RWBY: Then vs. Now

With the premiere of a new anime series, the impending release of Volume 9, and apparently an upcoming feature film crossover with the Justice League, RWBY is back in the spotlight once again, a place that it has held many times over the years, though not necessarily for the best of reasons. In any case, now is as good a time as any to look back and reflect on what we've been given from this franchise so far and how RWBY has changed over the years.

The best place to start this exploration would be with the overall plot structure of the series, and, more importantly, what that structure meant for the show's writing. In the beginning, RWBY's plot structure was relatively simple: short arcs lasting only a few episodes each that mostly consisted of “good guys training to be hunters and investigating the bad guys” and “bad guys plotting in the shadows.” In Volume 1 alone we have the introduction to Beacon, the Emerald Forest mission, settling in post-team formation, the bully arc, and the arrival of the White Fang, each arc focusing on a single core idea and elaborating outwards from there. Volume 2 had the opening food fight to set up additional characters, Team RWBY investigating the White Fang, the school dance, and the Mountain Glenn mission. Even Volume 3 can be segmented into the two distinct sections of Vytal Tournament matches and the Battle of Beacon, and, for the most part, all of these arcs felt relatively self-contained and slowly constructed more and more setup for the eventual explosion at the Battle of Beacon. Starting with Volume 4, however, the story seems to go all-in on longer, more complicated plot arcs. The march from Patch to Haven takes all of Volume 4, as does Weiss's homecoming in Atlas and Yang's mental recovery. Blake and Sun fighting the White Fang in Menagerie spans Volumes 4 and 5, as does the overarching “reunite Team RWBY” plot. Cinder returning to Salem spans 6 and 7. The Atlas plotline could arguably span all of 7 and 8, but Salem's arrival at the end of 7 does give it some sort of demarcation point. With the exception of Volume 6, which has two major plot arcs bisected by a mild detour that turned out to be one of the best arcs in the entire series, modern RWBY is dominated by much longer plot arcs than earlier volumes. Additionally, as you might have noticed already, a lot of these plot arcs tend to overlap each other and run concurrently, thus making the overall plot much more complex. There were vague hints of this in earlier volumes, but it mostly just boiled down to the bad guys doing something in secret until our heroes uncover it and start to actively fight against it.

I put so much emphasis on the particular lengths of each arc because, by understanding all of that, it becomes much easier to understand why RWBY's writing on a micro level has changed dramatically along with these macro-level shifts. You see, while early RWBY's overall plot was relatively simple, that does not mean that the writing itself was plain or uneventful. What it lacked in complex plot structures and intricate detailing of major plot events it made up for tenfold with a sheer mass of creativity in regards to setting, characterization, aesthetic, and moment-to-moment concepts.

Volume 2 in particular makes the best case for being the pinnacle of early RWBY unrestrained ambition and passion for cramming in as many cool and fascinating ideas as possible. Wanna have a food fight with the students recreating their usual attack styles but with different types of food? Go for it. Have the characters explain the basic geopolitics of this world via a game of knock-off Risk? Knock yourself out. A four-way information search that ends with them getting chased down a busy highway by a rampaging mech suit? Sure thing. A school dance focusing on the more personal and intimate sides of character personalities and relationships? Why not? A corgi that can be used as a projectile in combat? Absolutely. A search-and-destroy mission that uncovers the ruins of an underground city where the bad guys are loading up a train with bombs in order to break into the city and let a bunch of Grimm lose on the streets? RWBY you had me at “underground city.” It's this borderline unhinged spamming of disparate ideas that all spawn off of the single, simple plot throughline of “the bad guys are building up their forces” that made early RWBY such an immense joy to watch.

