RWBY S6E7: "The Grimm Reaper"

I'm kinda surprised it took them this long to use that episode title. Anyway, Ruby uses a scythe, she's getting a lesson in using her anti-grimm eye powers that I'm guessing still won't let her use them consistently, etc, etc. Let's do this.

Open on some dramatic cuts around the entrance of the vault where the genie lamp used to be kept. Voiceover from Cinder, as she finishes explaining to Salted Caramel With Walnuts about the relic she was trying to steal. And, presumably, about how the whole point of the attack on Vale and Beacon in the first three seasons that Maryland Mud and her dearly departed senpai were recruited for was an attempt at stealing another of these artifacts.

She also slips up and tells Rocky Road that she needs to get the lamp before it's secured in Atlas and bring it to Boston, before hurriedly correcting herself and just saying "to my group."

Cinder Fall, a master of subterfuge as always. She was damned lucky she was up against Ozpin in seasons 1-3 and not someone with more than two brain cells to rub together.

Then, Cinder abruptly changes the subject to how they both want Ruby dead. Okay, that's a bit of a non sequitur there. Did she just bring her to the vault entrance as a show of trust or something? To give her some closure about what she and Roman had been hired to aid with in the first place, and that Roman died in the process of? Maybe? Anyway, she and Haagen-Dazs both want to kill Ruby. Unfortunately, Cinder explains, her employer (she doesn't hesitate to name Boston this time. I guess she figures that she already fucked up on that secret, so no point in trying to un-fuck it) has forbidden her from killing Ruby. I don't remember that ever happening, but I'll assume it happened at some point in season 4 or 5 and that I just forgot about it. Anyway, Cinder is rangry about this, and keeps conjuring knives in her hand and then melting them to prove it.

However, Cinder says, Boston didn't forbid Cinder from allowing someone else to kill Ruby. Therefore, she and Haagen-Dazs will work together; the two of them will try to beat the target to Atlas, Cinder will locate the target when it arrives, and Haagen-Dazs will eliminate it.

...

I could probably go on for paragraphs about how stupid Cinder's "loophole" is and how unlikely Boston is to accept it. It's like an excuse a four year old would try to come up to try to argue their way out of punishment. But, any of you who aren't four years old yourselves should already be fully capable of understanding the issues here, and if you ARE four years old then you should stop reading my reviews because I use bad language sometimes.

...

They shake on their stupid promise. Or, well, I guess it isn't necessarily stupid for Haagen-Dazs, but for Cinder it sure as hell is.

Then we cut to someone crossing a bridge.

The someone is female, and wearing a skull mask. But like, a human-ish skull mask, not the turian looking thing that Yang's mom wears. Or like the White Fang wear, exactly. The scene is silent save for the wind as it sets the bridge swinging and the little saplings growing from the surrounding crags swaying. RWBY *has* gotten better at atmosphere, there's no doubt about that. Suddenly there's a loud screech, and a grimmroc starts swooping out of the mist toward the bridge. The someone pulls out a gunscythe and turns to face it.

Ruby's mom, gotcha.

She throws her gunscythe at the thing and jumps off the bridge just as it's about to break it. Turns out her gunscythe has a tractor beam feature built into it, and she latches onto it remotely with her hand and lets the roc fly her off through the ravine while some videogame-ish metal plays. She climbs onto the roc's back and...oh, wait. Okay, she actually has two mini-scythes that are tractorbeam-linked to each other, and they have the same stylized pseudo-Mesoamerican skull motif on them as the staff that Granny Cybereyes carries. Okay, not Ruby's mom, Granny Cybereyes back before she was a granny or had cybernetic eyes. Babby Normaleyes? Babby Normaleyes.

...is it going to turn out that GC actually is Ruby's mother, prematurely aged and with a name change? Probably not. The similarity in weapon choice was PROBABLY just a fakeout to make the fans think "OMG RUBY'S MOM" for a moment without any actual connection besides maybe being very distantly related via the silver eye gene. But you can really never tell what these writers are going to do, so I wouldn't even discount it.

Anyway, she brings down the grimmroc and then does a sexy action girl pose atop its corpse for the benefit of absolutely no one.

But what's this? The grimmroc isn't quite dead! It starts getting back up, and Babby jumps off of its body, throws back her head, and shoots her silver eye blast at it. Why didn't she just do that to begin with? Fuck you, that's why.

Incidentally, we're getting the patronus-looking version of the eyebeams today, and a combination of the "petrification" and "turn to dust" effects where the target turns momentarily to stone before crumbling. It...honestly, the way the stages of this are visually emphasized makes it seem like someone pointed out to the creators that they made the eyes do the wrong thing last time, and so now they're hastily attempting to reconcile that with previous showings.

