I had the idea of a Remnant yearbook. A yearbook of all students of all years and all staff from all 4 four academies during Team RWBY's freshman year. But then I thought, how many teams are there in each year? We really don't know. We only know that there are at least 3 per year per school.
A yearbook is an amazing idea and I absolutely loathe that we never got anything even remotely like it. Can you imagine all of the cool or interesting things the show could have done with that? Like, Tai unshelving his old yearbook, and showing it off to his kids. Or Team CFVY pulling out a copy of theirs from first-year in order to prove some dubious fact (“I swear, Professor Oobleck used to have a beard. Look, here’s the picture—”).
Or, for something a little more somber: A third-year team who lost a teammate, and occasionally, one of the students stares quietly at the photo taken from the year before, back when their team was still whole.
There’s so much application for a yearbook in this setting and I am gutted we’ll never get to see any of it. What a waste.
Your second point warrants investigation, because the size of the student body always puzzled me, too. On a whim, I pulled up “The First Step” and rewatched the initiation scene. Here’s what I found:
The launch site that overlooks the Emerald Forest. | Source: RWBY Wiki contributor user:Maki Kuronami.
Total number of people: 16. Number of blacked-out silhouettes: 7.
All of JNPR is in this shot. We see three members of RWBY and two members of CRDL, which means that three of the silhouettes in the lineup belong to Blake, Sky, and Dove. That leaves four people unaccounted for, who presumably went on to form a fourth, unnamed team.
(Mind you, this is working under the assumption that the omission of Blake et al wasn’t an animation error. Which given the track record of V1 – V3, is a distinct possibility.)
This means that at the time Ruby entered Beacon, there were possibly four first-year teams.
On a superficial level, the math checks out. Sixteen entrants means that everyone gets neatly sorted onto a team without there being any stragglers.
But you’re right to wonder how many teams there are in each year, because when you think about how the enrollment system works, it doesn’t make any sense. Like, what happens if there are 22 applicants that year, and all of them come with glowing recommendations? Is Ozpin going to arbitrarily refuse two of those students because they would be two people shy of having another four-person team? Huntsmen are a non-negotiable part of the kingdoms’ survival, and training new batches of them is Ozpin’s job. Is he seriously going to turn away eligible students, and compromise the future security of his country, just because he’s adhering to a precedent derived from a fairy tale?
I wish I was kidding. Like, no joke, the (totally-not-a-retcon) reason why the academies assign students to four-person teams is because the King of Vale was inspired by a Mistrali folk story, The Hunter’s Children.
As V5 showed us, the kingdoms can—and sometimes do—face Huntsman shortages when a sudden, large number of them are killed off. That is a very real, very possible threat. Therefore, the idea that an academy might deny someone entry on the basis of four-person teams (and thereby contribute to a future shortage) is indicative of a dangerously flawed system.
Granted, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing from a story-telling perspective. For starters, plenty of real-world colleges and universities have waitlists because there are only so many students they can accommodate at a time. And there’s nothing wrong with including flaws in your work, if your plan as a writer is to point out and deconstruct those flaws within the story.
But RWBY doesn’t do this. It doesn’t tell us if the academies can only accept a certain number of students per year, or if that number has to be a multiple of four. It doesn’t tell us if they have a waitlist, or if there’s a vetting process for deciding which applicants get to enroll that year. It doesn’t take the time to draw attention to how tradition might actually make things worse, or have the characters propose new ideas in its stead.
But, yes. A yearbook would be a lovely idea. Perhaps we could use it to bludgeon the show to death.
