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Volume 2 Final Thoughts | Table of Contents | 15 – Volume 3, Episode 2, “New Challengers”
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Volume Two was a rollercoaster. It was a mish-mash of good and bad, with the good and seemingly-inoffensive often undercut with really bad ideas or messages. I wanted to like it, and there were some salvageable parts and the plot was actually coming together.

With that out of the way, let’s begin RWBY, Volume Three, Episode One:

V3E1, “Round One”

We open on a shot of the late afternoon sun with the sound of cicadas singing. Shots of grass, trees, and leaves, all cast in gold light, give way to a distance shot of the very same cliff where we first saw Ruby Rose—no longer covered in snow, though she continues to emanate rose petals all the same. Only when we cut closer do we see her standing at the gravestone we know is there, the one bearing the name ‘Summer Rose’. The rose petals fade away and Ruby lowers her hood.

R: Hey mom… Sorry I haven’t come by in a while. Things have been… Well, things have been pretty busy.

This sort of personal, solemn action of talking to the gravestone of one’s mother would make a lot more sense if we hadn’t had it established last volume that Ruby, at least by Yang’s account, was still too young to understand what was going on when Summer died (at which point she was still small enough to fit into a wagon). It’s not like you’re not allowed to talk to your parents’ gravestones without an attached tragedy, but it sure does become a lot more believable that way.

R: Oh! Dad’s here, too. He’s, uh, ya know…Dad. He’s still teaching at Signal. But he told me he’s going to be going out on some missions soon! I think he misses adventuring with you. …I miss you, too.

Ruby continues that she hasn’t gotten kicked out of Beacon yet (no similar fate for Jaune is established either, unfortunately), and that she’s grateful to be on a team with Yang. Ruby continues that Yang is a really great fighter, apparently having visibly learned a lot from their father. Weiss and Blake, her teammates, are good fighters, too. Thus, they are ‘Team RWBY’. She goes on that she’s made a bunch of new friends and ‘odd’ teachers, and that she and hers have succeeded in stopping some ‘bad guys’, pridefully invoking ‘like mother, like daughter’. She gives a curious head tilt and we get a closeup of her face as she wonders openly why Ozpin let her into the school early.

R: I guess he’ll tell me one day. You know how he is. It’s funny, the more I get to know him, the more he starts sounding like Uncle Qrow.

There’s a bark from Zwei from behind her, and the camera pans slightly to show Zwei and an art cutout of Taiyang, Ruby’s dad, standing behind her.

Explaining that pops is dropping Yang off for the tournament match before his next mission, she bids her mother’s gravestone goodbye. Wishing for luck, she raises her hood again and says it was good to talk. She then runs offscreen as the camera tilts back up to the sun.

Some birds fly towards the horizon, the image lining up to call to mind the peculiar signature of Monty Oum.

With the flash of a rose petal crossing the screen, we cut to a stadium floating in the sky, wherein audiences cheer a battle happening in a divided arena, half icy crags and half volcanic wasteland. We see that Team RWBY are fighting against an opposing team of four, but I want to draw everyone’s eyes to something.

Notice something wrong with this animation? Namely, that Ruby’s scythe completely disappears while she’s spinning it, replaced by some spinning disc? This wouldn’t get openly mocked until it became rampant in Volumes 5 and onward, but it first shows up here—it’s a trick to conserve animation, meaning that it saves on time by lightening the load on the animation software that otherwise has to handle a bunch of moving parts. It’s cheap and it’s very, very noticeable.

We’re not three minutes in, and we’re less than three seconds into the first fight scene, and we already have reason to be worried that fears of low-quality animation in the wake of Monty’s passing were valid.

Your Fight Scene Sucks: 21

The scene zooms in to a commentator’s box, where we find Oobleck and Port. This is the four-vs-four match (i.e. beginning matches) in the Vytal Tournament, and the floating stadium is called Amity Colosseum. Airships are shown flying in and taking people on and off the stadium, which I’m going to presume has invisible barriers preventing anyone from just falling off the fucking edge to the earth way down below.

Port helpfully explains the rules that people watching would presumably already know (P: If this is your first time watching, allow us to break down the rules)--Matches happen in 4v4, then 2v2, and then 1v1. Age and school year are “irrelevant”, (O: In this tournament, the only attribute being tested is skill), which I would say is a very quick way to gauge not who is the most capable combatant, but who is the luckiest, especially as combatant setups are, from what we’re told, randomly chosen. Age and school year do matter, because these competitors come from combat schools, and their capability increases with school year and experience!

