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From the Bookshelf: The World of RWBY
An oversized book jutting out from the manga shelves at the area bookstore got my attention; taking it down from beside copies of the RWBY manga I’d plugged through before, I sorted out from its cover it was an “official companion” to that computer-animated series. Flipping through the guide turned up a proper explanation of the different terms used for the show’s superpowers, something I’d hoped to find in a young adult novel I’d also plugged through; at that moment I did begin to ponder buying the book. As a hardcover it was a pricy volume, though, so I decided to wait a while for some special discount points on my bookstore card to become available for a limited time; returning to the store then revealed its only copy of the book had sold already. It took driving to the chain’s next outpost to find several more copies and buy one of them.
After all of that the book was interesting, starting off with real-world history back in the days of “Red vs. Blue,” with the very first people at Rooster Teeth trying to promote their “machinima” series at fan conventions only to start wondering about some of the costumes they kept seeing and pick up on anime fandom. For all that the first series of RWBY about ten years later used generic silhouettes in its crowd scenes, though, the book had me thinking that by that time Rooster Teeth was already bigger than “a few people with some cleverly assembled computers,” as I suppose I’d assumed in those first days. I did wonder from some descriptions to what extent the show’s creator Monty Oum “put things in because they’d be cool”; the people carrying on after his tragic early death seem to have to think through things a bit more. I also might have really picked up for the first time that he and other high-placed creators of the series got to voice some of the more important young male characters (with Monty’s place being filled later by his brother); fortunately, in contemplating those characters I didn’t swing over to sudden accusations of “self-insertion” or anything similar. Reading the book, I did start thinking for some reason it had been compiled after RWBY’s fifth series had been completed, but then I ran into a character description of someone introduced in the sixth series (although there weren’t any pictures of her). I also managed to notice one character didn’t have a voice actor listed; the person performing him, a large fish in the small pond of anime dub actors, had wound up in some trouble over inappropriate convention behaviour then made things worse by falling in with online trouble-stirrers.
A lot of the illustrations in the book were screen shots; while being a “guide” might help justify that I’ll admit to wishing for more “developmental sketches” for their hand-drawn touch. At the very end, though, there were some sketches of new variants of the main characters with “V7” labels. My first thought was “version 7,” which got me wondering how far the story would have to go to get to them; then, I managed to think of “volume 7” and supposed they’d show up “next,” if after some unspecified period of waiting. As I poked away at these comments, though, I ran into an announcement that not only had the new series arrived just months after I’d finished the last one but this time I wouldn’t be waiting for it to be available on Crunchyroll. The first episode stuck with the previous character models, but did turn out a bit differently than I’d imagined, including one surprise that could be said to work by storytelling rules established in other places but which at this point did feel a bit sentimental at first.
After all of that the book was interesting, starting off with real-world history back in the days of “Red vs. Blue,” with the very first people at Rooster Teeth trying to promote their “machinima” series at fan conventions only to start wondering about some of the costumes they kept seeing and pick up on anime fandom. For all that the first series of RWBY about ten years later used generic silhouettes in its crowd scenes, though, the book had me thinking that by that time Rooster Teeth was already bigger than “a few people with some cleverly assembled computers,” as I suppose I’d assumed in those first days. I did wonder from some descriptions to what extent the show’s creator Monty Oum “put things in because they’d be cool”; the people carrying on after his tragic early death seem to have to think through things a bit more. I also might have really picked up for the first time that he and other high-placed creators of the series got to voice some of the more important young male characters (with Monty’s place being filled later by his brother); fortunately, in contemplating those characters I didn’t swing over to sudden accusations of “self-insertion” or anything similar. Reading the book, I did start thinking for some reason it had been compiled after RWBY’s fifth series had been completed, but then I ran into a character description of someone introduced in the sixth series (although there weren’t any pictures of her). I also managed to notice one character didn’t have a voice actor listed; the person performing him, a large fish in the small pond of anime dub actors, had wound up in some trouble over inappropriate convention behaviour then made things worse by falling in with online trouble-stirrers.
A lot of the illustrations in the book were screen shots; while being a “guide” might help justify that I’ll admit to wishing for more “developmental sketches” for their hand-drawn touch. At the very end, though, there were some sketches of new variants of the main characters with “V7” labels. My first thought was “version 7,” which got me wondering how far the story would have to go to get to them; then, I managed to think of “volume 7” and supposed they’d show up “next,” if after some unspecified period of waiting. As I poked away at these comments, though, I ran into an announcement that not only had the new series arrived just months after I’d finished the last one but this time I wouldn’t be waiting for it to be available on Crunchyroll. The first episode stuck with the previous character models, but did turn out a bit differently than I’d imagined, including one surprise that could be said to work by storytelling rules established in other places but which at this point did feel a bit sentimental at first.