RWBY Is Disappointing, And Here's Why

[Music] when it was first announced ruiby seemed like it was going to be great it was produced by a darling of independent web content and created by a legendary animation genius and some of his most trusted colleagues and written by two but even with all this stuff in place ruby is pretty bad the basic concept a 3d anime about monster hunters is great and when it tries to flesh this out there's some really interesting ideas at times and in brief moments it's got scenes or segments that suddenly really work but overall it's confusing and frustrating it isn't fun to watch and no matter how much attention you give it your attention is only rewarded with more writing or animation problems it's not like the worst show ever made but ruby's failures matter because it really could have been something and that makes the parts that were good even sadder because you can always see what it could have been and maybe almost was i wanna just call this garbage and move on with my life but it's just not that simple which is a shame for me it means i can't use the most popular video title i use when i criticize media is this it is this gonna be on my [ __ ] gravestone eight long years into production with a massive crew by web video standards and its eighth season on the way sorry volume they call them volume the show has garnered a pretty large following and a super devout fan base and it's easy to see why the show frequently threatens to suddenly become good people saw what it promised and believed it would deliver the pieces are all still there and sometimes just often enough for people to keep watching it looks like they're going to fall into place but they never have and it's starting to become clear that they probably never will and that makes the show infinitely more disappointing than something you could easily say is worse and the reasons why the show has failed to become what it could have been are multitudinous and interlinked there's a million distractingly small problems that ultimately aren't that big a deal and weaken real criticism by being given too much attention and every major problem ties into and is responsible for every other major problem in a way that makes it almost impossible to unpick ruby may be the first show ever to be holistically bad but do not despair fellow believers in objective analysis of cartoons i'm here to defend you and eviscerate ruby with a sword made of logic and reason it's a metaphorical sword really oh also it can turn into a gun because that would be cool uh this is how media criticism works right so this time on the increasingly infrequent cries for help my family refuses to believe is my job i'll be exploring the problems that started in the early years of the show's development how they set the tone for a show that never quite ended up where it could have been why it matters that such a promising thing turned out this way and exactly how and why so many decent ideas can often get misunderstood when writers simply borrow them from other shows they like i'm focusing primarily on the first three seasons of the show in this video because ruby can be pretty neatly divided into two separate eras with two different sets of problems that don't fully overlap and for the purposes of criticism i intend to treat them as distinct entities in most cases if you're a fan of the show you're probably dreading the worst here although if you're a fan of the second half of the show you probably already agree with most of what i'm going to say but in any case if you like ruby and you still watch this video i love you and thank you for joining me on this journey my goal isn't to make anyone think less of a show just to think more about it it's important to be critical of media you enjoy and there is a lot to enjoy about ruby so i hope to give credit where it's due and in the places that aren't as good well that's way more interesting it's often said that failure is one of the best learning experiences and in that respect ruby has a lot of good things to teach [Music] oh do we not have a cool animated intro for this video it's about an anime it would have been kind of cool are we just going with the standard it's fine i mean it's a bit underwhelming but hey do you all remember rooster teeth no i don't mean at t's warner media's otter media's rooster teeth the company with hundreds of employees that makes podcasts and shows and movies and games rooster teeth is starting video game development i mean rooster teeth the five or so people who made red versus blue in their bedroom hey yeah you ever wonder why we're here it's one of life's great mysteries isn't it popular on the web in the early years was machinima people would pose and act characters in games effectively using video games as a medium for making movies not in my diner you didn't know lumberjacks didn't you see the design it just said no lumberjacks oh yeah i didn't see that time red versus blue wasn't the first attempt to make something like this but it was far and away the most popular one all right here's the plan and it was shockingly successful people who had no idea what machinima was knew about red vs blue how many people could make a show half as good as this using what amounts to a microphone and a copy of halo i certainly couldn't and i know because i tried and i'm so glad no one saw that i was saved by not knowing how to upload videos when i was 12. youtube would simply not accept my windows movie maker file as a business 2000's rooster teeth were incredibly smart a tiny team producing a fairly simple show made in a video game engine but managing to promote it and build it into a recognizable brand of its own the show had merch not halo merch but red vs blue merch rooster teeth had done what was basically impossible and successfully built a business making machinima not even machinima did that so yeah well done to bernie burns and the rest of the team anyway then it kept going for like a decade while i wasn't looking no really they're still making red vs blue over at rooster teeth did you know that can you conceive of the idea that a show you had fun with in your bedroom when you were in high school is 17 seasons deep i found that out while i was working on this video and a friend told me that they're on season 17. it's still hitting me why haven't they stopped well it's not because the creators of red vs blue had 17 years of ideas in them rooster teeth isn't a small company whose people can do what they want creatively anymore they've been bought they're part of a large conglomerate now and their work isn't just a show they like making for fun because they had a nice idea it's an intellectual property with a capital i and p and they're gonna keep making it for as long as it theoretically makes money no matter how little anyone wants to make it as bernie has always said as long as people like it we will keep making it yep so shut the [ __ ] up and even once you hate it even once you're you're totally fed up with it you're like just stop we'll still be there i'm gonna milk the [ __ ] out of it every penny meanwhile in another corner of the internet another form of early web hashtag content was being produced a guy named monty ohm was putting 3d animations of some incredibly cool fights on the internet on places like early youtube and deviantart and game trailers god remember game trailers oh i feel so old now his most long-running work was the dead fantasy series short fights featuring the female characters from dead or alive and final fantasy these animations are still really cool they're basically just characters you know from stuff fighting but that's all they have to be the fights feel desperate violent impactful cool fast and incredibly technical there's nothing quite as good as these at the things these are doing but perhaps the most well-known monty animation was released in 2007 it was called haloid haloid is utterly fantastic halo man beats up hundreds of halo aliens but then metroid man turns up and they fight but then it turns out metroid man is a girl and then they fight each other again and also more aliens in a big sequence so epic only music taken directly from the matrix reloaded's burly brawl scene could possibly do it justice and they even pay homage to some scenes from that fight while they're at it they blow all the aliens up and escape reenacting another cool scene from the matrix reloaded in the process but then it turns out that halo man was also a girl oh my god and then they watched the sunset ah that's nice maybe i'm being overly sentimental about some animated fights but the late great montiom was basically a genius at what he did the guy passed away really tragically and suddenly in 2015 but the body of work he left behind is genuinely fantastic and inspirational it's fascinating to me that stuff monty made for fun for free in a couple of weeks is infinitely more dynamic and fun and engaging than stuff real big budget animation productions have put together i can barely think of a handful of things that even remotely compare for a time rooster teeth and monty own were just their own things off in their own corners of the internet but then 2010 pax rooster teeth premiere a new episode of red vs blue it's standard fare for the show really familiar characters familiar engine limitations cute meta jokes about how nerfed the pistol was in the new halo game [Music] but then [Music] i wasn't there when this happened but i remember going as wild as this crowd did when i saw this episode online [Music] [Applause] the limitations of the halo games had been broken who could be behind who am i kidding you know who's behind it you've guessed this bit we saw a short film called haloi by a gentleman by the name of monty ohm and we were extremely impressed by what we saw this is if you haven't seen it before it's a it's a piece where master chief fights naturally wow bernie video game knowledge check fail it's sergeant metroid have some respect for the troops monty had been hired in secret by rooster teeth to work on animation for the new season of red vs blue for almost 10 years now i've been so in love with how they introduce him he's literally in the audience and they say hey monty's here now and he just gets up and joins in as the fourth panelist it's excellent showmanship and also just really kind of beautiful so now in red versus blue there were suddenly tons of interesting and creative animated sequences and when some kind of fight was going to happen instead of being in-engine characters standing and shooting at each other and being kind of boring it'd be a monty ohm fight these sequences really added a lot to the series all right now you're just showing off well that's a big thing we like doing team up stuff right and we found money on the internet here's something he's doing that's really cool that we can't do so he's going to come together and make something cool as they grew they expanded their production of other shows and podcasts and became a media entity which would eventually be worthy of the ultimate prize being bought and turned into a subsidiary of a larger media conglomerate however their biggest show and monty's animations were still technically just fan works of someone else's intellectual property monty and the others clearly wanted to paint on a bigger canvas and have a fresh start monty wanted to create something as expressive and unique and stylish as the anime and video games that had inspired him like monty and i are working on right now a whole series that's just not machinima at all it's just animation stuff right and we're throwing out ideas for that this show would turn out to be called rwby and the first of four trailers for the series was released with the conclusion of red versus blue season 10. but uh ruby which we finally showed a trailer for at the conclusion of red versus blue season 10 last night yeah we're [ __ ] excited it's it's awesome now obviously i'm kind of biased against this show i'm making a whole video about why i didn't like it keep this in mind when i say that ruby's red trailer [ __ ] owns it's an extravaganza of violence visual style speed timing and this is one of the most fantastic things ever everyone who saw this flipped the [ __ ] out holy [ __ ] it's a scythe that turns into a gun the red trailer has 15 million views on youtube that's more than any episode of ruby that's more than any episode of red vs blue the first episode has 14 million views and just for the record the second episode has 6.8 the only things on rooster teeth's channel with more views are the really cool monty fight from red versus blue season 8 which i already showed which they uploaded on its own separately from the show because they knew it was amazing a joke angry birds movie trailer that went viral twice you know once when it came out and then again when actual trailers for the actual real angry birds movie started coming out and uh minecraft let's play because of course the trailer is very simple this red character visits a grave then gets accosted by werewolves before fighting and killing dozens of them but it's so much more than that it's so cool looking so good feeling to watch and just so alive with motion that it sells the show right away you immediately want to see more of it and know what's going on in this world welcome back by the way i'm saying that because half the people watching this video remember the red trailer while i was talking about it and paused to go watch it again another thing i want to bring up over here is that this is the best piece of music jeff williams has ever composed jeff had been doing music for rooster teeth since early in the red versus blue days and while he was clearly talented there wasn't much room in red vs blue most of the time for his music to shine and this trailer really gives him the chance to do that and he clearly latched onto it like a limpet the song in this trailer introduces a really powerful motif it's this bit here it has a surprising amount of versatility it gets used later in this fight in a much more intense variation this sound will basically be ruby's both the show and the characters central theme for the rest of the series they knew they had something great with this and they just went with it the white trailer introduces us to a character called weiss who appears to be a singer and intercuts her singing with a sequence where she fights a giant knight with a rapier with a revolver in the handle she has more of a magic oriented fight style and the fight's pretty good i really like how expressive the visuals are in these first two trailers the world is stark colours and the lighting is harsh the backgrounds here are blacks and whites it's hard to tell if the events of the trailer are literal or if this is a liminal space and the knight represents something i like the red on the inside of her dress and boots too it really pops out and makes the whole visual design work they've really committed to making the character one colour but giving them just enough of other stuff that it stands out even more weiss's singing is done by casey lee williams jeff williams's daughter who was 15 at the time casey is clearly pretty talented so it works weiss wins and it fades back to her singing for the audience but the wound she got in the fight fades to a scar did she get it in this fight or from something else ooh mysterious the black trailer introduces us to writing and voice acting it's time i'm sorry what i'll turn that up for you blake it's time oh god i shouldn't have turned it up the anime ninja run over to catch a train snaking through this beautifully designed red forest inside the train is a cool fight with evil robots yeah the fight's pretty good blake's weapon is a sword whose holster is another bigger sword and they're connected by a string or something also it can turn into a gun uh it looks neat but i couldn't tell you exactly what it does i like it though the music in this trailer has lyrics too sung again by casey lee williams the singing is well this time she's being pushed to sing aggressive anime fight music [Music] the fight is cool though i don't think it's as cool as the red trailer because it's set in or on a train so the fight sequences are in a rectangular box or basically just a straight line it's hard to have creative movements and camera work in that setup it's a bit of a limitation halfway through we get the first proper story beat of our whole show perfect i'll set the charges what about the crew members what about them oh i think he might be a bad guy this is the beginning of a writing problem which starts here and continues to plague the show until uh actually it hasn't stopped yet when you have a character straight up say i don't care about killing civilians to someone's face what you're doing is having a character openly admit they've been written to be the bad guy and that's incredibly weird because they've written monsters into the setting that are just generically evil and want to destroy humanity because that's in their nature so it's very weird that the actual characters that you wrote behave like that too anyway they get attacked by a robot and the guy cuts it apart in a genuinely really cool shot but then he gets to the front of the car and blake says goodbye and cuts the car free leaving him behind obviously having a problem with his being okay with killing innocent people and i guess this is the first time she's noticed this about him and as she disappears into the distance and the colours really beautifully fade away so she's alone in a void and were given a meaningful impression of her emotional state the audience is struck with one lingering thought he can make that jump in the yellow trailer we're introduced to yang a character based on goldilocks so we have red riding hood snow white goldilocks and uh this one isn't really clear yet but trust me we'll get to it it's we'll get to it yang goes to a bar whose soundtrack is a remix of the theme from the red trailer neat she beats up the manager over whether he's seen someone in a picture and she's written like two adult men who've never written anything professionally before except for red versus blue trying to write a teenage girl weirdly specific impression there oh junior i was just playing with you don't be so sensitive come on let's kiss and make up okay but after two minutes she punches the guy and a fight starts and the trailer gets really good her weapons are gloves that unfold into fist guns yang's design and basic fighting style seem very evocative of tifa from final fantasy vii a character monty previously liked to use a lot in dead fantasy it kind of makes sense that some of the characters are designed around characters he previously liked animating but now they're his own characters that he has total control over yang has three back-to-back cool fights against a gang of guys who will dress like jim sterling two ladies who i guess are bodyguards or something and then against the guy she punched earlier she punches him with so much power that the screen gets a photoshop filter over it and when she lands outside the bar ruby is there yang is that you oh no is that how she talked the writing and voice acting could do with some refining and some of jeff's musical decisions could be dialed back just a little bit but basically these trailers are some of the coolest possible trailers for a cartoon ever like if you showed me every trailer for every cartoon and asked me which one i'd want to see at the end of that of course i'd pick lunatics unleashed i mean seriously this is [ __ ] insane why would anyone make this i have to know but at a very close second i'd pick this one literally millions of people have gone back to watch the red trailer again and looking at view figures they've done that instead of watching more of the actual show they're not just amazing teasers for a show they're just good it's so hard not to be on board for the show these trailers are pointing to they imply a show that's going to be utterly fantastically tremendous but then it came out and it was bad oh you're still here right so ruby isn't as simple as a bad show is it it's a bad show which could have been something something truly amazing and that makes his problems infinitely more interesting and important to explore and it's especially worth doing because the show's creators do try to be receptive to criticism well they try but this manifests in a strange way i'd like to discuss real quick the writers have talked on podcasts commentary tracks panels and so on about the ways people have been shitty about the show and how important it is to not be an [ __ ] when you're criticizing something people will make a comment maybe it's like a criticism or something and you go okay yeah that's a fair that's a fair critique but you don't want to listen to them because of the way they said it which is something i think most people agree with it's really tough when expressed um an incredibly insensitive and rude way because you never want to reward him like that that's not the way it's just not i really get what he's saying here and yeah plenty of criticism of the show is worthless dog [ __ ] for some reason this show seems to attract people who need excuses to yell at cartoon women but i'm having a hard time finding more than one or two decent examples of times they've really explored actual criticisms of the show and the fact the show keeps making the same mistakes implies they kind of don't i've seen the writers sometimes quote retweet someone being shitty about the show and responding to this behavior and again often what they're saying is correct if you have a point but you're an [ __ ] about it no one will want to listen to you i basically agree completely with what miles is saying here but he appears to spend a significant amount less time responding to the kinds of criticism he says he wants to see and there is good faith criticism out there so stepping over them to point at bad faith criticisms and complain about how they're not helpful means that functionally all you're doing is rewarding shitty people with time and attention you then don't spend engaging with the people who make the decent criticisms of your work and as a lifelong fan of rooster teeth and monty own i certainly hope it's clear that my criticism comes from a well-meaning place i'm only here because i really thought the show could have been great and i still think that maybe