I really do suck at drawing stuff on time for characters birthdays! I always miss em! But Happy Birthday to Yang! This outfit has always been my favorite and this is a quick sketch. I am tempted to render this.. but alas I have alot of other things to work on
This volume of RWBY isn't one that I've felt like writing a ton about. It's existed as a bit of background noise to my weekends, a must watch but in passing. It was a wonderful journey, but not as impactful as I thought it should be to me. It hit all the right marks. Well-written, well-animated, great music. It wasn't until the finale, where I was reminded, again, of why I loved this show in the first place.
I've been seeing an outpouring of love for V9 that seemed to spur a re-examination of it as a series, in both what RWBY means to fans and what Ruby means to the audience. This whole volume she's been a proxy facing the show's vocally decried imperfections: for what the could have beens and should have beens keep saying. In Ruby's own personal doubt, we see the seeds of the show's very own history of grappling with fan expectations, critical analysis, commercial success, and the complicated legacy of the tragic passing of the show's creator.
But CRWBY's love for this volume is so evident it seemed to drown out any bad faith arguments: this is RWBY as it was always meant to be.
In finishing this volume, I see once more that fiction can help us suture the parts of us that seep. That its creators are people we may never know but whose ideas we stitch into the membranes of our core. RWBY doesn't have to be a masterpiece emerging fully formed from the minds of its writers and animators. It is a vision expanded upon, a messy beginning built up, a work of surfeit love, flawed and lovely in the mess.
As a perfectionist I tend to chase that critical clout, to draw from external sources the meaning of my own art, to wonder if the interpretations are good enough, if the writing and characters are done with enough mastery that I can succeed in other's eyes. But RWBY will never be a success to some, and in that we see that even the most collectively beloved things are criticized by their detractors. We will never create a bulletproof thing.
Life is exposure. Love is vulnerability and art in service to that love - of self, of others, of vision - exacts the same toll of knowing. Even against the diatribes on Youtube that have stated otherwise, RWBY's heart is worn on its sleeve. It is a show fully sure of its sincerity. This volume seems meant to present that to us and to Ruby, as a character. She has always been the heart of the show. Pursuant of hope in the face of insurmountable odds, always picking up the pieces of others, always with the weight of the world on her shoulders. But, at her core, she has always been a simple, more honest soul.
RWBY and Ruby have faced failure after perceived failure. Ruby always tried hard but never quite got it and now, in the sea of her doubt and the under the current of others' expectations, she sees herself as less than. As incapable of serving the people she loves most. Ruby's fear of failure does not come from her need to be beloved, it doesn't come from a selfish interest in public opinion, but rather from a stalwart need to do what she believes in.
RWBY has long been the scruffy underdog of the animation world, an easy little show to poke fun at. This isn't to say that critiquing is inherently bad faith, or that there's no place for it. There is, and there always will be things that irk or bother us to some degree with every piece of media we consume. But, much like the people we love in our lives, those imperfections are part of them, and we can either take them as is and have faith enough that they'll grow just as we do, that their center is good and worth it, or we can simply let them go.
Choose for yourself one who can leave your burdens behind, or chose one who can be enough to bare them.
There's something to be said about the moral simplicity of a show like RWBY, in which things don't always work out, but in which the characters have enough faith in themselves, and the world, to still seek to save it. This is a fairytale, but it is one that hopes to impart on reality a little bit of that kindness.
It is wholly intentional that RWBY is thus stylized as a children's fairytale. It lacks the tonal shift of grit and anger that adulthood seems to impart on innocence, and posits that: no, you don't need to be anything else, even if others decry that self as naive or emotional or exposed. There is a beauty to RWBY's vulnerability and it's always been there, baked into the show itself.
V9 feels like a love letter to RWBY as a whole. It has always been a show set on positivity, on pursing that goodness at all costs. RWBY does not partake in the labor of being something else more gritty or mature or indifferent. It is what it's always been.
The Blacksmith is Alyx! The headband is her bow! Her hair is like the stripes in Alyx’s skirt! Her overall color scheme! She wants to fix what she broke including Jaune!
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