Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-25025248-20150719005825/@comment-25555436-20150720182739

Kev.soupie wrote:

Well that's Monty Oum first time directing the actual web series and writing which is why he needs some help from the guy who does RVB writing. I mean how can you expect for the writer and director to make the series perfect without mistake for the very first time? I wasn't expecting him to do a perfect job right from the start, not even great. I expected a 5-6/10, but RWBY falls on 3 at best.

Bad Writing was not Monty's fault, it was Miles and Kerry's, for multiple reasons. For starters, they "trained" by watching hundreds of Shonen Animes. This was a bad idea; they have horrible writing most of the time, and the exceptions were barely present on the list they watched. They are also extremely cliché, especially adaptations of Shonen Jump's mangas.

Plus, Miles has never worked on something like RWBY. Most of the things he wrote for either didn't have a real plot, didn't need a plot, or had a simplistic one. The "training" didn't help. Result was a writing so terrible, it's full of snark bait and asking for insults, which it gets. A lot.

Now, Monty does have some part of responsiblity here though. According to Miles, he just gave them the OK. In other words, they wrote the episode, then he just said "OK", not checking any issues or problems or anything. There's also the fact that Miles and Kerry wrote the episodes while DRUNK. While RT isn't the most profesional group, how do you expect to do a good job like that?

Besides, Monty did visit TvTropes sometimes, so he must have known at least some tropes, and how they can be used. Plus, there are things that no matter how good or bad your writing skills are, they are just common sense, such as giving the main characters a main role in the story (Yang was, despite being the Y of RWBY, a very secondary character in all of Vol.1) and most importantly character development (Ruby has spent 2 fucking volumes with 0 character development or even implications towards it).

On the Direction aspect, that was Monty's fault. In that aspect, he did, honestly, a piss-poor job. For starters, shitty Time Management. Volume 1 was made inconsistently, which shows on it's episodes. Some were so short it's like they were rushed to be released, and the quality on every episode raises and lowers like a roller coaster.

Second of all, the crater joke showed that there was at least in Vol.1 no communication between each section of the team. The writers wrote a scene for a joke, the Crater Joke, and it included a Crater. Problem was, the Animation team was not able to make a Crater. They still went with the joke, without changing or removing the parts that involved mentioning the Non-Existant Crater. It didn't even require much, just get up, tell Miles they couldn't make a crater and to change it or remove it from the joke, and done. It didn't need much else (just Ruby saying she exploded was funny enough on it's own).

And of course, Monty's response to criticism, which basically amounts to "haters gonna hate". His words were more than just that of course, but it basically amounts to that. Now, while most of the criticism RWBY got was often shit-posting more than real criticism, many people that have given it Caustic Criticism did have a point, and just because it sounds mean it doesn't mean it's any less true.

The animation outside fights was dreadful often, and the plot is a joke, a snark-bait festival. It's cliché to the Nth degree. The villains, especially the Grimm, seem less threatening than rats. The exposition it's either forced, or does not explain enough. 7/10 things in this wiki are speculation instead of facts, because we are like Jon Snow: We know nothing, or next to nothing, about pretty all of RWBY, thanks to the lack of explanation.

They improved on the obvious areas, animation and visuals. The writing is better paced but also arguably got worse if you analyze it deep enough (close to nit-picking). The villains still are a joke, after Breach even more, which makes the whole "the Grimm are so dangerous people need to live on the kingdoms or die" stuff seem like Blatant Lies pulled out of their asses to try to explain why Hunters exist. The WoR tried to rectify the explanation issues, but it explained the things we already knew, and not what we didn't, barely anything new.

With that in mind, If I was the director or at least writer, I would try to fix some of those problems, and probably make things a bit darker if only to make the Grimm actually dangerous. Anything else is more secondary than those 2 objectives, except for, of course, making sure the new direction still follows Monty's plan.