Animus 1: RWBY Volume One
16 April 2026
The dramatic poster that doesn't match up to the quality of the series.
Ask any writer or creator of anything about the hardest parts of art. They’ll give some varied answers, but for some of them it’s the beginning. The beginning is often the one of the most talked about sections. Advice on how, when, where, and what to start is all over the internet. So it’s fitting to start the blog with volume one of RWBY, pronounced “Ruby.” RWBY is a early 2010s anime-style internet 3D animation which aired on Rooster Teeth’s channel. Ever since its inception, it has been a controversial series. Many people love it. Many people hate it. I hate it. So I want to talk about it.
RWBY has four main problems:
Show structure puts more emphasis on the supporting characters and fight scenes.
As a result, it makes the main cast shallow and tropey in comparison.
Tone shifts from an anime geared towards a teenage audience to 4kids dubbing/Saturday Morning cartoons.
Any complex conflicts gets simplified and resolved quickly.
These problems riddle with RWBY, including some of the plot points.
STORY SUMMARY
RWBY starts with an explaination of Dust, Grimm and Hunters. This is all explained by a voiceover from a character you haven’t met yet (more on that later). It then shows a dust robbery led by the antagonist of the season: Roman Torchwick. As Roman and his gang rob the dust owner, we meet one of the protagonists, Ruby Rose, reading a magazine/comic. When one of the gang members tries to apprehend her, Ruby uses martial arts and throws him across the room. This ensues a fight between Roman and his goons vs. Ruby It ends with two mysterious women who show up. One, who is later revealed as Goodwitch, helps Ruby. The other has fire powers, and helps Torchwick escape. Ruby is enamored with Goodwitch because she’s a Huntress. Goodwitch then proceeds to scold her in a black room before the headmaster of Beacon, Ozpin enters. Ozpin compliments her tactics before offering her to move up earlier into Beacon. Ruby accepts and arrives while meeting the three other protagonists, Yang (her sister), Weiss (heir of the Schnee Dust Company), and Blake (mysterious girl who has a lot of knowledge on Schnee’s business). After meeting the four, they begin their initiation and school life while learning more about their world and the forces that threaten it. The actual story on paper is fine. But they fucked it up, starting with how the supporting cast and fight scenes are more important than the actual main characters of RWBY.
STRUCTURE
Supporting cast and fight scenes are given more emphasis in RWBY’s structure. The fight scenes, while spectacular to look at, are sometimes not needed to be there. Like the Grimm fight in episode 8 where they are trying to avoid them instead of fight. It highlights the discordance between what the scene before relied on and what the show wants to show. It creates a sort of doll setting where the characters could be thrown in any sort of conflict without much characterization or interesting solutions to problems. Speaking of characterization, the supporting cast is given way more of a role in the Volume One. In the first eight episodes, the focus is on the main characters struggles with one another and school. The switch flips when the story enters the Jaune Arc.
The Jaune Arc focuses on one of the characters we meet, Jaune. Jaune is...okay he sucks balls. When he is first introduced, he doesn’t leave with that much a good impression. He pukes on the airship to school in the first episode, he still wears onesies to bed, and he is very awkward person to be around. Jaune as a character is fine….but not really. The problem with Jaune, which will bring up over and over again on this podcast, is that the creators love him, but he just bland. Take for instance, this arc. The entire arc, is a Bullying PSA. This wouldn’t feel out of place like in a show like Steven Universe, but here it feels defanged. It clashes with the tone a little, but more on that. Right now, the Bullying PSA takes up two episodes. Two episodes to learn more about our protagonists or...deepen Yang’s and Blake’s relationship. You know the other half of team. Instead we devote to this guy. It creates an uneven importance to this character. Even when we have the Blake Arc, we still focus on two new characters who aren’t important at all. Half of what should be a satisfying conflict and exploration to a character that feels hidden away from us is then squandered to shed light to people who aren’t affected/effected by Blake’s choices. This haphazard attention to the supporting cast and the fight scenes and the main people creates this tense confusion of who the story is focusing on. In the end, it makes the main cast look shallow and tropey in comparison to people who aren’t as important to the story.
