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RWBY Final Thoughts: Characters (Part II) | Table of Contents | RWBY Final Thoughts: Legacy

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Before we can finish up on RWBY as a whole, we have to go over style—the ways in which it was presented to the viewer. This one’s important, because it has a lot to do with the parasocial relationship Rooster Teeth have always relied on. Someone new to RWBY and binge-watching in 2023 could probably analyze a plot, but it takes someone like me—who’s been with the show since its beginnings—to really spot certain things I’ll be telling you about now.

Let’s examine the rest of the counts that weren’t related to story or characters. Those are:

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
How To Piss Off Gay People: 114
Invisembl: 14
Broke-Ass Clowns: 79
Shut The Fuck Up: 24
LuLaRwe: 82

RSVP has already been discussed a little bit for the “Character” section, but I’m including them here anyway because at the end of the day, it needs to be discussed in the way it affected the writing style. As you’ll notice, style accounts for a little more than half the total counts of this spork. However, we’re going to separate these into writing style and then go over the ones that are more related to art style, because we have to discuss both.

Writing Style

Most of this is stuff we’ve already covered with the Story segment, but we have to go into a little bit of extra detail here primarily because, being the main writers, Miles and Kerry created a lot of problems due to their poor writing style that the rest of the show makers had to work around.

In most cases, you hope that a person’s writing style will get better with experience. This...was not the case with Miles Luna and Kerry Shawcross, who were probably the biggest weaknesses of the show overall right after the slew of executives who saw no issue with the abuses the animators went through.

“Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Veil” was the count I used when the intentions behind the writing were painfully obvious, and I added the two subcounts to account for the different ways this effect occurred—Wink Wink, Nudge Nudge for those occasions when Miles and Kerry tried to assure their audience they were going to improve things by nodding at elements fans had expressed distaste for, and Band-Aid Brigade to tally their actual attempts at doing so.

And this happened a lot. Much like their protagonists, the writing of Miles and Kerry was primarily reactive. They would see a problem and attempt to patch it in the most immediate fashion available. This isn’t a smart way to write—while of course you want to fix things fans are upset about, sometimes things aren’t one-and-done fixes, and a lot of the time they ended up only making things worse due to not properly understanding why fans were angry.

More than anything, though, the reality of RWBY’s writing style is that it never developed because nothing was ever planned in full. Many people have noticed how the individual volumes come off as self-contained stories with preceding material often forgotten or ignored when it contradicts new happenings. Not to mention how long it often took for rather significant events to be followed up on. I lost track of the amount of times some new plot element or development was hastily thrown in to get it out of the way or set up something rapidly approaching that would’ve been completely out-of-left-field otherwise.

Simply planning things out is a necessary step in writing, quite literally, any plot. I would not ever advise beginning production on a serial that doesn’t have a complete plot outlined yet, and the sad reality is that that takes time. A lot of time. Granted, this was time that Miles and Kerry actually had, but according to the grapevine, writing on new volumes doesn’t even start until they’re about a month out. If this is true, it’s an egregiously lazy and self-defeating way of writing considering the length of the hiatuses.

Another major problem with Miles and Kerry is that they’re publicity writers. They thrive on attention and they’re the faces of the RWBY writing team, and as such they’re the second-biggest faces of RWBY as as whole after the voice actors—and eventually became the biggest faces overall, with the way the fandom idolized them. If you’re going to write for millions of viewers, you really need to be giving it your all, listening to an editor, and aware of what your fans want (a failing that comes up just as much in the sections below). And more than anything, you have to have the maturity to take criticism with care and learn as you go.

A lot of RWBY fans and ex-fans really, really do not like Miles and Kerry, especially Miles, who tends to be one who comes up so much more often. And it’s not hard to see why, Miles is...kind of an asshole. He gives off the vibe, both in his videos and in his writing for RWBY, of someone who has only ever been told that he’s an excellent writer and was never exposed to criticism before he was thrust into a main writer’s position. He’s always been famously aware of (and, if you ask me, very bitter) about how Jaune, his character, has been poorly received by fans,

and very poor at hiding his disdain for certain other characters. This reached its zenith in Volume 8, which was one long train of Miles taking a Volume 7 that had done a lot of good for the show and pissing on it.

