For a long time, RWBY has been subject to a non-stop debate over whether or not it qualifies as anime or is merely anime-inspired like Avatar. Starting last year, one of the things that fans in favor of the anime argument could cite was news of RWBY getting a monthly manga adaptation in Shonen Jump, and fans were eager to see how RWBY would do in the 2d medium. After all, RWBY’s biggest weakness for years has been its rough start in Volume 1, a weakness that CRWBY to this day highlight and presents a significant roadblock for anyone trying to get into the series today.

A manga adaptation, meanwhile, would be able to finally smooth out that roadblock with a more concise adaptation that carried the storybeats but would omit the more questionable aspects, and while it would suffer from not being able to properly adapt the fight scenes that RWBY built its credibility on, it would be a small price to pay for a concise retelling of the rockier volumes.

But rather unfortunately, RWBY’s Shonen Jump Manga has proven to be a massive disappointment despite an incredibly solid start. At the time of writing, the ninth chapter has just been released, marking the beginning of the adaptation for Volume 2 and the official halfway mark of the manga (as it has been said since launch that the plan is to only adapt the first two volumes). While the manga started out well with a very well-received adaptation of the first half of Volume 1 and its initiation arc (barring grumbling from Ren and Nora fans about the two getting 90% of their screentime cut from the manga), many of the following chapters have felt far less competently made in comparison, with far more content being cut than preserved and precious little new, original content being added to fill in the ever-growing gaps. Even if the manga planned to go past Volume 2 at this point, some of its omissions would stall the pacing as it frantically rectifies past mistakes, with entire establishing beats for characters being left out. As such, tonight I would like to go over where I feel the Shonen Jump adaption by Bunta Kinami has fallen flat.

1) What it does right- Ruby and Blake’s early characters

To start though, I want to highlight why a lot of people gave the manga a shot in the first place, and that was giving Ruby a far more dynamic personality in the manga than she does in the show, while also making Blake far more consistently written.

Ruby in her main show has a bit of a problem with her character, something I and many others have pointed out over the years- she’s not a great main character, put bluntly. And while Volume 6 did finally begin to solve the issues with her character, mostly by just giving her agency and making her an actual leader, further steps do need to be taken for the sake of Ruby’s character and growth… chief among which being giving her a new song for the first time in six soundtracks, Jeff.

The manga did a wonderful job with Ruby its early stages, letting her treat her situation with more gravitas and less comedy than the show itself did. She has a far more serious answer about the Huntsmen Academies when asked by Ozpin about them:

She even gets to be far more confrontational with Weiss in the adaptation and far less passive than she was in canon, saying “A jerk with a bad attitude like you could never cut it as a Huntress.” Ozpin also asks Ruby why she wants to be a Huntress, which she gets to answer at the end of the chapter:

This is actually a rather crucial moment in Ruby’s character. Instead of just stating it outright that she wants to be a hero, she answers after being berated by Weiss during the bedtime scene. She is told she’s at Beacon for no reason, and that she has no goals and is a dim-witted child, but Ruby once again stands up for herself. She doesn’t care if her dream is stupid or dull, she wants to be a hero like the stories she read. It’s a far better version of Ruby than the one seen in RWBY prime, and the early chapters paint a far more vivid portrait of the world of Remnant. Even still, Weiss’s hostility drags Ruby’s mood down, and the manga shows that neither of them wanted to be partners with each other at first. Ruby at first is content to let Weiss leave her be, only for inspiring words from Yang to motivate her to find Weiss and team up with her against the Grimm. Ruby saves Weiss, but she still isn’t friendly with her. She tells her that she didn’t want to be her partner, but letting her die would not be right and she wouldn’t be the Huntress she wanted to be if she let that happen.



The manga overall does a stellar job of informing Ruby’s character and giving her a far more dynamic arc than the show did, which it does by effectively translating comedic scenes into more dramatic ones and removing some of Ruby’s optimism to make her far more sympathetic and human.

Blake, on the other side of the coin, gets the benefit of more consistent writing when the manga makes her the protagonist of the final parts of Volume 1.

