#but like… at least a significant portion of rwby fans on here saw what happened

[demonio-fleurs]

does anyone else in the rwby fandom remember when ironwoods va was being inappropriate with a minor on twitter and barbara reached out to the person he was being inappropriate with for proof and the poor girl sent barbara like all of the screenshots and then barbara ghosted her and the poor girl abandoned her blog, or was that way too long ago for anyone to remember?

[itsclydebitches]

Is RWBY's current model sustainable? By which I mean, you've written a few times that the show is so loosely written that every viewer has a different reading. I just saw two more bloggers I enjoy post they're done with the series, one at the hiatus and one after vol. 8 wraps. It seems like RWBY keeps shedding viewers. Wold tighter writing have helped? I ask because every way I can think to 'fix' RWBY just turns it into a knock off of another show.

Hmm. Well, we’ve got two separate questions here: “Is RWBY’s current model sustainable?” and “Would tighter writing have helped [viewership]?” With a bonus implied third: “If we somehow ‘fix’ RWBY’s writing that might increase viewership, but is that worth it considering we may lose what makes RWBY RWBY and instead turn it into a knock-off of other shows?” So it’s complicated! Frankly, I find it hard to theorize what would or would not (supposedly) have helped RWBY in this alternate universe, just because viewership itself is such a messy thing. We could make RWBY better by a solid 40% (whatever that means) and it still might be losing viewers eight years in because that just happens. I’ve dropped or forgotten shows with absolutely stellar writing for reasons I can’t articulate and likewise finished garbage shows for equally elusive reasons. Which doesn’t even factor in how hard viewership is to gauge, period. Unlike a television show - which, nowadays, is likewise dealing with a culture of illegal streaming, huge portions of the audience watching in a way no one knows how to successfully track - a webseries is designed to be accessed via multiple channels online. You watch RWBY on RT’s website, or youtube, daily motion, etc. and no one source will even come close to telling us the whole picture. So we’re in this very weird situation of feeling like there’s a change going on - all these individual fans announcing that they’re dropping the show - but we’re unable to quantify that. How many people are actually dropping as opposed to just saying they are? How many will catch up two years from now? Where are they watching RWBY and how in the world can we track that? Toss in the fact that a bad show can sometimes increase (or at least sustain) its viewership - you just need to know how it ends, you love the drama, it’s so bad it’s good - and we’ve got a situation where, my own opinions aside, I don’t think we can easily say, “RWBY is losing significant viewership” let alone “and that’s because the show is bad.” 

All that being said, I think the model is sustainable in many ways. Partly because, as I just mentioned, a nearly decade long investment can easily create a strange, frustrated loyalty that outweighs the quality of the show. I’m a perfect example. I don’t think RWBY is good anymore, yet I still watch it faithfully because I’ve already put this much time into it, I enjoy writing my recaps, I’m a part of the fandom, etc. RWBY being badly written feeds viewership almost as much as RWBY being well written would: we’re still discussing it and eager to see more, it’s just that the conversations are critical as opposed to full of praise and the eagerness is more like the curiosity you experience while witnessing a car crash. So there’s that, but also the fact that this “so loosely written that every viewer has a different reading” means that huge chunks of the viewership are THRIVING. We just said it: everyone has a different reading and, thus, lots of those readings are good. The way that I engage with RWBY is pretty specific, merging years of analysis practice, an intention to keep the canon facts straight, and active watching together to get... whatever the hell my blog is lol. But the next fan over has a totally different approach, one that RWBY, in its looseness, heavily encourages. It’s a malleable text, meaning that if you’re not already inclined towards that work of trying to keep all the facts straight and acknowledge when they don’t fit together, then when RWBY asks its viewers to fill in a blank, many do and they do it well. They fill in the blanks with something GOOD. Something that works for them as an individual and makes sense for their version of RWBY. For us it might be frustrating when other parts of the fandom forget a contradiction in the canon, or praise RWBY for something the writers obviously didn’t intend, but from their perspective they’re not making any sort of mistake, they’re watching the “real” show. The one that is written well, does make sense, and - notably - is confirming all the things they already like. Filling in those blanks means that Ozpin is the evil manipulator which is great because you hate him, Blake/Yang are 100% a canonical couple which is great because you ship them, Ruby is still a brilliant leader which is great because she’s your fave, and on and on. When you have a show that is so loosely written combined with a fandom eager to straighten that mess out for the writers, you’ve got a show that, for most, is very sustainable indeed. Of course viewers want to come back. From their perspective RWBY is great! ... provided no one points out these issues and provided they’re never willing to seriously consider them. For every viewer frustrated with RWBY’s bad writing, I suspect there’s five filling in those gaps, gaps that of course cater to their preferences, and thus we’ve got huge swaths of viewers coming to the conclusion that this is a show they want to stick with for the long haul.