RWBY - Volume 9 Final Thoughts

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58 – Volume 9 Finale | Table of Contents | RWBY: Final Thoughts
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Welcome to my Final Thoughts on RWBY, Volume 9. Now, regardless of whether or not this ends up being the last volume of RWBY, it won’t be my last Final Thoughts on this show—I have one I’m cooking up for the show as a whole.

But before we get there, we have to observe the abomination that was Volume 9. And there is just so...so much.

 

Story

It’s bad. It’s so freaking bad. And not one single type of bad, but a lot of different types! And not even in small ways—all of the ways this volume sucked on the story front, and pretty much every front, was highly visible from the word go!

Let’s start with the first and, really, most major problem:

NO ONE CARES ABOUT THIS.

This volume was completely pointless. I said from the very outing that this volume’s whole setting and direction was an abysmal mistake, and by the end of it, that’s only all the more the case, because by the end of RWBY Volume 9, nothing has changed. Nothing about the characters, and nothing about the wider world of RWBY. Jaune has white streaks in his hair and Yang has a girlfriend now, both of which are things that didn’t connect to anything outside the Ever After setting in any fashion and can’t possibly affect any plots in play. If this volume hadn’t happened at all, we’d be left with pretty much no differences!

I cannot fathom sitting down and, while serious events are still unfolding at this very moment in the canon, penning an entirely irrelevant filler arc where absolutely nothing is different by the end of it. Give us a new power, a weapon change, a new look, a new castmate, something! There are people who waited two and a half years for this mess! And I’m one of them!

This was a complete waste of time. There was zero reason this volume needed to happen and nothing that the characters went through in it couldn’t have been accomplished in Vacuo instead.

Of course, “waste of time” could apply to multiple aspects of this volume even before all the zeroes are added together. Not only was this a filler volume, but the filler volume itself was 50% filler. I’m not kidding when I say this is worse than Volume 5. If you shaved the first 5 of this volumes 10 episodes off, you would lose, and I need to state this clearly, nothing. What happens in the first five episodes that actually matters? Yeah, that’s right, nothing.

The cat? They don’t do anything of note before episode 8. WBY getting shrunk? They’re full-sized again before Episode 6 starts. The Ruby Rose’s great big journey of self discovery? She doesn’t even snap at anyone until episode 7. The Bumbleby canonization, Ruby’s suicide, Neo’s vengeance, Summer Rose, these things all happened in Episode 6 or later. Everything important was in the back half, and my god, could you tell. The first half of the volume drags by so slowly, so painfully, that you can pretty much tell they only really had about five or six episodes’ worth of content as a whole and somehow needed to stretch it out. It just wasn’t going to fit into twelve, so they downsized to ten.

Not helping matters is that this volume is an absolute mess. I mean, I feel like I need a new word, because I already used “messy”, “chaotic” and “tornado” to describe Volume 8. But frankly, Volume 9 puts 8 to shame in how slapdash it is, how utterly…*looks up thesaurus* anarchic this volume was. Each episode feels like a totally different story than the prior one, and things get dropped without being followed up on, and other things will be dropped without ever actually being relevant.

• The opening episode shows a bunch of fireball-like things floating around Ruby in the interstice and she possesses one, only for it to fly off. We never find out what it was, what its loss means for her, or why we should care.
• It was mentioned by a guard that the “Red King” would still be present if not for Team RWBY or at least a human or some sort, but how this makes any sense is unknown and unexplained.
• The Jabberwalker picks up something green and gear-like that the camera very noticeably focuses on but tosses it away. What this is and how it’s relevant is never made of.
• Neo takes Cinder’s form in a rage in Episode 3’s final scene, but ends the volume “ascended”, so her revenge on Cinder is never going to happen.
• More seriously a problem is the Jabberwalker itself. We don’t see what Neo did to it, and every Jabberwalker shown thereafter is a semblance clone. Did Neo kill it? Did she subjugate it and use it for further cloning? Did she clone the Jabberwalker and feed the original to a clone in a horrific act of auto-cannibalism? We have no idea, and we never will.
• Summer Rose’s flashback ultimately doesn’t add anything to the circumstances of her death besides that Raven knew something about it. For all of Ruby’s distress that she lied about it being a routine mission, it should pale in comparison to the conclusion she already came to in Volume 8, which is that Salem mutated and brainwashed her in all likelihood.
• For that matter, how Summer’s axe got down to the Ever After at all and in the blacksmith’s care is completely unmentioned.
• And for that matter, how Penny’s blade ended up in the Ever After is also unexplained, and forgotten after Episode 5. In fact, Ruby never recovers it after the Red Prince tosses it into the bushes. It’s just going to be gone forever, I guess, with no one really caring about it.
• Speaking of, the Red Prince makes a regular habit of beheading his guards—but it’s later established that, in the Ever After, beings don’t die, they “ascend”, a detail that appears to have not been implemented that early in the volume because the Red Prince never indicates his guards ever change or return from decapitation.
• And of course, as we’ve already stated, nothing about the end of Volume 8 besides where RWBY ended up gets addressed.