I’m going to highlight some grievances with Kinami’s art style later in this post (especially his very whimsical relationship with backgrounds) but I will highlight that when he’s on his game he can deliver some stellar art, as seen here with Blake’s Faunus reveal and the Grimm in general.

One of the benefits to the more compressed nature of the adaptation is removing some of the more choice aspects made by CRWBY, such as Sun following Blake for two whole days and them casually chatting in a cafe. Instead, their first major scene together is on the day of her argument with Weiss, and Blake only talks to Sun after he gains her interest, and only opens up to him after he proves that he has a good moral compass.

Blake’s characterization is also far more consistent here. Whereas her loner nature in the early volumes was far more of an informed attribute, here she’s genuinely a loner. It helps that some of her more egregious out of character behavior has been removed with the offending episodes such as Badge and the Burden, which had her joining in RWY’s antics after just a day of knowing them. This had the unintended effect of making Blake’s character very hard to pin down as a consequence (M&K have since admitted Blake was the hardest character to write for a while and it does show). In the manga, Blake only speaks as much as she needs to and remains on guard around Sun. Even as she tells him a bit of her past in a far-better-flowing scene than canon, she only reveals a little about herself, just enough that he knows where she’s coming from, and when he brings up her team, the walls slam shut in Sun’s face almost immediately. Blake definitely benefits just as much as Ruby when it comes to the manga’s attention, making one of the more inconsistently written characters of early RWBY far more sympathetic and consistent.

Pity about Yang though, but them’s the Volume 1 breaks.

2) Story and character omissions

With that out of the way unfortunately, it’s time to delve into the manga’s most significant problem, in its breakneck pace and tendency to skip much of the side content not directly related to Team RWBY themselves. Even as far back as Chapter 1, the manga was skipping over character introductions- Cinder does not appear as Roman’s pilot- but that omission worked for the better in that it helped set up Roman’s skills and kept him in the forefront as the main antagonist until Cinder’s reveal after the docks battle. The real problem comes when the protagonists are losing not just their intro scenes, but many of their establishing scenes to boot.

Ren and Nora get done dirty by the manga, there really is no other way to put it. Their intro dialogue is completely cut in favor of going to the Jaune, Weiss and Pyrrha locker talk, Ren’s fight with the King Taijitu is entirely cut, with Pyrrha’s Aura explanation instead being layered over Yang and Blake fighting some Ursa. They finally get to appear right before the Players and Pieces battle, but even then they play second fiddle to Jaune and Pyrrha. They don’t even get their small moments in the Jaundice arc, as that’s cut entirely, but we’ll get back to that later. As someone rather cynically put it in a server I frequent, “It’s like they put V5 ReNora into V1.” Even as someone who has argued in favor of having Ren and Nora leave the show, if only temporarily, to help with its character bloat problem, it actually hurts to see Kinami outright remove basically every one of their major scenes and reduce them to background filler status.

And on the villains side, Emerald and Mercury have been similarly mishandled. The Volume 1 finale chapter only has them in shadow as Cinder makes her debut, but the opening chapter to Volume 2 doesn’t include either of their major scenes- assassinating Tukson or meeting with Roman and Cinder at the warehouse, and the exclusion of the second scene in particular means that V2′s plot suffers as we don’t see the dynamic of the villains. At this rate I expect Pyrrha’s battles against CRDL and Mercury to both be cut because CRDL have already been completely annexed from the story while Mercury is two for two on getting shafted. It especially hurts that these two have been excluded from the manga, as one of my hopes going in was that the manga could slow down and take a more leisurely pace to explore the world of RWBY, which would also allow for more interactions that the show couldn’t or wouldn’t allow such as Emerald with team RWBY or the ever-coveted inter RWBY-JNPR moments. Additional lore for the side characters like CFVY and SSSN (at least before the CFVY saga decided to steal that wig) was something the fans have wanted for years and the manga not being constrained by the financial burdens of 3D animation gave Kinami an effective blank check to chisel his own mark into the world of RWBY.

