This RWBY Retrospective series ended up a lot more drawn-out than I intended, but we’re finally at the end. This one is more personal and perhaps a bit self-indulgent; it’s about the RWBY fandom as a whole, but also my experience in it, and the effect the show and its community had on me. Although it’s not the focus, I will cover some of the drama, and I also threw in a few asides touching on some of the side content since I only really looked at the main show in the other parts.
This final part was also supposed to be a quick follow-up… and it’s been almost three months since part 2. For the most part the writing flowed well, it’s just that there was always something else pulling me away. I slowly chipped away at it and eventually decided to just power through the last bit, and now we’re here.
We have to talk about the FNDM
Because it’s become a bit of a mess. At a glance, the RWBY fandom is 1) highly polarized and 2) disturbingly horny. For a case in point, take a look at the biggest RWBY subreddits.
You have r/RWBY, the “main” RWBY sub, which is mostly fanart and clamps down on discussion that verges even mildly into the critical (and also has a disturbing amount of hornyposting). Then there’s r/RWBYcritics, which claims to be for open discussion but is pretty negative and toxic. And r/RWBYNSFW is larger than both of them.
It’s been a while since I’ve really been immersed in the RWBY community, but as far as I can tell this is reasonably representative of the fandom today. It’s starkly divided between those who are very defensive of the show and those who are very critical of it (and there’s a bigger contingent who’s just here to get off). It’s kinda sad to see, but I think there are reasons why the fandom ended up polarized, and I’ll get to that later in this piece.
It’s also one of those fandoms that’s attracts both alt-right chuds and the queerest folks you’ve ever met. I can understand its appeal to both crowds. It’s a world of badass and a story of powerful heroes saving the day, not to mention lots of cool guns. And it’s also a vibrant world full of colourful designs that’s not afraid to play with gender roles, with stories built around positivity, harmony, and forgiveness.
The best discussions I’ve seen have been actually been outside RWBY spaces, in tangentially related threads. I think it’s easy to get immersed in an echo chamber where certain opinions, positive or negative, get reinforced in a vicious cycle. If you can step back from that a bit, it both gives you some room to think and the ability to express your own opinions without being dogpiled.
The Power of Creation
I was blown away with the quality and quantity of fanworks the first time around, and they’ve only become more impressive in the years since. There’s a ton of fanart and fanfiction, of course. Early on, there was a single abridged series and a 3D animated trailer. Now there are full fan animations in various styles and at least a dozen fangames, some of which have pretty good production values.
I’ve struggled to write this section, because there’s something really special about something reaching a place where people are devoted and passionate enough to start doing their own spins on it. When it becomes more than just a thing because of the community and creation that has sprung up around it. Its really one of those things that if you know, you know, and maybe someday I’ll find better words for it. Maybe it’s just the nostalgia talking, but I was able to be in a few fandoms like this, and there really is nothing like it.
I got my start as a creator with fanworks. I spent my teen years writing fanfiction, and those stories were both the first ones I shared and the ones with which I learned how to put a story together. Some of my first forays into game development were haphazard attempts at DOOM total conversions (I was late to this party- it was the mid-2000s). Both of these are easy, low-barrier-to-entry gateways into their respective worlds. My story is hardly unique- there are many published authors who started with fanfiction and many modders who either moved on to work in the industry or released original games of their own. RWBY fanworks are (not uniquely, but unusually) an echo of RWBY itself: Monty Oum’s Haloid and Dead Fantasy animations put him on the map, and Rooster Teeth’s claim to fame was a Halo machinima.
Five Minutes of Fame
Here’s my Wish.com version of Jenny Nicholson’s Friendship is Witchcraft reveal. I wrote a popular fanfic!
I’m not sure if it was the first “Remnant and Earth” fic, but it was definitely the trope codifier. It’s hard to get a feel for how popular Emergence really was. Which is kind of ironic, because one issue with that fic was that I had no idea how well-known or not RWBY was in real life, but I digress. It was very well known on SpaceBattles, fairly well known on r/RWBY, did occasionally come up in discussions elsewhere, and had acknowledged clones. It even had a TVTropes page! However, I don’t think it was really known outside those circles in the wider RWBY fandom, and it rarely (though sometimes!) comes up today.
