Tag: Ice Queendom

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch RWBY: ICE QUEENDOM Episode 6

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

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.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch RWBY: ICE QUEENDOM Episode 5 – Awaken in a Dream

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

The show about a character associated with the color red is dead! Long live the show about a character associated with the color red.

Yes, in stark defiance of all logic and frankly even my own personal preferences, I have officially made the jump. I am going to be covering RWBY: Ice Quendom from this point forward instead of Lucifer and The Biscuit Hammer, which, frankly, I just don’t want to think about that anime anymore.

So, I won’t! By more or less coincidence, I covered the surprisingly great episode 4 of this very show just the other day here on MPA. As such, anyone who’s read that and my impressions article on the premiere is totally up to speed. Let’s get into it without any further delays.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this episode isn’t quite as visually consistent as last week’s. What is surprising though, at least to me, is that it also doesn’t mark the end of the whole “Weiss’ Nightmare” arc, indicating to me that Ice Queendom is willing to invest a fairly significant amount of time into this story. (Even if it ends next week, that’s still three episodes; as many as the combined premiere!) Even with the visual wonkiness, which reaches a nadir with a botched scene transition about 11 minutes in, in mind this remains an interesting arc, and I’m curious to see how it eventually ends.

Something we don’t get here is the teased Ruby / Weiss fight from the end of the last episode. In a bit of a bait-and-switch, Shion actually pulls Ruby out of the dream before much else can happen. Team RWBY regroups in the real world, spending the first 7-ish minutes of the episode planning their next move.

Pictured: Regrouping (most of image), Weiss looking hilariously dead (top left of image).

Notably, when Ruby notes that it really seems like Weiss genuinely doesn’t like her, her teachers (including Shion!) are rather dismissive of the notion, chalking it up to interference from the Nightmare Grimm. I do wonder who’s right here, or if it’s a 50/50 sort of thing. We see evidence for both ideas throughout the episode. (Most shows would take the easy way out by revealing Weiss to be a good person “deep down” all along and thus sidestep having to thoroughly unpack the rest of her emotional baggage in the real world, time will tell if Ice Queendom is “most shows” or not.) We also learn, on an unrelated note, that diving into a dream world requires you to have a cute little mummy doll made of you.

I was going to crack a joke about how these seem like real merch, but I think they literally might be? I think one of my younger brothers owns a Blake one. I may be misremembering.

For the second dive into Weiss’ dream, all three members of Team RWBY tag along. The only other thing of note that occurs in the waking world is the folks from Team JNPR (still hate that name, by the way) checking up on her. Jaun makes a….weird comment, before our heroines set off.

Hey bud? What the hell are you talking about?

In the dream, Yang and Blake find that unlike Ruby, Weiss’ subconscious has mostly made them stronger. Blake’s weapon has been reconfigured into some wild grappling hook thing (and she’s been given a cute redesign, too), and Yang is so strong that she can knock trees flat in a single punch. Ruby laments getting the short end of the stick, it’s a fun little scene that also seems to betray who among the team Weiss has a kind of begrudging respect-of-strength for.

The dreamworld is as bizarre and goofy-dystopian as ever. With the notable exception of the grim, repeated White Fang attacks on the ice trains (which seem to happen basically constantly and are definitely indicative of some deep-held, fucked-up stuff on Weiss’ part).

A more fun thing about this kind of setting is that it invites you to try to puzzle out every little detail and its significance. Why does Weiss’ subconscious feature, for instance, storefronts filled with road signs? Why is there a musical number at about the 13-minute mark, with notably wonky and off-model animation, where a caged Pyrrha sings about how lonely she is? (Okay, that one’s pretty easy to figure out, but still, what the heck?) What of the strange shadow people that toss themselves into a frozen fountain?

