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Volume 9 continues, despite how much we wish it wouldn't.
And yes, they're going to keep doing that stupid thing with the alliterative titles.
We open on RWBY being marched through the Red King’s lands to the tune of a drumbeat, which I guess is what passes for a score these days. The other members of the team are unsure of this course of action. Ruby says that in the book,
Shut The Fuck Up: 18
the Red King helped
A blue butterfly is shown landing on a wall. Look at all that significance. Once they reach the Red King’s courtyard, the procession meets them, and we get more Weiss jump cut gags and closeups of the drummers’ drumming that most definitely doesn’t match the sound provided.
Broke-Ass Clowns: 54
LuLaRwe: 64
The Red King’s appearance and arrival has a feel nauseatingly similar to that of Caroline Cordovin from Volume 6. My awful hunch is proven correct as he appears to be much the same in personality. When Ruby identifies him as the Red King, he has about thirty more words to say when correcting her than necessary.
Hmm.
Broke-Ass Clowns: 55
You know, on general suspicion, I skipped ahead to the end credits to see if this was the character Brendan Blaber, aka JelloApocalypse, aka a YouTuber who is openly critical of Rooster Teeth and RWBY, was for some reason hired to voice act. I was wrong; this character is actually voiced by some dude from Genshin Impact. Blaber’s voice role is...Toy Guard 1.
Man, the disrespect from these people just doesn’t end.
The score pops in as the guards all echo “Happy Birthday Your Majesty!” and the Prince glares at a guard who didn’t say it because he was distracted by that oh-so-significant blue butterfly floating by.
RWBY remark to themselves that the Red King in the book
Shut The Fuck Up: 19
Wasn’t nearly this short, rude, or loud. A guard nearby hisses that if it weren’t for them, the Red King would still be here, and he is immediately shushed by everyone present.
We are never going to find out what that means. If RWBY hold any blame at all for the Red King being replaced by the Red Prince, we are never shown how or why.
We then get the absolute stupidest scene ever as Ruby and her unamused team wish the Prince a happy birthday, causing the Prince, who just loudly announced to all present that it was his birthday and received a clamor of congratulations from his guard just now, to freak out that they somehow know it’s his birthday. No, I’m not kidding.
No, I’m not sparing you the dialogue. If I have to go through this, so do you.
Weiss reminds him that he just said out loud that it was his birthday and advertised his party all over the island.
The king gets up in Weiss’ face and screams before continuing his tirade.
Let’s see, the exaggerated anger and cartoonish antics, the jump cuts in each model, the wacky humor of the guard the Prince is standing on bursting his snot bubble… Honestly, I hate this whole scene with a passion, let’s just call it an even ten points, cause five sure isn’t enough.
Broke-Ass Clowns: 66 (+10)
*severely aggravated* This is filler. This whole scene is filler. This is an incredibly obese filler scene in an already unwelcome filler season. And it’s not even funny. In fact, about the only way you could make this scene funny is if Weiss just lit the palace and everyone in it on fire. Yeah, that. That’s about what it would take to make me laugh at this point.
None of these characters has used their semblance for the past three episodes, and there has been no fight scene. This whole season so far has read like a dry laundry list of checks on Miles Luna’s plot points with absolutely no effort to make it flow.
Weiss asks Blake if she was once this obnoxiously pompous. No, she was not. She was not even close to this annoying and I remember being rather annoyed back in Volume 1. You’re getting a point just for that stupid attempt to make the viewer recall the Good Ol’ Days.
Wink Wink, Nudge Nudge: 36
Two guards push past them and bequeath unto His Assclownery the gift Ruby gave, that being Penny’s sword. Said guards emphatically insist it is their gift and no one else gave it to them.
The scene of the Prince taking the gift looks like this.
Broke-Ass Clowns: 67
The King then bitches at his guards that the gift is green, and kicks Penny’s blade away into the gardens, and Ruby runs to try and get it only to be stopped by a guard. Instead of zooming past them with her semblance or making literally any attempt to fool the viewer into thinking she or Miles and Kerry give a shit about Penny’s memory, she just becomes a 5 year-old Victorian child and whispers “How could you…”
I am going to explode. I can feel it coming.
The king has the two guards who presented him with Penny’s blade, begging for forgiveness, dragged behind a wall of red bushes and beheaded. I have no emotional reaction to this whatsoever. Not only because it’s not a compelling scene, but because you’d think the guards would’ve known the color preferences of a guy called the Red Prince who lives in a place called the Crimson Castle and apparently executes guards at the drop of a hat.
Also, the guard is pretty clearly, you know, murdered. This despite the fact that in the Ever After--as we're to find out in a few episodes--death isn't really a thing per se. As far as I can tell, Miles just forgot about this moment when writing that later on.
Ruby, acquiescing to this scene’s unbearably slow pace, strides forward and says maybe they can cheer him up. The Prince says beheading people cheers him up, but encourages her to go on, and she says she heard he likes to play games. Ruby is just so smart because this obviously works.
The Blue Butterfly of Significance that is probably
The Prince wants to know what Ruby wants if she should win the game, and Ruby engages in some filler-y flattery, and then says she and her group want to go to the tree. The Prince huffs, but agrees, and when Ruby looks at the board and asks how to play, she’s laughed at by the whole theater.
