Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-94.8.221.186-20180402122306/@comment-4010415-20180402134838

If you watch for the characters, it's still good. I enjoy watching the characters.

But... while Volume 4 was alright, most of Volume 5 was boring. It's not even a matter of overanalyzing at this point - Volume 5 was mostly the characters just sitting around talking, and too much of it was things we already know. This isn't even a complaint of "There wasn't enough fighting and action", it's "People sitting around talking gets boring when they do it for several episodes straight. I wish they would go somewhere or do something."

The beginning of Volume 5 was promising, but then it quickly dropped into 99% nothing.

There's also the fact that the Battle of Haven was horribly underwhelming. They built it up so much, as this really important, dramatic event, and then it was disjointed and bland. What I mean by "disjointed" is that they kept switching between the characters too much and in a way where it was hard to get invested in any of the fights or in what a lot of the characters were doing. Too much of the fighting happened off-screen, and there was too much standing around in the middle of battle, which didn't make any sense. Why did the bad guys let RWY, JNR, Oscar, and Qrow just stand around so often?! This isn't a "stop and analyze" thing, this is what I was thinking about while watching the episodes for the first time! It felt weird that the good guys got to take a breather in the middle of a battle! The only time the good guys got to take a break during the Battle of Beacon was when all the enemies in the area were defeated!

It baffles me when I compare it to the Battle of Beacon. They had around the same amount of time to show the battle, and the Battle of Haven all took place in one single location, whereas the Battle of Beacon took place in multiple different locations, and yet the Battle of Beacon was done much, much better.

The Battle of Beacon was intense, dramatic, and interesting to watch. It was easy to get invested. The Battle of Haven was not. The only fight in the Battle of Haven that was actually well done was Cinder vs Raven.

So... yeah... Volume 5 started strong, dropped into "Doing nothing but sitting around talking for so long that it got really boring", and finished off with underwhelming blah. The writers rushed the characters to Mistral for this, and it wasn't worth it. We didn't even stay in Mistral that long. We didn't even see much of Mistral proper at all.

At least in Volume 4, we actually saw the characters doing things, and things were happening.

I do like Volume 4, though not as much as Volumes 2 and 3. Volume 5 was really bleh, with everything except the first couple episodes and the characters.