Ill Logic: 29

Discounting subcounts, Ill Logic still remains our highest count even when I discard physical quandaries.

Anyway, the winners of this round pick two of their number to proceed to the next, and so forth. We get some drawings of citizens around the world, in bars and in outbacks, watching the tournament proceed, and Port mentions getting back to the match, which is between Team RWBY of Beacon (Vale) and Team ABRN (“auburn”) of Haven (Mistral). We cut to Blake in a separated clash with one of the members, Reese Chloris, who uses a highly unconventional weapon: a skateboard that hovers off the ground.

Reese sends her hoverboard spinning towards Blake, who deflects it right back with Gambol Shroud, only for Reese to punch it back a second time when it flies back towards her. Blake deflects yet again, and while the apparently magnetized hoverboard is on its way back, she closes the distance and lets loose with a flurry of strikes that all go blocked.

I have to say, while the raw creativity boggles my mind, this feels like a very “style over function” kind of weapon.

Reese re-mounts her hoverboard on having repelled Blake, moving forward at high speed. Blake leaps back, leaving an icy clone to take the hit Reese tries to land on her (by doing a spinning ollie on her…) and leaving her open to slash. When Blake’s attack hits the hoverboard, it splits. The result is a pair of pistols that Reese dual-wields and fires mid-air—but not only does she not land any hits, she also forgets to stick the landing, resulting in her slipping on the ice when she hits the ground and landing right on her ass. Not just her ass—you know it was her tailbone, where it really hurts. Owch.

Blake and the audience all wince, and we cut to Yang’s skirmish on the fiery side of the arena, with Arslan Altan. Arslan is a black girl with platinum hair (so, every bit as vibing as Reese and her bright teal hair) and a possible South/East Asian bent to her apparel. She’s a martial artist combatant, which shows in how she takes a punch straight to the face from Yang and keeps going, crossing blows with her until her fist meets Yang’s in a clash so strong it sends out a shockwave.

They separate, and when Yang tries to re-engage, Arslan trips her up by wrapping a dart on a wire around her leg and kicking her over to the icy side of the arena which, after Arslan socks a recovering Yang right in the mouth, allows us to get a look at what Weiss and Ruby are doing. But first:

Your Fight Scene Sucks: 22

Don’t think I didn’t notice Arslan coming for Yang against a blank blue background.

You’ll have noticed that guy at the end of the gif ready to train his gun on Yang, and his name is Nadir Shiko. He doesn’t get the chance, because a shot from offscreen knocks his gun out of his hands while also sending up a wave of the ice dust making up the ground, freezing his legs so he can’t retrieve it. The camera zooms in on his face, whose expression clearly says “shit, I got clowned live on global TV”.

Yang’s assist comes from Ruby, who says she’s got her back. Yet another offscreen voice questions who has hers, and this comes from Bolin Hori, a staff-wielder challenging her (you don’t need to remember any of these names, these are all one-off characters who aren’t important). His dumb question is answered by a black glyph, which sucks him in just as Weiss careens in from offscreen to kick him to the curb. She coolly rejects Ruby’s labeling her “BFF”, and then the fight is on.

Ruby and Weiss converge on Bolin, who landed on the fiery side of the arena while lyrics begin to accompany the soundtrack. Now I get to highlight another noticeable problem with the fight scenes. No, not Weiss, it’s Ruby again. Notice how in that high strike, she lands in such a way that Bolin can block her scythe? You know, because...it wasn’t positioned to hit him with the blade, at all?

We’re two volumes in now, and not once has Ruby attacked a human opponent with the actual blade of her scythe, her iconic weapon that she cleaves apart Grimm with by the dozen. I mean, the reason is obvious: with a sword, or a bludgeon, you can “smack” an opponent in animated fashion, but a scythe’s cutting blade is on its inside, so it’s a lot harder to have Ruby attack someone with it without the blade visibly going through the body.

Evisceration Evasion: 13

But that shouldn’t be a problem! Aura, remember? If Penny can shove dozens of knives through the bodies of White Fang goons without leaving a mark, I see no reason why Ruby can’t actually swing her scythe! Her weapon is large, heavy, and would obviously pack serious cutting power, putting her on the highest tier for raw damage in armed combat-only terms. Why are we hamstringing her?

