YMMV / RWBY

YMMV Tropes For RWBY

The following have their own pages:

• Complete Monster
• Fan Nickname
• Fandom-Specific Plot
• Fanon
• Ho Yay
• Memetic Mutation
• Memetic Personality Change
• Narm
• Nightmare Fuel
• Woobie

Other examples:

A - F

• Abandon Shipping:
  • Tauradonna (Adam + Blake) shippers ended up all but disappearing after "Heroes and Monsters" was released and revealed what kind of person Adam really was, which turned the once well-liked ship into complete No Yay, compounded by confirmation in the Livestream that Adam was abusive to Blake in the past. The news even spawned a controversial alternate name for the ship on Reddit - "Animal Abuse" - which only further encouraged everyone jumping ship.
  • Emberald (Cinder + Emerald) shippers have always been on shaky ground due to the relationship being canonically abusive (Cinder slaps Emerald during a flashback in Volume 3), but Emerald and Mercury indirectly saying that Emerald saw Cinder as a surrogate mother for the one she never had was another nail in the coffin.
  • Cloqwork (Ozpin and Qrow) shippers took an initial hit in numbers after Ozpin's death and possession of a teenage boy, but Volume 6 was a series of sustained gut punches to the ship thanks to Qrow's Broken Pedestal. Ozpin gaining a more canon love interest being Salem's past lover also didn't help things. Time has gradually healed the wounds, especially as more people became receptive to the idea of Qrow being shipped with men after Volume 7.
• Adorkable:
  • When Ruby first arrives in Beacon, she gushes so much over all the new weapons she can see other students carrying that she briefly turns into a cute, floating chibi version of herself with stars for eyes. When Yang later suggests she make her own friends, she begins hugging and caressing her weapon like it's a kitten. Ruby is obsessed with weapons and admits she went overboard when designing her own because of this. She therefore tends to become very nerdy in a very cute, excitable way whenever she has a chance to wax lyrical about them.
  • Jaune is introduced as someone who is full of optimism and wants to make friends and meet cool, quirky girls to talk to, but he also becomes clumsy and over-eager when talking to such girls. While Yang was turned off by him wearing onesie pyjamas, the sheer pride with which he poses in such an embarrassing outfit, when he spots Yang looking at him, made him very endearing to fans.
  • Velvet is a shy, unassuming rabbit Faunus who is an amateur photographer with a strong engineering aptitude. She is always excited to show off her photography to anyone she can, even though most characters think she's bad at it because they don't realise she's photographing weapons instead of people. She also tends to become embarrassed when catching people off-guard when taking photographs, leading to her apologising in a cute and flustered way. Because she has a weapon that has to be used sparingly, she rarely gets to use it in battle and becomes extremely excited whenever given the chance. In the novels, her engineering abilities are explored further, showing that she can be an absolute geek when she's given the opportunity to start talking about the inner workings of her weapon. While it doesn't always impress the characters around her, it helped endear her to the fandom.
  • Penny is a Robot Girl who is extremely cheerful and optimistic, but occasionally hits the wrong social note in wacky and endearing ways. When she first meets Team RWBY and gets knocked to the ground, she starts greeting them while lying on the ground until they ask her if she's okay. She becomes extremely excited, and latches onto Ruby like a lost puppy, when Ruby calls her "friend", and, during the school ball, she doesn't waltz like the other students; she performs the robot dance in a very gentle, tentative way. As her robotic nature was originally a secret, when she accidentally gets a magnet stuck to her head, she tries wearing an excessively large straw hat to hide it which makes her look both cute and silly at the same time.
  • Marrow is the youngest and newest member of Ace-Ops. He tries so hard to be as cool as the rest of the team that his attempts to mimic Clover's stern, straight-backed, confident walk, making him look extremely dorky. His attempts to be stern or stand-offish tend to fall apart because of his dog tail, which constantly wags and gives away his true feelings; and when he updates a soldier in the background on Ace-Ops' recent mission, the audience can see him enact the entire fight for them in an extremely enthusiastic, slapstick fashion.
• Aluminum Christmas Trees: Yang's turkey boxing gloves have a raw chicken real world precedent.
• Angel/Devil Shipping: Ruby Rose, the All Loving Heroine of the story, and Jaune Arc, the clumsy sweetheart, have been shipped with every villain there is in the show, with Cinder Fall being especially popular.
• Angst? What Angst?: One of the show's criticisms, especially in its early stages, was Ruby being perennially happy and whether or not it grated as the Volumes steadily got darker and darker and the cast developed their personalities - only one episode implies it might be for show.
