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55 – Volume 9, Episodes 3 and 4 | Table of Contents | 57 – Volume 9, Episodes 7 and 8
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Alternate Title: Rooster Teeth Play Their Hand
We are now halfway through the season as of this episode. I haven’t even started writing this and I already have a headache.
Last time...god, what the fuck happened last time? Oh, right, uh, acid trip character “development”. Well, let’s get into it.
V9E5, “The Parfait Predicament”
We open on Ruby running through the mushroom forest, holding WBY in her hands with Little still on her shoulder. The cat catches up, saying they’re glad the four of them are “still the four of them”. Weiss calls the cat on ditching them earlier, which of course doesn’t faze them. She seems particularly bothered by the part where the herbalist was swallowed up by a hole in the ground, which I didn’t elaborate on at the time because I thought it was just his means of exiting the scene since holes opened in the mushroom’s walls a la doors the whole scene prior.
CC: Yes, yes, Alyx had a similar reaction the first time she saw someone return to the Ever After. But it’s not how it seems. …Well, I suppose it is. But not the way you think, if you think like Alyx. Which it seems like you do!
*tired* What the fuck does that mean. Are you just taking up space with randomass sentences again, is this more filler?
After hopping a short distance away, the cat says they’ve arrived at their destination.
Forgive me, but I thought they were going to the tree in the center of the island? This big spiraling lily pad with its fairy lights is pretty cool, but why are we here?
On the cat’s advice, Ruby hops on the closest lily pad, which begins floating across the water to the spiraling lily island shown. Yang, who has absolutely not learned anything from prior experience with this fucking cat, asks them what they meant by their earlier remarks.
CC: When we break or wear out or simply finish what we’re meant to do, we’re called back. But Herb...his heart was too weak to listen. So I gave him a little bit of mine.
There are other denizens of the Ever After also traveling to the central island on floating lily pads. When Blake asks if the herbalist is dead, the cat’s answer is exactly how you’d expect.
CC: Oh, no, no! Well, maybe a little bit. But not at all!
Y: Urgh, which is it?!
CC: [clearing throat] Now that Herb’s properly returned, he’ll be fixed up nice, and made into the Herb he wanted to be when he was still Herb. Then he’ll come back and find his purpose. Could be the same as before, or maybe not.
Ruby asks if the Herb that comes back will remember anything, and the cat asks what the point of that would be. He goes on to say that denizens of the Ever After don’t “die”, they “ascend”. Weiss calls BS, saying everything dies at some point. I’m sure Salem would beg to differ.
The cat starts to speak again, referring to a creature (undoubtedly the Jabberwalker) to whom these rules may not apply, but cuts himself off, citing it as the sort of thing not spoken of in polite conversation.
A bird man walking upright greets the group when they step onto the island, selling something we don’t hear about the way a carnival vendor would. Blake asks if “ascension” is what happened to the Red King. The cat clarifies that, when the Red King lost his game to Alyx, he was horribly upset about it, ascended and got “fixed up”, and became the Red Prince that RWBY met. This is proving to be terribly inconsistent with that earlier moment where said guards clearly stated it to be the King’s birthday, whereas it’s exclusively called the Prince’s birthday in Episode 3. Miles and Kerry are really not putting in the slightest bit of effort to keep things in line and it’s showing.
Ruby correctly asserts that whatever the King was like before being “fixed up”, the Prince was worse. The cat responds that playing the game and winning no matter what is what the Prince is meant to do, which bothers the fuck out of me because it sounds like the cat, too, has read that stupid fucking book and is just listing off each character’s role the way Blake does. Blake, as it happens, is very concerned about the differences between what they’ve experienced and what she read in that fucking book, so you know what that means!
Shut the Fuck Up: 21
Blake is whining about how there was nothing about “ascension” in the book. The cat has this to say:
CC: Well, of course not! Exposition is terribly boring! Even this conversation was, on the whole, rather tedious!
*rubbing temples* Miles and Kerry are venting their frustrations at their audience again, I see.
Let’s just call it what it is: this is another one of those moments where they’re turning to the audience and winking,
Wink Wink, Nudge Nudge: 47
except that it’s less winking and more giving the middle finger. You know, I think I recall seeing this in Supernatural a lot during that back half, when the author guy who wrote the in-universe SPN books would go off on tangents about writing conventions that were really just a thinly-veiled means of complaining about the audience not liking the show’s writing. It also reminds me of the Ratchet and Clank 2016 reboot—you know, the one that had a movie tied in that it had to follow, where everything was rewritten to be kid-friendly enough to sell merchandise and the writers knew the audience would hate it and resorted to taking potshots at game reviewers through one of the characters’ mouths? Good times, right?
