User blog:SomeoneYouUsedToKnow/SYUTK's V5E11 - Being Weiss Is Suffering - Impressions/Recap

So, 2017 finally ended. About time, it was quite the awful year for everyone and everything. Sure, it had it's positives like always, but I doubt anyone's gonna look back at it and think it was overall a good and happy year.

On a more personal matter, after practically starving for more than 10 hours till 12am arrived, me and my family ate some sweet dinner. And by sweet, I mean it.

First, we ate Ravioli (with some meat inside) with a red sauce that I don't remember it's name, while drinking orange juice.

Then, we had dessert. Brownies with a bit of vanilla in them, and on top of them we put Ice Cream - the beige thing in the bowl in the 2nd pic. It's not vanilla-flavored, it's Dulce de Leche, mixed with some cookies (pretty sure Oreos) along with Flips.

The idea was to make it similar to McDonald's McFlurries. It wasn't quite like it at all, especially since this is a more basic Ice Cream, with the cookies and Flips literally added mid-preparation, while the McFlurries are Sundaes with the Flips/Oreos/Pirulins/Whatevers added on top.

But it was still delicious.

After the Ice Cream-Brownie combo, we had Cake. Not sure what kind of Cake it was, though it was soft and slightly flan-like. It also had a delicious Chocolate Icing (Frosting for muricans). Sadly, the Ice Cream, Brownies and Ravioli filled me up so I took a small slice and called it a day (night?), though roughly half of it was still left at morning.

Was it worth the starvation? Yes.

In other news I finally was able to download and play Closers: Dimension Conflict, which finally is getting a western release and is already in Open Beta.

And it runs beautifully. I don't know what the hell they did but it runs excellently on my poor laptop, even without changing any settings. In fact, it runs better for me than games made more than a decade before it. The game itself is quite fun, everything I expected from it.

In other other news, this thing.

For newcomers to this thing, this is basically me, making an informal recap of what happened in the episode, while giving my thoughts about what happens. It also includes fancy color speak, the Language of Truth, of which 2 colors are particularly notable:

Red means truth, fact  in the eyes of the user, le me.

Blue means a guess, an hypothesis, a theory.

This time this should've been done sooner, and I wanted to start working on this since Sunday, but....Closers happened and it took all my time away from RWBY. Not to mention, if I have to choose between Vacations and Family, and RWBY, I pick the former.

Before anything, to make it clear: This was written as I watched the episode.

In any case, onwards we go. We start our day with:

Triumph (or Triumph!)
I know I recapped, as far as I understood, the "asynchronia" between Blake's story and RNJR's story, in terms of when they happened in relation to the other. Just in case, let me do it again:

1>In V5E1-3, Blake was roughly 2 months away from the beginning of the Fall Semester while RNJR was just 1 month away. Adam killed Sienna at about the same time Oscar arrived in Mistral and Ozpin told RNJR what was going on.

2>In V5E5, Oscar mentions that it's been weeks, while Corsac and Fennec have already received news of Sienna's death. Given the lack of CCT I doubt they would've been told inmediately or even quickly. But as minimum, this means that in V1E5 it's been a whole month since V1E1 for Blake (1 month + 1-2 weeks maximum).

3>In V5E10, Ghira mentions that they got 2 weeks before Adam's attack on Haven. Meanwhile, from CAME's talk with Raven and thanks to Raven portaling to Qrow inmediately after, we know that for RNJR they got about 2 days left.

And, of course, we know RNJR and co. are gonna walk into an obvious trap, despite them already being suspicious of Lionheart (even if for the wrong reasons).

.....So far it sounds like it makes sense. But there's a key problem here that I only noticed recently: Blake has 2 weeks to get to Haven. In other words...

She has 2 weeks to train her army of peasants - which I assume are about 30-50 people since Menagerie has quite the small population - equip them, and transport them across the sea to Anima, and then transport them on the ground from Anima's south all the way to Mistral, and then Haven.