And this is an aspect of RWBY's writing that has been missing from a very large stretch of modern RWBY, with this style switch setting in completely around Volume 5. Whereas early RWBY was more concerned with wowing the viewer with as many cool ideas as it possibly could, modern RWBY is much more concerned with concepts like setup and payoff, extensive lore-crafting, alliances and betrayals; concepts that you're more likely to categorize as “plot,” rather than moment-to-moment ideas. Now, I want to be very clear on this point: focusing on plot is not an inherently bad decision. There are thousands of shows that focus on their plots that are amazing. This is not an inherently bad choice, but that is the choice that was made, and this shift from “minimum plot, maximum idea-building” to “maximum plot, minimum idea-building” could have still made for an engaging series.

However, along with this structural shift, another shift began to occur, most notably in Volume 5, in regard to RWBY's pacing. Volume 1 issues aside, I think it would be accurate to describe the pacing of the Beacon trilogy as “moderate.” The plot isn't exploding everywhere every five seconds, but enough stuff happens on a consistent basis that it never feels like it's plodding along. Volume 4, on the other hand, being the first big cooldown moment after everything went off the rails at the fall of Beacon, does seem to dial back its pacing just a bit, and this allowed for brilliant moments of character-building and a slow, but steady leadup to a terrifying and exhilarating Grimm fight in its climax.

However, this dialing back of the pacing was received…less than positively by a decent bulk of the fandom. Not everyone, mind you, but enough to say that this was a common talking point about Volume 4 for a very long time, one that I vehemently disagree with. Whether or not the idea of “not enough happened in Volume 4” actually made it to the writer's desk, it appears as though these fans eventually got their wish, and it ended up doing irreparable damage to RWBY's story in its aftermath. Starting with Volume 5, RWBY began to develop this habit of setting up multiple concurrently running plot threads that all needed to conclude by the end of the volume in order for their payoffs to work, without realizing that there simply was not enough time in a single volume to effectively convey all the necessary plot information while also making sure that the characters were at the correct moments in their own personal arcs for those moments to happen.

Raven Branwen's arc in Volume 5 was the first major casualty of this increased pacing. She spends most of this volume monologuing to Yang or Cinder or whoever is confronting her in the moment with very little actual characterization or informative dialogue that isn't directly plot-related. All we really know about Raven is that she will destroy anyone in her path in order to survive, including her own family, so when we get to her final confrontation with Yang in the vault and Raven breaks down out of nowhere, it feels unearned and out of place. They decided that this plot point needed to happen by the end of this volume even though there wasn't enough time to make her conflict more interesting, and so her development gets slashed to ribbons and we're forced to watch her go from hardened warrior who doesn't seem to care about anyone to weepy absent mother faster than you can say James Ironwood.

Speaking of which, I think it's time we finally addressed the walking tin can in the room. General Ironwood might have had the most potential for interesting character writing out of anyone from the entire cast, at least in terms of his relationship to the world he inhabits. His descent into corruption and megalomania was set up all the way back in Volume 2 and that impending heel turn provided endless possibilities both for his development as a character and as a jumping off point into discussions about what leads societies towards fascism. Watching Ironwood slowly lose his mind over paranoia, both justified and unfounded, is the perfect vehicle for these ideas.

And then we hit Volume 7 and it becomes immediately apparent that the script was forced to manufacture Ironwood's downfall by having Ruby and her friends lie to him constantly even though A. not lying to comrades was supposed to be the big takeaway from Volume 6, and B. Ironwood hasn't given much of a reason for them to not trust him. He immediately lays all of his cards on the table as soon as they arrive, gives them preferential treatment amongst his ranks, and even awards them their Hunter licenses that they weren't able to obtain after the fall of Beacon. Nothing Ironwood has done warrants deception on their part, and almost everything that goes wrong in this volume can be traced back to them not telling Ironwood the truce. They lampshade this constantly throughout this volume and even try to come up with reasons after the fact, but the result is a decision that feels completely out of character for everyone involved, and so Ironwood's downfall feels inauthentic and leads to innumerable jump the shark moments in Volume 8 where Ironwood feels like someone who was a delusional maniac from the start rather than someone who slowly slipped into fascism as a tool to survive. The trek from “closing our borders in case a war breaks out” to “dropping a nuke on the poor people to get a bunch of children to do what you want” needed way more time and proper setup than what we got. This is what happens when you get impatient with a slow-moving plot point and try to jump to the good part. In hindsight, I suppose the complete waste of potential that was General Cordovin in Volume 6 was a sign that this series wasn't going to handle topics like military fanaticism and the rise of fascism with the grace that it needed, but when you're trying to speedrun your story I guess a lot of stuff gets left on the cutting room floor.

