On RWBY and bad writing
RWBY and bad writing are two (or three?) words that I’ve seen together more that I would like to have seen. But what is bad writing? We could call bad writing plot points that doesn’t makes sense, a characterization that prevents from relation to a character, dedicating time to secondary characters in detriment of the main characters, character development that is unbelievable, characters that are too bland or uninteresting, romance without chemistry, and I could go on and on. RWBY is not innocent of bad writing, examples like the excessive time dedicated to Jaune Arc in volume 1, or the “reveal” that Penny is a robot. The way that the dance arc was handled in volume 2 and the uneven screen time distribution in volume 4 could also be considered bad writing
But why they happened?
Some like Penny’s reveal are related to Monty’s writing; he was a great animator yes, but because of that he linked everything to what could give him the coolest animation sequence, this works in other kind of animation (like Dead fantasy) but not in RWBY, which needed some solid foundation. Others like the Jaune “arcs” and the dance arc were just badly developed: Jaune received too much attention early on, when not even the main characters where properly developed; and Pyrrha receive too little screen time despite her crucial role during volume 3. And sometimes the writers face challenges that they haven’t encountered before (like dividing the screen time between the four protagonists, with every one of them having a very different story) so mistakes just happen.
Now I’m not trying to defend this, these instances of bad writing deserve to be criticised, we must (respectfully) give feedback (as in, constructive criticism) to the writers and animators so they can continue to improve. But we also must be knowledgeable of were these mistakes come from (or at least try to give our most educated guess, like I’ve done right now). Because this gives us insight what is bad writing and what is not.
So, what is not bad writing?
In short anything you hoped to happen but didn’t.
Fans can, and do, create hype around things they like. Monty’s breath-taking animation was the perfect fuel for fandom hype; but often the delivered product does not live up to the fandom idealized version. This is disappointing of course (and nobody is here to say that you can feel disappointed with how the show is proceeding), but is not an instance of bad writing. What fans hype themselves of what something might be just to be disappointed its entirely their own fault. What is not bad writing either is characters that belong to a minority group having flaws or being bad persons (unless of course, they have those flaws BECAUSE they are minorities, then it is bad writing). Neither is the fandom inserting political cometary into a scene and the complaining that that scene caries a bad message, because if that scene wasn’t written with a specific political cometary in there, it’s the fandoms fault to interpret it that way. And last but not least, not getting your ship is not bad writing either (unless counted exceptions, like for example when the creator forces a ship that in the story has no chemistry whatsoever).
This is my opinion on the subject, everyone is free to disagree. If we’re going to have a debate let’s keep it civil.