And what, also, of her mysterious advisor, a living candleflame that seems to constantly dangle a bizarre carrot on a string in the form of a place of “true rest” in front of her face? Is this character part of Weiss’ own mind, the Nightmare’s influence made manifest, or is there not even a meaningful distinction anymore? What is pretty obvious is that the “resting place” being a frozen coffin is pretty damn ominous, as are the thorned vines that encircle Weiss almost any time she’s on screen.

Eventually, Ruby and Yang hear an announcement over a PA system. An announcement that they are “missing” and need to be recaptured. They actually allow themselves to be captured, and to be returned to the living prison where the “Sillies” are kept so they can’t cause any harm. (Specifically, the door to the jail is alive. His name is Sleepy Klein. This is delightfully weird.)

Blake, meanwhile, notes that Weiss’ announcement doesn’t mention her at all, and wonders if there’s just not any version of her in the dream at all, although Weiss mentioning a “woman in black” to her dream advisors would seem to indicate otherwise.

Ruby and Yang’s “prison” is a lot more like their dorm room than anything, and it’s filled with things Weiss likes. Some of these inclusions are rather telling.

In it, the two find a mysterious “artifact” (a red chess knight), which Shion helpfully informs them could possibly help them reach farther into Weiss’ mind and wake her up. Blake finds one too, while infiltrating the inner fortress of Winter City in a more conventional fashion. She breaks Ruby and Yang out of their prison, but Yang stays behind so that Sleepy Klein won’t get suspicious.

The episode then ends much like last week’s; after Blake and Ruby discover a new, strange part of the palace—a vast, spacious hallway lit by purple lanterns—Weiss discovers and confronts them, again an obvious setup for a fight next week. This time, though, she seems to have much more of an issue with Blake being there than Ruby, because her final comment in this episode is pretty straightforward about how she, or at least this particular part of her, actually feels about the ‘B’ of Team RWBY.

And on that note of extremely blunt bigotry, we cut directly to the credits!

It’s a little hard to know how to take all this. Weiss is, pretty obviously, a genuinely prejudiced person, and it’s not like it’s not worth exploring how she deals with that and, presumably, eventually rids herself of those notions. But even if “hatred of fantasy beast people = racism” wasn’t already a very difficult, if not impossible, metaphor to make work well, the extremely abstract approach taken here—with the dream world and all—might make it even harder.

What’s worse is that this arc, for all it does do right, is definitely going out of its way to paint Weiss as a victim, rather than as a perpetrator. The simple fact of the matter is that she is of course both. Being one does not excuse the other. (Note also how little of this arc has actually been about Blake so far, even though she’s the one who Weiss has this irrational bias against.) Some part of her does seem to recognize that what she’s doing is wrong, but her desire to “be worthy of the Schnee name” is overriding it, and she’s hurting people in the process. I would really like to see her have to actually deal with that and try to actively make amends somehow.

Of course, if Ice Queendom does simply take the easy way out and play the “Weiss was actually secretly a good person the entire time” card without any further development of the character, that will be disappointing. Strangely enough though, the fact that I’m even invested enough that I could eventually be disappointed is still a huge improvement over the premiere.

I think breaking down the places where the cracks show in the series’ writing is just the responsible thing to do, and it does legitimately bother me to see something trotting out this particular bit of hackery in 2022 (not that it’s ever really gone away. See Bright, infamously and somewhat recently), but on a moment-to-moment level, Ice Queendom is actually working a lot better now than it was during the premiere. (Which, to be fair, handled the Faunus stuff even worse, so maybe there’s a correlation there.) There is certainly more than enough room for Ice Queendom to go up from here, and I really hope it does. As it stands, this has gone from, frankly, a pretty bad show, to a solidly decent one. I would really love to see it get even better.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Anime Orbit Weekly

Anime Orbit Seasonal Check-in: What the Hell Happened to RWBY: ICE QUEENDOM?

Anime Orbit is an irregular column where I summarize a stop along my journey through anime, manga, and the related spheres of popular culture over the past week. Expect spoilers for covered material.

