Tag: Weiss Schnee

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(REVIEW) Giving the Cold Shoulder to RWBY: ICE QUEENDOM

This review contains spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning.

Magic Planet Anime posts will be extremely irregular for the foreseeable future. See this post for details.

For a while, it looked like things might improve.

I’ve covered RWBY: Ice Queendom on and off here on Magic Planet Anime since it premiered, and I was not shy about the fact that I did not really care for its opening arc. Then, unexpectedly, episode four happened and for a while, it seemed like things were picking up. I had hoped it would stay that way, but suffice it to say, this didn’t happen. I just haven’t felt very motivated to cover Ice Queendom here on MPA in a long while. And because of that, this is, in a sense, less of a proper review and more of a conclusion of my coverage of the series. It’s been a long and rough road, and I am mostly unhappy with how the show has turned out, but I do feel obligated to write something.

But to back up a bit, there isn’t anything inherently wrong with what Ice Queendom is trying to do. As a reboot / side story / whatever of the larger RWBY series, it succeeds in that it doesn’t actually require you to have seen any prior material to get an idea of what the series’ whole deal is. (A good thing, too, since, as I mention in the First Impressions writeup linked up there, I am a neophyte to the franchise.) As a Studio SHAFT anime made during what is at this point undeniably their twilight years, it succeeds in looking intermittently cool when it’s not busy being extremely janky. In that sense, it’s not terribly different from, say, Assault Lily Bouquet, another “girls with cool weapons” anime from SHAFT from just a few years back. And indeed, Ice Queendom‘s greatest strength is the visual oomph brought by that SHAFT pedigree. The Studio SHAFT of 2022 are not the Studio SHAFT of 2011, but they can still deliver some real knockouts when things come together. For the most part, even from this angle, Ice Queendom really does feel like there’s no one “at the wheel” so to speak. These flashes of excellence; mostly in the form of fight scenes or other visual setpieces, seem to be largely the work of individual animators or occasionally episode directors, rather than there being any sort of unifying hand throughout the production. Still, it’s something.

In practice, you’re more likely to notice the show’s flaws, which stem from its one major difference from the bulk of mainstream TV anime. Any number of other battle girl anime are, generally, either original IPs or they’re based on existing Japanese series. Ice Queendom is, of course, based on the extremely weeb-y, but very much American, original RWBY. This matters, because, I am told, the original series is the original sin for what ends up being this show’s most glaring, central writing problem. The root of all evil; The Over-wrought Furry Racism Allegory.

Very briefly, RWBY takes place in a fairly standard urban fantasy world. There are monsters, there are people who hunt the monsters with cool weapons, and an academy where they learn how to properly engage in monster hunting. Very well-trod stuff, but not necessarily bad. Here is the problem; in addition to the humans and the monsters (called Grimms), we also have kemonomimi called the Faunus. For reasons I can only guess at, Ice Queendom is very fixated on the Faunus, specifically as a vehicle for the aforementioned Over-wrought Furry Racism Allegory. This is a somewhat infamous stock plot, and it’s pretty much impossible to do well unless you’re the guy who wrote Maus. Personally, I’ve been over it since about when the first surly Skyrim guard threatened to turn my Khajit into a rug. And I cannot even imagine how utterly sick actual POC must be of the continued prevalence of this particular trope.

Ice Queendom‘s take, unfortunately, is particularly bad. A majority of the show takes place not in the series’ own real world, but inside the mind of one of its main characters, the snooty heiress Weiss Schnee (Youko Hikasa), who, along with her friends Ruby (the cheerful red one, Saori Hayami), Yang (the big sister-ish yellow one, Ami Koshimizu), and Blake (the cool and aloof Faunus, Yuu Shimamura), is one of the four members of the titular Team RWBY. Early in the series, she’s possessed by something called a Nightmare Grimm which locks her in a dream world inside of her own head. With the help of extremely cool original-to-Ice Queendom character Shion Zaiden (Hiroki Nanami), the remaining Team RWBY girls dive into this nightmare prison and attempt to rescue Weiss. This takes up the remainder of the show, and along the way they fight a fairly wide variety of dream baddies and, at least ostensibly, help Weiss grapple with the trauma that comes from being raised by a bunch of rich assholes who probably don’t care very much about her.