But alas, the manga seems deadset on only adapting moments directly involving Team RWBY themselves, and even then episodes like The Badge and the Burden are left on the chopping room block barring a single panel of Weiss wanting her notebook back.

Badge and the Burden’s exclusion does make some sense with context- its purpose is to have Weiss and Ruby butt heads over Ruby’s leadership style, which the manga had already done during the Initiation. Having Weiss repeat this argument would have been redundant and added little to the story so its exclusion made relative sense and it was clever of Kinami to adopt the conflict into Initiation to flesh out Ruby and Weiss’s characters.

Jaundice being completely skipped, on the other hand, does not. Without it we skip the arc of Jaune revealing that he forged his way into Beacon, we skip him stepping up and proving his mettle against the Ursa, we skip CRDL entirely and the chance to finally answer why Velvet was in Oobleck’s history class, and we skip Pyrrha’s Semblance reveal, alongside skipping yet more ReNora screentime. Even as someone who has railed against Jaundice in the past, which I have, and CRWBY themselves have admitted disappointment with the episodes, that’s not an excuse to skip them. The manga’s retelling should serve, as seen with how Ruby and Blake’s characters were refined, as a way to remedy the past mistakes RWBY had without sinking millions of dollars into pointless remakes of Volumes 1-3 (can we please stop asking CRWBY to reanimate the volumes btw). Just skipping past these controversial episodes shouldn’t be the way to approach a retelling. After all, what’s the point of doing the entire retelling if I can just achieve the same effect by scrolling down the playlist for six episodes?

Especially after the Initiation, the manga has adopted a breakneck pace. With only two volumes to adapt it feels as if Kinami is rushing to get to the end of the series so he can move on to another project, and the art’s slow decline in quality reflects this. The manga is made as a monthly release and yet often scenes will have minimal background details drawn and will just go for plain white backgrounds- an acceptable tactic for weekly releases of manga, but as seen with other monthly manga like Attack on Titan, Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure or Vinland Saga, those series all look insanely good and usually go for backgrounds all the time. Hajime Isayama, the mangaka behind Attack on Titan, has even spoken about how he has a good work/life balance with the monthly schedule, and he’s been on the monthly schedule for going on an entire decade. Kinami’s lack of detail in the backgrounds and character arts can be put down to sheer inexperience (this is his breakout manga), but that itself raises the question of why Kinami was chosen despite a lack of recorded experience and if he was only chosen because he was cheaper than some other mangaka Shonen had on hand. Unless something is going horribly wrong, the manga should not be skipping as much content as it is, while looking as rough as it sometimes can.

What in the name of God happened to Ironwood’s chin?!

Kinami’s art as the series has progressed still retains that flair that made the opening chapters so engrossing, but the regularity of this goes from every few pages to maybe once or twice a chapter. While several character reveals such as Roman and Cinder carry their character’s attitudes and airs with style, others such as Ironwood (as seen above) and ReNora carry far less weight as a consequence. Parts of the manga almost carry the air that Kinami himself doesn’t care for the adaptation- that he’s just doing this for the paycheck and is turning in below-average work because he hopes to use RWBY as a springboard to launch his own series. Alternatively, news from RTX 2019 that the manga would be getting a physical release in 2020 may indicate a need to rush the volume to make sure everything’s ready to be printed. That Kinami has the whole story pre-written for him just makes this all the more odd.

I still wish Shirow Miwa had been hired to do the Shonen Jump manga. His adaptations of the trailers still make for RWBY’s best manga content to date- not that this is a difficult title to hold.

Really the worst part for me is that Kinami has shown that he can make changes from the original script for the better, most notably with Ruby and Blake’s development, but post-Initiation he barely lets himself off the leash. The cut content such as ReNora was at least more tolerable when it was justified as “making room for new content that improves on the original,” but now that we’re just getting abridge retellings of the episodes and little in the way of new material, it’s harder to justify that stance.

Kinami, you had a month to draw this chapter and the most you could do for the background was some shadows and Mercury’s hair?!