it could be hey see the chapel wasn't just here to be a reference to that scene from kingsman it was also a clever metaphor for my intent to make a good faith criticism hey come on i thought it was clever wait is that is an intro playing now hasn't it been like 20 minutes deep down inside a voice christ that tells you what's inside your heart the world is frozen you've been chosen we must all now try to make a start it's time for revolution tear it all apart so please tell me guys [Music] ruby is about a girl who goes to anime warrior school after getting invited by the ominous and enigmatic headmaster sephiroth dumbledore and ruby and her sister and new friends mess about doing plot lines that don't go anywhere for a few years while the show decides what its story actually is okay wait we're getting ahead of ourselves i wanted to start this video by doing the thing all the smart video essayists are doing nowadays where they sum up the plot of the thing they're analyzing in a funny way that lays the groundwork for future critique but trying to delve into and describe the deeper story problems misses the surface problem that there basically isn't one there's a really telling scene at the end of the second season where the main characters sit around discussing the events of the show so far and conclude that they don't really know what's happening or why and haven't figured anything out yet we didn't solve everything a lot of people were hurt and we still don't even know why they did this or who that mystery girl was the show attempts to justify this though not every story has a neat and tidy ending stories don't have to make sense or go anywhere now to a certain extent this is an okay point to make like in real life things don't have arcs or necessarily lead anywhere but if 28 episodes into your story you're ending a season on a character giving what amounts to a justification for the story not mattering maybe the plot could have done with some more work the dog mimicking yang is really cute though so at least there's that uh time for bed oh please absolutely this is the season two finale we don't know what the story is nap time almost all of our main characters don't find out what the actual story that's going on actually is until about halfway through season four where someone tells them while sitting around a campfire ruby's story is one of those stories that i like to call theoretically interesting where like if you read it on wikipedia it would sound really cool and in the show there are plenty of times where the characters sit you down and tell you what the story was and you go oh that's actually really interesting i wish i'd seen some of that but in the actual episodes of the show you get to see not much happens at all so to hone in on why the story ended up like this we're gonna have to explore how the show was made monty ohm was the main creator of rwby but it seems like he didn't do much of the writing himself in interviews monty and the rest of rooster teeth have been upfront that monty's not that interested in the writing part of making a show and we do stuff like writing characters and story lines and stuff that he doesn't really i don't know if he's not interested in it but he doesn't do it he likes all the animation monty was more of a visual storyteller and seemed to prefer to have writers do the writing part which means the show has some other important creators miles luna and kerry shawcross ruby is being it's directed by monty holm uh and then uh monty carrie and myself are the lead writers for the show kerry had done some editing and compositing work on red versus blue and miles had done machinimating like the head bobbing to the recorded dialogue on season nine he then wrote 13 minutes worth of mini series and helped co-write season 10. when ruby was a lot of fun it was a lot of fun it was really scary because it was essentially the first time that either of us had ever written anything oh i appear to have accidentally paused that clip written anything conditional yeah or in this scale especially for sure yeah there's a fourth really important team member who often goes unmentioned even though he's in the credits of ruby from even the first trailer shane neuville he was a close friend of monty's and the two collaborated quite a lot on stuff he'd worked with him on the animated parts of red vs blue monty or shane will choreograph fights or whatever sequences and he's made some great stuff on his own monty first came up with some of the basic concepts for ruby while eating in an ihop with shane he doesn't get credited very often for his role in the making of the series but some of the best animated moments were made by him so monty came up with the basic ideas for ruby's world and characters and story and then brought on kerry and miles as writers and shane as another animator the kind of thing we want to deliberate on and put more thought into is like the plot and character and that's the stuff that miles and kerry has been helping me with you monty carrie and miles appear to have worked together to come up with a basic outline of the plot and setting but most importantly for monty the action sequences that were going to happen and when in the story they happened and then monty shane and maybe a few others went off to start work on the action scenes in doing so crafting some of the most cool and elaborate action sequences ever made meanwhile the writers and the rest of the animation team put together the rest of the scenes eventually the three of us all decided on a few set rules and characters and um story ideas that we wanted to stick to monty's working on like action and like the design and the look of the show and he kind of had us go off and start writing uh the first episode yeah this division of work does seem to make sense on the surface however something miles is being nice and not mentioning is that sometimes monty would just disappear and then come up with new characters story elements and action sequences which the writers would then suddenly have to make room for in their script more on that later but for now generally speaking monty and shane did the fights carrie and miles wrote the words and another team of animators put together the non-action scenes the three of us would have a lot of meetings and collaborate on michelle to the point where i just started coming up with the broad strokes eventually and they would they had pretty much written the the bulk of the show so in monty's own words the bulk of the show is written by these writers to a certain extent it's a bit like if dead fantasy was a full animated series with writers hired to connect the dots and explain and justify the fights that were happening so there's a lot of good places to start when analyzing the show's writing process but the best place is probably the very beginning of the show i know right i'm a genius the opening of ruby really doesn't set up the story too well but it does set up the writing problems we'll go on to see throughout the story in a useful way ruby begins with a very simplistic looking introductory animation explaining the basic setting of the world with the slight problem that it doesn't actually do that at all all it actually says is there's man and also dangerous monsters that want to eat them up called grim as in grimm's fairy tales which is kind of cute and then man discovered dust a magical substance well magical ish we'll get to that later which can be used to defeat them in some vague way this power was appropriately named dust why is that an appropriate name hang on man born from dust was strong wise and resourceful okay so it's called dust because we like came from dust man and that's the intro you'd think they'd explain a little bit more about the world itself or what the setting is like and as they zoom out on a world map you briefly see four castles so what's going on there are they countries but before you can be told anything more important than dust they evaporate and we transition to the first real scene of the story the intro doesn't share information which might have been really good to know going in so people aren't confused when it suddenly comes up later for example there's a third species separate from humans or grim called the forenus whose existence and treatment by humans is supposedly one of the driving elements of the entire plot the first time this plot element or even what a fullness is comes up is about 11 episodes into the show it must be hard to be a fanus your first reaction to a core plot point is to be a what what's that the fullness are mentioned once at the end of episode 1 on tv when a piece of concept art briefly brings up something called the faunus protests this saturday's faunus civil rights protests turn dark but before they can actually tell you what that is it cuts out and then they don't come up again until near the end of the season so it's almost like a surprise when they come back up for another example in ruby's setting every character has a power called assemblance an ability completely unique to them what a semblance is or the fact they exist at all or how this universe's version of magic even works isn't mentioned in the slightest in the opening where that might have been nice and the name semblance isn't even said in the show until episode 4 teen 14 sorry i stuttered the four kingdoms and their relationships with each other and their fragile peace barely comes up until that peace is fractured in season 3 where you suddenly learn as it's happening that this piece was incredibly easy to fracture and was hanging by a thread our kingdoms are at the brink of war wait what are they what's happening these all would have been really useful to know going into the story or at least should be properly set up at some point and not just dumped on you the instant they become relevant but instead basic aspects of the setting start to feel almost like twists when they suddenly come up multiple hours in with no groundwork laid for you whatsoever and the main opportunity to set some of this stuff up and get the audience on the same narrative page the intro gets thrown away to give you a commercial for dust why well the first scene in the show is the main villain of the first season robbing a dust store and ruby fighting them now in abstract this opening scene itself is a fine idea it's a very common and punchy way to start a story have a crime happen and the main character stopping it it's immediately engaging it draws the viewer in with action and stakes and it's a strong way of establishing the primary hero and villain of a story now they could be robbing a bank or a convenience store or a gas station or a jewelry store or an analog for these things that's appropriate to the setting but the decision was made to have it be a dust store and this is a decent choice too it's an important thing within the setting however this does pose a problem for your audience because now you're opening on the attempted theft of a fantasy resource which has no point of easy comparison to anything in real life you know how everyone knows what the one ring is because it's a ring that has evil magical properties so you kind of get it not quite as many people engaged with the silmarils did they god even admitting i know what that is embarrasses me if you just opened on this robbery without the intro people would get the gist of robbery and girl stopping them but not what dust is or what it does or why it's so important but you kind of have to start with the dust store because it's a unique place for the setting which could be interesting if it's pulled off well and the plan of the main villain for this season is that he's stealing all the dust from everywhere so it's economically good storytelling to open on one of those attempted thefts so in order for everyone to know what dust is and why it's important the intro animation for the entire series was either written or rewritten to primarily focus on explaining dust which is a tremendously poor idea because now nothing else is explained when it comes down to it there's stuff much more important to set up in the story than some guy robbing a store compounding this is that the plot of the entire first season is this bad guy clockwork orange man is trying to steal dust why well you'll find out in season never because they dropped that plot point i'm not even kidding they changed their mind about the plot so none of this matters so yeah on top of the obviously quite large problem that the writers didn't know what their story was going to be until after they'd finished writing a season of it the chance to set up and explain the wider setting so people know a little more is squandered in order to explain why the next scene in the show is supposed to be important and then it turns out not to be anyway this is the opposite of economical storytelling this is expensive storytelling this jumbled mess of ideas plot decisions intro priorities and later changes makes the intro feel like a first draft that they couldn't change in the commentary track they talk a lot about how cool it was that they got the voice actress for cortana from halo to do the opening voice over and it seems like she might have had a pretty busy schedule so i have the sinking feeling that they wrote the intro and then recorded it and then realized that maybe it could have done with some more work and it was too late that's that's just my speculation there though but this stuff needs to be the strongest because it's the best chance you have to sell an audience on your setting and story the only thing really holding up its end here is monty's fight with the robbers which is really good and also the transition to the fight from the scene in the store employs a really cool technique i love called shifting diagesis because you think that you're just hearing the music but it's actually playing on ruby's headphones [Music] that and the fight are really cool and because of the intro not being super great i think it's the only thing that really hooks people in in the first few minutes no one's watching the intro and going oh wow dust sold the show ends up having a lot of interesting ideas but those ideas are executed on and explained to you extremely poorly in a way that really lets the show down i'm gonna say this right now ruby's story gets interesting ruby is a really fun show to write a wiki about there's some great stuff in there over the years but the story telling only gets worse and the setting is one of the most poorly communicated the world had ever seen before bright came out let's talk about world building and more importantly how you convey that world to the viewer i think lots of good fiction stories for young adults try to do is craft a story where you learn how things work without being explicitly told the setting of say avatar to pick a completely random example doesn't tell you exactly how everything works because this world is normal to the people living in it so no one would need to stop and ask what's going on sometimes you meet people who can throw fire at you and that's just not that surprising there's a nation full of people who can do that and hey you probably have a relative who can throw rocks without touching them that's life man so for the sake of the audience the story is written so the unique aspects of the world come up in ways where the audience learns how things work it's water bending and yeah yeah an ancient art unique to our culture blah blah blah this example from the first episode is a little clumsy and obvious compared to the rest of the show but it's really solid exposition especially for a show that children might be watching you now know what waterbending is and that it's unique to a culture and that this is all so normal in this world that even teenagers are casually dismissive about this information and you learn all of this without even feeling like you're being told you think you're just watching two siblings arguing about how to catch a fish you [ __ ] idiot but you're secretly having the main concepts of the world explained to you it's clever katara is trying to catch a fish with water bending but in real life the viewer is the fish out of water who let you in here i once heard someone smarter than me calling this naturalistic storytelling the story never condescends to its audience by pausing to tell you how the world works instead it just tells the story in a way that makes it easier to understand how it works but if you're a talentless hack there are other ways of writing exposition in say harry potter harry is a person from our world learning about a much more magical one hidden behind his own so the viewer is told how some things work by way of harry learning because harry doesn't know and needs to be told so we get scenes where people tell harry how the world works now i personally think it's better to discover things without having a character just be told but a lot of harry potter takes place at a school so almost all interesting storytelling is kept to a minimum harry potter isn't as good as when you read it as a child the hottest take of 2014. the exposition in ruby is well there's a character in the story called jean jean arc do you get it who inexplicably doesn't know basic elements of the setting he lives in and at several points early in the story another character takes him aside to tell him how things work do you know what aura is for example in an early scene this character pira explains aura to him she gives a long speech about how aura is a manifestation of your spiritual energy nay your soul basically you have a shield for a while in fights like in halo i guess old habits die hard aura is the manifestation of our soul it bears our burdens and shields have you ever felt like you were being watched our aura can be our shield everyone has it even at a monsters we fight lack of soul creatures it's manifestations a force field okay miles kerry you just made your whole audience sit through that exposition you can't then make a joke about how simple the explanation could have been also when you're doing exposition you still have to think about the character who's saying it and why you know pira's a teenager young adults don't tend to walk around with entire speeches about how their world works prepared in case someone asks that's just really strange characterization it's also really strange writing wise for jean to not know this jean is the latest in a long line of heroic monster hunters and is in anime warrior school because he wants to live up to this legacy my father my grandfather and his father before him were all warriors they were all heroes i wanted to be one too there's no way he didn't at some point pick up this concept growing up or in training or you know it is a core aspect of like life in this world jean's character not knowing is such poor characterization that it literally doesn't make sense you know in harry potter harry was a literal child who was deliberately sheltered from magic all his life so his not knowing stuff was explained by the story that's kind of the only way this expository style works you have to incorporate them not knowing into the character or it doesn't make sense if you want to explain one of the world's mechanics it's not great to do it by having a character whose whole life revolves around knowing this information not know it and for the first person he ever asks about it to happen to have a speech prepared jean's idiocy is often used to try to make hilarious jokes about man not no thing there's no way i put my gear in locker 636 yesterday i would have remembered having to count that high but more than for a joke it's also a vehicle for someone to have an excuse to give really straightforward sounding exposition for the audience in the scene where jean first meets pira weiss tells him who peera is this is pira hello again here graduated top of her class at sanctum never heard of it do you know who pira is let me tell you and also the viewer who she is and list some of her accomplishments she's won the mistle regional tournaments four years in a row a new record the what it's not just that jean's characterization suffers from him being written to be literally born yesterday it's that everyone else's characterization suffers too when they essentially have to pause being their own characters in order to explain the story to someone pira in my opinion is one of the most interesting characters in the show but so much of the time she could have spent like being interesting or doing something interesting is spent obsessed with teaching jon everything he needs to know and how to fight i've seen people call this show progressive and feminist because it has a lot of female main characters but looking at how they're written i don't think i can agree there this strong female character is basically immediately reduced to doing all of the emotional and physical labor for this guy a huge portion of the early show's screen time is dedicated not to the main characters of ruby who the show is named for but to jean the real main character getting trained and explained to and flirted with by pira the coolest girl in school incidentally jean is voiced by miles luna the lead writer of the show hey pira sup girl how you doing she's so pretty she's so pretty yeah she's so pretty so even while having a comic relief character who doesn't know things he definitely would so people can explain it to him the show is still struggling for good opportunities to explain the setting and plot luckily for exposition's sake but not the viewers they have like harry potter set a majority of the early show in a school so often the viewer is in a literal classroom being lectured to and no it doesn't become fun when the characters in the scene are bored of it too however because they're trying to make the exposition naturalistic you're also expected to immediately grasp multiple abstract concepts that aren't explained at all take for example semblances what's assemblance okay well they're not magic something the show is very careful to explain is that they're not magic because people don't think magic is real in this setting we have dust semblances but i mean there's no such thing as magic to them semblances are normal and magic would be really weird but just for my own entertainment three of the things i just showed you were semblances and one of them was magic good luck figuring out which is which without being explicitly