I’ve been in a love-hate relationship with Rooster Teeth’s not-quite-anime RWBY since I was in middle school. I’ve watched the show ever since the Red trailer dropped, and it’s become one of the few shows I keep up with regularly. The character designs were cool, the weapons even cooler (the main character uses a sniper scythe!) the music by Jeff and Casey Lee Williams elevated it further, and the fight scenes are still some of the best 3D-animated fights of all time. Despite its flaws (the non-fight animations leave much to be desired, and the show features some egregious examples of telling instead of showing), I genuinely love most of the first three volumes of the show. It’s the coolest 6/10 in existence.
But the rest of the show is a mixed bag of interesting ideas, disappointment, wasted potential, and occasionally decent fight scenes. There’s a lot of discourse on whether the series fundamentally changed when creator Monty Oum tragically passed away in 2015, but it’s unfair to everyone else who works on RWBY to focus on the idea that they aren’t living up to the legacy of a genius. But with the release of Volume 9, it feels like the show may finally hit its stride again.
In the past few years, RWBY has become a delicate balancing act of almost being good and then somehow just missing the mark. It’s the web show equivalent of the student who has a lot of potential, but never does his work so it never bears out.
The main issue with the show is its writing. RWBY’s writing has suffered from attempting to punch way above its weight conceptually without ever committing. There’s a racism subplot that feels like it was written by someone who has a surface-level understanding of the Civil Rights Movement, and it kind of just goes nowhere; it exists for the idea that Catgirl Martin Luther King Jr. can be morally superior to Bullman Malcolm X, and not really much outside of that. Zootopia had a more nuanced take on animal people’s racism, for crying out loud.
Of course, no one’s necessarily looking to RWBY for high-quality writing—there’s a girl with a sniper scythe. But RWBY also hasn’t felt as cool as it once did. There aren’t weapons like canes that shoot explosives or shotgun gauntlets; now we just get guys who use fishing poles and futuristic hammers. All of the off-the-wall batshit stuff that got me into the show has been homogenized to the point where it’s devoid of any cohesive identity. We went from visually striking character designs to generic mobile game fantasy characters. RWBY was always a cheesy action show, but as it attempted to become more serious it lost its way.
