RWBY S6E3: “The Lost Fable” (part one)
This review was commissioned by @Lorenz_Kill.
Full circle, huh?
Before getting into this review, I should talk about some retrospection - and introspection - that I've been doing over the last two years. Two years, man. It really doesn't feel like it's been that long, but it has been. Looking back at my RWBY reviews, and at a lot of my early JoJo reviews, I'm really not proud of them. Part of it is the lack of background knowledge I had at the time; I'd seen anime before, but I really hadn't seen very much of it, and some of the takes that ignorance led me to were pretty cringe.
Another part of it is that, up until then, I was really not in the habit of hatewatching. It's not something I'd done. I'd enjoyed other online critics and livebloggers tearing bad fiction apart, but RWBY was one of the first times that I ever personally kept watching something after deciding I didn't like it. So, my perspective on how common various level and types of badness are was...well...sheltered. Really sheltered. And the level of vitriol I threw at the show for relatively minor and common mistakes was, at times, very disproportionate.
I still consider RWBY to be one of the worst shows I've ever seen. But, it's probably not the worst. Or, if it is, then it only wins (loses?) by a pretty tiny margin. And, I know there are much worse things that I haven't seen (and don't intend to) which the amount of venom I injected RWBY with could be more justly directed at.
So, am I taking back my previous assessment of RWBY? Sort of. The vast majority of criticisms I made of this show, I still believe to be valid. I just don't hate it as much for doing most of those things as I used to. And, I will try my best to suppress my lingering ill-will when reviewing this episode and give it as fair a shake as possible. So, with that in mind, let's talk about "The Lost Fable."
I speedwatched the fourth and fifth seasons of RWBY after abandoning my let's watch and before writing it off entirely. However, the third episode of the following season, "The Lost Fable," is one whose reputation precedes it. Apparently, an ancient artifact that the characters recovered at the end of the previous season had an immortal genie living in it, and this episode is all about the genie telling the ancient, mythic origins of the world. As in, this episode is pretty much all history and worldbuilding. And, the details I've heard about said history and worldbuilding are...okay, I said I'd give this a fair shake, so I'm going to very, very generously assume I was misinformed about them.
One more thing which I'm adding just now as this post goes public. By a rather stunning coincidence, youtube's HBomberguy posted a multi-hour takedown of RWBY just earlier today. I haven't watched it yet, and I don't intend to until the entirety of this review of my own is public.
So. The origins of Remnant. Let's do this.
Season 6 intro is...okay, I guess. The instrumentals lean much more metal than any of the previous, while the vocals are quieter and more subdued. The imagery is also a lot darker than most of the others; not just in terms of subject matter (the ratio skews more toward people looking seriously or hauntedly out of windows and less toward chaotic videogame-esque fight scenes than usual), but in terms of color scheme. Almost every shot is nocturnal or in a dark room, and the only lighter ones are against either a bleak snowy backdrop or a glowing white void full of what look like they're supposed to be Ozpin's previous victims (oh, right, so in season 4 it turned out that Ozpin is an ancient possessing spirit that takes over a new host body in each generation. Important detail. To be fair to him though, he doesn't seem to have much choice in the matter himself). One other shot that calls attention to itself is a closeup of the moon shattering, which I suspect is something that's going to be addressed in this very episode given the pitch.
Overall? Not RWBY's best intro (seasons 1 and 2 are still easily the winners in this category, for their music and visuals respectively), but still much better than 3 or 4's.
The episode begins with a World Of Remnant style still image of a woman looking out a castle window. A female narrator, who I assume is that genie the gang met, tells us that this woman is one of her own predecessors in the narrator tradition. Meet pre-grimmified Boston Massachusetts:
Her father was apparently a possessive, miserly sort of aristocrat, who kept her locked up with minimal freedom. Stock fairy tale stuff.
Then it shifts into season 4+ RWBY's usual visual style and she starts moving and OH GOD I FORGOT HOW FUCKING BAD THE ANIMATION IN THIS SHOW IS HOLY SHIT. And like, this is two seasons and change after they shifted to an actual animation program, they have no goddamn excuse for not knowing how to use it at this point! Fucking...okay, well, moving on. Genie explains that in Boston's native era, the world was full of thriving civilizations, anyone was capable of greatness (not sure what that means, in context, but sure), and magic was a gift from the gods that all humans were capable of learning to use.
Which sounds a lot like the semblances that everyone can still learn to use, but I guess this older type of magic was more versatile and equal-opportunity, rather than everyone just being stuck with one or two (or thirty, if you're a Schnee) inborn powers. So, less of a superhero-ish setting, and more like your typical post-D&D heroic fantasy setting. I think.
