#but then you gotta think about where Wukong is in his character development

[imminent-danger-came]

In the Samadhi Fire ritual flashbacks and the brief vision of Macaque and Monkey King's final fight, SWK lacks the circlet. Do you think this is an intentional plot element, memory being fallible, or a straight-up animation error?

The 3x04 flashback of SWK and Macaque's fight lacking a circlet could easily be fallible memory or bias, but either way it's definitely intentional. The 3x10 Samadhi Fire flashback on the other hand is an unbiased account of what sealing the fire had looked like, so without a doubt we can trust everything we see there!

Honestly, at this point I wouldn't be surprised if there were in fact 2 SWK V Macaque fights: one during jttw where Tang Sanzang encouraged Wukong to spare Macaque (Like the great monk had done with LBD—that or Wukong is just straight up unwilling to finish Macaque off), and another fight post-jttw where it's Wukong alone without the influence of the pilgrims. But that's just me throwing stuff out there.

[tsuki-sennin]

Acho! Donbrothers, basically my weekly feeding of peach-flavored crack.

Speaking of peaches, we've been getting a fuckload of those lately, as thanks to a special deal we've gotten. Momoi Tarou will truly never leave me alone. What's gonna happen to me later?

Spoilers, I guess...

-"Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah, sorry man. No quitting for you."

-"No punching my companions. ...except for all those other times."

-Momoi's trying to be nice and it's killing him.

-Oh hey, Jirou~! Hello!

-I recently remembered, thanks to the fine folks over at Death Battle, that Sun Wukong ate every last peach of immortality in heaven.

-Sooooo... perhaps

-Momotani Jirou!

-Hang on a moment, Shuichi Saihara- I mean Shinichiro Shirakura- I mean, Shinichi Saruhara. This is supposed to be a nice moment with the new guy!

-:O

-HE THANKED US

-Character development~!

-Nah, Haruka, you've gotta get your positive reinforcement elsewhere. He's got a limit, you see.

-My man's throwing his own welcome party <3

-Ah, Ji-money's been promoted to the intro~!

-He's kinda brutal, yeah. Not unlike AbareKiller in his debut.

-Crashing the delivery job.

-He's learnin'!

-Oooooooh, that's a nice Bento.

-Monkey see, monkey do?

-Oh God, do people actually brush their teeth at work?

-Do what needs to be done and live up to full life consequences.

-Momotani Jirou.

-Well, his art-style's pretty nice.

-Kinda reminds me of early Dragon Ball, fittingly enough.

-BRUH

-Yabai

-"...dude, c'mon."

-Oh boy, Haiku time.

-Ehhhh, I can only have a little wasabi with each bite. I'm well accustomed to other kinds of spicy food, but I'm afraid it's a little beyond me.

"Like the moon over the day, my genius and brawn are lost on these fools." -Bowser Koopa, Super Mario RPG

-Oh god, office work.

-10 yen.

-My American brain saw a copper coin and thought that this man dropped a fucking penny on the paper. I was close, 10 yen is roughly 8 cents.

-OH MY GOD

-DUDE

-Oh, gamer. Is he perhaps our... Denji-ki?

-Idk what he's playing, the last fucking game I ever played was Megaranger.

-Of course, I'm kidding, the last game I ever played was Kamen Rider Chronicle before I swore off of video games altogether and became a mountain hermit with no internet.

-OH MY GOD THIS CHAT IS SO MEAN HJKJLKG

-Oooookay, that's a dinosaur.

-Seems like... Bakuryu-ki? Gamer rage is explosive after all.

-Tsubasaaaaaaa!

-Hi, Doggy!

-DOG FOOD

-DON'T EAT IT

-Shake?

-NO SHAKE

-Guess everybody hates the monkey dragon man.

-Oh fuck, it's Momoi.

-Oh fuck it's Sonoi.

-Nah man, I don't wanna fight you.

-Oh, goddammit Inoue, not now.

-He don't wanna talk about it.

-Good enough for me then. He gay.

-Inoue always writes the most unintentionally amazing gay ships ever. I don't know how he does it.