Your Fight Scene Sucks: 23

Anyway, the rest of the fight. Bolin charges, deciding on Ruby as his target. He dodges a swarm of ice knives Weiss sculpts from dust and throws at him, but when he dodges Ruby’s scythe swipe, he keeps running, causing her to huff. Instead of continuing to engage them, he grabs a fire crystal growing out of the ground and tosses it to Reese over on the ice side, who jams it into her hoverboard, which turns red. Reese winks at Blake and passes by Bolin, melting the ice he’s trapped in, then attacks. Her board, when it meets Blake’s blades, sends out a blast that knocks Blake through an ice crystal and on her butt.

She presses her advantage, seeming to catch Blake in another blast, only for Blake to separate mid-air from the shadow clone the flames wrapped around, and throw Gambol Shroud’s kusarigama blade at a distant point, dragging herself around a corner.

Reese rounds the corner as well, spotting Blake standing still in the middle of the open field with her back turned to her, and is fool enough to fall for it. Sure enough, when she tries to attack the shadow clone on her hoverboard, it’s a fake, and the kusarigama is thrown across her path so that Blake can clothesline her. It works, and she kicks Reese right out of the arena, not only eliminating her by ring-out, but by depleting her aura past the allowed level.

The fight continues! Arslan is employing a similar trick, sliding around the ice side of the arena with her dart wire functioning as a grapple, and Yang has found her footing on the ice, chasing her in the fashion that Yang usually does: firing her shotgun shells on Ember Celica to direct her momentum. Elsewhere, Nadir lands on the ice arena, clearly ready to make up for his earlier performance, but Weiss is not here to take part, she’s here to take over: she grabs Bolin with a black (gravity-infused, exerting an attracting force) glyph, and launches him straight into Nadir, bowling them both over. They have no time to recover before she’s got them in the grips of another glyph, through which she manipulates the ice dust underneath them, forming a fucking giant hand that grabs them in its fist and curls into a ball, which she rolls across the arena.

Man, Weiss. That’s OP.

The soundtrack, I should mention, is Weiss-flavored, with themes of breaking free from others’ control and deciding one’s own fate. Get used to this, we’ve got at least four more of the same to go.

Arslan, who is still trying to occupy Yang, notices this and rolls her eyes, and takes it upon herself to free them. She stops herself short, faces down the ice boulder, and hits it with a fire-infused palm strike that shatters it, freeing her two teammates.

This apparently makes for an opportune moment, and Weiss calls for Yang, before crafting a huge ice wall. And now we get the part of this that is truly painful: the team attack.

Yang launches herself along the curved ice wall, and grabs Blake’s kusarigama when she throws it. Blake basically hops on Ruby’s shoulders, and Ruby does a little leap forward to “launch” her, resulting in Blake throwing Yang over her shoulder and Yang slamming into Arslan, Bolin, and Nadir fist-first like a wrecking ball, launching them all out of the arena in one big blast.

*sigh*

Alright, let’s just sum up: in order to land a decisive strike on recovering opponents, you decide to construct a huge, complicated attack...

Your Fight Scene Sucks: 24

…That essentially boils down to “throw Yang at the opponent”.

Your Fight Scene Sucks: 25

That point needs some elaboration. This is clearly meant to be appreciated in the same way we appreciated the double attacks from Volume 2’s Paladin mech fight. Except in that instance, RWBY was combining unique factors of their own, highly individual and seemingly-clashing styles, and doing so harmoniously. This, by comparison, is just a lot of incompatible parts of their fighting styles coming together. Even the Nevermore fight from Volume 1 shames this, because slingshotting Ruby in that instance was made believable and necessary by the distance, agility, and durability of the opponent. There’s no real reason to do this instead of just, say, having Yang or any other member run up to them and punch them. It would take less time, time that the other team is probably using to figure out what’s happening and prepare, and as we see in the very next episode, it’s not like people wouldn’t think of doing exactly that.

But the team celebrates their win, as achieved with their ridiculous team attack finishing move because team attacks and finishing moves are just so cool.

Ruby jumps up in glee at having won, and we cut mid-jump to her landing back on the fairegrounds with her team, complaining that she’s hungry. The rest of the team takes 20-ish seconds to agree when they could’ve taken two (dialogue filler? Dialogue filler). Weiss gets a call from her father, but ignores it. Just as they’re walking off to get food, Emerald pops up—with Ruby’s pickpocketed wallet. With a cheerful laugh, as though they’re the best of friends, she returns it. Ruby simply assumes she dropped it, continuing her trend of being as observant as a goddamn rock.