I really did not think I’d ever be writing about this show again. I didn’t make a secret of the fact that I wasn’t super impressed by RWBY: ICE QUEENDOM‘s premiere. When discussing that first episode, I called the show a mess. In that context, I meant it negatively; a slapdash, hacky story given a wildly uneven production that felt like it was being carried on the backs of individual boarders and animators rather than being directed with any strong sense of purpose. I stand by those statements as they hold to episodes 1-3, which together made up the series premiere on Crunchyroll, and they might still hold true going forward, but we’re not here to talk about any past or future episodes of this show. Not today. Today, here, in the very first of the new Anime Orbit columns, I’d like to talk about episode 4, the first new episode since the series began its normal weekly airing schedule.

Because 4 is something else entirely. To really just lay the matter on the table; it’s really good. In a way that feels a whole universe removed from what Ice Queendom had been doing up until this point. The actual plot here is very simple—one of the ‘Nightmare Grimms’ introduced in episode 3 gets its hooks into Weiss, and it’s up to Ruby to rescue her from the confines of the resulting dream-prison—but the way its presented is another beast entirely. If nothing else, Ice Queendom deserves some sort of “most improved” award here. This is lightyears ahead of what the first three episodes were doing, both in terms of visuals and, to an admittedly lesser extent, writing.

When we were introduced to the Nightmare Grimms concept (not a name explicitly given to them in-dialogue, but I can think of nothing else to call them), the first person they afflicted was Jaune. Who is, just speaking honestly, not a character who particularly endeared himself to me when he first showed up a few episodes ago. Jaune’s mental world was also not terribly interesting, to my recollection.

No one could make the same criticism of Weiss’. Her inner world is an absurdist dystopia monitored by living propaganda posters of her father Jacques and robots that greet each other with a bizarre salute of “Big Nicholas!”. It’s a massive walled factory town surrounded by blizzard-stricken bluffs, allegedly part of a wider “Empire”, where it always snows. Huge trains made of ice run unknowable cargo in and out of the city, only to be set upon by White Fang-affiliated bandits. Everything here seems jumbled up in guilt, insecurity, paranoia, and inherited prejudice. It doesn’t make Weiss seem like a particularly great person—and it’s not like the show needed help in that regard—but for the first time, it makes her sympathetic.

This entire thing is still mess-y, mind you, and I doubt Ice Queendom is going to really reckon with the inherent problems at the core of the whole “Faunus” analogy, but you can consider episode 4 a study on the difference that the addition of a single Y can make. For certain, it holds your attention in a very immediate way; one more comparable to all those other great SHAFT shows than anything in the first three episodes.

Helping to build the dreamy atmosphere are lots of little details, like Ruby’s scythe-gun not working the same way it does in the real world because Weiss is mistaken about how it’s put together. (Weiss seems to be under the impression that the gun is on the handle, which isn’t true. The first time Ruby goes to fire it in the dreamworld, she hits one of the robots behind her because of this, accidentally firing it backwards.) The little dream-gadgets Ruby can use via a payment of magic coins connected to the mysterious witch-exorcist (Shion Zaiden, played by Hiroki Nanami. We met her in episode 3 as well) helping them try to pull Weiss out of this thing are great, too. Using the coins, she can conjure up phone booths to talk to Shion for advice, she can summon decoy “chibi” Rubies who run around and repeat various things she’s said, etc. It’s strange and fun in a way that’s just an absolute joy to watch.

This is RWBY Chibi, right?

It’s not all fun and games though. As mentioned, there’s a distinctly dystopian / authoritarian bent to Weiss’ dreamscape. Winter City is a cold, hostile place.

A place where Ruby learns about the horrors of capitalism.

Even the few seemingly-friendly faces that Ruby meets turn on her the instant she’s declared a “dummy” (which Weiss’ subconscious seems to use as a catchall for people who can’t be trusted) by the regime, and she’s spied on for much of her stay by Weiss’ brother Whitley….who is also a bat here. (It’s a dream, just roll with it.)