Also, apparently the genie's history lesson is a fully detailed VR experience, as Ruby seems to be standing in Boston's room watching the figure as she listens to the story.
Probably not a super important detail, just explaining it now so that Ruby and Co's presence in the screenshots doesn't confuse anyone.
Eventually, a legendary warrior set out to rescue the princess from her controlling father. That, um. Okay, I guess an asshole miser warlord type is probably going to make a lot of enemies, so I can easily imagine that there was a bit more to this story than is relevant at the moment, so I'll roll with this for now. This hero was a man by the name of Ozma.
Okay. So. This isn't nearly as hard a slap in the face to L. Frank Baum's creations as what they did to Glinda. I'd probably shrug and not even mention it, were it not for the context of Rooster Teeth's recent branding of this show. But with that context, well...
...
In the original Oz books, Ozma is the land's ancient god-queen who was deposed and hidden away during the rise of the Wicked Witches (weirdly, the Wizard was also complicit in this, and was framed as an outright villain in the book that related Ozma's story. He was portrayed as a decent guy in every book before and after this one, and his antagonistic role here was never mentioned again. I guess Baum decided he didn't like that twist and just retconned it so that the Witches alone were responsible). Anyway, Ozma couldn't be killed, so instead the witches wiped her memory and turned her into a human peasant boy named Tip. Tip always felt like something was wrong, and had that wrongness set right when she eventually regained her true name and body.
RWBY's creators made a lot of noises about being LGBT friendly from the beginning, and ramped it up with hints that female characters Yang and Blake would would become an item in season 6. It's been two seasons since then, and from what I'm told said relationship has yet to be acknowledged within the show itself aside from a couple of scenes in that one season where they hold hands and look at each other romantically, and one other wink-wink-nudge-nudge scene of the sort that was getting old even when lgbt representation actually DID have to fly under the radar in the one after it. The creators also did a...thing...where they dressed Nora up in the trans flag colors for a later season's redesign, and Liked some comments of people asking if she was transgender on Twitter, but still have yet to do anything with this aside from just having those colors in her new outfit. So, in light of all that: here they had a zero effort, lowest-possible-hanging fruit opportunity for actual LGBT inclusion handed to them on a silver platter, and they seem to have pointedly turned up their noses at it.
Really, think about this. By not choosing to rule63 Ozma's original self, they could have both 1) made a non-ambiguous lesbian relationship not only exist, but also be extremely relevant to the plot rather than just a blink-and-you'll-miss-it background detail like what Disney etc tries to peddle as wokeness, and 2) had Ozma's later male incarnations - like her struggle in the original novels - be a pretty strong analogue for real life gender dysmorphia. It would have been a damned two-in-one as far as representation goes.
Again, if it weren't for the creators' pattern of promising queer content and then watering it down to almost nothing, I wouldn't complain about this. Given that pattern, however, this feels...not good.
...
We're told that unlike the others who had tried to raid the tower before (um...what?), Ozma wasn't just after the tyrant's hot daughter. He actually wanted to...rescue her from him? Or just end his unpopular reign, with Boston's plight being an aggravating factor? He was motivated by "righteousness alone," but that doesn't actually mean anything when it comes to why he decided to attack this lord's castle.
Even if this was an actual fairy tale that works on pure storybook logic rather than a piece of history from a world like Remnant, this would have me scratching my head. Knights rescuing maidens from towers is a classic, of course, but not when the tower belongs to her actual parents and there's no prior communication between her and the knight...well, hmm. We did see Boston doing some unspecified magic thingy with her hands before it cuts to Ozma's introduction, so maybe we're supposed to infer that she was magically calling for help from people outside, but if so that really should have been explicit.
Then again, this episode's title is the lost fable. So, maybe the illogic isn't as much of a problem, if say, it's going to turn out that the entire world worked on fairy tale moon logic back then, and that reality itself has fundamentally changed since then. We'll see.
So, Ozma storms the castle, kills a scary looking armored dude who I think is supposed to be Boston's father, Charleston, and reaches her tower. She reacts in fear when this strange weapon-wielding figure with blood on his armor kicks in the door, but literally one second after looking at him her expression changes to one of irrepressible thirst.
We then see her actively helping him fight their way out of the castle with some magic use of her own, followed immediately by a rather incongruous shot of him pulling her along by the arm as they flee across the wilderness away from it. I guess she's decent at fighting, but really slow.
