Rwby and Writing

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This one’s about RWBY. I stopped painting my Warhammer minis to plan this one, and the writing process has involved me tearing myself away from whatever else I’ve been doing at the time. Now I’m just hoping momentum will carry me. This blog needs posts and I want to stick to it being about writing, as opposed to the gaming work I did at the start. So, in the interest of keeping this alive, hello again.
This post will be about the writing of RWBY, an internet series that started in 2013 and whose future unsure given the company collapsed and then got bought by a previous owner. But the politics of the company aren’t what I’m here to talk about. Google Rooster Teeth if you want to know more. It’s interesting stuff.
The series started as an excuse for one of the creators, Monty Oum (link to him and his work), to make cool fights. He was great at it, but that sort of flashy stuff isn’t really my style. He got two other people at the company, Miles Luna and Kerry Shawcross, to work on the writing – only to come in occasionally and add things he thought were cool. Early on, it was very slap-dash and more a venue for his animation skills. Given the quality of his work, the amateur nature of the rest of it could be ignored. It had a scrappy feel to it.
Sadly, Mr Oum is no longer with us. He died early into the show’s run, around the beginning of the third season’s production (hereto referred after as Volumes, as per the show’s own labelling). While I’m not as big a fan of his work as others, I can still respect the effort, passion and quality of it. Something was lost with Monty (namely the style of fights), but this isn’t to say the writing in RWBY was any better or worse with him gone.

(To be frank, I feel ill-equipped to give him proper justice in such a small amount of words, especially as someone who wasn’t as invested in his work when it came out. I can, however, still respect a creative as one myself.)

Bumbleby (Yes that's how it's spelt)

To move back to the writing, and a plot point that a lot of fans had been waiting for, there’s this one thing the writers and even actresses associated with it have said. “Bumbleby was planned from the beginning”. That sounds like nonsense to you (I assume you’re not a RWBY fan), and a misspelling. Believe me, I’m not happy about it either. I’ve worked as a proofreader, and it… Well, it’s not as bad as people who write without properly punctuating or implementing their grammar.

The idea told to us, the audience, was that this couple, or ship (like relationship), was ‘planned from the beginning’, but isn’t.

Blake and Yang kissing, AND THE SHIPPERS GO WILD. Copyright Rooster Teeth, 2023

I, and a lot of the RWBY fandom, don’t think it was. The two spent a good portion of time apart after Blake abandoned the team, leaving Yang to be helped through her own issues by her family and friends. When they met again, their issues weren’t talked about and were just sort of brushed aside. Yang, at no point, says that Blake abandoned her. Granted, it could go unsaid and be implied, but I don’t trust the writers to have intended that.

Blake (the catgirl), holding Yang's bionic hand (that she lost in defending Blake), and telling Yang how she's, "Not going anywhere." Says the woman that already abandoned Yang.
"I'm not going anywhere." Says the woman who already left the group, to the woman who lost her arm in defending her in a fight. Copyright, Rooster Teeth
Yang hearing the one thing from Blake that wouldn't help. A good bit of character writing.
"What?" Said Yang, hearing the one thing from Blake that wouldn't help. It's a really good bit of character writing, in my opinion. Copyright, Rooster Teeth

This then got resolved (somewhat) at the end of Volume 6 with them killing a villain together and hugging, then holding hands. But… nothing. No confirmation or anything. Because… well the story was focussing on other things and the writers prioritised the plot over having character downtime (despite the fact the next portion of the story was them in a city with weeks of downtime off-screen). One could argue this is a problem with the later parts of RWBY on the whole, that they went from slice-of-life to save-the-world.

(I’d be fine with either. Judging by how I’ve enjoyed my tabletop campaigns, I’ve grown to enjoy party banter and slice-of-life.)

The kiss itself felt odd given they were forced to confess to one another by the plot (the world itself shunted them into a pocket dimension where they had to confess things). Now, this could have been interesting if it was pointed out, that the world was so sick of them dancing around the issue it went “JUST KISS ALREADY”. This goes unsaid, so it feels more like the writers threw their hands up in the air and cut to the chase. Still, lovely soundtrack and imagery. Go watch it on YouTube if you want. I trust you to know how to Google things.

“RWBY Bumbleby kiss” should work.

Nuts and Dolts (my favourite ship)

Moving back to shipping, one of my favourites is Nuts and Dolts (the fandom gives these pairings names, I find this one fitting). This being Ruby (yes, Ruby and RWBY, clever), the main character, and Penny, a robot girl she knows.

Ruby (left) and Penny (right).
Ruby (left) and Penny (right). Ruby's the protagonist and Penny's more a side character, but they interact enough that people thought they'd make a cute couple. Or, to put it another way: Weapon-loving woman comforting the living weapon she's friends with. Meanwhile the shippers are cheering, just quieter than the Bumbleby shippers. Copyright, Rooster Teeth.

