Im a big fan of RvB, but I never was able to get into RWBY, something about the faces and way they moved outside of the awesome combat scenes hit me too hard in the Uncanny Valley to really give it the chance it deserved (and Im a massive anime fan so it's not just the BESM style). But that's really my only hesitance with Rooster Teeth: while they've proven capable action animators they arent the best when it comes to original art assets or design or conveying subtle human emotion and facial movement and whatnot.
There was a
dramatic improvement in animation quality after the first season of RWBY. I was hesitant too, because I thought it looked terrible overall from the start. It felt like something an indie developer would make for a Nintendo system. It still feels like a video game rendering system, but for something actually good, like Valkyria Chronicles.
To me, the biggest flaw was always the weird physics. Models never seemed to actually interact with anything, just sort of collide with it. Picking something up might look like they pass their hand over it, and suddenly they're holding it.
That and some serious genre shifts later on makes it worth sticking with, in my opinion. It takes a serious turn, and the happy-go-lucky, genki style of the beginning moves on to way darker material. That and, you know, raised stakes, et cetera.
RT really likes to take something, start it off light and funny, then have a dramatic twist that takes things in an unexpected direction.
I still think that with minor changes you could group three books into a season and get a decent season every time:
Season 1 (StF, FM, GP) - Insert Bianca into Fool Moon and you got a big bad.
Season 2 (SK, DM, BR) - Insert Thomas into Summer Knight and you have a Thomas season.
Season 3 (DB, PG, WN) Add Cowl into Harry's PTSD in Proven Guilty and call it a day.
Season 4 (SmF, TC, Changes) - Thread Peabody into Small Favor and call it a day. You've earned it. Plus, Changes makes a hell of a finale.
Season 5 (GS, CD, SG) - Pretty solid through line that puts Harry back together by the end of the season. Mostly.
I can get behind tweaks like that. So long as it doesn't screw up the lore and adds to the story rather than detracts from it, I'd be fine.
Not sure I agree about ending a season with Cold Days, Quantus. The Gates make it seem like the scope of the overall series is going to change, but it really doesn't in Skin Game; the stakes shrink down to personal, relatively minor political maneuvering. Peace Talks will bring the scale back to a global level, but Mirror Mirror probably won't. Then comes Fight Night, right? I think it'd make more sense to do Peace Talks (which, I believe, will feature a lot of fan service, with returning characters galore), then Mirror Mirror (which will likely feature many of those reintroduced characters but in a separate, bizzaro-world context), then Fight Night, where Harry returns to solve a more run-of-the-mill mystery, but is introduced to a different pantheon of gods, who will presumably be bigger players moving on.
Plus it's kind of hard to beat the ending of Skin Game; it's Harry's first total, untarnished victory. He feels guilty about Ascher, Murphy getting hurt, and is worried about losing the Grail, but he's finally got some of the things he wants. Things will be more different for him in Peace Talks than they were at the start of Changes, but the message is still the same: Harry's back, and Chicago's his turf.
That's how I see it, anyway.