Suethors cannot remove themselves from their work, we know that. But I have honestly never seen authors write the way Miles and Kerry did in Volume 8—with every major occurrence pointing towards the idea that they resented Volume 7 and wanted it overshadowed and ultimately forgotten in favor of what they wanted.

Volume 8 is also where I began talking about thumbprints and earmarks, because so many of them showed up with a vengeance after a suspicious absence. These patterns in the writing are what you could say make up a rather large amount of Miles’ and Kerry’s writing style, and none of it is good. They have no real eye for spectacle and make very basic mistakes that could be prevented by just thinking for a little bit about how it looks and how it’ll be received. They relied a lot on filler, melodrama, and out-of-nowhere reveals, and carelessly (and spitefully) bulldozed through prior material with thin veneers of logic applied. Volume 9 was almost as bad in this regard, with a lot of the events that happened having no real weight to them, and Miles and Kerry not being nearly skilled enough with drama, aesthetic, and spectacle, not to mention tone, to pull off a trippy Alice in Wonderland-esque season.

Perhaps the real failure of Miles and Kerry as writers is their inability to connect with their audience, who at times seemed much more imaginative and invested in RWBY than they ever were.

We know that if you give the audience what they like, they’ll stick with you even if the writing is a little bit bumpy. But if you can’t read them and deliver what they want, or worse, have open contempt for them, they’ll drop you very quickly. Just look at Game of Thrones to see what that looks like. Miles and Kerry repeatedly failed to understand what it is their audience really wanted and so continued to disappoint them, piling on more mistakes that later had to be patched over as previously discussed.

Knowing Your Audience

The RWBY fanbase was a very gay fanbase, and wanted to see major players of the story resemble them, but Miles and Kerry were unwilling to make any character gay unless they’d already been written out of the story or eventually would be—this accounts for quite literally every LGBT character the show has ever introduced up until Blake and Yang, who were effectively heterosexual until profit margins were threatened. Pilot Boi, Scarlet David, Coco Adel, Jaune’s sister and her wife, Ilia Amitola, all of them. The RWBY fanbase was also a very nonwhite fanbase, and wanted to see more characters look like them and reflect their struggles, but Miles and Kerry had nothing good to say about that (because they’re racists).

Any first-rate marketing student could probably have predicted that Miles’ and Kerry’s tactics on these fronts were going to piss people off. The racism subplot with the White Fang and Adam that served as the major basis for Blake’s character, even if it hadn’t been warped into a means for Miles and Kerry to castigate what they viewed in real life as anti-white terrorism—because it’s abundantly clear that’s what that was—would just not look good with how it was handled. Once Volume 5 came along and MK said what they felt they needed to say, that subplot was dropped entirely. Just as with Jacques Schnee being the evil tumor corrupting the SDC, Adam and the radicals of the White Fang were treated as the only elements Blake needed to fix to pursue the better world she wanted, and she doesn’t even seem to care about trying to combat anti-faunus racism any further beyond that. Fans who express any interest in social awareness, let alone black fans who this matter directly spoke to, were never going to be happy with this.

Of course, RSVP being attached to a subplot which was abruptly truncated the way it was means it ends up as one of the lower writing-style related counts, with only Fauxminism being lower. We also need to address the fact that RWBY’s writing—hell, as well as its directing, promoting, marketing, and merchandising—took blatant advantage of their gay audience. There are multiple routes that RWBY could’ve taken towards actually representing gay and bisexual people within its cast without compromising their story. Qrow could’ve been bisexual or gay, as could a character like Sun—both of these men were flirtatious and charming and likable. Ironwood could’ve been gay, because whether it’s Volume 7’s heroic Ironwood or Volume 8’s insane villainous Ironwood, that character’s role in the story doesn’t involve romantic relationships. But even if it had to be a woman (because Miles would never let a man show attraction to another man if he could help it), there were decent options. Ruby herself is highly unconcerned with romance, so her being a lesbian wouldn’t have demanded much effort or course-correction from the writing, and the same goes for Weiss.