Yang asks her what’s up, and Emerald offers some praise for RWBY’s fight, which causes Ruby to get all flattered. Weiss mentions that they rarely seem to see Emerald’s whole team, who have also advanced past the team rounds. We see a cut to Cinder’s team, with Emerald, Mercury, and Cinder repelling some randos, and there’s a surprise at the end: the fourth spot on their team is taken up by a girl with green eyes and black hair in pigtails—revealed to be Neo, when her eyes change to pink and brown—who stomps on an offender’s face.

Ruby offers Emerald along to eat with them, but she declines, citing her team members’ “introversion” (cut to Mercury sniffing a boot) and social awkwardness. Emerald mentions that she and Mercury will be moving onto the doubles round (a suspicious choice, as Cinder can reasonably be expected to be stronger than both of them, and probably Neo too). Ruby says that they’ll be sending forward Weiss and Yang.

This...almost makes sense. Ruby would make more sense, given her speed and that ridiculous scythe’s power. Weiss is a good choice because of her versatility, in that she can do a variety of things the situation may call for and can adjust for the battlefield, and her skillset can be very overpowered if she’s allowed to be on the field too long. But, there’s also her fragility issues. Yang is definitely more durable, but we the viewers have seen that her straightforward fighting style has some holes in it.

The group part ways with Emerald, who meets up with Mercury, the cheerful smile dropping off of her face almost instantly. She says she hates [RWBY], citing their insipid happiness, but on Mercury’s asking, she says she did get what she was after, meaning that Cinder’s faction wants to know who’s putting who in the doubles rounds for some reason.

We cut to RWBY at a noodle stand, which serves massive portions, and…Blake nods at the vendor, who serves her up a similar bowl filled with fish. Raw fish. Blake does the anime twinkle-eyes gag from Volume One.

‘Cause she’s a catgirl, guys. Do you get it?

RSVP: 25

Either your characters are a racial minority analog, or they’re a furry joke, Rooster Teeth. They don’t get to be both.

Weiss tries to cover the meal with her shiny Schnee Dust Company-provided credit card, but it’s thrown back at her when it comes up declined. Weiss is baffled by this, while Blake laments the loss of her fish bowl, but before she can discern that ignoring her father’s call has had a consequence, Pyrrha shows up and offers to pay. She and JNR would like to eat here, too, as it happens.

A scene cut later, everyone’s finished and full. There’s some hijinks in here I don’t care to describe—Pyrrha is polite, Jaune is pathetic, Nora is kooky, and Ren is sensible, you get the picture. JNPR’s match is next, and Ruby asks if they think they’re ready. Nora starts off optimistic…

N: Of course! We’ve got a world-renowned fighter on our team, what’s basically a ninja, I can bench five of me, [fumbling] Jaune…! We’ve trained all year, our weapons are awesome, Glynda barely yells at us anymore, and uhhh…Jaune!

R: …Aaaare you gonna take that?

J: [head buried in arms] She’s not wrong.

So Jaune is still a noticeable weak spot in the team? Good to know that hasn’t magically gone away, I suppose.

N: I’m kiddinnnnng, he knows I’m kidding! Don’t be so nervous, the worst that can happen is that we lose, then it’s just a few more years of walking around school with everyone knowing we’re failures, [quickly becoming anxious] our friends will slowly abandon us to preserve their social status, we won’t be able to show our faces in class, no one will sit with us in the cafeteria, Ren and I have no parents and we have no home left to go to, we’ll be officially renamed Team Lose-iper! [face faults in despair]

I would call that a smooth way of dropping backstory hints, Rooster Teeth, except that the bolded portion has literally nothing to do with the otherwise school-related imagined happenings here. C’mon y’all, be a little less clunky. Also, Nora, calm down—a lot of teams are going to get eliminated. Hundreds of students from all around the world are competing, and spoiler alert, the finals round will consist of only eight fighters.

Pyrrha tells Nora to cheer up, because now they get to look forward to a fight with guidelines, not a fight with murderers. Pyrrha has no reason to say this, because she has not engaged any murderers at any point—only Grimm and CRDL so far. But whatever. Pretty soon, they’re called to check in for their match.

Back at Amity Colosseum, RWBY enter at the same time as Emerald and Mercury, but go different directions to their stadium seats, Yang looking curiously over her shoulder at them as they go. JNPR enter the arena, which right now is a blank set of panels with a raised center, along with their competitors. Emerald and Mercury are in their seats later, Mercury with popcorn, and Cinder sits down—with Emerald making it clear they already know who will win and Cinder popping a corn kernel by heating it between her fingertips.

