Review: RWBY Vol.9 “Altercation at the Auspicious Auction”

Overview

Team RWBY while further exploring this Fairy Tale world encounters a talking Raccoon and gets more than they bartered for…


Our Take

After arriving in Meepleburg, our heroes come to a sham auction run by the King Of Dokapon, who’s now a raccoon named Jinxy that deals with Faustian bargains rather than moolah. Many of these oddly specific deals have something that requires the extraction of a specific emotion in exchange for something tangible since currency doesn’t exist in this world.

And to the surprise of everyone, a specific item turns out within that auction just so happens to be something of great value to Ruby herself, which Ruby used as a bargaining chip to get taken to a royal birthday after we get a repeated loop of them walking in circles which lead to a minor comedic joke involving Weiss and a rock.

Overall, I feel that this episode has highlighted the girl’s inner problems: Ruby is starting to lose hope and wants to stop “pretending that she knows everything”, and Yang doesn’t know what it feels like to be loved (which would explain why she and Blake haven’t confessed their growing love for each other.) Blake isn’t happy with being forced into the role of the rude fairytale character in the story, likely because doing morally wrong things reminds her of her outlaw past, and wants to be as cautious as possible. And finally, Weiss has lost two homes in two years and is attempting to use logic to try to keep herself grounded in a world where logic is non-existent. Now the question is how are they going to overcome these specific problems? And will following the Fairy Tale’s story truly be the solution? And what’s become of Jaune and Neo? Hopefully, we’ll find out soon…