gstud

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Roosterteeth and Their Issue With Timelines

So, in the entirety of the show RWBY from Roosterteeth there has been many errors in continuity mostly involving time. Now I know for the most part people, myself included would just vote to ignore this fact or rationalize it with common sense, but with the examples I’m fixing to talk about there is no way in hell that these errors can be ignored. So, to set a baseline I’m going to rattle off some facts: at the beginning of volume one of RWBY our main characters are seventeen except Ruby who’s fifteen, Adam is presumed to be in his mid-twenties (around twenty-three), Ghira is a middle aged man I’d say around his mid-forties, Ilia is supposed to be around Blake’s age at seventeen give or take a couple years. All of that is set in stone, you can’t change your age for whatever reason, with that said Ghira stepped down from leading the white fang five years before the start of Volume one making our main characters twelve and Adam eighteen which is fine for the most part except in the Adam trailer that dropped a couple months ago Ilia was amongst one of the soldiers with Ghira along with Adam and Sienna Khan who looked the same age as if they were in Volume one (or four in Ilia’s case). With that said, that means Ghira’s peaceful protest group is putting children in danger putting him in a sour light. As for Adam he’s an adult dating a child, eighteen to twelve, it would be a very complicated work around to get that shit to work. Same goes for Ilia too because if she’s seventeen or eighteen during the Adam short she’d also be twenty-three during volume four and five. The timeline doesn’t work like that so if they wanted to avoid that issue then they just shouldn’t have had Ilia there to begin with.

Next issue I have involving time and age is regarding Winter where she’s an Atlas specialist with presumably high respect seeing how she has her own ship, guards, and seat next to General Ironwood. Any idea how old she is? According to Miles during the volume five recap he stated that Winter is Twenty-two. That’s really impressive, to the point of probably being almost impossible without some bribery which I don’t think Winter did and I doubt Jacques is involved with Winter’s life anymore considering she strayed outside of his rules. I thought the general consensus on winter’s age would be late twenties to early thirties, not four years older than Weiss. I bring all this up not because I don’t like Winter, I honestly want to see more of her in the show, amongst other characters, but just with my experience being surrounded by our military in the real world it seems that it takes a lot to get promoted and to get promoted to the rank to where YOU GET YOUR OWN FUCKING SHIP. Just seems weird that she has that kind of position considering her age.

[gstud]

Pyrrha V.S. Cinder Combat Analysis

Alright so with this post I'm going to be reviewing the fight between Cinder and Pyrrha, so let's get this show on the road.

In my opinion Pyrrha should've won the fight but just barely given that cinder has the fall maiden's power. Now what we know about Pyrrha: in volume one when we're being introduced to characters and such Weiss goes on an exposition dump talking about Pyrrha and how accomplished she is as a combatant "Pyrrha graduated top of her class at sanctum... she's won the Mystral Regional Tournament four years in a row, a new record." That's pretty damn impressive, so much so that Pyrrha in volume two says that she's on such a high pedestal that she's unapproachable.

Then later we've seen in multiple seasons, most notably volume three, of how well she fights holding her own very efficiently against two fighters (volume 3 episode 2). Her main advantage over all of her opponents has always been polarity which we've seen her use minorly when she fought Mercury and then majorly when she fought Penny (R.I.P.) but when she's fighting Cinder she can't use her polarity with Cinder's weapons because their made of some sort of stone/glass, I like to lean towards obsidian (obsidian comes from a volcano so does cinders from burnt wildlife, not all that important though). While Pyrrha can't use her polarity against her weapons she can use it on her environment which we saw, which I thought was very effective. That's enough about Pyrrha, we're gonna now focus on Cinder which may be a bit more difficult to talk about seeing how we have limited information about her.

So we know that Cinder is working with Salem who has some control over grimm, so Salem could've taught Cinder how to fight or how to think through a fight (though I'm a bit reluctant to think that because I think Salem is just using Cinder as a pawn) so there's that, we also know that she is very cunning in the way of planning out the Fall of Beacon and recruiting people to her cause (ie, Mercury, Emerald, Roman, the White Fang) again adding onto her tactical experience which is all said and good but tactics can't win a battle alone.

Combatively she has taken out a lobby of Atlas grunts, which I'm sure any huntsman can do so, eh ok that happened, then she has the successful mugging of the fall maiden which is definitely impressive though she wouldn't have been able to do it on her own, so for the most part she excels at guerrilla warfare, hit and runs. As for her fight with Ozpin, idk what to make of it there was no body to be found and we only saw them clashing so Ozpin could've slipped away via some magic bullshit or she did kill the body Ozpin was using but then jumped hosts we don't know, but I will give her this: from what we did see of the fight it seemed like she had to go all out to at least keep up with Ozpin which can lead to exhaustion.

Now to the actual fight itself, finally. So the overall fight itself was good, it was exciting, both dishing out damage pretty evenly throughout but there were two moments, maybe three, where Pyrrha could've ended the fight or kept on fighting.

