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kitkatopinions · 7 months

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Okay, so I just watched a Miles Luna cameo video talking about the chant Pyrrha does to unlock Jaune's aura, link here to the reddit post of it. And it's a very interesting video for a number of reasons. Please note that while talking about this, I wanna be aware that my interpretations of what he's saying may not be definitively true. Miles Luna is someone I don't know and I'm unable to ask for clarification on anything he says. I'm simply talking about what this video made me think and how it came across, not trying to say like "this thing he said definitely means blah blah blah." This was just very interesting and I wanted to talk about what I found interesting and what I got out of it.

So he was answering the question "what's the deal with Pyrrha's aura unlocking chant thing in volume one? Was it like a standarized thing, or was the mantra unique to a person's beliefs?"

I'm going to be putting things that Miles said in indented and then talk about the things I think are worth talking about.

"I've always been in the camp that it's the latter, that that's like a Pyrrha Nikos thing."

So this'll happen again, but it's just interesting that Miles' answer comes in the form of 'this is how I saw it' rather than 'this is how we saw it,' which makes it seem like there wasn't an agreed upon conclusion or even an agreed on supposition on what this moment even was.

"The story behind that is a wild one, it takes us back to volume one. Back when me, Monty, and Kerry were... Learning how to tell stories." *Laughs* "Stories that lasted more than like - you know - five minutes, and build worlds and stuff. And back then, you know, so much stuff was rough around the edges. And it was a lot of experimentation, and just trying things, and having to just like, throw ideas out there and commit to them because we just had to work really quickly and..."

Miles talking about how rushed they were, how they didn't know how to tell a real story yet and were just 'throwing out ideas and committing to them' is just... To me, it really seems like it indicates what I already thought, that things weren't 'planned from the beginning' because they were just writing, and writing on a deadline, so they were putting things into the story without fully thinking them through and committing to them because it was all they could do.

"I remember we were trying to establish, you know, we need to teach the audience how aura works. First off-" *Laughing* "I don't think we did a super good job with that. The same with semblances, and a bunch of things."

It's so funny to me that if rwde posters and rwby critics said something along those lines, like 'they weren't good at telling us how aura worked' or 'they really just didn't establish a lot of things very well,' many anti-rwde posters would just hate us. XD And this is what I mean when I talk about how overly defensive some people in the fandom are, because one of the main writers and creators can look back and laugh about the ways they went wrong in the early volumes and recognize that they weren't the best at storytelling, and meanwhile there are fans that would be like 'ummm why do you need your handheld? Obviously aura works like *insert headcanon here* and you should've gotten that through the brilliant scene, you fucking idiot." Like, it's so much easier for me to fondly smile and shake my head at the sort of charming follies of early-RWBY. Random tangent, but it reminds me of watching a movie with my ex-boyfriend where he got angry that I said a character who was getting in a physical fight was aggressive and he rewound the movie several times and made me watch the character start a physical fight repeatedly to 'prove to me' that the character wasn't being aggressive, and I was just sitting there thinking 'I would like this movie a lot more if you weren't so defensive over it.' But anyway, back to the video.

"But I remember we were like 'okay, well Jaune's kind of our like - our big dummy who needs to be taught everything so the audience can learn a lot through Jaune. So Jaune doesn't - It makes sense that Jaune doesn't have an aura, and maybe he like um, unlocks it at some point like during the - the Emerald Forest trials, but like how?' And we were trying to figure stuff out, and Monty goes like-" *Shrugs* "'What if we just have Pyrrha unlock it for him?' And we were like 'how would that work?' And he was like 'I don't know, man, Pyrrha's supposed to be the best. Maybe she's really in tune with her aura. And so like, you know, maybe if like, people are really in tune with themselves and - and in sync with their aura, they can give people with more potential - they can just give them a little nudge.' And we went 'yeah, sure! Why not?'"

So if you applied the ideas of the two criteria here to world building, you have 'People who are really in tune with themselves and in sync with their aura can unlock other auras' and 'People who have potential can get their auras unlocked.' Which means potentially characters who are shown to be confident, self-assured and who know who and what they are - like Glynda, Robin, Maria, maybe WBY now that they had their 'I am a Huntress' moments - could hypothetically have this power if it hadn't been dropped. And who has potential is a bit trickier, but civilians who can or want to fight, maybe? So, would Whitley count as being able to unlock an aura? See, the interesting thing is that I wouldn't consider Pyrrha to be particularly self-assured emotionally. Physically, yes, but emotionally I think she suffers from some insecurities that might give her blind spots. So maybe unlocking aura requires someone to be physically in tune with their body.