But that’s not all. Even the things that do get followed up on don’t feel remotely organic. It really is just like hopping rapid-fire down a checklist, because things just happen. Anything Miles and Kerry needed to happen, just happened, right then and there.

Weiss and Blake have been captured by mice? Here, Ruby made a friend of one. Yang needs her arm back and Ruby needs Penny’s sword? There’s an auction, they go get ‘em, they leave with minimal trouble. The volume needs enemies? Here, Neo can have godlike powers out of nowhere. Ruby needs to know she’s fine the way she is? Here, have a Summer Rose flashback. Jaune has to somehow not be forty years old anymore? Here, he can have Alyx’s knife and now he’s good because random unexplained magic crap. Neo won’t have anything to do once she gets her revenge on Ruby? Just shove a cat demon down her throat.

In even another season of RWBY, Neo experiencing a hollowness and dissatisfaction after getting her revenge on Ruby, to the point of being lost and effectively broken would’ve been a season-long development, and in another show entirely, would’ve taken multiple seasons. In this volume, however, it happens in a matter of seconds, pretty much the very second Ruby drinks the tea and vanishes, so that the Cat can possess her. Even before then, Neo’s powers alone had pretty much stopped obeying any and all rules of semblance and aura, doing things she emphatically wasn’t capable of doing before and on a scale that seems limitless despite us knowing Neo should have a limit to her aura reserves. The instant she landed on the Ever After, she developed powers that effectively made her a god, seemingly just to justify the re-use of models and the over-use of the one new Jabberwalker model.

Most egregiously of all is the great big Bumbleby canonization, which quite literally happens just because. Apparently, in the Ever After, a random weather pattern can come along out of nowhere and trap two people in a pocket dimension they can’t escape from unless they confess their feelings for one another. It connects to nothing that was happening before and nothing that happens after and progresses each girl’s personal character journey in no way whatsoever.

And when the volume was actually doing things we ostensibly should care about, it was not a good time. Pretty much the entire point of this volume can be boiled down to “Ruby has a breakdown and has to overcome doubt and self-hate” which occurs over three episodes out of ten, and is primarily accomplished by having another character beat her half to death and rub it in her face how worthless and detrimental she is.

I cannot overstate that the final few episodes of Volume 9 of RWBY are just...unpleasant. Neo torturing Ruby, Little getting stomped on, Ruby drinking the suicide tea, the Curious Cat violently vore-ing his way into Neo’s body, it all reeks of shock value, and you know where that leads. It leads to grimdark, aka, audiences that are less intrigued and compelled than upset and turned off.

The treatment of mental health in particular is appalling. You might could expect that Miles and Kerry, and furthermore Rooster Teeth after suicide baiting and suicidal ideation has come up in a few of the allegations against them, would be smarter than to present their primarily Twitter- and Tumblr-based tween viewers with a drawn-out, utterly gruesome scene of a teenage girl being tortured into trying to kill herself and then immediately trying to gaslight said viewership into believing it was all a big therapy/self-improvement kind of thing…

Let’s not have any smoke and mirrors: what Ruby did was a suicide attempt. She did not want to exist as Ruby Rose anymore, she was despairing and broken, she had no other options and saw no options coming, so she drank the tea. The framing irrefutably positions this as Ruby trying to end herself. You cannot remove that from the scene. And trying to twist it around into something positive only results in conveying the utterly bizarre and terrifyingly thoughtless message of “the choice of whether to kill yourself over your problems is yours, but if you do, you’ll come out better for it”.

Receiving this volume week by week and being more frustrated and unnerved with each passing episode was a frankly disgusting experience. Like, I feel like I need a shower. Usually I wouldn’t compare, but I can only say that watching this volume felt distinctly similar to reading Partially Kissed Hero, Savior of Magic, or other like-minded fanfictions with visible symptoms of lack of planning, emotional callousness, insistence on drawn-out and rather unfunny gags, filler without end, and a disturbing fascination with shocking violence. I mean, I wish I didn’t have to go there—we’ve all read PKH and we know how low a blow that is. But that’s what I was constantly reminded of.

But perhaps the reason that this volume felt so much like a bad fanfiction might be because...well, it is one.

What I’m about to posit is probably going to sound extremely off-the-wall, but I’m dead serious about it. I’ve heard various people accuse Rooster Teeth of forming RWBY from other series they’ve ripped off, anywhere from mildly to shamelessly. I usually don’t comment, because they’re usually talking about series that I’ve never been exposed to before. Well, shoe’s on the other foot today.

Some of you reading this might’ve been a bit reminded of the popular game Undertale during this volume, given its cast falls beneath the world and meets a host of cutesy monster-like people. I know I was reminded of Flowey with the Curious Cat’s rather sudden reveal of villainy after seemingly manipulative befriending behaviors before, as well as the ‘curse of curiosity’ nonsense.

But I do not believe Undertale to have been the primary basis for this volume of RWBY, no. I believe what Miles and Kerry ripped off was actually the game that Undertale owes most of its own inspiration to, a much-lesser known but still high-quality game called OFF.