told by the story every character in rwby has one really unique special ability blake can leave shadow clones behind and use dust to augment their elemental abilities yang can go super saiyan and get more powerful when she's angry but then later they re-explain that it's her getting stronger as she gets hurt more like she channels the damage with each hit she gets stronger and she uses that energy to fight back then later they change it again to how it is her getting angry her father calls it basically a temper tantrum basically a temper tantrum oh and then they change it back again in volume six his semblance is like yours he absorbs energy through his sword stores it up and then sends it back when he's ready so if you're confused about how the main character's semblances actually work it's okay so were the writers this isn't just me nitpicking this lack of internal logic when it comes to something even as simple as one of our four main characters abilities makes the show very confusing to watch when you're watching yang fighting you don't know whether to feel if she's actually in trouble or if she's waiting to unleash her power and that means it's kind of hard to ever really know what level of danger one of your main characters is in and that really sucks oh also another expository problem is in this scene too a guy who can move this quickly is currently fighting yang he's just off screen while this is happening did he stop so blake can tell yang his semblance is he just waiting for the exposition to finish listen guys i'm not trying to be mean but like show one other person your script before you're done like just show it to one person ruby's power is she can move really quickly and turns into a weird orb made of cloth and rose petals as she does it weiss can make symbols appear that either lock things in place or stick people to things but also she can summon monsters but this isn't magic it's not magic glinda goodwich yeah really clever can well she can basically do magic like control things and shoot energy and put broken things back together and instantly kill monsters but it's not magic and pira is basically magnet man from the x-men so this is a totally cool thing to put in your fantasy setting it's very shown an anime it really fits it's a fine idea so how is this explained to you by the story well uh they don't the intro doesn't mention it along with most things and for the vast majority of the first season it's not mentioned at all you see some crazy magical looking stuff happening and you assume based on people's reactions that some people can do magic in this world and that's fine but then 14 episodes into the show pira saves jon's life by manipulating his shield from afar with her magnet man powers which we didn't know she had until this moment either by the way and all the other characters react to this as if it's a crazy unique thing uh what despite tons of magical [ __ ] happening before that and one of the people in this scene surprised by pira's power can seemingly also do magic and they have this conversation about it how did you well ruby has her speed you have your glyphs my semblance is polarity this is the first time in the show anyone has mentioned semblances this just happens nobody watching the show knows what that word means yet so then bam right as you're maybe getting to grips with everything else you've been told brushed up on your in-show ruby 101 classes it turns out fundamental things you thought you knew about the setting like that there's magic and that's fine were lies and actually every single character in the world has one unique thing they can do with its own special name that is explicitly not the same thing as magic but just to [ __ ] with you magic does also exist in addition to all this the idea is completely fine but this is not how you convey it to an audience this scene is supposed to be about jean's personal growth as a character but instead first-time viewers are going to be going hang on what's a semblance i thought people could just do magic imagine if the first time anyone said bending in avatar the last airbender was 14 episodes in but in addition pira also specifically is keeping her semblance a secret we gotta tell them what happened we could or perhaps we could just keep it our little secret she doesn't broadcast her power so it puts her opponents at a disadvantage but then later when some other characters figure out what her power is they call it by the same name her semblance is polarity so it's a secret but everyone knows the specific name of pira's ability without needing to be told it once they see her do it what i'm trying to say is semblance is a kind of a semi-complicated concept to just drop on people they don't have to be there are tons of shows and anime where every character has a unique ability of some sort there's this great narrative technique that a lot of anime utilizes nowadays where they explain what is happening in them in jojo's bizarre adventure almost every main character has a power called a stand but the way they introduce it is they have a character getting confused by these weird powers he has and then two other characters turn up to explain what a stand is to him so he gets it thus helping to ensure that you also know how stands work so that the audience knows what's happening in the story so yeah it's not like every character having a power is a bad story idea but semblances are specifically made stranger by either the lack of exposition or the presence of incredibly confusing exposition like in volume 5 they explain what semblances are to another character presumably because they realized the audience had never been actually told what semblances were in the show for five seasons can you see the problem here when these ideas and story components are being explained so strangely and it's taking seasons to correct eventually the viewer either stops watching or stops caring about really understanding what's going on they start to treat it like it's not really worth their time and tune it out while they wait for the next cool fight good exposition and proper conveyance of information are so important in stories especially fantasy stories if you do it in a boring way or do it badly or don't do it at all or explain only one thing in the introduction of your whole series and then it turns out not to be as big a plot point as you'd thought the audience's experience of your potentially good story is damaged and it's really hard to get that good will back when you've lost it i'm only realizing now writing this video exactly how cool ruby's story could have been if it was written in a way that wasn't such a struggle to get to grips with the show is having such a problem conveying its world that you have to watch another different show to learn basic [ __ ] despite spending tons of time sitting you down telling you how the world works they still don't manage to tell you enough about the setting for you to be able to understand it so they made a second companion show consisting entirely of lectures called ruby world of remnant everyone's favorite part of watching a cartoon the homework like what all the countries are and how they work how huntsman academies work and the basic history of the world along with the major mechanics of the show like what grim actually are what fourness are how aura works what a semblance is oh and how could we forget the cross-continental transmit system the creators seem to have realized that this isn't explained very well in the story that they wrote so they essentially made a private personal wikipedia to tell you what was happening in the commentary track for volume 2 they basically admit that world of remnant exists to patch up all of these holes have the world of remnant videos to kind of get uh some exposition across um as best we could as best we could guys no one was forcing you to write the story badly they're even animated in the same style as the intro effectively admitting the actual introduction didn't explain anything if you watch through ruby on crunchyroll which uh why the world of remnant episodes are scattered between the normal ones they're genuinely telling you that the best way to experience ruby is for the show to stop every now and then so that you can be told a few minutes of straight exposition the world of remnant is a dangerous place it especially doesn't help that the explanations in world of remnant aren't very good either the world of remnant episode about grim explains that we don't really know much about grim scientists perpetually find themselves with more questions than answers little else is known about the creatures of grim great thanks the world of remnant episode on semblances tells us that every single semblance is completely unique the wielder semblance is completely unique but then it turns out that weiss's semblance isn't unique and the schnee family have the exact same semblances like it's in their blood or something and her sister winter can do the same things as her every shnee has the ability to summon we have for generation so they're unique except when they're not i'm glad there's a video explaining how this works but it would also help if the explanation made sense and if it didn't just raise more questions also we schnees are unique unlike many our semblance is hereditary winter is telling this piece of information to her sister she's one of the only other people who already knows this this isn't how you write exposition i don't want to be down on the concepts themselves here the idea of semblances and the idea of someone keeping their semblance a secret to have an advantage or a semblance that runs in the bloodline of a family and gives one of our leads a reputation to live up to are all decent things to put in a story and they could all potentially be really interesting but for those things to be interesting they have to be actually conveyed well and then used well in the story itself a good idea isn't enough the world of remnant episode about the schnee dust company largely covers the life and times of a really interesting sounding character who we never see in the show and who never actually comes up by name ever they just invented a cool guy and made up a story about him you don't get story points because an idea sounded good in fact it just means you lose more points by wasting it if you do watch all of ruby and do enough research and ask around on the reddit but only once you've consulted the wiki and watched world of remnant you might finally know what the story of ruby was supposed to be and understand how cool so many aspects of the plot sound in the abstract but you probably won't have had a good time you can't just tell me how good the story or concepts might be in a side cartoon you have to tell me a good story if you try to get someone new into ruby pay attention to how much you have to explain things on the show's behalf even if you like the show and think it's good or at least gets good thinking critically we have to acknowledge that it certainly takes some getting there it's especially disappointing when sometimes you can see the show setting things up quite well when ruby gets done beating up the sterling squad the bad guy manages to get away in a ship even though a new lady turns up to help ruby stop him i bring this up because credit where it's due there is some pretty good storytelling going on here when this new character turns up and does wrecking shop malcolm mcdowell boy says [Music] and this is a really good line because the audience is like that sounds neat what's that i bet they're important and then right after ruby reacts like meeting a huntress is really cool you're a huntress can i have your autograph this is a decently animated scene but also good exposition especially compared to the rest of the show we know that hunters are a big deal without having to be directly told who they are or what they do based purely on seeing a guy react in a kind of panic to her appearance and how ruby reacts herself it's fun and cool and doesn't bog you down with explicit explanations so the writing in this sequence specifically really works that said you fully learn what huntsman and huntresses are by sitting in a classroom while they make a point about how this is boring and the other characters aren't paying attention individuals who have sworn to protect those who cannot protect themselves oh really wow thanks this scene was worth my time surely there's a more interesting way to explain things to your audience than with a lecture besides that's what world of remnants huntsman episode is for what this scene with glinda implies to me is that someone on the writing team did know how to write exposition and his name was monty ohm the action scenes the ones monty had gone off to make while the writers wrote the other stuff are consistently the most interesting examples of character writing and storytelling in the show in volume 2 our characters are so busy having drama or doing wacky skits to establish why these characters are actually friends did you steal my binder i am not a crook what are you talking about is that a dog in the mail but a few episodes in we have this big fight where the team worked together to beat a big mecca and in this scene monty does all the characterization that could have happened in the show the character's teamwork using each other's abilities in conjunction together is choreographed and prepared in a way that shows the audience that these characters have learned to work together each move even gets called for by ruby using a code word showing that she's grown and learned to direct the team she's leading the audience can finally tell that these characters have a really intimate knowledge of each other and their skills these names were actually chosen by monty as a reference to the ship names the fandom had come up with for the characters what's a ship sorry that wasn't meant to signify my feelings on the subject well a ship is a thing fan discussions of media end up doing when fans want or predict characters to end up in a relationship together sometimes creators make subtle nods to these communities in their work like in steven universe that one time they had a literal ship with two characters on it referencing the ship names is a little bit creepy ruby is like 15 you know ruby rose is a 15 year old girl but at least let's take careful note of how ruby and yang are the only pair that don't do a team attack here because that would mean acknowledging the part of your fandom that came up with a ship name for two half siblings which is [ __ ] disgusting in addition to being a really cool monty fight we're seeing our main characters in action as a group and learning about how they've grown together between seasons would have been nice to see them grow in the actual show but credit where it's due it's well conveyed exposition you might not even notice you're learning about the characters because you're watching them beat up a giant robot it's a good scene like that's the thing about early ruby it'll just keep inexplicably having good scenes that are either super fun to watch or work way better story wise than anything around them and usually it's the action sequences which somehow managed to outright the writing of the scenes the writers came up with here's another example as we've mentioned the bad guys finding out peer assemblance is a big deal but since this discovery is made during a fight it's done really well using animation and artistry mercury has a sparring match with pira and the action is shot to focus specifically on the attention mercury is paying to how she moves and fights like he's trying to figure her out then when she tries to stealthily use her semblance to avoid one of his attacks he notices what she's doing it was actually animated by shane neuville whose grasp of using animation to tell a story is really good in the director's commentary track for this scene the whole team can't not gush about the work he does it was a shame this is all changed this is all shane layering in that tiny little stuff where it's like he got the tone of the fight he knew what this was about yeah man the way they were able to read each other and the movements barring the kicks and flips and everything it's just there's so much going on like in the performance it's like a silent dialogue scene oh my god we're looking at their faces and seeing them examine things it's a really strongly characterized scene just out of nowhere also i got that reference good one shane compare and contrast with when the bad guys actually discuss piera's power and they're just sitting around going oh she can control magnets it's called polarity which i also know somehow like it's so weird that really well told scenes are right next to this scenes made by monty and shane feel like pieces of a much better or at least better told show trapped next to this stuff and outside of the fights the animation is [Music] well [Music] we have big plans for you roman the [ __ ] is that just [ __ ] concept art if you want to really unproductively hate ruby all day forever you know if for some reason you've decided it's your job to be angry and sad all your life there's tons of animation problems or ugly sequences or shots to poke fun at but talking about them in this video seems like a distraction because the show looking perfect wouldn't fix its core writing and storytelling problems and i've enjoyed much worse looking shows because they told a better story the biggest problem with the show isn't the animation surrounding these fights it's the story surrounding these fights it's the way these fights are being connected or rather not connected by the writing a useful thing to know is that while working on red vs blue the script would have gaps in it marked monty action sequence here i would then find uh places in that script places in within between the lines in that table read and start inserting my sequences in the parts where bernie's script would say multi-action sequence here red vs blue had a script but how exactly the fights looked was entirely up to monty since he was the best at deciding that stuff while the rest of the show was being made in the traditional machinima style in the halo games themselves monty was making the best possible fight he could and these pieces of the show joined together at the end of this process pretty organically early ruby was made using a fairly similar principle the three main creators had agreed on the story in the broad strokes and then monty was doing the fights in the same way but with the writers actually writing out the plot they'd agreed upon while monty was making the action sequences to give an example the first fight takes place in a street environment so they wrote the dust store robbery and then as quickly as possible move the events outside to connect with the street fight and then up to the rooftops to connect to another monty fight you can see this in the version of the show on the dvd extras where they show episode 1 with the storyboards everything the main crew were working on had been written and had storyboards so the animators knew what visuals to go for and then when monty's cool fights are happening the storyboard is just a black card that reads monty action and given what his fights were like three exclamation marks is appropriate the we got a huntress part i praised earlier was also a monty action sequence on the storyboard so it's likely monty came up with the idea to have torchwick say words to this effect and not the writers whose best idea for conveying what a huntress is is to have a professor tell our hundresses in training in a classroom as if they've never been told before even though they're going to a school for huntresses and then to write a side cartoon telling you again in another good example when the characters are being tested in the woods the characters all get their individual plot lines and then when it's time for the big monty fight designed to happen at this point in the story we get this insert shot of the characters running to the specific location where monty's fight was done now this is one of the standout action sequences of monty's career it's really good it's one of my favorite animated sequences in basically anything it's just great but really disappointingly due to some strange writing choices it doesn't actually connect to the story that was just happening because the gang's plan at this point was to run away from the big monsters attacking them there's no point in fighting these things run and live that is an idea i can get behind but as soon as monty fight mode begins it's like they were leading them here to have a proper place to fight them i'm assuming monty and the writers had decided on this fight in a very broad way like during the trial the gang fights some giant monsters and it's really cool and monty made this fight thinking the writers would come up with an explanation but the explanation ended up being let's run away there's no point in fighting these things i don't know how to make this clear enough that is the one thing that you do not write immediately before cutting to a fight against them and the worst part is this is probably the most seamless connection between the story and action the show manages to do because you can at least like assume that their means of escape got cut off or they got too close and they had to fight but when they have several characters agree to run away and they say they're going to run away having them just kinda stop it's very strange another really strange thing you start to notice when you try and keep track of how the fights are being connected is that character arcs seem to start and then suddenly stop on a whim when the characters get sorted into teams ruby is made the leader of team ruby and this annoys weiss who thinks ruby isn't very smart or good and who she argued with a lot during the test but then during the test weiss decided to be nicer i'll be nicer but she's mad again now because she wanted to be the leader this seems like it's going to set up interesting character tensions maybe a developing friendship with emotional speed bumps along the way but it's resolved instantly when weiss complains to a professor and they say stop it that's preposterous and weiss decides to be nice i am going to be the best teammate you will ever have i'll be nicer problem solved writing like always needed was for a man in a position of