Perhaps the most revealing scenes are the ones from Weiss’ own perspective. She is the city’s dictator, and sure enough, her outfit here has her rocking a militaristic overcoat and shades, making her look like some cross between Douglas MacArthur and Esdeath from Akame ga Kill!

I couldn’t get any good stills of her with the sunglasses actually on. So, in order to preserve the hilarious reference above, I’m going to need you to just imagine them. Picture an old-school smoking pipe in her mouth while you’re at it, really complete the look.

But she’s as trapped by the long shadow of her father—and the ancestor to the both of them, the ‘Nicholas’ referred to in the robots’ salute—as anyone else. When she reads reports off of a giant computer screen in her castle at the center of the city, a massive hologram of her father appears on the ceiling to berate her for her many perceived failures. Most especially, of course, letting this “Ruby” girl run free. This is what leads to Ruby’s branding as a “dummy,” and sets up their actual confrontation at the end of the episode, which builds both on what’s established here and the friction we already know exists between the two of them. Their battle starts here, but doesn’t end, implying this intriguing arc will have at least one more episode.

It’s worth looking forward to. In addition to the many things about Weiss herself we learn, there’s no denying the sheer mood of this thing. Perhaps my favorite moment actually comes not from either Weiss or Ruby, but from Shion, who offers this very true and absolutely fascinating piece of advice when Ruby calls to ask for help, concerned that Weiss secretly hates her.

If it can keep delivering moments like that, and like the more openly bizarre turns in this episode, Ice Queendom will be worth keeping up with. It remains to be seen if this marks a new direction for the series or if this is merely an anomaly. But for the first time since the series premiered, I’m optimistic. You should be, too.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: Hacking and Slashing Through RWBY: ICE QUEENDOM

Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.

Rarely do I feel the need to start an article with disclaimers, but this is one of those few cases. The RWBY phenomenon largely passed me by, in its original form as a 3DCG cartoon. I was dimly aware of the much-hyped color trailers, the fanbase the series eventually acquired and the eventual backlash to that fanbase. I was also aware, again in only a broad sense, of its status as Rooster Teeth‘s golden egg, of the deeply sad passing of original series creator Monty Oum, and in a general sense, of its history. I even personally know a number of people who are or were huge fans, including my three younger siblings (this is probably the first thing I’ve ever written that there is a non-zero chance they might stumble upon).

Nonetheless, in spite of all that, RWBY was very much something I just knew about. I never really engaged with it at all, beyond occasionally playing the fighting game BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle, in which some of RWBY‘s characters appear. (My younger brother bought it for our then fairly new PlayStation 4.) So, when I write about Ice Queendom today, its curious spinoff / reboot / reinterpretation / something at the hands of Studio Shaft, I write about it as a more or less total outsider. I am judging it largely on its own merits as an action anime, not in terms of how faithful it is or isn’t to the original story, which I’m largely not familiar with, or how well it executes some abstract “vision” for the franchise. (Every long-running franchise has such a thing, an ideal, imaginary form that only exists in the minds of individual creators and fans. Rarely is discussing them productive for anyone.)

To me, Ice Queendom is primarily interesting because of that connection to Shaft. As a studio, it’s hard to argue that Shaft aren’t noticeably past their prime, with their biggest impact on the world of anime—the original Puella Magi Madoka Magica—over a decade in the rearview at this point. But that doesn’t mean they can’t still make good things, and they have recently, including both Madoka’s own spinoff Magia Record and another battle girl anime, Assault Lily Bouquet. There’s some pedigree here, and while I’m only broadly familiar with the man’s work, industry lifer Toshimasa Suzuki seems like a solid choice to direct such a thing, too.

