DieselDust: “Pilot”

So, if you'd believe it, I was actually asked by two different people to compare the RWBY pilot to the pilots of two other low-budget web originals. JelloApocalypse's Epithet Erased was one of them. The other, which I'm now getting to, is DieselDust, by Team FourStar. Unlike JA, I'm not familiar with TFS. From the look of things, they mostly do podcasts about media analysis, so this is a case of critics turning creator. Well, I am a little biased in their favor just because of that, I have to admit.~

Anyway, I could probably recite the script of "Ruby Rose" by heart at this point, so I'm not going to rewatch it yet again. I'll just compare at the end. So, let's give this DieselDust thing a try. So far, it's just the pilot; the rest of the show is still in development.


Open on a futuristic-western town with futuristic-western music, and a female voice telling us that the reason she did "it" was because no one else was going to. As she speaks, a motor vehicle arrives at the town, and a covered wagon pulled by a poorly animated lizard-thing departs it.

The ATV-like incoming vehicle stops in front of a space western saloon, and its crew dismounts. There's a teenaged boy whining about how they should install a bed in there, an adult man who's scolding him for wanting to sleep on the job, and a third person (the woman narrator?) who we don't get a good look at. The narration continues about how she brought "her" into this world and gave her freedom. Okay. Mysterious and all.

Meanwhile, there's an argument breaking out in the saloon they parked by. Some drunk patron rambling on about how the tavern is too dirty, just like everything else on this planet. Eventually, the hook-handed bartender throws him out the window, breaking it. You'd think he'd take better care to avoid property damage in his own saloon, but maybe they have bullshit nanotech or whatever that allows for self-healing windows.

Also, the characters, when we see them up close, look like Lego people. And move like Lego people, give or take. The animation is stiff. Really stiff.

A robot with a sheriff hat rolls up to the drunkard and asks him if he needs help, only for the man to be struck by a thrown bottle from inside the saloon and knocked out before he can answer. Then, the camera sort of drifts back over to the three ATV-riders. Okay, interesting aside I guess.

The ATV crew approach what looks like a futuristic ATM machine or something. The kid does something whacky, and gets it to print money that they don't have (I think? It's not clear that this is an ATM as opposed to something else, but either way the kid just used it to print a counterfeit something-or-other) and hands it to the third person. Mysterious narrator says "I didn't build her to fight, I just built her to live." And we see that the third person is a gynoid, and presumably the subject of that voiceover.

She looks cheerful for a fiterobot. Makes sense if fite wasn't her original purpose.

The three characters name themselves as Huxley (the kid), Riley (the stern, hulking older man), and Cadence (the robit). It's also established that the three of them are fugitives from the law, and that Riley thinks this means they shouldn't be having fun, whereas Huxley believes they should be using this opportunity to have ALL of the fun, with Cadence not taking part in the argument but leaning toward the latter. Got to say I'm leaning toward the latter myself. If you're already a criminal anyway, you might as well kick back and do things you wouldn't normally let yourself do, I guess.

Before the conversation can get any further, Cadence proves that her senses are sharp despite the apparent blitheness, and intercepts a bullet from a nearby rooftop using some kind of energy shield she projects from her arm. The attacker leaps down from that roof, revealing himself to be a thin, ninja-looking fellow with white hair and a concealing hood.

He has a pretty good opening line, too. "That's a nice trick. Now why don't you show me the one where the gorilla, the shrimp, and the pincushion all surrender and come quietly." I dig it.

Cadence tells the other two to run back to the car while she deals with this bounty hunter. The voiceover from Cadence's "mother" finishes with the statement that "it was 'you' who made her a fighter." Guess we're hearing her side of a conversation with whoever taught livebot to be fitebot.

For all that he complains about the other two not taking their situation seriously, Riley seems perfectly willing to stand around and exchange stupid quips with Cadence while she stares down the attacker. Projecting much, Riley? Cadence also refers to Riley as "Sarge," so I guess he's (ex)military, interesting. Anyway, the meatbags leave and Cadence starts engaging the bounty hunter in combat. She initially gets the upper hand, evading his weapon and closing the distance to kick him against a wall with her superior machine strength. But that's then followed by one of the dumbest things I've ever seen in an action sequence.

The bounty hunter appears to be unconscious. Cadence starts to walk away and follow her companions back to their vehicle. Then, she hears a noise from behind her. She turns and sees that the bounty hunter just rolled a grenade after her, and it's just rolled to a stop about a meter behind her. And, instead of running - or even just continuing to walk away from it as she'd already been doing - she stares at it a second, sighs, mutters a silly oath to herself, and lowers her head, all while it continues ticking down to detonation.

I would have been able to get out of the blast radius, even with my awful reflexes and poor reaction time. The vast majority of you, I'm sure, could do the same. It honestly comes across less as her not having time to get clear and more as her just not caring to.

The grenade explodes. The bartender from the saloon right next to them shrieks about his good window being broken. Um, two things to say to you Mr. Bartender.

1) If you break your own windows for no good reason whenever there's an unruly customer, you don't get to complain when other people break them once in a while.

