Random Internet Person
kiwifarms.net
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RWBY - The Hindenburg on which Rooster Teeth rests its hopes, dreams and future
- Thread starter Fougaro
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- May 12, 2020
"Lol, now that Rooster Teeth isn't suckling my teats, I'm gonna roast them."
I can smell the sea from here.
- Joined
- Oct 5, 2020
>That voice
It's definitely a tranny but I just can't tell which way
Either way, not a bad review of the current state of affairs with RWBY
Unicorn of War's just a dude who's gay (last year he broke up with JeremyNoir and got a fallout that led to Unicorn abandoning his Twitter account altogether), contrary to many who thought it's a chick.
And credit to where it's due, some honesty from this clip of his is better than just licking RWBY's ass again like so many other morons out there these days that would defend this godforsaken show with the fierce loyalty rivaled only by the SS.
ChevroletBlackboard
kiwifarms.net
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I got to thinking in the last few weeks about Monty and how his reputation would have changed had he not died and kept with RWBY for a few more years. I know most people peg that he either would have been as much of a lolcow as Miles and Kerry or gone independent with RWBY per Shane's letter, but I got to thinking about RWBY's production from the POV of his own staff.
It's open record that Monty would go massively off-script to include characters, fights and stories that he wanted to see regardless of if it was the plan for the show or if he had discussed it with Miles and Kerry, and several times he'd add elements behind their back until it was too late to fix- see Penny fighting in the Volume 1 finale which Miles openly said on the commentary was something he didn't want until after Penny had been revealed as a robot, or Monty adding the Maidens, Neo's entire character, the dance arc, etc.
It was also open record that Monty saw himself as a good animator but a bad storyteller, and yet even mid-season he would introduce plot elements just because he wanted to or because he made a fight and wanted to cram it in with a crowbar. And while I don't think that absolves Miles and Kerry of their weak writing (the Faunus plot still largely lies on them in their failure to adapt it), it does make me pity them a little. But who I really came out of this brainstorming pitying the most was the poor staff who had to rework the show.
Can you imagine coming into work and your crazy boss never left, worked through the night and the first thing you hear before you've even punched in is "The footage you worked on yesterday can't work anymore, Monty scrapped it for a new scene." Like they had to either get the cast back in or scrap entire finished animation sections only to hastily rework the show. Dillon Gu (the guest animator for Volume 3) said that for the Poser Era, CRWBY were expected to clock in a full minute of finished animation each week- problem being, the industry standard is only 30 seconds. So you're already crunching, your boss just changed the script and now you have to add onto that workload because the new episode has to go up on Saturday.
No wonder Cinder's parkour animation in Volume 2 was so crap, they probably made that the night before.
Where I'm getting with this is that I think had Monty lived, his professional reputation would have plummeted in the years after Volume 3. As RWBY got more complex and demanding, Monty's extra flair would have been a real detriment in terms of production as this would be after they'd gone to actually rendering their content and making it in Maya. He would have either been put on a muzzle or his behavior would have led to RWBY staying at the small episodes of Volume 1. And animators who left Rooster Teeth likely would have warned people against taking jobs for Monty because of this.
I think if Monty hadn't died, he likely would have become a real nightmare to work for.
It's open record that Monty would go massively off-script to include characters, fights and stories that he wanted to see regardless of if it was the plan for the show or if he had discussed it with Miles and Kerry, and several times he'd add elements behind their back until it was too late to fix- see Penny fighting in the Volume 1 finale which Miles openly said on the commentary was something he didn't want until after Penny had been revealed as a robot, or Monty adding the Maidens, Neo's entire character, the dance arc, etc.
It was also open record that Monty saw himself as a good animator but a bad storyteller, and yet even mid-season he would introduce plot elements just because he wanted to or because he made a fight and wanted to cram it in with a crowbar. And while I don't think that absolves Miles and Kerry of their weak writing (the Faunus plot still largely lies on them in their failure to adapt it), it does make me pity them a little. But who I really came out of this brainstorming pitying the most was the poor staff who had to rework the show.