You may ask, what does all of this have to do with kemonomimi? Well, you see, one of the things that the show repeatedly hammers home over the course of its run is that Weiss does not like or trust Blake. Specifically, she doesn’t like or trust Blake because she’s a Faunus. Because, you see, some Faunus are part of a, ahem, “terrorist organization” called the White Fang, which attacks trains and such owned by Weiss’ family’s company. Blake actually was part of the White Fang at one point, having left some time ago for only vaguely specified reasons. Thus begins Ice Queendom‘s utter fixation on both this dumb-as-bricks plot and, on top of that, trying to falsely equate Weiss and Blake’s struggles.

Let us be very clear here, based on the information that Ice Queendom itself gives us, Weiss is a troubled but still very privileged heiress from a wealthy background. Blake is from a, by all appearances, widely discriminated-against ethnic minority, enough so that she feels the need to wear a ribbon to hide her wolf ears, and may have done some arguably-bad things in the past. I am not embellishing here; those are the facts laid out by the series itself. Somehow, Ice Queendom insists that both of these characters are equally sympathetic, utterly emptying the pantry of basic dream symbolism in service to the idea that somehow, Weiss Schnee, deeply unlikable rich girl who spends much of the series as her subconscious “nightmare self” trotting around in a militaristic overcoat, and Blake Belladonna, a girl who has by all accounts had a very rough life, are equally at fault for the rift that emerges between them.

If I ended up inside someone’s mind, and I found out that they thought things like this, I would probably have a hard time trusting them, too. Just saying.

Make no mistake; what actually happens, repeatedly, throughout Ice Queendom, is that Blake will say something that the show frames as her being hurt, but which is actually, obviously, completely correct. Weiss will then say something racist. We are supposed to believe that both of these people are doing something wrong here, despite the fact that it its trumpetingly obvious that only one is.

I’ve said this before, but I feel like a total idiot for complaining about this kind of thing. Not because I’m wrong—I know I’m not—but because it just seems obvious. I have said a fair few positive things about Ice Queendom in my earlier columns on the show, and I stand by most of those. I do genuinely think it’s pretty visually interesting, and, even if the dream symbolism leans toward the obvious, it is the closest we ever get to actually seeing a full inner picture of Weiss that doesn’t just make her seem like an entitled snot. But none of that really fixes the fact that overall Ice Queendom fails at some very basic things.

The whole Blake / Weiss feud plotline would, itself, be just the source of a complaint—a major one, but not necessarily one that would wreck the whole series—were Ice Queendom not so obsessed with circling back to it. The show’s entire final stretch, from episode 8 to episode 12, is almost entirely about it. Other narrative threads like Ruby’s personal development as a leader of her team are reduced to perfunctory side stories; this is clearly what Ice Queendom wants to be about, and for the life of me I cannot figure out why, because it is both its worst and its least interesting plot by an order of magnitude, and it rots the show at the root right up until the very end.

Naturally, the series ends with wishy-washy handwaving bullshit about how the power of friendship has helped Team RWBY overcome their differences. Except, of course, that a huge chunk of the very last episode—what is supposed to be the triumphant postscript, mind you—is spent by people still casting aspersions on Blake for her being a Faunus. One of those people is still Weiss, who really does not seem to have grown as a person at all over the course of the story. Another one is the school’s headmaster, who both assures her that the academy is totally egalitarian and then also grills her about her possible connections to the White Fang within the space of a single conversation. It is a truly breathtaking display of double standard, and if it were at all intentional it’d be almost brilliant, but I’m not convinced it is. Instead, it’s just the last of a very long series of nails in Ice Queendom‘s coffin. And then the proverbial spit on the grave is Weiss using the threat of calling the police as a bit of bargaining leverage against a different Faunus character not ten minutes later.

There is one further bright spot, and it also comes in at the show’s end. And I do mean the very end; as in, the last scene of the whole series. Inexplicably, we end on a scene of Ice Queendom‘s cast getting into a massive foodfight. It’s lavishly animated and a pretty slick little tune pumps in the background as it happens. It’s also completely baffling. I’m told it’s an homage to the opening of the second season of the original RWBY.

On its own, this is great. In a meta sort of way, it even loops back around to what RWBY as a series was originally about; flashy fight scenes, with any greater narrative context a secondary concern at most. (Even I know about the famous color trailers. I’m not totally out of the loop.) But taken in the greater context of Ice Queendom on the whole, it really raises the question; why could they have not just done this the entire time? There is no real reason that all of the writing problems that so badly hamstring the show should be present, and I really doubt anyone would’ve blamed the scriptwriters for sidelining or even outright ignoring some of the original’s more questionable plot lines. No one likes RWBY for its writing. Again, even I know that much.

