Shorts Review: RWBY – Volume 4, World of Remnant: Between Kingdoms

Thy Kingdom Come

Once again we have Qrow Branwen as the narrator delving into another info-dump on how RWBY’s Universe works that you can check out by clicking here.

While the previous four “World of Remnants” within this season talked about the 4 kingdoms, the newest one talks about why we have small villages that distance themselves between kingdoms & cities.

The small villages for a number of reasons seem content where they stay despite the bullshit they have to endure if it’s not Grimm it’s killers & vagabond bandits who steal your shit or would even go as far as to wait for an aftermath of a Grimm attack before looting.

What’s easily the biggest plot-holes in this narration are:

1. I don’t buy bandits in this setting. At all. Either ‘skilled fighter’ is code for ‘implacable badass’ and each bandit is equal in combat ability to a huntsman or the Grimm aren’t really as credible a threat as they’re made out to be. Roman was killed because he was a criminal rife with negativity and it’s explicitly stated here that bandits have the same problem with attracting Grimm. So living by raiding already well-defended towns to survive, constantly being hounded by Grimm even more than huntsmen are. Why in the hell would you ever choose to be a bandit? And it would be a choice. These small towns ‘don’t want to deal with the big cities’ so even if the bandits happen to be wanted criminals (which not all of them will be), the bandits wouldn’t be recognizable as that to the townsfolk. Their lives are high-risk for minimal gain and there are better options immediately available. No one would choose that life.

It’s the Fallout 3 problem. Wanting a bad guy faction that’s okay to be killed. Except here’s the thing: THE GRIMM FUCKING EXIST. Just like in Fallout 3, bandits (or raiders), don’t make much sense and even worse here, they don’t need to exist because there is already an unambiguously evil faction. I was honestly expecting the attack on the town in episode 2 to have been Tyrien’s doing but apparently not.

And 2.

No offense, but why not just cut through? With the way the villages are structured, there’s seemingly no good reason. It’s arguably pointless to start a town then. Just the amount of things putting your lives in danger at that point seem to heavily outweigh the benefits.

Truthfully the World of Remnant is one of the most interesting parts of RWBY, I just wish it was more integrated into the show as opposed to just given to us as exposition. I do really like the lore and the world building, it just seems a bit clunky at times and this episode is the clearest example. Everything else about this was fine but these two plot-holes just really sticks out as not being thought through.

I thought we could get a WoR based on the “Menangerie”, where Blake is going, since we didn’t, I am expecting that trip to end in a couple of episodes later than the next one… After all, it is pretty far. Another reason the humans wanted to exile the faunus, and the fact that some stayed, kinda means that even though humans lost the war, they got a little victory by being segregative assholes to a larger population. So the episode before Blake arrives to the island on the lower right corner, we will hopefully see a WoR based on it.

Now, the obvious person that Qrow hints at in the end is Salem, to which I still feel that RT might have something against me or maybe Oregon in general…
Either way, it is possible that he could though be referring to his sister Raven, who I think is actually supposed to be based on Dorothy given STRQ’s whole Wizard of Oz motif (outside of Summer of course)… Maybe we can look forwards to seeing where the hell she keeps going later on in the Volume.

In general, this made me think, not about the viability of the WOR episodes’ structure or the prophesized Yang Chapter, but about the structure of the series so far. There’s only a limited amount of screen time in the volume, yet our heroines have been split up, so will the story of this volume be satisfying if it has to follow Four-Different perspectives, splitting the story up into small chunks from each perspective? Or will there actually be more episodes in this volume than in the previous volumes? Of course, I don’t want to assume anything about the structure or quality of the volume before the rest of it has been released, because I have the utmost faith in the passion and hard work of the people at Rooster Teeth, but I’m just curious as to how the rest of this will play out. As a general side note, We’re all anticipating the day when we the fans will all collectively shout what We’ve been meaning to express: “Fuck YEAH! TEAM RWBY’S BACK!!!!!! WHOOOOOOOOO!!!!”