In this variation of chess, the goal is just to get the most pawns to the other end of the board. Naturally, the dramatic twist is that Ruby’s troop of pawns is missing pieces, which of course means that her team will have to fill in. The Prince shrinks them down and applies them to the board.
Unfortunately, Little is not among the pieces, so no seeing the annoying mouse get the chop. Having said that, it looks like we might finally get a really crappy fight scene, but a fight scene nonetheless.
Ruby’s first attempt at pushing a pawn into enemy territory, naturally, ends in defeat. They’re not even giving us kid-friendly gore, no chopping the little wooden salt shaker in half or beating him up with fisticuffs. I’m supremely disappointed.
Your Fight Scene Sucks: 156
Remember when I was giving RWBY shit because they cut corners and didn’t show the robots Blake and Adam were chopping up actually coming apart? Those were good days.
When a second attempt goes similarly sour, Ruby cuts to the chase and just sends Weiss into 1v1. This goes much better.
I can’t give this Evasion points, but I can give it the Suck points because it did that thing I hated in SSSN vs. NDGO and just cut to the weapon itself swiping off the enemy so as to not even have to animate a whole model at a time.
Your Fight Scene Sucks: 157
The Prince is obviously pressed about not getting to just whoop Ruby’s team perfectly, and engages her in conversation. When asked why she wants to go to the tree, Ruby says they think it can get them home.
Yang and Blake do some of their own kid-friendly ass whooping,
which comes with another bit of bait. For the record, yes, I know they’re going to kiss this volume. Everyone knows they’re going to kiss this volume. It’s still bait because none of this would be happening if Rooster Teeth didn’t feel their money draining away. It’s ‘gay cash’ maneuvering at its laziest. The rainbow capitalism is in full swing.
The continued pummeling WBY are putting on his pawns pisses the Prince off, and unfortunately, the white pawns on RWBY’s side missed the memo about them obviously being benched. These two factors collide to result in a field-wide skirmish, albeit one that the Prince loses almost immediately. He promptly throws a tantrum, and yes, I very quickly went back on my promise to drag you through the mud with me and am cutting and condensing quite a bit.
Just kidding.
Broke-Ass Clowns: 72 (+5)
Suddenly stricken with a sense of fear, the Prince climbs back up onto the table and asks what Ruby and her friends actually are. The revelation that she, Weiss, and Yang are humans causes some distress. A pair of blue eyes manifests in the darkness behind Ruby, and the Prince’s face cracks.
Apparently being human is a big faux-pas of some sort, and he declares that she cheated. Cue another chess pawn skirmish as the Prince sics every piece on the board on WBY, and another fight scene that, of course, has to have Yang and Blake working together while Weiss just fends for herself, I guess.
But Casey’s voice does finally kick in and provide us vocals while we get to a proper fight scene after three weeks (years, really) of waiting.
Ruby begs him to stop, but the Prince says it’s his birthday and he can do whatever he wants. The music is actually kind of interesting despite it still being a far cry from the Jeff Williams excellence of RWBY’s heyday. It starts out in a...well, I’m not great with discerning musical genres, let’s say a light synth-ey metal kind of place, with the vocals in a background layer, before it starts to kick into an electro swing jig—that I can recognize. Fortunately for Casey and Ok Goodnight, metal and electro swing happen to be two of my favorite genres.
WBY fight, but the pawns start to overwhelm them. The Prince demands that she surrender, but Ruby refuses. The metal sound returns and I find myself liking it more than I really want to.
WBY fight with renewed vigor. And as hesitant as I am to give this obnoxious, unbearable episode any credit, the fighting is actually pretty good. We get something we haven’t seen since Volume 7’s fight with the Ace Ops, or if you want to go even further, Volume 2’s Paladin mech fight: WBY’s combinations of powers actually being used in an interesting way.
Weiss uses her gravity glyphs to get everyone in place while cutting down swathes of soldiers with giant feather flechettes from a summoned Nevermore, and when Yang breaks free, semblance burning bright (if ugly), she leaps high. Blake sets up the slingshot ribbon, and Weiss arms her with her knight’s gigantic sword, which Yang rockets to the earth with so hard that she eliminates the rest of the pawns in one go. All to the tune of some genre of music I can’t identify, but like a lot.
There are some points to give. First, in the course of the fight, Yang charges her semblance, and much like RWBY’s petal burst speed blob, it’s ugly. It’s actually looked this way for a few volumes now, but I haven’t commented on it since her semblance comes up so rarely these days. Her hair just being consumed in 2D fire is...bleh. So gross. This is just another thing that really rings up as a downgrade, compared to how her hair glowed and burned like the sun in early volumes.
“THE POWER OF ANIME” – Yang, probably. Jesus, why does it look like that? Why’s it look like she’s wearing her hair like a helmet?
LuLaRwe: 65
Second, during a cutaway when Yang launches herself into the air, they have a white pawn and a red pawn fighting, despite the fact that all the pawns were gunning for WBY as a whole by now. Someone wasn’t paying attention to when this clip was supposed to be inserted.
Your Fight Scene Sucks: 158
But that aside...it’s good. It’s not mind-blowing, by any stretch, but it works and it didn’t make me want to claw my eyes out of my skull like every fight scene in Volume 8 did. Don’t expect praise like that again because I know full well we’re about to get another
The Prince flips the board in anger, forcing Ruby to save her friends with her ugly semblance
LuLaRwe: 66
that she’s finally remembered she has, lest they fall into the void. He threatens to have them beheaded if she doesn’t concede.