But at every turn, we got crumbs—listed above—and even when it seemed like the story was setting up something that could’ve at least appeased fans in a fair way, it was thrown out. Ilia left the story, and not only was Qrow’s overtly romanticized relationship with Clover struck down to a very unnecessary and cruel end, the story then all but shoved him into the arms of Robyn Hill, who is the only character he really gets to interact with thereafter, with the hug he shared with Ironwood a volume earlier very clearly killed stone dead with his declared intentions to kill the man over something that wasn’t really even his fault.

You can feel the homophobia radiating out of the screen, and it’s frankly upsetting that Rooster Teeth let this all happen while simultaneously blatantly profiting off of Bumbleby shippers’ interest in Yang and Blake becoming an item and using that to craft an image for themselves as a progressive company—but that element of rainbow capitalism will be talked about more next post.

But even on simple terms not related to social awareness, they still repeatedly failed their audience. Believe it or not, RWBY doesn’t consist solely of bad and badly-executed ideas. There were a lot of things fans got invested in, and Miles, Kerry, and their handlers at Rooster Teeth were astoundingly bad at playing those things to their advantage, to better the show or their relationship with fans.

The RWBY fanbase liked Ozpin dying and leaving Qrow to pick up the pieces. They liked Team CFVY and their air of badassery. They liked Winter and her sisterly relationship with Weiss. They liked Summer Rose being the woman Yang considered her real mother. They liked Torchwick, for some dumb reason I still can’t process. They liked Adam as this dark, morose rebellion leader who turned to violence as a means of fighting oppression. They liked Salem as an unknowable, evil entity. They liked Emerald as a swaggering, cold-blooded villain. They liked Ironwood as a flawed but effective leader. They liked Clover and the positive effects he had on Qrow. They liked Penny as the winter maiden. They liked Maria and Pietro. And yes, believe it or not, they liked Sun and his team and Sun’s romance with Blake.

There were so many chances fans gave these people, so many things that could’ve cultivated a thriving fanbase with a little more love and care. And yet, all of these were written out and as a result, fans’ ties to the show began to come loose one by one.

None of this looks good on its own, but just seems downright terrible when considering the effort Miles and Kerry put in when they wanted something. Miles wanted that tragic Cinder backstory and god damn it, he was going to get it, even if it was four volumes longer than expected. He wanted Weiss to like Jaune, and goddamn it, that was going to happen, even if it took nearly a decade. They wanted a fairy tale-esque Alice in Wonderland arc, and goddamn it, they were going to have it, no matter how ill-timed and uninspired and ultimately pointless. These things I just listed, among others, all do not fit well within the story, adding pretty much nothing and largely being annoying because they receive so much focus, proving that Miles and Kerry, as writers, are more interested in making RWBY what they want from it than making RWBY into something that was actually good.

Ultimately these are all symptoms of two people having too much power over the work. What RWBY has desperately needed since day one is an editor. Kerry is not an editor. Eddy Rivas is not an editor. Gray Haddock, Kiersi Burkhart, Dustin Matthews, and Paula Decanini are not editors. RWBY needed an accomplished writer-editor with a real grasp of plot and characters and style that was willing to chew the shit out of bad ideas and make it very clear what worked and didn’t work, and that was simply never available to RWBY.

And if any of these people were trying to improve Miles’ and Kerry’s writing, it certainly wasn’t in any effective manner. An editor needs to be direct, blunt, and potentially hurt feelings to get the point across. Much of the vitriol Miles and Kerry earned could have at least occurred before the work got published, rather than being permanent things they had to live with forever after. But now, the damage is done, and I have a hard time imagining that a lucrative writing career is in the futures of any of these people save perhaps Kiersi, who is already a published author.

Art Style

Art style, if nothing else, was the one thing early RWBY excelled at and the major draw of the show. When I say “major draw”, I’m referring to three things: fight sequences, cool music, and the vibrant look.

