I’ve tried my best to be positive about RWBY: Ice Queendom up through now. As a character study on Weiss, I still believe it’s not bad! But this week… This was not a good week, for a lot of reasons. Let’s dive in and talk about them.
Starting off, dear god did this episode look bad. I’m not talking about just bad or janky animation, that’s been present since the beginning. Though that does of course exist as well. No, rather what I want to draw attention to is just the half-assed, absurdly lazy direction and storyboarding of the episode. Stuff like Yang just standing in the center of the screen while the camera slowly pans upwards. Or the incredibly static nature of a train and its occupants sliding across the screen. Stuff like that. They even managed to make a train crash boring and unimpactful! And you can find this basically everywhere. From the small Ruby and Weiss fight to Yang’s motorcycle to Smol!Weiss and Pyrrha shooting out of the train cars. It all feels like the most basic, straight forward, lazy way the scenes could have been presented.
Normally this is where I get to say Queendom’s narrative picked things up a bit. That it covered for the poor presentation. Well that’s only slightly true this week! This being a character piece about Weiss, the opening bit inside Ruby’s dream was actually quite good. I’d never considered how Ruby’s feelings regarding her deceased mother could relate to Weiss’s upbringing and her own parents. And the whole bit of being able to communicate because Ruby fell asleep in Weiss’s dream, the thorns creeping in around them as the Nightmare starts to take over along with the rest of the details like only the real Weiss having a scar while Dream!Weiss does not, was all really clever. When Queendom has the motivation, the time to just sit there and explore who Weiss is, it’s decent. But this is the only time in the whole episode I can say that.
The sad truth is that, outside of the Ruby/Weiss scene, Queendom dropped the ball this week. Take what was supposed to be a huge scene for Weiss in front of her coffin. Now I don’t want to take shots at Engrish, nor do I want to say “The original did it better nyeh” or anything like that. But… Fuck man, Casey sung the song better! And when it’s such an iconic song for the character, this entire line of music basically being her arc throughout the show, it’s important that you get it right! And they just didn’t here. The words, the visual portrayal of her emotions, the storyboarding and camera work throughout the scene. Hell, just compare it to Pyrrha’s song a few episodes back. That was similar Engrish but they at least tried there, and it mostly succeeded. But this? I felt nothing.
And the issues don’t stop there! We also can’t forget how both Blake and Jaune advocated for caution, for a plan, only for no plan to be formed and everyone to throw caution to the wind! Yang and Blake apparently thought attacking the manor with the White Fang she hates so much was a smart idea, meanwhile Ruby decided to drive the train into the castle, which… fair enough I guess? At least it’s making use of the established idea that Ruby can go where she wants in the dream because Weiss see’s her as having the freedom she doesn’t. But then what about being pushed off the wall way back in episode 4? Or all the other instances where her progress was thwarted by the dream/nightmare? It show’s how important Ruby is sure, but it’s not terribly consistent.
Getting back to Blake and Yang though, I still don’t really get what’s going on here. How did they break the sky and invade? Why is she wearing the Fang mask and dressing in red? Are they trying to play into Weiss’s preconceptions about Faunus, what with Blake having 2 ears now and no bow, thus giving them power within the dream by playing by its rules while still trying to change things? It’s just that, at this moment, it doesn’t really make much sense. Especially when you remember that Blake ran away from the White Fang precisely because she didn’t agree with the bloody direction they were heading. It’s like all the thought was put into Weiss and how they can explore her character, and no one else’s. Well, maybe not no one, Ruby is pretty important. But you know what I mean!
Finally on Blake, to address one last little controversy, I’ve seen people getting upset at this outfit. That Queendom is having Blake dress up like Adam, her “abusive” ex-boyfriend and a source of trauma. But I think this is both ridiculous and not really a problem. For one, he was presented as pretty reasonable at the start of Queendom. Even in the OG RWBY he didn’t really get unhinged until Volume 3 and after, which is where I will agree he both got abusive and his character went downhill. Prior to that though? Eh. I have more of an issue with Blake thinking this is a good idea than her outfit. This whole “trauma” angle some of the fandom is having feels like a bit much to me and they all just need to calm down.
Anyways, all in all this was a pretty disappointing episode for Queendom. The visuals seem to be getting worse and worse as the production melts, all the while the narrative is struggling to engage anyone other than the Weiss-stans. I’ve tried to be optimistic about a possible finale, but the more I see the more I fear that the first three episodes were created in a vacuum. That we will never see Nagano’s hand on Queendom again. And the more I look at the growing staff list, the clearer it becomes that Queendom was just a delayed train wreck. Hopefully it can salvage something in it’s last 3 episodes, but I’m no longer holding my breathe praying for a success. This week just sort of… made me give up on Queendom being anything more than a “Cool, I wish Monty could have seen it”.