This, in essence, is the biggest paradox of RWBY's writing. It tries so hard to cram in as much plot as it possibly can, but ends up saying far less than it did when a tidal wave of creative ideas was the main focus. Characters that could have had interesting and engaging storylines are either truncated to the point of not making any sense or are relegated to plot manipulators with one-dimensional characterization who get a single moment of interest directly before they become irrelevant for the rest of the story. It speaks to a lack of inventiveness in these new plotlines being written, creating the image that they care more about hitting the most salient story points and then moving on to the next batch of plot rather than finding intriguing and creative ways to flesh out the characters and aesthetic that drive said plot forward.

This same lack of creativity can be found in how the fight scenes have evolved over the years. Out of everything that early RWBY had in its arsenal, Monty's choreography and the explosive creativity of the combat were far and away the strongest pull for the series when the fandom was just starting to develop. Between the “it's also a gun” gimmick and just the sheer quantity of ideas for unique weapons, RWBY's combat was immediately set up for success with just how many options it had to create variety and intrigue in its fight scenes, and the rhythm and weight of the choreography bolstered all of this to spectacular effect.

There's also a second aspect to early RWBY's fights that doesn't get discussed as often, but I would say is just as pivotal to their success: the fight locations. Whether it's a giant chasm speckled with stone pillars, a busy highway system, a cramped office space, or a dock full of shipping crates to knock around, the locations of these fights provided both a dynamic space to move around in in order to create variety in movement and fighting style, as well as a method to obscure the location of different combatants so as to segment larger fights into more digestible chunks, a deceptively important concept when crafting battles with multiple participants. Additionally, many of these fights often change location as they progress. Moving from the city streets to a rooftop or a train to the town square adds even more momentum to keep the adrenaline high until the fight is over.

And pretty much everything I just mentioned vanishes from RWBY's fights roughly around Volume 4. For a long stretch of volumes, it felt like the show had completely given up on trying to wow you with insane weapon concepts and dynamic settings in favor of cleaner, more static combat. It's hard to think of any weapons from modern RWBY than feel truly inventive and impacting, with Marrow's boomerang rifle being pretty much the only exception, and, as the series continues on, we're starting to see more weapons that are just minor variations on stuff we've already seen. I understand that it's difficult to keep coming up with new designs for every new volume, but considering that this element was part of RWBY's core appeal for so long, it's still extremely disappointing.

As for locations, most of the fight settings now, especially in 4 through 7, consist of empty rooms, abandoned streets with nothing on them, and open cliff faces, which simultaneously makes these fights less interesting and causes you to overthink the logic of the fights. The absolute worst example of this is the Haven Academy fight in Volume 5, where the pacing is so god-awful and lopsided that it constantly forces you to ask why everyone is just standing around doing nothing in this empty box while people are getting stabbed to death. There are standout exceptions here and there, but they are just that: exceptions. This used to be the norm and now it feels like a breath of fresh air compared to the stagnant setups of modern RWBY.

Even in terms of the actual actions within the fights, this disparity of idea concentration becomes even more apparent. Whereas a good chunk of the choreography in early volumes was chaotic, explosive, and borderline unhinged with the direction each fight traveled in, later fights mostly boil down to two or more characters in an empty box swinging their weapons around really fast, and that gets boring after the fourth or fifth iteration when the norm for previous fights was off-the-wall creative insanity like a girl turning her grenade launcher into a hammer, using a stone bridge like a seesaw to fly through the air like she's riding a sailboat, and then curb-stomping a giant scorpion. Again, this is not a one-off example. This was the norm for most of early RWBY, and even at its most stylistic, two or three characters swinging their weapons around really fast in an empty box pales in comparison.