Let’s focus on the last of those first. When you try to categorize what RWBY is based on what it looks like, most people call it some variation of “animesque”, to the point that some people still refer to it as an actual anime. This is a well-known feature of RWBY, but…I’d like to argue against it.

RWBY’s look and major influences are actually that of video games. To the point that in trying to ape an actual video game being released at the time, the team flat-out stole an actual anime video game’s model—yep, still not letting the Grimmjow model nonsense go. Not to mention Jetstream Sam.

There’s a reason I felt like I had to be the sporker in charge of taking down RWBY, and it’s because growing up as a teenager playing way more video games than I should have, I felt certain of those influences more clearly than some people who focused on the anime feel. Monty was an avid gamer, everyone knows that. Hell, Haloid was the major proof, among other things. Everything about RWBY screams “video game brought to life” from the vibrant colors to the over-the-top weapons to the music. Hell, RWBY even uses the same “vocals hit during the battle’s climax” trick that Metal Gear Rising did and the Red Trailer is essentially a one-player arcade sweep.

This is something only select people will understand, but I’m going for it. To any of my homies who grew up in the Golden Age of the Playstation 2, are you thinking of the same things I am? Hopefully you get it: RWBY can be considered a fusion of the three great Playstation 2 franchises. That is to say, Ratchet and Clank meets Jak and Daxter meets Sly Cooper.

It has everything. The use of “dust” as a magical sort of energy propellant is basically just eco and it even gets used in machinery and guns the same way as in Jak 2 and 3, and in fact the exaggerated, balls-to-the-wall bombass weapons of death wielded by tiny teenage heroes is a dead ringer for Ratchet and Clank’s much beloved draw of having the player take on hordes of enemies with progressively more insane weapons. With Sly Cooper lending the comic book vibe that would be known as “animesque” when actually brought to life in RWBY, it all makes sense.

And that’s a recipe for absolute gold right there. Those three franchises took up all the attention Nintendo saw fit to spare the masses back in the day because they’re excellently designed and were built on things that were inherently fun. The three great platformers, the ones that appealed to every teenager by balancing the childlike sense of fantasy with the craving for a more adult vibe.

Nailing this balance shot RWBY to a mainstream phenomenon before it was even out of the gates, and carried the show while it was still figuring out the writing style. But RWBY would eventually lose that balance and everything it seemed to be getting right would eventually fall away.

And this is why Monty or at least those who closely studied him were kind of necessary for RWBY’s success. Monty was one man, and the only guy at Rooster Teeth who had both the ambition and the technical skill to make something that appealed to people on the same level as those franchises I mentioned. If more time had been spent actually listening to him while he was alive instead of trying to pry his show away from him to make it what a few executives and a couple boneheaded first-time writers thought it should be, RWBY might’ve lived past its major hurdles instead of eventually dying, floating facedown in a river of broken promises and unrealized dreams while trying to ape Alice in Wonderland of all things.

But let’s look at the trifecta of elements RWBY brought to the table, things only it was able to supply in a way unique to itself, the fight sequences, cool music, and the vibrant look. All of them died out one by one.

The look itself was the first thing to change, as post-Monty seasons switched to Maya. Some people are, to this day, unwaveringly against this switch as they believe Poser offered a superior look and Maya was a downgrade. Personally, I can’t really agree with these people because, as many broken clocks with average cocks have said, it’s not the equipment you have that matters, but how you use it. Maya itself didn’t have to be a downgrade, but the decision to desaturate the colors and make everything look more low-energy was a bad one. It meant things didn’t pop anymore, and it crossed badly with first-timer choices when it came to character design and outfits. As certain astute people have observed, characters wearing things that amount to a bunch of buckles and zippers aren’t ever going to draw interested audiences and this is generally a sign of having no real ideas when it comes to action fantasy apparel.