Can you imagine coming into work and your crazy boss never left, worked through the night and the first thing you hear before you've even punched in is "The footage you worked on yesterday can't work anymore, Monty scrapped it for a new scene." Like they had to either get the cast back in or scrap entire finished animation sections only to hastily rework the show. Dillon Gu (the guest animator for Volume 3) said that for the Poser Era, CRWBY were expected to clock in a full minute of finished animation each week- problem being, the industry standard is only 30 seconds. So you're already crunching, your boss just changed the script and now you have to add onto that workload because the new episode has to go up on Saturday.
No wonder Cinder's parkour animation in Volume 2 was so crap, they probably made that the night before.
Where I'm getting with this is that I think had Monty lived, his professional reputation would have plummeted in the years after Volume 3. As RWBY got more complex and demanding, Monty's extra flair would have been a real detriment in terms of production as this would be after they'd gone to actually rendering their content and making it in Maya. He would have either been put on a muzzle or his behavior would have led to RWBY staying at the small episodes of Volume 1. And animators who left Rooster Teeth likely would have warned people against taking jobs for Monty because of this.
I think if Monty hadn't died, he likely would have become a real nightmare to work for.
Random Internet Person
kiwifarms.net
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- Jun 28, 2019
You know, I really think that Monty dying made things like the Beacon arc look better than they really are.
When people bring up the Beacon arc, they mention things like "Monty's passion for it", and "it's very simple compared to what Miles and Kerry are doing", and "the show knew what it was back then and that's fine", except for the feeling I get where things like Blake And Weiss' motivations were things that showed that even back in the Beacon arc, there were going to be things that couldn't be solved with a fight, or how the fact that students already are super adept at the combat aspects before they enroll and could even do some cool shit in the color trailers (if you like to assume they're canon, at least the show tries to act like Black and Yellow are, and Red was more of a pitch/proof of concept) could make the academies aspect pointless, especially when you realize that the academies didn't do much to explain anything about the world in great detail or even really gave much meat to the rules and limits of the things that make the combat in RWBY tick. As for the combat? It was the same "runaway trains colliding at full speed" that makes for good fight animation...but absolutely make any argument about things like power scaling or power levels or tier lists pretty pointless to argue if you really want to show that a result happened because of a difference in power. Team RWBY vs. The Ace Ops in V7 is just something that I can't really get too mad about these days, nor any complaints about characters getting "nerfed".
As for the writing, The Beacon arc was basically "anime high school adventures" mixed with the typical YA "things go on in the background, main characters stumble on/investigate it". You could easily get the same thing playing some JRPG along the likes of say...Persona or Danganropa or watching K-On! And then you have the Vytal Festival which was nothing more than a tournament arc (or more specifically, the Chunin exams from Naruto) that didn't understand what gets people invested into tournament arcs. And then there's that part where you said that Monty would add things on his own without telling anybody. And thanks to dying an untimely death before these rogue additions could strike out, Monty looks like a genius avant garde visionary who could piss excellence and have accidents be 10 times better than the intentional things done by Miles and Kerry.
Overall, the Beacon arc showed how Monty and his crew underestimated how much thought needed to be put into the worldbuilding and character development and overestimated how far the show could go driven solely on action and Monty's passion for the project. And with Monty dying an untimely death, you got people looking at the Beacon arc with rose colored glasses when in reality that arc was the forbearer of problems the show would have later at best, or at worst, a pile of shit that only looks great because it's smaller than a nearby pile of shit, doesn't smell as bad by comparison, and the guy that brought that pile of shit together is buried under it.
And then you got the people saying Miles and Kerry took a look at Monty's vision and went rogue....honestly, when you're never given credit for success, blamed for failure, and someone else is getting credit you feel may not be deserved, why would you even go on instead of just going "fuck this shit, I'm out"?
Xenomorphs Are Cute
kiwifarms.net
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That's not it either, he was a bit of a lolcow in real life too. He went on autistic tirades on people when someone sold his signed merch in cons. This also led to his fans finding his wife sus when she did the same after his death, except on Ebay.