Ruby finally calls this obnoxious brat on throwing tantrums, he tries to have them beheaded, and the Cheshire Cat appears and stops the scene. Talking as any Cheshire expy would, he tells them no, don’t behead the heroes. I’m not transcribing it.
The Cat works some pathetically-animated magic to heal the Prince’s heart,
LuLaRwe: 67
and the Prince agrees not to behead them but continues throwing a tantrum, crying, uh...marbles, as he throws himself on the ground and says he never wants to see them again. As Ruby protests that they need to be taken to the tree and her friends are still tiny, the Cat has this to say.
CC: Promises are like birds. They taste great, but always escape.
...Bzuh? Was that supposed to be witty? Some attempt at a Wonderland-ism I’d ooh and aah at? God, this show’s dialogue sucks.
He then advises RWBY to leave while the Prince is busy being annoying. He leads them out, and Ruby follows them with her friends in tow via ugly semblance,
LuLaRwe: 68
allowing Rooster Teeth to show off all the trippy Wonderland-esque nonsensical environments they forced their underpaid and overworked animators to build specifically for this one scene.
Hell, let’s have another point for that specifically.
LuLaRwe: 69
The Cheshire Cat, leading Ruby through the small vent-like space, has Ruby’s thanks for the help. When WBY, riding in Ruby’s scarf with Little, mention the Red King, the Cat gets up in their spaces and asks how they know him. Then this:
Hear that, everyone? That’s the sound of Miles Luna pressing the big button labeled “CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT” that he never bothered to get fixed. He’s pressing it and pressing it, but all that’s going to come out is hackneyed attempts at introspection trying to compel and not really getting there.
Something odd happens, and what seems to be the light at the end of the tunnel shines bright and overwhelms Ruby, and they’re transported to outside.
W: Great. So we’re not in a stupid story—we’re in its stupid sequel.
I choose to believe Kara Eberle ad-libbed that line on purpose to comment on what this mess of a plot has become.
The Cheshire Cat is much like Tyrian, in that while I know what they’re going for, it’s simply not hitting because Rooster Teeth don’t have the skill to hit the target they’re aiming for. He asks Ruby, in order, what she is, why they wanted to see the King, and what her favorite dessert is.
When Ruby again insists that they’re humans, the Cat just says that they’re not nearly as interesting as the others he’s met (again, kind of a self-own from MK), and then he gets distracted chasing a butterfly. Blake then remembers her one allowed personality trait for the volume, which is that she’s obsessed with that fucking book.
That’s not just any cat, she says, that’s the Curious Cat. I’m still calling it the Cheshire Cat because I don’t have time for this shit.
Shut the Fuck Up: 19
Blake and Yang mention that the Cheshire Cat helped Alice find the tree. Then Yang fucking destroys me.
*spluttering* ‘Rubes’?! 'RUBES'?!
We really are in Meyer-land, aren’t we? Who the fuck is this character and why can’t she put on a better Yang Xiao Long act? Literally no one has ever called Ruby ‘Rubes’, especially not Yang, nor should anyone because that’s fucking stupid.
*still reeling* I… Who does this? Who fucking wrote this? I’ve dragged Miles and Kerry and recently Eddy Rivas through the mud, but this is such a juvenile, immature, and first-time writer insertion that I don’t think even they could have done this. Did you guys let those Bumbleby fans you brought in to animate the volume write it, too?
Guys, shortening a two-syllable name into a one-syllable name with an ‘s’ on the end is not something people really do in real life. The reason you see it so often in first-time fanfiction is because young kids see this being done to longer names by fictional characters in whom this sort of nicknaming is a consistent character trait, and they come to the conclusion that this is something people who are friends do, when really, it’s something reserved for specific character types. Remember Breaking Dawn? Remember when Jacob called Bella “Bells” and knocked the wind out of me because it was so random, and then suddenly everyone was nicknaming each other even though none of them ever did that in the prior three books?
That was a symptom of it being some of Meyer’s earliest writing published much later and with zero editing to save it. But that situation doesn’t apply here—Miles and Kerry wrote every volume since Four and were writers on the first three, and this has never happened before. I’ve said before that the writing quality is literally regressing, but we’ve regressed past the bedrock and we’ve now got dialogue I didn’t think could be penned by people with ten years’ writing experience.
The episode is not over. We pan upwards as Ruby chases the cat who is chasing a fly, transitioning to a new scene. The ‘Jabberwalker’ sprints across a bridge connecting the collectathon levels, stopping in some dreary level where it discards some canister I don’t get a good look at. Its attention is drawn by something falling from the sky.
The meteor appears to be Neo, who upon landing begins rapidly shapeshifting from her own form to Ruby’s to Cinder’s and back again, manifesting her rage with her semblance. The Jabberwalker encroaches, and seemingly without meaning to, Neo’s semblance expands, manifesting multiple clones of herself, and the beast backs off.
But Neo makes to attack. The Jabberwalker is clearly afraid, but Neo calmly sics her clones on it and the episode fades to black.
This episode’s credits say that it was directed by Connor Pickens and Dustin Matthews, and written by Kiersi Burkhart. Whichever one of them inserted that ‘Rubes’ bit needs to be smacked with a rolled-up newspaper.