At this point, Miles and Kerry have earned no quarter and I’m getting the burgeoning feeling that the waves of spite that drove Volume 8 to be what it was have not left us. The Ever After as a whole is starting to look like a setting designed purely so that Miles and Kerry’s avatars can bitch that writing is a thing they do that is not always easy and hrrr grrr stop criticizing them, please.
Miles and Kerry are not authors. Their writing credits amount to Red vs. Blue, Camp Camp, and RWBY—and Nomad of Nowhere for Miles, but let’s not pretend that actually amounted to anything, at least not anything positive. Two comedy series, one of which has mainstream appeal and one of which is only really known by people that are into Rooster Teeth content as a whole, and RWBY, RT’s first serious work ever. When Stephen King wrote Misery, or other works which poked fun at the various ways audiences have received his work, he gets away with it because he’s fucking Stephen King and could write his way out of a Saw trap. When two-bit writers like Miles and Kerry do it, it’s just bitter. They have been writing for ten years, and have spent more of it complaining about how audiences absorb their work than not. They have not earned nearly the respect due to them through good writing to get away with constantly inserting little dialogue gags like this to “poke fun” (read: complain about) the things audiences say.
Yes, exposition is boring—if you make it boring. Remember Pyrrha’s big infodump to Jaune about aura, what it is, and what it does, in Volume One? That was some of the most exposit-ey crap ever, but it wasn’t boring because it was paired with an action scene which handily demonstrated everything Pyrrha was talking about. Remember Oniyuri in Volume 4, and Ren talking about it? Not boring. Remember Weiss’ heart-to-heart with Yang in Volume 5? That was one of the only parts of the volume that wasn’t boring.
What you are doing here, Miles and Kerry, is indeed boring, and that’s not a quality inherent to exposition as a whole, it’s just because you two suck. Moving on.
They’re moving through a marketplace of sorts on this island, still akin to stalls at a carnival,
and searching for ingredients for that “gro-gurt parfait” that got mentioned before. There is a soundtrack in place now, finally. The cat tasks Ruby with procuring “nose hair from a leprechaun” that a “tea pot lady” should have, and I think my headache just got worse.
Yang (and her girlfriend-but-we-aren’t-saying-that Blake) decide to stay and get the rest of the ingredients with the cat, once it becomes clear his attention span is not up to the task. Weiss also opts to stay behind to avoid nose hair plot points. This just leaves Little and Ruby to go to the third level of the lily pad thingy where all this is happening and get the oh-so-special ingredient. *dryly* Yippee.
Here’s a gif of one of those so-hilarious chopped up gags, because god forbid we actually think we’ll go an episode without one.
Broke-Ass Clowns: 76
Some time later, Ruby is still wandering around empty-handed even as the stalls begin to close up and the festival grounds begin to go dark. The encroaching darkness that results is unnaturally thick, and the atmosphere takes a turn for the unsettling right until some sort of light goes off next to Ruby.
and before her materializes a vendor stall bearing Penny’s blade, having returned to her like a Behelit. An echoing female voice asks if the item interests Ruby, and she looks up to see some sort of armored woman bearing a hammer, staring into a wall of flame.
Ruby says she thought this blade was lost forever and asks how she has it.
???: Nothing, no one, is ever truly lost.
I’m sure that’s very comforting to fans who finally put down the show after watching Penny get murdered the second time. We finally get that shot from the trailer as Ruby looks into the blade and sees Penny reflected in it.
???: And what of you? Are you lost?
Ruby clarifies that she’s just by herself for the time being, and the woman responds “you’re doing this all alone?”
Did Little drop out of existence again? No, wait, they’re right there, waking up on Ruby’s shoulder. They appear nervous and say that they don’t think they’re supposed to be here. The blacksmith woman with the echoing voice asks if Little is Ruby’s guide.
The woman’s unsettling face is lit in the light of the sparks created when she strikes her hammer on her glowing hot creation, and she remarks that Ruby seems to be carrying a rather large burden with her. Ruby says that she’s fine and can handle it (an obvious lie), and the blacksmith offers Ruby her choice of any of the weapons around her, should she change her mind and “set [her] burden down”. Ruby looks down and finds that Penny’s blade has transformed into an ordinary dirk. She looks into the dirk’s blade, and sees the reflection of the black girl from the opening animation, who is obviously Alyx.