Babby starts packing up the mini-gunscythes to go back to...wherever she had been on her way too before the birdy stopped by...when a bullet flies at her from behind. It's a couple of randos, and a crocodile person with a bad cockney accent. Well, I guess the RWBY critics have misled me and made me come to an inaccurate conclusion about this season; I'd heard that it was a bad kiwi accent.

Crocodile lady says she and her pals are here to fuck Babby's shit up. Babby is like "do you even know who I am?" and Croco is like "yep, you're Babby!" Well then! I'm not sure how the bad guys are supposed to have gotten to the random spot where the grimmroc happened to crashland after an extended aerial battle that quickly, but maybe one of them has a teleport semblance or something.

She then pulls out an oversized old-fashioned pocketwatch (well..."pocket." It's big enough to require its own handbag or small backpack) and sets it for sixty seconds, promising Babby that it never takes her and her bros longer than that to kill a target.

Oh, she's THAT crocodile. The one from Peter Pan. Well, if she actually ends up taking a body part from her target, that would make her one of the most well-reasoned fairy tale references in the series for sure.

A typically not-great RWBY fight scene happens. I'd compliment it on doing at least one interesting thing and having it actually take exactly sixty seconds until the clock rings as promised, but the problem is that the way fight scenes usually work in RWBY there's really no sense of accomplishment in that. People get knocked out of the fight after an arbitrary number of hits and either get up again or don't get up again according to the whims of the creators, with no apparent correlation to the type of hit they've taken. Characters are as mobile as they need to to make the KO's happen, and then as slow as they need to be a second later to make the fight keep moving. Babby changes her weapon modes from two mini-scythes to a double-ended Darth Maul scythestaff in the middle for no readily visible tactical reason, but it eats up a couple of seconds. Etc. If you had to actually *choreograph* a fight to reach a certain outcome within exactly sixty seconds, while working around a set of consistent in-universe rules and character skillsets, doing so would be impressive. When everything is this arbitrary, it really isn't at all.

At least it actually is sixty seconds, though. If this were in a season 3 episode, you just KNOW they would somehow manage to fuck that up. It might not be much, but any improvement is better than no improvement.

Also, there's this thing that RWBY has started doing off and on since late season 3, where it shows characters briefly flashing like during shield loss in Halo to indicate when their auras have collapsed. In this fight, we also see Crocohook's flash when she *raises* it before the fight begins, which I don't think we've seen before anywhere else, but regardless. Croco's aura flashes again, presumably indicating it having collapsed, after she gets hit once with the butt of Babby's weapon. Like, not even the blade. And her tactics don't change at all to reflect the fact that she's now vulnerable after that moment. Ditto with Babby (though to be fair, she's outnumbered and surrounded and doesn't really have room to adjust her own tactics). But, my point is that it looks for all the world like they went back and added the aura-flashes after animating the fight, but just inserted them after random hits. No acknowledgement of them by the characters. Most of them happen incredibly early in the battle, but don't prompt any change in behavior or tactics for the rest of it.

It's basically no different from the just-plain-insulting scoreboards of season 3's tournament battles. People complained about how hard it is to track danger and fight progress because of aura, so they haphazardly throw some visual indications in without looking at what they're doing or thinking about how that should effect the way the scene plays out.

They really do put an impressive amount of work into being lazy, sometimes.

Anyway, the reason they bothered showing the aura flashes is that at the end, after Babby has managed to knock out or kill or whatever all of her henchmen, Croco gets in close and slashes Babby across the face, cutting through both her eyes.

My compliments to the voice actress; the scream of pain that Babby lets out after collapsing to the floor is convincing to the point of being downright gut-wrenching.

The clock rings, and Croco expresses annoyance that that blow was just a blinding one rather than a deadly one as she'd presumably intended. And...then there's another aura flash over her body, just randomly, as she strolls back over toward her blinded opponent. Is she raising it again? Did it collapse again for no reason? Well, keep reading. She approaches Babby, who tried firing wildly at her from the ground, but doesn't have a hope of hitting because she's blind. She explains that the only reason she was ordered to kill Babby is because of her eyes, so now that she's lost those she might be able to convince her to let her live. How common are healing semblances? Eh, who cares, it's not like those types of questions ever lead anywhere productive with RWBY. Despite being too blind to hit her with a bullet, Babby manages to somehow throw one of her miniscythes into the ground behind Croco and line it up perfectly so that when she activates the tractor beam on the other one it comes flying up behind her and impales her right through the torso.