"I remember Monty wanted to write uh, Pyrrha's monologue and - and it's so Monty. Um, but it's one of the few things where he was like 'Hey, can I take a stab at that? I think it would be fun.' And he did, and I think it's really great."

Him saying 'one of the few things' is also interesting to me. But I do tend to have the opinion that from what I've heard, Monty would have ideas and Kerry and Miles are the ones that did most of the writing and like, turning the ideas into a firm thing. That's just the vibes I've gotten from the way that they've talked, and this just kind of makes me think that more.

"And it's very - It comes across as very, like, mystical. And like, ooh, exciting, mysterious. Because that was - that was kind of what we wanted the vibe to be about like aura. Like it's this spiritual thing that like, we understand how we can kind of use it um, practically, in combat. But like, emotionally and spiritually, there's so much more depth there. It has room to grow, there's things about it we don't understand. And um, we felt that what Monty wrote kind of encapsulated that sort of mysterious, spiritual um, like, side of it. And also for Pyrrha too. Like it made her seem like she was just levels upon levels higher than where Jaune was at the time. And we also felt - I mean I definitely feel as though, that it's something that like, she likes to think about and something that she says to herself to give her courage. Because if she's gonna fall in battle, then so be it. But she believes that her spirit - that there's a part of her that will live on, long after her body falls, and will go to some other plane on some grand adventure."

A part of me wishes that this had been so much more explained, but also I feel like the spiritual part of things isn't something that I want heavy emphasis in when it comes to the characters that seem to disregard their lives a bit, if that makes sense? Like, don't get me wrong, I'm not one of the people who think that Pyrrha going to fight Cinder is some indication of fault with her or Ozpin or something, I think it's perfectly logical that she went up to fight Cinder. I just also think that adding in that Pyrrha thinks 'if she falls then so be it,' before having her actually die. RWBY has a very dicey at best track record when it comes to suicide (Penny, Ruby in V8) and I think adding in these elements for Pyrrha would just have made it even worse.

"And I think that gives her the courage to... Be Pyrrha Nikos, out on the battlefield, fighting for the lives of others. That's kind of always been my take on it. But yeah, the short behind the scenes answer is um, Monty thought it would be a cool thing to do. Um, that was the answer to a lot of things from back then."

More 'not everything was well planned' indications here.

"Um, and I - and I like it a lot too, because we were really trying to explain to the audience that the creatures of Grimm don't have souls. There should be no moral quandaries about slaughtering hordes and hordes of these scary looking creatures."

Okay, so... I'm going to get into some controversial stuff here, because if they wanted to ensure that there were no moral quandaries about fighting the Grimm in the early seasons, why were they comfortable having the White Fang being such prominent enemies who Team RWBY would throw off of train cars that were blowing up in a tunnel soon to be overrun by Grimm? To me, if I was concerned that people would take issue with the main protagonist mowing down animal-like creatures that acted mindless and therefore had to establish that they don't have souls, I would be five times more concerned with making sure my main protagonist wasn't just tossing aside talking sentient humans especially if I had made them part of an in-universe marginalized minority group. Just a thought.

"And then, you know, on the opposite side of that, if the things that all of our protagonists fight are soulless, then we should make something that makes huntsman and huntresses really strong, it's the fact that they do have a soul that can manifest itself in ways that can protect the user - like the body of the person. Uh - uh, it's just something that, I don't know. It's like warm, fuzzy like faith and belief. And just, it felt like the nice counterbalance to the like, hollow, cold, violent Grimm."

What's interesting to me about this statement is that they wanted Huntsman and Huntresses specifically to counterbalance the Grimm by having proof of their humanity in their souls being so blatantly represented. If it were me, I would have humanity in general separated from the Grimm through their souls. But it's almost like the only people they care about and the only people they want the audience to care about are the hunters and huntresses, and not the civilian figures and random people just living their lives. I think that does sort of come across in the writing with things like Cinder killing people on the bridge in volume eight and knocking them down but then later on Yang saying in volume nine that they saved everyone, and Weiss throwing the guards into the ocean never to be seen again, and no one really bringing up or caring about how Mistral is pretty much defenseless, and so on and so forth. I think this also comes across in the fandom, where I've seen people talk about 'why would we care about the NPCs' and things like that. This just makes it seem to me that the writers don't really care about civilians.

