The past three years of RWBY have been an utterly wild ride and I think the good people over at Rooster Teeth Animation managed to stick the landing. Given that said landing finished off with a note that grouped those three years into a neat little trilogy similar to it’s Beacon predecessor, I felt like writing about it.

This is going to be a series of posts looking into Volumes 4, 5 and 6 as well as a good many of the characters within it, a post-mortem of sorts for The Mistral Era.

VOLUME 4

The opening to our little three act play starts at RTX Austin, 2016. Exciting new character designs are revealed, as well as the V4 Ruby Short. Those who attended lost their minds over what they saw, and those who didn’t got to relive the crowd experience through a now infamous phone recording. Any actual analysis of the short itself would be difficult until October 3rd later that year, when the short would be release on YouTube two weeks prior to the volume premiere.

Discussion exploded. It was our first major piece of content in Maya, the fancy new “industry standard” animation engine we’d be using likely up until the show ended. Poser was an old habit of Monty’s, and by Volume 3 the team had started to hit the ceiling on what they could do with it. Plus, it would be easier to hire new animators if they were using something most students would be accustomed to.

The Maya shift was not easy. In slower, even still moments, the show looks absolutely beautiful.

In motion, things got a little jankier, to say the least. Volume 4 had an awful lot leading into it. This would be the first volume of the series without any animation work or choreography done by Monty, it would be seeing an animation engine change, the story was moving past the prologue - the community was excited, but also willing to give the season a lot of leeway. Expectations were simultaneously high and measured at once. That’s a notion you’ll be seeing a lot throughout this post in regards to V4, so keep it in mind.

Back to the animation of the short itself, the reaction, as is usual for RWBY, was overall positive while inviting a controversial discussion. Ruby wasn’t using her gun for mobility, a hallmark of her fighting style. Movement was stilted in places. There were so many threads discussing the new fight animation that it’s one of the few topics on the /r/RWBY subreddit we had to lock out for a week because it was so oversaturated.

Now this isn’t to say it was all bad. Many would say the show looked better than ever. The homage to Monty’s iconic Red Trailer was appreciated, and people loved seeing Crescent Rose’s war-scythe function again, so perhaps the CRWBY team weren’t totally lost without the series creator at the helm?

Volume 4 itself is quite experimental, unique in the regard that our four main heroines are completely split off from each other. It’s a bold writing choice that I still personally stand by, but it’s easy to understand those who don’t think it was the best route to take. RWBY isn’t quite RWBY without RWBY, but the absence of their dynamic, previously the status quo, resulted in some interesting character development and a lack of interest from fans who watched the show for it’s four leading heroines.

I’ll be talking about the openings in this post as well, because those too have quite the evolution over the course of The Mistral Era. Let’s Just Live isn’t great. It is personally my least favorite opening song and the accompanying animation is a little hit and miss. The opening visual of the four colours being sent across the world is neat, and the RNJR scene looks great. The positioning of JNPR themselves with a noticeable gap where the ‘P’ should be is appreciated. Weiss’s sequence isn’t as great, with some fairly boring transitions and then a laughably bad “zoom through the eye” transition from Jacques to Weiss. It’s an anime opening hallmark that they don’t quite manage to deliver all that well.

It caps off with an equally awkward shot of Weiss expressing her rage before moving on to Blake. Blake’s segment maintains the jerky, anime-esque movements until we go over to Yang, who actually has a lovely rotating shot thing going on that immediately gets across her conflict for the year. Fennec and Corsac look a little silly. We then go over to a shot of what I like referring to as Villain Mountain, which is definitely my favorite part of the opening, I’m sure due to my massive villain bias. I love the pan up from each of them, though the leaping Grimm to move into the big “hype” stage of the OP is again, not all there yet. I dislike the Ruby vs Tyrian section because it’s an opening spoiler, and nobody likes those. The Adam and Blake segment flows so poorly it became a meme. And then from there on the opening is pretty clean, Weiss’s summoning circle looks cool, JNR get a fun battle moment, and we leave off on some form of strange ice plane with our heroines looking on to the future.

Volume 4 marks the start of this new style of opening, far more similar to typical anime then the first three the show had. CRWBY aren’t great at it now, but they’re not ones for giving up.

Onto the volume itself, episode 1 opens fantastically. The mystique of the Evernight location, a strange new series of high ranking villains all taking part in this dangerous cabal. It’s engaging stuff, and Jen Taylor’s Salem remains one of the best casting choices in the show. Later we get our first fight scene of the volume proper and again, it’s not quite where it could be. Things are very floaty, Jaune’s strategy joke didn’t quite land with members of the audience who wanted him to start employing actual strategy, but the new Grimm is cool and Ruby gets a great sniper moment. Concerns from the V4 short aren’t quite put to rest, but hey, it was Volume 4. People were willing to give it a bit of a break.