Undertale is known as a quirky, surreal game beloved for its subversions of standard RPG conventions and its distinctive art style, but it can safely be said to owe a lot of these elements to OFF. If you wanted me to describe OFF, the first thing I’d have to say about it would be that it should be treated with a similar level of ‘don’t try and replicate this’ as Avatar: the Last Airbender. That alone should tell you whole franchises about how much I love and respect that game,

But where I would be saying that about ATLA for its sheer quality and depth of story, I say it about OFF because OFF is a very difficult game to understand or even talk about, let alone copy. It’s a short game on its own, and it’s deliberately surreal, ethereal, eerie, unsettling, and unexplainable in a variety of ways. I… I really can’t tell you what the plot’s about because it is very loose story-wise. One of its major inspirations was Silent Hill 2, and you could safely classify it as a psychological horror game as much as you could a cutesy RPGmaker experiment. All of the environments are in vibrant but soothing color schemes, all of the character sprites and art are in black and white, and enemies can range from adorable bedsheet ghosts to nightmarish demons to actual whales. For no reason.

Like its successor Undertale, OFF subverted typical RPG conventions and is famed for its ambiguous casting of the player character, only known as “The Batter”. The player will start out playing a somewhat straightforward RPG where their baseball-wielding character is on a mission to purify the ‘zones’ that make up the game universe, with the help of a couple NPCs that casually sweep aside the fourth wall on the regular—one of whom is a talking cat with a wide grin who calls himself the Judge.





By the end of the game, said player character has cast all of the zones into a blank void, possibly murdered an innocent man, slain his seeming wife and child, and is a step away from shutting OFF the entire universe.

It’s left ambiguous how this happened—did the Batter know what he was doing? Was this his mission from the start, or did he change over the course of the game? Does he take full responsibility for his actions? Does he honestly think what he’s done is best? The Batter doesn’t make much of himself known to begin with and even the language he uses—when he does talk—can swing wildly between very short and terse one-word answers, casual insults, and antiquated, loquacious verbage that might come out of a preacher’s mouth, and there are points where he doesn’t seem to understand what’s happening around him or particularly care. The player can go through much of the game without any real hints as to what the Batter’s really up to until near the end, where shit has really hit the fan.

I had felt several OFF vibes throughout the volume before the Curious Cat turned entirely black and white and I thought to myself “those motherfuckers…” Not only in the zone-like construction of the ‘acres’ that made up the Ever After, but also in the loquaciousness of the Curious Cat, the vibrant color schemes, the design of the Jabberwalker which provided me a lot of specter realness, and the music, when it could be bothered to be present. OFF music is very distinct, and it was also what introduced me to electro swing—a genre I noted popped up in Casey’s tracks for this volume.

That isn’t all that I was thinking of, though. The OFF vibes were strong, but what made it rather...personal for me was when the Cat not only turned black and white, but did the thing. You know, where it shoved itself down Neo’s throat and became the final boss of the season?

Not only is the Judge one of two possible final bosses for OFF (and the canon one), but he also has a brother, Valerie, who spends the second act of the story possessed by a small bird he swallowed. This ends horrifically in the original game, but OFF also had a multitude of fangames produced during its heyday. Only one that I know of ever went so far as to be a complete RPG experience, and it was called HOME. It starred the Judge, post-alternate ending, on his own little quest through the zones to ultimately stop the Batter. In that fangame, the Judge can save his brother Valerie, who will join the fight against the bird as it begins in full, similar to how Neo helped destroy the Curious Cat after being freed from its possession.



In fact, the Curious Cat’s ultimate form reminds me sharply of one of the enemies in HOME.





I wouldn’t typically get upset if it did turn out that HOME served as much as a basis for Volume 9 of RWBY as OFF did. But...well, HOME was created by a guy named Felix Mullins. Felix was a friend of mine, and I don’t have much record left of the time we were talking now that Skype has been overhauled and I’ve lost access to my account. Felix and I weren’t best friends, but we were still friends, and Felix also passed away in early 2017. It...was actually on my birthday. Not kidding.

Felix isn’t around to defend his work or intellectual property anymore. It may only have been a fangame, but it had a lot of love put into it. And imagining that it was flagrantly used as a cheat sheet for RWBY, knowing they’ve done this to plenty of artists alive and well in previous years…

It’s a sick feeling.

But, no matter what the ultimate reason for the way the story of this volume looks, it wasn’t good. Even if none of my speculations are true, we do know that they were also trying to crib Alice in Wonderland from the very beginning, an effort which was destined to fail. Alice in Wonderland is very difficult to use as a basis these days because as it turns out, literary nonsense is a difficult genre to write. There’s a reason Alice in Wonderland entered the world as a children’s book—because children largely don’t care about plot or justifying the insane happenings of stories.

But Miles and Kerry aren’t writing for children, despite occasionally behaving like them. The Alice in Wonderland coat of paint didn’t really help anything and if anything just made the whole volume more annoying. Many of the happenings and the denizens of the Ever After never came off as surreal and potentially dangerous, more often just being quirky to the point of irritation. And what it ultimately left us with was a pointless venture that would end up being the worst kind of filler.

But moving on to…

Characters

This whole volume was ostensibly a character development pit stop, we knew that from the very beginning. So in an ideal world, this section of the Final Thoughts would be just glowing with praise. Unfortunately, this is RWBY, and we know it’s probably the worst one.