*angrily* And whoever crafted the rest of that episode sans the third quarter of it needs to be fired, but we’ve all long since known that’ll never happen.
Guys, the entire first half of this episode was filler. The only things this episode changed from last episode is that Weiss, Blake, and Yang are tiny now and are following a cat—all of which happens after the halfway mark. The Red Prince’s episode was some of the most painful, unfunny, obnoxious, and un-entertaining filler I’ve ever seen. You could cut everything inbetween the procession greeting and the chess board and lose nothing. Because that’s what they were written for: to fill up nothing.
This is appalling. Rooster Teeth made a promise after Volume 1 that every volume would have at least twelve episodes, a promise that was broken, since we now only get ten. But even with only ten episodes, they somehow don’t have enough plot to fill all of that, and so we get the Red Prince, a character who clearly only acts as annoyingly as he does to take up time, something I imagine was also at play with his clear predecessor, Cordovin.
Here's a picture of Kerry being annoying about release dates.
We knew for years that they only write the volume’s contents maybe a month in advance of them airing, a phenomenally lazy and wasteful tactic that shows through in the episodes themselves, despite the hiatuses stretching on for six to eight months on the regular and this latest one extending for two and a half years. How?! How do you just waste all that time and have nothing to fill the episodes you begged us not to pirate?!
I’m so disgusted with this company and its loser-ass writers and directors.
The Wonderland arc of RWBY has so far been painful and aggravating and altogether pointlessly irrelevant. Let’s see how they’ll disappoint us again next.
Lovely, more of the Cheshire Expy. We open up on Ruby chasing that fucking cat through the red gardens. When she finally gets its attention, it makes itself presentable by rejoining its autonomously-moving front and back halves.
No reason is provided as to why it split in two in the first place.
Ruby waffles between ‘cat’ and ‘Curious Cat’ as forms of address, and asks him which one he “goes by”.
CC: Oh, I don’t ‘go by’. That belongs to the days and the years.
I love cats so much, but if this one keeps saying stupid shit like this I’m gonna call him Tom and change my name to Jerry.
CC: But if you are asking me what I am, I do suppose I am indeed a cat most curious.
You know, there’s a reason Alice in Wonderland is easier to use as reference than rehash outright, and it’s because absurdism and literary nonsense on their own are difficult and in the case of Alice, the mannerisms of the specific characters need specific setups to add to the mystery and awe of the setting, rather than just annoying the viewer because they keep answering questions in the most frustrating of ways.
Ruby requests his aid in getting to the tree. In answer, the cat says that one does not go to the tree, but the tree goes to them, unless they’re the cat himself.
CC: You see?
Y: Not even a little bit.
How relatable.
CC: That’s your problem. It’s a matter of perspective, I’m afraid.
I really gotta go through six more weeks of this crap?
Ruby asks if he can’t take them to the tree, seeing as he’s been there before, but the cat says that the tree is so last season, yo. Blake mentions him having helped “Alyx” which gets the cat’s attention, him wondering what their relationship to her is. Ruby fumbles that explanation and Weiss just gives the sparknotes version that may or may not be true: she wrote a book about her experiences in the Ever After.
The cat is just giggly, wondering how the kid’s book version of his portrayal is, and I think his voice is supposed to sound hungry when he wonders “Do I smell a mouse?”, but it instead comes off as...horny. Like, it genuinely sounds like he’s trying to seduce that mouse. This is fucking weird. 
B: From one cat to another, could you give us a minute, please?
Blake has never referred to herself as a "cat" nor would she. Blake is a faunus, not an animal.
Broke-Ass Clowns: 73
CC: Oh, so they’re spoken for.
Oh my god, he really was trying to fuck that mouse! Please, no!
The cat leaves them be to go chase a butterfly again, and Weiss wonders if the Cat isn’t actually called the Constantly Annoying Cat, being the voice of the audience as is her forte. And also using they/them pronouns, just in case you wanted a nonbinary cat to go with your nonbinary mouse. I love the smell of rainbow capitalism.
How To Piss Off Gay People: 92
Blake gets into exposition mode about the fucking book again,
Shut The Fuck Up: 20
and says that the cat is hungry for information and may not want to go back to the tree, but could be lured there. Ruby is just experiencing a Thought, about how she might be able to pull that off, when Yang points out that the cat is already gone.
Broke-Ass Clowns: 74
A spread of butterflies flitting away marks the cat’s location, and Ruby get their attention by offering to answer questions of theirs. Then that moment from the trailer happens,
CC: I sense a ‘but’ approaching. [back half reattaches]
Seriously, why is the cat splitting in half like that? What is the reason? Just for the gag of it?
Ruby denies there being a catch and just offers to occupy them on the way to the tree, before trying to tempt them with her scroll, giving it to them to play with like a single mother giving her phone to her toddler to make them shut up for five minutes. But it works.
We fade to a new scene, whereupon the Curious Cat says this:
CC: So, the old man and the boy share a body now? Oh, that’s got some unfortunate implications.
You guys missed that so much, didn’t you? The constant lampshading of MK’s own bad writing as if that makes up for it. I hesitate to say that they’ve actually woken up and realized that writing Ozpin slowly eating Oscar’s brain from the inside out is a very bad thing, but at the very least I can laugh because there’s obviously no way they’ve missed how the fans feel about it, either.
No, seriously. These folks are on Twitter outright confirming this scene was a winky winky.