"So yeah, that's kind of my all over the place answer, I hope you like it. Because that's how I always felt about it. We kind of just rolled with it back then, because we had to, because we had to work so fast, with so many constraints working against us."

The fact that even the main writers and creators seemed to be on time crunches where they couldn't take the time to really figure things out speaks volumes I think about how Rooster Teeth does business. Also, more little reasons here to not believe everything was planned from the beginning. Miles Luna says they just rolled with things not even because they wanted to but because they had to, because they didn't have time to put more thought into what they'd do before they did it.

"And we were super inexperienced. Um, if I were to do it all again, I would wanna - I would wanna dig into that more. I think there's some cool, untapped potential there. And in a million other places in the show."

This is so true that there is so much untapped potential in RWBY. But I just think it's really funny that once again, this is something rwde posters and rwby critics would get blasted for saying. XD Like I remember one time posting like 'there's so much I would change and explore more in RWBY if I could reboot it' and someone in the comment section was like 'I bet your writing sucks, idk why you think you could improve anything about RWBY.' If I said RWBY was full of untapped potential and I wish it was dug into more, I might get accused of being a know-nothing idiot or an obnoxious entitled brat, lol. XD

"Um, but, you know, those rough edges and that sort of like - amateur is too strong a word - but the - the over ambition of RWBY, I think has always been one of its greatest strengths and also greatest weaknesses."

For once, I completely agree with Miles Luna. One reason why RWBY is something I keep coming back to is that there's just so much there to work with, so much that could be really good. But it's also one of the biggest flaws of RWBY that it always packs so much in that it just doesn't seem to have any interest in properly exploring or following through on, and I do think it would be a much better written show if the writers would just stop and take a breath and scale back and edit to what they can handle. It's like filling your fridge with a ton of perishable food in the hopes of cooking amazing meals, but then not taking the time to ever really cook or do anything good with the ingredients and then throwing together a hodgepodge sandwich before (or even after) things start spoiling in the fridge. It's great for creativity and it makes me want to actually cook something good with all those ingredients, but you still think they shouldn't have been that ambitious and you're like 'next time you go shopping just buy stuff for a regular old sandwich because apparently you can't handle it, and this sandwich has moldy cheese, too many vegetables, balsamic vinegar, mustard seeds, uncooked lobster, and a twinkie. What were you thinking?' Anyway, long spiel short, RWBY has great potential, endless heaps of good ideas that are inspiring and that's one of the best things about the show! But it's also way too ambitious and it leaves the show in a mess. I don't even have a good solution that would keep the scope of the show and how it gets the creative juices flowing without being too much for the writers who can't seem to do any real depth or follow through, I'm just talking. XD

"Uh, but it has a lot of charm, and we had a lot of heart back then. And i'm glad that people still think about volume one to this day. It's just cool."

It's interesting to me that Miles Luna says 'we had a lot of heart back then.' Now again, I'm not trying to say 'Miles Luna definitely meant that they don't have heart now,' because I don't know him and I don't know what he meant, but just the nostalgia in his tone and the way he talked, it made me think about how RWBY used to feel like this loved thing that people really wanted to do, whereas now sometimes RWBY feels like the thing that people don't want to do that they're just plugging away at, and like skipping past loads of exposition and having their characters act exasperated and tired out by everything. I've gotten to that state where I was really excited about writing something, and then when I got out of the mood to write it and was just forcing myself too, it would leak into skipping over important things and just writing the characters to go through the motions in like vague annoyance because I was vaguely annoyed. It's a sign that I need to grow as a writer, but it also makes me go 'do I really want to even be writing this, does this even spark joy' and sometimes the answer is no. And it just kind of feels like sometimes that's what RWBY is now, a project people don't want to do anymore that no longer sparks that same joy that it used to.

But on a better, lighter note, I'm glad too that people are still thinking about volume one, because it often feels like the RWBY fandom on the general whole just doesn't even like the early volumes and wants to forget them, or even forget seasons 4-6 sometimes. Some people will act like the only thing that matters is the present, and looking at the setup or the early established things is just stupid when it's like... No, that's the whole thing that RWBY was built on. Volumes 7-9 alone don't tell a complete story. It's a hodgepodge sandwich full of a bunch of mismatched stuff maybe, but I really feel like the people that eat the whole thing and might complain about the bad parts actually like the sandwich way more than the people who take the top piece of bread and then tell you that all that other stuff doesn't matter anymore. XD But yeah, that's just the things that I was thinking about when I saw that cameo video.

#rwde

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