It was before the fan base grew AS toxic.
It was still toxic
Anime & Manga RWBY General discussion thread.
- Thread starter Zachowon
- Start date
It was still toxic
DarthOne
☦️
I think its because it was before the fandom went really woke. That and I think the fact that Pyrrha wasn't somewhere on the LBTQ mafia/ wasn't a 'person of color' played some role there.
It was before they went full crazy.
They were still crazy though
DarthOne
☦️
Hence ‘before they went full woke’.
To be fair the FNDM only got more rabid over time, it was there but wasn't as bad in 1-3 when the story was considered 'new' and had a 'future' of whatever the FNDM envisioned before it, but when Monty died the uncertainty of his death bleed into people's thoughts making them more controlling of what they envisioned he 'wanted' as his 'legacy'.It's no surprise that as the story went on more and more opinions diverged and people became angry when they didn't get exactly what they envisioned.
And if anybody wants to argue that the story was never truly Monty's and was more Miles and Kerry's brainchild from the start, take it elsewhere it isn't about truths but popular perception, Oum regardless of the work he did or didn't put into the series is the face that comes to mind when most think 'creator of RWBY' and because of the absolute feeling of that popular perception and M&K's reluctance to put their foots down and say it the FNDM always felt themselves just as entitled in the story process.
Circle of Willis
Well-known member
I think even the most cursory examination of what things were like behind the scenes during the production of the early seasons will amply demonstrate that the story was most certainly Monty Oum's, not M&K's, so long as he lived. I don't believe he had some epic full-length 12+ season vision for RWBY, but the guy was pretty (in)famous for fighting the writers to include more content that he came up with last-minute because he thought it was cool, like Raven's V2 post-credit appearance and the entire character of Neo. He couldn't have done that and won if he wasn't the showrunner.
As I've said before, I don't know the full details about what actually went down between Shane/Sheena and the CRWBY writers after his death (nobody does except them and they don't seem to be in any rush to openly air the old grievances, though maybe that'll change once RT is formally dead and buried). But I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out that the question of whether the animators should remain in the driver's seat for the show or the writers should take over was one of the bigger bones of contention there. Obviously, the writers won out and you can see how that affected the show in the shift to a plot-driven narrative where the characters are pushed along by the broader 'stop Salem before she destroys the world, if you can' plot, the decline of the fight scenes, inordinate focus being placed on things like Bumblebee instead of said fight scenes (despite them traditionally being the highlight of the show under Monty), established Monty-era content like Black Sun or Adam's old characterization getting binned, etc.
And as for the decline of the fanbase, I do think the new management had something to do with it. RT in general has tried to cultivate a 'we're just a gang of buddies having fun together, like you!' image and a parasocial relationship with the fans well before RWBY was a thing, but M&K + Barb Dunkelman and Arryn Zech seem to have kicked it up a notch in the years since Monty's death. They really got into pandering to a select core of especially zealous FNDM types, and the self-insert/wish fulfillment stuff got way more overt in the later seasons as well (I don't mean Jaune either, I mean things like all the political strawmen being put in so they can be beaten up, or the retcons to make Blake the furry princess of a tropical paradise & one half of Bumblebee). Hell they even hired some such people into Rooster Teeth later, like Arryn Troche (shipper who became an animator), and these people proceeded to try to lend support to their favorite ships in their work (Qrow/Clover having homoerotic undertones was the fault of these shippers, that & I imagine they also wanted to spite Vic Mignogna by implying the character he used to voice was gay).
They cultivated a stronger parasocial bond with the crazy tumblrina types who cared about RWBY for 'queer' shipping first & foremost and weren't nearly so interested in its roots as an action show, and basically enabled their bad behavior - these people never called out Wasps being dicks to fan artists or fans in general who weren't into Bumblebee even though they had so much to say about how they hate Trump, think 'SJW' should be a badge of honor and that if you don't approve of 'social justice' they don't want you as a fan, etc. The consequence was that they got to milk more money out of a die-hard FNDM that would fork over the cash as long as they were pandered to, and at the cost of increasingly driving away the non-rabid BB stans & generally making the RWBY fandom space into a much more insular place than it used to be. (Oh, and of course, making the show worse as a result of said pandering. We can see how well that worked out for them in the long run now.)