In fact, his work has it's issues too considering he's just a "rule of cool" type of creator. This lead to it's own sense of criticism of him. Best one I remember being someone on SFM Workshop making the Cresent Rose (Ruby's Scythe) & Myrtenaster (Weiss' Rapier) & he hated doing both due to him vehemently hating the very show itself since around 2014 (that's when the models were originally made) & their shit designs, which increased his workload more (they were supposed to be used in SFM workshop, unlike Monty's Poser, that's a whole different workspace). In fact, he even admits that he made them fuelled by hatred for the show. Even other users in the comments (also dating back to 2014) criticise the animation.
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Because Poser was a program never meant for animation and was already looking incredibly outdated as a thing by the time RWBY was in production with how mid-1990s anything done in it looked and its lack of useful animation tools. And I get the feeling had Monty not died, we'd still be seeing episodes animated in Poser unless they forced him to switch to Maya. Sure the Maya episodes don't look great (especially for a webseries and I feel the cel-shading is their excuse for hiding the flaws), but it at least doesn't move like a fever dream dA fetish nightmare.
I'd also argue the fight scenes were very much overhyped in the Monty era too, just looking at his pre-RWBY work, it's all style and no substance in pretty much every aspect (fast cuts, lack of weight, janky timing and poses), and it's the same thing during the first 3 volumes. The Maya volumes meanwhile, have the exact opposite issues with everything looking too weighted or floaty and slow as shit.
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Edit for context because I'm a retard: This is the guy that @Xenomorphs Are Cute linked to, the one who made the Crescent Rose and
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Random Internet Person
kiwifarms.net
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Honestly, I'd say that Monty's fault with rule of cool was he didn't think of the rule of cool's other edge of that sword: you need a plan for when the high from the cool wears off, like how in V1 the Beacon initiation fights against two massive Grimm leads to the question of why the academies exist to begin with if the main characters could already do all this cool and crazy shit before they enter what's basically college, especially since the academies don't really do their job of explaining the grander world and its mechanics, nor do we see characters really working to train or refine their skills or figure out how to deal with specific weaknesses or deal with the rules and limits of things like Semblances and Aura.
You mean how the fights looked like a stick figure animation you'd see on Newgrounds in the mid 2000s? I can get that criticism. As for Maya, I think they wanna have that same Monty era style, which could have only been done by Monty himself when you didn't try to rein him in while we was having fun at his playground, and with that you get fights that continue the RWBY tradition of runaway trains colliding, just slower, and making it look like a fighting game with how Semblances and Aura are written as plot points in the fight. Any group fights? They usually devolve into 1v1s or play out like a turn based RPG.
RWBY's action has always relied on raw power, brute strength, and a mindset of "when all you have is a hammer, everything in front of you is a nail". Not the worst method to run a show on, but when you talk about power scaling, nerfs, and tier lists, how far you can go before you're pretty much talking out of your ass or letting something like hatred for characters or anger at what you consider to be shitty writing is a pretty short distance.
Xenomorphs Are Cute
kiwifarms.net
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Agreed, I think Monty pulling a Yandev (it's basically Yandev's ego & his spaghetti coding, except Monty feels more stubborn that egoistic). Thing with Maya is, that it has the Apple issue, most just use it cause it's industry standard. What they don't realise is that
1: Houdini is better than Maya in many aspects. But it's mainly for FX.
2: It's a matter of skill, I've seen SFM & Blender made stuff better made than most Maya stuff. Hell, G-Mod stuff could compete with some Maya with competent hands behind it.
Yeah, he's based AF.
I agree, rule of cool can work, but as BlueFlyTrap said in the Steam Workshop photo, "Rule of cool only applies if the finished product is cool", which doesn't happen in RWBY's case.