By the end of Volume 7, I had mostly given up on RWBY, believing that this shift towards genericism was here to stay and that all the things I loved about RWBY wouldn't be returning any time soon…and then Volume 8 happened, and to my surprise, it brought back a lot of those elements that I thought had departed this franchise for good. The moment-to-moment ideas are getting more inventive and explosive, quite literally in some instances, the plot seems to be trying to shift back towards smaller arcs with more compact payoffs, with the Schnee Manor fight probably being my favorite of these, and the fights themselves are finally starting to break away from the empty box model that plagued this series for so long.

Even for as little lead-up as it got at the end of Volume 7, I really liked Ruby's breakdown in Volume 8 where she and Yang finally start coming to terms with the loss of their mother, Summer. Volumes 5 and 6 turned Ruby into a hyper-stoic husk of her former self that always seemed to know the right answer to everything, to which Volume 7's response seemed to be “let's have her make the absolute worst decisions possible that are entirely out of character and stand in direct contrast to everything she's learned,” so it was nice to see her get characterization that actually made sense for once and even tied back into her lyrics from Red Like Roses Part 2 all the way back in Volume 1.

By far though, the highlight of Volume 8 for me was Lie Ren, whose emotional arc hit dangerously close to home. The guy who rarely speaks and bottles up all his issues and then expects everyone to understand him when he suddenly explodes on them is definitely something I've had to grapple with in the past, and it seems to be one of the few major character arcs that isn't overly rushed, having started back in Volume 7. I genuinely loved this part of Volume 8, and even though his relationship with Nora reaches a less than positive point by the end due to Nora's identity crisis, for once I'm actually happy with where a character from the main cast has ended up.

All that said, Volume 8 is still pretty far from what I'd call smooth sailing, especially in terms of the plot. As previously mentioned, Ironwood's character took a massive nosedive that proved unrecoverable by the end. There's still a general sense of illogical strategy plaguing both sides. It has a LONG way to go in terms of recovering from horrible plot decisions made all the way back in Volume 5 that still have ramifications to this day, but with Volume 9 apparently taking us into a bizarre alternate world, the show might finally get the directional reset it needs, along with some aesthetically intriguing imagery and character exploration moments a la Alice in Wonderland as the trailer implies.

While we're on the subject, though, we also need to talk about RWBY's change in attitude towards references. For most of RWBY's run, a large chunk of its visual aesthetic, and occasionally part of its narrative, is heavily reliant on direct references to other pieces of media. This is most obvious in its references to fairy tales, anime, other Rooster Teeth properties, and anything else that adds either a unique flair to the show's aesthetic or an extra layer of meaning to their existence. It could be as obvious as having a villain's design reference A Clockwork Orange in order to immediately identify him as innately evil, or as layered as having Pyhrra draw reference to Tex from Red vs. Blue as a means of both conveying her indomitable strength and foreshadowing her destiny to fail.

However, starting with volume 7 and becoming even more prevalent in volume 8, RWBY made the jump from using other media as minute references to just full-on copying ideas wholesale. The Atlas-Mantle dynamic is a direct parallel to the setting of Battle Angel Alita. The talking Grimm is a pretty obvious riff on the talking Nomu that Endeavor fights in My Hero Academia. Cinder's back story is literally just Cinderella but with more fighting. I still appreciate that they're trying to throw out more ideas at once, but there's something distinctly copy-paste about some of these elements that lessens the wow factor a little bit.