And...I guess either due to social norms in this part of the world, or due to whatever cult of personality her father ruled through, she didn't have the authority to just call off the remaining guards after Charleston bit it. I feel like this story would raise vastly fewer questions if she was just a hostage of the evil king rather than his actual daughter.
Then, a line that could have only ever come from one specific studio of native English speakers:
““Ozma had been ready to give his life for justice countless times, but now saw a woman worth saving it for.””
That. I. What?
I had to rewind and listen to that again. So...is it saying that Ozma didn't place any value on his own life until he met Boston and had something besides the cause of justice to live for? I think that's the intent. It certainly makes more sense than the grammatically proper reading, which would be that he didn't care about saving justice until he met her. But the phrasing just..."worth saving it for?" Saving it from what? What is his life currently in danger from? Genie says this line while Ozma and Boston are just standing around and giggling together in this idyllic meadow with nothing dangerous in sight (well, okay, her father's castle is off in the background, but as they both were already running away from that it doesn't really fit).
Like, if this was a Japanese show, I'd shrug and attribute this to clumsy localization. But...this show is American.
For her own part, we're told, Boston ended up "finding freedom not in the outside world, but in the eyes of the man who saved her." I...RWBY, why? WHY? I WANTED TO BE FUCKING NICE TO YOU THIS TIME! WHY DO YOU MAKE ME TREAT YOU LIKE THIS, RWBY? WHY? DAMNIT, WHYYYY?????? Like, this line would have stuck out to me in a bad way even if it was from some random 80's shonen that didn't know any better.
Ffff...well, nothing more I can say about this bit that isn't already self-evident, so at least it's not as much work for me.
Anyway, the two lovebirds elope, and start planning adventures all around the world. Unfortunately, their happily ever after is cut ruthlessly short; not long after their courtship, Ozma fell ill with a disease that all of the era's free-access magic wasn't able to cure. Where countless villains and monsters had failed, a horribly banal sickness succeeded.
This is a neat touch, honestly. It's always the things you don't plan for. Always the threats that are normally so distant from your day-to-day experience that you aren't prepared against. No matter how good you are at swinging a war staff or casting fireballs, you're still just as edible to the germs. The hero dying in this prosaic, unsolicited way does work against the children's fairy tale feel that the rest of this story is already leaning way too hard on for its own good, but still. I just really like it when a story remembers that heroes are still mortal, and usually only exceptional in a few specific ways.
As Boston sobs over her late paramour's staff, she asks how the gods could let something like this happen. Strap yourselves in bitches, it's time for Theodicy With RWBY!~ Genie takes over again, and tells us a little about the twin creator gods of this world. These two were mentioned back in season 4, but not in very much detail, and not from a reliable in-universe source. One of the divine brothers embodies creation and has a golden light motif. The other, destruction, and has a red-and-black motif that the grimm seem to have taken after. As I recall, these two have sort of a friendly tug-of-war going on, using their opposing forces to keep the world in a mostly-deliberate homeostasis. We're now informed that back in Boston and Ozma's native era, the divine brothers physically dwelt on the planet's surface. So, when Boston's prayers were unanswered, she decided to just go knock on the Creator's door and ask him in person.
Ooh, pretty! One of the first things I ever said about RWBY is that while the animation might be terrible, the visual style of it can produce some really nice still images. Seeing some particularly sexy screenshots from the show was one of the things that made me want to try it in the first place.
Anyway, Boston enters the Creator's inner sanctum, and he appears amid a shower of leaves and a rising pair of luminous deer antlers that Studio Ghibli must have misplaced. And....oh for fuck's sake, he also walks across the water from his little tree-island right after appearing. They might as well have had Boston ride in on a wolf. Well, she drops to her knees and begs him to resurrect Ozma, and he gives her the expected answer. Things live, things die, that's the structure of the world. He is not just unwilling, but unable to do what she asks.
He does seem to earnestly regret that this is the way of things, so I'm inclined to believe him when he says that resurrection is beyond him.
She's not happy with that answer, and tells him as much pretty aggressively. His tone becomes much less consoling, and he simply repeats the words "let him go" before sublimating back into his tree-shrine. I guess she'll be heading off to nag Destroyer next.
Destroyer's earthly palace is surprisingly familiar. We've seen the Boston Red Socks living in it throughout seasons 4-5. I'm guessing that the sentence "I can't give you your husband back, but here, take this metal af demon fortress as a consolation prize" does not bridge the gap between then and now, but it should. There's already grimm creatures crawling around the place when Boston arrives. Genie's narration suggests that the grimm were an extant, but manageable, threat for the humans of this era.