THE MAIN CAST
Because of the story structure, the main cast is just shallow and tropey. The main cast consists the members of team RWBY: Ruby, Weiss, Blake, and Yang. Having 16 ten-minute episodes is enough time to build them while giving little hints of depth for the supporting cast. Since they devoted all that time to frivolous add-ons, the cast just feels paper-thin. Ruby, Weiss, and Blake aren’t given enough time to explore depth in their characters while Yang recedes into the background. It wouldn’t be egregious if the show wasn’t named RWBY. Jaune’s arc wouldn’t feel out of place as much if it were named anything else. Instead the main characters are used as vehicles for showing off the new supporting cast and fight scenes. We begin the volume with Ruby as a gun-toting, scythe wielding maniac, and leave with the same girl but now she has doubts her leadership. Her own shame about her leadership doesn’t get explored at all. Instead it’s all flavor text for anything truly interesting without showing it. The season could get into the start of Ruby’s doubts or Blake and Yang’s partnership. But noooo…..We must show how Jaune is getting bullied and have only two episodes on the resolution of Ruby’s and Weiss’s conflict. Oh we’ll just give a slither of good character writing with Blake in the end, but look at the new wacky characters we came up with. See how charming and crazy they can be. Such a fucking load of bull. With the main characters shafted out of the spotlight, the show also has another problem: a tonal shift problem.
TONE SHIFTING
Tone shift from anime to 4kids dubbing/Sat. Morning cartoons RWBY’s tone isn’t consistent enough. While on the surface, it seems a light-hearted Saturday morning adventure, it bounces in between the anime way of taking things seriously versus the more American style cartoon where puns and jokes are made in the villains expense. It feels less like an anime and more like I’m watching the 4kids dubbed version of the show or a darker Viva Pinata. As a result, it mashes against each other to the point it makes the conflicts not land. I called the Jaune Arc the Bullying PSA, and a huge part of it is the Saturday morning cartoon feel. Jaune’s bully, Cardin, is a simple, one-note character which antagonizes Jaune into actions he doesn’t like. Already I seen this plot in a lot of 80s to early 2000s media where the bully is just some tough guy who just bullies the protagonist for no reason. The bully is supposed to be hated and scrutinized, never more complicating at that. Cardin is even shown to be racist when he pulls Velvet’s ears and makes fun of her. The audience is supposed to hate this guy, and not explore anything further. It isn’t given any much though then foreshadow the treatment of Faunus, making this action sort of too simplistic. While bullying minorities students has and is what happens in school setting, they don’t explore much more of how these systems allow students like this to flourish. Which renders Cardin’s racism as a gawk and furrow your eyebrows disapprovingly. Other than the racism, Cardin doesn’t really show any sides of this. He’s just an racist asshole. One hand, not every character needs be this complex. On the other, if you have a character who shows up for two episodes being an ass and is given a cookie-cutter personality, then there are some issues with that. It kinda jumps from annoying to enraging when remembering there is a racist character in the main cast, and the story just brushes aside the racism.
You gave your antagonist and protagonist the same flaw.
And they faced two different resolutions.
The show can’t show racism being unrewarded and rewarded in short time!If it was more deliberate then sure. But racism in this show is seen as an evil trait given to the bully character. To have the same trait given to the protagonist only for it to be brushed aside and quickly done with is disrespectful and fucking irritating when dealing with a topic such as racism. But more on that later.
The other thing that makes it a Saturday-morning cartoon is the humor. The humor is so lampeshadey and annoying. Sometimes characters would point to someone doing something and go, “Did x just happen?” Or characters would do something straight out of Looney Tunes like when Jaune caught Weiss when she fell off a Nevermore in episode 8. Which is fine, but it doesn’t speak like an anime. On the whole, Saturday morning cartoon clashes with the anime aesthetic. What also makes this show not work is how conflicts get simplified and resolved quickly.