Ruby Rose and her Asshole Friends

Being perhaps the character of the volume, if not the show, Ruby was the character around which Miles and Kerry finally decided to spend some effort writing.

One of the major issues with Ruby Rose’s big impending breakdown, though, is that it shouldn’t be hers alone. In fact, it shouldn’t be hers at all—I know for a fact we’re all aware of how I feel about what led to all this, and the boneheaded decision to crash Atlas, and who was really at fault for that and why. It didn’t happen because Ruby Rose the character would think to do that, it happened because of Miles’ and Kerry’s petty vendetta and determination not to spare any expense blowing their story to hell to prevent anyone “improving” it again.

But even if we sit down like good little viewers and swallow protests in that vein, it still isn’t just Ruby’s fault. The plan to crash Atlas and displace its citizens was a team coordination. Jaune was involved, Ozpin was involved, and between them and Ruby, it certainly wasn’t entirely or even mostly her planning that led to it. Not only that, but Weiss, Blake, and Yang were also involved, and piped up with none of the logical protests they all should’ve had, most especially Weiss. Volume 7 had Weiss declaring that Atlas is her home and that she won’t give it up without a fight. Volume 8 had Weiss...giving it up without a fight.

You can’t play it both ways. Ruby shouldn’t be the only one upset about being a failure—but while Weiss is allowed to occasionally look somewhat down about the fact her fucking home continent got destroyed with nothing to show for it, Blake and Yang just look really bad. The whole world’s turned crazy, Penny’s dead, Atlas and Mantle are gone, Salem has two relics and is going to blow up the planet, and Ruby’s sitting here watching Blake all but hump Yang’s leg, and Yang just seems to be coasting with no real thoughts as to what happened. They give some modicum of attention to whatever is the center of attention at the moment, be that a Jabberwalker attack or Jaune acting like an overbearing mom on crazy pills, but don’t seem to feel bad at all over what ostensibly should be a massive blow to their respective confidences in their mission.

Four episodes into the volume, the whole show seemingly stops so that we can have a dream sequence that acknowledges that Ruby is feeling the hurt...and the others apparently aren’t. Weiss, Blake, and Yang talk themselves up to their old selves even despite their old selves pointing out the fact that their characters have been shot to pieces and they’re just going through the motions now.

Perhaps to drive home the fact that Ruby is spiraling, her friends pay her almost no attention throughout the volume, to the point where Ruby, in the second episode, just wakes up on the ground with Yang not even bothering to ask her if she’s okay, given that she fainted. Once she finally snaps and ditches her useless-ass friends, of course, Neo decides to prey on her, which just leads all kinds of bad places. But let’s take this apart and go through it character by character like we usually do.

Ruby Rose

In what almost seems like a full-circle effect given her continual non-characterization throughout the show, Ruby ends the volume virtually unchanged. A whole thing is set up with the fact that Ruby just can’t handle what her life has become and wants to not exist (as herself) anymore…and then just tossed out. Ruby ultimately overcomes her issues by just...deciding to be enough. To be okay.

Road to Nowhere: 54

Obviously, depression and trauma don’t work that way in real life, and it’s hilariously underhanded of MKEK to try and spin that into a “you are good enough as you are” narrative (you can see Kerry on Twitter peddling that nonsense) that wouldn’t really address why Ruby was feeling that way even if there hadn’t been a torture-and-suicide scene beforehand.

The irony in all of this is that the thing Ruby ultimately becomes when she sheds her wooden coccoon is…a confident, competent badass with a sniper-scythe. This is a bit of a spoiler for my Final Thoughts on the series as a whole, but this is something Ruby Rose should’ve been the whole freaking show, yet hasn’t been since the Red Trailer.

Ruby’s prior character just wasn’t interesting and she never seems to have a driving motivation or subplot besides saving the day, and that ultimately hasn’t changed, despite Miles once again engaging in what has come to be known in fandom as “Summer-baiting”. Repeatedly dropping crumbs about Ruby’s mom and not actually delving into her actual quest against Salem and how Ruby is carrying it on, etc. etc… After that happens enough times, it doesn’t really make Ruby interesting, it just makes you want to yell at them to get Summer Rose in the damn story already.

She’s at her most entertaining when she’s snapping on the others and actually biting back, but naturally, this doesn’t last. I remember seeing a RWBY fan post something along the lines of wanting to see an Episode 8 where Ruby snaps on Neo and just carves through dozens of Jabberwalker clones like a red whirlwind, and I remember thinking ‘that would be so entertaining, a shame that’s not going to happen’. And I was right. What did happen was so much worse.

Guys, Ruby didn’t deserve to be made into Miles’ scapegoat, and certainly deserved better than the sadistic scenes she was put through.

And the thing is that Ruby’s ultimate non-transformation could’ve been reasonably good, had they actually led off from what one of Ruby’s major concerns early in the volume was, which was Penny. The thing that the volume ultimately becomes for Ruby is just “yeah everything’s fine I guess, I’m me”. Ruby makes the choice to not be someone else, but to be herself. Yeah, sure, great, whatever.