But perhaps predictably, it’s more complicated than that. Through a morass of wonky art, confusing pacing, and at least one hackneyed political allegory, RWBY: Ice Queendom‘s first episode(s?) adds up to perhaps the year’s most confounding premiere. Given that 2022 has given us sheer WTF bombs like Estab-Life and Birdie Wing, that’s pretty impressive in its own way, and not all of the surprises here are bad. But suffice it to say, I think you’d have to be a fairly particular sort of person to want to watch this. Even its format is somewhat screwy; Crunchyroll lists the single-video premiere as “episodes 1-3.” God knows what’s going on there.

But upon starting the episode, what struck me first were the character designs. I’ve never seen the original RWBY, but I have seen screenshots and gifs of it—I had a tumblr in the early 2010s, it was practically omnipresent—and while it never struck me as a visual buffet or anything, it at least looked distinct. The same isn’t really true here, with all four of the main heroines being squashed into a frankly rather generic-looking visual mold that seems suited for an anime much less ambitious than this. Over the course of the hour-long premiere special, I got used to it, but it took a while, which is not a great sign. (Also, in an attempt to emphasize their lips, all of the female characters are given what ends up looking a lot like lip gloss. This is a visual trope that bugs the ever-loving fuck out of me.) Occasionally they’re drawn a bit differently (presumably the result of different boarders or even different animators) and look a bit better, but it’s still going to be an adjustment not just for returning fans but for anyone who even vaguely knows what the original series looked like.

Some characters take to it better than others. I like how Blake looks, in particular.

In general, there is a distinct feeling of visual cheapness throughout fairly large chunks of this premiere. The production bubble hasn’t been kind to anyone, and this would not be the first time a Shaft production took a noticeable hit because of it. But whereas Magia Record could get away with lacking polish to some extent by leaning into its abstractness, Ice Queendom mostly does not have that option. The fantasy world here is portrayed mostly in earthen tones, both literally and thematically, and it suffers noticeably from the lacking tactility and spatial definition.

This doesn’t mean there are no visual merits; this episode is pretty good at fun action sequences, definitely. There’s some good directorial work, too, with enough clever uses of manga-style paneling that it might eventually turn into something of a signature piece of visual work for the series. But really, if you’re just here for Sakuga™, there are a couple of real highlights. And in general, the issue is not the lack of quality, it’s the lack of consistency. Some scenes are excellent, and a few even achieve a somewhat surreal, spacey vibe that might dimly remind viewers of certain other Shaft shows, but others are just terrible (there is a very blatant instance of an unfinished animation being looped several times in a row in part 3, for a premiere, that’s a bad sign), and still others float somewhere in-between.

With its production a distinctly up and down affair, that leaves the story to carry the rest of the weight. But, even after having seen the entire premiere, a lot about the world of RWBY remains rather obscure to me. It’s possible this is on purpose, but it might also be semi-by-design, a case of trying to appeal to new arrivals and old fans simultaneously but falling between two stools in the process. (See also; that Pokémon movie I reviewed a few months ago.)

As far as I can tell, RWBY’s setting is defined by the presence of monsters called Grimms, which lack “Aura”—life force, basically—and turn into “Dust” when killed. Dust, as far as I can tell, can be broadly analogued to souls from Dark Souls. It has power of its own, and also seems to be used as a currency.

Grimms are fought by Hunters, which all four of our heroines want to become for various reasons. These are Ruby Rose (Saori Hayami), the bubbly title lead, her doting older sister Yang Xiao Long (Ami Koshimizu), the aloof, proud heiress Weiss Schnee (Youko Hikasa), and Blake Belladonna (Yuu Shimamura), who is a catgirl.

For the most part, they seem like rather simple characters with simple motivations, although Ruby is the only person we really get the full story of here, in that she wants to follow in her late mother’s footsteps as a huntress. Not for nothing is Ruby also the character who works best here, she’s cute as a button but also has a huge transforming scythe-gun thing. It’s hard to go wrong with that.

There are also many other characters introduced here. North of a dozen, if I had to take a guess. We learn rather little about most of them, this early on, although a small handful like honors student / cereal box model (really) Pyrrha Nikos (Megumi Toyoguchi) and the adorably terrifying Penny (Megumi Han) manage to make a decent impact in their relatively brief screentime regardless.

