CRWBY claims to have been sticking to “Monty Oum’s vision” for the entire run of the show, that they had the whole thing planned out in advance. A lot of people have expressed skepticism that the slipshod plotting of RWBY reflects some master plan conceived in 2013 and then followed scrupulously for a full decade despite major plot elements like the four maidens being added in along the way. But now that we know the whole story, yeah, I 100% believe that this was a story written in 2013 and adhered to without any significant changes.
What do you mean “we don’t know the whole story?” The last season never aired, but were Miles and Kerry keeping you on your toes with their stunning plot revelations? RWBY released new worldbuilding and had plans to keep doing that until, at the minimum, near the very end of the show, but its character and plot arcs were very straightforward. To their credit, their dedication to adhering to Monty Oum’s outline means they completely missed the obsession with plot twists and “subverting expectations” that gripped the world for a few years before Game of Thrones killed it in 2019. The show has always been about the same thing, going to the same place, so much so that you can tell its outline was pretty tightly focused.
We meet four teenage girls in shonen anime Hogwarts where they learn to fight Grimm, magical creatures who are attracted by negative emotions like anger and fear. This anger and fear is caused mostly by internal tensions, like racial conflict (the nations of the world are pretty much entirely at peace with one another) between humans and faunus. The White Fang are an organization dedicated to fighting for faunus rights by any means necessary. One of the members of the main team is a racist nepobaby, while another is a former member of the White Fang who can pass. For the first two major arcs at both Vale (autumn town) and Mistral (spring town – no, these don’t go in seasonal order, but the seasonal theming is still strong enough as to probably not be accidental, though not so strong I’m totally certain), the White Fang are the main villains. In arc three in Atlas (winter town), the primary villains are the Schnee Dust Company, the evil corporation most responsible for the exploitation of the faunus, while the final arc in Vacuo (summer town) revolves around the people of Atlas, formerly the most racist, being reduced to refugees and forced to beg the people of Vacuo for help.
See, it’s about people putting aside their racial differences and supporting one another – the climax of the show would’ve been about Vacuoans and Atlasians and the Menagerian faunus (who totally do get their own kingdom but don’t count as one of the four seasonal kingdoms, it doesn’t make sense but it’s also a perfectly believable kind of nonsense so whatever) putting aside their differences to stand against the Grimm together. Since main villain Salem’s evil plan is to summon back the two gods who promised to return upon the completion of a big ritual and either destroy the world if world peace had not been achieved or else repair it if it had, the ending here would’ve been that Team RWBY ultimately fails to stop Salem from completing her ritual, but just as all seems lost, it turns out that all the people of Remnant have put their differences aside and are now fighting the Grimm side by side, so actually the gods are going to do the good ritual. That inspiring (I mean, “inspiring,” but whatever) speech that RWBY gave would have successfully achieved world peace and repairing the communications network knocked out at the end of the first arc would’ve allowed it to reach the entire world.
I would not be surprised if Ever After, the primary location for the entirety of season 9, was not even mentioned in the original outline. It fits in just fine, but it’s not necessary to the rest of the outline and while I totally believe that they never replaced elements of the original outline, it seems likely that there were entire seasons that got less than a paragraph overview in that outline. Like, Seasons 4-6 in particular seems like they were probably described as a single combined arc, and Season 5 is the one that got gutted rather than admit that allocating three seasons per kingdom was a mistake in retrospect (they would eventually give Atlas just the two, so if I’m right, they did at least learn from the mistake).
But as much as the process of fleshing out an outline that was probably 2-3 pages long and heavily weighted towards the beginning and end resulted in enormous amounts of cruft, you can see the bones of the outline pretty transparently in themes that are stated from the very beginning, including in the music, which tends to be pretty on the nose about what the story is going to be about (this is fine, and if anything the problem is that it uses lots of relevant buzzwords but as a whole fails to make the point clear enough). A rising generation of young people, as symbolized by the teenaged Team RWBY, will open minds with the purity of their hearts, that in the end victory will come not by force of arms but from a simple soul. Team RWBY loses the physical final battle against Salem, she completes her ritual, but they successfully unite the world in peace with one another and thus trigger the good ritual instead of the bad one.
The story of RWBY was absolutely faithfully executing an outline written in 2013.
Chamomile Has A Blog 