Ruby remarks that she used to have a weapon. Ruby eyes a nearby axe hanging on a wall, bearing the color red and a gun trigger, and undoubtedly recalls the veils over the Raccoon’s auction items. In its reflection, she sees…
I think that’s supposed to be Summer Rose, but it’s kind of hard to tell, at least until the eyes glow silver. All of a sudden, in a flash of light, the surroundings disappear and Ruby finds herself back in the festival grounds, still lit up and active, with the cat and RWBY nearby and questioning if she found the nose hair from the leprechaun. Ruby is forced to awkwardly apologize, with salt rubbed in when Blake spots the teapot lady nearby. Yes, she is an actual teapot. It’s not worth showing.
Just as the cat finds the bottled hairs he’s looking for, fireworks begin to go off in the distance, which has everyone excited until panic starts to take the crowd, who yell that the Jabberwalker is coming.
The teapot lady similarly panics and begins sucking all her merchandise inside her, with the cat clinging to the nose hair bottle and Ruby protesting. In a hurried exchange, Ruby offers…
Her rose-shaped belt clip?
R: It carries a mother’s promise!
Promise…? What the hell are you going on about? No, no, no, we are not doing this, we are not just making up shit on the spot again! Miles, Kerry, face the music, no one that is left in this fandom cares about Summer Rose. You had volume after volume to build on her legacy and you didn’t even get started on it until Volume 7! This is way too late and you can’t just drop it in here out of nowhere!
*sigh* Well, that’s gone now, so Miles and Kerry have rid Ruby of one thing we the audience have no real attachment to and have never seen Ruby express attachment to, so who cares, and they take the nose hair bottle as the teapot woman flees. Then Blake says this:
B: Wait, what’s a Jabberwalker?
You are fucking joking.
Bitch, do you see this? Miles, Kerry, do you see this?! This is a direct quote from Blake in Episode 2. She should already know what a Jabberwalker is because she mentioned it in that string of things she read about in that insipid fucking book!!!
THAT WAS THREE WEEKS AGO. YOU CANNOT SERIOUSLY HAVE FORGOTTEN WHAT YOU WROTE THAT QUICKLY.
The cat calls the Jabberwalker a terrible creature who can eat denizens of the Ever After, in which case they can’t ascend/get remade/put in the discard pile/revived. They get to mixing the growing potion, with the cat warning the group that if the ingredients are added incorrectly, they’ll just have to make a shrinking potion later. All of the gathered items go into the nose hair bottle, which goes up in smoke and immediately transmogrifies into a delicious-looking parfait in a glass bowl.
After eating a handful, the girls do grow, but not enough so before the Jabberwalker arrives and is upon them. Ruby grabs her friends and uses her semblance
LuLaRwe: 71
to evade the Jabberwalker. However, it knocks them out of the air with its tail, which shouldn’t be possible because as told to us by Penny exhaustively last volume, Ruby’s just a swarm of molecules when she uses her semblance.
Ill Logic: 194
This causes the growth potion to splatter all over the Jabberwalker and exactly what you’re thinking of happens.
Man, some weirdos out there with certain fetishes are probably lovin’ this right now.
The newly gigantified Jabberwalker runs to try and eat Ruby, but is knocked on its ass by, uh, the birdman vendor from earlier? Who flies in at high speed, whereupon the cat tells them to run—and quickly explains that he gave the vendor “something new to do for the moment” which…
Only through the sheer volume of absolute bullshit that Miles and Kerry have put me through up to this point was I compelled to momentarily doubt that not even they could write this with a straight face and imagine it to be un-villainous. Yes, the cat basically brainwashed an NCP to come help. Yes, they will be a villain later.
What’s worse is that Birdman Missile is very quickly (I mean, like, seconds) rendered null and thrown into a stall. The real rescue comes from the Rusted Knight, that armored figure that featured so prominently in the trailers for this season and who everyone and their mother has already guessed is Jaune underneath the visor.
The Knight’s bizarre beast kicks the Jabberwalker right in the stomach and on its ass while WBY go for the remaining parfait on the ground. Once back to normal size, they get their weapons out and move in to attack, while the cat beckons to Ruby to follow them.
More metal music courtesy of Casey kicks in, which I bitterly tap my feet to, maybe a headbang just a little. The Jabberwalker is immediately glued to the ground by Weiss, Blake deflects its tail strike, and Yang just starts punching it.