Wink Wink, Nudge Nudge: 37
The cat is a pure motor mouth as he continues to rattle off lampshades of MK’s dumb writing, including putting a city in the sky (Atlas), Ciel Soleil existing for exactly one scene (Penny’s trial version teammate), and trying to juggle a cast with many more characters than they can handle (self-explanatory).
Wink Wink, Nudge Nudge: 40 (+3)
And no, the creator commentary Miles and friends made sure to record several months after this was released assuring the viewers that this was not some immature little dig at critical fans is not very convincing. The team are obviously worn out of listening to him, and a reminder of his original thought that led to this tangent has him laughing about how the brother gods were gigantic jackasses.
Wink Wink, Nudge Nudge: 41
And it’s stopped being funny and now it’s just annoying. Miles, Kerry, if by some god-forsaken chance you read this,
GROW. UP.
When you do this, it doesn’t display the ability to laugh at yourself in a healthy way, it just gives off the same bitterness it’s always given. We get it, your feelings are hurt by people criticizing your writing. But if you haven’t learned to shrug it off and actually take the advice of better writers in the last ten years, it’s gonna show. You lost all rights to sympathy when you abused Monty’s memory, lied to fans, manipulated and baited the LGBT ones, and most egregiously, reacted with spite when another writer tried her best to improve your work and stomped over every change she made. You can forget anyone chuckling at this because we can tell you aren’t.
The cat does commend them for being more in the know about Remnant’s origins than Alyx, who he says was overly concerned with trivial things. They arrive at the edge of the collectathon level,
Where everyone oohs and aahs at the iridescent leaves blowing down from the tree. Yang comments on the puzzle piece-like construction of the world, which the cat explains as each “acre” being designed specifically for its inhabitants and their roles. Weiss asks if they won’t be getting back to their normal size soon, and the cat says all the ingredients for a “grow-gurt parfait” *eyeroll* will be shortly ahead.
The topic turns to Salem, and how the actual plot, at last check, ended with her having entirely too many relics for comfort, one of which—and I should stress this—will give her literally anything she can think hard enough about.
CC: How are you even supposed to stop her now that Atlas is gone?
Ruby has no answer for this.
Wink Wink, Nudge Nudge: 42
Concerned for Ruby, Yang addresses her as “Rubes” again, and if they keep doing that I’m going to add another count. I don’t care if we’re at the end of RWBY’s lifespan, I don’t have the patience for that. If Barbara Dunkelman craved even half as much death recording that line as I did hearing it just now, she might tell MK to knock it off.
Blake suggests not worrying about issues on home base right now, but doesn’t finish her thought before the Yang alarm rings again to let Ruby know the cat got too far away, like an unhelpful pop-up in a game with an escort mission.
Broke-Ass Clowns: 75
Little pops back into existence as well to say that the cat saw a bug. And they did not feel the need to say anything earlier, causing Weiss to lament that the only helpful characters they’ve met have attention spans shorter than my remaining patience.
Left without help in the middle of spooky woods, the team follow a rather eerie groaning or growling sound that’s some distance off. They come across a set of three eyes peering out of a pile of leaves, and a voice asks “What are you?"
R: I’m getting really tired of that question.
So am I! What are the chances? And so enters the Absolem expy.
This caterpillar man describes himself as an ‘herbalist’. Ruby begs yet more help getting to that stupid tree, and the caterpillar obliges. He takes them into his quarters, which is inside a giant luminous mushroom.
The first thing they need is that growth potion, which the herbalist sighs at. When asked again what they are, Ruby answers with ‘huntresses’, people who fight monsters, and says she doesn’t understand why it matters. Good, because neither do I.
The herbalist, in short, says it matters because he knows he’s an herbalist, while he suspects that ‘huntress’ is just a guess for these people. Given a more sure answer by Blake (huntresses are heroes who protect the weak), he then asks if they’re good huntresses.
I can answer that question! No, they suck. They destroyed two landmasses and doomed thousands of people. But you shouldn’t blame them for that. That’s the fault of the writers, who are again displaying that they are all too aware of what people say about them and their shitty plot online.
The herbalist is quickly frustrated, because he wants to help people become whatever they need to become, but can’t if they don’t have an understanding of what they are now. All of this is couched very insistently in terms of roles and states of being, and I can see Miles very clearly behind the screen, trying to weld the character development angle onto the current plot issue (needed a growth potion) even though it’s not working. And that much only because if he can’t pretend that this is an actual character development season, then he has no real reason for having forced the show into an Alice in Wonderland mold to begin with.
When they follow the herbalist into his study, we get a rotating shot of the room, which isn’t very cool because most of it is jar-like objects on shelves, too similar in design to one another and too packed with tiny but meaningless features for them to make interesting background details, and causing the whole overly-darkened scene to feel like it’s been motion blurred. 
Like so.
LuLaRwe: 70
The team become unsettled and think it’s time to leave, but the herbalist traps them inside. He then enacts an acid trip sequence, a mushroom samba sequence, whatever you want to call it. 
Magic hallucinogens made from the tree's leaves, at any rate. As Ruby falls coughing to the floor, the iridescent smoke overwhelms everyone as the herbalist’s voice echoes, continuing to ask what they are. Lost in the smoke, Yang makes sure to call Blake’s name before Ruby’s.
How To Piss Off Gay People: 93
Weiss doesn’t get mentioned at all. When Yang coughs on the smoke, it trails away to coalesce into her Beacon era self.
