u/RadDudesman

It's been over 10 years since RWBY started.

At some point, we really have to stop treating it like it's still a scrappy little indie web series that gets a pass because “they're doing their best with what they have.”

That excuse made sense in 2013. It doesn't really hold up anymore.

RWBY is now an established franchise, and with VIZ Media owning it, we're talking about a professional IP backed by an actual major media company. That means the series should be judged by the standards we'd apply to other professional animated productions.

And honestly? Volume 10 has a lot to prove.

After a decade, I don't want to hear about potential anymore. I want payoff. I want tighter writing, better pacing, character arcs that actually go somewhere, consequences that stick, and plot threads that feel like they're being deliberately brought together rather than continually pushed down the road.

RWBY has had years to figure out what kind of story it wants to be.

I'm not expecting perfection, and I'm not expecting it to suddenly become the greatest animated show ever made.

But after ten years, “it's an indie web series” just isn't a sufficient excuse anymore.

Volume 10 doesn't have to be perfect. But it really does need to show that RWBY has grown. The "potential" that the series has been coasting on isn't enough anymore, it needs to bear fruit.

The original scene was cool precisely because it was so fucking simple. Shanks shows up, gives the Sea King a death stare, and the thing just fucks off. That's it. You immediately get the impression that this guy is different without needing to know why.

And honestly, I think that's way cooler than retroactively going “yeah, that was Conqueror's Haki.”

Not every impressive thing a character does needs to be part of the power system. Sometimes a character can just be intimidating as hell.

The whole appeal of Shanks early on was that he was this mysterious dude where you had no idea what his deal was. He doesn't need to start throwing around named abilities in Chapter 1 for us to understand that he's dangerous.

I also don't really buy the “Haki was always there” argument. Sure, you can reinterpret the scene as Haki after the fact. That doesn't mean Oda necessarily wrote it with Conqueror's Haki specifically in mind.

By “Boba Fett Effect,” I mean characters becoming massively popular because they look cool, act mysterious, and radiate aura despite not actually accomplishing much.

Kubo is so good at character design and presentation that he can make a character feel legendary before they’ve earned it. A guy walks in with a ridiculous outfit, says one hard line, reveals a Bankai, gets a double-page spread, and fans immediately declare him “HIM.”

Then you check his actual résumé and it’s:

• showed up
• explained his ability
• looked cool
• got countered
• lost

The Visored are probably the funniest example. Former captains and lieutenants with both Shinigami and Hollow powers should be monsters, yet half their purpose seems to be putting on cool masks before getting folded.

Shinji especially has one of the coolest designs and abilities in the series, but somehow spends more time explaining how his powers work than actually winning with them.

The Espada are similar. Their introductions, designs, Resurreccións, and general presentation make them feel like unstoppable monsters, but a lot of them ultimately exist to give captains cool fights.

Starrk is beloved, but what did he actually accomplish? He fought some captains, looked incredibly cool, and died.

Squad Zero might be the peak of this. They’re introduced as the Royal Guard, stronger collectively than the Gotei 13, with members who invented fundamental parts of Soul Society itself. In the original manga, their performance compared to that hype was laughable.

And then there’s Ukitake, who might be the king of being respected entirely through implication. One of the oldest captains, trained by Yamamoto, supposedly insanely powerful, universally respected… Actual combat résumé? Basically a LinkedIn recommendation with a sword.

That’s the thing with Bleach: fans constantly confuse strength, accomplishments, narrative importance, and aura.

A character can be canonically powerful and still accomplish almost nothing.

A character can have an amazing Bankai and still lose every important fight.

A character looking cool while getting folded does not mean they didn’t get folded.

But Kubo gets away with it because he might be one of the best mangaka ever at making characters look important. He can make standing still feel like a feat.

So Bleach ends up full of characters you remember as absolute legends, until you reread the series and ask, “Wait, what did this guy actually do?”

Usually, the answer is:

Not much. But he looked cool as fuck doing it.

I’ve never really understood why some anime feel the need to literally use video game mechanics even when the characters aren't actually in a video game.

Like HP bars, XP, skill trees, stat windows, cooldowns, damage numbers, “leveling up,” etc. It just feels kinda stupid when the setting is supposed to be an actual world.

And the funny thing is, most anime that are actually based on video games don't even do this.

Take Pokémon. The games are basically built around levels, stats, turn-based battles, type matchups, four-move limits, PP, evolution, all that stuff.

But the Pokémon anime doesn't just go, “Okay, Pikachu has 43 HP left and Thunderbolt has 8 PP remaining.”

It basically takes the premise of Pokémon and asks:

“Okay, what if Pokémon were actually real?”

And I think that's way more interesting.

Battles become actual battles instead of just selecting moves from a menu. Pokémon can move around however they want, use the environment, dodge attacks, come up with weird strategies, etc. The anime takes the basic idea from the game and expands it into what that world might actually look like.

That's what I wish more anime would do.

Instead of:

>“Congratulations! You gained 500 XP and unlocked Fireball II!”

just show that the character has gotten better at magic.

Obviously if the entire premise is that they're inside a video game, then yeah, use all the game mechanics you want. That's the point.

