replaced her with a whole new person and I'm sitting here like

How is she now "Not the quiet one" and before she was "the quiet one" when she was five times more outspoken and acted more confident and passionate and feisty before? I do not get it, I do not understand how I'm supposed to think she's more healthy now. I do not know how I'm supposed to think that she's done all her growing and is now much better when she actively seems worse off than she did in V freaking 1.

[fecklikedust]

I'm really not as critical about rwby as I think I am, and I'm definitely not as critical as other people who have very valid points to make.

My honest biggest gripe with rwby is that, on paper (and with your brain half off), rwby is really cool. In theory, rwby is an interesting story. In isolated moments, rwby appears to be full of heart and passion, but actually siting through and watching rwby is booooorrrring. Boring that boarders on insulting because of how full of air rwby is, that somehow they've made 9 volumes, mind you filled with big important plot altering scenes, and yet it still feels like I've watched nothing. All those moments that if watched in isolation feel important and gripping when watched with it's context loose all it's weight because everything surrounding it adds up to nothing.

Rwby is deceptively interesting, in that it deceives you into thinking it's gonna be cool. It doesn't reward people who actually care about what it presents.

[invested-in-your-future]

The worst part about looking through anything I wrote for Blake is the sheer amount of depression it causes to realize how easy it is to trivialize hatred and discrimination and how close that hits home to the world we live in.

It's so easy to feel helpless about the world around you, seeing the people care more about "burning and looting" than about actual injustices surrounding them.

By all means Blake should be compelling character and the star of the show - especially if we going down the route on "judging" humanity's worth. Who better to emphasize those ideas than a character that gets to suffer the worst the world has to offer merely because of who she is?

The fact that the show chose to instead trivialize discrimination itself by leaning into model-minority nonsense just makes my head hurt.

[neptunevasilias]

Since we’re talking about sun and neptune today does anyone wanna talk about the queerbaiting rt did with them

[schnees-and-schnugs]

Cr/wby needs to stop trying to make that rodent happen. Who cares about that rat. Why is it here. Who asked for it. I hope that stupid nonbinary rat dies. Badly.

[bug-the-chicken-nug]

spitballing the idea of Qrow's Semblance being modestly reworked to still basically do the same thing, but now the effect like, has a directly visible, quantized "vector"/"carrier" for the sake of making it less vague and easier to pin down.

like now he continually generates levitating black "feathers" made of Aura. "Misfortune" then specifically happens to things or people that these feathers have touched and then merged into, imparting their "unlucky aura" in the process (multiple feathers can also interact with the same thing to compound or prolong the effect. A single feather only stays in effect for a moment, and can typically only cause small misfortunes, unless a larger effect was already only a small nudge away from happening on its own.)

People can easily be caught unaware by this, as although the feathers are visible before merging, you can't "feel" that you've been affected. People's Aura barriers do not stop them.

On the other hand, Qrow *also* doesn't "feel" anything when they merge with something, making it all the more important (and stressful) for him to keep a close eye on them.

Qrow can control it in terms of directing where they go, or making more of them, or dismissing some of them. With difficulty, he can also stop them from merging into things until they've touched a desired target. In theory, someone who trusts him enough could safely touch and carry one around without being affected, although Qrow often doesn't trust *himself* enough to let anybody try.

After all, he can still never quite *fully stop* his Semblance. His ability to keep the feathers from merging with things is finicky, and the feathers are frequently at risk of "slipping away from him", especially if he's emotionally distressed or has made too many of them at once. At any one time, there are always at least a few idly floating near him, the exact minimum being dependent on his current mood and well-being. (when he reaches his minimum, trying to dismiss the rest causes replacements to materialize just as fast as they're dismissed... which in turn often irritates him enough to make the minimum actually *increase* instead.)

At the very least, as they aren't "real", just pieces of condensed Aura, they naturally disintegrate when they're more than ~20-ish meters away from him.

[thecoolerliauditore]

Not a rwde poster just like to lurk but YOURE SO RIGHT ABOUT THE HAZEL YANG PARRAREL WHYYYY DONT WE EVER SEE THEM INTERACT?? Like it's right there. The pararels. The. Og my god.

It amazes me how the show managed to set up literally so many perfect parallels and just never pursued the storylines that came with them. Like idk these kinda just write themselves you want a fun shounen-esque adventure, you've got four main characters, four bad guys to fight before the main bad guy, four macguffins to pursue (either the maidens or the relics it doesn't really matter tbh) and four main areas to explore. Like.