It's difficult to speculate what RWBY may have been like had Monty lived - according to Shane's letter he was even distancing himself and the show from RT, taking it to his own studio (page 13 or so). But I think it's very, VERY unlikely that the show would have gone down the same path it did, or even gotten close to it; in fact, Shane explicitly named the people that Monty said he wanted to bring with him to continue working on RWBY at his own studio, and M&K were conspicuously absent from that shortlist. Monty may not have been the greatest storyteller and made his share of bad narrative decisions, but the man clearly had creative integrity and a spine born out of a thousand-mile stubborn streak: if he was willing to stand up to his own co-workers & friends that he knew IRL to wedge his characters & story ideas in, I highly doubt that he would have chosen to pander to the likes of the Bee stans (essentially just randos on the Internet, even if they were very loud and angry randos) at the cost of compromising whatever ideas he had like M&K did.
As I've said before, I don't know the full details about what actually went down between Shane/Sheena and the CRWBY writers after his death (nobody does except them and they don't seem to be in any rush to openly air the old grievances, though maybe that'll change once RT is formally dead and buried). But I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out that the question of whether the animators should remain in the driver's seat for the show or the writers should take over was one of the bigger bones of contention there. Obviously, the writers won out and you can see how that affected the show in the shift to a plot-driven narrative where the characters are pushed along by the broader 'stop Salem before she destroys the world, if you can' plot, the decline of the fight scenes, inordinate focus being placed on things like Bumblebee instead of said fight scenes (despite them traditionally being the highlight of the show under Monty), established Monty-era content like Black Sun or Adam's old characterization getting binned, etc.
And as for the decline of the fanbase, I do think the new management had something to do with it. RT in general has tried to cultivate a 'we're just a gang of buddies having fun together, like you!' image and a parasocial relationship with the fans well before RWBY was a thing, but M&K + Barb Dunkelman and Arryn Zech seem to have kicked it up a notch in the years since Monty's death. They really got into pandering to a select core of especially zealous FNDM types, and the self-insert/wish fulfillment stuff got way more overt in the later seasons as well (I don't mean Jaune either, I mean things like all the political strawmen being put in so they can be beaten up, or the retcons to make Blake the furry princess of a tropical paradise & one half of Bumblebee). Hell they even hired some such people into Rooster Teeth later, like Arryn Troche (shipper who became an animator), and these people proceeded to try to lend support to their favorite ships in their work (Qrow/Clover having homoerotic undertones was the fault of these shippers, that & I imagine they also wanted to spite Vic Mignogna by implying the character he used to voice was gay).
They cultivated a stronger parasocial bond with the crazy tumblrina types who cared about RWBY for 'queer' shipping first & foremost and weren't nearly so interested in its roots as an action show, and basically enabled their bad behavior - these people never called out Wasps being dicks to fan artists or fans in general who weren't into Bumblebee even though they had so much to say about how they hate Trump, think 'SJW' should be a badge of honor and that if you don't approve of 'social justice' they don't want you as a fan, etc. The consequence was that they got to milk more money out of a die-hard FNDM that would fork over the cash as long as they were pandered to, and at the cost of increasingly driving away the non-rabid BB stans & generally making the RWBY fandom space into a much more insular place than it used to be. (Oh, and of course, making the show worse as a result of said pandering. We can see how well that worked out for them in the long run now.)
It's difficult to speculate what RWBY may have been like had Monty lived - according to Shane's letter he was even distancing himself and the show from RT, taking it to his own studio (page 13 or so). But I think it's very, VERY unlikely that the show would have gone down the same path it did, or even gotten close to it; in fact, Shane explicitly named the people that Monty said he wanted to bring with him to continue working on RWBY at his own studio, and M&K were conspicuously absent from that shortlist. Monty may not have been the greatest storyteller and made his share of bad narrative decisions, but the man clearly had creative integrity and a spine born out of a thousand-mile stubborn streak: if he was willing to stand up to his own co-workers & friends that he knew IRL to wedge his characters & story ideas in, I highly doubt that he would have chosen to pander to the likes of the Bee stans (essentially just randos on the Internet, even if they were very loud and angry randos) at the cost of compromising whatever ideas he had like M&K did.
f1onagher
Well-known member
I suspect that as RWBY went on and lost popularity someone on the writing team had the bright idea to string along the Bumblebee shippers for a few seasons to keep the idiots buying RT's shit-tier merch. It was pretty clear as early as season 5 or 6 (I would argue as early as 4 but I am aware of my bias) that the writers had decided on Blake/Yang, but they certainly didn't string it out for years because they wanted time to build up to it organically. Given that these were the people most likely to camp out on and spam RT forums across the internet it makes sense that they would come off as the disproportionate majority of RWBY fans and after enough bad writing and cheap pandering it became a self fulfilling prophecy.