The match is Team JNPR of Beacon versus Team BRNZ (“bronze”) of Shade Academy, which represents Vacuo, though we don’t know whether it’s a Hunstmen’s prep school like Signal or a specialty school like Beacon isn’t made clear—it’s probably the latter, but there’s no way of knowing for sure. Vacuo, by the way, is Sun’s homeland, in case you needed a reminder, and is primarily desert.

Holograms pop up around the arena displaying rapidly spinning figures on a wheel, deciding the arena layout, which ends up being half dense green forest and half mountainous crags—with a thundercloud expressed on the latter hologram. We close out on JNPR vs BRNZ about to begin.

Now, our newly-established tradition: going over the opening animation and forming our bullet list for the Volume’s Final Thoughts:

The song is “When It Falls”, and in my opinion, it is extremely chaotic and unwelcome in my ears. The theme carries over from “Time to Say Goodbye” in that it brings us from ‘somewhat ominous’ to ‘outright dire’. The first shot is of the broken moon at night, tilting down onto a field where a rose blooms…only to be trampled by rampaging Grimm. A zoom in on one Ursa’s eye transitions to shots of the innards of Amity Colosseum.

First up are RWBY in their team shot, then SSSN (Sun, Neptune, Sage, Scarlet, in case you forgot their names), looking fine as hell, then JNPR. Bringing up the rear is Emerald, Cinder, and Mercury. We get a familiar zoom-in onto Cinder’s burning eyes with flames rising in the background, before transitioning back to the field with its horde of Grimm. They’re assaulting Beacon, crashing through its courtyards, converging on the CCT tower. There’s a shot of Glynda and Ozpin on one side of the glass in his office, with eager Grimm waiting on the other side, pressed up against the glass. They see only their own reflections, though—before the glass shatters, but on the other side is open sky, filled with warships. We zoom into one and see Ironwood, surrounded by soldiers both living and robotic, prepared for battle. We cut to Blake striding through the Forever Fall Forest, only to pass a clearing in the distance where Adam is present with assembled White Fang forces. Adam turns his back to his men, and they fade away into rose petals along with the scene shortly thereafter, transitioning once again to the same Grimm horde, which is being met by opposing heroic forces—JNPR, RWBY, and a shit ton of Atlesian soldiers. Then we cut to similar one-on-one battle shots, like last Volume’s opening. Yang vs. Mercury is here again, Blake is fighting Adam this time, Weiss is fighting Emerald (again), and Ruby is fighting Cinder. We cut to Weiss looking up in admiration at what can only be her older sister, who must be Winter—she looks like Weiss if she were taller, in her twenties, and dressed like she was more prepared for a business meeting than a high-society ball. Winter looks away and walks away, and another scene shows us Ruby and Yang with an older, sword-wielding man who must be their renowned uncle, Qrow. Winter and Qrow get up in each other’s faces in a hostile display, before Qrow’s attention is drawn to a passing photograph on the wind. There’s a zoom in on it, showing us Qrow, Taiyang, the swordswoman from the train incident (Raven), and a white-hooded girl who must be Summer Rose. There’s a zoom-in on the gears in the sword Qrow is wielding in the picture, which transitions to real, moving gears, which itself transitions to a scene of an orb of pulsing darkness. This fades out to show us RWBY and JNPR falling at high speed down a shaft of some sorts, hands linked, and the chain breaks, leaving JNPR falling and only RWBY still together. We cut to RWBY sitting with their backs together in a dark void, looking full of despair, before we cut to black and the shining white letters of “RWBY” fade in and then out.

I want you to pay special attention to the very first bolded portion, because it’s the one that will be relevant next episode. Last Volume’s trailer and opener were the first ones to imply Sun had a team that would be present (which was a lie). This Volume’s opening is now implying they have an active role to play—and it must be a prominent one, if they’re being showcased before deuteragonist team JNPR.

But I’ll see you then.

Counts:

Jaune: 16
It Was Right There: 3
Fauxminism: 6
Hypocrisy: 8
Ice Cream Queens: 0
Reliable Leaders: 9 + 1
- Prowling Wolf Fallacy: 1
Threatening Enemies: 4
Love to Be a Part of It Someday: 18
Your Fight Scene Sucks: 25 + 12
- Evisceration Evasion: 13
Ill Logic: 29
Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Veil: 11 + 2
- Wink Wink, Nudge Nudge: 1
- Band-Aid Brigade: 1
RSVP: 25
Road to Nowhere: 7
Y.A.S. Queen: 3
Rooster Tease: 5