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RWBY 2023 Retrospective (Part 1) | Table of Contents | RWBY Final Thoughts: Story
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Continuing on from where we last left off, we're advancing on our journey of RWBY's most immortal moments, but this time the badge is one of disgrace.
While there were some sparks of quality here and there (mostly in Season 7) after RWBY took its swan dive, the vast majority of things RWBY gets remembered for post-Volume 5 are overwhelmingly negative, proofs that the show was just never going to be what it was meant to be, and never going to regain the quality and fun that it was once known for.
I have twenty moments today that broke me and essentially spat in my face after all the time in my youth growing up that I spent faithfully watching this show and expecting greatness or at least goodness.
20. The New Standard For Quality – Raven Branwen vs. Cinder Fall, Volume 5
I have always disagreed that Raven vs. Cinder is the “highlight” of Volume 5. It’s certainly supposed to be—a big fight that takes three minutes of the episode to showcase and is posited as this big confrontation of super versus super. But while ultimately more engaging than its immediate precedents, those being the utterly embarrassing failures of action sequences in Volume 5’s climax, it still isn’t very good by the standards of RWBY. When I think about it, a lot of the stuff that I detest about modern RWBY fight scenes starts here.
An over-emphasis on slow motion insertions? Blurry blade swipes? Stopping the fight to talk? The characters continually crossing weapons without any indication they’re actually trying to hit each other rather than tap each other’s swords together? It’s all there. The climactic sequences with Pyrrha versus Cinder and RNJR versus the Nuckelavee were better because at least you could see both sides of the fight actually reacting to the other’s movements, rather than just the two flying back and forth making no real progress in the melee front.
Most aggravating at all is the sound design. One of the things RWBY definitively lost with Monty was, for some reason, the sounds associated with each weapon. Ruby’s rifle still makes something akin to its old noises, but that’s about it. Every other weapon? Nothing sounds distinct anymore. It doesn’t get super noticeable until Penny and Winter versus Cinder in Volume 7, because Penny had some of the most noticeable weaponry soundbytes, but this is where it began. There’s no oomph to the strikes Cinder and Raven take at each other, no real underlining sound design besides anonymous ting and clink sounds.
This of course being the fight that was so at odds with Cinder’s previous desire to murder Ruby Rose in fiery vengeance for her previous defeat, and Raven and Cinder barely knowing each other at this point, and Vernal having taken a Miles-and-Kerry blunt pen to the gut to make it happen, the fight’s just thoroughly annoying more than entertaining.
19. An Unpleasant Incident Involving a Train – Grimm Attack, Volume 6
And with that, we move onto the scenes that actually made me angry. This has to be the worst premiere fight scene of any volume of RWBY. It goes on forever, and every single inch of it is more aggravating than the last.
It’s the logic of it all that tore my brain open. The sequence relies on the heroic faction correcting a dangerous course of action and handling the problem themselves, but for this to work, they have to paint the established, routine, and functional use of automated defenses to be some kind of bad thing. I pointed out over and over how there was no reason for Qrow and Oscar to be freaking out over the defense turrets on the train which, after all, were doing exactly what they were there for and defending the civilians. There was nothing at all to imply this was dangerous or hazardous except the main characters’ word that it was, and none of them ever explained their strange insistence that these defenses were drawing Grimm to the passengers—they were only deployed once the Grimm showed up, were spaced evenly along the entire train, and the passengers’ cabins were shielded by thick armor that prevented any outside attack.
In trying to force such a bizarre and backwards scenario, the characters also came off not only illogical, but downright violent—Qrow is at his worst here, when he physically attacks a man whose arm is freshly shattered, and no one has the slightest thing to say to him about it. It was appalling to watch in action, and made me realize that there was not going to be any improving from Volume 5.
18. “Just A Light Slap On the Arm” and Other Lies – Sun & Blake, Volume 4
One of the first things signaling an immediate downgrade from Volumes 3 to 4 was the treatment of Sun Wukong. I suppose I could’ve just been happy he got any screentime at all, but it was difficult to enjoy when it all seemed to go so wrong.