2) We clearly saw the trio park their vehicle next to your saloon and then turn a corner and cross a fairly wide-looking street to get to the ATM type thing. The bounty hunter attacked them right in front of the ATM. For your saloon to now be right next to the grenade blast, it must have teleported across the street and a few doors down. As the proprietor, you are responsible for the shifting coordinates of your own business. Nobody's fault but your own.

Cadence steps out of the smoke. It looks like the grenade blast didn't do much damage to her, so perhaps her refusal to avoid it could be justified. Although, in that case, why did she even seem put out by this, if she knew it was such a non-threat? And, why didn't she use the opportunity to close the distance and grab that bounty hunter, if he was apparently just faking unconsciousness, instead of just standing there talking to herself?

Also, she meanders out of the explosion, head lowered, talking to the others over a comm system built into her head, without any regard for the fact that the attacker is still up. And is caught totally flat footed when he pounces on her from behind, grabs his weapon that she had picked up back, and nearly takes her head off before she manages to throw him off.

-_-

He starts shooting high explosive rounds at her that she seems better able to block than dodge. I'd ask why he didn't do that to begin with when he had the element of surprise, but given that he was trying to get them to surrender I can infer that the bounty is higher for bringing them in alive, so that could make sense. Then there's a confusing sequence where she charges him, and he...well, it LOOKED like he was just shooting another exploding shell at her, but when she blocks it it turns into this animu energy arm-wrestling match instead of the projectile just exploding or bouncing away. I don't really get what's happening here. I do know that Cadence's facial animations during an ensuing close-up shot are really, really unfitting for what her body is supposed to be doing, though. She finally breaks the match, and he retaliates by flipping his gun in the air and making it release some kind of...EMP burst? I don't know.

Back at the car, Riley and Huxley are watching. Huxley is also climbing around on the power lines, which is apparently a thing he can do. Neither of them seem particularly concerned for Cadence, but given the open commlink I guess they're probably aware in realtime of the fight not going too badly for her. At Riley's nagging, Huxley climbs down and they start whining at each other again.

Also...I'm starting to get the impression that Huxley might be trans or NB or something of that nature. Male pronouns. Refers to himself as a "grown man" in defiance of Riley trying to act like his father. But his figure is really femme looking, his voice very adrogenous, and in some shots it looks like he might have breasts that his clothes deemphesize. I could be wrong, but if not then that's cool.

As they argue about how serious the situation actually is, Huxley reminds Riley that she told "Weapon" to stay in the truck, so it couldn't be that bad. So there's a fourth party member named Weapon. I'm guessing another robot, this one purpose-built for combat and much less able to blend in. Okay. Then a spotlight falls on them, as it turns out the bounty hunter has an aircraft tracking them. It's either AI controlled, or has his partner(s) in the cockpit.

Granted, given that androids are a thing in this setting the difference between "partner" and "autopilot" might not necessarily be a difference at all. Hell, the man fighting Cadence might actually just be an employee or subcontractor of the AI bounty hunter controlling that gunship.

Cut back to Cadence fighting the guy. The others tell her over the radio that they're pinned down by an aircraft, but she's still busy fighting the dude. She manages to disarm him again, but this time he's ready for her close quarter tactics and holds her off there as well. I'm guessing this guy is a cyborg or android himself, given his ability to keep getting up after these hits.

Also, there doesn't seem to be anyone in this town besides that one drunk, that one bartender, and that one apparently useless sheriff robot. No one running and screaming, no one trying to shoot back at the battling pair who are blowing up their town, nothing.

Anyway, she finally manages to kill or stun the guy for real, and takes a moment to rest. She needs to rest, despite being robit, which actually doesn't bother me. A machine that gets tired when overclocked and rests instead of running itself down to the breaking point and needing constant maintenance is at least arguably better than the alternative. A superadvanced robot might very plausibly be designed to act more like a human body and less like a modern machine in this regard.

Huxley is hiding under their vehicle, playing a videogame or something to pass the time. A spider robot crawls under after him, but it turns out to not be an enemy drone but rather one of their own.

Among whatever other functions it has (maintaining the vehicle, I imagine), the spiderbot has a built in comm unit that Huxley is using to talk to Cadence. Not sure where Riley is supposed to be right now. Huxley informs her that the enemy has a beaten up old "Jericho" pinning them down, and is shooting everything that moves in the area around their parked car. However, it doesn't seem to have particularly good aim; he and Riley have moved multiple times without triggering it, and at least once it targeted a cat over them.

Cadence is very concerned when she hears about the cat, and calms down when Huxley assures her that the cat got away just fine. I guess the writers read "Save the Cat" and might have taken it a bit literally. Anyway, Cadence says she'll take care of it.

Cut to the unconscious bounty hunter. Voices are hailing him over his own headset, asking if he's okay; looks like he's not a lone operator, or if he is then he at least has an open channel back to whoever issued the bounty. They name him as...I think Eugene? Something like that. He slowly wakes up, but before he can talk to any of his remote companions Cadence puts his own sword to his...well, she holds it in his general direction I guess.