The actual plot? Our girls enroll at an academy for Hunters. I don’t want to say that “Harry Potter packing heat” is the general vibe here, but in spots it kind of is. Much of the specifics of this become the victim of the premiere’s downright bizarre pacing.

There is a pretty incredible moment where, because of a news story, three of our four heroines are discussing how corrupt one “Schnee Corporation” is, only for Weiss, who is the heiress of said company, to introduce herself to the group by overhearing it and taking offense. Was she just standing around eavesdropping? Is this bit of hilarious coincidence from the original show? I honestly have no idea. I’m not entirely sure it’s meant to be as funny as I found it.

It doesn’t really matter, because not long after that scene, our characters—plus a second team of hopefuls—are flung into a forest to take their life or death entrance exam. Here, the show comes to life with properly exciting action sequences and just enough forward plot motion to be compelling. Then, when our heroines pass their exam and are formally grouped together as “Team RWBY”—all of the teams have fun, pronounceable acronyms for names, I suppose—it immediately becomes boring again, focusing on the petty and uninteresting conflict between Weiss and Ruby or other similarly dull character interactions that just don’t mean much of anything because we haven’t gotten the proper time to know these girls, yet. Ice Queendom is frustrating in this way; at several points during the premiere, I was bored to tears, only for it to burst with exciting and fluid visuals or an interesting story tidbit once again, and then again promptly fall back asleep a few minutes later.

It’s actually Blake Belladonna who gets the shortest end of the writing stick, at least so far. Blake has the misfortune of being Team RWBY’s only Faunus—that is to say, a kemonomimi person—and consequently, she is the conduit for this episode’s utterly toothless gesturing toward political commentary. Over the course of the third part of the premiere, she and Weiss get into a big argument about the (pick one) terrorist group / brave freedom fighters / people just doing their best White Fang, who Weiss loathes because they’ve killed people she personally knows, and which Blake used to be a part of.

There is a frankly incredible scene where Blake pulls off her bow only to reveal that she has cat ears that look exactly the same as her bow underneath it. It is incredible in every sense of that word.

There are, I’m sure, ways to handle this that are not completely terrible, but you won’t find them here. Blake and Weiss are treated as simply having a misunderstanding, and Weiss eventually kinda-sorta reconciles with Blake after only a few real-world minutes of self-reflection. Nothing is actually resolved, and Weiss apparent actual bigotry toward Faunus (yes, an anime girl who hates catgirls. Unreal.) is simply brushed aside. (And of course, despite the weird racism angle here, it will not shock you that at no point during the series so far has an actual POC shown up in a noteworthy role, which is just inexcusable.)

On the whole, Ice Queendom is a mess, really. Which is a shame, because there is some good stuff in here. In addition to the visual highlights there’s a neat plot—unresolved here, presumably it’ll be concluded in the next proper episode—where a Grimm that can imitate humans and trap them in mental prisons based on their own insecurities shows up. It’s defeated temporarily by a mysterious character who calls herself a “nightmare hunter.” Her exorcism method involves tying people up with weird purple string.

Bondage Joke.

It’s weird, it’s cool, and it points a way forward for Ice Queendom in general. It’s not impossible that the series will eventually find its legs. And I hope it does, both because I will probably continue watching it somewhat in spite of my own good judgment (I will remind longtime readers that I’m one of the few Blue Reflection Ray apologists, bad production has never scared me off), and because the people who have been ride-or-die for RWBY for nearly ten years deserve a good show, not something haphazard and half-assed.

The Takeaway: If you can stomach the bizarre plotting and wonky production to get to the standout action sequences and some of the weirder stuff, this might be worth checking out. If you’re a lifelong RWBY fan, you’re probably already watching it. For anyone else? I think this is probably a skip, especially with more promising-looking battle girl anime (eg. Lycoris Recoil) on the immediate horizon.

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