And I’m sighing because I already know where this is going.
This is going to be a reflective “journey” wherein Miles and Kerry do the one thing they know how to do consistently, and that’s reference the volumes of this show people actually liked. And it’s not going to work, for several reasons.
- We are long, long past the point where any fans dissatisfied with the show were willing to give it a chance to regain what it once lost.
- Nothing that viewers miss about earlier volumes could be reliably regained in the span of a single volume, let alone six and a half episodes, because it’s not one thing. It’s a bunch of individual problems that’ve gone years without being addressed. It’s plot, it’s art style, it’s music, it’s pacing, it’s a sense of fun, it’s a lot of things.
- Rooster Teeth does not have the manpower to get that era of RWBY back, nor the soul to actually pay those people who could achieve that. They don't have the funds anymore, but even if they did, they'd just steal enough paychecks to end up right back here again.
- And most relevant to this actual scene: to actually suggest that going back to before is an option would be to tacitly acknowledge that most viewers would enjoy it more that way, which is unacceptable since it would be acknowledging that Miles and Kerry have run this show into the ground about a dozen times over, and there’s no way they’re going to do that.
Look, I do miss old RWBY. I did love this show, once upon a time. But the reason I’m sporking it now isn’t because it became bad. I’m sporking it because it’s raw shittiness happened due to a lot of people being unwilling to do the right thing. It’s personal for me that way.
Yang’s past self says that Yang doesn’t have to go forward. She could go back… And this is set up with the current Yang grasping at her metal arm, implicitly offering the disabled character a chance to be un-disabled again.
I am not actually going to roast that for ableism the way I think some people would be expecting.
The thing about disability is that it’s not a single unified experience. Yes, we live in a world where being disabled is punished and othered, and people who live disabled lives are often considered people that need to be “fixed”. That attitude leads to a lot of people getting hurt, and thankfully, at least we in the first world front are experiencing a shift towards normalizing disabled people.
But not every disability is something that should just be lived with, if the means to rectify it are available. There are plenty of people with disabilities, who were born with them or gained them later in life, whose disabilities cause them immense amounts of frustration, physical pain and discomfort, and lost opportunities. Not all of that boils down to normalization or accessibility; being in agony from trying to walk, for example, shouldn’t be normalized, it should be fixed. There are plenty of disabled people who are probably desperate to be rid of their disabilities and that’s something often lost in the flow of single-thought positivity that so often boils down to agitated TikTok and Twitter posts. I have poor vision; I wear glasses, but if I had the money for it and wanted to, I could go get laser eye surgery and get my vision permanently fixed, and no one has an issue with that. That being the case, I don’t think it’s wrong to suggest Yang might miss her flesh and blood arm and would have it back if she had the chance. I don’t think it’s an attempt to erase her disability.
(I just RWBY should maybe shut the fuck up about disability considering how they used it as a way to villainize one of their better characters.)
Meanwhile, Blake’s older character says to her she could be ‘just human’ or ‘just a cat’ if she wanted to be. I have no idea what the hell that means, but I know it's pissing me off because, again, Blake doesn't do this. Blake is a race rights advocate--she has never called herself a 'cat' and that coming out of the mouth of her old model (sort of) just makes it worse.
Really, what proves my point about the uselessness of this sort of exercise is the fact that these aren’t even the older models. They’re newer Maya models we’ve been seeing since Volume Four, with the more muted colors and odd design choices we’ve been seeing since Volume Seven. Blake’s hair framing her face in a really awkward way is a good example. If they really wanted to show us what old RWBY looked like, they’d be pumping way more color into these at the very least.
Old Blake clarifies that Blake doesn’t have to struggle with trying to be a bridge between the humans and the faunus, a struggle we haven’t seen since it died in Volume Five via Blake’s rapid mutation into a mouthpiece for racists to spout off about the dangers of activism.
But where I really get pissed off is the interaction between Weiss and old Weiss. Old Weiss asks why Weiss even wants to bother with reclaiming the Schnee name, asking what it even stands for anymore.
Which, I would like to remind you, is a conundrum resulting from Miles and Kerry smashing the plot and Weiss’ entire home continent like a screaming toddler breaking a toy they don’t like anymore, and killing Jacques for good measure. All of Weiss’ promising plot threads were cruelly snipped because they were collateral damage and no one cared to preserve them when they could have Ironwood randomly murder people and just blow up settings to prevent anyone ever fixing their plot holes again.
In fact,
Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Veil: 114
One for the characters undergoing self-analysis at the behest of writers trying to seem deep while knowing full well they’re not going to actually fix anything in a way that matters,
Wink Wink, Nudge Nudge: 46 (+4)
One for each character talking out loud about how their character arcs have suffered immensely in the past seven years of absolutely garbage writing. They’re not going to be band-aid points, even though that’s more in line with this trajectory, because none of this shit is shit Miles and Kerry actually want to fix. They just want people on the internet to stop being mean to them.
Old Blake, Old Weiss, and Old Yang all tempt their current selves with the possibilities of freedom, simplicity, and wholeness. Naturally, this ends with Yang rejecting the offer because what the hell else did you expect?
Y: No. My losses, my failures, those more than anything are what have shaped me into who I am.
But who you are now is much less interesting and less entertaining than who you were before. Sorry to tell you.