If you have the patience to track RWBY threads across the decades (which if you do please find a better hobby) you'd see more and more normie fans drop off leaving behind only the most vicious haters (hi!) and the most rabid of fans. Hence the FNDM's infamous reputation for toxicity. Rooster Teeth literally cultivated their own cesspit by being too up their own ass to just commit to a story and follow through and instead kept jinking their own plot to subvert the fans' expectations, as was the style at the time. Joe Rogan is right, never read the comments.
If you have the patience to track RWBY threads across the decades (which if you do please find a better hobby) you'd see more and more normie fans drop off leaving behind only the most vicious haters (hi!) and the most rabid of fans. Hence the FNDM's infamous reputation for toxicity. Rooster Teeth literally cultivated their own cesspit by being too up their own ass to just commit to a story and follow through and instead kept jinking their own plot to subvert the fans' expectations, as was the style at the time. Joe Rogan is right, never read the comments.
Circle of Willis
Well-known member
This is true. But even back then it should have been apparent that pandering to Tumblr would be a bad idea that would cost RWBY (and RT) more than they could hope to gain in the long run. I recall (that was the Gamergate 1.0 era) that even in 2015 or so, Tumblr was already known as a containment zone for deranged SJW types and especially out-there porn artists, and had even gotten into & lost a 'war' with 4chan. I guess Rooster Teeth fell to the same bug infecting much bigger companies and compelling them to keep pandering to the descendants of said Tumblrinas even after it became obvious that that was just turning off their actual fans & tanking their profits to a point where they've lost (and are still losing) way more money than RT had ever made.
I suspect another element to it was that RT themselves had always been liberal-leaning, so they were always more likely to pander to that crowd than not. They were, after all, urban techbros based in Austin (the main liberal hive of Texas) and tech/'nerd' culture in the 2000s-early 2010s was a pretty left-wing landscape compared to today when it's been gutted by said left (most self-described right-wingers in tech from that time period were libertarians rather than doctrinaire conservatives IIRC, Marty O'Donnell the Halo composer & audio director was one of the most notable exceptions). It's just that they radicalized in time as the rest of the mainstream left did after GG and the 2012-2016 elections, but building an echo chamber of (not-so-ex-)Tumblrinas for themselves couldn't have helped with that since it meant they were constantly bombarded with increasingly inane far-left fearmongering in addition to fan demands, and it really shows not just in RWBY but also their later Twitter posts. I am not aware of RT screaming about Mitt Romney being a fascist or publicly celebrating Obama's reelection on social media in 2012.
Notably Ruby's design used to have crosses to pin her cape, but those were ditched from Volume 4 onward. Guessing at Monty Oum's religious inclinations is even more difficult than guessing at whatever ultimate vision he may have had for RWBY, and I would be enormously surprised indeed if it turns out that he had been a zealous Christian in life. But I will say that being an American-born & raised animator, he must have been aware that there's a lot more to that symbol than 'wow it looks cool' unlike most Japanese anime artists who throw it in (especially in the '90s-2000s when he was growing up and would've been exposed to anime for the first time).
If I'm to guess based on the company he kept, Shane & Dillon seem totally apolitical and (very much unlike modern RT) have never tried to bring RL politics into Dillongoo Studios' work or social media AFAIK, so I think it's most likely that he was either also apolitical himself or a normie liberal type and consequently would be weirded out by the likes of the Bumblebee Tumblrinas had he lived, even before they started getting in his face about binning Black Sun and forcing BB through (almost certain to provoke a highly adverse reaction from him, given how fiercely he was willing to fight the rest of CRWBY over creative matters). I highly doubt he (and they) would have pandered to that mob had they been able to pull off his break with RT, the sort of person who would care to appeal to what Tumblr was already widely known to be like in 2014-15 would never have put crosses on their main heroine in the first place.
The thing about Tumblr is that is where RWBY had so much popularity so that would be why they would go there fir the fans.