-Ooooooooooooooh, Tsuyoshi...!

-:(

-Miho-san :)

-Ich...

-ICHIBAN-KAI?!

-Holy shit, not offbeat even once.

-"You're another one of my funny sidekicks!"

-OHHHHHHH

-Oh fuck

-Oh my god.

-He's become edgy.

-Jesus Christ

-OHHHHH GOD

-Holy shit, his throwing arm.

-HE STOLE HER SHADES

-HE GOT THE MONKEY MAN

-Man

-Is this where Kagerou went?

-Gamer Dino Go!

-Sooooo... he spaced out his story telling that much?

-God, dude.

-Greatest Superhero of All Time

-Kinda giving me Lord Drakkon vibes, ngl.

-Wow, Tarou's gotten very nice.

-Tsuyoshi! :D

-Get his ass!

-SMACK

-Goddamn, girl!

-So, he doesn't remember?

-Huh... that's... a lot of questions unanswered.

-Hot damn!

-He's doin' the Alter Change thing!

-Is that?

-Holy shit, it is!

-...actually, come to think of it, this guy might be a Kyoryu-ki. Bakuryu-ki seems a bit obvious. God, idk man, dinosaurs might as well have never gone extinct at all.

-Hey, dog dude!

-Guess Don Dragoku doesn't get beeg.

-Oh!

-Kyoryu-ki. That's our Dragon Ranger.

-...god. I know this sounds weird for an American, but I'm more familiar with Super Sentai than I am with Power Rangers. As such, I'm always amazed whenever I see that the OGs, stock footage and Saved by the Bell antics and all, were just... Red Ranger, Yellow Ranger, Blue Ranger. Not even with their designated prehistoric animals, just colors. So weird, huh? ...speaking of PR, I really wanna try to get back into Dino Fury, that shit slaps and heals my soul. Gay heals.

-You're a pain in the ass, Momotani Jirou. You fit right in~!

-He's sorry! It's progress!

-Oooooooooh, shit.

-Natsumiho. ...that was pretty quick, all things considered.

-Ayyyyyy, more Avatar Change action! I missed that!

-"Oh, Tsuki seems like he's forgotten our Senpai Sentai. Let's make him excited by showing him Burai's suit!"

-Well guess what, Inoue, it fuckin' worked!

[knightofbalance-13]

https://rwdestuffs.tumblr.com/post/178292713093/done-dirty-ssn

Can’t do someone dirty when that’s their purpose.

Ah, Sage, Scarlet, and Neptune. The guys who were pretty much added just so that Sun could have a team of four.

Counter point: Team CFVY was the same for Velvet and yet they are an favorites. Not inherently a bad thing.

Since Sage and Scarlet are basically non-existent in the show, let’s start with everyone’s favorite hydrophobe: Neptune.

So you basically baited Sage and Scarlet fans. Congrats on reaching Muffin Man Dan levels of bad.

And really?- Giving him a fear of water and not expanding on that?- Like, I can understand having a fear of water. Too much of it can drown you, you can get caught in the rain and get hypothermia, you might end up lost at sea- but this isn’t expanded upon. So far; the best explanation for why Neptune is afraid of water has to do with his weapon. Where is the backstory for this?

It’s a joke. There doesn’t NEED TO BE a backstory. Even so, we CAN infer by how he acted with his weapon in the INDGO fight that it has to do with his electrical weapon.

Really, this seemed like a cheap way of generating humor. “Oh, haha! The guy named Neptune is afraid of water.”

It is. That’s the point. It’s just for humor. This is like demanding a backstory for Beavis and Butt Head: It doesn’t matter.

And really, Neptune deserved better than this horrid line:

Yes. Because treating Weiss like she’s a prize to be won is sure to win over audience members. While I can understand the idea behind it (Neptune wants to help out his friend), neither Neptune nor Jaune were considering Weiss’ feelings in the whole thing. Jaune was only focused on his own during his time of constantly asking her out, and Neptune was just trying to hide his own small ego when he rejected Weiss. Sure, jaune sorta redeems himself by getting Neptune to ask Weiss out, but it doesn’t necessarily erase what he did before. It just… eases it.

