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surgeworks) wrote2022-10-29 11:17 am
RWBY - Volume 3 Final Thoughts
23 – Volume 3 Finale | Table of Contents | Shane’s Letter
____________________
*pacing back and forth*
*stops for a moment, facing the computer, then continues pacing*
Volume Three. It’s… It’s a lot, no matter what angle you try to take it on from.
It’s the volume Monty was working on when he died. As such, it retains a special place in fandom as the last part of the show he had a hand in. It is considered a peak by some fans, the point of the story where the team was truly able to show their true animation and writing chops. I’ve made the case that this is, in some areas, true. To other fans, it’s where everything started crashing and burning. I’d find myself agreeing with that, too.
I’ve already made mention of the fact that this volume is the one people get rather protective about. As the volume finished in the wake of Monty’s death, criticizing it—even when it was presenting obvious trip-ups—felt like criticizing Monty himself. Obviously, you and I know that’s not true, but that was the feeling pervading the air. If you dared to suggest there was a flaw, you were beating down the work of a man who had recently passed before his time. And the idea that Rooster Teeth might not be following the plan he had was not tolerated, even by people who actually felt that way—that suspicion felt unsettling and dangerous.
I will say I do think Rooster Teeth could’ve, if they had the right idea, bothered to dispel some of the vitriol accompanying said protectiveness. But they benefited from it, and still do. There will be more to say on that later, though. We have enough on our plate going ahead.
Before I go on, I want to address some things.
I knew this volume would be a lot. I knew it would bring some troubles. I didn’t expect to never have to deal with some arguments in the comments, particularly around such characters as Qrow and Ironwood. Lo and behold, I was right.
*sits down at the computer*
So let me say something very firmly: Try to remember that I am not your enemy.
The fact of the matter is, I just think RWBY is poorly written and want to analyze how. At this comm, we need to be better than getting caustic because the wrong thing was said about a show or a character we like. I’m just taking the show as it’s shown to me and reacting as I do. I’m not anyone’s waiter, either—I am not getting paid to take vitriol and turn the other cheek.
I haven’t been flawless in this respect, either. So if we’ve clashed in the past, I want you to have my sincere apologies. If you feel like you’re not welcome to comment here, know that you are. As long as you’re here in good faith and not just trying to tear me down for examining a show or character you like, we can disagree all day. I consider it my job to convince you, not deter you.
Some of you have even convinced me on occasion. One such example is the “Ice Cream Queens” count. While I disagree with the highly specified approach others have cited and feel the spirit is still there, I was basing this on the feeling that Volume Three was essentially throwing women into the meat grinder to create the drama. And while I could argue that’s true, I’ve been thinking, and it’s occurred to me that while women do die in later volumes, there isn’t any volume off the top of my head where this becomes such a glaring issue besides this one.
So, in light of that, I’ve decided to retire the Ice Cream Queens count going forward. Its points will be absorbed into the Fauxminism count.
Fauxminism: 13
However, I am also not going to play defense all day. I know the difference between a polite comment and a politely-worded comment. I know the difference between genuine criticism and pointed attacks meant to make me defend my spork. I do not have the time or energy to argue with people who won’t separate themselves from a show they like and have already decided whatever I say against it is wrong—I went through that for several years on other sites, and I’m not going through it again here. You can decide for yourself if this spork is for you, and if it’s not, I won’t mind.
With that said, let’s take off.
Story
In becoming the first era of RWBY to actually have a complete story that shoots for more than “passable” and has better progression of events with very little filler to be had, Volume Three’s story would hold up. The ambition was going places. It’s just that the ideas that were slotted in as the big game-changers…sucked.
The maidens’ powers make little sense in their story placement, and we aren’t given a reason these powers are so desirable beyond simply being power—and, without being sufficiently impressive, that alone isn’t good enough. It’s obvious that whatever might happen later, right now there still wasn’t a solid goal on the part of the villainous faction beyond causing chaos, which is really sad because the heroic faction are still purely reactive at this point.
The tone went full darkness this season. I’m not gonna argue that the darker tone makes RWBY feel more mature, and meshes well with the increased ambition in the execution, with everything feeling well-designed and all the cherries on top. But besides the bad ideas for the general plot with the maidens, the fumbles at the last second are what screw it up. The deaths of beloved characters like Penny and Pyrrha, plus the tense and dire tone, might have been something I could brush off if not for the fumbles with Adam and Cinder and the freakin’ silver eyes.
The technical aspects of writing are important. I tend to be really compelled by solid emotion, but you can’t rely on that alone, any more than aesthetic or spectacle, elements which were carrying the show in prior seasons. There’s so many swerves and twists and shocks that I really can’t help but feel like this was cobbled together from mismatched ideas and not really double-checked.
Characters
Main Cast
Ruby Rose
This character is really coasting by. She’s there, especially in the later episodes, but the villains driving so much of the plot leaves her little room to shine. Her best moments come at the end, when she puts the pieces together that something isn’t right, that Penny and Pyrrha are in danger, and famously just isn’t fast enough to save them.
Really, the problem with Ruby is that we don’t have things we know that she wants. We know Yang wants to find her birth mother. We know Weiss wants independence and growth. We know Blake wants reform and equality without the issues that plagued her past. But we just don’t have anything like that for Ruby herself. The end of the volume finally seeks to give her some, what with the silver eyes and avenging Pyrrha and Penny, but how well it plays out (that is, badly) is a matter for next volume.
