User blog comment:ArrwCtchr/Character Development./@comment-9090085-20131019043246/@comment-24047001-20131019084816

First of all, I appreciate the time you took into your response, I do however think you misunderstood a few of the points that I was making.

"But when you say that Roman is our antagonist - as in the antagonist of the series; when you say he has to be behind every conflict the heroes encounter"

I never said Roman had to be behind every conflict. You're combining two separate points I made and inferring that incorrect conclusion. Firstly, you're correct Roman doesn't need to be behind every conflict. It would be ridiculous if he was. However, he is behind none of the conflict though and that's a narrative problem. Setting up your antagonists is an important narrative step because establishing a threat to the protagonist is an extremely important narrative element. All I was saying is that, while Roman in episode 1 and episode 8 is clearly being propped up as the antagonist, but has done nothing narratively to earn that role. It does tangentially relate to the other problem with RWBY.

There is no agency to the threats at all. The grimm are soulless (which is canon) beasts of evil that want simply to maul people. And when we are told that a forest is full of them; lo and behold it is full of them. It's not the fact that Roman isn't behind the grimm, it's that the grimm themselves are as narratively important as all the background silhouettes.

Here is a simply change that could easily add a bit of mystery and tension to RWBY:

In the Forever Fall Part 1 Glenda Goodwitch says "This forest is full of the creatures of grimm", so when a grimm does show up, it does nothing to change the status quo. To make matters worse, the specific type grimm that shows up is an Ursa, a type of grimm that not one, not two, but three different characters have handled with relative ease earlier in the story, which undercuts the dramatic tension in the scene even more. If, however, it had be mentioned that this forest was safe from grimm and a giant Ursa shows up (or an unindentified grimm!), well then things just got a lot more mysterious and intriguing. It's a mystery that doesn't require any explanation yet and can be tied to a later plot line OR it can be directly tied to the action of the current antagonist.

"Just because you can intertwine plot and character development, doesn't mean you should."

Every once and a while, a scene that doesn't advance the plot, and solely is used to help establish characters can work. An example in RWBY would be, after Ruby and Weiss make eye contact in the woods, thus forcing them to be partners, Weiss completely ignores it and walks away, until she ends up next to Jaune where she promptly turns around and goes back to Ruby. It's a small scene, that does a nice job of showing a bit of Weiss's character. My criticism is that on a larger scale, the RWBY is a show about characters being developed. If you pull back from the small scene between Ruby and Weiss (and Jaune) in the woods and look at the greater context, that's where my problems lie in the narrative. The fact that there is no narrative difference between the formation of the teams as we are shown from episode 4 to episode 8, and drawing teams out of a hat is the problem. You can remove 25 minutes of RWBY and replace it with a 30 second random drawing. That's a narrative problem.

They devoted 20 minutes of the show to character development. At the end of the 4 episodes, we are back to where we were at the start of episode 11, the difference is now, Jaune is presumably going to be a better fighter and will be more willing to stand up to himself. The narrative doesn't move for 20 more minutes. Even CRDL, they could go literally anywhere, and it's irrelevant to what happened over the course of the episodes because they had no character traits before episode 11 started.

"Most shows have Antagonists - Plural, not Singular.

'There is a reason we call them "Main Antagonists", because they are the antagonist central to the story; the others, while threats and providing character development, may be tools the main antagonist, or ultimately be insignificant in the grand world. Conversely, the main antagonist may not be the one pulling people's strings, but is the one most personally invested in the heroes, And, while uncommon, the main antagonist can change over the course of the show - especially over seasons."'

Honestly, you kind of lose me here, I would never suggest that Roman is the only antagonist that will be in RWBY, especially over multiple seasons. I would also never I suggest that he is the "biggest" antagonist that will ever be in the show. But secondly, Roman is currently neither "central to the story," nor "the one most invested in the heroes". Which, was entirely my point.

"It sounds to me like you expect the Main antagonist to appear almost every episode."

This is not even remotely close to what I was saying or what I "expect". What I would expect is a narrative throughline that connects the actions of the protagonists to the actions of the antagonist building into and through the climax.

"Which brings me to I feel is your problem: you're more or less saying the foreshadowing is bad before it has born fruit. Considering the Volume One Finale is three weeks away, you are essentially saying the story is bad right before you hit the climax. If you can hold off on deciding whether it was poorly or well written until you watch episode 16, then your arguments will have some weight."

I really do appreciate you taking the time to reply, because I can tell you spent a lot of time crafting it, but if you think my argument had anything to do with foreshadowing, then I clearly did explain my argument well.

The thing is, I don't need to wait for the climax of the show to assert that it's bad writing, because for the 90 minutes of RWBY that we've seen it is bad writing. Secondly, a note about narrative structure, the narrative element that gets you to the climax of a story is "rising action", and rising action is the single most important element leading to the climax, because it sets the stakes for the climax and drives the dramatic tension.

Just putting a fight at the end does not make it a climax, and even if Roman is involved, he's been irrelevant to the rest of the narrative outside of getting Ruby into Beacon. Which, will most likely be his downfall. Ironic I guess, that the only thing he contributes to the narrative is the one thing that will ultimately doom his plan. So while you may assert that I'm calling it out too early, I'd argue that narratively it RWBY hasn't earned a narrative climax and what happens over the last 2 episodes will be largely irrelevant to the arguments here. Certainly though, I'll allow the possibility that the events of the next 2 episodes could dramatically change my mind and if that's the case I'll come back here and admit that I was wrong. But I know enough about narrative structure and story telling that I was confident enough writing this out before the end of Volume One.