I’d take this seriously if it weren’t for a scene in Volume 3 where Weiss demands that Neptune be beat up for flirting with other girls and you NEVER mention this.Yeah it’s a joke but you take jokes seriously so that’s no excuse here.

You don’t actually care about the characters, you’re just sexist.

And in all honesty, Neptune and Sun ditching the titular team to eat noodles is just bad writing. These are the guys who stick up for their friends, right?

See my previous two points.

And let’s be real here: Scarlet and Sage being taken out so easily in the tournament is just insulting. No time to develop character or show off their fighting styles, Sun and Neptune are the ones who gotta get this done!

Who cares, the tournament fights are a waste anyway.

It’s all about Neptune and Sun for this fight. And really, the least they could have done was have one or both of them ring-out a member on team NDGO. But no. That would be taking away from the “immense display of strategy and power” (Read: Dumb luck) that Neptune and Sun have.

Dudeblade, quoting a strawman does nothing. It was a joke fight, that’s it.

And to be honest, Scarlet being revealed as gay in the manga isn’t really that special. This is the same as a creator saying “Oh yeah, this character is gay” in a side project or something, and not ever revealing it in the actual canonical content at all. In reality, this isn’t a special thing. This is something that’s been done before.

Unless I see you calling out JK Rowling, I’m not listening.

And Sage?- Who the hell is he? Sage is nobody special. He’s not even really a full character. He’s just a filler character the writers made to make sure that Sun’s team had four members. Same with Scarlet really, but it gets worse because these two are token minorities. Sage is the only one with non-white skin, and Scarlet was revealed to be a token gay in the manga that was stated to be “Canon until it’s not.”

No because Blake, Sun, Neptune, Velvet, Flynt Coal and more exist. Can’t be a token minority if OTHER MINORITIES EXIST dumbass.

And then Neptune gets it all the same, just a bit later. He’s completely irrelevant and only mentioned once in volume 4, and none of Sun’s teammates are mentioned in Volume 5. The main characters were in Mistral. Why couldn’t they have run into them?- Team SSSN is from Mistral.

No, because Sun is from VACUO. They TRAIN at Haven, just like Weiss is from Atlas but trains in Vale.

Also THERE’S NOWHERE TO PUT THEM. There’s no REASON to meet them. It’d just be a pointless scene that wastes time.

This raises further questions, because if Sun is from Mistral, and Mistral is stated to be a “less faunus friendly area,” then you’d think that not only would racism be a thing he’d have dealt with, but that the White Fang would be there too. Did Neptune, Sage, and Scarlet always treat Sun with respect, so that Sun is completely unaware of faunus discrimination?- Actually, that sounds like an interesting concept… hmm…

No you just missed the NUMEROUS times Sun says he’s from VACUO. And since Lionheart is in charge of Haven, Fanaus discrimination doesn’t make sense.

Look, if the rest of Sun’s team shows up and are fleshed out more in volume 6, then that would be spectacular. But there is no evidence that they’re going to be anything more than just “Sun’s teammates.”

Which is what they are suppose to be.

For fuck’s sake!- We don’t even know whose partner is whose. For a team that was stated to have been created after the titular team, they sure are underdeveloped.

Says WHO? And if you cited Salt-Wukong, you’ll need to give me TWO sources instead of one.

But wanna know what is funny?

The fact that you are demanding that Miles focus on MORE characters when his one weakness tha tis noticeable in ALL OF HIS WRITING is focusing on too many characters.

AKA You are demanding Miles be a WORSE writer.

[fairytail-whathesays]

What happened with RWBY?

It’s time. Time to have address that which I have long avoided. Here’s a rough cut image from my blog (because it’s too long for copy-paste and I don’t want to give links to my personal): 

But if you want to get a fresh, full rant, click the read-more below. Fair warning, it’s a rollercoaster, but I’ve gotta air my problems. It revolves mostly around certain characters until that one nasty bit at the end. You’ve got to see the steady downhill feeling.