authority to give her a good telling off your exceptional skill on the battlefield is matched only by your poor attitude just so you know weiss's main character arc is about her relationship with her abusive and controlling father so the idea this is what she needed is actually kind of gross me personally i still don't see it as a big deal i'm just like i don't see them as like these are four females that are awesome i'm like now these are just four cool kids that are fun i can't really think of any moment really where we sat down and we're like okay this is happening or we want this to happen because they are female yeah i know it's always just been like it's just like they're full of people they're awkward teenagers hey hashtag ruby fans have you heard yang xiao long is gonna fight tifa lockhart my money's on the hot one all right uh so we've got yang xiao long she is the bubbly one on the bunch she's just so happy she's the party girl she's you know pretty much everything everybody wants in a girl so they brought back the interesting character conflict of the test then re-resolved it right away this is like watching a learner driver stall their car like come on you almost got a story going just just keep going at it immediately after having a character just give up on what their character arc should have been the plot suddenly switches gears and focuses on someone else wait gears and then it was the store the car thing was that a deliberate metaphor no that was an accident i'm sorry thus begins the jaune arc a big portion of volume 1 4 of the show's first 16 episodes is about how jean actually forged his anime college transcripts to get into this school which makes him the deepest character we've met so far wow who'da thought and then he gets bullied by a generic mean guy who threatens to tell people his secret and get him kicked out but then he stands up to him and saves him from a big grim and now he respects him so he won't share his secret that's the solution to bullying kids save them from a monster and maybe they'll leave you alone out of respect jean finally asks pira for the help she was offering him instead of pointlessly refusing it and it becomes kinda clear pira is working really hard on this guy because she's into him for some reason this multi-episode break from covering any of the main characters of ruby you know it's in the name to focus on one of the lead writers characters certainly seems strange but what makes the pace even stranger is that once those episodes are done there are two episodes left and they have to now connect the story to this final fight scene in a shipyard starring and i can't stress this enough two characters who have not yet appeared in the show oops so the next episode starts and uh his son he's here now and then while chasing him the gang randomly runs into no literally runs into penny the other character who they forgot to put in earlier because there was just nothing you could have cut to establish these characters sooner this pure gold just has to stay in so now these characters are here just in time for the climactic fight sun's stick that turns into nunchucks that are also guns is so fun to watch it's just amazing however because of the frankly bizarre pacing caused by the show's production i have barely any idea who most of the characters involved even are which affects my engagement somewhat it's a really cool scene but it feels very disconnected from the rest of the story now exactly how this problem got here isn't something it feels fair to speculate about too hard i'm sure you could easily conclude that the three agreed on a story and then the writers just messed up making the plot feel like a cohesive whole with the action sequences and writing-wise the show feels very idiosyncratic and self-conscious like it's looking for something to spend its time doing before the next fight and therefore misspending the time that would have added context and character to those fights until it's too late to really do that stuff properly but at the same time some behind the scenes material and panels and stuff seem to imply that monty went away and then came back with new characters and action sequences for them and dropped it on miles and kerry with little to no notice however this disconnect got here it's not very good and relates to some serious production problems like if your main creative leads aren't on the same page about what's happening in the story the story's probably not going to wind up very good and also the way a huge swath of the show isn't about team ruby and their plot line evaporates to make way for the adventures of some guy the writers don't seem to be handling the story they didn't know they were supposed to do that well either it certainly doesn't make it look any better that the guy is voiced by one of them oh and then in volume 2 they correct for this problem by adding a second author insert so a guy called neptune turns up he's a really cool attractive guy who wears goggles and they make a point of showing how weiss is into him like right away let's not assume that this is like author insert wish fulfillment or whatever like let's assume they just came up with this character and then kerry shawcross decided to voice him like hey if you're writing a whole show you should get to voice one of the characters that's fine but come on it was really weird that you picked neptune man this character gets into love triangle stuff with a bunch of young female characters who you write so it just feels weird and then this character hangs out a bunch with yang you know pretty much everything everybody wants in a girl oh what a woman uh she's 17 and yet in volume two the plot pauses itself for a shockingly long amount of time to have an arc where our characters prepare for the school prom and figure out who's inviting who because weiss wants to go with neptune but jon wants to go with white but pira wants to go with george and she can't bring herself to ask it so whenever something in the show happens that's really strangely explained and you wish got like told to you better remember that they had time to do it and spent it writing scenes where two characters voiced by them hang out at a prom hey guys you know when you were talking about needing to get exposition across as best you could put it here put naturalistic exposition in the scenes where this [ __ ] prom would have gone the prom stuff isn't even necessarily bad either it's nice seeing the sweet dance animations monty did for it he was a big fan of animating dancing along with fights and it's cool seeing this stuff in rwby too and a lot of the character and relationship stuff happening in the prom scenes is like fine the problem with the scene is even if it's perfect it's yet another thing that's happening instead of a story it just becomes aggravating knowing you're watching all of this and basically still waiting for the plot to start again and you know how it starts again well right at the end of the episode before the final two of the season the ground suddenly opens up under ruby's feet and she falls into the plot watching this show knowing that it had a creative lead and two writers and the plot consisted of a bunch of people [ __ ] about going to the prom and not doing much else for most of the season like seriously what were you doing it turns out there's an entire dead underground civilization the bad guy and his goons are doing an evil plan in but the next fight that monty was making were a series of fights on and in a train riffing on the ideas he'd had during the black trailer and those scenes are supposed to happen now so the dead destroyed civilization that ruby just fell into has a working rail network with a train in it this is another instance of there's no point in fighting these things like instead of the plot leading organically into the fights on the train the train is just there when it needs to be in the story i feel like there might have been a slightly easier way of getting the characters onto a train that's all i'm saying but once we get there the actual action sequences on the train are really well done monty and shane and the rest of the team do some really stellar work here the zwei scene from yesterday was shane newville's idea blame him thank you shane that scene was amazing oh and thank you harley dwartz who shane says helped this is the second best shot in the entire show ever of all time do you get it did you get it and i wish the writing and story had the kind of energy the animators were capable of manifesting there is this one really cool fight between yang and neo a character fans love because her deal is she doesn't talk and therefore cannot be ruined by the writers she actually beats yang and then a strange warrior woman we don't know at all turns up to protect her and neo is so [ __ ] off scared of whoever this lady is that she's like nope peace out and then the lady leaves it's really cool and mysterious but there is one teeny issue with this scene and that's the really good music that plays during it [Music] this is genuinely a pretty awesome track it really builds tension and mystery for what's going on with this character and what her deal is this track is also the best piece of music that jeff williams didn't make well that's not fair to say that's kind of mean but when i first heard this song i couldn't get it out of my head and i realized that i couldn't because i'd heard it a bunch somewhere else before and then i remembered that i spent most of 2014 listening to the soundtrack to the godzilla movie that came out that year [Music] they found the bones of the godzilla soundtrack and they rebuilt him into midi godzilla now i'm not saying this is plagiarism or anything these songs are just incredibly similar because they're both very generic but i do kinda secretly hope that they got the idea from the godzilla movie because i love finding other secret godzilla fans out there oh shin godzilla was so good wasn't it the train crashes into the city so a bunch of grim attack people all our main characters worked together to beat up some monsters for a while oh look a reference to haloid which was itself a reference to the matrix i love it it's a pretty good end to a volume you know defending a city from a bunch of monsters [Music] and then team coffee shows up team coffee four characters who've barely been on screen until this exact moment and only get mentioned in passing like once appear and heroically single-handedly kill almost all the grim in a matter of seconds i absolutely love the music for this fight [Music] [Applause] uh it's awful it's it's objectively a terrible song but i love it it's like if the sonic adventure soundtracks vomited into my mouth and i want it this is the climactic action sequence of the volume by the way monsters attack the city and four other characters turn up and save the day that's that's the story once again a bunch of characters we barely know are starring in the climactic fight of a season of the show who the hell is this guy what are his weapons why does he look like that what is the point of having a story if this is how it ends every season if i wanted context-free fighting i'd watch dead fantasy again the whole point of ruby is that there were writers helping make it something more than that connect the fights in an organic and meaningful way ruby could have just been a collection of fun fights uploaded on a youtube channel and all it would have lost is several hours of baggage you just destroyed my favorite clothing store oh you can barely tell a man wrote this there's one particular strange moment in this scene that really encapsulates the problems to write the problems the writing is having why do i write such long sentences this character the bunny girl who appeared very briefly in season one her name is velvet she has a weird case that's got her weapon hidden in it and when she goes to use it in the fight her leader who's a name i had to google because i don't think i told it until the next season no i'm not gonna tell you what it is says hey come on you spent all semester building that up it's always here and proceeds to do all the killing herself with her cool minigun bag thing it's great this line is meant to be like a funny nod to the audience right like we've been building that up for ages let's not waste it now it's meant to be a funny joke but the problem is that joke requires the setup of us having seen that velvet has a weapon and wanting to find out what it is but because the story's writing has been so mismanaged velvet has been on screen for literally seconds in the show so far the clip of velvet you're seeing right now this is her only appearance in volume two she just walked off screen right she's gone that's it see you in the climax so all we get is this scene of the group leaving for a mission and another character mentioning they sure have been away on that mission for a while team coffee's away mission lasted longer than expected we don't know who this character is the joke about velvet's weapon combined with her and her team's sparse appearance in the show despite saving the day at the end is perhaps the clearest look into the early show's production problems was this scene planned in advance and then the writers didn't have room to give team coffee a place in the story because there was already too many characters to handle and all the prom stuff did monty and co suddenly drop the climactic fight on the rest of the creators at the last minute and then they had to scramble to give it any sort of last minute justification did the creative leads all mutually agree that the best way to end a season of the show was for it to star a bunch of random new characters i don't know and it doesn't feel right to speculate but i do know that the way things are means the story sucks all the plot scenes of the show feel so weightless and contribute so little to the thing that really works the fights that the story ends up being basically an afterthought i do have to say though it does look like at some point in the production process team coffee or at least velvet were meant to play a larger role in the show and there is evidence that suggests this the behind the scenes production diaries for volume 2 spend a lot of time specifically covering the creation and development of velvet so we thought we would introduce you to the various parts of the production pipeline by following the supporting character of velvet that we introduced in volume 1 and follow her from concept to modeling and how she comes to life in the recording booth and in the animation and in the edit they sifted through hundreds of fan submissions over 1300 submissions we see the modelers and rigging and artists working on her and her weapons we see the effort that goes into designing the case for her cool weapon but we don't want to spoil what's in it so this is what her weapon's going to be in we're not showing the weapon yet because yeah i know you're not going to see that yet but we need something we need something for her to carry it in you know as if to imply that at some point in the show we would see velvet have a box with the weapon in it and people go oh what's in it and she'll be like ah you'll see we meet the voice actress all of this stuff hours and hours of multiple artists putting time and attention into creating this character and all of this work goes into the creation of a character who due to some kind of natural disaster is on screen for like 30 seconds maximum and does nothing just to give you a sense of how miserably mismanaged the writing was velvet is speaking for about 14 seconds of volume 2 of ruby i just showed you all of it the interview with the voice actress in the behind-the-scenes material is longer than that i think volume 2 might have needed a second draft this fight is technically really cool looking and i really enjoy the animation especially this bit where the grimm's legs flip out but imagine how much better the scene would have felt if you knew who these characters were or if this fight felt at all like part of a story you know it turns out that even compared to machinima making an animated series is like really hard a whole ton of people have to work together as part of a huge process to get this thing made and ruby is a higher level of production than any other show we've ever produced and if the process isn't being managed very well or the big picture ideas aren't there then the resulting show suffers massively there are tons of scenes in the show that are fairly decent especially the fights but because of issues with putting the show together the result is a show that's less than the sum of its parts and what feels like two full seasons of teething problems you know there are lots of shows with like fun fights to watch like jojo's bizarre adventure which i brought up earlier but the thing about those shows is even when i remember the really cool fights i go back and watch entire episodes or arcs of the show again i don't just go like oh remember that fight that fight's good let's just watch that out of context like no the storytelling is part of what accentuates those scenes fights in jojo's bizarre adventure feel meaningful because they've been built up to by the plot monty's fights are still some of the coolest fights but they're never gonna have the impact they could have done because either due to a lack of planning of what the story would be or very poor writing choices being made in connecting his action sequences the story these fights should have been a part of is practically non-existent and honestly it just seems like such a waste you know so far we've mostly talked about the production and execution angle of ruby the telling of the story the conveyance of the world and how well the writers incorporated the action sequences but now we need to dig one layer deeper and discuss the story they're trying to tell remember that first fight in the dust store and how i talked about how it is kind of a good idea for an introductory scene because introducing your protagonist by having them stop a robbery is a good idea for an opening in fact it's a good intro in the movie they got this idea from oh plot twist [Music] cowboy bebop is a great anime it's a 26 episode series and it also has a feature-length movie in the movie they reintroduced the main characters from the show by having there be a convenience store getting held up at gunpoint and spike the main character comes in with headphones on and shops around pretending he can't tell what's going on before expertly taking them all out with some backup from his friend this is a really good opening scene the problem with ruby is that its writers didn't seem to know why it was a good opening this opening works well in the movie because it takes the opportunity to tell us about our characters and how they think spike tells a guy holding an old woman hostage that he doesn't care if he shoots her sorry lady but we don't protect or serve this is strictly business what guess you'll just have to chalk it up to bad luck which makes you think oh wow maybe this guy has no real regard for human life but then it turns out he did that to get the guy to turn his gun on him in order to save the lady's life so really he has no regard for his own life and will gladly put himself in extra danger if it means it might help someone else this scene is good because it's what we call characterization we're learning about our main character and how he thinks the action is well animated and nice looking but that's secondary to the experience of learning about our characters we're learning how little spike values his own life if you keep on pushing it like this you're really going to get cut down to size for good sorry i'm not exactly the delicate cautious type in the show we have a lot of time to learn in detail that spike has embraced a very specific philosophy toward his life whatever happens happens and he doesn't even really see himself as alive and this enables him to more easily throw himself at life or death situations how he got this way is part of the story the movie sets up this part of his character incredibly quickly for people who didn't see the show or refreshes people who need a reminder by showing how he saves a woman's life by making sure it's him being shot at instead we're seeing a dimension of his character which the rest of the story is going to go on to explore what does a man who doesn't value his own life do with his life other than constantly risk it in ways he didn't have to is this a heroic trait or is it a bit sad to constantly live this way welcome to the core themes of cowboy bebop i mean the movie's literally called knocking on heaven's door like the film's about these ideas this robbery doesn't really have anything to do with the plot at all it's an unrelated opening scene but cowboy bebop's scene is better storytelling because it is telling you things and you are learning something and your brain is thinking about it i want to know more about what spike's deal is i want to see what he does next what does ruby set up about ruby in this first scene well she's reading weapon magazine and actually distracted instead of pretending which i guess shows us that she likes weapons a lot and she's still a child who doesn't pay much attention to her surroundings we also see she's a really strong fighter for example without taking her weapon out using her bare hands she beats the [ __ ] out of two guys bigger than her and sends them flying remember this part i'm gonna do a thing this isn't really much characterization events in stories even in intensive action sequences are compelling largely because of how meaningful they are to the audience and this is achieved by developing a connection with the characters the gang and bebop choose to get involved in this and choose how specifically to handle everything that happens and spike even deliberately chooses to put himself in way more danger to try to help someone else what these decisions are and why they make them are interesting the story of this movie is what we call character driven in this opening scene ruby never actually has to make a choice she just happens to be there just happens to be a badass anime warrior who can beat these guys easily and then just happens to be seen doing it by a professor at anime hogwarts who refers her to the headmaster ruby gets into this school and is therefore present for the rest of the