User blog comment:Gundam Legilis/Philosophy in RWBY/@comment-11188061-20150127130142

On a related note, I believe that the current RWBY do not yet have enough length to portray a good enough story.

For Volume 2 as it is, there is literally no way they could've portrayed anything to be dark because the show's overall impression is super bright. It's like watching a child's show, and you suddenly want to put a torture scene or two inside to make things 'mature'. Not only will it fail, it will just screw up the whole pacing of the story. Imagine if they'd added Tukson's blood splatter at the beginning - it gives people the anticipation that something really terrible will happen in the show, presumably soon or around Episode 6. And what do we get? A whole lot of coolness, but absolutely nothing dark until perhaps the end of the show.

Take Mountain Glenn for example. The place is said to be an abandoned city, where people have tried to establish their livelihood but got wrecked by the Grimm, and even when they're trying to escape they got ambushed by underground Grimm. You'd imagine it to be something like this:



But what do we get? We get what looks like an incomplete construction site, and a single weed worth scrutinizing by Oobleck (literally) to represent the overgrowth of nature. Seriously? Monty and the crew might think that they've put a lot of effort into building that 'wasteland', but it looks more like a lego playground, or something out of Minecraft to me.

Oh, the story definitely could be dark there, with talks of massive deaths and monstrously huge Grimm roaming just about the corner, and if I replace the Grimm with 'zombies', replace the abandoned city with one from 'The Last of Us', and replace the girls altogether with a few adults with grim faces and dirty clothing or heck, even Space Marines from Starcraft, the effect would've been entirely different. Let's face it - the plot may be somewhat boring, but the art definitely did not live up to the writing at all.

From what I see, it's like Monty and the crew prepared all the animations and everything, went through it and was like, 'Ok, shit, does this look dark to you? In any way?' 'Nope.' 'Okay, in that case, we remove those elements altogether and push it to Volume 3. Too late to redo them now.' Hence the decision to remove blood splatter, and the bloodless Grimm invasion to preserve consistency of the mood. All in all it is a great decision, but one forced by poor planning and resources.