Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-25049191-20140725062625/@comment-14909251-20140726032707

As someone who has watched a lot of animé, read a decent amount of manga, and was not some devotee of Rooster Teeth (I watched some of RvB a long time ago, but not much), I rather like this series. I don't think it's perfect. Many times I have been disappointed and the trailers were a headfake for me as well. That said, it is hardly reasonable to expect something incredible right out of the gates with the story and voice-acting. RoosterTeeth started out by doing joke skits in Halo multiplayer and uploading the videos to the Internet. Until RWBY their only big series was RvB and the rest was basically joke stuff anyone could manage. Monty is not someone with a long record of experience in writing, nor are Miles and Kerry. You are talking a low-budget, indie series where voice-acting is typically done in-house trying to do a relatively major production. Most big studios can bring in writers with experience when doing a show.

When you look at online produtions on major online platforms like on Netflix or Hulu, they tend to have the backing of major studios and people with significant experience in the entertainment industry. Here we are basically talking about a bunch of glorified Youtubers trying to compete with the big name studios. For various reasons, they are going to fall short of your expectations in terms of quality. I do not think the story itself is as big a problem as the dialogue, personally, since I think the universe is well-constructed overall and actually rather fascinating. "Originality" is kind of a vague notion and is mostly about the take you offer on recurring story elements rather than not having story elements people recognize. The universe is fairly original in that respect, even if the stuff we have seen up to this point in terms of dialogue is not particularly ground-breaking. In time I would expect them to improve on the writing and the voice-acting as they have improved on the animating just in the move to Volume 2.

As to what you said about Ruby and Weiss, my feeling is that the trailers are not completely off. Monty says Ruby was out of character, but I think one can easily rationalize it as a product of the whole "visiting her mother's grave" thing. With Weiss I have no doubt that she is not the "bitch" you think and that what we saw in the trailer is truer to her nature than what we have seen in the series so far. I would even suggest that there are glimmers of it on occasion if you pay close attention. Basically, give it time and it may surprise. Even if it doesn't, it will still have its funny moments and epic action sequences.