plot of the show because she happened to be in a store while it was being robbed this isn't character-driven story writing this is coincidence driven story writing also about this scene where ruby is like being interrogated by glinda and gandalf goku they're like in this dimly lit chamber like like it's a prison or something but then it turns out that she was brought here to be invited to a school hello nice to meet you you want to come to my school why is it shot and lit like an interrogation where are they is this like a safe house that this guy has okay there actually is an explanation for why this scene is like this and we're gonna get into it don't you worry it's a doozy so the issue with the just store robbery is that ruby doesn't actually choose to do anything a fight happens at her and she wins to be honest that's basically the entire plot of the show except sometimes the fight happens at someone else we barely know so the issue with this scene is lack of characterization and this isn't a failure of the writing of the specific scene but a more general problem with the way the creative leads treat the characters ruby hasn't been made a particularly interesting person she has a cool gun and is good at fighting and wants to be a hero and that's about it your book does it have a name it's about a man with two souls i love books i love books our main character ladies and gentlemen coming up with compelling characters who make interesting decisions is basically the core job of stories ruby is effectively a blank slate so she's just not interesting except when she's physically doing something interesting with her cool gun like bouncing in the air using its blowback to slow her descent that's interesting for a couple of seconds ruby's so poorly characterized that the writers are still making up their minds multiple seasons in to the point that even what little we do know about her gets rewritten to try to make her more interesting than she first appeared for example when ruby falls into the plot she doesn't have a weapon with her but luckily as we've seen she's an expert at hand-to-hand combat and can easily dispatch the oh wait between these two scenes the writers decided it would be more interesting for ruby to be useless without her weapon wow you are much more manageable without that oversized gardening tool yours so now we're in a situation where characters basic abilities are being rewritten on a whim to try to make the story more interesting and maybe it is more interesting and all you have to do to engage with this new story is forget the events of the very first scene in the show so what little characterization is happening in this scene gets rewritten later this means even in potentially cool scenes taken directly from one of the best anime ever the scene doesn't work because the character doesn't have an opportunity to act to make choices so yeah i'm gonna say this scene doesn't work very well because it doesn't have any decently thought out characters in it and therefore has nothing to tell or show us about them except for the basic aesthetic design of ruby and her weapon and the coolness of the fight animations so the writers evidently had seen the opening of cowboy bebop the movie enjoyed it because it's great nice and decided to start their show in a similar way but didn't know why cowboy bebop's opening actually worked so well so they just borrowed the surface components store robbery acting distracted headphones and cool fight without using them in a way that does anything specific for the audience now you could say well how do you know this is the scene that inspired them what if the scenes just happen to be similar well if that's the case the scene still doesn't work and the comparison still shows how much better the scene could have been if it was being used for actual characterization but yeah maybe the similarities are accidental to prove they aren't i'd have to somehow demonstrate the creators had seen cowboy bebop and there's just no easy way i'd recommend a show to someone looking to get into anime i'd go with my personal favorite cowboy bebop because i think it's got enough like western stuff going on just a spike i'm just gonna say spike's beagle from from cowboy bebop because he's just like water and he's so cool my favorite is cowboy bebop my favorite anime is cover my favorite anime is cowboy bebop and although it's not technically an anime i also love avatar the last airbender avatar hmm okay so i'm gonna go out on a limb here and say maybe miles was inspired by his favorite anime while trying to write an anime you know what i keep i keep falling back to bebop but uh uh you shouldn't just run away from your past sometimes you just gotta deal with the problems that you started and if you don't they will catch up with you keep in mind i'm not saying this is plagiarism creative theft is a different thing entirely i'm saying this is derivative and doesn't even replicate the thing it's trying to it's certainly not wrong to draw inspiration from other works you like or even pay deliberate homage to things you enjoy or which seem fitting to reference in a scene i mean cowboy bebop does this all the time and the convenience store scene actually references pulp fiction when one of the robbers they don't know about comes out of the bathroom and surprises them which happens literally three times in pulp fiction i'm gonna take a [ __ ] pretty sure this is a reference and i should know i had a lot of very long arguments on now deleted fan forums about whether this counts and let me just say to mazin kaiser x if you're still out there i have a youtube channel now so [ __ ] you you little philistine i win what i'm getting at here is that firstly i've always been cool but also that there's nothing wrong with wearing your inspiration on your sleeve what is wrong is doing it without understanding what made the original thing work because now it's not a cool introduction to a character story and setting inspired by another good thing it's a weird clunky and unnecessary scene whose best feature is it reminds people of cowboy bebop but ruby doesn't just remind me of bebop it reminds me of a lot of other anime and this is a result of the show's design and then the next day he was like hey we should make an anime so as prep before writing the show monty gave the writers some homework anime homework uh i went to kerry and i i i gave him anime homework if you if you want to be honest you should do some anime homework so i just started giving him shows to watch that we could you know work comparatively to and then um miles was the second person on to this where i would give him anime homework yeah watch this show if you wanna if you wanna be part of it now i don't like admitting this i'm kind of secretive about it but i've seen a lot of anime in my time and i know a bit about it i'd like to think no one's noticed this about me but we've somehow finally reached a place where proper criticism of a piece of media relies on using that knowledge a concept which terrifies me but with the benefit of your trust we'll come out the other side having learned more and improved our analytical technique so in the name of science let's punch this plate of spaghetti in order to reverse engineer it to its component ingredients and find out what's really going on it's a reference but i'm also making a clever metaphor for analysis [Music] ruby is inspired by anime not just in terms of visuals but more directly by the tropes and idioms and basic story elements of shows the creators liked or at least were told to watch the problem is it draws far too much on ideas and concepts that feel like anime without really understanding what made the things it's borrowing actually work in the shows they were in ruby is a really strange bunch of shows and if you're willing to check you can even find out which ones in a reddit thread miles luna said what some of the shows on his anime homework list were among them gurren lagann soul eater naruto bleach and blackrock shooter some of these shows have direct parallels with ruby's story naruto bleach and solita especially have some direct contrasts all these shows have large casts of characters who all for their specific story reasons have their own unique powers this is really traditional for shonen shows everyone kind of has their own deal and in bleach almost every main character has a unique magical sword which grants them a specific ability and the main character in solitude wields a cool scythe it's not that hard to tell what ideas ruby is borrowing from these shows is it but again the core elements being borrowed are the really basic wikipedia level synopsis ideas the sort of stuff people who don't watch anime think anime is about like the school for learning anime fighting the large cast of characters with cool abilities and powers the super simple stuff that isn't really why anyone watches something these shows work because they're really about the characters and their choices and relationships and they happen to be set against a fun fantastical background with cool action borito's dad and his army of frenemies live rich inner lives and form interesting connections with each other and the audience as they grow and change in soul eater the cool weapons are alive and lots of focus is put on how they relate to and work with their users and this also happens in bleach but you know in a way where it seems really awesome and you you choose to watch it over all the other shonen at the time and then it crushes your hopes and dreams and it seems like in the early ruby weiss relationship this is what they were going for the way they bicker in the early trial and weiss is angry about not being the leader later this is honestly genuinely the beginning of an interesting relationship but instead of making this an aspect of the show they fix it and make someone else's life the focus of the show for half of it and then someone else turns up to do all the fighting so the thing that makes these shows work the characters their relationships your engagement with the characters as they do fun fights is absent it's a stew but without the most important ingredient the stew mix that's the rule by the way you're allowed to make food metaphors in criticism but only when they're actually a clever reference at best the main character who theoretically should be the most interesting is a lady in a nice outfit with a cool gun that's a really low ceiling to put on a story ruby feels like fanfiction of a show that doesn't exist except no that's not true there is one specific show it feels a whole lot like fan fiction for to quote miles luna again if you want to get a feel of what the show will be like watch avatar the last airbender oh this explains a lot of things so if you go watch avatar you start to realize where a lot of the show came from for example avatar is set in a world with four nations in it long ago the four nations lived together in harmony ruby has four kingdoms so you see it's different the four kingdoms the called kingdoms because well they can't call them nations can they in avatar in times of stress the avatar enters a state where his eyes glow and he manifests amazing powers you'll never guess that three seasons into the story with zero setup that this is a thing ruby's eyes suddenly glow and she's revealed to have the amazing power to instantly turn even the most powerful grim to stone you learn she has this power the instant it happens and you only learn what this power is in retrospect because there was no room in the story to set this up was there another cool thing about avatar is that the avatar reincarnates into a new form whenever he dies completely coincidentally there's a character in ruby whose spirit goes on to inhabit a new form whenever he dies amazing you see it's actually a clever twist because no one would have expected them to be that obvious so when they really did just do avatar again it's a genuine surprise oh another massively important plot element one of the antagonists is a revolutionary political movement reacting to oppression led by a man in a mask with horrendous scars underneath was i talking about ruby there no i was talking about avatar legend of korra but yes that also happens in ruby oh actually you see the scar is different because it's over one of his eyes that's slightly different from avatar so it's not the same thing you see no what's this picture of zuko doing here then in later seasons they decide to take the story in a very different direction you know to make it a bit more unique so now the characters have to travel the world and visit lots of different towns and villages and cultures on their way which is completely unlike avatar because when it happens in avatar it's good remember when i was positive about the potential of ruby's story and setting well it feels like i'm really just complimenting the material it borrowed so many of ruby's choices seem made specifically that way because it was that way an avatar even though it's completely unnecessary to borrow those parts why is it that every time you play with magic water i get soaked it's not magic it's water bending oh my god is that where the characters powers not being magic came from why would you even think to do that i always thought each season of ruby being called a volume was a bit weird and unwieldy and guess what it turns out it sounds way better when they're called books even the intro voiceover sometimes sounds like they right-click thesaurus some aspects of avatar's intro my grandmother used to tell me stories about the old days legends stories scattered through time it's like the show's playing a game of telephone with avatar those words in that order sounded good so let's use some words that are a bit similar in a different order and also make it all about dust the thing that made avatar's introduction work is it set up a lot of stuff at once for example how this settings version of magic worked the thing you didn't mention at all or the fact there were four big nations you know the thing you didn't mention at all except for when four castle looking things turn up for three seconds before disappearing jean is a pretty direct analogue for soccer to the point where the creators just say that's what he's based on oh no i was saying like we we when you first did reads and i was like we need like a soccer character and this retroactively explains why jon's plot line was so weird the jean arc had this subplot of jean not accepting pierre's offer to help train him to be a better fighter but his explanation for why was always really strange he wants to get better without help or he's not really a hero or something if i can't do this on my own then what good am i but he never tries and never pays attention in class so that's [ __ ] and at the end of his section of the story he just accepts her help standing up to a bully taught him to this confusing arc happens because it happened to soccer in avatar a story with characters with depth and infinitely better world building in the beginning sokka is not a great warrior but he desperately wants to be one he's from a culture that looks down on the idea of women being fighters but then he gets wrecked by an order of female warriors who protect a village on their travels and has to confront his beliefs about women he learns a lesson from this and begs them to train him he gets better as a fighter but this plotline is super engaging for an audience because we get to watch him grow as a person and change his beliefs soccer starts out like kind of as a shitty teen i thought i would really not like him when i first watched avatar but he grows so much he becomes such an interesting character super quickly so now it's clear why jean's arc is seemingly missing pieces it's not just that soccer was written better but more specifically it's clear the writers liked the idea of giving their soccer character the same arc but the problem with this arc is it means one of your core characters starts out as a bit of a chauvinist and needs time and work to grow into a better person but if you're trying to write a cool progressive anime starring mostly girls you don't want to have a character acting like that do you that sounds kind of heavy and are you really going to write your character who you voice to act like that so jean is written to already start out as basically a good person who respects women's abilities as fighters who simply needs to learn to accept help instead of refusing it for what is now no reason it actually turns out that a ton of weird things about ruby happened that way because they were like that in avatar that interrogation thing in the first episode of ruby was always a silly choice why take her to this weird dimly lit empty room to invite her to a school but it makes much more sense if you happen to have seen the first episode of legend of korra when korra gets arrested and interrogated if a scene in ruby seems out of place or like a scene from another show just happened for no reason in the middle of this one it's probably because it did so it's pretty clear to the point they literally admit it that a big problem with ruby's writing is that the creators are grasping wildly at shows they like for things to recreate in their show in the hopes of crafting a story it's only technically been written in one sense of the word it's more of a reconstituted amalgam of things they thought were cool elsewhere grind up all that meat and stuff it into a sausage casing or i guess in this case a body pillow no miles what are you doing this is really embarrassing ruby rose is a 15 year old girl if you like anything about ruby and you haven't seen much anime before because it didn't seem like it was for you i guarantee you right now there's a show in this list that the thing you liked about ruby came from and you'd like that show a hell of a lot more and let's be honest it's probably avatar a lot of people i've met who are really big fans of ruby tend to be not into anime they don't think it's for them or they haven't watched it before yet but if you take the plunge and then you see how good a show using these ideas could be you'll very quickly be able to see why a lot of people with a bit more of a frame of reference are so disappointed with this show go pick a show from that list and have a better time seriously just make sure it's not bleach don't make the same mistake i did please you mustn't you have to there's a scene in volume 2 where it turns out yang and ruby have a family dog called zwai there's a dog in cowboy bebop of the same breed called ein get it the creators are trying to make a cute reference to a show they like they don't seem to have realized they've referenced all the shows they like quite enough already i was hoping they'd eventually try doing something else the real impact of all this on ruby's potential is that it means the things that are truly unique about it get ignored because the world building is vague and really just a loose approximation of nine other cartoons all kinds of little tidbits crop up that would be so interesting if they went anywhere but never will remember crescent rose you know one of the most dangerous weapons ever designed one of the most dangerous weapons ever designed there is one really interesting story element to it which is that ruby designed it well i'm kind of a dork when it comes to weapons i guess i did go a little overboard in designing it ruby designed this weapon one of the most dangerous weapons ever designed now if you were looking at the script and you'd written these two things what you should do at that moment is kiss yourself and realize that you've just struck [ __ ] gold the main character of your show is a child inventor who can craft incredible machines that kill what a fantastic premise for a story and ruby loves to read weapon magazines and nerds out about the weapons she sees when she first gets to anime warrior school like they've almost written a character here and everything else about ruby's character is the most milk toast stuff possible like oh she wants to be a hero great i love books i think this line annoys me so much because like ruby has a really interesting character trait you could be doing something with danger and you're doing this no no you can't i forbid it and when this comes up ruby's talking to jean whose deal is he just has a regular sword like it's a punch line and when i was first watching the show i was really having my doubts about where things were going but when this happened i thought oh cool ruby's going to help him design a unique weapon that really works for him and we're going to see them coming up with it and building it and developing his friends and that's going to be so cool jean's going to come into his own and learn things about himself as he does it and grow as a fighter and as a person and there's something really wholesome about learning a skill and building something in a story that'll be a really cool thing to follow and then it didn't happen for a season because they were doing anime [ __ ] instead fighting monsters dealing with bullies falling asleep during pointless exposition oh and in the show as well and then for years i kept thinking when are they gonna do it when are they gonna do it when are they going to use ruby's interesting character trait that they just seemingly forgot she has and then finally in volume 4 they go to a blacksmith and a character who we've never seen before and never will again upgrades jon's sword using pieces of his girlfriend's armor and ruby rarely if ever talks about the fact she made crescent rose and she stops nerding out about weapons except for like once per season if the writers remember that was her one unique character trait ah but i'm sure you're going somewhere with this avatar remake don't let me distract you no i'm not even [ __ ] kidding you even the forging of a sword out of some cool material he has is a thing soccer does in avatar it just doesn't stop it never stops this show has so many cool concepts that just crop up like that where if you're paying attention there's tremendous potential being laid down here and then they ignore it to just loosely copy stuff from [ __ ] bleach look that guy has the sword that's a bit like the one from bleach do you remember bleach i remember bleach someone please validate me remembering so much bleach there's a roger ebert quote i always really liked and used in a