At the end of the day, what we have with Ice Queendom is a deeply frustrating piece of media. Intermittently good, occasionally brilliant, but willing and ready to repeat the mistakes of not just its source material but an entire generation of pop media, usually in the most basic fashion imaginable. Often enough that doing so completely ruins it. This is a case where a show’s positive aspects don’t balance out the negative ones so much as they make them seem even worse by comparison.

If we are to remember Ice Queendom in any kind of positive light, it should be for those rare few moments of visual brilliance. But, of course, when it’s possible to experience all of a show’s highlights just by scrolling through sakugabooru, there’s already been a greater failure of imagination.

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.

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Let’s Watch RWBY: ICE QUEENDOM Episode 7 – Dreams Come Rued

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

Before I say anything else, I do want to be clear that yes, “Dreams Come Rued” is this episode’s title. That’s not a typo; it’s “rued” as in the past tense of that word you only ever see in the phrase “rue the day.”

In any case, I think I have maybe not done the best job of conveying how goddamn weird this show is. RWBY: Ice Queendom is an anime that, by now, has taken place mostly within a dream world by volume. And inarguably, one of its strengths is that that world does in fact run on a convincing facsimile of dream logic. Things change on a whim according to the dreamer’s mood and, indeed, changing the dream itself is part of Team RWBY’s plan as they once again venture into the depths of Weiss’ mind, with Team JNPR’s Jaune in tow.

We open with The Funky Four + 1 More here trying a different tack; they defend one of the ice trains that continuously attempts to enter the city from the recurring White Fang attacks. In doing so, they allow one of the trains to enter the fortresslike Winter City for the first time, perhaps, ever. Weiss, notably, has to actually give the order to open the city’s gates and hesitates until the very last moment to do so, a pretty straightforward metaphor for how much difficulty she has in letting other people into her life. She actually visibly is panicking a bit as she has to make the call. Indicative of authoritarian people freaking out when they no longer have pet issues to fearmonger over or just reflective of the fact that Weiss is, like, super tightly-wound? We at Magic Planet Anime ask, is there no reason it cannot be both?

Regardless, the results are pretty magnificent. The city literally transforms around the train as it enters, and despite Weiss’ protestations that the city “will not change” and how she has to make Blake “understand” this, for a while it looks like things might resolve themselves peacefully. Team RWBY hide out of the way while Jaune enters one of the “Silly Prisons.” That’d be the literal cages where the dreamscape versions of Team JNPR are kept, as we first saw several episodes back. Unfortunately—and, call me crazy, I’m getting the impression that whoever wrote this episode is not super fond of Jaune—Jaune ends up unleashing a horde of tiny, chibi Weisses—Miniweissen, we’ll say—who promptly start babbling one-liners like this.

Now he does get ahold of one of those relics—this one yellow—too, but this turns out to be a pretty big fuckup. Frankly, the entire thing has to truly be seen to be believed; it’s nuts. If Ice Queendom was just uncut weirdness like this all the time, it’d probably be my favorite thing airing this season.

Ruby of course interprets the Miniweissen being free to run about as a good thing. And it does initially seem like it might be, because they disable the menacing robot guards from attacking by…infecting them with childishness?

But then they start making a mess of the city, and it rapidly becomes clear that whatever the solution might be to Weiss’ horrible combination of a self-loathing complex, deeply-ingrained bigoted attitudes, and a generally authoritarian attitude towards not just others but herself as well, it was not letting these things out. Before too long, they combine into larger forms—Magnaweissen?—and start levelling buildings and such.

And then, of course, Weiss calls toward the heavens….

“By the power of Studio Shaft, THIS WILL LOOK BETTER ON BLU-RAYYYYYYYYYYY!”

….and promptly unleashes her giant bronze spider mecha. What, you don’t remember that from the original show? (Honestly, I shouldn’t say things like that given that I haven’t seen it. Maybe it is in the original series.)

If I seem to have a lack of things to say here, I think it’s more because this is a transitional episode than anything else. Team RWBY have tried a different approach and it’s gone awry, and we end on a pretty intense cliffhanger as Weiss summons the aforementioned spider mecha. I have no idea where this is going, but I’m excited to find out.

Yeah, okay, maybe she’s a bad person, but the style though. Sheesh.

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.

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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.

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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.