The problem here is that this is just bound to fail for a million reasons, that if it doesn't fail it would shatter one's willing suspension of disbelief.

1> I doubt the Ship Captain from V4E3 could take so many people to Anima in time, especially if we add the Grimm problem I mentioned in the past blog.

2> Even if he managed to somehow take them there, there's the question of how they get to Mistral after that.

2.1>> For starters, there seems to be a lack of Airships to go straight there, judging by how Yang kept riding to Mistral once she got to Anima, instead of taking an Airship.

2.2>> Whether there are Airships or not......they are Faunus, people supposedly discriminated even today, or at least that's what Blake has been preaching for years. What makes them think that there would be someone, perfectly willing to take 40+ Faunus, all the way from the southern shore to Mistral?

2.3>> Even if there was someone, where would they get the money for it? I can see the Captain taking them to the shore for free due to "a favor, and honor, and etc.", but I doubt a random joe would do it. Even if Blake told them "the White Fang wants to destroy Haven!", it would be stupid if they believed her just like that.

3> Even if they, somehow, got to Mistral within these 2 weeks they have......there's an important matter: Training and equipment.

3.1>> They live on a tiny island, 2/3 desert and 1/3 nothing but palm trees, with a nearby shore that leads to nothing but water and fish. Where would they even get enough materials to make shields, weapons and decent armor for 40+ people?

3.2>> Tech-wise they are quite outdated. How will they even make all that stuff, for 40+ people, in time?

3.3>> They still would need to juggle the training, with the transportation. The training in itself would be harder because these are people, who literally live in Menagerie because they didn't want more conflict, Blake said it herself. I doubt they would train on the Ship on their way to Anima, and I especially doubt they would be allowed to train on an Airship, especially if they're as tiny as the one we saw back in V4E12.

4> Problem 2.2 and 2.3 is made even harder because they are not normal Faunus being transported, they are armed Faunus. Any person with half a brain would have second thoughts of transporting an army to the capital, especially if they're aware of the capital's rather lacking security at the time.

5> The people, at best, get mediocre equipment and 2 weeks of training. The White Fang, meanwhile, has 5 years of training as the bare minimum for the general troops, and has enough tech to make quite-good weapons, like Ilia's Lightning Whipgun, Blake's Sheathsword-with-GunKatana, Adam's Fireblade-with-Gunsheath, and the Albain's DustDaggersomethings.

This beside anything else they've gotten thanks to Salem's group's help. Back in Vol.2, they got dozens of Atlesian Paladins, before they were even released on the market. Imagine now, almost a year later.

Overall, it feels like the writers have driven themselves to a literary Morton's Fork. No matter what they do, it can't be good, and they don't have the skills to make us think otherwise.

1> Blake arrives in time and helps during the Battle of Haven, and we get a perfectly-happy ending. But said timely arrival would be ridiculous, especially if the Menagerians are not anihilated by the White Fang. Unless they resort to words and the WF refuses to kill their own kin, which makes no sense because <font style="color:#DC143C">they had no qualms about following Adam and killing their own kin before in this entire Volume. In any case, this would just make the writers look bad......again.

2> Blake doesn't get to Haven in time, and thus RNJR and co. have no believable chance of stopping it's downfall, at best repeating what happened in Vol.3 where Ruby saved the Kingdom and stopped Cinder, but couldn't save Beacon itself. <font style="color:#DC143C">This in itself would lead to the same response Vol.3's finale did, dividing the fandom, and in this case risking Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy, in other words, making people stop caring because it's too dark and hopeless.

3> Blake arrives in time and helps RNJR and co., but they all fail to save Haven due to the sheer lack of quality and quantity compared to the WF and Team CAME. <font style="color:#DC143C">It's far more believable than the 1st option, but would have a worse reaction than the 2nd option.

Overall, no matter what M&K do, it's gonna suck. <font style="color:#DC143C">If Blake had more time to prepare the Menagerians, it would make more sense, but with just 2 weeks, there's just not enough time to make all that believable.