So, she asks Destroyer to un-destroy Ozma. And, according to Genie, made certain not to make any mention of her already having beseeched his brother. Hmm. Between this detail, and the previous bit about Creator being unable to bring back the dead, it's starting to seem like the brother gods don't have nearly as good a relationship as was previously implied.
Surprisingly, Destroyer actually grants her request. Or pretends to, at least. He does a thing, and a person who looks exactly like Ozma appears in front of her. Scared and confused, but very much alive and seemingly healthy. Just as he's getting used to existing again and she's soulfully embracing him, there's a crack of thunder and Creator shows up.
Creator demands to know what Destroyer just did. Destroyer replies that though Creator might be the own who usually does the making and life-giving stuff, he can still dabble every once in a while himself when he feels like it (and it seems like he created the grimm, so yeah, that must indeed be the case). Creator bellows that "this is not creation!," and Destroyer asks him why not, and Creator doesn't really give a coherent answer. Instead, he just says that he will do what he must to maintain order, and unceremoniously disintegrates Ozma. Destroyer gets pissed off at that, and resurrects Ozma again and places a protective shield around him and Boston while making ready to fight his brother.
...
It seems like the gods might actually be reversed. We've only seen Creator destroy things so far, and we've only seen Destroyer create and, now, actually protect things from destruction.
It's also now explicit that Creator was just lying to Boston's face and crying crocodile tears when he said he "couldn't" resurrect Ozma. Now, as he and his brother face off, he accuses Destroyer of "breaking the rules that we both agreed upon," and Destroyer counters by saying that he's sick of those rules only ever working out in Creator's favor.
So. Creator and Destroyer agreed to some sort of compromise. And Destroyer is getting irritated that that compromise apparently included "things are eventually destroyed." And now Creator is mad that that particular rule is being broken.
If it turns out that "Creator" is actually Destroyer and "Destroyer" is actually creator, and the two of them switched names and aesthetics as part of some divine bet or the like, then this might actually be sort of clever.
...
Destroyer sics some grimm on Creator, but he vaporizes them with a familiar-looking burst of silver light. I think we're supposed to infer that Ruby's eyeballs are made out of his dandruff or something. Well, while I'm not going to place any bets as to whether or not they had this planned as far back as the season 3 finale, it is good to see them tying things together instead of just adding more and more disparate elements. Both gods then turn into these giant dragonlike forms and start to fight, but then Creator tells Destroyer that he's been tricked; the only reason Boston came here is because she'd already been rejected by himself.
And. Um. Destroyer agrees with this assessment, and apologizes for getting so aggressive with his brother. Because...him being frustrated with how the rules always seem to favor his opposite is negated by Boston having gone to him first? Like, I can see how that might be taken as a slight, but...to the point of him going back on everything he just said? Even the parts that strongly indicated deep-seated, longtime discontent with the status quo and that Boston's plea had just finally given him the opportunity to do what he'd long been wanting?
The way Creator phrases it also puts the emphasis in the wrong place for this to be a "she likes me better than you, you sure you still want to help her?" type thing. He says that she only came to Destroyer after he'd told her that resurrecting Ozma would disrupt the balance and breaks The Rules. He repeats "The Rules" a couple of times, and emphasizes the part about how "we both agreed on them together" more strongly than any other part of his speech. Maybe they just gave the voice actor terrible direction or something, but...there's just enough incongruity all around that I'm not confident in any guesses about what the authorial intent might have been.
So. Destroyer apologizes to Creator, and then vaporizes Ozma one last time himself. Boston curses both of them as monsters, and she's not really wrong. She then tries to curse curse them, like, with actual magic, but that goes about as badly as one would expect. Creator teleports her back into his own little domain, and he and Destroyer both stand over her and rant. Creator says that he really did pity her when she first came to him, but now he sees that she's really just a selfish she-dog who didn't deserve it. Why, because she tried to ask someone other than him? Not even the Greek gods were this petty, wow. Well, we already know he's a liar, so that "I really did pity you" can be dismissed out of hand. Then, the two of them punish her by making her immortal - and thereby unable to rejoin Ozma in the afterlife - until she learns the importance of life and death. Then they teleport her into some random field somewhere.
Genie explains that Boston was now, once again, a prisoner. Right, because "freedom" for her means "my boyfriend's eyeballs." This episode really does like its eyeballs. Yummy, yummy eyeballs. Anyway, I'm guessing that despite the gods being pretty readily accessible, conclusive knowledge that there IS an afterlife must have not been a thing. Otherwise, if Boston really cared more about being with Ozma than anything else, she'd have just killed herself in the first place. Although...well, it's also entirely possible that there actually isn't an afterlife at all, and Creator just told her that there was to make her miserable about her immortality.
