User blog comment:Varzan Deodinm Beldinm/The "meh" factor of this show has finally gotten to me. ( please read, then judge.)/@comment-14909251-20131013074253

I have my fair share of criticism for how the story has been handled so far, but I also think you are seriously wrong on a few points. For one, while Weiss started out looking like a tsundere, I do not think it is actually accurate to suggest she fits that trope. She shows no difficulty being nice to people when they do not give her cause to be upset with them and she has fairly good reasons for being upset with people when she does get upset.

Jaune does fit the trope of the bad-ass goof, but he does break the mold in a few distinct ways. The most obvious being the whole "lied his way into his position" detail. Usually, the people who lie their way into the group, be it a school or a military unit, have some ulterior motive or are just bad-asses who could not or would not get in using normal procedure. That the person who seems completely undeserving actually is, by all rights, undeserving is a nice deviation from the traditional take. In a way, that this undeserving person lied his way into a prestigious academy because he wanted to live up to his family legacy makes him seem even more pathetic than normal. While this type of character typically is the target of bullies, this is one case where the bullying is karmic.

Your statement about good vs. evil is completely off-base. While it is true that the Grimm do not have much room for gray, it is not true that there is no gray within the series. The issue is that the gray of the series has not been explored much yet. A group such as the White Fang can only be seen as gray since they are likely just in their cause, but are still cruel in their methods. The whole Faunus situation sets up the gray to an extent.

Some things you identify as clichés can not even be fairly called clichés. A school setting is not "cliché" in itself any more than Cowboy Bebop was "cliché" for having a space cowboy theme. The same goes for the Faunus. Are you going to argue that elves are "cliché" when used in a fantasy storyline? Not all of them are "cute" if that is what you are calling cliché. Whether such common story elements are cliché depends on how they are used. Most stories starting out with these elements will likely seem cliché for a time, until they find what makes them distinct.

As far as Team JNPR is concerned, I too am upset at them, namely Jaune, being focused on more these past few episodes. I would still not say they are less interesting characters who should not be the focus of an episode. Honestly, I would be more interested in a Nora chapter than a Yang chapter at this point. Nora is crazy in a way that would be far more interesting to explore, while Yang is just sort of quirky without a lot of apparent mystery.

I would not be fool enough to call it the greatest series out there, especially this early on when a series rarely gets my juices flowing, but even with a few missteps it is off to a very good start for a series with so many constraints. Methinks many of us are just coming down hard from the high of Episode 8.