It was my first fic that could be considered in any way popular, though, and my first experience with any form of internet fame within a community. Honestly, I still find myself pining for those “glory days”. I was never able to turn the popularity of that fic it into any sort of interest in my other projects, and I still sometimes wish I could build that kind of following again. For a while I was pretty down about it, but I eventually got to a place where I can share with a few like-minded people and I’m happy about that.
I learned some good lessons, some hard lessons, and some important lessons. I learned that you can’t satisfy everyone, and some people come in with unrealistic expectations. I learned how hard it is to keep up when your story is set in the present and tracks current events (although it didn’t stop me from doing this again). I learned how annoying it is to write a fic while canon is actively developing, and how that can leave you in the lurch.
Someone brought up the maxim “you’re allowed one unicorn”*, and it’s a useful rule of thumb I’ve kept in mind since then. You can have one thing that’s really out there and still make something that feels grounded, as long as you limit it to that one thing and play out its consequences realistically. That becomes the premise of your story, and you build around it. For the most part I stuck to this, and for the most part it worked.
*I don’t know if this is an established term or not, but here’s the post that brought it up.
I’m still amazed by the pace I managed when I was writing Emergence. The shorter chapters in the first part were cranked out 2-3 per week, and even when I went to longer chapters and stepped back a bit I was still doing over a chapter for month.
The Potential Paradox
There’s one big thing that’s stuck with me from Emergence. To paraphrase, “it has potential” is one of the worst things to hear about a work, not because it’s bad in and of itself, but because it means the audience has built their own wildly varying expectations about what’s coming and you’re never going to match all of them. The original post explains it a bit better.
This happened with Emergence. There was a lot of excitement initially, even though the first chapters were rough as fuck. But as the story unfolded, some readers started to get really unhappy with it. While I’m generally happy with the fic as a whole, I definitely made some mistakes with it, including hinting at some ideas early on that I never went through with. Some were disappointed with the direction I went in, others disappointed that it never achieved the level of quality they desired.
I think this happened to RWBY itself, too, and it would go a long way to explaining why the fandom became so polarized. It was practically set up to fall into this hole from the very beginning, starting off with extreme levels of jank, incredibly vague worldbuilding, and by-the-seat-of-your-pants writing, but hinting at being just the beginning of something much greater.
A lot of viewers- and I was one of them- went wild with theories about how the world of Remnant worked and hyped ourselves up about all the cool places the show could go. And then the real thing stumbled and struggled, and not only wasn’t what we’d built in our minds, but wasn’t good enough to stand apart and proud as something better and bring us back onboard.
For some of us- and yes, I was one of them, too- RWBY just didn’t live up to the image of it we’d built in our minds. I don’t think it was fair, especially in hindsight, but there was a feeling of investment, even ownership, and thus betrayal when the show disappointed. Meanwhile, those who stuck with the show probably didn’t go that far down this path, or just genuinely preferred the choices it made. I think that feeling of investment and that attitude of “I could do it better”* really intensified the disagreements, though given how the internet works it might have been a mess no matter what.
*I’m not going to weigh on whether that’s justified or not here; I just did that in Part 2.
I do think there’s something to be learned here about the mental model an audience member builds, and how important it is to manage expectations as a creator. RWBY and the people behind it told the fandom to go wild with their imaginations, implicitly and explicitly, and that kind of came back to bite it.
I Also Tried Another Thing
I also tried to do a fan animation.
It’s bad. Indescribably bad. It was always in a state where I would only kinda-sorta acknowledge its existence, and it was only ever uploaded to DailyMotion, because in addition to being more than a bit crap it’s probably violating a lot of copyright.
