RWBY - Always What Could Have Been

This is a separate transcript of a Tumblr post I wrote musing about RWBY. For context, after the death of RWBY’s original creator, Monty Oum’s death & its subsequent years of mishandling by parent company Rooster Teeth, Monty’s wife, Sheena, recently posted a bunch of lost information about RWBY’s early ideas, varying from cute outfits, to character concept art and episode notes. The transcript is below.

Perhaps one day I’ll write another blog post about my long relationship with RWBY, but another time, I suppose.

I'm only reblogging this so I can find the link later and to archive my own thoughts on this, but these are just my own idle, cathartic ramblings, having known this show for almost half my life. Reading about all this lost content for RWBY made me want to arrange my recent thoughts together, so permit me to vent a little. These opinions and expressed emotions are of course, all my own.

I've been following Sheena's posts revealing new snippets of RWBY's production lately. A lot of stuff was revealed: concept art for Winter, numerous outfits, even entirely new characters and plotlines. If this info was revealed years ago, back when my feelings regarding RWBY were strong and my disappointment in RT more immediate, this would have been year-defining news to learn.

So many characters unused. So many plotlines dropped. So many opportunities unseen. A lush bed of inspiration I'd gladly use for my AUs and fanart, or any fan would be glad to engage in. What more the company and some of the closest people to Monty, who had the privilege and resources to make them a reality, right?

Years of being in the thick of the fandom, expressing my qualms with RWBY's direction, critiquing its own loss of identity, yet watching a subset of the fandom defend it tooth and nail out of parasocial obsession with RT's employees, was like water eroding a stone. Reading all this would have felt immensely vindicating.

We all as a fandom had some hopeful idea in our heads that RT, even if incompetent, at least had some good intentions of stewarding RWBY, even if they didn't know how, neatly archiving Monty's notes and refining those ideas (or at least the spirit of it) into the show as much as possible.

Like when Kentaro Miura, mangaka and creator of Berserk passed away, his team vowed to follow his notes as close as possible to faithfully continue his manga. And if, say, Eiichiro Oda (creator of One Piece) or another great mangaka would be unable to finish their work one day, I would think those who worked with them or knew them would do all in their power to see it through with the creator's blessing.

But Rooster Teeth never really cared, did they? Even when the creator's closest confidante gave them a series bible on a silver platter, offered it, they didn't care. At least, they only cared inasmuch as they could mold RWBY into their own product. They only cared as far as maybe only the notes Monty shared with RT staff, which meant to them, those ideas mattered more. They only cared as far as the company's walls could close around those they wanted control over.

Arguing the individual merit of each of these ideas - different maidens, beach episodes, Raven having her own team - to RWBY's story is pointless. The fact that these ideas existed, archived and waiting, straight from Monty's shared brainstorming and notes, and RT decided to cherry pick which to make canon to their product and which to disregard completely is the point. They didn't even want to try and make those ideas work. In fact, they'd be glad if these ideas had never been brought up again. To this company, not all of Monty's ideas were equal, and the ideas said by the people RT higher-ups approved were more equal than the rest.

The vitriol I would have had, the anger and frustration over how unfair this is, how much of a waste, and I'm just a random-ass fan, one of thousands inspired by RWBY and Monty's work yes, but just a drop in the pond nonetheless. I couldn't even imagine what it'd be like for Sheena or the rest of Monty's friends whom RT decided on a whim whether they'd be important enough to have a say in RWBY or not.

But now, with RT dead and RWBY becoming more of a nostalgic interest of a recent past than an ever-present fixation it used to be in my creative life, those feelings are very different now, more melancholic, almost a sort of sad acceptance of how different things are now. The years have eroded any anger I could have now, like water on stone.

For Rooster Teeth, there is no more anger left for the thing that has died, only a secondhand regret for years flushed down the drain for truly zero reason. Anger would have meant there was still time to change, time left to hope RT reevaluated their own stewardship, time left for urgency, but that company truly clung to its incompetence, bone-thin hands shaking and clawing, till the bitter end, and anything that could be said now just falls on deaf ears in death, just like they went unheard in life. RT just sold RWBY to VIZ, washed their hands of it, and made it someone else's problem now, right on its deathbed when nothing left could be done to hold them accountable, to make them work to redeem those years lost.

RWBY will always remain an important thing to me. Least for its quality, partly for its ideas, and partly because of the inspiration Monty and RWBY's initial wide-eyed pluckiness ignited in my young artist mind. But a large part is because everything about RWBY, from its production to its community and its decade-long journey, is a cauldron of complex emotions I've never felt with any other creative work, and probably never will again.

There are many injustices in this world, many so important as to make RWBY irrelevant. But the injustice of RWBY's treatment, how it was consistently puppeteered against the people who want the best for it, even as it wasted away in its captors' hands, is an injustice I've watched helplessly for so long as another creator and felt so powerless as a single random fan to affect, it will remain with me a sobering lesson for a very, very long time.