draft of this video i was working on like five years ago which lindsay ellis happened to use first in a video before me so now it feels like i'm ripping her off thanks lindsay where when reviewing battlefield earth he makes the comment that the director has learned from better films that directors sometimes tilt their cameras but he has not learned why i'm gonna take a [ __ ] i believe miles when he tells me avatar is one of his favorite shows but i'm not convinced he knows why he liked it cowboy bebop is cool because it's about a man who believes his life is already over throwing himself into life or death situations to feel alive again spike's beagle carries a weight with him and you have to watch him do his best to pretend he isn't cowboy bebop is not cool because he's good at spinning kicks and his friend has a robot arm and frankly the idea that that's what really mattered is personally offensive to me if you really respect this material you should borrow the things that gave it meaning not all of this surface level stuff this is kind of the important thing to drill in on here these shows aren't about cool powers or great visuals or engaging fights they have those but on a core level what they're really about is characters people who you feel things for who you watch do things who you can be invested in if you don't have that base layer of engagement with the people in your story you don't really have much of anything if you have a cool fight but you haven't made people interested in or understand why they're fighting then you don't even really have the fight do you lots of things in the show are references to other rooster teeth properties there's in-jokes everywhere posters from other shows quotes from their podcasts this store's name is a pun on a simple walk into mordor that show they did about walking in new zealand even tiny things like jean's locker number is a reference to the address of rooster teeth's old studio whatever unique story and potential there is in here it's taking refuge behind an immense patchwork quilt of references to other things they like other things their company made and eventually references to the few things people seemed to like about the show itself one of the standout moments that people really liked about early ruby is the part where nora pokes ren's nose and says boop people really liked that because it's a genuinely simple and cute moment that you don't need to know rooster teeth lore to enjoy and isn't trying and failing to emulate something else it's just nice you know that's good it's cute people also really liked the way penny introduced herself because it's genuinely a really nice moment like weiss accidentally knocks her over and she just goes salutations that's funny that's good writing that's characterization it's immediately clear that something is up with penny it's good please stop being sometimes good and getting my hopes up so of course in addition to selling merchandise that quotes these moments in the second season nora starts wearing a boop shirt they don't have room to make the prom stuff interesting or to connect monty's fights properly and make them feel like part of a story but they had room to go hey remember when she said boop well it's in stores now the show is just a continuous list of references to other things that were good and by the middle of season two sorry book sorry volume two it's referencing the few good parts of itself writing like the word writing is often used to mean a lot of different things but at its core writing means making decisions and risking making the wrong one what's acutely frustrating about ruby is that miles and kerry don't necessarily always make bad decisions it's that they have done almost everything they can to avoid making them to abdicate the responsibility of having to write a story of their own they don't understand exactly why the things they're borrowing actually were enjoyable which makes it worse but centrally they're in this mess because they're going out of their way not to be unique and thereby failing to do interesting things with or apparently even notice the potential that an original animated work made for the internet with no oversight can have the show could have been anything and it wants to be anything other than itself and that wasted potential will never not be tremendously disappointing when you take no risks and try to say very little while looking like you're saying something important you get a story element like the fullness by later in the first volume we finally sat in a classroom and learned what the fullness are and also seen the bully character mistreating one of them the faunus are a stand-in for the oppressed races of the world yes that is correct i did not misspeak these guys have to talk about racism now and i am here for it i've heard it mentioned that this aspect of the story was originally conceived by monty but unfortunately the story is being written by the men who brought you my semblance is polarity the big twist in volume 1 is that blake is a fullness she gets mad at weiss for being a racist and runs away and dramatically takes off her bow to reveal cat ears in addition to her normal ears have you guessed which fairy tale character blake is based on yet well i'll tell you she's beauty and the beast now i don't know about you but ruby didn't initially strike me as a show that was trying to be about something this heavy i mean for the most part it's been an adventure story about kids beating up monsters and bad guys so when this happened i don't know it seemed a little weird like is this particular show with the tone you've set so far really ready for something as serious as this i'm queen of the castle i'm queer the castle like we're in the middle of this fairly light-hearted show so light-hearted characters have a magic shield in fights so they can't get hurt too badly and then in a classroom the comedy fast-talking coffee drinking professor guy voiced by the guy who plays caboose in red versus blue starts to discuss the horrific tragedy of the mistreatment of the foreigners prior to the faunus rights revolution more popular known as the false war they begin to explore the topic of racism by using the comedy silly talky man now have any among you been subjugated or discriminated because of your faunus heritage the issue of racism is a big part of the rest of the story or at least it tries to be a central component to the plot is the white fang a group of foreigners who do crimes and terrorism in the name of faunus liberation the white fang are presented as antagonists in the story they work with the batman from volume 1 and do a bunch of crimes including the train thing a lot of the goons getting fought in fights in volumes 1 two three four and five are white fang members when the main characters aren't fighting grim they're beating the [ __ ] out of in-universe minorities but it's okay you know they're bad because they all talk in the evil voice finally i get to kill schnee oh i think he might be a bad guy once again we're seeing the writing problems that made jon's character so terrible creeping in here this argument between weiss and blake comes to a head because at least initially weiss was written to be kind of racist the white thing what an awful bunch of degenerates i don't particularly trust the faunus her family profited from exploitative faunus labor and maybe slavery but it's hard to tell exactly what because the show is written badly infamous for its controversial labor forces and she seems to take the opportunity to be shitty about fourness when it presents itself stop calling him a degenerate he's a person oh i'm sorry would you like me to stop referring to the trash can as a trash can but at some point down the line the writers were smart enough to see a problem with writing a main character with this flaw white being racist might affect the audience's ability to relate to the character wouldn't it the creators want the audience to like this lady as they go on adventures with her and watch her dote on pup boy bebop how many members of your audience are really gonna want to cosplay as the wise supremacist so her beliefs about the fullness are quietly dropped off screen and we are to assume she's anti-racist in future volumes she just says hey whatever we're a team let's work together now and then in the next volume this side of her character is quietly forgotten knowing this show i presume a man told her off-screen not to be a racist anymore and she went okay in volume 2 she says she wants to become a huntress specifically to try to do better than her family name has been in the past and she doesn't like what her father is doing implicitly saying she became a fighter who protects the world because she wants to not be like her racist family this is done instead of having her grapple with her prejudice towards a group of people and growing and changing and learning you know akin to what a story would do they made her racist and then rewrote her to never have been racist the writers are far too precious about their characters to permit them to have like flaws or lives or even personalities beyond cookie-cutter heroics i love books they don't need to learn anything or grow which makes them fundamentally uninteresting and in the same way the writers are far too precious about their world itself they want their world to not be so fundamentally flawed that a group like the white fang is necessary you see the issue here is the white fang are basically in the right the faunus are an oppressed people whose struggle for liberation and equality is immediately the instant you actually think about it the morally correct side of the argument spoilers for real life but we recently discovered in lab tests on mice that racism is wrong but like if you have a movement whose purpose is to liberate an oppressed group that means your society has some incredibly deep set problems right people who need liberating from something you know the black panthers didn't pop into existence because things were fine in the 60s right oh i really hate hbom's political videos but i love his media stuff it's way better ha i tricked you but miles and kerry realized at some point that if you introduce a group like this then the main society of your story is a systemically racist one and a huge portion of your main characters would be tacitly implicated in this by living in that society and not doing anything about the way those people are treated basically they'd be writing a pretty grim story where almost everyone is on some level racist or at least okay with an unequal system because a lot of [ __ ] would need to change if there's a group like the white fang running around and anyone sitting around enjoying the status quo instead of doing anything wouldn't be a heroic or positive character in this setting in other words you'd have a bit too much social commentary making everyone really uncomfortable about the parallels to real world history and in some places the real world present which would be an interesting story i'd like a story like that really but which would kind of suck the fun out of your anime cartoon about killing monsters with sci-fi rocket fists people aren't gonna buy your boop t-shirts if they're sad about racism so the writer's objective was to make a show which explores racism but without making anyone too uncomfortable without risking actually saying anything about our society and without risking saying that the white fang might have a point so everyone can have fun watching people beat them up because they're the bad guys we wouldn't want any implications to think about so firstly the mistreatment that appears in the story is always incredibly minor it's established that the foreigners have already had a civil rights movement of sorts and been granted equality but just aren't really getting it yet in some places despite being promised equality the faunus were subjected to discrimination and hate some specific people are still kind of racist foreigners get bullied by some people in school there's a no forness sign on one bar there's nothing wrong with the system anymore individual racists are the problem since we aren't living in a racist nightmare world we can feel less bad about the status quo of the setting and more okay with the idea that the white fang are bad but even then they still have a roughly sympathetic goal if a shadowy group were blowing up the businesses of people who refused to serve forness or attacking people with unethical foreign labor practices which i assume is what a controversial labor force is half the people watching might not realize these are supposed to be the bad guys you can't have a story where the liberation movement has a point because then you're writing a story that's slightly more complex than help we need to stop the bad guys and that's not fun if you're writing a story for tiny babies you want to be writing a generally okay world that's being threatened by evil outsiders you know like the monsters you could have already had be the main villains so to add an extra level of moral simplification they have the white fang be recently under new leadership that are way more violent and pro-terrorism than normal five years ago our leader stepped down and a new one took his place a new leader with a new way of thinking so okay now they might have a point but they're just going about it all wrong with this terrorism stuff now we can all get behind how they're the bad guys even if racism is wrong and they maybe have a point oh i think she might be the bad guy etc you get the point the story amounts to a long series of justifications for why the organization whose stated goal is the liberation of an oppressed people can be thought of as the antagonists the white fang used to be good guys like agitating for progress in a nice way politely asking for racism to end like good second-class citizens but then a new leader stepped in who was more violent and aggressive and now they're the bad guys and not respectable anymore the problem is you're now effectively writing a story in which the most prominent villains are an oppressed people who are reacting wrong to being oppressed yeah sure racism is bad but you're supposed to take it up with your congressman guys there's no nuance here the white fang are written to be as unequivocally in the wrong as possible the main white fang member where shown is that guy who didn't care about killing innocent civilians with bombs and who later turns out to want to kill all humans because he sees his people as the superior race the faunus are the dominant species of this planet oh also he wants to kill his ex-girlfriend for breaking up with him over the fact he's evil the need to write an obvious villain into the story has burned away any relevance to the issues the show was supposedly trying to explore with this aspect of the story i will make it my mission to destroy everything you love what is the show trying to say racism is bad but don't kill civilians or your ex-girlfriend okay if you want to talk about real world issues you should actually do it and if you don't you don't have to you don't have to have a take on racism and you especially don't have one when you set your story in a fantasy world where racism is over and the real bad guy is a protest group that turned evil i never wanted this i wanted equality so hey remember velvet that one character who seems like some members of the team intended to be more of a part of the story and then she just wasn't it makes it just a little bit more egregious that the story is kind of about the persecution of her [ __ ] race like how do you [ __ ] this up this badly and for the record that is not how human male teenagers would treat bunny girls if they were real they would wait on them on hand and foot and beg them to step on me absolutely no one was holding a gun to miles and kerry's heads and saying to make the show about how they think malcolm x could have toned it down a little they did this by choice they were given free reign to write a story and connect the dots on monty's fights and this is what they made guys i don't think you have as much to say on this topic as you initially thought you know instead of seeing oh you know the humans have a side they should respect us more he turned into let's get rid of the humans and then they'll respect us because they'll be dead let me just let me just read that back to you just to make that more clear he turned into yeah let's get rid of the humans and then they'll respect us because they'll be dead [Applause] kerry are you sure you want to go with this there's also the problem of representation i'm not going to criticize the show's diversity or lack of it that much because i don't think that's really my criticism to make and i don't want to risk making it poorly on behalf of people who could say something better about it than me there are doubtless plenty of people a whole lot less white than me who like the show and don't think it has a representation problem although that's not saying much most brands of literal cracker are browner than me oh [ __ ] my [ __ ] laundry besides i'm sure some people will tell you there's plenty of black people in the first season however i can't help but notice that they have managed to write a show that tries fails but tries to deal with the impact of racism on a group of people in society but in such a way that they didn't have to have too many non-white characters instead they invented a fictional race which consists almost entirely in the story of white women with cute animal ears and a cool buff white guy with a tail this was a really clever decision it turns out the way to get weebs to understand racism is to make the target a cat girl the white fang are like the black panthers but with the emphasis on the panther i mean sure regular racism is over and remnant but here in the real world if there were too many black characters some of your audience members might start to smell politics now who'll buy our boop shirts black lives matter especially when they're white people with vague animal characteristics but you know we can't risk having too many people of color in our show about racism by the way you know this animated bit i showed you that's blake telling her backstory to sun yes sun another faunus she is telling the backstory of a movement are intimately aware of that sun says he knows about are you familiar with the white fang of course i don't think there's a faunus on the planet who hasn't heard of them which describes the history of the treatment of fullness to one of the only other foreigners in the story exposition guys have her be telling this to someone who might not know it like any other character in the show have you told your friends any of this got even sons asking why she's telling him and what's up with all of these teens preparing elaborate speeches about their lives and the world if you try and get away with a monologue that long in my household your parents tell you you're a horrible son and they hate you when you remove all of the moral and ethical dimensions from a story the story disappears too when it comes down to it the white fang are a bunch of angry bad guys in masks and all this talk about how they're just reacting to mistreatment but don't worry guys things are fine they're just overreacting is boring window dressing on a story that's basically about how we have to stop the bad men from blowing up the city and stealing all of the precious jewels the gang gleefully killed dozens of white fang members throwing them off a train at high speed where their remains will be shattered and smashed into a pulp unburied in a collapsing tunnel covered in monsters and explosives and then later the only exit from this monster-infested tunnel is sealed shut trapping any of the survivors inside to die horrible deaths and sure maybe they experienced racism and suffering but they decided to be evil so they got what was coming if you kill one of these guys your conscience is clean oh look that one was black do you feel represented yet i'm not saying you should have sympathy for these characters and that killing them is wrong what i'm saying is it should be at least slightly more complicated than this and the fact the story is written so that these characters are just evil is a massive flaw it's like in the dark knight rises bane basically has a point gotham is corrupt and the people are oppressed by a system that seeks to profit from them and find new ways to spy on and criminalize them if they resist the occupy wall street movement had a lot to say and a lot of it was true this is a stock exchange there's no money you could steal really and why are you people here but if you put that in your film that means something's deeply wrong with your actual society so bane also wants to kill everyone with a nuke so now when batman beats the [ __ ] out of him and everyone who stands in his way it's not because batman is a tool of a corrupt establishment it's because he's heroically stopping this definitely bad bad guy from killing everyone the moral complexity of the story exists purely to sound cool and get thrown away before it gets anyone to think about the actual problems with our world the dark knight rises is complete bollocks because a villain who might have a point is consciously rewritten into a bad man in a mask with a big bomb who batman needs to punch to win yay the good guys hitting the bad guy don't think about wall street the writers of ruby want to look like they're talking about serious real world problems because that seems cool and clever and meaningful but they don't want to run the risk of spoiling the cartoon fun and they certainly don't want to risk the people in their audience who think talking about racism is for sjws to stop watching so we're left with generic masked bad guys who want to use a train to blow up a city and try to cut off one of our main characters heads with a chainsaw but maybe some of them have sad backstories behind them being evil murderers who want to kill their ex-girlfriend oh wow how clever no thanks in the actual modern day right now in fact literally right now there are people marching out there in the streets against systemic injustices racism and police brutality and a not insignificant amount of people are dismissing all of this as opportunism as looting rioting people trying to cause chaos and anarchy for no reason when you tell a story with