Starting with the really really bad red herring where we’re supposed to think Adam followed Blake, only for it to be revealed as Sun without a thought as to how bad this made him look, things started going south very quickly. While the first slap from Blake to Sun’s face is largely played up as comedic and a tad justified, the second one later in the volume is not. One cut, we’re watching Sun faceplant through the door all funny-funny, the next cut, Blake and Sun are alone out on the porch and Blake is just whaling on the poor guy. There’s no comedic tone, it very clearly hurts, and she follows it up by grabbing his phone and tossing it in the woods. The fact that it more closely resembled other, clearly deliberate depictions of abuse via characters like Adam Taurus and Jacques Schnee than the alleged light slap on the arm that it was supposed to made it very difficult to believe Miles Luna’s claim, when faced with fans upset about it, that this was all just a big misunderstanding and the animators just darn didn’t get it right.
This is a major factor fueling my suspicion that Miles was getting back at a fictional character because he can’t separate fiction from reality and disliked Blake, voiced by his ex, being interested in a character voiced by someone else.
17. That Time A Literal Child Got Tortured – Oscar, Volume 8
Gratuitous torture and suffering is a major tell as to Suethor immaturity. There is no tactic more prone to misfiring than putting a helpless character through a grisly trial of pain and agony. As much as you would hope audiences will see it and sympathize, you run just as much risk of it turning them off, especially if there isn’t a point to it.
There is no point to Oscar being tortured, at least not one that involves Oscar actually mattering. Hazel berating Ozpin for hurting children while himself hurting children does not come off any better than it did in Volume 5—he still looks dumb for it. And of course, the ultimate goal is still to shield Ozpin. See? He’s offering to take the torture, but Oscar won’t let him! So that makes it okay that Ozpin is going to eat his brain like soup!
And, of course, some SUBTLE FORESHADOWING about fairy tales that unfortunately becomes Volume 9, like a cancerous mass growing out of the side of Volume 8’s neck.
It’s wonderful that Oscar is just so strong as to resist Hazel beating the living shit out of him, sure, but ultimately none of it was about Oscar. He’s going to get up and keep going and not mention the trauma this would surely realistically inflict later, because if he did, that would be inconvenient for Ozpin.
And speaking of Hazel and Ozpin,
16. Hazel’s Brain Outgrew His Skull, I Guess – Hazel, Volume 5
Our next one is the not-so-small part of Volume 5’s terrible, awful, no-good climactic last few episodes that’s so mocked and maligned: the collapse of Hazel as a character.
It is amazing how it all made it to script and actually got animated without anyone stopping them. In retrospect, Hazel being mad at Ozpin over his sister dying due to something only vaguely related to him, enough to become Salem’s enforcer and commit countless murders, is something so abundantly, deliberately dumb that I can’t believe I didn’t spot the derailment sooner.
Perhaps it’s not the worst example of pig-headedly steamrolling ahead with bad ideas, but I can safely say it was the earliest. I can’t see even Miles or Kerry looking at this and not imagining it sounds dumb, I just think they didn’t care, because it sounding dumb as hell was the point. Unfortunately, the audience did care, and this became part of the epic shitshow that got Miles and Kerry maligned as terrible writers. As it turns out, the audience who was already suspicious of Ozpin weren’t going to magically forgive his transgressions just because in-universe, some characters that didn’t like him were given the most braindead reasons to do so.
So Miles and Kerry tore down a character and forever ruined any ability of the audience to take him seriously, without even having anything to show for it, setting the stage for him to be summarily swept out of the show three years later.
15. Jaune’s Wearing His Girlfriend – Volume 4 Premier
It stands as a stark testament to exactly how bad RWBY got over the years that this epically hated moment is only 15th on this list.
How absolutely thoughtless could a writer be, I’ve often wondered, to put this to pen and not see the glaringly obvious problems with it? To presume that the last effects of a fallen warrior, a girl who gave her life to fight evil, would be best added to Jaune’s equipment as upgrades, sealing the deal on any doubt that Pyrrha Nikos had lived and died as a character purely to benefit Jaune?
It really proved how careless Miles Luna could be, and it’s sad that it could’ve been saved by just waiting longer to do it. Jaune never accomplishes, to my knowledge of the canon, anything at all with this upgraded sword, so there was no reason to just wait until Pyrrha’s parents could be entered into the story and give their blessing to do what was clearly thought by Miles to be the most incredibly deep of developments.
But he didn’t think, and didn’t consider what fans might think, and from that point onward Jaune was unsalvageable in the eyes of the fanbase. All for a fancy-looking broadsword.