But people aren’t single individuals untouched by the influence of others. At the end of the second episode, Ruby lifts up the memory of Penny Polendina and glamorizes her, not only mourning her but praising what she stood for. For all that the first half of the volume seemed to be setting up something with Penny’s green blade, it never goes anywhere and what Ruby ends up staring at in the blacksmith’s weapon displays is her mom’s axe for some stupid reason. I think Ruby choosing Penny’s blade because she wants to become the kind of person Penny was, and live for her memory and the things she fought for, would’ve been at least marginally better than what we got.

But alas, nothing has changed.

Weiss Schnee

Let’s be honest, Weiss was second place in how much she contributed to this volume after Ruby, but it’s a very distant second place. She doesn’t do anything to change or develop, and unlike Ruby, we’re not being told that she is, either, but she at least gets to think about the consequences of Volume 8’s climax for longer than one episode.

Of course, like with everything else, the second half of the volume is wildly different from the first as far as she goes, and what starts out as doubts about her worth as a huntress and mourning the loss of her home ends up being traded for...loaded interactions with Jaune. It’s not super obvious because Blake and Yang’s nonsense is so up front and deliberate, but it didn’t pass me by how even when Weiss isn’t making eyes at Jaune’s “maturity”, she’s always next to him, talking to him, partnering up with him in battles… It’s as droll and predictable as Miles’ material always is, and I guess I shouldn’t be surprised at the longevity his interest in that ship had, given how long he holds petty grudges for.

I’m left struggling to think of what Weiss really got out of this volume or contributed to it.

Blake Belladonna and Yang Xiao Long

And here come the Siamese girlfriends. Weiss being noticeably more interesting than her castmates is a pretty consistent thing with RWBY, and it seems like every volume I’ve mentioned that trend. Blake and Yang, however, are basically wearing neon signs screaming that they have no subplots left to contribute to and no driving motivations at all.

Blake’s obsession with that stupid fucking children’s book in the first half of the volume is a painfully obvious yet ineffective attempt to fill that void, because otherwise she’d pass the volume by while barely speaking a word. Yang’s token stabs at actually remembering her sister exist are paltry lip services to try and get people to stop saying that Blake seems to be all that she cares about these days, which is again woefully ineffective because a) Yang caring about Blake is all that her fans care about and b) Rooster Teeth know that and banked everything on their dumbass kiss to try and secure enough merchandising funds to keep the show going. Whatever Ruby was going through was not nearly as important to the writers as getting that gay cash, and it shows.

But worse than being poorly written is being poorly written and uninteresting. Suffice it to say that if you’re not a Bumbleby shipper—and that number counts not just me, but a lot of people—then Blake and Yang were just thoroughly uninteresting this volume. Besides their big confession and kiss that came out of nowhere, what did they add? What was their arc?

Even in terms of the romance, what was it built off of? What was the central point of their journeys that brought them together? It can’t be Adam, because he never got so much as mentioned in Volume 9, or even Volume 8. It can’t be their contrasting personalities, because they don’t have those anymore. You ask any Bumbleby fan what the actual cornerstone of their relationship is, and they will not be able to tell you. They’ll spout off a bunch of crap that’s either a blatant misread of a canon scene or something they completely made up.

This is boring, I’m bored! Give me something with substance, give me something with actual romance!

Jaune Arc

And here we come to the major proof Miles just cannot let anything go, because Jaune absolutely did not need to be in this volume.

Granted, you could say that about pretty much everyone because this volume really didn’t need to exist, but Jaune especially sticks out as doing a lot of talking and emoting and fighting and accomplishing very little with it. I was devastated we passed the volume without another “Ruby Rose has a meltdown” moment, if only because it meant that she only got the one and Jaune still somehow made it his own instead of hers.

Naturally, Miles was not going to give. Despite all indications, we did not get Jaune finally acknowledging that the reason he’s a shitty hero is because he better suits a supporting role, a fact all prior volumes have proven. No, the reason he was a shitty hero is just because people keep dying and he’s not good enough. No flaws acknowledged, at least not ones that can’t be linked back to his paaaaaaain over Pyrrha and Penny.

Probably the peak of this is the Paper Pleasers’ reincarnation. At last check, everyone was in a panic because Ruby got taken by the tree, but despite the consequences that loomed—pretty much a guaranteed erasure of Ruby and no memory of who they are, if she ever gets out—we still had to stop and acknowledge that Jaune was being too smothering with his little origami children and give him a big ol group hug because it’s all better now. I guess keeping the matter strictly centered on Ruby was just too much.

I don’t care, Miles. No one does. Everyone is sick of Jaune and no one needed him here, and if you excised him from the volume as a whole, very little would change.

Little

This was a genuinely pointless character.

I was very sure this little creature was going to be a shining light of innocence that would restore Ruby’s hope and self-worth, but despite the wrap-up in Episode 10 acting like that’s what happened, Little was barely present in this volume. They spent most of their screentime sleeping, eating, and being unhelpful.

Granted, seeing Neo stomp them to death under her heel was rather upsetting, but I can’t say there was much about Little to get invested in. Little wasn’t actually used to restore Ruby’s hope, they were used to destroy it. And that's awful.