I fell in love with Sun Wukong’s character right after his debut. I liked his personality, I liked his character design, and holy shit did I love watching him fend off Torchwick with those gunchucks. 

And liking him wasn’t easy, early on. Because from the moment of his appearance, the fandom hated him. Despised him. Most of this being because Sun was quite clearly an imminent threat to the fandom’s very popular BumbleBY (Blake/Yang) ship. They would go on to claim that Sun was the epitome of homophobic and heteronormative writing, that he didn’t respect Blake. Most glaringly, they’d accuse the Black Sun (Sun/Blake) ship of having no development at all, which they really didn’t have any room to talk since Blake and Yang had barely glanced at each other the entire Volume 1 and only got one bit of good interaction in Volume 2 or 3, and had known each other a lot longer. I shipped Black Sun and believe me, I loved it despite everything they said. 

But have you ever gotten the distinct feeling that writers don’t like a character? That they go out of their way to either lock out or punish a character? Because that’s the feeling you’d get from watching Volumes 2 or 3. From there on out, Sun and his newly-introduced team were phased out with startling speed. Which seemed really odd, because from his part in the Volume 1 finale, you’d think he was a character the writers were excited for. After Volume 2 was done, I got the feeling there was some meddling from the interfering businessmen happening. Because here’s how Volume 2 went:

The trailer and opening to Volume 2 not only included Sun, but actually gave him and his team a slot of their own, which was notable because Sun was previously a standalone character. Scarlet and Sage didn’t actually appear at all in the entire volume–you only see them for one scene very far in the background and you could easily not notice them–which in fact is what happened. Many people didn’t even realize they were there until they were pointed out. Sun and Neptune fared slightly better. Slightly. Neptune got formally introduced and they got….some involvement in the first half of the volume. A little. It starts off with Sun accidentally letting slip to Neptune (while gushing about how cool Blake is) that she’s a Faunus, which is kind of important to him. That’s supposed to be a secret–although just the next episode, we’re shown that Blake gave Weiss permission to tell the rest of RWBY and JNPR, mitigating Blake’s irritation somewhat when Jaune nearly spills that secret to a library in a loud voice.

From the fandom’s reaction, you’d think Sun was a terrible person who had a history of spilling secrets and not being able to keep his mouth shut, and owed Blake an apology on his knees. Yes, it was supposed to be a secret, but I repeat: not that serious. Especially since Torchwick knew by then, and Torchwick was a real threat.

Then came the little mini-arc about trying to investigate Torchwick, which led to Sun and Neptune tagging along for the ride. Sun got a little bit of interaction with Blake where he got to feel just how brutal the White Fang group had had it and how grimdarkevil they were now. Neptune basically didn’t do anything. In the climactic chase scene and big fight against Torchwood’s mech later, Sun and Neptune get the chance to show off Neptune’s weapon (which are really cool in this series) and Sun’s Semblance (personal power)…..both of which accomplish absolutely nothing before Torchwick literally tosses them out of the scene, so RWBY can do their thing without Sun and Neptune being involved. That’s not a joke–they’re ejected from the scene, and it’s very transparent.

This trend continues. In the Volume 2 finale, where all the different teams and factions are fighting off the Grimm invasion to protect the city, Sun and Neptune are shown arriving on the scene….and are immediately skipped. No seriously, we finish up JNPR fighting, we cut to them arriving….then it cuts to the Atlas army doing their thing and Sun and Neptune aren’t seen doing anything at all except bumping their fists together at the end. This was the finale! The climax of the arc! If there was ever a time to show them doing something, it was now! If they weren’t going to be involved or seen doing something, why bother showing them being there in the first place?! Sun and Neptune were in ten of the twelve episodes in the Volume, and accomplished nothing! Sun got more done in five minutes of the Volume 1 finale than he got done in the entire second volume!

The trend continued, and worsened, in Volume 3. In the Volume 3 trailer and opening, not only did Sun and his team get a presence, they got a big presence. In the whole teams lineup at the start, SSSN (Sun’s team) appear before JNPR–that is, before the dueteragonists/secondary protagonists. I admit I got excited. It looked like SSSN were finally going to get the screentime and importance they were owed. Of course, I was wrong. Shouldn’t have gotten my hopes up.