14. “Not Only Was It Not Funny, But You Wasted My Time” – Willow Pill, Volume 6
Caroline Cordovin is such a pointless and aggravating character that she ranks among the few in all of RWBY that I have never seen someone attach themselves to, which is quite astounding as I’ve seen people declare Oobleck to unironically be their favorite character with astonishing frequency. She was designed to be frustrating, that much is clear, but it’s the tone of her character and her ill fit into the story that separates her from the likes of Cardin Winchester. Her antics and behavior were clearly intended to come off light-heartedly enough to be funny, but they came off as incredibly out of sync with the show around her. And, simultaneously, she was treated with enough seriousness to warrant a staggering three-episode stretch of combat, when most confrontations with antagonists were dealt with in one at most.
Ultimately, the purpose she serves in the story is incredibly bare; she wasn’t written with the intention of being loved or even hated, but her screentime meant that she was difficult to ignore. She was simply there to give Volume 6 a climax that more characters than just Blake and Yang could participate in, and the lack of weight to her part in the story, her lack of personal stakes compared to Adam or Cinder or Salem, or even Torchwick, meant that the longer she was onscreen, the more frustrating it was to watch her in action.
In short, it was decided that there would be a giant mech fight for absolutely no reason, and against all odds, Miles and Kerry managed to make that unenjoyable.
13. One Last Knife To the Gays’ Hearts – Clover Ebi, Volume 7
In case it was not clear by the planet-freezing fury I expressed when I recapped it, one of the more despicable crushing defeats of Volume 7 is the viewer having to watch Clover Ebi die in the stupidest, most offensive fashion possible.
Much like the rest of the Volume 8-isms that served as Volume 8’s immediate precedent, this aspect of Volume 7 just felt...mean. Spiteful and cruel, and pointlessly so. In order to achieve it, Qrow and Clover both have to violate all possible sensible courses of action and then, when Clover is given the fatal blow, it’s explicitly given the most heart-wrenching edit possible and framed the same way as the darkest hour-style scenario that is the loss of Yang’s arm. You play “Such Arrogance” over Clover getting gored with Qrow’s sword, and it’ll fit right in.
Perhaps I’d have been less angry about it had I maybe been able to believe that Clover’s death was simply the accident of running out of plot and there not really being a plan for him. But simply killing him off because he wasn’t immediately useful isn’t the Rooster Teeth way; it stands in stark contrast to characters like Torchwick and Neo being expanded upon purely because audiences liked them, and the audience was raving with love for Clover.
The difference, of course, being that love for Clover was rooted in affection from LGBT audiences. At this point, I believe that implying Qrow and Clover to be a viable relationship on the part of the fanbase was, by Volume 7, enough to sign Clover’s death warrant. It was never going to be something homophobic writers were willing to allow.
12. Furry Vore R/pe – The Curious Cat, Volume 9
Again—a symbol of how insanely bad RWBY is that this moment doesn’t even crack the top 10.
Volume 9 as a season of RWBY feels like an extensive case of ADHD, with different plots happening in each episode and not one of them actually being good. And by the eighth episode, it plunges from simply not good to being thoroughly nightmarish and not in a good way.
Jumping from the torture of Ruby by Neo, to the gruesome and ruthless murder of Little, to the Curious Cat attacking Ruby with intent to posses, to this failing due to suicide tea, to the Cat jumping Neo and shoving itself down her throat, is like being on the most unpleasant acid trip I could conceive of. It all happens entirely too fast and reeks of grimdark, with the script going to extremes designed to shock but with little ability to compel.
One thing I know for sure is that they did not need to frame the Cat’s actions the way they did—perched atop Ruby, or growing in size so that the way it pinned Neo against her chair could come off as thoroughly akin to sexual aggression—right before pulling a move out of Alien and shoving itself down her throat.
It was a dismal and careless way to set up the season’s final boss, and needlessly upsetting.
11. Jaune Arc Saves A Chick (But Punctures Her First) – Jaune Arc, Volume 5
You wouldn’t think that something Jaune-related could piss audiences off more than him melting down and wearing his late girlfriend, but then Volume 5 happened.
Audiences were absolutely not in Jaune’s corner when he started off the abhorrently-done fight sequences of Volume 5’s climax, and they went from irritated to livid when Jaune’s carelessness was combined with untypically poor showings from Weiss in order to get her mortally wounded—itself only arranged so that Jaune could unlock his teased-for-ages-at-that-point semblance.
