Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-25266931-20170224140119/@comment-4010415-20170227231756

KNN005 wrote: So no one has any issues to bring up about the cast of RWBY and how they can improve? Because if not, I'm going back to what I was saying a second ago. And expand on the civil war and world war possibilities. Eh.. Some of the issues that we've had with the show have been fixed at least a little bit.

Like, we've come to find out that one source of problems was the fact that Monty and Shane had a big habit of wanting to make awesome epic stuff happen simply for the sake of coolness without thinking about how that would affect the writing. Miles said that he had to keep holding those two back from doing things like that because Teams RWBY and JNPR weren't strong enough to do some of the things that Monty and Shane wanted to make them do yet.

For example, from what I can gather from the volume 1 director's commentary (which is where this issue of Miles having to hold back Monty and Shane was revealed), Monty wanted Blake to cut the train itself in half in the Black Trailer.

"136. Kerry: So, uh, during the uh, the, the "Black" Trailer, at one point Monty was contemplating cutting a train in half. (Monty chuckles.) Which Miles' response to that was "Yeah, that's really cool, but it's way too early to do that."

(Monty chuckles.)

137. Miles:  She's not powerful enough yet!

138. Kerry: She's not powerful enough yet. Which, y'know, essentially lead to him not doing it."

^ Their use of "She" indicates that they were talking about Blake.

I bring this up because some of the writing issues came from Monty and Shane pursuing Rule of Cool without thinking about it from a writing standpoint, just an animator's standpoint. This especially became in issue in the fact that, sometimes, Monty and Shane were left to animate fight scenes without Miles or Kerry knowing what exactly happens in the scene, as evidenced by the fact that Miles hadn't yet seen Penny's fight in Black and White until they recorded the commentary, which led to him getting kinda mad and yelling "You bastard! You cut a vehicle in half!", him and Kerry explaining why Miles got mad, and then Miles calming down like "It's fine, Penny can do that because she's powerful."

So...

1. One thing that annoyed a lot of people was the Paladin fight in Painting the Town. There was no understandable reason for Roman to have hopped into the Paladin to chase down Blake and Sun, running through the city and down a busy highway bridge, right in front of the entire public. The Paladin was stolen, it had the White Fang symbol painted on it, and this took place on the same day that Ironwood presented a hologram of this new mech to a bunch of people in public.

And yet... the only mention we got of it that volume was Ozpin casually mentioning something about a fight with a robot. There was no sign of anyone talking about it, not even on the news, even though Roman threw cars around, which probably killed people. Blake and Sun got no consequences for leading him to a busy highway. The whole thing was done most likely because it'd be cool to have a mech chase scene, followed by a mech fight.

2. The inconsistency of the strength of Ruby's whirlwind move. Monty did the food fight, where Ruby did a whirlwind move that was so powerful that it picked up Team JNPR, cracked a wall, and then threw them into that wall. Yet she didn't do anything close to that until the Volume 4 Character Short, which takes place after RNJR has been traveling across Sanus for a while and gotten some field experience, thus getting stronger, plus her skill with her Semblance is obviously better.

3. Breach was the perfect opportunity to have the Grimm actually seem dangerous instead of just being cannon fodder, and on top of that, the plot acts as if the breach was sooo much worse than it actually was. Monty directed Breach. The plot acts as if the original idea for Breach was that the students were going to be overwhelmed by the Grimm and fail to get the situation under control, and the arrival of Atlas' military and the teachers was a heroic save. However, Teams RWBY and JNPR seemed to be doing okay, not horribly, and CFVY utterly annihilated the Grimm (despite being, what, second-years?). I guess Monty couldn't help himself and wanted the fight to still be cool.

This led to people being confused and complaining when Coco was quite obviously seriously nerfed in volume 3, since her gun's bullets suddenly couldn't even go through trees and weren't very useful against completed Paladins, when she previously made a Death Stalker explode and cut a giant Nevermore in half.