But if it's supposed to be a real fantasy world, I don't need a floating menu telling me a character's "stats". You can just show them.

Before this, fights had a real sense of progression. You could see someone getting worn down over the course of the battle. Broken limbs, busted ribs, characters barely being able to stand. By the end of the fight, they looked and fought like people who'd been through hell.

Goku vs. Vegeta is probably the best example. Goku completely destroys his own body with Kaioken, Vegeta gets his face smashed in, his eye crushed, gets hit by a Spirit Bomb, flattened by Great Ape Gohan... by the end he's crawling away because he literally can't fight anymore.

Then you get Goku vs. Frieza, and it's mostly ripped clothes and blood running out of their mouths.

The worst example is Frieza himself. He gets cut in half, loses an arm, and in the manga you can literally see his guts spilling out. Yet it's treated as little more than an inconvenience. He's still talking, still firing attacks, still trying to kill Goku. An injury that would've ended any previous Dragon Ball fight barely slows him down.

And that becomes the blueprint for the rest of the series. Characters don't really lose because their injuries catch up to them anymore. They lose because they run out of stamina, can't regenerate anymore, or finally get hit by a bigger blast. Physical damage becomes mostly cosmetic unless it's the finishing blow. Fights are now dictated by invisible HP bars.

This isn't to say Goku vs. Frieza is a bad fight. But it fundamentally changed Dragon Ball fights, and the characters feel a lot less "human" from here on out.

I feel like battle shonen has started running into the exact same problem superhero comics have had for years: everyone has to have their own unique power.

At first that sounds awesome. It's fun seeing all the weird abilities authors come up with. But I think it creates a problem that people don't really talk about.

The second you give a character a unique ability, you're telling the audience, "Hey, this person matters." If someone has a really cool or versatile power, of course people are going to expect them to actually do something with it.

So then what happens?

They lose every fight.

Or they disappear for 150 chapters.

Or they only exist to get bodied so we know how strong the villain is.

Then people complain that the character was wasted, and honestly, I don't think that's an unreasonable complaint. The story itself built those expectations.

It's basically the same issue superhero comics have. Marvel and DC have hundreds of heroes, all with their own gimmicks, powers, and fanbases, but there's no way everyone can get meaningful moments consistently. So you end up with dozens of characters who feel like they should be important but never really accomplish much.

Battle shonen is getting there too.

Instead of having a few major fighters and a bunch of regular supporting characters, every named character gets their own personalized ability. The cast gets bigger and bigger, but the amount of spotlight doesn't. So now you've got 20 characters with awesome abilities fighting over enough screentime for maybe five of them.

I honestly think the solution is to stop giving everyone powers.

Have more normal people.

Have soldiers who are just really disciplined. Have detectives, medics, martial artists, strategists, engineers, civilians, whatever. Let them contribute without needing a flashy, one-of-a-kind ability.

Because if a character is just a normal guy doing his best, nobody expects him to suddenly get a huge solo fight against the main villain. But if you introduce someone with this incredibly unique reality-warping, shadow-controlling, gravity-bending ability, people are naturally going to ask why they spend 90% of the series eating dirt.

Ironically, I think unique powers would actually feel more special if fewer people had them.

Not every member of the supporting cast needs to be "the guy who controls sound waves" or "the girl who manipulates ink" or "the dude whose blood turns into chains." Sometimes it's okay for someone to just be a person.

Saving the coolest, most unique abilities for the characters who are actually central to the story would make those powers stand out more and keep fans from constantly feeling like half the cast got wasted.

Tl;dr We need more Rock Lees (people with no powers, just pure martial arts) or people whose powers and skills aren't combat-related. Bulma is considered the third most important character in Dragon Ball by both the creators and fans precisely because she doesn't fight; she has a niche as the tech wizard who can invent whatever device the plot needs, something no one else on the cast can do. Because she was never fighter to begin with, she never became outclassed.

I've been watching a bunch of cartoon pitch pilots on YouTube lately, and I think I figured out one of the biggest differences between a lot of these and the shows that actually make it.

A lot of them just don't seem to have a show.

Like, they might have cool character designs, funny dialogue, good animation, and characters who have fun chemistry with each other. But then you get to the end and you're left wondering: "Okay, but what do these people actually do?"

There are thousands of these pitch pilots online, and compared to the cartoons that actually got picked up, there's a weird lack of a world, goal, premise, or formula in a lot of them.

The characters have personalities, but they don't really have wants.

They're not trying to master all four elements and defeat the Firelord to end a hundred-year war. They're not trying to solve mysteries, run a business, survive in a weird fantasy world, become superheroes, win competitions, or accomplish anything that naturally creates stories.

A lot of them are basically just "these quirky friends live together and hang out." The entire premise is that the characters have funny interactions, and while that can absolutely work, it feels like a hard thing to build an entire series around.

Even shows that are mostly about people hanging out usually have some kind of engine behind them. The Simpsons has the family and the town. Regular Show has two guys trying to get through their weird jobs. Adventure Time has an entire fantasy world to explore. It's Always Sunny (not a cartoon, but the point applies) has a group of terrible people constantly creating their own problems.