Tyrian and Blake I admit is probably the weakest of the connections with pretty much all they have in common being that they're both faunus (we really don't have much to work with in tyrian's case to be fair) but Watts and Weiss never properly interacting is something that I think will haunt me to the grave. There was so much that could be done with Watts being essentially exiled from Atlas' elite and Weiss' gradual realisation that her dad objectively sucks and ruins peoples' lives but instead the final confrontation with Watts was given to Ironwood of all people for. some reason.

[orchidvioletindigo]

I both can and can't believe RW/BY fans are still acting like hbomberguy is some sort of villain for watching a show they like and giving what was a comparatively even-handed criticism of it. Before the RW/BY video, his other two similarly styled critiques had called things either genius or garbage. RW/BY he deemed "disappointing." The whole video was him going back and forth on how the show had good parts and bad parts. And that's somehow not good enough?

I also think it's weird how many of these fans claim he was somehow misrepresenting the show when uh. I watched the show. Four volumes of it before I gave up because I was sick of all the same disappointments he voiced. I didn't pick up on a single misrepresentation in his video, and neither did any of my friends and acquaintances who are also former RW/BY fans. I have yet to see anybody making this claim give an example of anything the guy actually got wrong; it's always just that he didn't make up enough excuses for things, look at the show with rosy enough glasses.

Unless somebody can prove me wrong on that point, what this amounts to is a whole lot of people trying to falsely discredit the trustworthiness of a man who makes thoroughly researched video essays on very important topics because they don't want to believe a show they love could possibly be honestly looked at in a less than glowingly positive light.

[diaryofamadsunwukongfan]

...he has a lot of layers for someone from a desert nation.

[constantvariations]

What about the crew members?

I cannot get over this line from the black trailer for a few reasons:

1. This is a world where there's fully functional soldier robots and AI. Why is the train manned by people in the first place? Jacques clearly motivated by money, so the less people he has to pay the better

2. We never see these supposed crew members, so there's no chance of having a visceral reaction to either their safety or demise. The only SDC workers we ever see iirc are the ones from the Adam short who smirk after throwing a smoke bomb. If we were meant to sympathize with them, it would've been better to make them shaking and scared because they're maintenance engineers instead of security (because having two types of security is expensive and stupid)

3. The SDC is enslaving and branding people, and everyone not fighting it is complicit. Blake has rescued Faunus from literal cages in SDC factories and has seen Adam's face, so she knows this intimately. Why does she care if a few accessories to slavery get blown up? Does she care more for complacent humans than suffering Faunus?

What about the crew members? Fuck em, that's what

[a-mellowtea]

I do not know at this point how to explain to people that "what's the point of saving anyone if Salem destroys the world anyways?" is neither a villainous nor morally bankrupt thing to point out and pearl-clutching over rUbY sOuNdInG lIkE iRoNwOoD is a magnitude of moronic I cannot rightly begin to comprehend.

There is no point in any of their heroics if they're not also working to keep the calamitous judgement day hotline from Salem as an equal priority. Ruby was right, and it needed saying.

[invested-in-your-future]

If the war was hundred years ago why are faunus still discriminated against?

Look at our own world.

The big civil war thing in the US was ~159 years ago. That should have solved this slavery and discrimination stuff, right?

There are still sundown towns in the USA to this day.

Just saying "Welp, we won - everyone's equal now!" solves nothing.

That's just the world entering the "well TECHNICALLY it's not illegal to discriminate against" phase. Another "war" - this time within the bureaucracy machine and legislature - it's up to governments and elected officials to draft the laws that prevent discrimination as the people interested in that scuffle against those who don't.

That's also not the end of it - that's when the world enters the "dog whistles and microaggressions phase" when discrimination would get coated in lies and subterfuge by people acting between the lines of the law - and people acting outside of the law.

It was "technically" legal for anyone to run for Congress or any position of political power in the US - all that meant was an obscene amount of people of color being outright assassinated when they had attempted to. Even being "politically involved" like doing voter registration drives or protests would often make people a target of bigotry - just ask Medgar Evers - a notable campaigner for civil rights(and enforcement of voting rights) who was shot near his home 61 years ago. And that's two years before black women could actually vote everywhere in the US.

If the fight against discrimination was a war of any kind it would be a tug-of-war - a constant struggle back and forth where the moment you let up, the other side instantly takes hold and advances.

And it's not just with civil rights movement - the same pattern can be seen through all history with every case of discrimination, racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. Just think how old the blood libel propaganda is.

Just because The Great War "ended" doesn't mean that discrimination that fueled parts of it is suddenly gone. The fact that show never explores that properly is a shame.