Weiss Schnee
You could almost forget Weiss was a racist in the first volume, hence my repeated assertion that she probably shouldn’t have been made one in the first volume. Her character is driven and direct, and compelling, if a little basic. I did mention that the whole deal with not being able to summon with her hereditary semblance was an obvious patch job so that Weiss has something to do now that her prior conflicts with racism and friction with her teammates are done with. But hey, a patch job is still work and it still works well in her favor, and the way it’s tied in with her trailer is good. Perhaps by sheer luck, the new summoning arc really works in her favor as it aligns with her confronting her issues within her family and her team dynamic.
Blake Belladonna
Wasn’t here this volume.
Well, she was here at the end. But in the main bulk of the volume, she was absent, and so her character didn’t go very far, and fans noticed. You could say that her screentime and character finally gets a kick in the pants near the end of the volume, but that’s where she got beat with the Battered Woman stick, so I wouldn’t exactly say it did her any good. Blake’s major struggle was with the plight of her race—hence her vendetta against the racist Torchwick and his control over the White Fang. This was supposedly where her split with Adam was concerned, especially if we go by her own description of events in the middle of this very volume. But now Adam is a wifebeater and Blake will be pulling double duty going forward, balancing the racism subplot with the abusive ex thing (and eventually tossing both in the garbage).
I could say this feels like another patch job, but it really doesn’t, because unlike with Weiss’ patch job, the primary character arc Blake was going through wasn’t done with, and won’t be for some time—although I could believe this was as far as anyone had written on the racism subplot when Monty died and the rest had to be made up from scratch. But I have many thoughts on that and the only one that’s relevant here is that this doesn’t feel right. I have an idea of what this is, and it’s a really bad one.
Yang Xiao Long
Yang got the bulk of the real character development this volume, if you count trauma as development. It’s not really as well-done as Weiss’ (and Weiss’ isn’t exactly smooth and seamless) but all of the terrible things that happen to Yang here do at least let viewers know that she’ll have a lot to do going forward.
In a weird twist, you could call it the predictability of Yang’s character that lets her get knocked around by the cruel hand of fate so easily. The villains know they can count on Yang to defend herself and use this to ruin her on international television. We as the viewers know that we can count on Yang to go ballistic in Blake’s defense, not only because that’s a ‘Yang’ thing to do but because she did so with Weiss earlier in the volume—but Adam turns out to be quite a different beast than Flynt and Neon.
Perhaps this is hubris, because if I recall correctly, one of the criticisms early RWBY detractors commented on was the blandness of Yang’s character and how things always seem to go her way. Well, that’s not so anymore, huh?
Jaune Arc
In a twist so bizarre that it feels like we’ve entered a weird parallel world, Jaune actually comes out the most squeaky-clean of the cast. Yeah, I worked in a single Jaune point for his critical failing late in the volume, but facing facts here, that point represents less how Jaune was being damaged and more how this latest damage was something he just didn’t have the credit score for.
Many RWBY fans, Jaune-antis and otherwise, cite this as his best volume, and it is. And that’s just proof of what happens when you let him be a character and not the main character. Things have turned on their head this volume with Jaune largely supporting Pyrrha’s own character development instead of the other way around. He looks very good, and he doesn’t enrage me as he usually does. The emotional drama is there.
He’s going to have to subsist on that for about five minutes before Volume Four starts.
Pyrrha Nikos
Oh, Pyrrha, Pyrrha, Pyrrha… Was Fate reserving its most sadistic acts for you and you alone?
In a way, Pyrrha represents both the best and worst of RWBY in this volume. She really shows what the writing team are capable of when they sit down and think.
I mean, take a look at Blake and Yang. Their arc-related struggles, a racist system and a search for a missing mother, respectively, have nothing to do with the tragedies that befall them this volume, that being a vengeful ex and...erm, being in the path of the vengeful ex. In contrast, Pyrrha’s ultimate kicks to the face come as a direct consequence of her own arc-related struggle, that being her “destiny”--to become a protector, but potentially at the cost of everything she is. That’s good! That’s why people were more invested in her here than in any other volume, and in any other character in the show, even the above two.
Unfortunately, in true RWBY fashion, Pyrrha largely also represents more of what could have been had it not been royally fucked up. In a way, her dying was sort of her only option. Imagine if she survived the volume—what would they do with her, then? It was obvious that the maidens plot was the only one Pyrrha could claim as her own. Once that was over with, what were they going to do? The only options were more shoddy patch jobs or her death.
Doesn’t mean the options we had left were good, mind you. I’ve already pointed out that Pyrrha dying literally makes no sense, and she essentially walks to her doom for no reason and to the benefit of nobody else.
Well. Excepting perhaps one person. But that’s for later.
This rounds out our main characters, and it’s largely a ‘8/’ kind of feeling so far. I could believe that RWBY fans feel that this is where the characters were at their most well-written, because RWBY fans don’t look past the surface level. This is where the RWBY cast was at its most emotionally-charged, and while I wouldn’t call any of them necessarily bad or uninteresting at this point, it is very noticeable how the writing crew is basically having to screw things in as they go along.
Side Cast
Lie Ren and Nora Valkyrie
Why are these two even here? I mean, yeah, I could bring up the crumbs they got—they get a split-second line mentioning they are essentially homeless, and late in the volume they get to actually *gasp* interact with Pyrrha on an individual level! Once. For a largely humorous scene.