The knight looks on, as WBY do their thing and Yang triggers her semblance despite having received no damage to her aura that I can tell,
Your Fight Scene Sucks: 159
Ill Logic: 195
and her final strike causes the Jabberwalker to dissolve in a familiar pink glittery mist. Everyone stands in shock, expecting Neo, but there is no Neo. Another clone climbs up onto the deck (deck? Is it a deck?), stunning everyone present, including the Rusted Knight who totally isn’t Jaune, because a simple voice filter is all it’ll take to fool us, right? More Jabberwalkers begin spilling into the vicinity, and everyone is getting appropriately freaked out.
The cat bids the others to run, and tries to hold off the Jabberwalkers with his mind-controlled bird salesman. I sincerely hope they both die.
The group follows the knight up to the top of the lily pad island, whereupon they can see the denizens of the Ever After fleeing the chaos in terror. Weiss seems especially shaken, obviously remembering Beacon and Atlas. She and Ruby follow the knight inside the lily, although I think they forgot to animate a door opening somehow, or just didn’t bother.
Inside, the knight sheathes Crocea Mors, and Blake gushes over meeting this particular character from that stupid fucking book in person,
Shut the Fuck Up: 22
Which means Blake’s out-of-character-ness is spreading beyond the gaybait now. The knight pets the reindeer-like animal he was riding, addressing it as “Juniper”, before removing his helmet. Devastating surprise occurring in 3...2…1…
J: Team RWBY… You finally made it.
Bum bum buuuuuuuuuummm.
Before I go out, I would like to let you guys know what RWBY stans are up to. This may surprise you, but even outside the sick, disgusting realm of Jaune-obsessed incel fans, there are actual fans of Jaune, the character, and it is among these circles where you will find a nonetheless bizarre insistence that Jaune is actually pretty muscular. Ripped, as one would say. Where do they get this idea from?
From seeing a skinny dude’s bare shoulders, I suppose. It’s no wonder RWBY fans have taken to Genshin Impact as their next big thing, really.
Obviously this died down somewhat when Adam, Qrow, Ironwood, Taiyang, Hazel, etc. appeared, but having been deprived of male characters that are human for *checks watch* five weeks now, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that these sorts of people have already started referring to this reappearance of Jaune as “DILF Jaune”.
So ya know, if you need me, I’m going to be smacking these sorts of people with rolled-up pictures of actual DILFs. I swear to god, the most unfortunate thing about Jaune’s new look is that he now looks exactly like the people that obsess over him, complete with bunking in someone else’s attic while never shaving or bathing.
That’s all for now. Next episode!
We're entering the back half of the volume now. Four more weeks to go.
You guys are gonna keep doing that through the whole season and for what? I've already checked, it's not like we're gonna be able to spell out anything with the alliterated letters in the titles, so far it's P, A, R, C, P, and C again. So far we're at "CRAP" and "PC".
We open up on the sounds of combat, and are shown the same sequence we opened the volume on from Jaune's point of view, as he falls from the interstice and into the Ever After. However, it's him that sees Crescent Rose falling (despite the fact that Crescent Rose fell a good few minutes before Ruby, and Ruby herself fell long before Jaune).
Ill Logic: 196
Cut to him dragging himself onto the shore of the island. Some slicing through the underbrush later, and he comes across a strange tree, with a glowing, ticking clock set into it.
Like a complete idiot, Jaune just opts to take one of its fruits, which are stopwatches. Said stopwatch starts to rapidly tick backwards, and in time with its motion, the sun, which was setting, jumps back higher into the sky. Time starts to rapidly rewind, the shooting stars that are RWBY and Neo zipping back up from their crash sites and into the interstice, untold days and weeks and who knows what else passing as Jaune watches helplessly, beating the stopwatch and begging it to stop.
Time rewinds so far that the tree itself un-blooms, and when Jaune collapses to the ground in a panic, his sheathed sword has broken the one remaining stopwatch that did all this—like an idiot.
So naturally, there will be no putting time back the way it was when he got here. He’ll just have to wait the years out. A lovely plot twist, but is it going anywhere I care about? (No.)
Jaune, in Miles “grown-up” voice, says he thought he’d never see them again, as we flash forward—an older Jaune sitting on a rock, many years having gone by as he waited for RWBY to fall again. Back in the present in the lilypad fairegrounds’ attic, and when he is assured that it’s really them, they all go in and hug him. Naturally, this is followed by something I absolutely despise.
Not just gag bits,
Broke-Ass Clowns: 77
but this:
B: How are you the rusted knight?
Y: And how did you get so…
W: [eyeing Jaune up affectionately] ...mature?
Eeeeeeyup. Miles Luna is finally going to get what he wanted all the way back in Volume One—Weiss thirsting after his self-insert. I’m in hell.