Everybody saw it, and everybody saw through it. Out of all potential scenarios, Miles picked perhaps the worst one in falling back on Weiss getting injured and thus saved by Jaune, especially given that his own enthusiasm for the White Knight ship has only been met with equal disdain on the part of fans. He deserved every bit of shit he got for it, too, considering how blatantly Weiss was hamstrung in order for it to happen. It was a huge disrespect to ever-independent Weiss as a character, and ultimately didn’t benefit her in any way, just Jaune.
Intermission
We’re going to take a short intermission here. The top 10 Worst RWBY Moments are so bad, so awful, so abysmal, that there really is no point to ordering them—the tenth is pretty much as bad as the first or close to it, so the rank is going to mean very little from here on out. But to refresh ourselves and detox from all the accumulated badness we’ve been exposed to in the past ten entries, let’s have ourselves a little treat of manflesh and adorable animals and sweets.
Model: Patryk Lawry
Model: Kellan Lutz
Model: Myles Leask
Model: Marci Kiss
And my main man, just to round things off and provide the best fortifications:
Model: Jordan Torres
And, now that we’re sufficiently fattened up, let’s head into the fire.
10. The Cane Was a Nuke, Oh My God – Ozpin, Volume 8
An evil like Salem had been a subject of excessive fear and caution throughout the show, with her endlessly hyped as a threat so great and unstoppable that cunning and clever antagonist Raven viewed trying to deter her as a futile cause, a force so terrible that seemingly benevolent Lionheart became a backstabbing, treacherous rat in her grasp, and someone Ozpin had been working against for untold ages because she simply can’t be beaten with power moves.
Well, except for the power move that happens when you click a button on his cane.
This had the effect of making Salem effectively look like child’s play because she can be beaten all day, just not perma-killed, rendering her as basic to deal with as a spider under an upturned glass. But the worst part about it was that that was a side-effect. It wasn’t even the main reason the cane nuke was manifested out of nowhere—I am firmly of the mind that the original nuke that blew up Salem was Ironwood’s, but that this was hastily rewritten so that his nuke could be used to threaten Mantle as he was deemed in need of further villainy injections. Perhaps if Ironwood’s bomb had been the one to take out Monstra, a case could’ve been made for the angle Miles and Kerry allegedly went for, with him becoming so determined to beat Salem he became as bad as her via willingness to nuke whoever was in Monstra with her—but alas, instead we got this, something which made Ozpin look worse than ever given how he apparently had this power all along yet failed to use it when it not only would’ve helped, but would’ve been deemed absolutely necessary, such as the attack on Beacon by the dragon Grimm or his fight with Cinder, or the Leviathan attack on Argus.
This was demented, left-field nonsense and it was hideous to watch in action.
9. Ironwood Shot A Child – Ironwood, Volumes 7/8
This, for me, was the moment that proved Miles and Kerry just didn’t care.
There were innumerable other reactions for Ironwood to have—yes, even in the middle of a mental breakdown—that were more realistic, more practical, or more logically achieved what he allegedly wanted than shooting Oscar, an unarmed and nonhostile child, off a ledge and to seemingly certain death. Oscar had done nothing that would’ve made Ironwood’s actions make sense, no matter how irrational he’s supposed to be acting, because Oscar wasn’t trying to threaten Ironwood or anything he cared about, which is supposedly what drives his ‘direct line from a to b’ mindset from here on out—all he tried to do was coax him out of a foolish plan. The abundant other options between this and rationality tell me that Miles and Kerry jumped several guns straight to this one because it was step one towards getting people to hate Ironwood was much as they did.
It was spite, plain and simple. And it was the first nail in a very awful coffin that would then become Volume 8.
8. Ruby Got Tortured Into Committing Suicide – Neo, Volume 9
This was vile.
I admit that after Volume 8, I had thought things might calm down a bit. They wouldn’t be good, certainly, because nothing Miles or Kerry have created in years has been good. But I had thought that, with Ironwood and Penny and Atlas out of the way, we at least wouldn’t be treated to any more perverse tortures of characters.
How wrong I was.
The gall of it all astounds me, honestly. Neo quite literally tortures Ruby Rose, beating her physically and mentally with the faces and weapons of fallen allies, with the explicit aim of making her end her own life, over something that wasn’t Ruby’s fault. And she succeeds. Ruby, following this deeply gruesome and difficult-to-watch display, and out of complete despair under Neo’s handiwork, drinks the tea that causes complete death of personality. Miles Luna wrote that happening.