Neo

What a travesty.

Neo basically wasn’t Neo in this volume. Much like with Adam or Ironwood, the upgrade to a seasonal villain cost Neo quite a lot. It’s one of those proofs that Miles and Kerry don’t know what their fans like about the characters, and probably don’t care. Everything fans liked about Neo has now been stripped from her.

Neo was, early on, sold on her mystery. All fans knew about her was that she couldn’t talk, was an incredibly skilled melee fighter, and had strange powers that lent her talent as a stealth artist. Her motives were unknown, and when Neo had to be expanded on in Volume 6, they stayed simple and that was to her benefit: she was involved with Roman and only really did anything she did for his sake, with her grief providing the writers an opportunity to write her into the story again on Cinder’s side.

I raged and raged about the redemption of Emerald and how it flew in the face of Emerald’s canon characterization prior, which was monstrous. If any female villain had a major redemption waiting, it was Neo, who had already been shown to be largely out of the loop regarding Salem, who was known to be motivated by love and grief for Roman, and who now had a grudge against Cinder to seek vengeance for.

So, naturally, Neo’s major moment in Volume 9 is conjuring up clones to beat Ruby to near-death while mentally assaulting her for her failures through the mouths of her dead friends and allies, utterly sealing her doom and rendering her forever unsympathetic.

Remember how I cringed at how Ironwood, in Volume 8, just became another Cinder Fall? Coolly delivered threats, constant monotone, oozing malevolence? Well, now it’s Neo’s turn, and she gets to be petty, spiteful, murderous, overpowered, and utterly sick in how she enjoys tormenting others weaker than her. She’s just Cinder Fall now.

Everything unique and interesting about her is gone. Neo no longer needs to bother with stealth; as soon as she lands on the Ever After, her semblance powers instantly expand to a laughably overpowered degree, so she can now clone herself and others into entire military troops, and even create entire buildings out of nothing. She’s no longer coldly efficient and to-the-point; she spends an extended scene violently beating Ruby Rose into the ground with the express goal of hurting her enough to make her commit suicide, and then kills a helpless animal just to drive the point home. Hell, she’s not even mute anymore, considering her holograms are now fully capable of speech and can talk for her.

Becoming so blatantly overwrought meant that that the other seasonal villain only managed to overpower her when she sat there and let them, and that was even worse, because then she went from vicious and spiteful to helpless vore victim in an uncomfortably perverse display.

And then, of course, she exits the show. The one villainess with the most potential, and she gets the closest thing to a redemption after having acted too ruthlessly cruel to feel like she deserves it. This is, of course, the better option in retrospect, because the alternative was getting eaten by Jabberwalkers like the fucking Cat. What a shame that only one of our antagonists had tits, then we could’ve had two ascension redemptions, right?

The Curious Cat

A thoroughly unenjoyable character.

Despite the swerve into villainy being heralded by the declaration that they had been trying to break Ruby all along, this isn’t reflected in the prior episodes, with the Cat very clearly having insidious elements and obvious hints of manipulation and villainy, but content to spend most of their time in relation to Ruby just being really annoying. In fact, in the one episode before the halfway point where it looks like Ruby might actually break, the Cat dispels the visions and sends the Herbalist on a little ascension trip before it can go any further.

Turning the Cheshire Cat expy into a villain rings of the same kind of nuance-less tunnel vision-esque short attention spans that produce villainous Dumbledore and villainous Happy Mask Salesman fics. Combining that with the uncomfortable similarities with OFF/HOME that crop up around the Cat, and I’m just dreading the fact that Miles and Kerry simply can’t leave well enough alone. Their twists never work out, and maybe it’s a short attention span that ultimately causes that.

Of course, the Cat gets some minor sympathy too late to really matter in the very final act of the final episode, when the Blacksmith explains the backstory of the gods. Apparently, when creating the Cat, they forgot to program ascension or other means of magical reset button onto them, and so when the Cat had its heart broken by Alyx’s betrayal, it had no means of working through that. This is, in essentials, the same motivation as Neo, whose heart was also broken and, as all but spelled out in her last scene, didn’t have any support for that and thus went down a villainy spiral.

So, because the Cat doesn’t have tits, they end up messily eaten by monsters while Neo gets to be turned into a graceful wood chrysalis.

How To Piss Off Gay People: 114

Because that reminded me, I forgot that both our non-binary characters, despite being animals, were brutally killed. I gave Little their point, but not the cat.

I really am curious what the viewer is supposed to be feeling here when this discrepancy pops up—the Cat isn’t a man, it’s an animal. If anything, it presents even more harmlessly cute than Neo does, and most people don’t like seeing (or hearing) domestic animals like cats torn apart and fed on by monsters. Why did Neo deserve any prettier an end than the Cat did?

I guess because Miles doesn’t find it suitable to jerk off to, into the meat grinder it goes, right?

The Jabberwalker

This was not a character. This was, for all intents and purposes, a Grimm, with the same fodder role as any other Grimm in the series. The end reveal that it’s a direct creation of the God of Darkness who got pissy that it was called defective only cements that.

The Great Tree/The Blacksmith

I’m not even sure what to think of this one, but I know it’s not anything good.