Miles and Kerry flushed the whole franchise down the toilet, that’s what.
Jaune says they've got some catching up to do, and we fade to a scene set outside, as they survey a flowering field with a stormcloud in the distance. Ruby is dismayed to hear that Salem has two relics now. In totally-well-integrated and inconspicuous dialogue, the team at least find the silver lining that Cinder won't find the Beacon relic. Probably.
Correction: you crashed Atlas and lost the relic. Atlas going down was all on your whole team. You did that, and you did it on purpose. Losing Atlas wasn't a bug, it was a feature.
Lol. Lmao, even. Anyone wanna check up on Nowhere, Vacuo, and see how many of those thousands of civvies have been eaten by the Grimm?
Correct! You did not think the plan through nearly as thoroughly as you thought you did, and you did not consult anyone whose lives you were throwing away!
Blake says that saving everyone (they didn't) has to count for something, but Ruby asks what good that is if Salem just destroys the world. And all of this would be very entertaining, except that I'm not interested in Ruby taking accountability for the colossal failure of Volume 8. Because had Volume 8 not been written with a very visible agenda, Ruby would not have done the things she did. I am gaining nothing tangible out of sitting here watching Ruby beat herself up over things that, while they were her fault in-story, clearly resulted not from her logical character trajectory but from spite and railroading.
Then Yang pisses me off.
Is it? Because Ironwood didn't seem to do much thinking at all. He was the most derailed character by far.
Jaune interrupts the conversation to say they need to get moving, before the storm overtakes them. The next scene features them walking through the fields directly towards said storm, with Jaune leading them towards his village. Blake, when the subject turns to how far they've gotten, says they had help, before sparing a thought to hope the cat is okay. I don't, I hope they're dropped from this story harder than Pietro and Maria--and they dropped pretty freakin' hard.
Unfortunately, at this remark, Jaune ominously asks "What cat...?" as thunder rumbles overhead. The pain in the ass themself arrives, frolicking into the field as though they were there the whole time and nonchalantly pleased to have found them.
And also sheepishly bidding hello to Jaune, who has the posture of someone ready to snap. The storm rapidly moves into view because Rooster Teeth only ever learned one form of tonal shift. Jaune, who in a shocking reversal is actually going to be prevented from killing a semi-important character for a change, tries to attack the cat and is held back, but not before Blake sneaks in that obviously, they'd know each other because the Rusted Knight and the Curious Cat knew each other in that fucking book.
Shut the Fuck Up: 22
The stormcloud stiffly moving across the sky is so funny, too. It reminds me of this.
Jaune, barely held back from attacking, pivots towards his village again, and insists they won't need a guide out of the Ever After, to which the cat responds that RWBY wanted to go to the tree. Blake is made to feel stupid as she stupidly recalls that, hurr, that's the way to get out in the story, durr.
Shut the Fuck Up: 23
Jaune bristles and accosts the cat for withholding information from RWBY, which the cat denies, but now that someone is around who can finally speak something resembling sense, no one is paying attention to them. Jaune says that the tree is "death" and that going there would result in a person being turned into something else, their memories erased and their personhoods absorbed...the same process which was referred to as "ascension" earlier. We're getting the 'Psycho' strings in the backtrack just so everyone knows that my hunch that the cat is secretly a villain was on the money. In a very Ozpin-esque twist, the group realizes the cat has misled them, and turn on them.
It's an unfortunate sign of how bad RWBY's dialogue choices typically are that I honestly can't tell if the sudden shift to "you guys" colloquial is a slip-up of the evil cat's eeeevil mask, or just RWBY being a dumb show with dumb dialogue again.
R: Who?
Yeah, who the fuck is Louis? Oh, wait, that's "Lewis" as in Lewis Carrol, isn't it? Jaune identifies this person as Alyx's brother, which causes shock amongst RWBY. Weiss is infuriated that she gave in and got dragged along on a fairy tale book journey and it wasn't even true, which I could've easily predicted but still relate to.
The storm continues to worsen, and Ruby begs everyone to calm down long enough for her to take everything in, which the cat responds to by working more of its magic, which Jaune responds to with panic and a characteristically unsuccessful attempt to stop.
J: No!
W: How perfectly, stupidly, Ever-After.
Weiss is again relatable. Although I hope MK aren't applauding themselves on cleverly foreshadowing the weather literally responding to Ruby's emotional state, you can all go back and look at prior recaps to see how I clocked that shit from the first example. Also, why did Blake and Yang not appear here, though (shhh, I know why)? Ruby I get, but if tangential elements like Weiss and Jaune and the rabbit deer are here, too, why not them?
