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neohenry Since: Sep, 2014
11/18/2014 01:09:29 •••

The Worms of RWBY

The Worms:

There are no political and culture foundation of RWBY. Other than having angry furries protesting for a vague idea, it's as if the setting is make to only characterized the individuals (that we know of) and not vice versa (and there are cases where RWBY makes a character to fit in the story). How they try to solve that? By having the World of Remnants, RWBY creates a developed setting to ensure the balance between characters and world. But by doing that, it takes the viewer's focus on one environment (story, characters, conflicts, theme) to another (geopolitics, culture, genesis); it's a bad idea to create two segments for one story because, in my theory, the writers are lazy to weave the story with its setting.

If you're making a story with a fantasy theme, you got to weave story and setting together unless your ego is as big as Star Wars.

The animation is not my concern, but it's the choreography and combat which I abhor. Emotionally, it's awesome; logically, it's terrible. In one scene, the guards that tried to defeat Cinder, an antagonist with pop culture's influence (what sane mind have blade bigger than the grip - two of them!), don't bother to use guns as if it takes 30 seconds to reload one shot (would it also make sense to have machines protecting the database since RWBY's technological knowledge is advanced?). And in another, it takes trial and error to defeat a mech because the RWBY gang never bother to organize their tactics on defeating a huge creature EVEN THOUGHT they are train to kill monsters as fast as possible (else they might run away or something).

And last but not least: individualism. My personal/gestalt philosophy doesn't emphasize individuals because I also focus on community. It's very distracting when the RWBY gang is not wearing student uniform in class. It doesn't show rebellion, it shows laziness when considering the interaction between community and individuals. Weiss is interesting with her inner conflicts on helping her people's ambiguous protests (The furries don't tell us what they want. They don't want to be second-class citizens? What factors are making them so?), but she can't be the only character that is being shaped by community. Ruby being a hunter? More like a person that is going to be in a political environment.

That's my review of RWBY so far.

omegafire17 Since: Apr, 2010
09/21/2014 00:00:00

Trial-and-error on the mecha? Did you not see the full-team tactics Ruby was calling out (and which were clearly known to the team beforehand offscreen)? Full-team tactics that steadily tore it apart systematically? Then laziness for a flexible class schedule that usually involves physical fighting on a semi-regular basis? For that, they can't always be in uniform; they need their combat clothes and weapons, which are stored in their lockers. Clearly it's officially allowed, because no teacher has called out a student for doing otherwise.

Plus, regarding the World of Remnant segments, Vol. 1 was mostly 5-7 min stretches, and now after some lead time, Vol. is 12+ mins... but with 12-16 episodes per Vol, they still can't fit a whole world's characterization into there. Weaving it in would only slow the plot down, and plus, RWBY is still building upon a lot of it's base elements.

And as far as the first combat example; RWBY's physics and weapon designs are not ours, so we can't apply ours' to those blades. Plus, in any event, the soldiers were surprised, moving instinctively - it's ALL too easy to forget you have guns. But considering this is Cinder, it wouldn't have made a difference anyway, considering even students can deflect gunfire.

FullBlast Since: Sep, 2013
11/14/2014 00:00:00

Props to you man on this review. I hadn't even considered the lack of the political culture and missing Culture overall. This'll definitely be something I'll be keeping in mind

I love being irrefutable
Tomwithnonumbers Since: Dec, 2010
11/14/2014 00:00:00

I agree that the world-building so far in RWBY has kind of sucked, and to it's detriment because clearly a lot of the plot and characterisation is going to be meant to turn on it. It's why I really liked the episodes where they were exploring the ruined city, because it was really the first time they'd established what kind of world they were in and the way the environment influenced people.

World of Remnants sucks and the reason it sucks is it's not their attempt to do worldbuilding. They're there because they need something cheap and quick that can fill a few weeks so that they can finish the animation. And because they clearly want to reveal this information in the story, they hold it all back in Wo R. So we have five minute info dumps that deliberately try to avoid dumping info -_-. I'm really hoping they fix that up next season as quickly as they finish everything else.

I utterly disagree on the combat and uniforms though. It feels like a big case of not getting it. The whole point of RWBY is taking style over substance to it's wonderful extreme, it's about the emotion and the beauty and the feeling. Whats the point of letting that be constrained by other needs when it's the reason the show exists? There are plenty of other places you can go for logically consistent fights, but there are few places you can see a girl firing a sniper rifle behind her to make her go faster before she transforms it into a scythe to slice the head of a monster and then land behind it with literal frigging rose petals streaming out of her cape.

Lunacorva Since: Mar, 2011
11/18/2014 00:00:00

I would not consider the World of Remnant videos to be an example of laziness, but a result of time constraints. Remember, each season is only about Two hours long. That means they need to focus on the most important aspects of plot and character development. They made the world of Remnat videos because they didn't have the time to fit them into the season itself.

As for the combat. Cinder was already in melee range when the fight started (remember she was the one who initiated combat by charging them). And as any one with even a minute degree of tactical knowledge knows, shooting at someone engaged in close quarters with your friend is a VERY bad idea. Especially since Aura users like Cinder have been shown moving at Mach 49 speeds (much faster than a bullet).

As for the fight against the Atlas Mech, I refer you to Mr Omegafire's review above.


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