#ok gonna get ready for angry anons in my inbox bc that happened on my main when I critiqued this video

[neptunevasilias]

So I watched h/bomber/guy’s rwby video a few days ago, and I’ve had some time to sit on it. And while most of his video is pretty good, there were some smaller parts that I thought were.... off? Like they were leaving things out or were painting something in the wrong picture. One of those things is where he compares everything to avatar: the last airbender. Now, yes, rwby does pay some homages to shows/other stories, or take inspiration from shows/other stories(in fact the latter is like. The whole point of rwby but I’ll get to that), and he’s right that some of the things probably do take inspiration from avatar, but only leaving it at that does rwby such a discredit because it leaves out how rwby takes inspiration from so many things, from recent stories like avatar and from older stories like beauty and the beast and journey to the west, and makes it something new and original. Also, some of those parallels between rwby and avatar that he made I thought were just him grasping for straws, like the one where he compares the entire basis of rwby which is everything being based on legends and fairy tales and saying it was based on one line in a version of the avatar opening that’s only seen in the first episode(“my grandmother used to tell me stories about the old days”). Like, dude.

But anyway, these comparisons really bothered me, because it’s not like avatar owns the idea of “the rule of 4.” Hell, just to come up with another story that uses it off(heh, get it) the top of my head, look at the indie rpg OFF. And to be honest, I think rwby uses the rule of four better than avatar. In avatar, you’ve got the four nations, the four elements, the four mentors/members of the gang and that’s... it, unless I’m forgetting something. But rwby uses it religiously. You’ve got the four kingdoms, four members of a team, four schools and four headmasters, four maidens, four relics, four base types of dust, four subordinates of cinder, four subordinates of salem, four members of ozpin’s inner circle, I could go on and on. The rule of four is so prevalent that whenever it’s broken, it’s clear that something is off or even suspicious. For example, the ace ops, where the fact that there’s five of them is the biggest hint that something’s not right with them(aside from, you know, everything else).

The other things he compares to avatar that don’t have to do with the rule of four just made me go... “so what?” For example, he compared the maidens, ozpin, and silver eyed warriors to the avatar(ozpin reincarnating, maiden powers transferring to someone else, and eyes glowing). Even if those were all inspired by the avatar, none of them are carbon copies of it. None of them can be compared to the avatar much beyond one, maybe two similar traits. And they all use different traits of the avatar, and not only that but are their own separate things. With the avatar’s glowing eyes in the avatar state, that’s hardly similar to SEWs at all. Silver eyes are a genetic trait that came from the god of light(the brothers are another thing that might have been inspired by avatar, but if you ask me the gods of light and darkness were handled WAY better than raava and vaatu), coming from his own eyes of light, which means they’re handy against grimm and magic(the god of darkness’ creations) but not much else. Or Ozpin, probably the most likely to have actually been inspired by the avatar? Sure, he reincarnates into another person whenever he dies, and is an important political figure in keeping the world at peace, but he reincarnates into an already living person and has to fuse with them over time. His reincarnation is also not a widely-known thing, in fact it’s a secret. He’s also not very successful at his job, and views it as a curse because he retains the same consciousness in every reincarnation. So really, trying to critique rwby by comparing it to ways it was possibly inspired by avatar and then implying it didn’t do as well as “the original” is a useless critique because rwby’s not trying to be a carbon copy of anything. Maybe it took inspiration from some things from avatar, but it took that inspiration and made its own unique story. Oh, and I’m not even going to touch on that “books” and “volumes” thing. That’s just nitpicking.

Other stories are the basis of rwby, but that’s not a bad thing. You wouldn’t critique one upon a time for being unoriginal, so you certainly can’t do it for rwby. Rwby even goes one step past shows like ouat(or at least what I understand it to be since I haven’t watched it), because it’s not a literal mashup of legend and fairy tale characters. It’s its own world with its own story, it just makes strong allusions to these other stories. It does this in many different ways. It does it by taking the surface plot of a fairy tale and translating that into a personal character arc, like with blake being both beauty and the beast being representative of how she needs to learn to love herself after years of abuse(YES blake’s allusion is genius, I am so mad at h/bomber/guy for spending so much time acting like it’s terrible and then not even explaining that opinion once in his two and a half hour video). It might also do this by having characters be a “failed” version of their allusion, doing this especially for villains or morally gray characters, for example leonardo lionheart being the cowardly lion who lost his bravery. There’s also of course the fact that some characters will have multiple allusions, for example adam being both gaston and the cursed rose, or summer rose being both “the last rose of summer” and dorothy from the wizard of oz(a failed version of dorothy - the girl who never came home), or as mentioned earlier blake being both beauty and the beast. Jacques technically has three: jack frost, the snow queen, and snow white’s evil stepmother.

Lastly, and this can sometimes tie in with the last method if the character has their own allusions, but (usually main) characters will sometimes have their story’s allusion bleed into the other characters around them. Blake is the best example of this - she is beauty and the beast, but with yang has her love interest(fite me) she also becomes both beauty and the beast. And adam becomes gaston and the cursed rose, sun becomes chip, etcetera. Or weiss and her family, she is snow white(AND prince charming, she saves herself), her dad is the evil stepmom, her mom the king, winter the huntsman, whitley the magic mirror, and klein the seven dwarves. It even applies to villains, like cinder, who is based on cinderella. Salem is her fairy godmother, ironwood the prince charming(cinder leaves behind a glass chess piece so he knows who she is), the rest of cinder’s faction are arguably her stepsisters, and probably atlas as a whole is her evil stepmother.

My point is, while most of what he says in his video is right, I thought some of his critique was, uh, wrong. And this time I wanted to talk about the section of his video where he compared things to avatar, because I don’t think that’s a critique at all, and he wasn’t accounting for how rwby as a whole operates, which is taking inspiration from other stories and making their own intricate world out of it.

#meta #ok gonna get ready for angry anons in my inbox bc that happened on my main when I critiqued this video