Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-24038343-20131114025435

Spoiler do follow, ut if you haven't seen the show by now you should get hee to Crunchyroll or buy the DVD.

Well the RWBY DVDarrived yesterday and its pretty decent, with a fair number of extras. Several of the animation bugs (like Nora's selectively invisible hammergun) have been fixed and there is occassionally added background detail, especially in the pilot.

It has the option of watching the DVD as a movie or as episodes (10 episodes not 16). I reccomend watching the series episodicly as at this stage it simply doesn't work as a movie. The movie has no real plot or resolution and seems to bounce all over the place with no coherent focus.

However, as 10 episodes, the series works better than either the web releases or the feature. The episodes as edited for the DVD are much clearer than the abreviated +-5 minute webcasts in that they each tell a descrete part of the interlocking stories that compose the assembly of the ensemble cast.

The episodes that deal with Weiss make it clear that as flawed as she is, by her adolescent arrogance and necessarily provincial outlook, she genuinely strives to be a decent person. The fact that the show dares to touch on the fact that bigotry, while wrong, is not neccesarily irrational and sometimes has two sides is a fairly gutsy move. Its rare today to be reminded that even the best of us are not immune to the darker angles of our nature and those most confident in the rightness of their views are often most likely to fall in that regard. It's glossed over a bit by Weiss's off camera decisionmaking, but it does set up an interesting and poingniant dynamic in the show.

The fact that Blake and to a lesser extent (so far) Weiss were able to look at themselves, see themselves on the path to perdition and try to step off it into unknow territory is pretty refreshing actually.

The seemingly strange plot digression with regard to Jeaune is much clearer in this context than in the webcasts...there was some griping that it went on for weeks, but its closer to 18 minutes. It works beter in either than in the movie edit. A lot of exposition early in the series revolved around explaing basic things to Jeaune (and the audience ) in small words. The two episodes that focus on him not only explain why he didn't know basic facts, but reveal that, even more than Ruby, he's punching well above his weight...whether this forshadows that we will be getting two parrallell "journey of the hero" stories or this is just establishing a likeable background character is unclear but in the 10-12 minute episode format it works either way.

And that's the thing, this story is just getting started. This is a series, not a feature, and it is telling its story in an episodic format over time. I hope that going forward the production team will allow themselves enough lead time to do the 10-12 minute episodes. 12 episodes is quire common nowadays for a series so this 10 episode run is not unreasonable. I really don't think the movie format works.

All in all the DVD was nicely packaged, and the series thus far is trancending its low budget. My one real gripe is that the two most important pices of info were missing.

1:When will the series resume?

2: When will the full soundtrack be released?

Alas, when ones greatest complaint is that one wants more, it does not indicate that the production staff has actually erred. 