Epithet Erased S1E1: "Quiet in the Museum" vis a vis RWBY S1E1: "Ruby Rose" (part two)

Alright, time to conclude this battle of the very strange Youtube series.


"Quiet In The Museum" continues with Giovani picking Molly up by the hood, putting her down again, and then declaring victory to the enthusiastic cheers of his men. I guess setting the bar low isn't a bad idea for a newbie commander. He leaves three of his men (who he calls by the villainous monikers of Flamethrower, Carcrash, and Ben) to guard Molly and make sure she doesn't have another way of calling the cops on them while he and the other three mooks plunder the museum.

Definitely on the "thief with a heart of gold" spectrum, totally unrelated to his comedic ineptitude. Setting men aside for the purpose of keeping Molly unhurt without having to so much as restrain her for the duration of the heist is a lot more decent than I'd expect from a museum robber.

Then...um...there's an argument between Giovani and Ben over whose fault it is that they have to guard a bystander instead of everyone getting to help choose the loot. Apparently, Giovani wanted to do this raid at midnight, but Ben couldn't, which is why they did it in the afternoon instead.

But. Um. It's eight-something. After closing time. And Giovani was the one who was just disappointed that there weren't more bystanders to terrorize (though I'm not sure how he'd been planning to do that, given his apparent reluctance to cause bodily harm).

O...kay, then.

Giovanni does tie Molly up after all (and this is the first time in the episode so far where the third person autonarration actually IS pulling weight for the story; as there's nothing to represent the duct tape he's using onscreen while we're in grid-view), but still leaves half his team to guard her. Seems excessive. You'd think one man, at most, would be sufficient, and that would be a great way to punish Ben for causing this complication. Then again, Giovani being dumb and not very practical is a pretty well established trait at this point, so. Anyway, he and the other three head off to plunder the museum, while the three he left behind stand around and chit chat on the opposite side of the lobby nowhere near Molly without facing her.

Their dialogue quickly reveals them to be teenagers whose parents don't know what they're doing, so I guess they at least have some excuse for failing this badly.

Speaking of failure, we have a real storytelling flop now. Indus the stupid box guy with the barrier stand and the bad voice acting suddenly comes in the side door. Apparently he's both a box-mover AND a security guard. Erm...when does he sleep? Maybe his barrier protects him from tiredness. Anyway, so, Molly starts doing the weird third person narration thing, describing how she looks over at the Bonzai Blasters to make sure they're still distracted and then uses her stand to muffle the noise as she scoots the chair she's bound to over to Indus to catch them both within the silence bubble.

First, we see this:

Then this:

And then, after she narrates everything and uses her stand, this:

So, not only was the weird narration totally unnecessary here due to it being totally obvious what she was doing and why every step of the way, but the grid-view was also unnecessary! We already know what direction the Bonzai Blasters are in from where she's bound. They already drew the background for the side of the room Indus entered into (since we already see it. It's in the screenshot just above). They could have shown Indus sticking his head in on the right entrance, cut back to Molly, had her look to the right toward him and then left again to check on the Bonzais, cut to the Bonzais still arguing, cut to Molly using her stand and starting to slide the chair, and then flash to her reaching Indus. No need for off-putting inner monologues. No need for fucking Roll20 machinima or whatever that grid view is supposed to be.

The show is trying to be some new kind of hybrid medium, I guess. But it isn't making very efficient or effective use of that at all.

So, Indus and Molly are in the latter's silence bubble. Apparently it blocks sound going both ways, but you can still hear other things that are inside it with you, which is handy. When she explains the situation to him, Indus takes a long time to figure out how to unbind her. The creators seem to think this is much funnier than it actually is. He then leaves the perimeter and challenges the Bonzai Blasters to an honorable duel. And somehow they decide that it's going to be a posing contest. And this goes on for a really long time and isn't nearly as funny as the creators seem to think it is.

Then...um...somehow Indus gets stuck in a wall somehow, and Ben decides he needs a villain nickname. He decides that "kid-puncher" would be a good one and starts walking menacingly toward Molly. She throws some thumb tacks on the floor in front of them, and it takes them a minute of discussing countermeasures before they realize they can go around it. The creators think this is much funnier than it actually is. Like, it COULD have been funny, but the comedic timing, delivery, etc are just really not up to the task of making it so. They finally make their way over. Molly doesn't try to run away despite there being an open hallway door right next to her. She agonizes over whether or not to break her rule and use the other application of her epithet on Ben, but finally does so.