Well, she can't kill herself now. And Genie gets really weirdly judgy about her attempts to do so. She speaks with unmasked contempt of how Boston's despair eventually degenerated into her committing "petty acts of spite against the gods." While she hisses that sentence, we see Boston crying miserably as she stabs herself in the chest over and over again in a desperate attempt to die.
Why, that spiteful ingrate!
I'm trying to decide if Genie is meant to be taken as the voice of the authors or not. It's framed like she is. It's delivered like she is. None of the characters watching this reenactment are reacting to what they see and hear in a way that suggests disagreement with her judgments.
Going back to Greek mythology as a point of comparison, there is the contradiction between stories where, eg, Zeus is a universal force of order who can be appealed to for justice, and stories in which he's an arbitrary murderer, torturer, and rapist. But that's largely due to different myths having different origins, and what we know as "Greek mythology" or "Egyptian mythology" or the like really being a hodgepodge of various local traditions. Gods don't generally act like petty, abusive monsters AND get framed as ultimate arbiters of right and wrong within the same story. So, either Genie is stanning the brother gods here, or the writers are. If the former, that's got to be a buildup to said Genie or the forces she represents being in the wrong. If the latter, well...either the writers have a really fucked up worldview, or (much more likely, considering RWBY) they just blindly assembled this story out of mythological tinkertoys without paying the slightest attention to which pieces they were putting where.
Well. Like I said, trying to be sanguine. So, unless something else happens to contradict it, I'm going to assume that Genie is just an unpleasantly biased narrator.
...
Hmm. Just had a thought, actually. Creator told Boston that her immortality would end when she "learned to appreciate life and death." It seems like she appreciates death just fine at this point. But life? Maybe what he meant was that she needs to learn to live life for its own sake, rather than just for someone else's. That would go back to his initial instructions for her to "let him go." So, she just needs to learn to love and appreciate her own life, and then...
...um.
...and then she can die again.
:/
Okay, well. I was about to say that maybe the brother gods aren't actually quite as bad as they seemed if this is the case, but no, they really still are. Possibly even worse. Goddamnit.
...
Eventually, Boston realizes that if the gods really are this flighty, petty, and quarrelsome, then they might also be defeatable. She thought that maybe if she united all of humanity against them, she'd be able to make like Antifa and dethrone the gods. Or, at least, make them suffer the way they made her suffer. So, she goes from kingdom to kingdom, showing off her immortality and weaving tales about how she "stole" immortality from the gods. She urged them to join their martial and magical forces, and see if they can't steal a whole bunch more immortality from them and distribute it among all. She's pretty charismatic, and her immortality is genuine, so with enough time and effort she manages to put such an army together. We see them charging into Creator's sanctum, weapons and spells in hand, and-
Wait. Hold up.
The brother gods live in physical locations within the world, right? You can just go up and talk to them (albeit the approach to Destroyer's home at least is a perilous one, due to the grimm. But still, if Boston managed, other people can also manage, and even if not there's still Creator).
Okay, so. In all those years that she was weaving lies about how she managed to "steal" immortality from the gods, why didn't anybody go and ask the gods if that's really what happened? I mean, sure, the gods are liars, and at least some people probably already know that the gods are liars. But which story sounds more likely? That the gods decided to make this otherwise normal woman immortal for reasons of their own, or that she somehow managed to "steal" that from them without them retaliating by, idk, imprisoning her under a mountain or turning her into an immortal cockroach or something? Sure, her lies would sound appealing. They're the kind of lies that people would likely want to believe. But the sheer implausibility of her story compared to theirs, and the IMMENSE potential consequences of them acting on it should it be false, well...yeah. SOME people, at least, would ask for the gods' side of the story after hearing hers. I'm not buying that she was able to pull this whole operation off in secret. Maybe as an allegorical myth that's not meant to be taken literally, this could work, but for something that's supposed to have actually happened?
Well, I guess the gods could just be feigning ignorance. They're pricks, after all. That would be much more sensible an explanation.
So much for me trying to be less nitpicky than before. I'm at almost five thousand words, and still just barely halfway through this 25 minute episode. It's not that this episode's problems are necessarily that appalling. It's just that there's so damned many of them. Every other sentence has something in it that makes me go "wait, what?" Not always a very big something, but always at least just big enough to give me pause and make me feel compelled to write about it. It's like listening to a really complicated fairy tale being told by someone with dementia, and they're constantly mixing up details, randomly switching to other stories, or just not speaking in coherent sentences.
I'll be splitting it here. Next part will be public in the next couple of days.