And then after the volume was finished, him and his cronies had the nerve to insist this was all some big metaphor about learning to love yourself. It makes me sick.
7. Penny Polendina Got Tortured and Fucking Murdered – Penny, Volume 8
The treatment of Penny Polendina leaves me feeling cold and nauseous whenever I think about it. It’s not a reaction I have at a story that’s just flawed. It’s a reaction I’m having because this character was effectively tortured by the narrative until she no longer wanted to live—the exact same thing that happens to Ruby in Volume 9, but with the added dose of having her autonomy repeatedly stripped of her, and having her decision to be slain framed as some sort of proof of said autonomy.
The treatment of Penny Polendina leaves me indescribably furious, because every signal Miles could possibly have read was flashing red, crying out “DON’T DO THIS” and he did it anyway, and for what...? So that the winter maiden’s power could go to a chick named ‘Winter’, who would then accomplish absolutely zilch with it?
They didn’t care. They decided Penny had to die to correct her receiving a power they didn’t write her having, and in order to facilitate that, they decided that, well, they’ll just make her want to die so it’s not so bad!
*spits*
6. “What Does She Even See In You?” – Adam, Volume 6
It’s one thing for a piece of media, an episode or a chapter or a scene, to suck. It is quite another thing for you to go into that episode or chapter or scene, knowing it’s going to suck royal ass beforehand, and being proven a hundred percent right.
Adam simply could not be the terrifying force of nature he’d been made into in Volume 3 and the complete joke he’d been in made in Volume 5 simultaneously. He could not be the murderous, abusive incel he’d been made into in Volume 3 and the dark, fallen hero rebel leader he’d initially been written as since the Black Trailer simultaneously. Trying to force both conflicting sides of these characters, on both these fronts, to make sense was simply never going to work.
Not only had they destroyed Adam to such an extent that, not being able to wring any more use out of him, he was then written right into his grave...but they decided to make the new official direction of the show the ship whose fandom had, up til that point, behaved like absolutely awful people, but who were seemingly vocal and loyal enough to carry the show on their own...or not.
5. They Finally Fucking Kissed, Oh My God – Bumbleby, Volume 9
Not labeled as “Blake” or “Yang” because they’re essentially one person named Bumbleby now.
It has truly been a defeat for the ages to be harassed and ostracized for years on end simply for believing that Blake’s love interest was, you know, Sun—the guy who was exactly that—and not viewing this to be some kind of mistake or red herring, and then watch Miles and Kerry tank the show to such an extent that kicking that character out and replacing him with Yang is deemed the only way to save it. The way the Bumbleby fandom behaved over the years absolutely should not have been rewarded this way.
Perhaps it wouldn’t have been so bad if Blake and Yang had been allowed to be Blake and Yang, the interesting characters they started out as, instead of increasingly paper-thin excuses for such that have no real chemistry or personality outside of one another. After that much, there wasn’t really much to expect from the grand finale of this rainbow capitalism fest, and yet I was still disappointed. I feel like I could’ve written a better love confession scene than that, albeit I suppose that’s a testament to the fact that the writers don’t particularly know what Yang and Blake would most love about the other.
The most disrespectful thing about the scene is how it essentially happens completely cut off from the rest of the story. It randomly occurs in the sixth episode with no buildup whatsoever and for no particular reason, and then once it happens it affects absolutely nothing about the story later on. If you snipped the scene completely from the volume, pretty much nothing would actually change, and while that can be said about quite a lot of things in Volume 9, it doesn’t help my suspicion that it was basically shoved in last minute once the Jenzen bombs dropped and Rooster Teeth essentially said “yep, throw in everything and the kitchen sink, too”.
4. “Then It’s Over For All of Us!” – Adam, Volume 5
It’s a bizarrely funny—and by that I mean, maddening—thing to see a character essentially be destroyed twice.
Volume 3, Episode 11 Adam Taurus could not have been a more obvious derailment if he’d been wearing a neon sign announcing as much, and this racism-driven destruction of his character was tacky, manipulative, and just plain racist. But at the very least, he could still conceivably be an effective antagonist.