The following episode goes down as an all-time fan favorite for Jaune and Pyrrha’s training scene. There were a number of worried viewers who weren’t quite done processing Pyrrha’s “unpredictable” demise, and Jaune’s armour trim and the training video itself put a clear message across that Pyrrha Nikos was not going to be a footnote of the show’s history, even as we move past the prologue. Weiss’s arc gets off to a weird start with the introduction of Whitley, who was previously unmentioned in every respect from the show itself to CRWBY panels and Q&As. I have a conspiracy theory that he’s the result of a heavily reworked Winter Schnee, but that’s a post for another day. His addition together with Klein have always felt like they put a damper on the whole 'loneliness’ thing she was created around, even if Klein is a great method of integrating the seven dwarves to Weiss’s Snow White.

Blake’s arc has an even weirder start. It begins with a rather muted moment for something seemingly monumental - the removal of the bow. The significance of this happening now to place focus on Blake’s faunus side appears stronger in retrospect, and it’s far from the only thing that does in The Mistral Era. We follow with the introduction of Sun Wukong, creating the controversial “stalker debate” that I’ve seen pop up to this day three years on, and an equally controversial fight scene vs the Grimm Sea Feilong. If the previous V4 combat sequences looked floaty, this one may as well have taken place on the moon. Together with Blake’s rather high levels of unpopularity at the time of airing, Chapter 3 did not go down well.

It does give us our first look at Yang which the next episode expands on, and she’s beginning a long road to recovery. Yang’s volume 4 is often said to be rushed, and that critique is fairly easy to understand when you look at how much screentime she had compared to her teammates. Admittedly RWBY perhaps isn’t the best of shows to portray a gradual battle against one’s own demons, and this isn’t to say every fan disliked it. There’s been plenty of praise for the content within it, but it does feel as though Yang should have had more time allocated to her.

The improvised Team RNJR takes the dominant focus, resulting in a much needed and much appreciated amount of depth added to Ren and Nora, side characters who hadn’t stepped far outside of their comic relief box beforehand. They encounter Tyrian Callows, the theatre performing, huntsman hunting scorpion extraordinaire. His battle with Qrow is epic, arriving right on time for the Christmas Eve/Day weekend and it’s the best present the FNDM could have asked for. The poorly choreographed shadow hanging over everyone’s heads is swept away with several minutes of extraordinary animation, and the RNJR audience remain happy.

Weiss gets slapped by her dad and disowned before realizing she’s not quite as fragile as she was before she left for Beacon, and proceeds to get her shit together. We get glimpses of Atlas high society, something a lot of people had expectations for going into the volume. While we’ve lost the RWBY team dynamic, the world building we’d gain in exchange could serve to be a worthy trade. At least, for the most part.

The introduction to Menagerie was (you guessed it) hit and miss. Ghira and Kali are welcomed with an incredible amount of warmth all things considered, fan favorites to this day. The White Fang plotline still isn’t where it needs to be, and Blake spends most of her time moping with a sad little lapdog (lapmonkey?) following close behind trying to cheer her up. Corsac and Fennec don’t make for the most memorable or entertaining of villains, especially when many eyes are on a certain other faunus villain after their explosive entrance at the end of Volume 3.

If you want to know what happened to Yang, don’t worry! Everyone else at the time did too.

RWBY has always had a taxing production schedule, with episodes ranging anywhere from 12 to 18 minutes on average with breaks on certain weeks across the season. Due to the nature of Volume 4, it resulted in Yang not appearing on screen in six whole weeks.

A Much Needed Talk brings the beginning of Ruby’s fall from fandom grace. Many expect her reckless behavior to be properly reprimanded now that the show is darker and she’s gotten someone into legitimate danger, but she’s seemingly let off the same way she was after escapades from previous volumes. Ruby also has no questions about her eyes, whereas her audience has many. Qrow introducing another set of four magical entities is odd after we’d barely gotten used to the maidens. The creation story as a whole seems a little plain, but there are some props for integrating The Brothers Grimm into the series in a suitable manner. Team JNR’s anger doesn’t quite go far enough for some, but it’s important to note that post-Beacon Jaune has become a boiling kettle of barely constrained rage.

Yang finally gets her time in the sun in a training session with Taiyang. At first I felt this was a strong, but not particularly noteworthy scene. As with many things Volume 4 does however, it’s a hell of a lot better in context of the volumes that follow it. Yang is taught to keep a cool head, to find other paths around an obstacle, and to use her semblance as another one of her tools rather than something she’s going to hit the button on constantly.

In real time, Yang last activated her semblance on the 6th of February, 2016.

She would not activate it again for another 2 years, 11 months and 13 days.