The Blacksmith is essentially the personification of the Tree, or perhaps the Ever After as a whole, and her job is to explain backstories and re-mold characters who die into improved versions of themselves. Just because she couches everything in cryptic, vaguely hopeful language about self-improvement doesn’t really change anything about that. Really, you can call her the personfication of the volume as a whole, in which case this becomes much easier because she’s garbage and I hate her.

Alyx

Also not a character.

She was actually evil, shock gasp horror! Except no she’s not, she changed her mind. And she’s dead either way, so here, Jaune, have a free coupon to be young and virile again.

Bleh.

Everyone Else

The raccoon was annoying, the rats were annoying, the king’s guards were annoying, the Herbalist was annoying, and the Red Prince was the most aggravatingly annoying son of a bitch to ever darken this show, and that is saying quite something considering the irritating characters that’ve come and gone since it started.

Music

The music for Volume 9 was rather underwhelming, largely because it was barely there. When a score was actually present instead of scenes just being completely un-tracked, it was often exceedingly simple, to the point of being less a song and more a repeating piano note or violin draw.

Casey and her bandmates are clearly talented songwriters, but I think the only tracks I out-and-out remember are the metal/electro swing mashup that played over Episode 3’s fight scene ("Checkmate"), and the music box rendition of Red Like Roses. Suffice it to say that either way, we’ve long since passed the point where music could save this shitty show, and although some of the tracks may slap, I’m just sorry Casey wasted some of her talent on Rooster Teeth.

Retrospective

Alright my children, let’s look back at the original post for this volume and see if we got lied to with that opening animation.

*skim skim skim skim skim skim skim*

Well, there’s the shots of the pun-derstorm pocket dimensions, which are switched. Weiss, Blake, and Yang appear in the stone garden while Ruby is the only one on the stormy bridge, but I don’t think that really counts.

There’s the shots we get of Neo.



But Neo certainly didn’t give the expected showing after this intro seemingly hyped her as a major player in the volume. Either way, since we’re not doing a big lie about Ironwood having a fallen hero arc or whatever it is Miles and Kerry like to pretend Volume 8 was, the opening animation passes.

What doesn’t pass is the actual volume trailer.

Yes, yes, we all know that RWBY stans were going to swallow the nonsense about this being a ‘character development volume’ hook, line, and sinker. That doesn’t change the fact that that is a bald-faced lie. And I’m calling it a lie because the trailer actually goes further than repeating ‘What are you?’ ad nauseum like the actual volume did. There was also the Blacksmith’s tempting question of what would happen if Ruby could leave ‘Ruby Rose’ behind…

...as well as the foreboding question of what will happen if she doesn’t. In the face of all of that, with Miles knowing Ruby was ultimately going to pass on any such offer no matter how dire, it’s just teasing a volume that didn’t actually happen.

Rooster Tease: 38

Airtime Observations

You know, every time I reach this section of the Final Thoughts, I go on and on about how RWBY’s fanbase had been bleeding out and is basically gone, to the extent that it would be redundant to harp on it more, but...I’m sorry, it does bear this one last mention.

There is no one here. No one’s left! Throughout the season’s airing, I made a practice of looking through the #rwby hashtags (usually the most active ones) across the web and it’s almost pitiful. Maybe 20 posts on the days RWBY episodes air, about 5-10 a day every other day and sometimes not even then. Of every post I found, maybe 80% were Bumbleby fanarts and edits, another 10% were miscellaneous commentary on the show’s episodes, 5% was accounts that have to operate daily like @rwbyfights, and the last 5% was just hideously horny fanart by people that very clearly are tuned out of the show itself. Much of what I saw was a blur with the same five or six accounts popping up. There is very little record remaining that RWBY was ever a huge hit show with a massive online presence.

And then, of course, there was the official RWBY channels posting attention-fishing sorts of material, putting their Bumbleby “moments” everywhere, with the inexplicable air of someone expecting adulation for being pansies that can’t even let two women hold hands, or posting the Cheshire Cat’s meta commentary on the show’s events as though it were a wink and a nudge rather than Miles and Kerry being bitter dickheads, both of which, when they actually got noticed and commented on by fans, were often shaded and dismissed.

Of course, there’s also the fans’ side of this. Much as usual, their day jobs consist of misrepresenting what’s actually in the volume to give it the best spin possible. This translated to an absolute assload of screaming that Ruby’s suicide attempt wasn’t actually a suicide attempt and somehow trying to make the people who think it was out to be terrible people for that. And now that the volume’s over, they’re doing their best to try and get Volume 10 greenlit, with the sort of desperation that says they know there’s a very good chance it won’t be.

Something curious and a little funny (but mostly aggravating) is how much Monty’s name has come up lately. You’ll find, if you trawl through the boards and feeds, that much of the bitchiness regarding bringing up Monty has taken on a derisive tone, as if “Monty purists” (their words, not mine) are idiots for focusing so much on “Monty’s vision” as if that couldn’t possibly be some concrete thing that was or was not adhered to. And yet, suddenly, Monty’s “vision” is extremely important. The number one angle Bumbleby fans in particular went for the second they got their canon ship and kiss, was to say that this was what Monty had planned all along, usually with a pointed reference to a tweet Monty made in Volume 2’s airing saying “good romance is earned”. I was around when that tweet was made and I can tell you for a fact it was more about Bumbleby fans being entitled shits that wouldn’t shut up about Blake and Yang not kissing right then and there to the point of harassing the voice actors about it--so don't play games with me.