Because it's easier to do THAT while blind than put a bullet in someone. Apparently.

This is why we had to see Croco's aura get knocked out in the fight. But that doesn't explain what the hell that later aura-lowering flash AFTER she blinded Babby was supposed to be. Did she start to regenerate it, but then lose that handful of hitpoints to cancel out a random migraine or something? Well, whatever, her aura decided not to exist at the moment, so Babby killed her while blinded before going off to get some cybereyes installed and age into a grandma.

Back in the present, GC finishes telling her story as Yang drives the rest of the Fellowship through the snowy forest away from Kakariko Farms.

After losing her eyes and getting some prosthetics installed, she decided to retire from Huntress-ing and lay low, afraid that whoever sent Team Crocoduck after her would decide blinding wasn't enough and try again.

Qrow is amazed. The Grimm Reaper was apparently a super legend back in the day. He designed his own weapon after hers. Huh...does that mean that Ruby also did? Or, just that she based her own off of Qrow's in turn? Wasn't it mentioned that Ruby's mom also used a scythe? Whatever. Oscar asks how a legend can just choose to disappear, and Qrow explains that the Grimm Reaper never used her real name or let anyone see her face behind the edgy skull mask.

...

Okay, remind me, how long have the Hunter Academies existed for? I'm pretty sure it's supposed to have been a good while, right?

So, did she wear that stupid skull mask and call herself by that stupid edgy nickname at all times while attending classes, spending time with her roommates, being asked out by annoying muggles who didn't belong there, etc? It's not like she could have only taken on that persona after graduating without anyone knowing, what with this being a world of semi-unique trick weapons, abilities, and fighting styles.

I guess things might not have been as formal and regimented when she was first getting started, with the academy training not being mandatory for becoming a Hunter (if "Hunters" were even a legally recognized international thing yet, at that point). But, until a textual clarification is provided, I'm going with my initial reading.

...

GC says she's sorry to disappoint everyone with the true fate of the Grimm Reaper. And then...she goes on this ramble about how she feels guilty for the state her generation has left the world in, how she wishes she'd done more to fix it, and how optimistic she is about the fresh crop of young adults being on their way to do better.

I laughed.

Not quite howling, like RWBY has occasionally made me do in the past, but there were a good few seconds there that I couldn't keep watching or typing because of how hard I was laughing.

This is them trying to be "topical" I guess? Just throwing in some misplaced modern generational conflict sound bytes? What, are the Boston Red Sox supposed to be analogous to climate change and late-stage capitalism somehow? Not continuing to kill monsters in the wilderness after some mercenaries sent by someone you don't know anything about blind you is supposed to represent boomer complacency? What?

If this story had been linked in any way whatsoever to, like, the apparent centralization of the global economy under SchneeCorp, or faunus racism, or people putting trust in jokers like Ozpin and Co, or the Darwin-defying inanity of getting the public invested in highly competitive sports where serious injury is likely and national ego is on the line in a world where negative emotions allegedly attract monsters, this could have maybe-kinda-sorta worked. It would have been heavyhanded and inelegant as fuck, but it would at least be making a coherent point. But try as I might, I cannot see any way in which GC's backstory is analogous to modern generational faults or anxieties. Or even to HER OWN WORLD's generational faults and anxieties. What she's saying makes little to no sense in its Watsonian context even without the obvious attempt at scoring "relevance" points.

Well, after I finished laughing, Ruby tells GC that if she wants to have more of a positive impact now at least perhaps she could give Ruby some more extensive silver eye training. GC looks around at Ruby sadly, as if about to give her some bad news, but given that she'd already *started* doing exactly this in the previous episode I'm not sure what that reason could be. Uh oh, how are the writers going to get themselves out of this one? Why, with Jaune of course! Just as GC can't get away with dragging out the dramatic silence any longer, Ruby's phone rings (apparently she has service out here. Did they get those towers working again or something?) and Tomah starts babbling away on the line.

Whew, that was a close one! Now we can just not address Ruby's question again until we can think of a good reason for GC to answer in the negative. It really shows what RWBY has been missing without him. Just imagine, what would the show even be like if it kept not having Jaune in it?

...

In the previous post, I said that I had opinions about this based on what I had heard. Having now seen it myself, I'm more sure of them now.

What if, instead of losing her eyes to an assassination attempt, Granny needs her cybereyes because she overused the eyebeam power and ended up burning them out?

Now we'd be able to let Ruby actually learn how to use her stupid powers without completely neutering half of the enemies! Every use of the silver eye beams brings her closer to losing them, and her vision, permanently. So it becomes an emergencies-only power that she has to think before employing. There'd be an in-universe reason for it to not be the go-to solution for every other problem. It could add to the story instead of tripping it up.