Watching what happened in Volume 5—well, first of all, Volume 5 is a lot, a lot of shit happening at once, and by the time you even get to Adam, you’re dizzy and just want to leave. But with Adam especially, it was like entering a weird parallel universe. Not only was he made completely ineffective in total contrast to the last time he clashed with the heroes, but his behavior didn’t make a single iota of sense, most especially his reaction to Blake merely showing up being to essentially try and blow himself and everyone else up.
While many things about Volume 5 could be potentially waved away with ‘budget’ or ‘animation issues’, this was not one of them, and a completely shoddy visual product crashed headlong into stubbornly lazy and thoughtless writing. The confrontation with Adam was not given any effort whatsoever and as a result, this cost RWBY even further in the immediate and long runs.
My ranting on the issue was more than enough. Rewatching that garbage even for the sake of the spork was the one moment in the whole thing that actually reduced me to tears. Experiencing that immense disappointment the first time was like getting punched in the gut, and it wasn’t any better the second time.
3. The Most Hideous Exposition Dump Ever – Jinn, Ozpin, Salem, Volume 6
If Volume 5 proved that Miles and Kerry could not be relied upon to do their part when the system is working against them, Volume 6 proved that, at the end of the day, the show’s writing is one of its most abysmal aspects, and no amount of budget would fix that.
Volume 6, Episode 3, “The Lost Fable” was universally hated due to pretty much leaving nobody happy. A couple of supreme gods committed omnicide and that (among other crimes) was blamed on Salem, Ozpin looked absolutely awful for what he’d withheld (among other crimes) and in the end Oscar was still being treated like garbage. RWBY fans had long clamored for the backstory between Ozpin and Salem, yet by the time they actually got it, they feared the worst. After Episode 2 it was “please, please don’t let Salem and Ozpin be exes…” and Episode 3 brought us exactly that.
The writing was possessed of spite, victim-blaming, misogyny, and just blatant disregard for human life and consent. It was awful to watch in action, like a trainwreck that just keeps exploding car by car. Even the “how it happened” backstory for the moon being shattered was completely unsatisfactory, offering no intrigue or options to explore or infer further. It just sucked, and proved above all else that Miles and Kerry were the worst thing to happen to RWBY.
2. “Hello My Darling” – Adam, Volume 3
This was, quite honestly, the first of many death knells for the series. Volume 3 remains the most popular volume overall, yet the way it ended turned many fans away. Rooster Teeth’s public stance was that although Monty Oum had passed, his work would be faithfully continued as it was always meant to look by Rooster Teeth.
And then Adam chopped off Yang’s arm and tried to decapitate Blake, who was now officially his ex.
As I always have been, I remain astonished at the RWBY fanbase, who are the only fandom I’ve ever known to look at something like this and go “yep, seems legit, everything checks out”. Many people—though not enough to be heard in the positive outflow—were shocked and turned off by the portrayal of Adam, who had gone from mysterious and dark rebellion leader willing to take human lives in the name of defending his people’s freedoms, to what was basically an entirely different character with a sledgehammer of unsubtlety applied as to his ill relationship with Blake in order to make him more hate-able. If Rooster Teeth—and especially Miles Luna and Kerry Shawcross—were genuinely willing to preserve Monty’s vision in any fashion, I might’ve felt differently. Monty obviously didn’t leave a huge plan, and I understand the desire to continue his vision, especially as a lot of jobs were depending on it, so once RWBY got long enough, it was inevitable that some stuff would have to be tweaked and material would have to be added.
But that’s not what happened. Monty died, and pretty much immediately afterward, an axe was taken to his work, starting with Adam. Adam in Volume 3, Episode 11 in no way resembles Adam from a mere four episodes prior, let alone the one from the Black Trailer or Blake’s various descriptions of him in Volumes 1 and 2.
People love to use Monty’s name as a shield. Bringing him up in any way is forbidden unless you’re praising RWBY—suggesting that Rooster Teeth violated his work or memory in any fashion is seen as a real low, because how could you say that? You didn’t know Monty.
No, I didn’t know Monty. However, I do know that Monty was a man of East and South East Asian descent with Cambodian, Vietnamese, Japanese, and Chinese heritage. This is how he describes his youth:
“33 years ago my parents dragged our family here from the war on their own two feet, it was a matter of survival. We came to this country with no money, and not being able to speak the language. My mother pregnant with my older brother, and then myself a year after, found a job, learned the language, and provided for our family. My father who had suffered from post war syndrome was little help. So all I can remember of my mother in those early years was the she was never around. She was never around because she was busy fighting, she fought for our family to survive, because she had no choice. That’s why you work, because the alternative is unthinkable.”