Not only did Volume 3 continue the trend of shunning Sun and his team out of every scene they were in, it started the trend of making them incompetent laughing stocks. In their first battle of the Vytal Tournament (the four-versus-four team matches, in which RWBY and JNPR both dominated), Sun and his team do pathetically. Sage (green-haired dude) lets loose one sword strike which doesn’t even land before sitting there like a moron while an opposing team member takes him out of the field. Scarlet does better–he actually holds his own against the opposing team’s leader in one-on-one combat, but then Sun fucks up and accidentally gets him taken out. And that’s still Sun being the only really impressive member–he DID land the only real hits, and utterly smashed the one chick he fought with in the span of literally five seconds (I would say ten seconds, but five of those ten were him twirling his weapon). Neptune? Oh yeah, this is the part where they introduce the fact that Neptune is afraid of water. Cripplingly afraid of water. For this reason, he’s ineffectual for the entire fight until the end, where he tip-toes over to the water to electrocute the enemies in it. Yeah, this was an affliction given to him for comedy purposes, and to give slightly more credence to the villain’s plan of removing male combatants (no, seriously, that’s what she was doing) by manipulating the match settings.

Yeah, time out.

Put to one side Sage and Sun being varying levels of incompetent for now. Afraid of water? I’m sorry, but that’s just too much. Neptune is supposed to be a Huntsman, one of the immensely powerful and dangerous super-police of this setting who can slay vicious evil monsters by the dozen and hold his own against other Huntsman–that’s their job. Forgive me if I have difficulty in believing that a Huntsman could function well while being that terrified of water. And no, they did not actually explore this–it’s just there to make Neptune a laughing stock and unable to fight. Ha ha! Hey everyone, this kid called Neptune is afraid of water! Isn’t that funny!

It gets worse. Not only are SSSN still shoved out of the spotlight (we don’t even see Scarlet or Sage get any lines at all for the entire volume minus Scarlet’s one line as an audience member, and neither of them meets the main characters). But wait!

At the middle of the arc, guess who made it to the final round of the Vytal Tournament? The final round, consisting of eight combatants cut from several hundreds of losing combatants? Many of them with three to four years more experience than his one year? That’s right baby, Sun Wukong! Not that he gets a chance to actually fight his match or win, because all hell breaks loose before that can happen, but still! That’s got to count for something, right? Offscreen badassery, in spite of the chessmaster villainess actively trying to make sure he doesn’t make it to the finals?

Yeah, that wasn’t supposed to happen. You heard me right, that wasn’t in the setup. At least not the way the animators had it. According to the original scene, Sun and Neptune fought Pyrrha and Nora (two of the four dueteragonists) and got their asses soundly kicked, in part because Neptune’s fear of water was abused again–oh joy, more of that. Oh, nevermind that Sun at least is probably a capable match for Nora or Pyrrha, but you won’t believe what they had in mind for this scene. Floaties. Fucking floaties. Neptune was going to wear goddamn motherfucking kid’s floaties to survive water-setting combat. Ha ha ha! Look at Neptune, everyone!

Fuck that noise. Wanna know why this scene was cut? Irrelevance to the overall plot. So Sun only made it to the finals and got his offscreen badass title by default. And they were proud of this scene, too! They had most of it animated, and were going to show it if it got enough attention. This is the point where it genuinely became a humiliating thing to be a SSSN fan.

We’re not done. It’s time to talk about the last three episodes of Volume 3, where the finale disaster happens, a worse crisis than ever, and literally their last chance to show SSSN doing something or being effective. So guess what? They’re skipped again! Yep, they’re shown in the whole heroic badass teams lineup (Sun even seems excited to fight Grimm hordes bare-handed), and then they literally run offscreen and aren’t seen again, except for one small throwaway scene in which Sage and Scarlet helplessly cling to the back of an Ursa, such a minor threat it isn’t taken seriously by anyone around it. Well, what about when the teams work together to take out a Giant Nevermore? Sage cut off its head! Oh, well, he did it together with Yatsuhuashi....on an opponent that was pinned down and couldn’t move....yeah, such skill. Oh, well, Sun does make another appearance, after Yang gets her arm cut off and Blake gets stabbed! To, uh, say something? One line? Okay, I get it.