The second thing to fade away was the action sequences, and this is the first one people noticed and got annoyed about. Monty’s death was a disaster, but firing Shane was a grave mistake, and the corporate culture that allowed excessive crunch year after year along with cycling through oncoming waves of miserable, exhausted animators who never stayed with the project long enough to really learn its best looks meant that the action sequences were always going to look like trash after a certain point, and were eventually going to slowly be filtered out altogether.

This really was a major blow for the show and the one thing they should’ve concentrated on if nothing else, because let’s face it—without the major lifting done by RWBY’s art style, all that was left to observe was its plot, which is going to be a major black mark on the careers of Kerry Shawcross and Miles Luna in particular. No one who’s actually stayed with RWBY as long as I have would award the plot any accolades. Everyone knows that the major draw was the fight scenes, and letting them suffer in quality without making equivalent extra efforts at the writer’s table was another terrible mistake.

The music, while it has been on a decline since Volume 5 is you ask me, was the final major pillar of the show’s success to depart, with Jeff Williams leaving the show before Volume 9 and his replacements apparently being new to the work, uninformed, unpaid, or some combination of the three. One of the biggest sticking points for Volume 9 is how the music just isn’t there. The bulk of most of the episodes is entirely silent, which is very noticeable and very awkward. There’s been no major breakthrough hits to bat it out of the park in the vein of Red Like Roses Part 2 or This Life is Mine, either. A minimalist vibe just doesn’t pair well with the trippy look and feel they want for the Alice in Wonderland ripoff season. And all in all, it’s just the final death knell. RWBY without its music, even when RWBY was a much better show, would’ve been like Silent Hill without Akira Yamaoka, or Zelda without Koji Kondo.

I mean, think about what you remember from a lot of your favorite franchises. There are animes and movies and games out there that might not impress you necessarily on their visual qualities or writing, but make damn sure you’ve got their OST on your playlists. I said it at the beginning of the spork in my very first Final Thoughts segment: music can salvage a lot. The right artists with the right chops can make some bangers that will long outlast the actual series itself and still lend it a lot of goodwill. But, Jeff Williams left, and frankly his creative ambitions left before he did if his own admissions are anything to go by, and so the music of RWBY fell away, too.

All of this means that RWBY has no draw left. There’s no gigantic whirling death scythe action to splatter over Twitter timelines, there’s no badass music to jam out to filling up people’s Spotify playlists, and the few gifs and moodboards posted by remaining fans aren’t going to pass through any casual observer’s feed with more than an ‘oh, cool, my friend is posting about something they like, back to scrolling’.

Sad as it is to say, even bad environments can produce good works—just look at Metroid Dread becoming the best-selling Metroid game of all time before its first anniversary—but to make that happen, the people in charge need to know their direction. They need to know what their target audience and especially what their fans want and like, and it doesn’t seem like the execs up at Rooster Teeth ever cared enough to learn that and learn how to make that happen. Which is especially a shame, because it’s not exactly hard to spot.

But so far, we’ve only discussed the things RWBY had that made it stand out. Unfortunately, RWBY didn’t just lose its major points of excellence; as the show wore on, even its spare cogs and very frame were coming apart by the time it hit its second half.

One of the biggest issues outside what we’ve already talked about is tone. Tonally, RWBY is a mess, and you can trace this primarily to a sharp spike in cartoon-style gag bits that occurred in Volume 6. I have no idea who was responsible for that, but they really should’ve been hit over the head with a sign that says “SHUT UP”. It’s true that early RWBY used such gags, but they were very noticeably points against early RWBY and things fans openly criticized, which was a thing RWBY fans didn’t often do in the first two volumes. That’s why, alongside not being all that present to begin with, they quickly petered out in favor of a more serious tone. I think the last one I remember is Weiss’ exaggerated demand to hear what’s wrong with Blake while standing on a chair, and that’s about where they cut off.