Y: Show me how I need to grow.
Why not just put Ren in this stupid fucking scene and have him explain everyone’s feelings like you did last time, guys? I understand this is your really, really heavy-handed attempt at showing rather than telling, but what you’re trying to show is stupid.
Y: If there’s something I’m missing, it’s not because I lost it. It’s because I haven’t found it yet.
All very noble and inspiring, except that in my own terms, what you lost would be interesting plots revolving around self-recovery and confronting neglectful and self-serving bandit leaders, and those were done by Volume Five. What you’ve gained since then is a weirdo in a greyish wig who keeps talking about some stupid kid’s book and has no other roles besides being your girlfriend-but-we-aren’t-calling-her-that. That, and the aforementioned over-simplifying of the disability issue. For this approach that is intended to be self-respecting and nuanced, yet is so very typical, I award her a point.
Y.A.S. Queen: 19
Blake is of a similar mind.
B: [drawing her katana] A simple life wouldn’t be my life.
Really? Because if you ask me, it was too simple to begin with. Everything you wanted to do was accomplished in Volume Five, wherein you washed your hands of the racism subplot. Actually confronting racism was too uncomfortable for the dudes writing this show. They didn’t want to talk about the problems ethnic minorities experience, they wanted to talk about how terrible it was that ethnic minorities go too far with their protesting and turn into evil terrorists and how that’s the real problem we should be discussing. "A simple life" is exactly what you lead now, since you have no connection to any plot left and are really only around so Yang can have some arm candy.
B: My family, my friends, my culture—
Again, unseen since Volume Five.
B: I belong to them just as much as they belong to me.
Data not found.
B: To give that all away wouldn’t be simplicity. It would be betrayal.
Class betrayal, to be specific. Weiss, any thoughts?
W: [points her rapier at Old Weiss] I don’t know who you think you are, but let me tell you who I am. I am the granddaughter of a hero,
A miner who fought in the Great War, which if I recall established his side as the one that fought for global expansion, repression of the arts, and slavery. But sure, he was a hero to the economy.
W: and the child of a villain.
The villain who got blasted to death by Ironwood and whose empire crumbled because you crashed the continent. I mean, I think I spelled out pretty clearly that those not mattering anymore is the major problem.
W: I am a citizen of a fallen kingdom, and an heir to nothing. I will not be defined by my name because I will be the one to define it.
Okay, let’s slow down, because I think we just went in a circle. Weiss, your old self is trying to confront you with the fact that thanks to the boneheads in charge, your quest to define your name is meaningless. You can’t respond to that by saying “no, you”. The heroes and villains are gone. Miles and Kerry wrote them all out. There is nothing to define anymore. Schnee is gone. Its brand has no meaning because all of its economic power died with its CEO and the entire landmass it was based in.
But you keep chirping, lil birdie, I guess. It's pretty clear that this is all just a bunch of words that sound vaguely appropriate slotted in at the right times.
The three girls all echo “I am a huntress”, but then we finally cut to Ruby, who is not so confident. The long-established trend continues, albeit I think this is their attempt to start, about eight volumes way too late, on the problem of Ruby not having many compelling character threads and not acting on the ones she has. That one is getting a point, because Miles’ and Kerry’s crashing of Atlas and the idiotic plan they had Ruby come up with finally managed to turn the audience against Ruby in full.
I’ve never bothered with it. I’m sure all of you noticed with Sun and Ironwood, but I’ve never felt the need to hold a character accountable for things they do if they’re railroaded into doing them. Sun’s not a stalker. Ironwood’s not a murderer. Hell, Blake’s not a race traitor, and so on and so forth. I always blame the writers when it becomes clear that a previously likable character has suffered under criminally bad writing.
But that mediating field of view only stretches so far. The consequences of Miles and Kerry going so far out of their way to destroy their own plot stem, superficially, from Ruby. Many remaining audiences who don’t get their vitamins by kissing Miles’ and Kerry’s asses simply found the climax of Volume 8 to be too much and began openly hating Ruby. So this is their attempt to address that.
Band-Aid Brigade: 56
Old Ruby confronts current Ruby with the fact that for all her drive to make the world better and be a hero just like the ones in the books she loved to read as a kid, she’s achieved so much nothing and frankly left a lot in worse shape than before, and has no idea how to fix it. In the face of all this, the temptation to not be Ruby Rose anymore is a strong one. 
The Cheshire Cat interrupts, dispelling the distressing visions and demanding the herbalist get away from Ruby.
Not only do the in-show smoke and mirrors drop, but the real life ones do, too. The cat reprimands the herbalist and says he’s not trying to help, and gives him a “piece” of their “heart” to heal him of this nasty drive to make main characters realize they’ve been poorly written.
Just kidding, everyone! Any suggestion that the heroes have been absolute wastes of space and have had their character arcs rushed, swept aside, or destroyed outright, or indeed that they’re not exactly who they need to be as is? Tossed away. Only a bad person would suggest that!
I mean, I knew it was a pipe dream to suggest Miles and Kerry were going to acknowledge they screwed the pooch. I just wish they hadn’t made me sit through all that to get there.
The herbalist apologizes and leaves--well, he falls through the floor--and the episode ends on Little re-entering this plane of existence waking up and saying they found the cat.
I’m pissed. I’d give all this Rooster Tease or Road to Nowhere points for lying and leading me nowhere, except that this is going to recur to focus on Ruby again later, although much the same problems will be had.
