Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!

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Does anyone else feel like this storyline is dragging just a bit?

Far be it from me to say that the show is spending too much time on the titular Ice Queendom arc, it’s just that it’s taken a bit of an odd direction, and I’m not sure what to think.

^{“En garde, I’ll let you try my Wu Tang style.”}

Before we get into the writing side of things though, an administrative note and some production observations. For the former; your girl is really sick with something that is hopefully not COVID-19. So if my commentary is a little harder to follow even than usual, I apologize.

As for the production; Ice Queendom has never been a particularly consistent-looking show. Even in the case of the premiere, one of the episodes (the third) looked much better than the other two. Given the spellbinding episode 4 I held out some hope that things might even out a bit, but two episodes later and we’re kind of back to where we started on this front. Some cuts look really good, but there’s a general sense that no one is really steering the ship. It’s not just things like very obvious CGI rigs being used for mid-distance shots (and even the occasional closer-to-the-camera cut), it’s a general lack of consistency. Some cuts look like they haven’t really been entirely finished, and this episode’s directing wanders down the weird cul-de-sac of manga-style panel cut-ins, a quirk that’s appeared throughout the series but is used to the point of abuse here, sometimes to disguise the fact that not much is really going on in a given scene.

^{Why do I feel like I’m watching an episode of The Pink Panther all the sudden.}

There are also a few bizarre cases of directorial wonkiness straight out of Bakemonogatari, such as a scene where Yang and Blake talk over the phone while the latter evades monsters, but the latter’s side of the conversation is rendered entirely by cutting to a still image of her phone and replacing whatever dialogue might’ve been said with a bitcrushed electronic shriek. This really seems like it’s foreshadowing something, but nothing comes of it this episode. Interesting visually? Absolutely, but baffling in-context.

All this said, I still wouldn’t actually say the show looks bad. Occasional parts of it do, certainly, but that’s really the overall thing; it’s super uneven. (Maybe I’m just being nice because compared to the show that this one replaced in my weeklies, Ice Queendom might as well be Night on The Galactic Railroad.)

The writing, similarly, falls back into a much choppier mode after a few episodes of mostly holding it together. The episode’s actual plot is solid enough; Team RWBY attempt to defeat the Night Grimm lurking within Weiss’ subconscious and fail, getting expelled from her head yet again in the process. We see some good stuff along the way; like the very ship bait-y way that Weiss refers to Ruby as being “precious” to her, a couple solid (if, again, inconsistent) fights, some cool locales (including a floating snake statue wrapped into an infinity symbol that is only on-screen for a criminally short few minutes), and the return of the chibi doll gadgets from episode 4.

But there’s a strange thing here where the character interactions seem to imply a much greater depth to these relationships than what we’ve actually been shown. How long have Team RWBY actually known each other in this continuity? A few days at most? Interesting tidbits like Weiss possibly resenting / respecting / something? Blake for her dream-self’s habit of sneaking into the inner castle of Winter City only to escape again really seem like they’re playing off of some long-simmering tension….but we saw these characters meet, and it seemed fairly obvious to me that Weiss doesn’t like Blake because she has some bigoted attitudes that she’s not dealing with very well. (The series offers a not-entirely-convincing alternative explanation. We’ll get to that.) So, this entire notion just comes across as strange. Much like the odder visual moments, these scenes are interesting in isolation but lack any apparent further meaning in their actual context. It’s a little hard to buy that Weiss’ problems with Blake are somehow solely personal when she’s dressed like that.

More promising are the relationships centered around Ruby, who is by this point seriously doubting her capabilities as a leader and questioning if she’s really a good fit for the position at all. An interesting dynamic is brought to the fore here where Yang actively tries to flatter Ruby’s leadership in order to improve her mood, but it doesn’t really seem to be working and I suspect that Ruby is cognizant of her older sister’s obvious ulterior motive in, you know, seeing her baby sister happy.

The episode’s first half caps with a fight against “Negative” Weiss (that’s the Weiss within the dream, you see), who is actually defending the Nightmare Grimm hidden within the center of her own mind, either very much corrupted by it or acting on her own impulses in ways that aren’t immediately apparent. (Possibly her desire to appease her father and live up to the family name, or the watchful eye of her “brother,” who has continued to fly around as a bat throughout these episodes.)

In any case, Ruby gets a rather nasty cut from some of the Grimm’s thorned vines shortly after being explicitly warned about that exact thing. That will probably come back around later, if I had to guess. So, you know, keep an eye on it.

