RWBY Volume 9 – Table of Contents

[surgeworks]

RWBY Volume 9

Written by Miles Luna, Kerry Shawcross, Eddy Rivas, and Kiersi Burkhart
Directed by Kerry Shawcross, Connor Pickens, Dustin Matthews, and Paula Decanini
Produced under Rooster Teeth

Alternate Title: The One Where Everyone Stopped Caring

RWBY, Volume 9.

Originally, these recaps were posted concurrently with the volume's release in the first half of 2023. Those posts have been preserved, so you're welcome to browse them if you want my original reactions. Of course, this Table of Contents will instead have links to posts wherein these recaps are compiled into more complete forms and some edits are made here and there for the benefit of hindsight. And before that, we need a recap of events inbetween Volumes 8 and 9, so you know why this is probably going to be the last volume of RWBY, outright.

It’s always half amusing, half heartbreaking when a product sold by a company becomes its only lifeline, because that company is so infamously shitty that they can’t turn a profit without it. Even more amusing when said lifeline is already so dead that they have to resort to actively begging people not to pirate it. Yes, I’m still cackling about that one.

Nobody expected RWBY Volume 9 to be good. Volume 8 was an extended effort to, by appearances, force people to stop caring about the show given how it was written with the seeming sole directive of undoing every good thing remaining in it. Volume 9 wouldn't have had a fair chance even if it had been released on the yearly schedule, given how all but only a few remaining die-hards left the fandom in disgust after that showing. Add in an extra-long hiatus as a result of COVID-19 impacting the series' production, piling on even more time for people to lose interest and seek out other media to consume, and it's not looking good. Unless a miracle happened, it was going to tank, so it needed to be good.

Of course, whether it was good or not came second to whether fans would or could watch it at all. In the latter half of 2022, Kdin Jenzen's bombs about Rooster Teeth dropped, and people went from merely uninterested in RWBY anymore to extremely pissed off. A familiar state for a RWBY fan, given this was only the latest in a long chain of scandals. Rooster Teeth's brand was so damaged and RWBY Volume 9's prospects were looking so bad that they did something very, very stupid, and put up another money barrier. This is something they'd done before--first moving RWBY off of YouTube and onto the Rooster Teeth website, and then penalizing non-First subscribed accounts by increasing the wait time for free episodes of RWBY from one day to one week. But like a very dumb snake failing to realize why its tail hurts when it chews on it, they didn't learn their lesson, and instead moved RWBY off of their site, where paying subscribers now couldn't access it, and onto Crunchyroll--where anyone not paying that subscription wouldn't get RWBY without paying for an entire year.

You can't make this stuff up. Naturally, this resulted in Rooster Teeth staff outright begging RWBY fans not to pirate the show, even though by doing this, they had given them the greatest incentive yet to do so. It didn't help that Ariana Filippini, one of the people who worked on Volume 9, openly encouraged people to pirate it. Saying that Volume 9, at this point, was destined for failure would be beating a dead horse, no matter how good it was. Of course, what Miles and Kerry came up with to follow Volume 8 wasn't good, and in fact it was bad right out of the gate.

If we’re actually supposed to believe the Rooster Teeth take on this, this appears to be RWBY’s “character development volume”, a concept so laughably misplaced it’s sad. Imagine a scenario in another franchise, any series you like, that’s as dire and fucked as the end of Volume 8. Imagine that you’re in the middle of a scene where someone just got killed, the world is on fire, and everything you love is being eaten by demons before your very eyes—and then the characters turn to the camera and say “let’s sit down for a minute and just talk about our feelings, where we are in life and the people we’ve become”.

I mean, if you want to have such a plot, by all means, but maybe don’t jam it right in the middle of the freaking tornado of bad plot choices that are not just unresolved, but still actively unfolding. This is not so much reflecting in the aftermath of a bomb going off, but reflecting while the blast wave is still melting your flesh off.

And the thin papery glamor of an Alice in Wonderland makeover isn’t doing the volume any favors. Alice in Wonderland was a tired content recycle bin even in 2020 when this was supposedly being written. Three years off, it’s definitely a dead horse. Trippy colors and a new setting aren’t enough to reel in exiting audiences, and the promise of a plot with challenging and compelling character arcs is bait for an audience that long since left, with no one really fooled into thinking M&K suddenly learned how to write those things.

But it happened, and now we get to recap how much it sucked and why. Let’s take a look at our counts so far.

 

• Jaune: 83
  
• It Was Right There: 63
  
• Fauxminism: 61
  
• Hypocrisy: 57
• Reliable Leaders: 80 + 17
  • Prowling Wolf Fallacy: 17 (RETIRED)
• Threatening Enemies: 59
• Love to Be a Part of It Someday: 104
• Your Fight Scene Sucks: 155 + 33
  • Evisceration Evasion: 35
• Ill Logic: 192
• Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Veil: 111 + 89
  • Wink Wink, Nudge Nudge: 34
  • Band-Aid Brigade: 55
• RSVP: 72
• Road to Nowhere: 42
• Dragged Kicking and Screaming: 52
• Y.A.S. Queen: 18
• Rooster Tease: 37
• LuLaRwe: 61
• The Lovegood Fallacy: 15
• How to Piss Off Gay People: 87
• Invisembl: 14
• Broke-Ass Clowns: 34
• Shut the Fuck Up: 18

And here are the episodes.

• 54 – V9E1 | V9E2, “A Place of Particular Concern” / “Altercation at the Auspicious Auction”
• 55 – V9E3 | V9E4, “Rude, Red, and Royal” / “A Cat Most Curious”
• 56 – V9E5 | V9E6, “The Parfait Predicament” / “Confessions Within Cumulonimbus Clouds”
• 57 – V9E7 | V9E8, “The Perils of Paper Houses” / “Tea Admidst Terrible Troubles”
• 58 – Volume 9 Finale, “A Tale Involving a Tree” / “Of Solitude and Self”

Comments

[surgeworks]

The very idea of this being a "character development" volume was always going to be hollow because to suggest the characters as they are now need to change would be to suggest they aren't right the way they are i.e. the way Miles and Kerry have driven them into the ground.