And that's leaving aside anything specific that happens during the attack or before it, like a character death.

Speaking of Character Deaths, let's move on to the episode.

Could They Get Any Worse?
And more psychopathic faces....yay....

...Sigh...honestly, why the hell is Ruby so stupid? Why must the writers make her so stupid? Jaune was stupid too, <font style="color:#DC143C">but he was angry as fuck, so it makes sense. Ruby wasn't. There are 3 things she should know, and yet she ignored them all.

1> She has a fucking Sniper Rifle. SNIPE WITH THE DAMN THING instead of running at the enemy side all alone!

2> She has fucking Super Speed. If she's gonna run at the enemy, do it with your SUPER SPEED instead of at a normal running speed. In fact, her "maneuver" of trying to land an overhead attack on Cinder is dumb as fuck due to how blatantly obvious she made it.

3> At the very very least, she should've known that <font style="color:#DC143C">there were 5 people on the enemy side, near Jaune. Cinder herself is a Maiden, and she knows what Merc and Em are capable of, while Raven has years more skill and training and experience than Ruby has.

This is extremely stupid and suicidal for no reason other than momentary "DRAMA". As in, remember Kali's scene from the last episode? Even worse than that.

With Jaune it makes sense, with Ruby it just doesn't. It happens just because the writers wanted "DRAMA".

Sigh....8 minutes in and this ep is already irritating me more than amazing me or amusing me. Excellent. What a great way to begin the Battle of Haven.

2) Moving On To The Fight(s)...
.......Is that a tail? Leo was a Faunus all along? I would be impressed, but......there's a problem here. <font style="color:#DC143C">It makes the White Fang even more stupid.

Let's remember Ilia's lines after Ghira proposed the idea of going to Haven to protect it from Adam, ideas which I assume are not exclusive to her within the WF.

Ilia: ''Cowards... After everything the humans have done to us, everything they've put us through, you're asking us to help them?!.....The Belladonnas are the worse kind of Faunus! They want us to work with the same people that are trying to hold us down!''

.....And now we know Haven's Headmaster is quite literally a Faunus.

So all that shit about helping humans by trying to save Haven becomes just plain retarded because <font style="color:#DC143C">not only are there Faunus students in Haven, their Headmaster is literally a Faunus.

I can only hope the information about Leo being a Lion is secret, for whatever dumb reason, because otherwise it just makes the WF dumber.

RNJRSLOB vs CHLBVRE - Part 2
"Ranger's Love" (Cause I can't think of anything else that would work with these letters) vs "Calaverite" (Treat the H as mute and take the BV like a single V, like with SSSN) (Cause I managed to find something that works....maybe).

3) Second Round(s)
......Well....<font style="color:#DC143C">that's quite the way to end the episode.

Of course, it half-fails for me, for 1 simple reason, which I'll describe shortly.

Conclusions
This is.............<font style="color:#DC143C">quite the terrible episode.

There isn't much, narratively. This episode is mostly just fights. Narratively, what do we get here? And in terms of consequences by the end, what do we have? Meanwhile, action-wise the fights are mostly just......boring.
 * Huntsmen are perfectly capable of bringing their weapons everywhere and anywhere even if it would be completely unnecesary and questionable.
 * Emerald follows Cinder out of a life debt.
 * Leo went crazy and wants to take Oscar to Salem.
 * Raven is an asshole.
 * Cinder has been taking acting classes from Tyrian.
 * Oscar's Aura is down cause DRAMA.
 * Ruby is unconscious.
 * Cinder is weak enough to be hurt....or at least weak enough for her mask to be hurt.
 * Being Weiss Is Suffering.

They got speed, at least most of them, <font style="color:#DC143C">and that's good. But they lack flash, they lack this "WOW" factor. <font style="color:#DC143C">The lack of appropiate, exciting music doesn't help ; the background music spends too much time inducing a sense of dread, and too little time amazing us.