He tells her that he's got her friends pinned down, but she replies that she knows his old Jericho's targeting system is borked to hell and back and he just has it shooting randomly to make them THINK it's got working motion sensors. He finally surrenders, and she...tells him he can ask her a few questions if he wants to.

Um...she's doing this why, exactly?

He asks her if she's the robbit that went missing a couple years ago. Yes. Then he asks her why she ran away, and she answers that she didn't; she woke up out in the wilderness far from her creators with no idea how she got there. Then he asks why she didn't just go home, and where she's headed, and she tells him that those aren't things he needs to know.

Okay. Why were the first couple answers things that he needed to know, though?

It feels like this is just a very, VERY clumsy way of drip-feeding information to the audience. I can't think of any in-character explanation for it. It's...bad.

Anyway, she spares Eugene's life, and he promises not to give them any more trouble. Cadence then returns to the other two with some stolen food, and they all climb back into the car.

Riley bitches Cadence out for being too merciful, and tells her that sooner or later the real world is going to catch up with her idealism. Meanwhile, the Jericho flies away in the background, Eugene evidently having kept his promise. Ruthless fellow, but an honorable one it seems. Riley insists that not all opponents will be honorable, though.

Cadence just looks uncomfortable. Riley bitches about the food she stole for them. Huxley snarks. They drive off, and the narrator says that she built Cadence to become whatever she wants to become, and that what she became (either until or in spite of the other person teaching her the ways of fite) is "beautiful." End pilot.


So, I'm supposed to compare this to "Ruby Rose." There's a lot to compare, and for the most part that isn't a good thing.

To start with the obvious, the animation is bad. Now, as I've said many times before, part of making a good piece of visual media is knowing how to work within your limitations. That's why I considered the cookie-eating scene in RWBY to be so egregious; it was both completely unnecessary for the story AND completely beyond their animation ability, but they put it in anyway. There's nothing that bad in DieselDust, but there are a couple of moments that came close. Choosing to have the battle take place in a town when they must have known they couldn't animate the townsfolk and their reactions, for instance. The completely irrelevant and EXTREMELY janky looking altercation between the bartender and the drunk, for another.

I'd say that overall the animation is stiffer than RWBY's, but doesn't have the same wtf visual fail moments. Thing is, I can deal with crappy animation if there's a good story being told through it. But when the creators are trying to do visual storytelling that their animation skill just isn't up for...well, the story doesn't get told very effectively. They didn't drop the ball TOO badly, but badly enough to make me concerned about what they might do going forward.

As for the story and writing themselves...mm. Really mixed bag, I'd say. To start with the negative, the attempts at humor pretty much all fell flat, at least for me. Like, the "funny" comments from Huxley and Cadence all seemed like they were trying way too hard, and sometimes felt hollow, like there wasn't much actual characterization under them. Then there was just awful shit like the QnA session with the defeated bounty hunter where for some reason Cadence was letting HIM ask the questions instead of the reverse, or the lack of spatial continuity with the saloon's location. Those both felt RWBY-like in the bad way, especially the second of those things.

But, on the other hand, the broad strokes of the story worked. I understood what was going on and why, for the most part. The characters were mostly convincing, with Cadence's insistence on caring about human and animal life despite the violent life she's been thrust into being pretty touching. I feel like Riley would have worked a bit better if they just made his character model older looking. He acts like a grumpy old man who's been through too much, and Cadence even mentions that he's too old to be fighting bounty hunters when she can handle it herself, but his appearance and voice don't reflect this. If he just sounded a little more gravelly and had grayer hair, I think he'd have gelled better. Huxley was the least interesting character, but he was at least consistent. Overall, I felt like I was starting know the three leads by the end of the episode, which is a hell of a lot more than RWBY's pilot could say.

Also like RWBY - and here I'm going to make a positive comparison - the look and feel of the environments was all really pretty and evocative. The bad animation took place against really nice nonmoving scenery, and the music was also quite good and complemented every scene it played over pretty well. It also had more of it than RR, so that was nice.

Voicework was...mostly okay, I think? The narrator/inventor was the best VA, for sure. Eugene and Riley were both pretty good too. Huxley and the bar fighters, less so. And, sadly, the worst voice acted character in the episode was Cadence, the main protagonist. With the exception of the reverse-interrogation nonsense and the inanity surrounding the grenade, she was the best written character in the piece. Her voice acting really didn't live up to her writing, and that's a shame.

One major point in DieselDust's favor is the implied space western/cyberpunk world it takes place in, which is built up aesthetically and thematically quite well. Kind of reminds me of Borderlands. Seeing it explored more does tickle my interest at least a little. Another important detail, I think, is that this is explicitly a proof of concept pilot released well in advance of everything else, which means they have plenty of time to improve assuming they get the necessary resources. Another reassuring detail is that the top rated YouTube comments are all constructive criticism, mostly regarding the same points I've raised in this review. If the creators are listening to this sort of feedback, then they can easily improve. Unlike RWBY, whose creators banked on RoosterTeeth's preexisting parasocial cult fandom to get started and let themselves be surrounded by yesmen.


So, it's not good in a lot of the same ways that RWBY's pilot wasn't good, but it has more redeeming qualities, and if the creators learn from their mistakes here it could potentially be a good show.