But how the tables turn once they actually get what they want, right? I thought using Monty’s name was a bad thing? I thought focusing on his “vision” and what he would’ve wanted was dumb? Suddenly Monty’s plan extended all the way from Volume 1 to here, and included this moment that Miles and Kerry totally didn’t throw in on the fly when their show was finally facing potential cancellation? I’m curious—if that’s the case, are we really suggesting that Neo beating up Ruby and making her commit suicide was also part of that plan? Just asking.

So yes, fans are on some intense copium right now. Not much new to say there. The only thing that’s changed is that the end is finally looming. We all knew that much as soon as they moved to Crunchyroll and refused to release RWBY episodes for free for a whole year, and then begged people not to pirate it as if that wasn’t exactly the option they made most fans take. But as the volume has worn on, the writers, animators, and producers have been increasingly active on twitter, mentioning the budget nonstop and their scrapped ideas and how personal the volume was for them, yadda yadda, bullshit bullshit, etc etc. Little hint from those who’ve been around the block—any time the budget starts to come up every ten seconds, cancellation is around the corner.

Of course, that was the fate of this show from the day Volume 8 started airing, if we’re honest. There was pretty much nothing they could’ve done to save this show after Miles and Kerry decided spiting Volume 7 was more important than retaining fans. Volume 9 would’ve entered the scene pitifully low on fan viewership even if it hadn’t had two years of hiatus for said viewership to keep bleeding out. The final deathblow was imagining that the only safety net that they needed was a canon Bumbleby kiss, and doing absolutely nothing to draw back in their fleeing viewers, but rather indulging in upsetting grimdark bullshit and turning suidice-as-a-benefit plots into a Rooster Teeth trend, something Gen:Lock fans are probably astounded to see happen. Turns out, Bumbleby fans might've been a massive pain in the ass for many years, but that’s more for being loud and toxic than for being a big enough market to sell a show on. As was once said about Stephanie Meyer’s fanbase, what? Did you imagine that all of your loyal viewers actually paid to see the work?

Of course, you could counter that Bumbleby merch successfully sold out in the week following the sixth episode, but knowing Rooster Teeth, that’s probably because they didn’t make a whole lot of it in the first place. RWBY stans, particularly Bumbleby stans (which is pretty much the same group at this point) are now scrambling to try and scrounge up funds to monetarily support Rooster Teeth and get RWBY Volume 10 greenlit, a pathetically, morally bankrupt move on its own considering all that we’ve known about Rooster Teeth and its treatment of its employees for a while now. But their panic is a tad bit enjoyable just for how hard it’s hitting them that no, Bumbleby is not going to float the show on its own. I will be genuinely shocked if a tenth season of this show is greenlit, and if word doesn’t come within two months of posting this, I’m probably gonna post my final thoughts on the show as a whole.

I’m expecting some scandals to drop pretty soon, considering what the forecast is like for RWBY’s future. I’m wondering if we’re going to hear an utterly disgusting tale behind the baffling Bumbleby Onlyfans lingerie photoshoot, because I don’t think I’ve seen anything that implicitly horrifying in quite a while.

If there’s anything else to be reported inbetween now and the eventual posting of this on the comm, I’ll update this post to reflect it.

Counts:
 

• Jaune: 89
• It Was Right There: 64
• Fauxminism: 69
• Hypocrisy: 57
• Reliable Leaders: 80 + 17
  • Prowling Wolf Fallacy: 17 (RETIRED)
• Threatening Enemies: 59
• Love to Be a Part of It Someday: 106
• Your Fight Scene Sucks: 162 + 35
  • Evisceration Evasion: 35
• Ill Logic: 202
  
• Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Veil: 120 + 108
  • Wink Wink, Nudge Nudge: 50
    
  • Band-Aid Brigade: 58
• RSVP: 74
• Road to Nowhere: 54
• Dragged Kicking and Screaming: 58
• Y.A.S. Queen: 20
  
• Rooster Tease: 38
• LuLaRwe: 82
  
• The Lovegood Fallacy: 17
• How to Piss Off Gay People: 114
• Invisembl: 14
• Broke-Ass Clowns: 79
• Shut the Fuck Up: 24

 

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58 – Volume 9 Finale | Table of Contents | RWBY: Final Thoughts

Comments

[surgeworks]

Nope. Now that RTX 2024 is cancelled because no one wants to give Rooster Teeth money anymore, and now that Barb has done her little song and dance on Reddit bleating about the budget (an audacious thing to do given the stolen and unpaid wages reported by ex-animators), I think we can safely say that animatic will not be going anywhere. Why examine any more RWBY content that I already know won't matter?

I think I make minor references to it when discussing Raven on my Final Thoughts for characters, but otherwise, I didn't find anything worth the time spent to comment on it.