After an uncertain future with the closure of Rooster Teeth, RWBY has officially announced that Volume 10 is now in progress, with the show having found a new home with VIZ Media. I’ve watched RWBY from the beginning, and I even remember seeing the first trailers being released, so I know that it’s been rough to be a fan of the series. It’s not because of any one person’s fault that the series has been in situations that left its future feeling uncertain, but because of bad luck and unfortunate circumstances. Now that the show has another chance, I need it to fix this one element.
If you’ve been following the show from the start, you know how rough its production has been at times. Rooster Teeth closing was an unexpected and difficult obstacle to handle, but it’s great that VIZ Media was willing to acquire the show and give it another chance. We also had the devastating loss of RWBY’s creator, Monty Oum, early on during the show’s run, but the show has always found a way to keep moving forward. Now, I hope that one of its biggest flaws is addressed in Volume 10 and beyond.
RWBY Has a Pacing Problem
RWBY’s pacing has been inconsistent at best from the beginning. I gave it a lot of lenience early on, especially since the episode lengths tended to be on the shorter side at that time. When you have a short runtime each week and have to do the work of introducing the characters and their world while you start to weave in plots, it’s easy to struggle with the pacing in the middle of it all since you might feel compelled to rush sections for the sake of fitting in everything you need to include.
However, the pacing problems in more recent volumes have felt more noticeable, and harder to look past. One element that contributes to this is the varying episode lengths. With a standard show, you generally have roughly the same runtime for each episode, but that seems to vary more when it comes to RWBY. I think that having a set time that’s consistent would be a great first step to help with pacing. When you’re creating content and being held to a set length of time, you learn how to make use of that time and get used to adjusting to it. It’s sometimes more difficult to work within that kind of confine, but the results tend to have higher levels of consistency.
Improving the Balance of Setting and Plot
Right now, the state of recent seasons feels like they spend more time setting up the area that the season is set in since the characters are traveling for the sake of fighting Salem’s forces. I would argue that Volume 9 spent the most time setting up the world that the season takes place in, and it wasn’t a beneficial choice. Volume 9 takes place in a world that team RWBY knows from a fairy tale in their world, so a lot of time goes into explaining that fairy tale and using it as a guide to reach the exit and return home.
While I like the concept of Volume 9, I don’t think the execution had enough time to do it justice. The amount of worldbuilding that needed to be balanced with plot and character development all at the same time was too much for the number of episodes and their length. This is also the volume where we see the stress and despair of previous volumes start pressing down on the characters, particularly Ruby, who has the added burden of being the team leader and one of the few Silver-Eyed Warriors who are still alive and able to fight Salem.
While this could’ve been an amazing season for emotional development beyond making Blake and Yang officially a couple, it feels like Ruby’s emotional arc was in the background for most episodes, then rushed through and resolved too quickly in the final episodes. Weiss, as Ruby’s partner, also receives a role in these emotional developments that’s lackluster at best. The result is a set of developments that are all squished together in a short amount of time, and none of them hit as hard as they could’ve.
I believe it would’ve been better to split the volume into two separate ones, but I also understand that there could’ve been reasons behind the scenes that led to the feeling of Volume 9 starting off rather slowly and then cramming in most of the action into the last episodes. If that’s the case, I hope that VIZ gives the RWBY team the time and resources needed to let the show make full use of its potential.
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