Of course it back fired in the end
SoliFortissimi
Well-known member
They forgot that while they could expect their crazy yuri fans to stifle discussion, that would drive lots of fans away. They traded away victory in the market for victory in social media discourse.
Circle of Willis
Well-known member
Ehh, I don't know about that one. To my knowledge, while RWBY did have a strong following on Tumblr back in the day, it never quite got giga-popular there like Steven Universe or Undertale. Both examples which, incidentally, also had even more psychotic fanbases than RWBY - I don't think even the worst Wasps have ever stooped so low as to drive a fan artist to attempt suicide because she didn't draw a character exactly the way they thought was proper, or put needles into a cookie which they fed to another artist for the crime of drawing ships other than Bumblebee.
IIRC RWBY's popularity was more scattered, not hyper-concentrated into a single site like Twitter or Tumblr. The Tumblr fanbase was balanced out by the RWBY subreddits (the main one, r/RWBY, got so big and had so many fights that there was eventually a schism with more critical types forming r/RWBYcritics later in the show's lifespan; and both are dwarfed by the NSFW RWBY subreddit, funny enough), RWBY fans on various smaller forums throughout the Web, artists on places like Deviantart or Pixiv, and the many authors who wrote RWBY fanfiction & cultivated their own followings on sites like FF.net or AO3.
In hindsight it just makes it an even bigger miscalculation on RT's part that they leaned so hard toward the Tumblr brigade (who then migrated to Twitter and overshadowed the preexisting RWBY fans who were there before after Tumblr banned porn) while ignoring, and eventually enabling the suppression of, everyone else.
Tumblr was at its height, and the porn community had a large help with it going down.
I was heavily invovled in a lot of these communities.
Circle of Willis
Well-known member
Yeah I know, but even so I don't remember RWBY being that much of a juggernaut on Tumblr. I was on Reddit when Shane's letter first broke in like 2016, and thought the reaction & fights over it on there were far more severe than the reaction I saw on Tumblr (the most notable thing I remember from the Tumblr RWBY fandom around that time was someone's conspiracy theory that CRWBY murdered Monty to get their hands on his IP, which struck me as way too far-fetched and assuming too much of M&K and their buddies even though - as my posts here indicate - I am far from their biggest fan lol). If you look at FF.net's anime section, even today RWBY actually still has more fanfiction written for it than freaking Attack on Titan and other anime classics like Saint Seiya or Cardcaptor Sakura, and so on. Looks to me like the following on places like that rivaled Tumblr's back in the day.
Maybe it was controversies like Shane's letter and the decline in animation & writing quality post-V3 that drove the non-Tumblr fans away in greater numbers, forcing RT into a feedback loop where they had to pander more & more to the rabid Tumblr stans to stay afloat (and later Twitter stans after their great migration post-porn ban). But in that case, it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation since RT was definitely not faultless in the original problems which started pushing fans away in the first place. It's not like anyone forced them to be absolute unrelenting and unprofessional dicks to Shane & Sheena, or to start making dodgy fight scenes and quaestionable writing decisions (of which blatantly pushing Bumblebee was only one of many) even back when the Bee shippers, and RWBY stans in general, were still manageable and not as insane as they would become.
SoliFortissimi
Well-known member
What I still remember is how quickly it went to hell, but we only noticed it long after.
What's the sitch?
Well-known member
The thing with Ruby having crosses is probably to do with how Catholicism and to a lesser extent Christianity as a whole is portrayed in Anime. They are often portrayed as a sect of spell casters/Doomslayer/Paladin a lot of the times. This is probably part Parody and partly of understanding a read of the Bible/Other media through a cultural lens. Ruby having a cross was just likely in relation to the silver eyes and their purifying powers against darkness (grimm). They were then later removed due Tumblerites and co probably being unable to be in the presence of a cross without pain even when it is fictional and divorced from Christianity.
Very likely.I never lived in Japan,but read many books written by those who did so - and,according to them,90% of population do not really belive in anything,but they still go once in year to shinto shrine,buddhist temple,and participate in Christmas.
Darth couldn't you have just said. "Whelp! RT just died further! Their podcast server was sold to Mr Beast!" I mean just cut to the chase you are not on clownfishes TV's payroll, so rather than have us watch a click bait YouTube video (the thumbnail of depressed Ruby and lack of title info makes it obvious) at least give us a summary.