You need something that keeps generating situations.

I think a lot of pitch pilots confuse "characters I like watching" with "a premise that can support 100 episodes." A character can be funny for 7 minutes, but what happens when you need 22 minutes every week for years?

Obviously not every cartoon needs some huge quest or lore-heavy story. A simple premise can work. But there needs to be something that makes these characters do things instead of just existing.

I wonder if this is something other people have noticed with failed cartoon pilots. There are a lot of genuinely talented people making these, but sometimes it feels like they created characters before they created a show.

Writer: "This death will be emotional. It'll raise the stakes."

Several years later...

Writer: "Wait... this new storyline would be perfect for that character."

"...Oh right."

At that point they basically have two choices:

• Bring the character back somehow.
• Create a new character who's basically Dollar Store Version™ of the one they killed off.

And honestly, I think bringing them back is often the less awkward option.

You see this all over popular media. Comics are the obvious example. Characters die, then eventually someone realizes, "Actually... we still have a lot we could do with them," so they're back.

But it happens outside comics too. Sometimes a TV show kills off someone who was the glue holding a certain group dynamic together, and a season later there's suddenly a new character who's suspiciously similar because the writers realized they still needed someone to fill that role.

The thing is, characters aren't just powersets or job titles. They have history. Relationships. Chemistry with the rest of the cast. You can't just swap them out and expect it to feel the same.

That's why replacement characters so often feel off. You can practically see the outline of the original character underneath them.

I think writers sometimes focus so much on whether a death will have a big emotional impact right now that they don't ask whether they're going to regret losing that character five years from now.

Character deaths should be one of those decisions where you stop and ask yourself: "Am I absolutely sure I'm never going to want to use this character again?"

Because if the answer ends up being "Actually... yeah, I kind of do," then you're left with either resurrecting them or introducing Great Value™ version of them, and neither option is ideal.

Now, there are plenty of undone deaths that are just pandering or laziness, but more often, it happens because the writer is an imperfect human being who either didn't think the death through or didn't expect their story to last long enough for the character's death to leave a noticeable void in it.

Part 1 spammed the **** out of this theme (each Hokage until Tsunade was said to be stronger than the previous one, the Chunin Exams had more ninja make it past the Forest of Death than any previous generation and so they needed a preliminary round), and it continued into early Part 2. Then Hashirama and Madara got retconned into being gods, and this theme was pretty much forgotten. Pretty much all the "old gen" characters put their modern counterparts to shame. So there was no payoff to the "every generation is better than the last" theme

>Game Freak’s Beast of Reincarnation arrives with high expectations. The action role-playing game, due Aug. 4, was widely seen by fans as a chance for the Pokemon developer to show what it could do beyond the long-running series.

>Early previews indicated a massive departure from the creature-capturing and battling mechanics Game Freak has become known for. Even skeptical fans had hope for a new action RPG franchise and a potentially renewed creative spark for future Pokemon titles.

>On July 23, I was among about 20 reviewers invited to a closed-door demo of Beast of Reincarnation limited to the game’s prologue and first chapter.

>Despite some fertile world-building and decent sound design, Beast of Reincarnation plays like a bland, paint-by-numbers action RPG that borrows elements from more successful games without satisfactory execution, often leaving you wondering why they’re there at all.

>For example, parrying is one of Beast of Reincarnation’s crucial gameplay elements. Set in a postapocalyptic Japan in the year 4026, the game follows Emma, an outcast infected by a mysterious blight, as she battles golems (automatons both docile and rogue) and malefacts (creatures infected by the same blight). Emma’s successful parries charge a meter and unlock attacks from her canine companion, Koo, who also has the blight.

>Parrying is a common mechanic in many modern action RPGs, and games such as the critically acclaimed Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice and the award-winning Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 make it central to combat.

>But blocking an enemy’s blows is only as interesting as the enemies throwing them. In Sekiro, as well as this year’s Nioh 3, enemies attack in a rhythm that is challenging yet comprehensible and exploitable. The pleasure lies in overcoming the initial difficulty, discerning how to chip away at an enemy’s health and occasionally punishing them with massive attacks.

>In Beast of Reincarnation, by contrast, most enemies have just one or two attack patterns, reducing parrying to a rote exercise. Even the nushi, blight-infected guardian spirit animals that serve as each level’s boss, rarely move beyond this paradigm.

>Even above-average action RPGs typically use boss battles to introduce more aggressive and varied attacks, pushing players into greater danger and, ultimately, greater triumph. In Beast of Reincarnation however, the second phase of this climactic fight is essentially a repeat of the first. Even on higher difficulty levels, combat that should be the most rewarding fails to become more than the sum of its disjointed parts.

>Combat is only one of Beast of Reincarnation’s problems. The game also struggles with its soundtrack, particularly whenever the airy J-pop ballad that plays during exploration abruptly transitions to a generic battle anthem when the player encounters an enemy. And on the storytelling front, Emma as a character is largely devoid of emotion despite her harrowing circumstances; the game presents some brief justification for this, but it still amounts to a main character more akin to a brick wall than a likeable avatar for the player.