There is this common defence I have noticed in FNDM of people responding to RWBY is trash with "ok but have you watched volumes 6 through 9" that I have realised I really dislike.
I understand and agree with the spirit of it, I think.
6 through 9 is where we finally start to get the scope of the narrative and world building and contain some truly great moments and exponentially more polished production quality. 6 through 9 are when RWBY comes into its own in a very specific way, it's not that this is when it finally becomes RWBY or when it finally becomes good, it's that its when the audience finally gets enough information about the world to understand why it works the way it does. This grants a kind of stability to the narrative from then onwards even as the show still engages in plenty of subversion, because we get what the stakes are and we know what the ultimate conflict to be resolved is. The path can still be twisty but we have a north star now.
But a lot of people haven't seen these volumes because they couldn't tolerate the lower production quality OR because they couldn't tolerate the level of subversion the show engages in during the preceding volumes. As someone who loves the show that is unfortunate but it's understandable. People have different expectations and desires for the entertainment they engage with.
And a lot of them aren't magically going to gain a tolerance for those things just because they're told the show has a more obvious sense of direction down the line, and that the first 5 volumes are basically foundation laying.
Not to mention the ones that are just some for whom hating on the show is their entertainment and so there's no meaningful reason to be taking their arguments and complaints in good faith.
But this comeback of "have you watched 6 through 9" doesn't give me complicated feelings because of how it can come across dismissive of people's personal tastes and entertainment tolerances, I know damn well the place of defensiveness it's coming from with all the shit the show and it's fans have weathered.
My complicated feelings come from the fact that I think it's just kind of unreasonable to expect anyone to weather 5 seasons of any show to get to the part where it will finally become palatable to them, and where they might finally kind of like it.
Like that is HOURS of real life time you're asking them to invest so that they have enough context to actually understand what is going on and why characters respond to things the way they do. Do you do this with other media?
If I told you to read a chunky 5 book series where the first 3 don't really have anything you're super into and that I personally found kinda sucky save for a few quips by a side character added to my blorbo collection, but book 4 was solidly average and book 5 damn near changed my life but only because it mirrored the themes of the first three books but finally gave a full exploration and closure the characters couldn't have gained in the early books, most of you would tell me to fuck off.
Some of you would maybe politely negotiate your way into reading just books 4 and 5 or just the final book 5. And then you'd maybe agree that it wasn't an unpleasant reading experience. But it would be an uphill battle two ways through snow for you to feel anything deeper without any of the previous context about who the characters are and how momentous the growth and loss they experience is. And we'd be able to chat about the part that hit me hard but we'd feel the disconnect. I'd probably leave feeling kind of dejected that you can't match my enthusiasm even having experienced it and you might feel uncomfortable with my obvious dejection, neither of us would be having as much fun as we might have.
Having lived this on both sides sometimes it is genuinely better to just only engage with a media via your friend rambling about how much it's on their mind because then you can be asking them directly for context proving you are engaged and interested in their interest and they get to have fun talking even more about the thing on their mind and maybe find new angles to think about it from simply from needing to put their thoughts into enough order to communicate them.
Implying that people should just push through because of the 7th movie in the series really slapped, or the 3rd season of the audio drama finally stopped joking around, or the production quality of an indie animation finally caught up with the standards of large corporate made shows somewhere around the 5th season is just kind of wild.
If that's when something "gets good" but you cannot justify a person starting at that point and you can't find a place earlier than the literal start of the property for your pal to have enough context for them to be able to connect with the story on an emotional level, then you need to stop loudly implying (and sometimes even outright saying) that the earlier parts bad.
Warn that the beginning is not the part they should pin their expectations to. Tell them a central element to the show you like that is only in its set up phase if it's seen at all earlier on so they can be on the look out for that growth instead of expecting endless schoolyard comedy. You don't have to give spoilers just tell them some themes or tropes that one of the characters will engage in that would seem unlikely for them based on early appearances. Warn them that the shoe string production capacity has fallen outside of other people's aesthetic tolerances and explain just how tiny it was when it started so they can properly calibrate expectations instead of walking in expecting the later more polished version of the show.
Don't just go, haha, yeah the early stuff is kinda shit but I promise it gets good later, really.