such a massive fixation on a group like this what you're doing is saying that there are people in real life like this ruby is a deeply stupid person's idea of what racial politics are like watching this show through now i can't help but be struck with the kind of horrible feeling that some people are gonna watch this and go yeah that's what they're like and the idea of this show playing into people's worst instincts is frankly disgusting but even on a basic story level having such a simplistic faction like this driving so much of the plot means that all their parts of the plot basically suck the potential of this entire aspect of the story is seemingly purposefully declawed rendering the whole thing as pointless as if it hadn't happened the bad guys could have just been some evil corrupted monsters who chose to be bad because they're bad for no reason and the story would have been better because it would have been more honest and a lot less uncomfortable the end point of this bottomless pit of compromises is well a compromised story a story about nothing telling you very unconvincingly that it's about something actually important in our world right now no wonder the introduction didn't mention them they might as well not have been there we can't really recount the history of ruby without talking about the death of his creator can we after the end of volume 2 and while in early production on volume 3 monty ohm passed away very suddenly of an allergic reaction during routine surgery monty's death was a really tragic event that affected a lot of people both at rooster teeth and in monty's audience monty was well known as a relentlessly passionate worker and the phrase commonly attributed to him by many including his widow was keep moving forward so to carry on his passion almost in tribute to his life they continued making the show i'm going to keep analyzing the show now but as a fan of monty's work since haloid came out i want to mention that i don't feel like i've had room to really celebrate his specific skill and talent in this video so i'm working on another one just about that i've been a fan of monty's for most of my adult life and i've wanted to gush about why his stuff is so great but to make sure this video has any kind of decent pace i've had to cut most of it out i'll try and have that video done soon so volume 3 obviously struggles with a lot of issues it's still got a lot of the things we've already discussed it has the additional problem of the team having to make do without its original creator but if anything the biggest problem volume 3 has is that it gets good volume 3 opens on a big tournament between teams from all the anime warrior schools of the world every single anime out there eventually does their tournament arc and you know we wanted ruby to have its version of that because how better to prove that ruby is just like an anime than to give it a tournament arc i mean a story would have been nice but mid-fight the announcers played by the professors from the first two seasons explained the entire tournament system for those of you just now joining us the show pauses to tell you how the entire system works again exposition guys that's just not how you do it if this is your first time watching allow us to break down the rules they're explaining this in the middle of the fight at the worst possible time to be explaining it in fact look at how even worse done this is when you realize it's being done diegetically imagine watching the tournament on tv when during a fight that is currently underway the announcers interrupt to tell you how the tournament works in case people who've never seen the tournament before just tuned in there are infinite other ways of conveying this information to the audience and they chose now in this incredibly clunky way if you're just joining us the objective of golf is to get the ball in the hole in as few strokes as possible points are tabulated by the amount of strokes under par and remember it's the lowest score that wins oh it appears jimmy has finished the course while i was talking so the exposition is about as well done as it's always been the fights also feel written now much more emphasis is placed on dialogue and specific moves than before which slows things down and really messes with the pace if you're just joining us one of the big problems with the first two volumes was the constant influx of new characters who aren't on screen enough for you to learn anything interesting about them or care but manage to suck up enough screen time that the actual characters don't have room to breathe remember how neptune's entire relevance to the story of the show was that weiss wanted to go to the prom with him and how after that i never had to bring him up again so all the screen time that went into him was a waste wasn't it the writers have noticed this problem and decided the solution is to add 100 million more characters since it's the tournament arc now just like in real animes we get new teams to throw into the story for our other characters we kinda know to fight against and you know exactly which ones you won't see in fights because they're just 2d concept art but that's not all we also have more characters who are just here now winter schnee weiss's sister is here to not do much of anything and just kind of turn up for a couple episodes to give weiss a pep talk and explain for the benefit of the audience how their semblance works twice the only other person who already knows how it [ __ ] works oh and also to have a pointless fight with crow another character who has finally turned up after getting name dropped a bunch in previous seasons here's the thing you probably noticed by now but every character is usually named for a fairy tale character of some kind like ruby is red riding hood nora is thor jean arc is joan of arc blake is [ __ ] bad and crow glinda ozpin the general and some others are based vaguely after characters from the wizard of oz anyway the gimmick is wearing so thin now that they're really struggling to come up with characters that fit this scheme in one of the fights yang and weiss fight against neon cat a forness character inspired by nyankat and flint cole the son of a dust store owner who wises family wait flint coal this is like the second black character in the show and his name is flint cole oh no okay so it's not as bad as it sounds it's actually a clever clever reference to rooster teeth's minecraft let's play dude i got cole and flint oh you're set that'd be a cool name flint cole would it be private yeah you'd be like like an international private investigator though right i dig what's his weapon called anyway you see all the characters weapons have names they get mentioned in behind the scenes material or named in the show crescent rose one of the most mertenasta gambol shrow but flint coal flint coal doesn't appear in many other ruby materials so we've not had an opportunity to learn his weapon's name so the ruby wiki has had no choice but to list it as weapon trumpet [Laughter] but the thing about season three is that it gets good midway through this volume the plot of ruby starts the main characters take pira aside and say hey so what's actually happening here is there are four maidens women with incredible magical powers not like semblances or dust they're not magic this is real magic each time a maiden dies someone else inherits the maiden's power oh so it was just avatar again really okay each of the maidens represents one of the four seasons it's the four seasons not the full elements so it's not like avatar oh hang on there's four different elements of dust aren't there wow it's avatar all the way down isn't it it's really boring and the rules of who gets to be a maiden and why are really silly and the exposition of it is bad but it's not that bad because the show has now introduced crow how does the power choose through a series of stupid and convoluted rules the writers made the genuinely clever decision to have him annoyed and bored by most of the characters and plot of ruby did you miss me did you miss me no crow spends half the show ridiculing all the characters that have been taking themselves seriously for hours with no one questioning them before if you were one of my men i would have you shot if i was one of your men i'd shoot myself so even if you aren't really enjoying the story or the ridiculous amount of plot being dumped in your lap regarding the maidens and cinder the real villain of the last two seasons who hasn't done much who it turns out actually has stolen half of a maiden's power and might inherit the other half if the maiden dies it's not so bad because another character in the scene isn't enjoying it either it's ironic that everyone else is bird-brained so it turns out that the story's really always been about these four maidens each representing one of the four seasons and cinder wanting to cause enough commotion that she can get to the full maiden and kill her to ensure she gets her power there's some pretty genuine drama now as pira is offered the choice to take the maiden's soul into her body a process which will probably kill her but prevent the power falling into the wrong hands a character has to choose between having her own life and doing what might be the right thing for the world pira is actually given an identity and questions and important choices to explore outside of her relationship to jon and it makes her the strongest character in the show it makes it easier to ignore that the plot is basically yet another avatar thing there being people with magical powers whose abilities go to someone else when they die is very avatar adjacent but you don't even think about it because the exposition gets made fun of by one character and another character has to make a real choice about it so it actually works one of cinder's goons emerald has the power to make people hallucinate and makes yang thinker guys attacking her after a round has ended and while she thinks she's defending herself the rest of the world sees what's actually happening which is yang breaking a guy's [ __ ] leg for no reason don't worry he's a villain and he's in on it and he has robot legs so it's fine but no one knows he has robot legs so this causes a lot of unrest among the people watching and everyone seeing it on tv and fear and anxiety attract grim so they all start ominously moving toward the city and yang's freaking the [ __ ] out because she thinks she's losing her mind and everyone's mad at her it's like plot there's plot happening guys everybody wake up the characters finally have to do something then right after while pira and penny are fighting in the tournament emerald makes pira see way worse attacks coming which causes her to really push her power and the tiny wires all pennies weapons are attached to wrap around penny and penny the character we've known for a whole season plus like five seconds at the end of volume one is torn to pieces i mean holy [ __ ] she's a robot so it's not like a disembowelment but this was a character and she's dead it's [ __ ] up everyone goes wild cinder hacks the main frame and gives a speech about humans bad and a million billion grim descend on the city and school and the last hour of volume 3 starts with a [ __ ] bang everything bad is happening to everyone everywhere all the time a main character is [ __ ] dead in pieces people are crying this isn't your daddy's generic and then bad guys attack the city this isn't volume 2 [ __ ] the city is being destroyed caligula gets broken out of the prison he was locked in at the end of season 2 and starts hacking the army robots and blowing ships out of the sky everything's happening everyone's [ __ ] bring them to their knees the civil rights protesters still talk like they're [ __ ] evil but it's generally it's pretty good ruby's threatening a giant bird with one of penny's swords because she's too distraught to think straight and then it flies at her and everyone's lockers ram into it and pin it to the ground and everyone we've seen so far turns up to fight look even weapon trumpet is here this absolutely incredible shot was done by dylan goo it's my favorite shot in the show just narrowly edging out the zwei attack and there's great setup and payoff to it because we've known since volume one that characters can call their lockers to them to get their weapon out whenever they want it so having them be used as weapons and just smash into this thing all at once it's just so great so everyone's fighting monsters there's some great action ruby fights uh check malcolm mcdowell's imdb for another comical name the real world is cool and he's kicking her and giving a speech about the world being a cruel cold place as for me i'll do what i do best and he's [ __ ] dead they just killed him he's dead i mean holy [ __ ] right they're destroying the main setting of the story so far and killing off villains in the process it's great for a few short episodes the show isn't like avatar or anything else on its homework list you're briefly glimpsing what it looks like when it's trying to be itself when it's being ruby you know this is why the rest of the show is so frustrating right because every now and then something like this happens and you want to see the show this stuff came from ruby opens neo's umbrella and the wind [ __ ] blows her off the ship they're flying on hundreds of feet in the air she's dead she's [ __ ] dead until people start to get bored with the show and realize that most of the new characters are really boring maybe you weren't supposed to assume the fall was gonna kill her but she doesn't appear for like three more seasons after this so either the writers had intended to kill her and then changed her minds because they wanted the character back or they just forgot she existed for literally [ __ ] years blake gets attacked and stabbed by adam and he shares his incredibly good motivation for his actions uh i'm bad and i'm going to kill you and yang tries to help but adam cuts her arm off this moment is still so dramatic and visually done so well they fake out for a second that blake's head gets cut off but actually it was one of these illusions and she gets away but what's amazing about this part of this show is that for a second i believed that they might they just might actually kill one of the four main characters like if that's not proof that this show is onto something story-wise for a hot minute i don't know what is seeing pira trying to do the right thing while living with the fact she just accidentally killed one of her friends and seeing that affect her thinking is actually incredible and from a character perspective it's the best stuff you'll ever see in this show it would have been really helped if pira and penny had actually been friends or like on screen together basically at all before the fight where penny dies it's an honor to finally meet you like at this point it's actively offensive like how poorly spent the time leading up to this fight is and just how much better it could have been if they'd like given these characters a relationship before one of them killed the other like wouldn't that have been meaningful salutations do you remember when she said salutations do you remember pira decides to let herself become the vessel for the previous maiden but they're too late and cinder kills the maiden and then pira shoves miles into his locker where he belongs i mean pira sends jon away against his will so he can survive but not before fully confessing her feelings and kissing him and tries to take cinder on but she fails and gets shot in the heart by an arrow ruby turns up just too late to save her and watches as cinder dissolves peera's body into nothing jesus [ __ ] christ they are not messing around pretending this is a show for kids anymore are they and then ruby goes and turns out to have a magic power because she has silver eyes and this means she can instantly kill grim or something i don't know you learn about this power existing right now seven hours into the show it's not great but we've already talked about how weird that is on the whole the absolute chaos and world-changing events and the treatment of characters and emotionally interesting story moves that take place in the last 4 and the bit episodes of volume 3 make it briefly a great show pure and simple and this is a weird place to end a video about the problems with the show by talking about how good it was for a while and how promisingly it left its doors open but this is really why talking about ruby is so artistically interesting because it's always on the cusp of being good like this and sometimes it really is but that's also why the show is such a disappointment that part of season 3 damns the rest of the surrounding show even more by telling you to have expectations because for a second you can see how good it really could be the show hasn't got good exactly it's just had a really good time making serious changes to the status quo of the story but you can't sustain a story on red weddings alone the new story beginning with volume 4 onwards has to actually be good for this to all work out and ultimately it doesn't to really explore the more specific problems with volumes 4 onwards we'd need a whole other video i wanted to talk in specific about the first three seasons because they stand out as the time the show seemed most likely to be going somewhere and therefore feel particularly bad when they only do it for such brief bursts in monty's fights in the promising storylines or character moments that get forgotten or dropped and in the way they really satisfyingly did things with pira's character but now that character is gone so the show's back to having dozens of characters with barely one interesting personality between them the good parts of the show really can be great and because of this all the bad parts are worse than bad they're also a shame creating art is like jumping off a cliff and building your wings on the way down if you want to only start when you know exactly how to get everything right you never actually will you never really know what you're doing until after you've started doing it in the past couple of years of this weird life i've met quite a few people who knew monty and several of them have told me the same story he'd say that he felt like the first season first season and a half first two seasons based on who was telling it weren't turning out super great so far but it didn't matter if it was bad right now because in his mind the whole thing the act of creation itself even was a process of learning if you can really figure out how to make something really get the production and workflow down figure out what works in the writing and through this process find the core of what this thing you're making is really supposed to be it won't matter how bad it started out because where it went will be great there's a certain manic energy a compelling power in these early seasons of ruby even if you're having a bad time you feel pulled along like you just want to see how it ends up this tone will change as the show continues to be written and paced in frustrating ways and cheat off the answers on its anime homework and its most interesting unique aspects are continuously downplayed or ignored it becomes more and more clear that you'll never see the show become itself i didn't watch monty ohm's ruby to see miles luna's avatar but that's what people are getting if the creators of ruby had started learning from their mistakes and taken to heart the good faith criticisms the people who wanted to love their show were making ruby could have really been something but instead it'll be remembered by a majority of people as a series of really good trailers with some really strange dialogue some really cool fight scenes to watch out of context on youtube and a couple of inexplicably quite good episodes at the end of the third season the real shame of ruby is everyone whose work goes unsung because it's in a show that sucks people like shane newville who left the show and released a massive open letter detailing his feelings about the company's treatment of the show after monty's passing or harley dwartz who contributes a lot to making some of the best parts of the show or the many other animators and artists who are still to this day putting time and effort and attention into things that get ignored or thrown away or just executed terribly because the storytelling isn't there it's clear that a lot of really skilled artists and animators work on ruby to this day but the mishandling of the show's story and production means that it fails to reflect their talents and that is probably the worst thing a show can do it's important to talk about this show and where it went wrong because while this is the first attempt to make an animated web series of basically anything like this scale it won't necessarily be the last and that means we have to learn all the lessons we can from its production problems and failures or we'll see them get repeated again i want there to be a show one day that represents what ruby could have been and that means recognizing the show's potential and where it went wrong ruby will probably never be the show it promised to be but with the gift of learning the lessons it has to teach maybe something else can be thank you very much for watching [Music] hey thanks for making it all the way through this video i promise to never make anything this long again for my sake if not yours this time i'd like to really seriously thank my patrons for watching an early curtain giving me some really useful notes it was a particularly big help this time and i really appreciate the difference it's made i'd also really like to thank tantakrel who produced the fantastic opening theme he has a video on his channel about the process of making it which is super great and you should check that out as well note to self have the youtube pop-up thing do that now i don't know what it's called i talked about some serious issues in this video and it didn't feel right monetizing a video while talking about real-world problems like that i was going to announce in the fullness chapter that i was going to give the ad revenue from this video to a bail fund but rooster teeth can be very strange about copyright and monetization and i don't want to make a promise i can't keep i'll post an update if we end up being able to do that thanks a lot and yeah i love you you