Also, I doubt the writers would have thought that she could just be pretending to be sentient as a sort of user interface. That’s an idea I can use for myself if I use this. Someone starts talking with an AI that keeps faking sentience and ennui about their place in the world because that’s what it’s trained to do. It’s a more competent ChatGPT, running helpless_robot.exe.

The ship is both plausible and enjoyable to me, given that Ruby is a fan of weapons (and even made her own, but the writers forgot that) and her (hypothetical) partner being what amounts to a living weapon. Not that the show treats Penny as such. She might as well be a human, given she’s capable of emotion.

The fact that people ship them is proof of something: What happens when the fandom gets big enough and invested enough that they shout out how they want two characters to end up together, but the creators didn’t really put effort into that relationship, or just don’t want that to happen. Bumblebee has fans, and it happened, but only 9 seasons into the show.

Nuts and Dolts didn’t happen so hard that Penny’s dead twice over (spoilers) and the most we got was a villain taunting Ruby with her visage (an illuision of her) and how Ruby ‘meant the world’ to Penny, but still failed her.

An illusion of Penny, telling Ruby how much Ruby failed her.
"Can you imagine what it's like, to be completely and utterly failed, time and again, by someone who meant the world to you?" It's a lie, of course. The villain's whole gimmick is making illusions. A liar, in short. She wants to hurt Ruby mentally. I might just be saying this to feel less sad (it's an effective bit of writing). Copyright, Rooster Teeth
Ruby is broken, tired and would rather be anywhere else. Eyes reddened and panting.
Ruby is broken, nearly in tears. Copyright, Rooster Teeth

I’d have liked it to happen, but it didn’t, so I can just comfort myself with fan art and doing my own writing using similar archetypes. It’s not plagiarism if I just use the basic idea! Namely just the robot.

Speaking of my writing (links at the bottom), I don’t tend to have romance in my work. Other characterisation takes priority. Or, to use less words: It’s fuck all if we’re talking recent novellas and published stuff. The Tomeo novella (unpublished) had her and her husband but she’s distant and their relationship isn’t the point of the story. My experience with romance in real life hasn’t been the best, and that’s all I’ll say for the sake of privacy. There is such a thing as putting too much of yourself into a work.

Winding down

Okay, quick aside. I’m a writer. I write how I want the story to go. And frankly, if a bunch of people started loudly saying how they want the story to go, I’m not going to just do it. it’s my story. If it will make the story/characters better, or fits them, sure. If not, or if the story doesn’t need relationships as a focus, then no. I get the writers not wanting to bother with that sort of thing, but also wanting the audience to not be mad at them. The audience pays for this, they support you. Making them mad makes it worse. It’s a tricky thing to pull off.

In all honesty, I don’t watch RWBY, I watch reaction videos of it. I’d call this the Gogglebox of YouTube, but YouTube did this first. These videos often have long sections where they discuss the episode, the best even offering critiques and possible ideas for the plotlines. The funny part is going back to old episodes and seeing how these ideas turned out to be better than the actual story. These people have better ideas than the actual writers! Not to mention, I can take those ideas and twist them enough so that it’s not plagiarism. Like Penny getting hacked (in Vol. 8) and not only fighting the rest of the protagonists but shit-talking them the entire time (link here). It’s more interesting than her eyes going red, her clutching her head and – oh look, they fixed it.

 Hurray? 

Another suggestion was having Yang and Blake (the blond and the girl with cat-ears) having to air out their grievances with one another before confessing their feelings (link here). In the show proper their scene is far less emotionally interesting, carried mostly by the colours and music.

A note here is that the concepts are universal enough that one could argue they may not be plagiarism, but I would rather be on the safe side and credit content creators whose work I enjoy immensely. I don’t want to steal from people whose content I’ve enjoyed so much.

I assume you don’t know this stuff, but SEO might have saved me here, and this post gets a bunch of RWBY fans to see my work. In which case, hi! Sorry I bashed your favourite show or said a bunch of stuff already said by other people. Or, if you agree, great! I’m preaching to the choir, but that’s hardly a bad thing. I think this is one of the longest posts I’ve done on here.

For the sake of putting a bow on this, I think that RWBY serves as a list of things to learn from in terms of writing, and the critiques of it already made can be seen as a checklist for me as well as entertainment. It helps that these reactions made me laugh as well as gave me some good ideas, and I want to thank those people for their inspiration (those being Fatmanfalling and co., as well as Semblance of Sanity). With writing, your inspiration can come from a lot of places, not all of it being “what you know” in your immediate environment. It’s best to credit sources and, in a way, honour the people you got these ideas from. If you like them so much you want to use them, you’d better respect the sources enough to say it.

I’m on a roll with this, so expect more RWBY content in the future. I might cover more to do with ships, possible ideas that I could use for my own writing. An elaboration on the robot idea would be nice.

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