Monty just kept throwing whatever he found cool without any thought, or at least trying to sculpt it's nuance a bit more than just making it cool. Most of it may be on M&K too due to their lack of world-building & fucktillion retcons being made cause they don't know their own lore, or they just need a reason to bend the very laws of their universe (they did that a lot). Than there's also power levels, I've seen Dragon Ball had a better grip on it (at least until GT, It's all downhill since DBS).
Ironically, Black Clover did a better job with it's fights. Rarely any fight is 1v1, but it at least makes use of it's cast, even background ones have something to do & are competent at it enough that no characters are usually forgettable. In RWBY, I still can't recognise some characters apart from google searches, deep down memory dives & a lot of R34. And I'm watching this show for the last 6 years. Many other series I watch/watched have some of them less than 2-3 years with seasonal releases & hiatuses, but I still remember than when I see them.
The fights don't have to be simple like Dragon Ball or technical like HxH. But they should be good at least. There's no re-watchablity at all.
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- Jan 7, 2020
Honestly you can make something work on pure rule of cool, you just have to embrace the goofy nonsense instead of trying to take yourself seriously. DMC manages that pretty well. Jojo is another good example, and its probably how Dragonball got away with never ever explaining its power system. Once its clear that you're in a goofy setting that you arn't supposed to apply logic to people accept that things happen just because they're cool or funny. If you try to apply rule of cool to something that is supposed to be serious at best you end up with a melodramatic Hong Kong action movie.
I would argue Jojo is more high concept tactical fighting like HxH. Sure, there are just nonsensical fights where stands pull abilities out of their ass, but those abilities have an autistic level of detail explained to the viewer about how it works and how they are used in the opponents strategy.
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You misunderstand, it can be high concept tactical fighting while also being rule of cool nonsense. That is how you get nazi cyborgs fighting Aztec zombie kings after putting a poisoned wedding ring in the protagonist's heart and loosing by getting blown into space by a volcano. It doesn't matter how autistically they explain the rapist orangutan's power, how tactically sniper rat is defeated, or why the magnets made two dudes get into an awkward position. It is inherently a goofy series. A well played tactical decision can be ruined by dice throwing up.
Since the show is already filled with goofy nonsense, the writer can write whatever they think is cool and nobody will question it. The writer just writes whatever they think is cool.
By your definition you could say the same about HxH and any other "tactical" series then with elements of sci-fi and fantasy.
Random Internet Person
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I get that. But I also think Devil May Cry also fulfills the "has something for when the high from the cool wears off" condition, namely the dynamics between Dante, Vergil, and Nero. Hell, DMC5 also presents a pretty blank slate for the franchise being carried by Nero.
If by "serious at best" you mean "world that's pretty grounded and can be easily mistaken for our world", then I guess that's one way to describe Remnant. I'd just say that with Blake and Weiss, you had characters with goals that couldn't be easily obtained by way of winning a fight, a combat/powers system that had no real hard rules or limits to deal with, which only got compounded more as more was added to it, a world and characters that probably needed to be developed beyond what you could get with "anime high school hijinks" or a YA novel "things go on in the background and MCs stumble on/investigate in their free time", and Weiss, Blake, and Yang all have baggage and personal antagonists that could probably fill a visual novel character route, while Ruby is your typical Weekly Shonen Jump "I wanna be X".
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Except for the fact that Togashi took advantage of "the writer can write whatever they think is cool and nobody will question it" and turned it into a fairly coherent power system.
Nen is basically every anime power system broken down and conceptualized from a skeletal standpoint. Nearly any kind of ability can be born out of it depending on the individual with its own checks and balances ensuring that none of it is too ridiculous or OP. And, even when there are OP abilities, all of them have underlying reasons and limitations that make sense.
Not to mention the crazy mind games that go into the story where even a simple game of "rock, paper, scissors" can be compared to a high stakes chess match.
RWBY just took whatever looked cool and slapped all of it on to catfish their audience before they realized their budget constraints and decided that, for the rest of the show, they'd just stand around and talk.
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From Hero:
ChevroletBlackboard
kiwifarms.net
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I don't wanna give HH a click, what's he on about today?