Perhaps the worst part of how disappointing the manga has become is that this might damage RWBY’s chances of reigniting interest in Japan. While the fandom does occasionally bring up how RWBY exploded in popularity in Japan, that interested has waned heavily during the Mistral Era. Volume 4 remains the final season to be dubbed in Japanese, with multiple Japanese fans blaming the tone shift and departure from Beacon as major reasons for the lack of interest after Volume 3, and as such Warner Bros have yet to even announce or tease dubs for Volumes 5 or 6 (something that’s especially odd after the high number of A-grade voice actors Warner got for RWBY- seriously, Raven’s JP voice is Megumi Hayashibara, one of the most high-profile Japanese female VAs since the 90s).

Add in that Volume 6 is not yet available on Youtube and Japanese fans can’t even easily generate fansubs on local video sites such as NicoNico (where in the old days fans just downloaded the episodes from YT to sub them). One can even see the lack of interest in the Mistral Era in how at the RWBY Banzai 3 event in Japan this year, most of the photographed cosplayers were still going as Beacon Era characters..

That awkward moment when more people went as Flynt and Junior’s thugs than Mistral-era RWBY.

The Shonen Jump manga had a critical chance to regain interest in the Japanese fanbase. Having RWBY in a published format and retelling the story that originally took the JP fanbase by storm could have revived hype for the show in the land of the rising sun, enough that Warner may have been tempted to finally go through with dubs for Volumes 5 and 6 to see if the fans would be more willing to tolerate the post-Beacon tone shift. If it worked out, then the series would have regained a lot of interest and made bank for Warner and Rooster Teeth. But if Kinami’s adaptation fails to properly adapted Volumes 1 and 2, the already-beloved Volumes in Japan, it’s hard to see how this rapidly-dwindling manga will fail to generate enough buzz to jumpstart another dub.

Sun and Roman’s gunchuck battle, still said to this day to be one of the best fights of the entire show for many people, is reduced to just two panels and some smear frames. It’s almost sad.



Perhaps the sadder (or funnier depending on how you see it) part of the manga’s decline in quality is how many members of the community were excited for it. Several Youtubers even made the lofty claim after the opening chapters that it would be “better than the show,” and that it would “fix” RWBY, both of which are claims that cannot be said to have aged well.

Again I will admit that Kinami’s art style fits RWBY very well, and these covers are proof that he can generate amazing looking art for the series when properly motivated.

The choices made when adapting Volume 1 leave me with little hope that the manga will turn around and solve my problems with Volume 2′s depiction. While I hope to see the spark of creativity that helped Ruby and Blake in Volume 1 resurface with other characters, especially once the team reach Mountain Glenn, I’m overall very sour on the manga as it moves into Volume 2.

Conclusion

Kinami’s Shonen Jump manga started out incredibly well for RWBY, offering a concise retelling of the first arc of the series and expanding on/fleshing out Ruby’s character, while also offering a far more consistent take on Blake. Unfortunately as the manga has progressed, the content it cuts out and lack of character interactions outside of RWBY themselves have begun to drag the quality of the manga with it. The art fails to impress for something made on a monthly basis (at times almost looking like a rushed weekly manga instead), many backgrounds are just nonexistent and entire plots and characters have been left on the cutting room floor, leaving for a plot that will steadily become more difficult to follow if this haphazard approach to deciding what arcs to cover or not remains in place. While potential still exists for this manga to be good, it’s failed to meet the expectations I had for it as Volume 1 progressed, let alone the ones I had pre-release. I wanted the manga to be great, and to prove such a hit that it reignited interest in Japan that could potentially lead to more of the series being dubbed in Japan. But alas, RWBY’s Shonen Jump manga is just an average at best retelling of content that has already been adapted before, and a retelling that will likely fail to even provide a more concise retelling at that. It could pull itself together now that it’s in Volume 2 and has a wider sandbox to draw from, but judging by how the first Volume 2 chapter already cut out Mercury and Emeralds’ introduction and the adorably fun scene of RWBY playing board games together, I won’t get my hopes up.

Thank you for reading.