CONFLICTS
Another instance of RWBY’s stupified writing is how conflicts are simplified and resolved quickly. Conflicts among the main characters don’t exist in a way of any other show of this caliber. In fact, it’s more kid show writing than anything. Each conflict has a bad guy or a moral for them to solve quickly after an episode or twoTake for instance Ruby’s and Weiss’s conflict with each other. Since they’re polar opposites with each other, they don’t get along ever since Day One. It intensifies when Ruby is made team leader at the end of the intiation arc. Weiss sees Ruby as childish, lazy, and untrustworthy. Even with her promising to be nicer to Ruby, it didn’t include her being leader. This is further demonstrated when Weiss battle Boarbatusk in Prof. Port’s class. After Ruby gives her some encouragement and one piece of advice, Weiss flips out on Ruby. She defeats it in class using Ruby’s advice and they argue afterward. It was then Ruby asks Ozpin if he made the right decision and Weiss confides in Prof. Port that she should be leader of Team RWBY. After, Prof. Port tells her that she’s used to getting her way and trusts Ozpin’s judgment. With this talk, Weiss shows she will be nicer to Ruby through her giving her coffee when she falls asleep studying. After that, Weiss and Ruby are noticebly don’t have any conflict.
The resolution of the conflict is, shit-ass. A conflict like that shouldn’t resolved with just a professor wagging his finger at a student. It happens again in Blake’s arc with the same character too! Yup, the writers did again with Weiss’s issues mysteriously getting resolved but this time they throw in racism. \
Yeah Weiss is racist. Toward the Faunus. Which Blake belongs to.
This gets revealed after Weiss said some bigoted shit about a Faunus thief (who is later to be revealed to be Sun Wukong). Blake pushes back, because of course she fucking does. And they argue for hours until Blake slips by implying she’s a Faunus. Now you notice how I didn’t mention Ruby or Yang in this whole debacle. Because they don’t fucking matter. That’s right. While these two people argue, the sisters just stand there awkwardly, not saying a fucking weird.
Classy.
Way to show how racism is bad guys by letting them not defend the obvious fucking minority. Fucking pathetic. What’s more pathetic is it gets resolved rather quickly. After the accidental reveal, Blake runs off and speaks to the Faunus thief from earlier, Sun Wukong. Together with him, they reveal Blake’s backstory. More on this later because the way it gets expanded upon is so fucking stupid. They then decide to apprehend the White Fang. A bunch of shit happens, but it isn’t important to the point I want to make. Anyway, after fighting her former comrades and shit, Weiss meets Blake again after the remaining team members spend the day trying to find her. Weiss says during the day she realizes that’s it’s wrong to be racist and doesn’t care about Blake’s past.
What a fucking joke. I didn’t know it takes a day to cure racism. Remember friends, if your family members ever hate minorities, just give them a day to think about it. Maybe they’ll turn around and say they don’t care. You know what’s so bad about this resolution?
The Faunus, the minority race in this setting, are then chastised in the show’s lens that violent demonstrations are bad. They are just as bad as the oppressors. It’s seen how Blake laments how violent the White Fang became. How Sun thinks of them as holier-than-thou creeps. Now I won’t try to show my political ass too much. Just know it rubs me the wrong way when violence from the oppressed group is seen just as evil as the violence of bigots. While the storyline it could be done well, it can insinuate siding with the oppressor if you don’t know how to handle these themes. Like RWBY literally did. It’s bad when Cardin pulls on Velvet’s ears but when Weiss macro-agresses it’s fine.
“Oh it’s fine that one of the character is racist actually.”
“It teaches people that being racist is bad but we won’t grill her too much.”
Like if you show a minor character with the same flaw as the fucking protag in your fucking anime show, maybe, just maybe, either explore it in a nuance way or fucking kill it. Because it makes the actual message worse. In conclusion, simplified conflicts which are later resolved are bad. Go fucking figure.
CONCLUSION
So RWBY’s first volume is riddled with too important supporting characters, fight scene that can drag the story, a shallow and tropey main cast, a Saturday morning cartoon tone clash, and simple conflicts with quick resolutions. What a fucking abyssmal first volume. Again if this was just really bad volume among a solid roster of season, it would be fine. Beginnings are tricky. They are one of the most important parts of the story.
If someone flounders the first quarter or third it would be hard to regain footing. Unfortunately, RWBY gets worse. Like really bad. But not in the next volume since it’s in the same quality. Or if you’re curious about the rest of the podcast, tune in next for my first anime homework episode. I’ll be talking about Kino’s Journey (the 2002 version). Until then see ya and stay creative.
I gives this two Courage nods out of five!