But the main reason might not be because of the fights themselves, <font style="color:#DC143C">but rather because RT fails at making good teamfights.

See, in a teamfight, a team is supposed to fight another team. ABCD fight 1234, together, as a team. But instead, here they simply took the easy way out <font style="color:#DC143C">and put everyone on 1vs1 duels, an in one case 2vs1.

This is terrible because <font style="color:#DC143C">a teamfight is supposed to be ABCD fighting 1234, not A fighting 1, B fighting 2.....no. Such a format makes the idea of a teamfight pointless because it's removing a Teamfight's very own selling point that makes them stand out from simple Duels.

Of course, to make things worse, Raven and Qrow just vanish after their little clash with nothing but a small cameo when Ruby does a Silver Blast, and Oscar and Leo later do the same, only without a cameo of any sort. We barely see anything of Yang vs Merc or Renora vs Hazel as well.

Take a look at this and this.

Ignore the visuals and flash. <font style="color:#DC143C">RT will obviously never get even close to Final Fantasy in either of those things. What I want you to focus on, is the fight itself.

More exactly, the Teamwork in the fight.

In the latter video, it's 10vs10. In the former, it's like 15vs10. In both cases, however, <font style="color:#DC143C">you never see everyone just going off and engaging in 1vs1 Duels each.

Even when the characters have clear rivals, like Cloud and Sephiroth, these characters do not ditch everyone to go fight by themselves. They attack other members of the other team, as well.

At the same time, characters do not spend the entire fight fighting just 1 enemy each. At multiple points they either attack, or are attacked, by an oponent different from the one they were fighting a few seconds prior. Using the ABCD-1234 example I used before, it's esentially this:

>A fights 1, while B fights 2.

>C is fighting 4 while D is fighting 3.

>>B stops fighting 2 and goes to fight 1 alongside A.

>>2 rushes to 3's aid and the two fight D together.

>>C keeps fighting 4 alone.

See what I mean? They don't stick to fighting the same character forever, they don't have simple duels. <font style="color:#DC143C">They don't attack the enemy, they attack the enemy team.

Of course, do note that it doesn't mean there can't be 1vs1 in a Teamfight. Like I mentioned, you can have C and 4 keep fighting alone. The thing is that <font style="color:#DC143C">you can't have a Teamfight be nothing but 1vs1, because then you're making the idea of a Teamfight moot.

Something that's also cool to see, though not strictly necesary in a Teamfight, is when A throws an attack at 1, and one way or another the attack gets close to C and 4 as they fight, either missing and just looking cool in the background, or outright affecting it.

We got a bit of that with a missed bullet, and it was a nice transition, but we could've gotten more, especially given we got: It might've been a small thing, but it would've done quite a world of difference if we saw, say, some of Vernal's lasers in the background as Oscar and Leo fought. Makes the fights feel like they are indeed happening in the same place and time, instead of feeling like everyone is in a different world away from each other.
 * A girl with a grenade launcher.
 * A woman whose guns shoot laser beams.
 * A girl whose specialty is Dust.

Another thing important in Teamfights like these, is Teamwork. See A protecting B from a strong attack, or see 2 and 3 making a Special Combined Attack, or seeing C throw D at 4. When you got multiple badasses it's always great to see them show off together.

That's all the basics of a Teamfight, it's their selling point, the scripted reason you write a Teamfight instead of a simple series of 1vs1. Multiple characters fighting multiple characters, helping each other, showing Teamwork.

But here the closest we get to that is Renora vs Hazel, which is not even shown for 99% of the episode. At the same time we never get anyone making some quick attack to help their allies, aside from Emerald throwing Ruby to the ground when she tried to help Jaune early on.

As for Combination Attacks, like back in the Paladin fight, or hell, back in the Geist fight between Ruby and Nora? <font style="color:#DC143C">None of that. We get none of that in any way whatsoever.

