RWBY

In my personal opinion, the worst thing a piece of fiction can do is provide to the audience all the tools to make something exceptional, and then make something mundane.

With Disney's "the Black Cauldron", there's a wannabe warrior who is stuck protecting a magic pig and later finds a magic sword, there is a "Princess" with a magic orb who is later described as a "Scullery Maid", and a bard who provides cheap slapstick comedy with incompetence yet has the most real world experience and negotiation skills. They meet the Horned King, who wishes to resurrect an army that never dies, and a trio of witches, who operate around tricky deals and their supreme magical abilities.

This could be awesome and deeply involving, but they focus on a character nobody likes (in-universe and irl) and defeat the main villain with a gentle shove in the general direction of the titular cauldron.

Thus lies the problem with RWBY. The trailers showed absolutely amazing action sequences, with tranquil music and stoic badasses. Some showed more talkative characters with story lines you'd expect to be actual episodes or explained by the actual show. And, whilst many people disagree, the further the trailers went, the less interested in the actual show I became.

Especially as the silent and stoic badass from the first trailer was given a rather whiny voice.

When the show actually began, we were given a lengthy explanation of the things we had seen and not given a moment's thought towards the mechanics of. They have a cool action sequence to start off, dwarfed by the quality of the original trailer, and lead into a nice dialogue scene where Ruby eat cookies and raves over the hunters.

This is where the animation flaws come in. Objects are treated as whole or entirely absent, lip-sync is poor at best and the character was revealed to be one entirely removed from the one developed by hype.

The other characters are fairly cliche as well, and I shall describe them by the trope names and nothing else: The Spoiled Brat, the Badass Bookworm, the Cool Big Sis, the Plucky Comic Relief, the Ace, the CloudCuckooLander, the Deadpan Snarker, the Big Good, the Stern Teacher, the Bully, the Mafia Boss...

But what's interesting is there are some VERY good concepts in there. However, none of them are considered to be the main cast. Team RWBY is cliche and boring, while team JNPR is flawed and fun, what with the leader being the most incompetent member of the school and the national hero giving him enough sympathy to help him out when he's clearly hopeless.

During one arc, there's a race to gather gold chess pieces which decide which team you will be in. The teams that form are, however, the exact teams that naturally happened anyway whilst fighting for the chess pieces. This could have lead to a great moment where two of the team JNPR and two of the team RWBY got on the other team, but Ozpin decided "hang it all, you don't need chess pieces to tell you where your allegiance is. You just need two giant monsters to fight."

And that's just one of the many brilliant moments perfectly set up and then never utilised. One of them could potentially happen, but I do not have enough faith in the story that they'll include that. Hilariouly, the character who's trailer was most focused on story is the only character to receive no development or defining character moments what so ever.

One of the main downfalls is that they're trying to be an anime, including where it comes to episode length, but due to the limitations of webvideo, they show it as one episode in 4 parts. Additionally, the style doesn't adapt well to the silly anime moments of minimalist animation and can seem inconsistent.

Do not get me started on Ruby's "crazy idea". Getting at speed and cutting off a bird's head with a giant scythe is a very rational idea, while Nora's idea of rocket-jumping to stab a scorpion with it's own tail is actually crazy.

And that is what annoys me about RWBY. There are the tools to make something amazing beyond compare, but they made something which is not bad.