However, it was a great playground for me to explore in. It’s one of the places where I really started developing my art style (if you can call it that) and my second experience with anything resembling animated content (counting my school project animatic but not counting some experiments with Flash a decade prior). It was also the first story I developed with the now-familiar pattern of “fucked up people trying to make their way through a fucked up world”, which was even going to be a line in it. I got to play with character design and setting and a kind of cinematography. It was fun and low-stakes, but tedious enough to do that it was never going to get far.
What I Missed
Long story short, a metric shedload of drama. There was a burst of disappointment and some contention about the show versus the trailers early on, but I checked out after Volume 4 which was just when the discourse was starting to turn. The shipping drama, production issues, and the show really starting to get bashed all happened after I’d left the fandom.
I don’t want to get into it too much, especially since I wasn’t there, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least mention some of the bigger blowups. After Monty’s passing, the assertion that the show was somehow not what he would have wanted started getting thrown around by critics, strengthened by an open letter from former animator Shane Newville sharing a similar view. Canonizing Bumblebee after years of hinting resulted in a backlash from shippers who preferred the also-hinted Black Sun, although I’m not sure if that drama was overblown by the sources I found. I think there were also some delays in there, but that was long after I’d stopped watching the first time, and I’m fuzzy on the details.
Rooster Teeth as a company has had no shortage of controversies, most of which affected RWBY to some level or another. Major personalities leaving on bad terms, in some cases because of serious abuse allegations against them, in other cases because they experienced abuse themselves. Gray Haddock allegedly ratfucking the animation department to make Gen:Lock. The negative Glassdoor reviews. Kdin Jenzen’s bombshell about mistreatment and wage theft, followed by her own controversy about racist comments. It’s sadly not unexpected to see from a company that started as a few guys in a basement- especially one steeped in early 2000s gamer bro culture- a meteoric rise followed by a collapse under its own weight.
Were these major blows to the show’s image, or just some more issues somewhere down the list? It’s hard to say. Personally, it’s the production issues, particularly the allegations of overwork and mistreatment in later years, that bother me the most. I feel CRWBY did make mistakes creatively, but those are their mistakes to make. A legacy of labour abuses is something much harder to move on from.
Moving forward
And with that, we’ve reached the end, at least for now. These articles grew a lot from what I originally planned- in total they’ve blown past the 10000 word mark- so thanks for reading all the way to the end. I really enjoyed the rewatch itself, and it’s been quite the experience picking through everything again.
I got into RWBY at a pivotal time in my life. I started watching during my passage into adulthood, and it remained a constant that stayed with me through those tumultuous times. The world of Remnant, or the version of it in my head, was a refuge when I was feeling down, and the fandom was a continual source of community and entertainment. There are ups and downs to every fandom, but it was nice to be there for a while.
It was also when I really started to get into making stuff. RWBY, with its humble origins, was an inspiration, and because I was so into it, had a huge effect on what I made. Some of those things were fanworks- including one semi-prominent fanfic- while others were original works that took inspiration from it in one way or another. I eventually drifted away, but there’s a lot I took away from RWBY itself and the time I spent immersed in that community.
I stopped watching RWBY years ago, but I knew I’ve been drawing some inspiration from it for Outliers- there’s a line in ItMotN where Gina directly compares her barriers to Aura – but it’s only once I did my rewatch that I realized how strong that influence really was. It’s a series about colourful characters with distinctive outfits and fancy weapons fighting mysterious shadow monsters. It’s not the only influence, of course- it owes a lot to specific video games, too, among other things- but it is a clear one. And I didn’t even realize at the time!
All that being said, it does give me a perfect note to end on…
Post Script: Back in the saddle
Or, rather, it would have.
That was where I intended to end this series: landing on the final note of how, although I’m not really involved in the RWBY fandom anymore, the show had a huge impact on me in so many ways, and directly informed several of my works.
Then I did a thing.
Against my better judgement, I decided to start writing a sequel/soft reboot of Emergence for its tenth anniversary. It’s going to be slow going, and I don’t know if it’ll ever be finished, but dipping my toe back into the RWBY fandom. Does this mean more fanart and stuff from me in the future? We’ll see.