Overall....they fail at making Teamfights. I'm pretty sure they've gotten worse, actually. I recall seeing at least a bit of what I mentioned here back in the 4vs4 and 2vs2 fights in Vol.3.

As for the individual fights, like I said, they just lack the flash and "WOW" factor.

Aditionally, there's an uncanny overuse of "distant shots", when the camera is far away from the fight on-screen, and at the same time the camera itself has minimal movement. <font style="color:#DC143C">Which ends up making whatever action is on-screen just look more boring than it would've been otherwise if the camera was closer to the action, and from a different angle.

Not talking about when something big happens, like Leo's Meteor Explosion. <font style="color:#DC143C">There it's fine. I'm talking about....well, look at Renora's fight with Hazel and Yang's fight with Merc. That's what I mean.

And for all those reasons, I must say, my favorite fight this ep was Oscar vs Leo.

It lacks flash and WOW, but it is justified because Oscar is more noob than Jaune is, even with Ozpin we can't expect him to do all the crazy shit with just 1 month of training.

Meanwhile, in terms of distant shots during the fight we only get 1, and one that actually makes the fight look better instead of worse. For the rest of the fight the camera is close to the action, <font style="color:#DC143C">all the hits are in our face, all the action is in our face.

At the same time, it might've been because I watched the fights first in like 50% slow-mo, but every hit he landed on Leo, I felt like they actually had impact, which helps provide some flash and amazement, as it was the case with Ghira before.

And from a writing point of view, there are no real problems whatsoever. At most, Leo's stupidity for not using Dust again despite how much damage it did to Oscar. And that can be justified in 2 ways: Well, there's the fact that Oscar wasted all of his Aura just to show off his Meteor-Blocking skills, but that was before the fight.
 * 1) He didn't want to kill Oscar.
 * 2) Due to the impractical, gimmicky method-of-use of his Shield's Dust functions, Leo would've had a hard time just trying to use it while Oscar was throwing a barrage of swings at him without giving him much breathing room.

All said, when you put this all together, <font style="color:#DC143C">it simply looks pretty damn good in an overall sense.

On a much more minor note, it's also nice to see that Oscar's fighting style is quite similar to Ozpin's.

Back in Ozpin's fight with Cinder, he effectively assaulted Cinder with a quick, constant barrage of attacks. He only stopped when Cinder broke free and pushed him away with her Maiden powers. And despite the many years of experience he has, his fighting style was mostly-mundane aside from the speed and the Aura Barrier he did at one point.

Here, we get Oscar, assaulting Leo with a quick, constant barrage of attacks too. Sure, <font style="color:#DC143C">he lacks Ozpin's finesse, he's not as fast, and his Aura actually went down in one go and he lacks the skill to do any fancy stuff. But the differences are small.

As a 2nd favorite fight, I put Weiss vs Vernal.

It's fast but it's lacking in flash for the most part. Vernal's laser beams prior to the one that she shoots point-blank, <font style="color:#DC143C">just feel weak. Weiss herself doesn't do much.

However, that last bit, Weiss failing to do much, is the reason it's my 2nd favorite fight in this ep. Because of the reason she couldn't do much.

On one hand, the beginning of the fight was dumb. Vernal has gundaggers that shoots laser beams, and yet she just throws them around like boomerangs instead. One could argue <font style="color:#6495ed">she was toying with Weiss, but still.

On the other hand, she's probably the most inteligent fighter this show has had in years. <font style="color:#DC143C">Because she keeps attacking Weiss and doesn't let her do anything, she never really stands there and just lets Weiss do her stuff, Vernal does the smart thing and interrupts her.

That's a level of inteligence I haven't seen in this show for years. Generally (and not exclusive to this show) when someone's about to do some big, fancy thing - sometimes not even either of those things - they do it while everyone just stands there watching (Cough Tyrian Cough). <font style="color:#DC143C">Vernal did not, and she deserves an applause for that.

