Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-39854843-20190814182344

I've started to think that a lot of the problems with this show--the pacing issues, lack of meaningful character development, stunted character arcs--stem from there being too many characters, and not enough time to adequately explore them.

When you think about it, RWBY has 4 main protagonists, 6 deuteragonists, 8 antagonists, dozens of supporting characters, and dozens of ancillary characters. And it has ~15 minutes an episode to address those characters. 12-14 episodes a volume gives you ~200 minutes a volume, which is a little over 3 hours.

Now, 3 hours may seem like a lot, but compared to mainstream tv shows, it's virtually nothing. Take Game of Thrones, for example. 10 episodes, with each averaging an hour in length, gives you around 10 hours per season. Network TV shows can have seasons ranging between 12-16 hours. The Twin Peaks revival famously ran for 18 hours. And many of these shows have fewer characters than RWBY, which allows them to focus more time on developing them.

RWBY not only has little time to explore the many characters it has, it's also an action-oriented show. Which means that much of the screentime is devoted to fight sequences that provide no real attention to character actualization.

In a perfect world, it would be great to see RT extend RWBY's runtime to a more traditional format (30-45 minutes an episode), but the reality is that they don't have the manpower to support that. They were struggling to get episodes out without overworking their animators before, so it stands to reason that doubling the workload would be inconceivable for a company of that size.

So, what do you guys think? Should they just 'red wedding' this show and kill off half the cast in Volume 7? Or are you happy with the current format? 