A good friend (OK, my crush) got me started watching a web show called RWBY (pronounced "Ruby,"), an indie-studio animated action/dark fantasy anime-inspired show about four young women training to fight monsters. It's kind of complicated to describe, but it happens to take a lot of inspiration from fairy tales, mythology, literature, and in some cases history and 20th-century classics. Also, it has a great soundtrack and fight scenes.
On the other hand the first couple of volumes, the first one especially, were dragged down by resource and time limitations (shoestring indie-studio budget) that resulted in things like bad animation outside of fight scenes in the first couple volumes, as well as what was intended to be the first season ending up getting dragged out over three volumes (the most recent of which just finished in February). The VAs also began as an almost all-amateur cast, so the voice acting wasn't so great in the early run. A lot of people apparently quit watching in the first and second volumes and didn't get drawn back in until the third.
It really got its shit together in the third volume, though. Production values went way up, the voice actors grew into their roles (there was some pretty impressive voice work from the recurring-character cast despite the lot of them beginning as amateurs), and the animation improved so much that the volume 3 finale gave me a whole new appreciation for animation in scenes that are just two characters talking to each other. Also the tone shift from more comedic in the first two volumes to the aforementioned "dark fantasy" genre thing in the third volume really hit the spot for me because I'm apparently one of those people who likes watching heroes face extraordinary adversity. The character modeling still has some technical hiccups but oh well nothing's perfect.
Also I'm pretty sure that either two of the main characters are being set up for a future romance arc together or this is some of the vilest queer-baiting I've ever seen, but the last couple episodes got me emotionally invested in it and now I have like a physical need for it to happen and if it doesn't happen I'm gonna cry and I am dying of hiatus fever 'cause Volume 4 isn't coming till fall and is it fall yet someone tell me it's fall
(I am too old for this shit)
but yeah there's a lot of stuff I want to say about this show but I can't because spoilers
It's a web show, though, so if I can get anyone here interested in watching it, I could see about livestreaming it so we could watch it as a group or something.
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