This would also be a much better explanation for why the silver-eyed individuals aren't better known, if most of them burn themselves out before they can make much of a name for themselves. It's certainly better than asserting that the villain has had arbitrarily strong assassins with global reach at her disposal in every generation for centuries.

Also, why does Boston even care about the silver eyed people? We've seen her use grimm as an overwhelming combat force once, sure, but that's pretty far from her usual MO. For the most part, she acts through these elite teams of human agents that she keeps somehow attracting to herself, which silver eyes are useless against. So...yeah, why does she even care?

...

Jaune tells Ruby that he's been trying to call her ever since they reached "the city." The what now? Just then, they rise over a hilltop and see a big coastal city. I'm still not sure if Ruby should be getting cell service at this distance, but okay. Also, it stops being winter.

Not pictured are the tall, gently swaying grasses around Yang's motorcycle. We see them in other shots though.

I was born in a place with warm seawater and cold winters. I know it's entirely possible to have significant temperature changes over just a kilometer or two from the shore. But this? Just no.

At least the city looks cool.

This is apparently the city of Argus, which is where they and the other assholes were trying to get to before they got separated in S6E1-2 sometime. They explicitly didn't know where the trail they were following led when they reached Kakariko, and they definitely didn't know what direction they were going when they left it, so...guess they were just really, really lucky.

They enter Argus, which is apparently a San Francisco looking place on the inside. The animation jank goes up considerably when there's a lot of people onscreen, but at least it's better than the still images they used when introducing Mistral in season 5. The jank is shared by Nora when she comes prancing through the crowd, followed shortly by Tomah and Ren, but it might be at least partly intentional in her case.

Nora's first action is to shout the words "cute boy!" and launch herself at Oscar like a spring-loaded Floridian Bakemonogatari cosplayer.

Okaaaay then.

Everybody else says hello, Ruby hugs Tomah and does a so-so job of pretending that it's possible for anyone anywhere to be happy to see him again. Then they take a trolley through Argus while Ren and Tomah deliver some dry, stilted, travelogue-esque exposition about the city. The way it's phrased, it sounds like this script might have actually been intended for a World of Remnant episode, if they were still doing those by season 6.

Argus is the biggest non-capital city in all of Remnant. It would normally be impossible to maintain a community of this size so far away from a center of military power, but Mistral and Atlas wanted a good trading port between themselves, so they did it.

Um. Okay? So, when World of Remnant (and previous episodes of the show) said that the kingdoms can't do this, what it actually meant was that they usually just don't care enough to. Got it.

Also, it has its own "relay tower."

-_-

I don't desire to like look back through the World of Remnant episodes that I know this contradicts on multiple counts, but fortunately I also don't care enough to feel obligated, so I won't. Yay me.

Anyway, it's technically a Mistrali satellite, but the Atlasian military maintains a permanent base here. On account of them being the only ones in the world to have an actual military, practice heavy industry, or invent advanced technology, presumably. As the gang dismounts their trolley, Yang muses about how they should start looking for a ship to Atlas, and Ruby asks where they've been staying. Cue the appearance of one of Tomah's sisters, who lives here. Great, more of them. It's like RWBY is charging interest for me not having had to deal with him the last few episodes. She's carrying a baby in her arm, though fortunately it doesn't look anything like her or her brother.

Fastforward to them in her home. Her name is Saffron, apparently. She teases her brother by threatening to tell embarassing stories about him (lol, like there's any other kind), while he whines about how she's treating him like a baby and wah wah.

Is it just me, or is Miles Luna leaning even harder than usual into his "I can totally believe it's not Jack De Sena" impression for Jaune, here? Maybe it's just the way that he's being actively written as a dumber version of AtLA season one Sokka with the way he's interacting with his sister in this scene that brings it out. Like, seriously, some of these lines of his are just "early Sokka, but worse."

Meanwhile, Yang and Weiss do some incredibly uncanny valley squeeing over the baby.

Because why not, I guess?

Saffron explains that she's the only member of their family to have moved so far from home. Home being somewhere in or around Vale, I guess? Maybe? I'd assume so, but given that not a single one of Ruby and Yang's classmates who had their birthplaces specified were actually from there I can't make assumptions. As they speak, Saffron's wife (who looks much more like the kid) comes home with groceries.

Oh hey, they did it! Actual gay people, not just chickenshit shipbaiting! This couple are probably only going to be minor, short-termed characters, but still, it's a hell of a lot better than nothing. And the show isn't being weird about it or anything either...

