RWBY IX: Fractured Fairy Tales

[Reddish Mage]

I'm not sure there's even a single difference in RWBY that is as visually slight as the real-life difference between a college all-star and a pro (to say nothing of the Olympic athletes who are also college stars). Maybe Pyrrha vs. Mercury, and that's with Pyrrha holding back.

Pretty much all cartoon and animated media are founded on exaggeration, not just anime. The visual cues are different, but not the underlying characteristic. And anime has many gradations of exaggeration.

I sense more than a little...trepidation? Disdain? Hostility?...towards anime visuals in general and animesque features in RWBY, in particular, so I'll stop there.

Anime is great but RWBY should not be attacked because it fails to uphold anime tropes and it shouldn’t be expected to adhere to shounen formula or output shounen-style combat.

First of all, because typical shounen formula deserves to be messed with a bit for variety sake. Secondly and more importantly, because RWBY has a distinct visual and storytelling style that doesn’t work when you try to force anime-type expectations on it.

With Amber my only concern was that they hyped up the powers to be like, this god power that if people knew existed would destroy the peace of the entire world. And then she does something not even half as impressive as anyone with actual fight training.

My only really issue with the Penny scene is that everyone in universe acts like it's strange what Penny did, when that doesn't feel like it fits at all. Ruby at the very least shouldn't of been shocked by it.

Amber powers are hyped as being important but they were simply called “magic” and were not hyped as necessarily being god of combat powers.

Recall I speculated their power was literally over the seasons and could work to cause climate change and otherwise seariously screw the environment up.

I just want an admission that Amber is incrementally more powerful than say, what RWBJNR showed in combat up until that point (I’ll exempt Yang because of the Paladin stunt and Pyrrha because she was fully implied to be a super-huntress).

Ruby’s look of concern on Penny did seem premature, I can see lots of reason for her to be shocked and concerned but mostly because that is what Penny’s reaction is at what she herself did.

Let’s chalk it up this way. Penny has ample reason to be worried, the exaggerated reaction of the crowd and Ruby was from her hyper-worried perspective.

In hindsight, it’d make sense for that hype to be a lie. Maybe Ozpin and co. just didn’t want Pyrrha to know about the relics: So they invented another reason for the Maidens to be kept secret. That way, their newest pawn could be controlled with a minimum of leaked intel.

I don’t actually think that that’s canon, though. The inconsistency is far more likely to be the result of sloppy writing.

Ozpin’s group said the maiden’s were special and had magic powers that were highly sought after. They had reasons to hold back on the relics (they are, after all, working to keep those a secret even more so than the maidens).

The angle that Ozpin is a manipulative bastard that keeps everything secret to maintain his power over people is an angle that Raven has played up. The guy keeps a lot of secrets but he also has a lot of justification to keep secrets, like the relics that apparently have the power to gift the world to Salem on a silver platter. Most likely the group hides the relics because those are the real WMDs that Salem would readily set off.

Going between Ozpin either being a manipulative bastard or things being a continuity error is stretching the plot in two incompatible and bad ways. Things can be read naturally in a way that makes sense and should be read that way if possible.