Counts:
- 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: 158 + 33
- Evisceration Evasion: 35
- Ill Logic: 193
- Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Veil: 114 + 90
- Wink Wink, Nudge Nudge: 46
- Band-Aid Brigade: 56
- RSVP: 72
- Road to Nowhere: 43
- Dragged Kicking and Screaming: 53
- Y.A.S. Queen: 19
- Rooster Tease: 37
- LuLaRwe: 70
- The Lovegood Fallacy: 17
- How to Piss Off Gay People: 93
- Invisembl: 14
- Broke-Ass Clowns: 75
- Shut the Fuck Up: 20
54 – Volume 9, Episodes 1 and 2 | Table of Contents | 56 – Volume 9, Episodes 5 and 6
no subject
Date: 2023-11-20 05:50 am (UTC)From:I wondered that the entire time this volume was airing. It was an insane decision to insert an entire volume taking place in another dimension at the end of Volume 8, much less to focus solely on that dimension to the exclusion of all else outside.
But from what I can gather by the end of Volume 9, the only conclusion I can come to is that they never intended to actually finish the scenario set up at Volume 8's end. The plan, for what little Miles and Kerry have one, appears to have been to smash their toys and set them on fire, so to speak, and then immediately jump-cut to when everything is fine elsewhere. Volume 9 isn't a thoroughfare from V8 to V10 so much as a tumor growing out of the side of V8.
no subject
Date: 2023-11-22 05:28 pm (UTC)From:But from what I can gather by the end of Volume 9, the only conclusion I can come to is that they never intended to actually finish the scenario set up at Volume 8's end. The plan, for what little Miles and Kerry have one, appears to have been to smash their toys and set them on fire, so to speak, and then immediately jump-cut to when everything is fine elsewhere.
I guess they were like "hey, we want to do this", without regard for whether it would make a good story. Kind of like fanfic authors, only fanfic authors don't force other, professional writers to cater to their whims. What do they gain from doing this, though? I mean, don't they want to make money? Are they that full of spite that they would destroy a source of income?
no subject
Date: 2023-11-22 11:22 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2023-11-23 04:07 am (UTC)From:Well, that's the thing about it. I don't think they thought they were destroying a source of income, just a story.
I guess they learned the hard way that fans have a finite tolerance. They can take a lot, but when people exhaust that last iota...
Fast forward to Volume 8, and MK finally ran out every last bit of patience from their fans and are now facing the end of RWBY and likely Rooster Teeth as a whole.
Is Rooster Teeth really that bad off? Do you think they'll survive?
Also, what have you heard about Kiersi Burkhart? I looked her up and couldn't find anything.
no subject
Date: 2023-11-23 04:47 am (UTC)From:An (alleged) employee who worked on RWBY has tacitly suggested Volume 10 would be the last volume of RWBY. This was generous; most ex-fans believe RWBY is finished because there is still no greenlight, even months after Volume 9 is done airing. Volume 9 itself is still on Crunchyroll for subs only.
Since Volume 9 finished airing, employees have continued to leave; this is of course by design since Rooster Teeth habitually hire contract work for one year and then let said contracts expire, which I'm sure saves short-term money in some form or another but doesn't give anyone time to advance in the company or learn the ins and outs long enough to teach them to new staff. Many, many others have left voluntarily. RT are still, as they have been since the late 2010s, getting savage reviews on GlassDoor about the poor work environment.
Also since the end of V9, Achievement Hunter (a long-running and much beloved series that many Rooster Teeth fans are mourning) has been shut down and Red vs. Blue's final season is slated for 2024. Many of their talents have left their podcast space which appears to be the only one really bringing them any regular revenue. There are no big projects in store for the future now that the Justice League x RWBY crossover has passed with little said of it. Many old episodes of Red vs. Blue and other beloved series have also been taken off of YouTube in an ill-advised, last-ditch effort to force fans of the content to follow it to Rooster Teeth and bring better advertisement percentages, a hare-brained move they've tried before, watched fail before, and appeared to have learned nothing from. Their list of scandals has severely impacted their reputation and the company is largely considered a shell of its former self even by longtime fans.
I think the end was pretty clearly spelled out with that utterly cursed Bumbleby lingerie Onlyfans shoot Barb and Arryn did. Their merch in the last few years has become hilariously shoddy (often a rectangular jpeg on a black background) and stunningly overpriced. It seems pretty clear that the remaining RWBY fanbase can't support Rooster Teeth. Granted, if they make the podcast and Vtuber fronts work out, something could come of it, but quite frankly I doubt that'll happen.
Estimates of Rooster Teeth closing their doors within the next year are likely unrealistic to the point of being doomposts, but it's also not impossible for that to happen, either.
Kiersi Burkhart is an author. Here's a list of her works. She writes horse girl fiction--not in the derogatory sense, I mean that's literally the plots and genres she works with. I have not read her books, nor do I intend to, and what I've heard of her work suggests it isn't fantastic. However, I do know she's written LGBT+ and same-sex romances before, and she is the first person on the Rooster Teeth writing staff to actually have published works before connecting with Rooster Teeth.
I posited and still stick by my theory that Volume 7 was as uncharacteristically good and well-written as it was thanks to her input, and that Volumes 8 and 9 effectively saw her kicked out of the writing room and Miles and Kerry put back in charge.