(It's some Bumbleby bullshit.)
There's a dumb gag where Weiss falls into the ether before reappearing because she referred to the setting as 'the pits',
Broke-Ass Clowns: 78
and Jaune states that the only way out is to either resolve the problem or wait for the storm to pass. Ruby actually asks outright where Blake and Yang are, and Jaune remarks they must've had something bigger to work out, before my hunch is immediately proven correct and we flash to where they are.
Yang and Blake have manifested on rickety bridges over the void, and again call each other's names to the exclusion of Yang's sister, which is getting the point.
How To Piss Off Gay People: 94
It's all going to get points. Rooster Teeth's wallets are on the line, and this wouldn't be happening if they weren't. It's not like we can't tell.
What I can also tell is that this scene is about to go for introspection, and that it's going to suck. It's going to involve retcons, or hitherto-unmentioned and un-hinted-at thoughts and ideas, because despite what Bee fans will tell you, Blake and Yang don't have chemistry. They used to if you squinted, back when they foiled one another as a loud, emotional thrillseeker and a cool, reserved stealth fighter, but by now, these two literally don't have any other characters to be except each other's girlfriends. There's nothing standing in the way of their relationship, and there's no subplots left for them to support one another through.
As if to underscore it, Yang's response when told they have to reach the central platform is "but how do we take the next step" instead of literally any more subtle kind of response.
How To Piss Off Gay People: 95
That one is for the part where Rooster Teeth, and in particular MK, are pretending this is an actual quandary. Not only did they not write in any variables standing in the way of the Bees once Adam bit it, but they are famously free from overhead control snipping gay characters for the sake of homophobic audiences. "How do we take the next step" is a question that implies tension or caution. There is neither here.
We fade back to RWJ's crossroads, where they come across a sign.
One appears to depict a Jaune-like boy, and the other a pawprint, a decision I thus can't make sense of. I think that's supposed to mean they're dithering over whether to trust Jaune or the cat, but my intuition tells me that would be implying Jaune could be untrustworthy, and Miles would never have that.
*irritated* Make up their minds about what? What two-forked decision is there to be made? Despite you dancing around the 'character development' and 'Ruby in turmoil' angles over and over, you've never clarified what the options are. The current mission and plot direction so far is just 'get out of the Ever After'. Ruby's potential quest of 'be Ruby Rose or don't' is meaningless to us because Ruby has no immediate means of being someone else. I'm sure you're going to try and do something with that re: the ascension and tree bullshit, but Ruby as it stands is not at the crossroads you've described. Weiss has even less to go on, and has been the only one clearly and consistently set on a specific course of action.
Ruby dithers on the story being both real and not real,
Shut the Fuck Up: 24
and Jaune gives the obvious answer: Alyx didn't record her experiences exactly as they happened. He passes a fountain flowing upwards, in which Penny's reflection can be seen, and which made me briefly homicidal.
Not helping was when Weiss passes a reflection of the city of Atlas. Again, this was literally something she endorsed--all these doubts and frustrations Weiss is having about crashing Atlas might've been some use to the story before she committed to that course of action with no apparent reservations, but are useless now. We are now about halfway through the episode.
Jaune explains that he waited years for RWBY to fall, but in the meantime, witnessed the falls of Alyx and Lewis. Jaune describes actually taking part in Alyx's adventure as it happened, but bitterly notes the biggest discrepancy: Alyx wasn't 'petulant' or 'inconsiderate'...
RSVP: 73
Oh hey, that point came out of retirement again. And it's for Rooster Teeth holding two cymbals, one saying "recolor Alice to be dark-skinned" and the other saying "recast Alice as a bad person" and then slamming them together. Probably should've just picked one or the other.
As Jaune describes, Lewis was the Abel to Alyx's Cain. There were places Jaune accompanied them to that weren't mentioned in the story, and as he puts it, the trip to the herbalist resulted in Alyx becoming distrusting of Jaune, who apparently knew the story already, and he frustratedly wonders if he changed it without meaning to.
........................
Jaune: 84
I'm not even explaining that one, you either get it or you don't.
As Jaune recounts, Alyx poisoned him and left him for dead, refusing to let anything stand in the way of her leaving. Back at the pun-derstorm crossroads whatever-the-hell, Ruby wonders where the cat enters the picture. As Jaune stares at a reflection of his old self, he says that the cat met up with him some time after Alyx had gone. What he does, Jaune explains, is convince people who have lost their way to accept their role in the Ever After, or go to the tree and get new ones, thus "feeding" the tree. As he describes, the cat took both Alyx and Lewis to the tree, but only Alyx made it back to Remnant.