Outside of the fights, there are a number of questionable lines that frusfrate and irritate me or just make me go "huh?". Merc frowning at Yang as if he was butthurt about the leg, Leo and Qrow's little exchange regarding bringing their weapons....

....And most importantly, Cinder grabbing the Jerkass Ball, <font style="color:#DC143C">with her condescence and assholishness being amped up to eleven for the whole episode, made worse by her frequent Psycho-faces with extremely shrunken irises and slasher smiles, that make her look like she's trying to imitate Tyrian.

Which overall just ruins her character for me. They could've at least left the psycho-faces out. An entitled smile is fine, like back in V5E9, but Psycho-faces to rival Tyrian is just bleurgh.

Overall, I really didn't like this ep. <font style="color:#DC143C">Action-wise, last ep was better. Writing-wise, last ep was better. Narrative-wise, last ep was better and not just because it had more. Even length-wise, last ep was better.

It's quite the disappointing way to start the Battle of Haven, made worse by how disappointing this Volume has been so far in a general sense, and the only redeeming factor is that this is just Ep11 out of supposedly 14, so there's still a chance of the battle "redeeming" itself.

And I sure hope it does.

Now......Weiss being impaled by a Lava Javelin. Down, above her waist. Not sure what kind of organs are there, if anyone knows please tell me.

Now, <font style="color:#DC143C">she obviously won't die. She's a main-main protagonist on the same level as Blake and Yang, the only character with bigger chances of survival is Ruby. Weiss's chances of dying when the overall story is, at most, only halfway through, are infinitesimally low.

So if anyone cries about her being dead....yeah, no, they're just crybabies, she's obviously not dead. RWBY hasn't proven itself to be Game of Thrones - no matter how many oversensitive kids try to convince you otherwise.

Had she had been hit in the chest, then yeah, she'd be deader than Pyrrha. But she wasn't.

Now: What is more interesting, however, <font style="color:#DC143C">is the consequences here . She's obviously gonna be out of the fight for at least the next episode. But let's consider what could happen.

She was impaled and fully penetrated in her....lower-right belly(?), with a long spear, that isn't just Obsidian, it has lava inside meaning it must have hurt a damn lot since it was burning her inside. At the same time it vanished, meaning that it stopped covering the hole it made, meaning Weiss should be bleeding out at the moment.

All this aside from whatever the laser beam did to her......and now that I think about it <font style="color:#DC143C">both the Laser and the Javelin hit Weiss in the same area. How weird.


 * If any of the bad guys wanted to kidnap her and take her somewhere else, they easily could.


 * Chances of Weiss surviving intact are slim. I'm not sure of what the exact consequences would be from being penetrated where she was, but I like a bit the idea of Weiss ending up mute or semi-mute like Cinder back in Vol.4 (even if it would make no goddamn sense).


 * She could end up in a coma. That's also an option.


 * At the very least, she would need to stay at the hospital for quite a while after the battle, probably even into Volume 6. Unless they time-skip that.


 * Narratively, if anyone is willing to save her and is capable of doing so, they can show off and thus reveal their ability. Most easily, it'd be Ozpin who can give people Magic, but who knows, <font style="color:#6495ed">maybe Jaune's Semblance includes healing people with a kiss or something.

.........Hey, Ruby's Semblance went from Super Speed to turning into a Petal Storm and flying around. Like Ozpin said, <font style="color:#DC143C">anything is possible . Ok? Ok.

Total number of images used: 343. How funny, a disappointing episode, made by people who became famous thanks to Halo, with a reaction blog with the same number of images as the name of such a disappointing company, who makes Halo games since Halo 4.

FUNNY V5E11 PICS!!! :D
As expected from an episode like this, there were...more than I was expecting.

There were many, but 8/10 of them were cheap Cinder Psycho-faces, and I didn't really like them much. Others are also quite funny, but not inherently funny or useful as Emote substitutes.

Except maybe that Ruby pic with her glowing-ass flashlight-like Silver Eyes.