She’s also taught about Raven. Raven has been a secretive character thus far, only appearing briefly at the end of V2 and recently in an ominous conversation over drinks with her brother that has planted seeds for the next season. We’re told that Yang is determined perhaps to a fault like her mother, and her father teaches her that she can employ that strength in moderation.

These elements, together with the trauma of losing both her arm and her partner lay the foundation for perhaps the strongest overarching story The Mistral Era has to offer.

The volume caps off with a look back at Ren and Nora’s origins before their climatic boss battle with the Nuckelavee, a terrifying horse-like Grimm rooted in European mythology. Horror levels ratcheted up, and the first thing on the fandom’s mind was death. Would Qrow survive his poison? Will Ren or Nora be the next to go after Pyrrha? The volume finale intentionally plays this up and it creates a gloriously tense atmosphere. As we know now, none of those characters meet their end in Volume 4. RWBY isn’t the kind of show that will drop it’s characters like flies, and that’s something V4 addresses well in the wake of it’s predecessor which went a little 0-100 on the fictional murders. Ruby herself ends the volume with little fanfare. Over half of her total dialogue is spoken in her narrated letter home, and as was the norm for Ruby, it was more to do with the overall progress of the series rather than anything to do with herself.

Weiss leaves her home. It’s shockingly anti-climatic, and she doesn’t see a proper combat sequence for the entire year. What’s worth noting is the intriguing conversation between her father and an increasingly paranoid James Ironwood, now sporting a pair of Maya given T-Rex arms. Much like her partner, Weiss’s arc that year was on the weaker side in regards to herself, but we got to watch the first few Atlesian plot threads be sewn into the narrative.

Blake Belladonna gets her shit together, in accordance with the season’s theme. After a controversial slap followed by a positively dreadful chase sequence, she’s convinced that her friends will be hurt regardless of if she stays or goes, and she might as well go down fighting. While her volume was certainly unpopular at the time, it does nicely set her up for next year’s. That doesn’t really make for good television though, and you can’t forgive the season’s mistakes because the next one makes it look better.

Yang gets her longcoat and gets to ride out to a triumphant credits theme which sparks the engines of Bumblebee (the bike) as well as Bumblebee (the ship). What she lacked in screentime she helped make up for with Armed and Ready, though it did invite questions over Yang seemingly getting over her trauma with ease. But in any case, it’s message is clear - Adam may have won the battle, but under no circumstances will Yang let him win the war.

Before I get into an overall analysis of V4, I should take a moment to talk about Oscar Pine. Episode 1 spends five of it’s precious minutes on a random farm boy in the middle of nowhere, rather than any of our established heroes and villains. There were countless theories as to who he was. Guesses at being related to Ozpin were frequent, and right on the money. But there were talks of him being linked to relatives, maidens and all sorts. It was honestly a little hilarious, but as previously discussed, frustrating for those who were waiting weeks at a time to see their favorite RWBY. Oscar is to become perhaps the 5th most important hero in the show, one of many major characters who was to be introduced after the prologue.

His arc this year is simple, and… hit and miss. Ozpin wants him to leave, Oscar says no. Ozpin keeps asking, eventually Oscar says yes. It was boring, and having nobody else to interact with did little to endear him to the audience. Many were surprised and disappointed to learn that Ozpin did just genuinely lose to Cinder rather than use a trick up his sleeve. And the most noteworthy thing to happen to this weird new pair is their fateful encounter with Hazel, which amounted to fairly little. But overall, the volume does its job. Oscar is established, as is his conflict. He wants to be a hero, but fate has not dealt him a typical hand.

The theme of Volume 4 is recovery, and that’s not an easy thing to miss. Blake and Yang spearhead this as assistance from friends and family get them back on their feet and back in the fight. Weiss finds independent strength she previously lacked and manages to fully summon her knight. Ruby remains optimistic in the face of danger, which she already was. Hm, hope that gets worked on next year. Nora and Ren begin to emphasize the solidarity they find in each other and in Jaune, but Jaune isn’t quite on the same wavelength. Cinder claws the pieces of herself back together and sets out with renewed confidence.

The disjointed nature of the season was risky, but the absence of something can be just as if not more important than the presence of it, and keeping RWBY apart has offered good results in places. All things considered, CRWBY didn’t have a terrible year. Many would point to Qrow vs Tyrian for the coming hiatus with hope that fights could maintain their quality. Alex Abraham and Jeff and Casey Williams weren’t slacking on the soundtrack either, and the team was sure to improve the visuals in their new engine the same way they did with the previous one.

CRWBY had made it through their trial year the way most people expected them to - lots of bumps along the way, but a passionately delivered season nonetheless. Onward to next year.

Screenshots all taken from the RWBY Wiki. Gifs made by GLQ.

