From the Bookshelf: RWBY: After the Fall
Aug. 31st, 2019 03:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerHappening on an end-of-the-bookshelf display of RWBY novels in the young adult section of the area bookstore did get my attention. For some years now, should I come across “based on TV and movies” novels I’ll at most glance at their covers before moving on, and that despite (or because of) past interest in some of them. At that particular moment, though, I did think of the translated-from-Japanese “light novels” I’ve read a few series of (being the original source of left-off-past-the-beginning anime series I’ve already seen), and how often their prose can seem to leave me with subtle indigestion. (Perhaps ebooks from J-Novel Club have suited me better than most books from Yen Press.) When I bought E.C. Myers’ RWBY: After the Fall, I might have been thinking of little more than “making a peculiar experiment,” bypassing certain barriers I only have myself to blame when it comes to “reading new fiction” these days, but also suiting me better just for having been written in English to start with. In any case, when I bought it I was still working my way through the sixth series of the computer-animated show; on the off chance the book would touch on it, I waited to start reading.
I’d known from the cover art the book would catch up to some of the tertiary characters of RWBY, who I understood had managed to catch some attention (including mine, if not in an overpowering way) through the first three series but had had to pass beyond the ken of the main and secondary characters “after the fall” of the initial combat academy setting. Velvet (who didn’t come across too well on the cover, suffering perhaps from that old “an occidental trying to ‘draw anime’ syndrome”), had first set up the story’s discrimination analogy with her rabbit ears (before someone with much more screen time had faced the same problem). The later episodes she’d appeared in had done its best to make up for that by giving her a whopping special power, though. Coco (who looked much better on the cover) “dressed cool,” accessorizing with a beret and sunglasses, and wielded a gatling gun that unfolded from a boxy handbag. The two guys of the four-person team Fox and Yatsuhashi I supposed to “fill out the roster,” but over the course of the book their backgrounds did fill in.
The book bounces back and forth between flashbacks to Beacon Academy and the combat team CFVY (it took the book telling me to realise it could be spoken “coffee”) trying to guard desert villagers against “the monsters of Grimm” and subtler challenges. The “action in prose” was decent enough, although there just might not have been the same “coming back together through hardships” feeling that had kept the story in animation interesting for me. I might have been most hoping a book would spell out the apparently complicated internal logic of the show’s superpowers, with “Dust” and “Auras” and “Semblances” all coming up at different times, but I didn’t seem to notice an explanation. I might even have got to thinking of all the boosterism of fanfiction as superior to “canon,” as many obsessions of its enthusiastic writers it may show. (This book did seem to intimate at a few points Coco is into girls, although she didn’t seem to have any chances to really show that.) I suppose I didn’t begrudge the experience in the end (which might have invoked a thing or two happening in that sixth series I’d just watched, but didn’t seem to intimate “you’ll have a leg up on others understanding revelations in series to come”). However, I did go straight on to another translated “light novel” I’d at least seen a few positive comments about.
I’d known from the cover art the book would catch up to some of the tertiary characters of RWBY, who I understood had managed to catch some attention (including mine, if not in an overpowering way) through the first three series but had had to pass beyond the ken of the main and secondary characters “after the fall” of the initial combat academy setting. Velvet (who didn’t come across too well on the cover, suffering perhaps from that old “an occidental trying to ‘draw anime’ syndrome”), had first set up the story’s discrimination analogy with her rabbit ears (before someone with much more screen time had faced the same problem). The later episodes she’d appeared in had done its best to make up for that by giving her a whopping special power, though. Coco (who looked much better on the cover) “dressed cool,” accessorizing with a beret and sunglasses, and wielded a gatling gun that unfolded from a boxy handbag. The two guys of the four-person team Fox and Yatsuhashi I supposed to “fill out the roster,” but over the course of the book their backgrounds did fill in.
The book bounces back and forth between flashbacks to Beacon Academy and the combat team CFVY (it took the book telling me to realise it could be spoken “coffee”) trying to guard desert villagers against “the monsters of Grimm” and subtler challenges. The “action in prose” was decent enough, although there just might not have been the same “coming back together through hardships” feeling that had kept the story in animation interesting for me. I might have been most hoping a book would spell out the apparently complicated internal logic of the show’s superpowers, with “Dust” and “Auras” and “Semblances” all coming up at different times, but I didn’t seem to notice an explanation. I might even have got to thinking of all the boosterism of fanfiction as superior to “canon,” as many obsessions of its enthusiastic writers it may show. (This book did seem to intimate at a few points Coco is into girls, although she didn’t seem to have any chances to really show that.) I suppose I didn’t begrudge the experience in the end (which might have invoked a thing or two happening in that sixth series I’d just watched, but didn’t seem to intimate “you’ll have a leg up on others understanding revelations in series to come”). However, I did go straight on to another translated “light novel” I’d at least seen a few positive comments about.