I have a serious problem believing that a man like that would write the stunningly racist portrayals of Adam and the White Fang as a whole that we saw, from Adam’s spontaneous mutation into a violent abusive ex to his ‘faunus supremacist’ rant in Volume 5. These things go beyond the realm of tone-deaf; they are actively racist and actively destructive to the RWBY that Monty left us with and apparently did not trust Rooster Teeth to properly portray.
Many people were not fooled by this, and did not fall for the very obvious trap that posited that only a misogynist would dare criticize the way Adam was warped out of character by racists who wanted to remove any sympathetic qualities from him, or the idea that to suggest Monty didn’t write this version of Adam was a villainous take from villainous people. And so, although RWBY was more popular than ever when this aired, the stage was set for the show to bleed out with each successive derailment from there.
1. When You Want to Save People So Bad You Nuke A City – Ironwood, Volume 8
Speaking of things I do not believe Monty Oum wanted to happen, there’s this bullshit.
In a long list of “last straws”, Adam in Volume 3 was only the first, and here we round this list off with the very last. I say that because there’s a lot of shit that has driven fans of RWBY away from the show over the years, forcing fans who were once enjoying themselves to leave in disgust:
- Volume 3, Episode 11, with Adam’s sudden deranged and over-played villainy.
- Volume 3, Episode 12, with Pyrrha dying and the “silver eyes” nonsense.
- Volume 5, Episode 2, with Adam’s ‘faunus supremacist’ spiel in Volume 5, which read like a Klan fantasy and immediately preceded the murder of Sienna Khan.
- Volume 5, Episodes 11 through 13 failing on every available front.
- Volume 6, Episode 3 delivering the most jaw-droppingly bad origins episode ever conceived.
- Volume 7, Episode 12, with the death of Clover.
- Volume 7, Episode 13, with Ironwood’s turn to villainy marked by shooting Oscar off a ledge to certain death.
- Volume 8.
Those were, of course, the fans of Penny and Ironwood, two popular characters that had had interesting and compelling journeys in Volume 7 and were not yet dead. Rather than play ball with those fans, Miles and Kerry crushed their last hopes.
I saw many, many fans of both these characters admit that the show wasn’t worth watching anymore, I saw so many Ironwood and Penny twitters, blogs, and servers shut down. Volume 8 was one long chain of slap in the face after kick in the teeth, and rewarded their loyalty with spite and a middle finger. It all culminated in the big moment where Ironwood sabotaged a rescue effort and threatened to nuke Mantle off the face of the earth if the heroes didn’t comply with a plan that would kill Penny.
This was the big moment, more than anything else, that told everyone there was never any intention to remain faithful to anything resembling a story or characters. This was the moment that told even the last few hangers-on that hadn’t yet given up that they were fools for staying as long as they did.
The reason I did not include anything from Volume 9 in that big list of “last straws” is that for everyone still supporting RWBY at that point, there are no last straws. There is nothing the show can portray, nothing the writers can say or do or pen or script, no scandal on the planet and no plot disappointing enough that it will actually make them abandon the show. We saw that. I watched it happen—I watched that crowd of die-hards defend the most disgusting parts of Volume 9.
I do not believe those fans ever cared about RWBY or Monty. Nor do I believe Monty Oum, who talked sadly and frankly about his “father who had suffered from post war syndrome”, would have written this about a traumatized war veteran or condoned it. It was a choice that destroyed, not an in-story element like Mantle, but the story of RWBY as a whole and finally sank the ship.
And that’s why we’re all where we are today.
It didn’t have to be like this. Once upon a time, a “top 10 worst moments in RWBY” list, let alone a top 20, would’ve been inconceivable. Once upon a time, even fans who didn’t like everything about the show would’ve defended it as a worthy work. I was once one of those fans.
What led to all this? Well…let’s find out in the next post, where the Final Thoughts proper starts.
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RWBY 2023 Retrospective (Part 1) | Table of Contents | RWBY Final Thoughts: Story
RWBY 2023 Retrospective (Part 1) | Table of Contents | RWBY Final Thoughts: Story