This lack of transformativeness really comes back to bite it with Penny's story being a new take on Pinocchio. Way back in Volume 2, Ruby tells Penny that her being a robot doesn't make her any less real than the flesh and blood humans surrounding her. She has her own aura and her own distinct personality, and she should be proud to be her own robot self. Flash forward to Volume 8 and they turn her into a “real girl” anyway because a virus is taking over her robot body, thus completing her Pinocchio transformation, blue fairy and all, thus negating a previously solid message about human spirit and the nature of the soul. Here, the excessive reliance on pre-existing narratives not only comes across as uninventive, but it also ends up actively hindering previously existing elements of the story and inadvertently soiling any residual positive feelings that this character could have invoked. And yet, despite all of that, I just might, with an extreme emphasis on the word “might,” be willing to overlook the goofy plot stuff if it means a grand return to a torrent of cool ideas and more inventive fight scenes.

What I can't overlook, however, is a new element present in the writing that I did not anticipate and, frankly, is far more troubling than rushed plot points or botched characterization, that being that the end of Volume 8 felt…mean. Not nihilistic. Not edgy. Mean. Ironwood going full Terminator and killing non-combatants because that's just how they wanted to write him. Atlas citizens led to a slaughter in Vacuo in a scene that echoed a bit more of Jurassic World than I would have liked. Bringing Penny back after she was dead for 3 volumes only to kill her off again two volumes later right after she became human, and having Jaune of all people do it; you know, the guy who is still traumatized by losing one of his closest friends and has basically acted as the party's healer ever since the end of Volume 5. It all feels just too nasty and mean-spirited compared to how this show used to be written, something I never would have imagined this series becoming, and I truly hope it doesn't stick around for Volume 9. I understand that writing styles will inevitably evolve over the years, but this tone stands in direct contrast to the themes of the show and how it always managed to implant a small spark of hope and heroism in even its darkest moments. This element, far more than any other, would definitely keep me away from RWBY for good if it becomes a permanent fixture. I wish I had more to say about this particular point because it is so incredibly concerning, but sometimes the most central criticisms end up being fairly easy to explain.

As for the new RWBY anime, Ice Queendom, I must say that I'm pleasantly and unpleasantly surprised in a lot of ways. The fight scenes are phenomenal and beautifully animated, but on the other hand, this seems to be balanced out by the non-action scenes being notably subpar, though to be honest this could have been mitigated quite a bit by stronger color design. The cinematography is far more competent and impressive than anything from og RWBY, but still shows a strong reverence for its source material, and the soundtrack, while definitely a far cry from what we're used to, is so incredibly vibrant and emotional that I can't help but get hyped during the climactic moments. At least on an audio-visual level, Ice Queendom is the perfect middle ground between the novel and the familiar.

The story, however, is another beast entirely. The first two episodes provide quite a few moments that actually improve on the pre-existing material, though there are also just as many moments that I felt should have stayed closer to the source. As for the new anime original plotline, it immediately makes a strong impression as something intriguing and unique while still falling in line with RWBY's sensibilities. Unfortunately, it's also very apparent that most of the content from these episodes doesn't really work unless you've already seen the original series. In the first three episodes, this anime covers the entirety of Volume 1, the White and Black trailers, and the anime original content in just under half the run time of the original Volume 1. Put more plainly, if the pacing of later RWBY volumes was like a sprint, Ice Queendom is like getting on a bullet train fueled by a particle accelerator. It simply does not function without prior knowledge of the series. Whether you see that as a fault or not is up to you, but it is what it is.

RWBY has changed immeasurably over the years, far more than I could have ever anticipated back when I saw the Red Trailer pinned to the end of Red vs. Blue Season 10's finale. Yes, not all of it is good, and I can hardly blame anyone for falling off at some point along the way. I fell off myself after my first viewing of Volume 7, but even through all the rushed plotting and truncated character arcs, I see potential for the core of what made RWBY special to finally come back, and for the first time in years, I think I might actually be excited about what comes next. Hesitant and ever-skeptical, but excited, even with that looming threat of mean-spirited writing hanging around. All we can do now is wait and see what happens. Thanks to all of you for watching. If you enjoyed this video, be sure to like and subscribe and follow Anime News Network on Twitter for more great anime content, and if you wanna see more from me you can check me out at Ember Reviews on YouTube and Twitter.