Guess what happened in May, by the way? Remember me saying I was a Black Sun shipper? Well, in May, the Volume 3 soundtrack came out–and in it was “Not Fall In Love With You”, a song from Sun’s point of view–about Blake. The first Sun-related piece of music in this show’s three years, and it’s about how much he loves another character. Not only that, but this came after Volume 3–the volume in which Sun and Blake didn’t interact at all except for one wink and a blush in one scene. Remember how I said the BumbleBY shippers loved to claim that Sun and Blake had no development whatsoever? Well, now I had to sit and stew after that slap in the face of a song and realize that they were right. They’d been vindicated. Sun really was just a boy-toy hetero love interest for Blake with no development. Man, that hurt.

And this is just the problems with SSSN. This was my biggest problem, but by now I had also already experienced Emerald and Mercury being overpowered, an insane BumbleBY fandom, the entire fandom having their heads up Roman Torchwick’s ass, everybody shitting on Weiss for being a racist even though she’d gotten over that two volumes (two real-life years) ago, constant streams of hate for anyone who got in the way of the ships, minor characters like Junior or Tukson being the butts of jokes and otherwise ignored, everybody insisting Adam wasn’t really a nutcase and that his sadistic monster-ness at the end of Volume 3 was “wildly out of character” (even though the only thing they’d ever seen of him was him wanting to murder bystanders on a train), accusations of animators whitewashing Blake despite Blake being white to begin with, and personal abuse of myself and my friends by assholes. But this was the final straw. I was through. What had happened for the last two years I’d invested in RWBY had seemed so different from Volume 1, where Sun had been one of the biggest badasses in the crew and been an involved character. What I loved about the show had been shit on and I was way too angry with how things had been handled to continue watching. I was done, and that was that.

After the Volume 3 finale, I quit RWBY a few weeks later, I was so angry. I had already quit. I’d gone from loving this series to hating it. Oh, but guess what happened the very next day?

Shane’s letter came out. Shane’s sad, angry, 36-page open letter to anyone who’d listen about how he, Monty’s friends, and Monty’s memory had been treated by the staff since he’d died in February and even before then. It was very in-detail and it was heartbreaking. The mistreatment and shunning of both himself and Sheena Duquette (Monty’s wife), the shameless and heavy altering of RWBY despite them saying in no uncertain terms to the fans after his death that RWBY would continue along the plans Monty had laid out. Everything in that letter just confirmed my fears about the handling of Volumes 2 and 3 and compounded my hatred for Rooster Teeth instead of just RWBY. 

To my knowledge and count at the time, around six thousand people were pretty pissed at this and swore off RWBY. Oh, Rooster Teeth was pissed off, too. They did their best to handle it without getting in an online shouting match with Shane, saying exactly what you’d think would be said–that he wasn’t the only one who loved Monty, that it was only his side of the story, and that he was biased.

I don’t believe he was biased. To my fury, RWBY survived that disaster that was the Open Letter. People blew Shane off as merely an aggravated ex-employee and immature. And I might actually be open to that idea, were it not for the sheer length and detail in that letter. I don’t believe the people who said that read it in full–or even looked at it. The fact of the matter is that no “bitter ex-employee” writes a 36-page exposee decrying his former companies’ deplorable practices and treatment of the memory of the one who started, wrote, and directed RWBY almost a full year after he’d already been fired. Thirty-six pages. I read every single one of them, and I believe what Shane wrote was from the heart and 100% true.

I despise Rooster Teeth for what they did and there’s no excuse for it. They’ve permanently lost me in their viewership, and I just wish that Shane’s letter had had more of an impact. Millions of people watched RWBY, and millions of people will continue to do so whether Rooster Teeth deserves them or not. I hope they crash and burn and that RWBY tanks–that might be especially bitter of me, but I wouldn’t give them another cent after seeing that disaster if they were broke and dying in the streets.