User blog comment:SomeoneYouUsedToKnow/"They are just standing around and talking"/@comment-34633327-20171126210248/@comment-25936766-20171126214438

"Impact" wasn't taken into account because it's related to the fights's quality. And the quality isn't the point of this. The point was how much action is Vol.5 delivering compared to past Volumes. People want fights, so how many fights is it delivering?

Impact in itself is rather subjective. A fight can be "meaningless" but still leave quite an impression, like the Food Fight. A fight can be "important" yet feel dull and lazy anyway, like the Breach.

Even Narrative Importance is meaningless here. If all fights were meaningful and plot-important, that'd be cool, but that's outside the point of this blog, which focuses on the amount of action delivered each Volume. How important or not important a fight was is irrelevant. People want action, and the action doesn't need to be plot-important to be action.

That said, Impact and Narrative-Importance did factor somewhat into which fights I counted as "Major".

>Ren vs Taijitu. Yes, it's technically unimportant. However, it's the first time we ever see a fight with a "Boss" Grimm that can give the heroes a challenge, which works to set-up and leave an impression of what we can expect of "Boss" Grimm in the future. It has impact.

>Cinder vs Ozpin. Super brief, but those few seconds left us with our jaws dropping at the sheer amount of power and skill both sides show. It has impact.

>The Breach. Yes, it sucked ass, but it was still a big brawl, and narratively it set-up Ironwood's army in Vale and Roman being captured, and just the fact that it happened was a factor in Cinder's plan to cause panic. It has narrative importance, even if it sucked.

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Having more story with little action is not really that good of an idea if the writing in itself isn't that good. And it isn't, in some ways the writing in V4 and V5 has gotten worse than in previous Volumes.

RWBY might have a story, but at it's core it's an action show. People came for the action, it was made by a guy who cared about the action, and even if the story was important, people want action and it was action what made this RWBY popular enough to still exist.

Even if improving the writing was good, sacrificing one of the core traits of this show in the process is just bad. It's the same as with the Fluidity vs Flash issue with the fights now.

Which is why they should do it like in Volume 1 or Volume 3, which didn't cut the amount of action delivered just to provide a decent plot with decent writing. Say what you want about their writing, but they don't sacrifice one thing to provide another.

Not all fights need to be super-important to the story either. At best, they just need to make sense as the reason why they happen. If RNJR had fought a Grimm on the road, it would've been narratively-meaningless, but it would've made perfect sense, and thus there's no problem.