However, come Volume 6, and these little gag bits are suddenly everywhere. It was immensely jarring after all the seriousness and not remotely welcome, giving the distinct impression that RWBY’s tone had actually regressed at high speed. From Sun’s dramatic declaration of “I GO WHERE I’M NEEDED” it was abundantly clear some bad ideas were in place, and by the time Cordovin and her cartoon cronies showed up, any hopes that this would not be the new direction of the show were squashed flat. Then of course, Volume 7 came, doubling down on this, and it just got worse from there, until Volume 9 was cutting to a new bit every ten seconds that primarily consisted of Weiss doing something by jump-cutting from one still position to another and manifesting anime/comic book emotion scribbles over her head.

Remember what I said up there earlier, when I was outlining the Playstation 2 franchises that RWBY successfully emulated early on? I mentioned that they were huge successes because they cornered a teenage market, providing settings that offered the wonder of childlike fantasy with the grit and darkness of a more adult vibe. But the Nickelodeon-esque gag bits don’t fit in that sort of series and never will, because they’re distracting and irritating. The teenager (or young adult) craving tension and badassery doesn’t have time for it and views it as beneath them, leaving the ultimate question of who Rooster Teeth were trying to appeal to with this tactic.

And so from every available angle, RWBY was just not giving audiences what they wanted nor any new reasons to get interested.

Roundup

Style, guys. Sometimes it’s the most important thing.

RWBY may have never had a solid foundation in writing, but stylistically it was a standout success, and for these reasons one might even say that style was the bigger disappointment—certainly RWBY’s plots are dizzy and malformed from the word ‘go’, but Rooster Teeth had all the tools at their disposal to keep the show firmly at the top either way, and still managed to bungle it.

But there is one more element of style I haven’t yet gone into. I mean, I’ve painted a pretty vivid picture, but I do want to go into this one last thing before we move on: soul.

Even if your plot writing is bad, style can still keep you afloat. Look at the Inheritance Cycle series—I admit some of its writing is tasteless, predictable, poorly-thought-out, or very obviously derivative of older works. But there’s a reason that Paolini’s work has seen more moderate review in recent years, while attempts at a ‘Twilight Renaissance’ are mostly constrained to ironic and unserious social media posts and anything genuinely appreciating it still gets jumped on by veteran netizens who actually read the series and saw the harm it did. Both were works that flourished to a thriving fanbase and both got there primarily on hype from how cool they were—the Inheritance Cycle for having a lot of elements in common with various Middle-Earth series with a fairly legitimate attempt to craft the world and writing that supported that, and the Twilight, uh, “saga” for being an epic love story that supposedly offered teen girls something that understood them in a world of male-dominated fantasy.

The primary difference is soul. Christopher Paolini wrote Eragon when he was fifteen and had the final drafts published when he was nineteen—and over a decade later, a new series from him is in the works, because he genuinely liked writing and wanted to tell a good story, and even if he wasn’t very good at it as a teenager, he learned as he went. Stephanie Meyer, by comparison, was a housewife pushing 30 when she wrote her first drafts of Twilight, and largely used the series as a vehicle to slavishly paint her fantasy life and spite those who were mean to her while making millions of dollars. I read both Eragon and Twilight as a teenager, and let me tell you, I know which one I’d give a second chance, because I know which one had actual love put into it.

RWBY has no soul in it, because it lost it the second it fell into the hands of people who were thinking of themselves and their profits. Its style comes off as soulless and transparently marketed at every turn, with the constant references to earlier, better days underlined with a creeping desperation to get back a fanbase that Rooster Teeth pushed beyond its patience. Its plot developments serve almost entirely as hype machines rather than logical follow-throughs, and many of them are blatant bait to try and regain traction, with none of the elements the series gained fame for having returned as animators have been deemed too expensive to actually pay and the writing and directing teams growing into amalgams of people not properly communicating amongst each other without ever snipping their main weakest links.

RWBY’s soul was being chipped away at the second control of it started to slip from Monty’s fingers, and the last of it was gone once Sheena and Shane were thrown out. Its ultimate fate was always going to look like this, because its legacy turning for the positive relied on people actually treating it with love rather than as a cash cow.

But speaking of RWBY’s legacy, that’s our last, and final, stop on this journey, so I’ll see you there.