...or...wait. Wait, maybe it is being weird about it.

More often than not, everyone calls Saffron "Saff."

Is that supposed to fucking be...

...eh, forget that train of thought. There's no way in hell that Luna and Shawcross know the word "Sapphic." It's probably just a coincidence. All good.

Saffron's wife, named as Terracotta, greets the newcomers and assures them that they're welcome to stay as well even though it'll be a tight squeeze in this apartment.

Heh, color me surprised. Saff and her family are surprisingly likable so far. Guess the apple fell far from the tree.

It's all she and her wife can do for Hunters, especially such a famous one as Qrow. Although, Terra asks, it's strange how young most of his companions appear to be. When they clarify that they're technically just students, Terra asks if that's even legal, and everyone starts stammering nervously.

...

......

..........

Mother.

Fucking.

WHAT???

So, when Ozpin sent four freshman students with just one actual Hunter to investigate a fucking terrorist cell, what would have been the legal dimensions of that?

Also, they're...wait, hold on, no, we're not even getting to that point yet. People learn to fight from very young ages out in the boonies, largely by necessity. Hunters working with people from the sticks, of whatever ages, that's got to just be a fact of life. If some decide to tag along when they're far from home base, it's hard to believe that there'd be laws in place *against* that. But, everyone is acting like they need to actually come up with some ass-covering excuse when Tera asks them this, rather than it being played as, eg, a naïve city slicker asking a dumb question.

So. What was ever the legal status of...anything?

Maybe Mistral has different laws about this kind of stuff than Vale? That would surprise me though, because in seasons 4 and 5 the Mistrali countryside seemed to have a *more* dispersed and rural population than Vale's. It's hard to believe that they'd be more restrictive about teenaged fighters accompanying Hunters than Vale is.

...wait hold on a fucking second they spent season five IN THE MISTRALI CAPITAL! If this isn't legal in Mistral, why wouldn't it have been mentioned...

I...

Well, the last few episodes were a high point, probably THE high point, of the show thus far. But it looks like we're back to just being plain old RWBY again now.

The topic turns to their business in Atlas. They're told that that's going to be a problem, as the Atlasian borders are closed at present. They decide to head to the Atlasian military base (which I guess also contains an embassy?) the next morning to apply for entry. Fastforward to next morning, and them getting the gate slammed in their faces while some cheesy military music plays.

They were smart in not bringing Qrow with them, but still no. I'm guessing the meeting turned sour when they mentioned his name, and his behavior toward Atlasian military equipment and servicemen in season 3 came back to haunt them. Oopsie poopsie. Just my guess about what happened in that conversation, but it's canon.

End episode. Lol, just as expected, they never got back to "why can't GC give Ruby some eyeball lessons?" I wonder how many episodes after this they were able to keep that hamsterwheel spinning for? Well, "I wonder" as a figure of speech. I doubt any of you think I could actually bring myself to care.


RWBY *has* gotten better. I can't deny that. Putting this side by side with the shit in my original Let's Watch of the early seasons, the quality is higher all around. The animation, writing (if only just barely), sound work have all had improvements.

Especially the sound and voice acting. The use of ambient sound and mood music outside of fight scenes, the growing experience of the voice actors (and new, professional VA's hired for more recently introduced characters, of course), this is where the improvement is most noticeable. Once again, I'm particularly impressed with how far Jessica Nigri seems to have come since starting out, but the VA's for the main four have also all improved to varying degrees.

But aside from the sound production, and some unusually good tension-building and mystery (and unusually mature handling of subjects like alcoholism. I still really do appreciate the job they did there) during the Kakariko Farms arc, it hasn't improved by much. It's better by all those other metrics, but only by a tiny bit. The fundamental problems - especially the writing and (lack of) postproduction - are all still there, and it doesn't seem like they're going anywhere.

There was ONE point, at the end of "The Coming Storm," where I actually wanted to watch the next episode for its own sake. Where I'd managed to regain some scrap of the investment and goodwill that I first started the series with back in 2017, and was interested to see what would happen next. But, it was short lived.

Maybe that little arc was a harbinger of eventual further improvement. However, given the fact that it was preceded by an episode even WORSE than I could have expected, I'm leaning more toward it being a happy outlier with regard to the actual quality trend. At the rate of *persistent* improvement it seems to be keeping, I wouldn't expect RWBY to become a decent show overall until at least season 10.

And even then, like I said in a previous review; how do you even go forward atop such extensively broken foundations?


At least the gay rep happened. That was legitimately nice. But that was only ever a tertiary complaint.