Cut back to the incomplete bridges where Blake and Yang find themselves, struggling to hold on and not be blown away in the high winds.
There's a big issue with this grand reunion ("Beeunion" as they call them in the fandom circles) and I'm sure you can all tell what it is, but we're gonna wait.
Yang tries to continue via more observations about Blake, such as that her cat ears are cute (how deeply romantic...), causing another board to materialize. The high winds have calmed, and Blake speculates that they can get to the central safe zone by "saying things [they] never said".
Toldja.
Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Veil: 115
Am I ever wrong about these things? C'mon, you know I'm not. Also, Blake, let me correct that for you: it's "saying things that weren't written before now".
Guys, you can't just swerve onto the Bumbleby rails and act like the reason Blake and Yang never expressed attraction to each other before Volume 7 was because they just didn't have the words. Yang has never had difficulty speaking her mind, as established in literally her first interaction with Blake, primarily in encouragement of her sister talking to her. She's never had issues expressing attraction or positive sentiment at all. The reason this wasn't there before is because it wasn't going to happen at all before the profits started to tank.
How To Piss Off Gay People: 96
Music starts up for the big canonization of this stupid fucking ship, of course, as Yang invites Blake to take her turn, and Blake says that Yang is "an extraordinary person. You're always the first to lighten a situation."
No, she's not. That character trait was present in early volumes, but disappeared with Yang's arm and never really came back, which is why the tonal shifts always go up when Nora is around, because she's the only one still carrying that trait. Since Volume 4, Yang has gone through depression, anger issues, and distance from the other members of her team, but has never really been upbeat and positive, a trait I sorely miss from her.
How To Piss Off Gay People: 97
A trait that was also something Sun possessed, as I'm noting now.
Yang takes her turn, saying she likes that Blake was never intimidated by her, even when she didn't like her all that much, which reeks of Volume 2 and Pyrrha's lament that Jaune's the only one who treats her normally, when we've seen no evidence of that.
How To Piss Off Gay People: 98
Seriously. No one except bad guys have ever been intimidated by Yang. Ruby hasn't, Weiss hasn't, Penny hasn't, Jaune hasn't, Nora hasn't, Ren hasn't, Oscar hasn't--the list goes on. Worse still, we've not ever seen any evidence that Blake doesn't like Yang. Unlike Ruby's and Weiss' friction in Volume One, Blake and Yang have always seemed to get along no better or worse than any other teammates or ship partners. MK are pulling this stuff outta their asses because they never actually wrote it, but now they have to try and peek at Bumbleby fans' fanon to try and create their financial light at the end of the tunnel.
Y: But you never gave up on them, even when they hurt you.
1) You are literally describing Sun Wukong right now, like, that's what his plot with Blake was,
2) Blake has, in fact, given up on people who hurt her. That would be Adam Taurus.
How To Piss Off Gay People: 99
For the love of god, please do. Yang prompts a big confession, and Blake blushes and is literally enveloped in angelic golden light and I'm going to fucking vomit if this keeps up.
The bridges suddenly slide further back on both ends as Yang thinks of something she isn't saying, and it finally hits her that the central platform is only gonna be under their feet when they go canon as a ship.
Blake encourages Yang to spit it out, and the two finally confess their love for each other.
B: [overlapping] I love you, too.
*idly* Hmm, no, you don't.
How To Piss Off Gay People: 100
One last point for the road, then.
Honestly, I admit to being surprised they pulled this card so early, and relatively out of nowhere, too (even by the low standards of Bumbleby so far). I was sure they were going to wait for the very final episode to make this happen just to drag it out as long as possible.
But nonetheless, gaybait it was, and now that it's graduated, rainbow capitalism it is. Because think: what happens now?
Granted, that's a question you could ask of any relationship that takes this long to go canon, but as I pointed out, Blake and Yang don't have any real subplots besides being each other's girlfriend, which officially just got "resolved" now. There's nothing more to be done with these chicks whatsoever. I hope the Bumbleby fans are happy with their half-assed ship, because it's right back to gaybait now. If RWBY actually manages to get another season (which I doubt), the strategy going forward is going to be to have these two girls be as unbearably sappy around each other as possible to bait the Twitter-and-Tumblr crowd into doing their squeeing and gif-making.