That’s not very good guys, considering it’s literally the most developed we’ve ever seen these two. I can’t give them a Someday point, because it was there, but it sure wasn’t much.
Ozpin
Perhaps as a consequence of the plot actually being plugged in now, Ozpin warrants his own character slot. Unfortunately, every criticism I could level at him was already pointed out by Cinder: he is the epitome of an unreliable leader. Some of this comes as a consequence of him acting in the only ways he really can under the weight of the current plot, i.e., I’m sure he wouldn’t be forcing incredibly dangerous experiments and devastating burdens on teenage girls if teenage girls were not his only options here. Others, however, are floating right past Rooster Teeth as they continue to not see how really, really bad he looks keeping everything hush hush purely because the Grimm will get antsy if anyone thinks bad thoughts.
I mean, Cinder proves my points regarding the Prowling Wolf Fallacy. Ozpin’s main concern being the potential for panic attracting the Grimm ends up putting egg on his face, because that’s a struggle he can literally only lose in the end. Cinder has the benefit of a broad goal here—her general goal is chaos and she can pursue that in any number of ways. It’s like trying to keep a balloon from popping in a crowd all holding sharp objects—that balloon is popping one way or another, damn it. Yet instead of trying for anything regarding actually stopping Cinder or her plans, he lets them play out right up until they’re on the verge of collapse anyway and Pyrrha is involved far too late to save anything.
At the very least, he has a character now that isn’t “general Dumbledore vibe”. He doesn’t look too ill-written here, unlike later volumes, but the fact remains this should’ve been his outro. He should’ve died here, instead of Pyrrha, taking his knowledge with him. Not that he did that much with it while he was here.
James Ironwood
It is amazing how all Ironwood needed was a fight scene and a shirtless scene for fandom opinion on him to completely mostly reverse. Before the end of the volume, he was regarded as an obvious weak link in the Big Good Conspiracy, a backstabber, and probably working for Cinder, theories I’ve poked holes in before. In truth, he comes off as just a guy in charge trying to work with the most inefficient, uncooperative people ever. But there is some good here.
His treatment of Pyrrha and Yang is noticeably more fair, straightforward, and sympathetic than resident newcomer Qrow—which sticks out, as one of those girls is the latter’s nephew. He is literally the only adult in the room that should be trusted with any responsibility, as literally everything that goes wrong near him can be laid at the feet of other people: Cinder for hacking his robots and targeting Penny, and Ozpin for failing to stop or account for the security breach taking place right underneath his office that led to both events. And when everything goes to hell in a handbasket, he’s the first one to get on the front lines and try to fix things. For all that he’s apparently supposed to be a brash buffoon who has no heart and can’t find ‘subtlety’ in the dictionary, he’s at least proactive.
That is what heroic characters, or at least protagonists, should be: proactive.
Qrow Branwen
Die.
The award for “character most widely-beloved by the fandom yet hated by me in particular” goes to this guy, because the guy in second place had long since been left in the dust.
When characters do not call out the behavior of other characters or react to them in realistic ways, and the character in question is permitted to behave with aggression, rudeness, and hostility, you’ve got a Jerk Sue on your hands. I was right to think that Qrow would be a major hot button this volume, despite the fact that even the RWBY writing crew later cottoned on to the fact that his popularity wasn’t universal and he did, in several scenarios, come across as unlikeable.
But this is back in 2015, and no one who was writing this mess realized that he was, indeed, unlikeable. The appeal of abrasive characters like Qrow is that, while they provide problems to unit dynamics, the people they’re assholes to occasionally deserve it, and the people they love receive otherwise-unseen warmth. It’s the same principle as Weiss—you weren’t supposed to like Weiss for how stuck-up and rude she was, you were supposed to like her for how she grew out of that, which isn’t the case with Qrow.
Qrow doesn’t have that. The people he’s an asshole to (Ironwood and Winter) are trying to help his cause and we’re never given a reason why he dislikes them that would make his behavior towards them understandable. Instead of giving us a reason as to why Qrow dislikes them to justify his behavior, we are instead supposed to take his behavior towards them as proof that they must deserve it—that’s standard Suethor writing and I am ashamed to see how well it worked on several people I’ve spoken to about it. The people he should be warm to (Ruby and Yang) get a couple rounds of video games with him and then, when Yang most needs some support, he’s disappointingly ill-equipped or unwilling to provide it.
Y.A.S. Queen: 6
I mean, at least he brings Ruby back home in the end? But let’s just try to avoid that becoming yet another “Where the hell was Qrow” question. Because between Volumes Two and Three, we can ask that question three times:
Child Yang and toddler Ruby walk out into the woods full of Grimm and are only saved in the nick of time? Glad that Qrow got there in time, but where the hell was he when they first left? Amber is being accosted by individuals who want her power and will go to any lengths to get it? Where the hell was he when the cyclone first appeared in the sky? Only in this latest case does he have the benefit of having to fight off enormous waves of Grimm to provide him with an immediate excuse as to why he wasn’t where Ruby was during this time.
I bring this up because the fandom, even today, seems more willing to hold the actual parents Taiyang and Raven responsible for what happens, when Qrow is already building up a pattern of not being present when he really, really should be as the guardian figure. Qrow is the one we should be examining here.
But speaking of characters who aren’t present…
Winter Schnee
She was shaky enough while she lasted, but that wasn’t long. That the crew had the audacity to advertise her in the intro they stuck before every episode in the volume, when she sticks around for 1/6th of it, is appalling. She seems to have essentially been created to serve as the seamstress for Weiss’ patch job character arc, introducing summoning and the problem of Weiss not being able to do it. Her name and relative age seem to come as a bonus of this rather than an intentional planned purpose, because Winter will continue to be conspicuously absent going forward.
You will recall (unless I just somehow failed to mention it) that when Weiss having a sister was brought up, everyone initially thought that it would be a younger sister. That’s because Weiss would presumably have to be the oldest in order to be the heiress to her company. This makes it appear as though Winter was aged up to suit this quick fix for Weiss’ character going forward before being swiftly kicked back into the void.
Winter probably wasn’t actually aged up, in all likelihood, but I do know her design was scrapped and replaced. And even if she wasn’t aged up, that doesn’t change the fact that once Winter had served a purpose, she was booted out.
Love to Be a Part of It Someday: 28
This is going to look very bad come next post.
Sun Wukong
*stands up and starts to pace again*
*stops short several times, tries to speak, keeps pacing*
*finally putting a hand against the wall and sighing*
I think if more people liked this character—and perhaps if less people had been so threatened by his existence, I say pointedly—fans might have been more willing to examine what was going on here. Because it’s not difficult to spot.
The difference between, say, Coco and Sun is that we know Coco was not part of the plan. We know that she is an addition deliberately made to appeal to the fandom—they liked Velvet’s design, so they wanted more Velvet, and she accordingly was given a team who were total badasses. That’s not the case with Sun. If you know what I know, you know Sun and his team were some of the first characters Monty designed, that they were based design-wise on the members of a kpop boy band he liked (God I really hope none of them had the misfortune to be designed after Seung-Ri…) and you can tell via their placement in the intro and the way they keep appearing that they are supposed to be important.
And yet they aren’t, and don’t do anything of note. What little we get from Sun’s team is that Sun is competent, and that Neptune is, haha, get this, afraid of water. Yes, I am still mad enough to boil water in my skull over that. Of Sage and Scarlet, we get literally nothing. They’re air filling space.
Just like last time I brought this up, Sun (and to a much, much lesser degree, his team) are actually present and onscreen in a majority of the episodes in this volume, but never actually get to do things. The exact same pervasive energy runs through this, hinging on the obvious question of why they’re in scenes they aren’t contributing to. This doesn’t happen to any other characters—Winter was swiftly removed once she had served her purpose, and even paper-thin characters Ren and Nora got to kinda-sorta interact with Pyrrha and contribute to her development when onscreen and are offscreen when they aren’t.
This all becomes especially apparent at the volume’s final act, once everything goes to shit: guys, run a Ctrl+F and type in “Sun” on my posts recapping Episodes 9 through 12. The number of results is way higher than in previous episodes.
Sun in particular has a good 95% of his lines and screentime here despite still being pointedly glossed over. When Ruby decides to intervene and stop the rogue ship, it’s Sun that comments on it despite other options being available. Yang may have been the one to get her arm lopped off, but it’s Sun that has the last critical interaction with Blake—offscreen. And it appears Sun was the one who bandaged Blake and Yang once they were injured while Weiss was recovering. If you had only watched those episodes, you would get the impression that he had been very involved in prior episodes in the volume.
And I am doubling down on the conclusion I reached the last time I was addressing them in my final thoughts: there is an obvious schism here. Someone at Rooster Teeth wanted them to be involved and doing things, and someone else was trying to nip that in the bud. There are a lot of hard-to-miss signs here that this character was intended to be important, but people just have blinders on because...I don’t know, I guess.
I mean, I swear to you that the hype for these boys existed. It wasn't small, either. There were plenty of fans constantly and vocally hoping these four would get to be involved and do cool things, soon. Hell, a few fanartists peddled some Yang x Sage stuff that got mildly popular, even. I've seen newer fans (and the occasional infamous noteworthy stan) scoff at the idea that SSSN being a point of fandom interest was ever a thing, or that it could've been a thing with any reasonable basis in how they were marketed. But they were--I was there, and I have better things to do here than lie. It happened, and it only highlights the bizarre determination Rooster Teeth--and seemingly, Miles and Kerry--had to hide them. These are the only characters this happens to.
Because think about it: acquiescing to fans is the Rooster Teeth strategy. They took note of the shipping names and used them as action calls. Roman was well-received, so they wrote him into more episodes and even gave him his own partner in crime. Fans went nuts over Velvet Scarlatina, so they went as far as to give her her own whole team and dedicate some spotlight to them, too. And while all this is happening, fans are also asking for more SSSN--yet they buck the trend by being actively shut out of the plot and mocked by the framing when they're onscreen. It's highly noticeable! Especially when contrasted with the continued marketing that runs counter to their actual treatment.
I am now going to consider something that some will criticize as patently ridiculous. But it can’t be that ridiculous, because I have seen other people suggest it in murmurs as of later volumes.
I am wondering if it’s possible that SSSN were originally the beta team to RWBY.
They are an all-male team to contrast RWBY’s all-female team. Their designs consist of bright colors and appealed to Monty’s personal design senses. Like RWBY, they share a team name with their leader, and like RWBY, they are a multicultural team with one faunus apiece. They are a team with established connections to literary figures, which is otherwise reserved mostly for the core cast (for example, CRDL do not have historical or literary connections at all save for Cardin). We know they were created very early.
And perhaps I would not be so obliged to nod my head at this theory were it not for weaker parts of the dynamic in the actual beta team. I don’t believe JNPR (“Juniper”…that team name still seriously rings up as awkward) were new additions created to replace SSSN, as we know Pyrrha’s fate was determined from the beginning. But Nora and especially Ren give off extremely cardboard vibes that say they were largely created to fill space—for example, literally Ren’s only connection to his alleged historical domain inspiration Hua Mulan is simply having an Asian-leaning design. Some of the early stumbles Jaune was going through could also be read as him being a character that was not originally as heavily involved as he ended up being.
Whatever’s going on here, it’s not as invisible as I’m sure some people at Rooster Teeth would like to believe.
[01]
Sure, I could be making a mountain out of an intro card, but this has always stuck out to me. The above pictures are the “main cast” card slides, which appear in the first seconds of the Volume 3 intro. They are the only characters framed like this and are arranged left-to-right for you in the order they’re shown. It has always bothered me because unlike in Volume Two’s intro, this is an extremely suspect placement and apparently regards SSSN as main cast members, despite how determined the crew apparently were to make them disappear, and the shot recurs later in the penultimate episode of the volume.
Whatever happened, we’re awarding the points.
Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Veil: 15
Love to Be a Part of It Someday: 29
This, too, is all going to look worse than I’m framing it before we get to Volume 4.
Penny Polendina
I’m running out of ways to say “this character did not particularly impress me but I still like them well enough and they didn’t enrage me”. But that’s about the case.
What with the way Penny was introduced in the tail end of Volume One, largely absent in Volume Two, and dies in Volume Three, getting a read on her is difficult. I remain convinced that she wasn’t killed for shock value, but also don’t know why she was killed. I know she was a character that had intriguing ties to Atlas and was learning to make her own decisions.
Really, what makes Penny an Ice Cream Queen isn’t even that her death will be used as other characters’ development—it should, because Ruby liked her and saw her butchered before her very eyes, and a motive for Ruby to confront the villains is sorely needed at this point—but I know for a fact that future volumes will barely remember to namedrop her. It will be like she doesn’t exists, up until the point she re-enters the picture, and after she does...well, let’s just say that ‘fridged’ would actually be a step up. No, what makes her an Ice Cream Queen is the fact that, as I pointed out above, Cinder has endless ways to potentially move the Grimm to her desired mass attack, if all she needs is negative emotions to do it. But specifically, Penny gets struck down for it.
It Was Right There: 8
I don’t know, man. Penny getting torn apart was a gut punch, and while it felt appropriate for the tone of the show at that point, it didn’t feel appropriate for the character. She wasn’t much of a character, but I wanted to see her go further than she did.
Villains
Cinder Fall
Cinder continues to dominate the game largely because the heroic faction won’t do anything to stop her. Qrow is off somewhere doing who knows what until the dramatically appropriate moment for him to “save” Amber, and Ozpin stamps his feet every time Ironwood points out that they should maybe do something about the obvious enemy intrusion into their field of operations. She enjoys the benefit of a broad goal with innumerable possible processes, yes, but in the end, she chose a complicated route that could’ve been defanged with some sensible behavior.
Threatening Villains: 7
Emerald and Mercury
Both of these characters enjoy a teensy bit of actual exploration into their pasts in the middle of the Volume, but Mercury doesn’t get much besides being a sociopath with robot legs who had a homicidally abusive father—okay you know what, that’s actually a lot. Or at least it sounds like a lot. The way in which it was all glossed over pissed me off, though. Emerald didn’t fare much better as her street rat backstory with her stealing to survive was terribly written and doesn’t much justify why she’ll butcher innocent people to please Cinder.
Emerald is hilariously critical to Cinder’s over-complicated plan, to the point that between her and Neo, you can largely accuse Cinder of being the weakest link in her own damn team. Even Cinder’s intrusion into the CCT probably could’ve been done easier by someone with Emerald’s powers.
Adam Taurus
I am so sorry for what they did to you here, Adam. No one was expecting it, and no one should’ve expected it. People were mad, and they had every right to be. While no one could’ve been sure what this character’s eventual meeting with Blake would look like, I can promise you not a single person envisioned it looking like this.
He’s a creepy, abusive, stalking, wife-beating lunatic with a sword, flushing away all the intrigue of his clean and sharp design and racially-motivated violence.
I mean, he presents threateningly if you squint really hard, I guess. It’s obvious why Cinder hesitated to force the issue before gaining half the Fall Maiden’s power, because apparently this dude can solo main characters just as well as gigantic robot boss fights, and is an unstable son of a bitch who takes slights very personally, holy shit.
But I also happen to know that the way things went in the final product was not the original plan, and yes, I actually have proof of this. But even if I didn’t, I’d be willing to say it. If you want one of the main reasons that people started to suspect the RWBY Monty Oum wanted does not match the RWBY Rooster Teeth created, look no further than this character. It’s not something a lot of people have said out loud, but it’s something plenty of people were thinking. This was such a hard, utterly careless swerve from what had already been established, what we had already been shown, that people really had no choice. No one was willing to believe this was what Adam had originally been written as, and unlike with Pyrrha’s death, no one at Rooster Teeth openly professed that it was. How could they, when odds are they’d get called out on it? Georden Whitman certainly proved ready to spill the beans.
And no, this will not be the last time a character on a clear path is derailed onto a more evil one.
Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Veil: 16
Torchwick and Neo will not warrant character slots here. Neo essentially exists as something cool to look at who occasionally makes the villains’ job easier, and Torchwick was not present in this Volume until an episode before his death. I already went over everything I wanted to say about him immediately after his death scene, anyway.
Music
Here’s the Volume 3 tracklist:
- When It Falls
- I’m the One
- It’s My Turn
- Not Fall In Love With You
- Neon
- Mirror Mirror Part II
- Divide
- Cold
- Time to Say Goodbye (Acoustic Version)
- It’s My Turn (James Landino Remix)
Along with a few battle themes for the tournament fights and the episode scores.
“When It Falls” is of course the opening theme for Volume Three, which I have skipped every single time I’ve heard it start after the first listen. A chaotic and irritating song, if you ask me.
“I’m the One” was the song I mentioned in Emerald and Mercury’s fight with Coco and Yatsuhashi. It is basically a song hinting at their backstories and explaining that they are merciless killers who should be feared and avoided.
“It’s My Turn” is the song that played over RWBY’s fight with ABRN, and has definite Weiss tones as the singer declares rebellion from their controlling force. Between that and Mirror Mirror Part II, this would start the trend of “Weiss songs” in each volume’s soundtrack that would eventually get the fandom complaining that she and occasionally Yang are the only characters Jerff Williams knows how to compose and write lyrics for.
“Not Fall In Love With You” is the one I would like to talk about. Given the lyrics and how Jeff sings it, plus its placement in the volume (a brief moment after SSSN’s match in the tournament, when Sun does the wink-and-finger-guns at Blake), this is very clearly a song intended, much like “Boop” for Nora to Ren and “Shine” for Pyrrha to Jaune, to describe Sun’s feelings for Blake. In short, it’s a ship song. Those are things now, they have been for a while.
Most people, when recalling controversy surrounding ship songs, tend to recall “bmblb” from Volume 4’s soundtrack, which got a lot of people angry as it was teasing Blake and Yang (“Bumbleby”) when those two—spoiler alert—don’t interact at all that volume, and thus functioned largely as a cocktease to a popular ship (or gay bait, if you will). I can relate, because this song—Not Fall In Love With You—was pissing me off, too.
I have always preferred the Eclipse/Black Sun ship in Blake and Sun, and it did not pass me by this song was coming about on a soundtrack for a volume in which Sun, having been so thoroughly shut out of the plot and having barely interacted with the rest of the cast, had also barely interacted with Blake. Sun and Blake’s relationship, which had been given some focus in Volume Two, had been sent down the toilet along with the rest of Sun’s character and Blake’s screentime. I viewed this as a slap in the face.
Actually, I think this might’ve a last straw for me. I’m not sure if it was this, or the release of the tracklist. I know it happened in May… But I’m getting ahead of myself, here.
“Neon” is of course a song embodying the one-off character designed to annoy Yang for an entire 15 minutes, and is annoyingly catchy about it, too.
Beyond that, I’ve already commented on Divide and Cold last post, so we don’t need to go any further than this.
Retrospective
Let’s look back on our intro again and see how the early look of Volume Three compares to its completed form.
- First up are RWBY in their team shot, then SSSN, 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.
Just whether something happened or not is not the close look we need. I’ve already pointed out in the character slot of this Final Thoughts that placing SSSN alongside RWBY, JNPR, and Cinder’s faction functionally ascribed them the same importance as those characters—and thus was dishonest as hell.
Rooster Tease: 8
Going further:
- Grimm assaulting Beacon? That happened, so check.
- Ozpin in the tower looking out on a sky full of warships? That happened, so check.
- Ironwood preparing forces for battle? Check.
- Blake confronting Adam? Okay, it didn’t happen at the Forever Fall Forest, but the meeting did happen, so check.
- Heroes versus a Grimm horde? Check.
- Yang versus Mercury? That one actually came through, surprise surprise. Check!
- Blake fighting Adam? This also happened, check.
- Weiss fighting Emerald, though, continues to be absent. That’s twice in a row they’ve paired up those two in a combat tease, and this is the second time it hasn’t come to fruition. No check.
Rooster Tease: 9
Weiss looking up at Winter is another one that needs elaboration. Yes, Winter did appear, and yes, she did have conflict with Qrow—but just like with SSSN, her placement in the intro belies exactly how little involvement she’ll really have this volume, and thus, this was dishonest.
Rooster Tease: 10
- The photograph of STRQ (prior generation’s A team, apparently) did indeed show up, so check.
- RWBY and JNPR do not fall down a shaft of any sort during the course of the volume. However, the check-or-no-check comes with the critical happening in that scene, which was something bad apparently happening to JNPR. Something bad definitely happens to Pyrrha, not her entire team, but if you look at it a certain way, the team itself is indeed destroyed by her death. I will hesitantly let it pass.
The last shot of the intro is a spinning despair shot, which about sums up how Volume Three went. We move on to the really important part of this Final Thoughts.
Hiatus Observations
(warning for subjective opinion matter from here forth)
It was a rough time.
RWBY essentially entered Volume Three at a head start, with everybody fascinated from the improved Volume Two flocking to the show eager to see more. RWBY was gaining respect in the mainstream community, and the fandom were getting more and more hype.
Each passing episode seemed to increase the energy further. Every weekend, there would be swarms of people discussing the episode, the ramifications of what happened within, and what would probably happen in the next episode. Qrow vs. Winter generated a ton of buzz, as did Emerald and Mercury vs. Coco and Yatsuhashi, and then “Fall”. The RWBY fandom may not have reached its peak size at this point, but it had reached its hype zenith. The feeds were moving at a hundred miles per hour, and every time a new episode came out, people were tuning in and already couldn’t wait for the next one. Furthermore, the fanbase were especially passionate to see the last of the work Monty had had a hand in and were paying rapt attention out of respect.
Mind you, not everything was totally popular. The tone of the show and certain characters were attracting their share of critics, even if it was low-key and got largely swept up in the waves of love. However, some of the decisions made in the last act of the volume proved extremely divisive. While many people accepted the losses of Penny and Pyrrha as something that was going to happen, others did not. Adam’s twist as of “Heroes and Monsters” was near-universally unpopular.
There were people willing to part ways with the show over these things, and they made that known. All in all, RWBY was going to survive, but not with a totally clean record, especially with how things went in fandom. It was chaos, and everyone was having to pick up the pieces. Furthermore, the truly toxic parts of the fandom chose to come out in full force. People who felt that this was not the direction the show should have taken were bitten into with some very sharp teeth—and one person who had made the decision to abandon the show over Pyrrha’s death became the target of a now-infamous person who was leading hate mobs to spam her until she attempted suicide.
Volume Three was so disliked by a section of fans that what people had been terming “rwde” (aka criticism of the show’s writing) finally took off in full force and became its own “thing” among the fandom, firmly in place.
For me, it wasn’t easy. While the RWBY fandom being toxic will not surprise anyone (seriously, there’s now whole video essays purely on how shitty RWBY fans have been, sprawled over YouTube), I’d like to draw attention to a particularly large and virulent portion of it. I’ve hinted at this before, but now, I am going to come clean and actually talk about it.
I am referring to the Bumbleby fandom. The Blake and Yang shippers.
If you’ve been paying attention to this recap, you will know from my comments that shipping in RWBY fandom has always been a major deal, and that people were shipping Ruby with Weiss and Blake with Yang as early as the trailers, before the show was officially airing and before any of these characters had even met. While White Rose, as it was called, started off strong and eventually faded as Weiss’ friction with her team cooled off and the drama drip ran dry, the Bumbleby fandom started with zero basis but increased in energy when the drama drip starting flowing in Volumes Two and Three. What’s more, White Rose didn’t have the enemy (and thus target of hate) that Bumbleby did—Sun, a character who played a very obvious love interest role to a character who was half of their ship.
(I mean, they sort of gained one for Volume Two in Neptune, but that fizzled out without too much hate being thrown around).
Of course, this doesn’t mean much since these days, these are separate parts of the fandom and look much different now than they used to. Back when all of this was happening, these shippers all tended to run in the same circles. People who shipped White Rose also tended to ship Bumbleby, and many of the “nicer” people in these circles also shipped Seamonkeys (Sun and Neptune) purely to get both guys away from the girls in their preferred ships.
Perhaps deservedly, these factions of the fandom have largely started to fracture and separate out as the more toxic parts of it coalesced. And I say “deservedly”, because these shippers made my (and many others’) online experience hell.
It was a downright miserable time. Sun was a threat to Bumbleby, and was therefore an unacceptable character. He was a terrible person, a terribly-written character, and a personal slap in the face from Rooster Teeth to their fans, and thus if you liked him, you were a misogynist and homophobic. He was called everything from a stalker to an abuser, and if you think the introduction of Adam Torrance—I mean, Taurus—lessened things any, you were wrong. All that meant was that now Beauty and the Beast was no longer viable, and so Adam was removed as a threat and Sun and his fans were the only ones left.
(I mean, I’ve only been a raging homosexual for my whole life, so I think I’d know if I were homophobic).
All kinds of abuse has been hurled towards fans who like Sun or dare to ship him with Blake, and no, it hasn’t lessened over time. It has, in fact, gotten a lot worse.
And whenever anyone bothers to bring this up, the common response from defenders has always been “Well, Black Sun fans have been toxic, too!” and, well, permit me to disabuse you of your notions. Because a) this is often said with the obvious idea that Black Sun fans had any hand in starting the “ship wars” that plague the fandom (they didn’t) and b) seems to be said with the implication that I am unfairly holding only one side accountable, and honey, that’s a dishonest take.
See, when one half of a “ship war” is a gargantuan portion of a truly massive fandom that has pointedly been harassing and attacking a much, much smaller portion of that fandom since a single character’s very first appearance, and has not let up since, I tend to side with the smaller portion who have not been shown to be guilty of sending harassment mail to everyone from other fans to the voice actors themselves (which actually produced a response asking fans to chill out, yes, that happened). Putting to one side the fact that in all my years of being in the RWBY fandom, I have laid eyes on exactly one person who shipped Black Sun and was behaving inappropriately towards other ship fandoms, and am not convinced that single person was not a troll planted to win an argument that was happening at the time, the point is that no fandom is perfect and no portion of a fandom is ever going to be perfect. People disagree and squabble and fight, it happens.
But no, Bumbleby fans that have found themselves under a microscope, no one is asking you to be perfect. People are asking you not to be colossal dickheads to other fans. This has been going on for years—I will unashamedly side with any Black Sun fan that has finally gotten fed up with the harassment that has been unceasing year after year and finally told someone to fuck off. And I don’t expect this to let up, ever, because it’s been fixed in place for far too long.
The term “wasp” was coined by annoyed Black Sun fans who kept finding aggressive Bumbleby fans in their feeds, inboxes, and tags, and the behavior of these harmful fans is such that I’m pretty sure RWBY eventually referenced them in the show. Of course, to hear some people tell it, being called the equivalent of a *looks at Supernatural fandom notes written on arm* Desti-heller means you’re the victim of a slur and have been hate crime’d.
So, yeah. You get the general vibe.
But see, I was willing to put up with this bullshit as long as the product that was unfortunately inspiring it was still good on some level. But to me, reasons to stay were slowly atrophying one by one by one. The characters I had liked were now either dead or had been irrevocably relegated to “background komedy” cast, I didn’t like where the more dramatic parts of the show had gone with the maidens and the silver eyes, and there wasn’t much left to tie me to the show that was worth waiting a whole hiatus for. The whole “Team Hot and Useless” joke along with innumerable unfunny jokes about Pyrrha, Penny, and Yang’s arm were exhausting. Once the tracklist for the Volume Three soundtrack came out (if I’m not misremembering the dates here), and I got that slap in the face I’d mentioned earlier… well, I had had enough.
I made my decision to abandon RWBY. It just wasn’t the show for me anymore, I said to myself. I wasn’t having a good time there, so I was leaving. But then, something happened. I shit you not, cross my heart, the day after I made that decision—something big happened.
Shane’s Letter came out.
Titled “An Open Letter to All Who Treasured Monty Oum”, it functioned as a 36-page account detailing Shane Newville’s working relationship with close friend Monty Oum and how he had been treated at the Rooster Teeth workspace before and since Monty’s death. It was damning.
Today, I’m absolutely shocked at how few people know or even remember that this thing exists—even as yet more allegations from ex-employees continue to flood the internet. Thirty-six pages is no joke, guys. This caused an absolute shitstorm of epic proportions, and then...blew over. It was like your house being on fire for a month straight, before going back to normal and listening to everybody act like there was never any fire.
This should have been Rooster Teeth’s “Not So Awesome” moment, guys. There were tears, and fans didn’t know what to do or who to trust. But somehow, it went away, which has left me stunned at the power of the parasocial relationship Rooster Teeth fans had with this company. Something (possibly the fallout from Kdin Jenzen’s account of her time at RT) says to me that if something like this came out today, it would explode the workspace in a much more permanent fashion…so I’m going to give it the attention it deserves.
This has been deemed too potentially inflammatory to be hosted on the comm, but I will be going through this letter line-by-line on my home journal [here]. I strongly encourage you to read through it, because if you don’t, some of the things that I say down the line later are going to confuse you.
With all of this said, there’s not much to do except look at the state of RWBY then and the state of RWBY now. To be honest with you, RWBY’s fandom is too big to ever truly die, but I can assure you it’s not nearly as loved as it used to be. I’m pretty sure Bumbleby fans are the only die-hards left who are determined to stick with the show to the end and unironically think it’s good. Every time I go back to videos of fights for this volume, or the trailers, or the soundtrack, the number one thing I see in the comments is “wow, I miss the way RWBY used to be”. Well, the way it used to be was… *waves hand at everything above* not that great, but I get why you feel that way.
Before I forget to mention this, there is one other thing about the gap after Volume Three, and that was when Rooster Teeth decided to introduce “RWBY Chibi”. Intended to air on a weekly basis during the hiatuses between RWBY’s seasonal content, it was...an odd choice. It was a kid’s show of a kid’s show, truthfully, made up of short comedic skits between the characters with none of the plot-related messes of the main show, and much more lighthearted for it, something some would say was refreshing after all the ceaseless darkness and grittiness of V3.
I would say that, having lost one brilliant animator who did a shit ton of work to make the series look good and fired another, and having infamously only just gotten the Volume Three finale finished an hour before it was due to upload…yeah, splitting your remaining animation department crew off to handle some new ‘bonus content’-esque spin-off when they could be using the hiatus time to work on the main show seems like a phenomenally stupid idea.
RWBY Chibi is wholly unimportant to the show it sprang from, and so we will pass it by the same way we passed by the RWBY manga and the RWBY anime adaptation that for some reason exists now.
So, Shane’s letter and then Volume Four. I can’t say I’m excited.
Counts:
- Jaune: 17
- It Was Right There: 8
- Fauxminism: 13
- Hypocrisy: 17
- Reliable Leaders: 15 + 5
- Prowling Wolf Fallacy: 5
- Threatening Enemies: 6
- Love to Be a Part of It Someday: 29
- Your Fight Scene Sucks: 42 + 18
- Evisceration Evasion: 18
- Ill Logic: 48
- Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Veil: 16 + 2
- Wink Wink, Nudge Nudge: 1
- Band-Aid Brigade: 1
- RSVP: 25
- Road to Nowhere: 8
- Y.A.S. Queen: 6
- Rooster Tease: 10
- LuLaRwe: 2
- The Lovegood Fallacy: 2
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23 – Volume 3 Finale | Table of Contents | Shane’s Letter
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