Team RWBY lose the fight, and are again expelled back to the real world. Exorcist-witch-coolest character in this entire franchise-sage Shion tells the girls that they’ll need to make their third try count; if they fail again, Weiss probably won’t make it. But, there’s some time before Shion can send them back in, so they should formulate a plan. Instead, they each split off on their own and talk with other characters. The second half of the episode thus centers around Team RWBY’s respective conversations with a bunch of minor characters who are mostly not worth caring much about.

The exception here is Yang’s chat with the robotic Penny (I don’t think we’ve been explicitly told that she’s an android or something, but it’s pretty obvious), whose talk about dreams as “maintenance” gives Yang the bright idea to perhaps try actually changing Weiss’ dream itself.

^{I like Penny. She’s very round.}

Later, we learn this is actually a viable plan, although Weiss herself will have to perceive the changes as an improvement.

Ruby gets the short end of the stick in terms of talking to actually interesting characters, since she ends up sitting with Team JNPR from episode 3, whose leader (I think?) Jaune is the guy who was first infected by the Nightmare Grimm in the first place. The entire team is there, including Nora, who has a hammer, and Whoever This Guy Is.

^{No, seriously, who is this? Was he even in any prior episodes? I don’t remember him.}

But! Ruby tells them that they—or at least, their dream counterparts—are present in Weiss’ dream as well, which gives Team JNPR the idea of perhaps tagging along. Again, this turns out to be viable. So hey, Team RWBY is two for two.

And then there’s Blake.

Blake meets up with her friend Sun (Tomoaki Maeno), the blonde Faunus first introduced in episode 3. Their little talk…rubs me the wrong way. Throughout their back and forth, Blake confesses that she wants to help Weiss change for the better (admirable enough), and then compares Weiss’ own dislike of her to the motives of the still-active section of White Fang, which makes no sense whatsoever. Even setting aside the borderline-repulsive implications there about what that may be trying to say (or inadvertantly be saying) about real-world political situations, on just a very basic level, one person’s prejudice is not comparable to the goals of a liberationist organization, which is what White Fang seems to be. Like, I almost feel like I’m way off in the weeds by even saying this, only because it’s so obvious; those fundamentally aren’t the same thing! They’re not even similar! It makes no sense to compare them! Ice Queendom of course just carries on like this is all a given, and Blake’s part of the episode’s back half ends with her redoubling her efforts to try to “change” Weiss. Sure, whatever. I like Blake as a character on a basic nuts-and-bolts level; she’s a stoic “cool girl” with raven hair and a pair of kitty ears, that’s hard to fuck up, but I really wish Ice Queendom would hand her a plot that’s not this.

I feel a little bad harping on this point so hard, especially because I know secondhand that this is a writing weakness inherited from the original RWBY rather than something that this series’ writers came up with. But still! It’s kind of a wild thing to do, right? There’s “having an inherited problematic background element in your show” and there’s “actively drawing attention to it.” This is the latter, and I really hope that the show either finds some way out of this little fox’s den it’s written itself into or it just stops trying to deal with this entirely. Obviously, the former would be better, but the latter would be decent compensation. To be fair; there is a glimmer of hope for the Blake situation specifically; Sun points out that Blake might be thinking about this the wrong way. The fact that Dream-Blake (who we don’t see directly, since our Blake is taking her place within the dream) seems to be such a thorn in Dream-Weiss’ side implies that Weiss thinks about Blake a fair bit. He puts forward that perhaps she’s just frustrated that she can’t understand Blake very well, implying that it may be because Blake isn’t someone Weiss understands—or even thinks she understands—and is thus beyond Weiss’ “control.” This has some weird implications all on its own, but simply as a relationship between two characters it makes way more sense than the stab at a political angle.

^{His name is Sun as in Sun Wukong, by the way. Get it, because he’s got a monkey’s tail? Ahaha. Worldbuilding!}

In fact, it rather makes me wish that said angle weren’t present at all, because if it weren’t, Blake and Weiss’ cat-and-mouse relationship would actually be quite strongly written. As it stands; it’s iffy, but perhaps it’ll pick up, the series is only half over, after all.

As for the episode itself; it ends with Team RWBY headed back into the dream. Most likely with Team JNPR shortly following, but we don’t actually see them enter it here, as the credits roll before that can happen.

I worry I’m giving off the impression that I dislike this show. There’s a trap you can pretty easily fall into as a critic where you end up just listing everything you dislike about something, even the things you genuinely quite enjoy. I wouldn’t call Ice Queendom an anime-of-the-year contender or anything, but it’s a solid series on a moment-to-moment level, and it’s consistently entertaining. You can get away with a lot if you manage to just work as a fun piece of cheesy action, and Ice Queendom is pretty good at that.

To six more weeks thereof, or perhaps even more.

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