So this moment was perfect to continue on fighting rather than being at a stalemate. Pyrrha obviously is overpowering Cinder in this position even if she can't finish it with her sword she can still turn and throw Cinder into the ground with a hip toss and at that point from that point she definitely has dominant position with Cinder on the ground she can stomp on her head, summon her sword and stab her and then get interrupted by the dragon and then we could continue onward.

Then there's this scene. God I hate this scene because it goes against all those years of fighting and practice because for me and my three years of fencing there are five tenets of swordsmanship and the number one tenet is protect yourself and when Pyrrha gets up she has plenty of time to see that Cinder is winding up her shot and she should've just raised her shield and let her shield take the shot AND NOT FALL INTO THE ACHILLES ARCHETYPE. That character archetype felt so forced, but let's say it's the heat of the moment and she doesn't notice that Cinder is winding up her shot and she does throw her shield WHY WOULD SHE BE TURNED AROUND WHEN THE ARROW HITS HER, IT LOOKS SO WEIRD LIKE WHEN I THROW A BALL, OR A FRISBEE AND WHEN I THROW IT I DON'T THROW IT WITH SO MUCH DRAMATIC FLAIR THAT I END UP TURNED AROUND. It really bothers me because she's a renown combatant and that's just a silly mistake for someone of her class to make. If she wasn't turned around she might have had time to see the arrow fall apart and then reform and potentially roll out of the way and keep fighting. And even if the arrow did hit, it shouldn't pierce the armor (though that's been under much debate).

And final moment that I think that Pyrrha could've kept fighting.

This scene. At this scene when Cinder is all touchy with Pyrrha spewing out her monologue that would be a great time to grab her arm and leap off with her good leg using her adrenaline to keep going and taking cinder to the ground and do some ground wrestling and hold on until Ruby gets there which wasn't very long. I just remember a comic someone made where Pyrrha asks cinder if she believes in destiny then suplexes cinder which was just hilarious, I loved it so much. But as I've been told before Pyrrha was probably going into this fight expecting to die but at the start she went in fighting for her life, at least that's what it looked like and I also know it was decided before this volume that Pyrrha was going to die it just seems like it was set up poorly hence this post.

Hope y'all like it and I'll see you on the next post.

[gstud]

Weiss Trailer Analysis

Alright so I'm probably late to talk about this, like reaaaly late but I gotta start somewhere.

Anywho I wanted to rant a bit about the combat in Weiss's most recent trailer focusing mostly on her weapon, so Weiss's weapon is essentially a rapier.

There's no curves on it and it doesn't have quilians like a longsword, it's very effective with thrusts and can also do cuts, though not as devestating as say a longsword or a saber, or I guess the katana (ew).

The cuts with a rapier are most effective when you hit a major artery and you might be able to cut through some bone in say an arm or calf if you put some force behind it. It'd be more understandable with a side sword which is thicker than a rapier and has more of a defined edge that can be used for cutting through people.

Like that, I can see that happening on a human, not so much on the decapitation, but maybe, though I'm not 100% sure on that because I haven't done test cutting with a rapier against dead animal, my point is (haha), is that you can't cleave through the main center of mass with something that looks like a tooth pick especially if the thing you're cutting through is thicker than a human being.

Like this, this looks silly to me.

This is me just nit picking but it looks kinda odd to me and after doing longsword and arming sword fencing for like three years, it just looks funky to me. But besides that I did like the trailer far more than others, it had good animations and it was nice to see winter again.

[gstud]

Introductions

Alright so before I go on to nitpick some of the fight scenes in rwby and potentially cause some drama I wanna talk about myself and kinda explain what s going on and humanizing myself.

So I'm a 19 year old man, I've been doing HEMA for about 3 years now and have won two medals out of that time. I started watching RWBY during the Volume 2 hiatus and loved the characters, the writing, and how the fights were presented, shit's hella cool. Then me and my friends started having issues with how Volume 3 was handle for a lot of reasons, which I might go into at a later date it's just too long for this post to explain all that. What got me wanting to do combat analysis posts was the Weiss Trailer for Vol 4, it's good trailer and you'll see my gripes with it here in a bit but I had issues with it and wanted to go into detail about it, then looking at other fight scenes I found issues with I thought I could throw in a different perspective of how it could've been done/why I don't like it. Doesn't mean I hate RWBY I loved volume 5 and can't wait for the next season but it's not without flaws much like most things.

So with all that I'm very open to having civil conversations about rwby, where it's going, or anything else for that matter but I'd like to have this blog be a place for discussion and not shitposting. If you want more posts like this in the future just lemme know or if you have a suggestion for an episode or fight you want me to look at just throw it into the ask box and I'll give it a look.

[gstud]

This is an amazing short clip I found on Reddit and wanted to share with you guys. I hope you all enjoy it!