In addition to blocking sound, Dumb can also turn people into drooling zombies with a touch.

She seems remorseful at doing this to a person. But...well...why didn't she at least try to run away first?

Also, she can apparently give her Dumb'd victims any instructions she wants and they'll obey them mindlessly. So, she convinces Ben that he's a car and that he wants to run over his friend. They were just discussing their villain names, so I guess "Car Crash" was on her mind. He chases him over the field of thumb takes and then they both end up unconscious somehow.

Molly helps Indus out of the wall, and they go looking for the other Bonzai Blasters.

Cut to the other Bonzai Blasters, led by Giovani, as they excitedly look for something worth stealing. They find the tourguide lady, and start demanding that she give them stuff. Because apparently they think that the museum valuables are on her person or something.

This takes a lot more time than I'm taking to tell it, but just...that time is all occupied by unfunny gags that aren't even unfunny in an interesting or unusual way. It's just cliche "haha these bad guys are stupid" stuff that we've all seen a million times with nothing to make it fresh and no standout delivery. It's like watching a really lame stand-up comedy routine; what can you even say about it?

They try to shoot her when she doesn't cooperate with their nonsensical demands, but Indus and Molly arrive and he uses his stand to block the bullets. Guess they're just normal guns, not lasers or anything; they looked all sci-fi-y so I made assumptions. Next, the robbers rush toward her, and Giovanni tries to beat her up with a wooden bat with a knife stuck to it (so much for him being a nonviolent thief who's all bluster, I guess), but Molly uses her stand to "dumb down the attack."

So, why didn't she just dumb down the lock on the museum door in that case? :U

Also? Having Molly not explain her stand's manifold abilities at all when asked in lieu of just repeating "it's Dumb" over and over again is an extremely contrived gag. She doesn't seem like she should be stupid enough to keep having this problem, nor does she seem like she's being deliberately obtuse. It just feels like she's being written like this to keep a gag going after it wasn't even that funny the first time.

Little "-1" signs appear over the lady's head as Giovani wacks her, without her showing any signs of pain, so I guess this is more of a Final Fantasy type of deal where everything has hundreds of hp rather than a DnD type deal. Then she uses some kind of telekinesis stand combined with Indus' barrier to knock the Bonzai Blasters out, before grabbing Molly themselves and announcing that they're going to use her to rob the museum themselves now.

O...kay? Were they already in the process of stealing from the museum when the Bonzai Blasters coincidentally broke in, hence Indus' pretending to be working security as well as custodian? Or were they actually on guard duty, and opportunistically deciding to steal shit now that they have someone to pin it on? In either case, what the hell do they need Molly for?

The end.


I don't think I need to blow-by-blow the rest of Ruby Rose to make the final comparison. Just rewatched it in one go, and that was enough.

Both of these pilots are really badly written and produced. Both of them feel fundamentally inept on a structural level, albeit for slightly different reasons. RWBY feels like someone trying to tell you about another show that they watched a long time ago and don't remember very well. Epithet Erased is more like a little kid making things up as they go along. And, honestly? By the end of each pilot, I think they failed about equally hard at what they seemed to be trying to do. "Ruby Rose" did not excite me with its poorly directed and communicated action, and it didn't get me invested in its incoherent characters or setting. "Quiet In the Museum" seems to be going more for pure comedy, and it simply wasn't funny.

Of the two, I'd say that "Ruby Rose" is the easier to sit through. Partly because it's shorter, but also because a) while the animation might be really bad, at least the character designs are visually interesting and vibrant, and b) it's nonsensical writing and direction have a WTF value that makes it at least somewhat engaging to try and parse even if you'll inevitably be disappointed by the end. Epithet Erased's characters aren't all that interesting looking, the insufficient number of sprites they were each given fail to convey personality to the extent that a still comic strip OR a proper animation would, and aside from the bizarre roll20 machinima segments there's nothing entertainingly ill conceived about it.

That said, Epithet Erased doesn't seem to have that actually ineffable failure to understand how storytelling works that RWBY gradually revealed. Which, again, makes RWBY a lot more fun to tear apart, but also, at least for the time being, means that EE has the potential to possibly get better.