Review: RWBY – Fairy Tales of Remnant
RWBY has never been very subtle about where its influences have come from. Most would point to the many filed-off-serial-number similarities to Avatar: The Last Airbender, but less talked about are the elements pulled from the much beloved (but now under intense re-examination) Harry Potter series, the most notable among them being the magical Beacon Academy and its headmaster Ozpin, whose character was pretty much just “hot anime Dumbledore” for the first few seasons of the series. Well, seems Rooster Teeth and E.C. Meyer (who previously wrote other RWBY side stories to mixed reception) has decided to double down on this by releasing their take on the spin-off novel, The Tales of Beedle the Bard. And by “take”, I of course mean SHAMELESS RIP-OFF, as the format of chronicling in-universe fairy tales and fables, amongst them being stories mentioned in the show itself, followed by literary commentary by the old mysterious mentor character, is pretty much copied wholesale from Beedle the Bard. The main difference being that, instead of the scant five stories in Beedle, this balloons that out to twelve stories, which are themselves padded and written in a way that I’m not even sure they’re really being written AS fairy tales.
What I mean by this is that, while they do take a bit of a mythic tone with their material and are (ostensibly) about a specific moral that the readers (both in-universe and out) are meant to take away from the stories, there’s just a BIT too much dialogue and omniscient narration that they come out to being more like short stories that take place in the universe. Which is fine if that’s what they wanted to do, but the title of the book says otherwise. And yeah, some of the stories do feel more like actual fairy tales, but they’re a scant few. Not to mention that several of the stories share a bit too many common details, including their alleged lesson. And it goes past the point of being part of a theme and motif and into the realm of them having several drafts for the same kind of story that they decided to just throw into the same book. They do try to make use of RWBY’s different in-universe cultures to show the difference in the lore, but that also is not utilized nearly as much. It’s also once again telling that the Faunus, RWBY’s most damning misfire of a racism allegory, mainly get a couple of creation myths that try to dig into the discrimination angle instead of just using them as part of the culture.
This book is pretty much just for the RWBY super fan and little else. The same could be said for Beedle the Bard and Harry Potter fans (which look to be running for the door at the time of this writing but I digress), but that kinda makes my point for me. As mentioned, the stories themselves do not function well as fairy tales in their own right and seem to be more focused on adding to the show’s lore than much else, except they don’t have the benefit of coming out when the main story is over and done with, so part of me gets the feeling that they’re only vaguely hinting at things to come for fear of “spoilers”, which just goes to show how poorly planned this was. The saving grace of this would probably be the illustrations by Violet Tobacco (who, no surprise, worked on a Harry Potter book too), which are quite pleasing to look at. So, this is pretty synonymous with RWBY in that it is a lot of pretty visuals that ultimately end up signifying little. Just pick up Beedle the Bard on Audible for free, you’re gonna like it better.