Channel: undefined

Views: 2,573,403

Rating: 4.8463669 out of 5

Keywords: hbomb, hbomberguy, RWBY, RWBY is Disappointing, Tantacrul, Shammy, ShammyTV, Shammy Television

Id: 81fdKWOHrdE

Length: 147min 25sec (8845 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 28 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Ezreal024]

Play nice.

[u/BlueWhaleKing]

I mostly agree with this. The production problems really contextualize a lot of the show's issues. Trying to write the fight scenes first and write the story around them is a recipe for disaster. It's the opposite of how it should be done. You need to put the story first, or it will suffer.

I also didn't realize just how bad some of the early volume's problems are.

The one thing I don't like in this video (along with not aknowledging that killing Pyrrha was a terrible mistake, though the later volumes made it worse) is the idea that Jaune is Miles's self insert. Really? Make all those great and well researched points, then put in something that's been so thoroughly debunked? It makes me question the reliability of everything else. Plus, even if he was, I think that would just indicate that Miles really hates himself.

[u/RalseiTheGrimm]

when you realise a show you’ve been watching for 8 years is actually really shit

[u/Aluesnoc]

Never had watched his videos, but this ended in my YouTube. I watched the whole thing and did make me realize somethings that I forgot or just put it in the category of "they will get to this eventually" He is making some solid points, and did not make me dislike the show. I was reminded that I have settled for how the show is coming out. I figured out that I'm a fan of the small amount of lore we get and the fight scenes. I'm glad someone brought up all the issues and used constructive criticism that would help the whole show if used. I really hope that vol 8 is taken in a better direction.

[u/Raytheon2014]

An excellent criticism of RWBY and how much it was butchered by Miles and Kerry.

[u/The_EnderSlayer]

It's always so interesting to me what people think about this show specifically, because it is never the same. You go on YouTube and basically every video about RWBY is criticizing it in some way (either that or it's a reaction.) But you go and see those reactions and 9 times out of 10 it's the exact opposite.

And I never really had a good idea on why it was so polarizing, because every time, every argument, every video, every random discussion thread, people praise and criticize completely different things. I hear one person praise the writing and characters and then you hear the exact opposite from somebody else. Some people think the fights are cool while others think they're stupid. You look up "Is RWBY good?" and the reviews are all good, the YouTube videos it pulls up are all bad, and every link that comes up leads to a discussion thread that sends completely mixed signals where nobody can agree on anything.

Now, of course, this is a thing with every show, so what's my point here? There isn't really a consensus on what about this show is good or bad or anything in either direction, every opinion I've seen on this show has had its opposite. It really shows the worthlessness of other people's opinions, because in the case of RWBY, you can't get a read on what the show is like by just looking up whether it's good or asking people. It really shows that sometimes people just like different things, and relying on other people to tell you whether to like something is never better than just seeing for yourself and forming your own opinion.

Personally, I think this show is okay as a whole, V7 was great though, if they can keep that up then it'll probably be really good. Anyway, this sort of had little to nothing to do with the actual video, I just wanted an excuse to express my fascination about the polarization this show brings. If you read this down to here, thanks, give yourself a virtual cookie. :)

[u/SonicNred95]

My post just got removed for asking if it were Beastiality for blake getting boinked by a human

[u/timo103]

Everything he said is right, holy shit

[u/MonstrousMaelstromZ]

After watching the whole review, I can safely say it’s the best one I’ve seen. No finger pointing at the fans. Some little jokes here and there, but never got the impression he was being malicious or uncaring. I think the first 20 minutes are my favorite, so if you don’t plan to watch the rest, I’d highly recommend watching the first 20.