We all knew they were going to kiss this volume, because that was their ace in the hole, and there was no other option left. Which is quite well-represented in the scene itself. Ironically, despite this whole setup being about "crossroads", there's never any other choices presented to Blake or Yang...even though Blake had another love interest in earlier volumes that could've at least been paid some amount of lip service. You guys really couldn't acknowledge Sun's existence long enough to even give Blake a choice between two bridges and have her choose Yang's?
No, I suppose not. That would suggest that Sun actually was a love interest, and Bee fans' historical revisionism (or denial of reality) that's been in place since Volume 1 has always been that Sun was Just Some Dude who was never Blake's true romantic interest.
Love To Be a Part of It Someday: 105
It Was Right There: 64
Surprisingly, the episode is not over, even though we get a pan upwards into the sky while white flowers bloom around Blake and Yang in a scene that totally begged for credits to roll.
We cut back to the crossroads where RWJ are. They are happened upon by the Curious Cat, who I sincerely hope pulls a Sun Wukong and just exits the story soon.
Ruby and Weiss are no longer in a trusting mood with this bitch, who feigns innocence, admitting that they do in fact give "After-ans" to the tree, but still insisting that this is not a fate that awaits RWBY. Weiss notes that he pretended he'd never heard of the story when they met, but had to have been told by Jaune. The cat simply responds by insinuating Jaune is going senile.
Right in front of Blake and Yang, who are still making out.
Miles, just...shut the fuck up. Shut up.
Wink Wink, Nudge Nudge: 48
How To Piss Off Gay People: 101
The episode is still not over. We fade to a house in Jaune's village at night, where Juniper the rabbit-deer is snoozing outside, Weiss is drinking tea, and Blake and Yang are holding hands. Jaune comes out of a back room holding a chest that, of course, contains Crescent Rose. Curiously, Ruby is not elated to see her scythe, and in fact undergoes some sort of 'moment' wherein the chatter fades and ominous music starts up until she's snapped out of it. Ruby awkwardly thanks Jaune and, as he makes to leave, asks him what happened to Lewis.
Jaune's ominous response is that he believes Alyx traded him to the tree in exchange for passage back to Remnant, after which she wrote him out of the story.
Then the episode ends. Let's go over my predictions from the first episode:
- Everyone very noticeably did not use their semblances at all during this episode; even Neo only used hers in the void above Wonderland—oh sorry, the Ever After. I’m going to guess there’s going to be some inhibiting factor that keeps them from using it and handily allows them to not have to animate anything remotely complex. [JOSSED]
- The Jabberwalker is obviously going to be an underling to either Neo or Alice or whoever the Red Queen expy is. [🗸]
- Jaune will, undoubtedly, be way more important than advertised so far. [🗸] And he’ll fuck something up. [PROCESSING...]
- The Crown of Choice will pop up somewhere. [PROCESSING...]
- The Bumbleby kiss. [🗸]
- Summer Rose reveal, perhaps? [PROCESSING...]
LAST MINUTE UPDATE
This person was an animator for RWBY Volume 9. This is as proof as proof gets that RWBY is, in fact, very firmly entrenched in the gay cash angle and are relying on Bumbleby to keep the series going. Ten points.
How To Piss Off Gay People: 111 (+10)
It's also how a lot of people found out that, no, Volume 10 wasn't greenlit by the time this aired.
Nor is it greenlit by November of 2023. So, despite relying on this trump card, it seems it was played way too late.
Counts:
- Jaune: 84
- It Was Right There: 64
- Fauxminism: 61
- Hypocrisy: 57
- Reliable Leaders: 80 + 17
- Prowling Wolf Fallacy: 17 (RETIRED)
- Prowling Wolf Fallacy: 17 (RETIRED)
- Threatening Enemies: 59
- Love to Be a Part of It Someday: 105
- Your Fight Scene Sucks: 159 + 33
- Evisceration Evasion: 35
- Evisceration Evasion: 35
- Ill Logic: 196
- Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Veil: 115 + 90
- Wink Wink, Nudge Nudge: 48
- Band-Aid Brigade: 56
- Wink Wink, Nudge Nudge: 48
- RSVP: 73
- Road to Nowhere: 43
- Dragged Kicking and Screaming: 53
- Y.A.S. Queen: 19
- Rooster Tease: 37
- LuLaRwe: 71
- The Lovegood Fallacy: 17
- How to Piss Off Gay People: 101
- Invisembl: 14
- Broke-Ass Clowns: 78
- Shut the Fuck Up: 24
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55 – Volume 9, Episodes 3 and 4 | Table of Contents | 57 – Volume 9, Episodes 7 and 8
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Date: 2025-10-08 08:57 pm (UTC)From: