(Sorta response to the anon ask about potential) I think it's important to remember that we, the audience, have liberties that RT doesn't when it comes to our fics/rewrites. RT doesn't have the luxury of years of retrospection on the show, or all the time they could want, to write. RT are also writing from scratch, not just adding to another's work. It's like the difference between following a recipe and cooking from scratch.
Not saying it excuses their blatant missteps, but as someone who has written on a deadline like that for something I'm getting paid for before, let me tell you it can be really easy to let cracks form moment to moment.
Hey, @just-rwby Idk why I just haven't been seeing your asks until recently, but this is a very fair point to make. It's easy to spot mistakes from the outside, it's much harder to see them in your own work. I have a consistent writing partner for fan fics who often will scroll over sentences on our google docs that I wrote and then write 'What?' So I know I'm just not communicating what I want right, and not writing so well. Writing is hard, and I'm by no means a professional.
As for re-writes, it is important to note that we are looking at RWBY from the outside and have all of the time in the world to figure out how we’d ‘do it right,’ we have all the pieces we need, we know where the characters might be headed from the start, we can see where the writers may have tripped up, we can watch RWBY fifty times to make sure we have the full picture. If someone were to re-write Harry Potter, they might get rid of the unnecessary floo network and use portkeys from the start because while JK Rowling might not have invented them when she wrote book two, we know - after years and years of being able to critically look at the complete series - that portkeys are going to exist and will be crucial for the fourth book. But that doesn’t mean that we’re better or worse at writing than JK Rowling.
The first time I was making a ‘re-write’ it was to alter the character reactions to Lost Fable in volume six that had really frustrated me. During the course of that fic, me and the person that I was writing the fic with turned it into a big overarching story where we A. Forgot that Raven had suggested Ozpin was her headmaster and had him be the former classmate of Qrow. B. Missed the quick flash of Pietro we see in volume three when Penny is killed and instead wrote an OC father for her. C. Forgot that communications were down and had that OC father contact them via their scrolls sometimes. And so on and so forth. Even with the option to watch through the first five seasons over and over, we were still making lots of mistakes. Of course, we were writing the fic for ourselves, never published it, and never sold it or claimed to be professionals.
Making AUs is great! It’s always fun to re-write things in the way that we want or to fix the mistakes we can see since we’re not under any time limit and can really think things through. For instance, I’ve been slowly trying to work on a RWBY re-write and one of the things I’d do is keep Ironwood a hero and go with Yang x Weiss and Blake x Sun as romantic ships. It would be ridiculous for me to say that RWBY should’ve gone with those ships and that arc for Ironwood just because I want it. But it is perfectly valid for me to say that I don’t think the way they did Ironwood’s arc was good and that I don’t think Blake x Yang as a ship has been done well. And it may have been rushed, but CRWBY are meant to be professionals trying to sell a product, unlike me.
Criticizing RWBY is valid, even venting and bashing and nitpicking is valid (posting it using the proper tags in a website so the creators will never see and that fans of the show can filter out.) RWBY the official product has to be held to a higher standard than any fanwork, because it is official, it’s meant to be professional, and it’s a product that RT is trying to sell people on. As creative and good and full of potential RWBY can be at times, their big mistakes are more serious and impact the overall story or even have hurtful narratives that impact the real world.
But RWBY fanworks are inherently built off of RWBY. People who make RWBY re-writes can alter the world magic, they can change up character ages and backgrounds, they can throw in ‘fixes’ and leave out some of the bigger mistakes and some of the harmful narratives in RWBY... But in the end, they aren’t making their own product, they’re just altering the foundation of someone else’s work and doing so with none of the limitations they have. Whether or not people who make these re-writes are better writers than the CRWBY writers is something that can’t be gauged through those re-writes, it has to be gauged through the products they’ve actually made on their own.
I’ve never managed to make anything of my own. I have tons of ideas, but I struggle to get them to become anything solid. The fact that the RWBY writers consistently put out a product is an accomplishment I’ve only dreamed about. But there are still these big, blatant mistakes and it is perfectly to valid to wonder at how they were missed and to criticize RWBY for them, because it impacts their story in the long run.
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