• Anti-Climax Boss:
  • Adam Taurus was built up as a powerful and dangerous adversary for almost five years, ever since the initial "Black" trailer. In Volume 3, he nearly killed Blake and crippled and traumatized Yang. In Volume 5, he successfully pulled a mutiny on the White Fang's leader and took over. At the end of the volume, he and his forces are easily caught and thwarted by Blake and the rest of Menagerie. When Adam moves to attack Blake, she strikes him down with a single dodge and a double-handed strike. While confronting Blake and Sun, Adam's forces are beaten and apprehended; he retreats from Haven, abandoning his men to their fates.
  • The Battle of Haven had several anticipated battles cut or relegated to offscreen, most notably Qrow fighting Raven and Ruby, Weiss and Blake versus Emerald, Mercury and Hazel. The scene cuts to Yang confronting Raven, but when it cuts back to the lobby, the girls have somehow scraped together a victory offscreen.
  • The Leviathan, despite being showcased as a force to be reckoned with and possessing raw power unlike any Grimm before it, is ultimately put down by Ruby managing to unleash her Silver Eyes again and weaken the Grimm for Cordovin to finish it with a direct attack with her drill in the span of 10 minutes.
  • Jacques has been built up as a personal antagonist for Weiss since the White Trailer, with her eye scar being a result of her trying to free herself from his grasp. His role in her storyline ends abruptly in Volume 7 when Jacques is abruptly arrested. A single-episode resolution after years of build-up left parts of the FNDM feeling like his departure was both weak and rushed. Weiss's mother Willow is properly introduced when she accidentally runs into Weiss and reveals she secretly recorded Jacques discussing rigging the election with Watts; Weiss gives the footage to the council and arrests Jacques with her new Huntress license. Then he does nothing throughout Volume 8 except get killed by Ironwood at the end.
• Archive Panic: New fans often say they indulged in an Archive Binge. While the short amount of episodes stimulates it, the length (usually 12 minutes, disguised in Volume 1 by splitting a few in two-parters) makes for a long watch. Including the various character shorts along with the main series proper, that's nearly 27 hours. It's even longer if including World of Remnant and RWBY: Fairy Tales, totaling 28 hours.
• Arc Fatigue:
  • One common issue fans had with the first volume was that the six episodes immediately after "Players and Pieces" were very slow-paced episodes dealing with school life where Weiss had to grapple with Ruby becoming team leader and Pyrrha discovering Jaune's secret and Jaune dealing with the consequences of it. The slow pace of those episodes, the shortness of each episode, and the fact that they were split across six weeks when the show first aired meant that many fans got tired of waiting for something interesting to happen. This stopped being a problem after the DVD was released, which included a "film" format that allows the entire volume to be watched in a single sitting.
  • Volumes 4 and 5 were criticized by some fans for having multiple plotlines that took a long time to resolve due to the main characters being split apart. One particularly common complaint was that Blake's arc in Menagerie was taking too long to resolve. Another arc that was complained about was RNJR's arc in Mistral in Volume 5, which mostly involved them hanging around the house, only training in one episode, and having exposition-heavy scenes, all while basically waiting for the plot to advance, while Blake managed to conclude the Menagerie arc all by herself. The experience was much improved on DVD, where an entire volume can be watched in one go.
• Awesome Ego: Every word out of Ambrosius's mouth is dripping in smug arrogance at his own capabilities, but Valentine Stokes's performance plays it up to such a degree that it's hard not to like him all the same; plus, Ambrosius really can back up his boasts, even though one of the requests is an unprecedented challenge for him.
• Badass Decay: In his debut and in his appearance in Volume 3, Adam Taurus acts like a calm and collected badass. His humiliating defeat in Volume 5 at Blake's hands caused many fans to admit that they could not see him as a threat anymore. His Volume 6 short partially helped reestablish his fighting prowess, but on a character level the damage had been done for many.
• Base-Breaking Character:
  • Blake Belladonna is easily the most controversial of the four main characters. Alongside being tied to the White Fang plotline, a plot that even the creators have admitted regret in handling, Blake is divisive due to her actions right after Volume 3. She left Yang's side before Yang regained consciousness from getting her arm cut off to save Blake; many saw this as reprehensible, especially as Blake goes on to verbally and physically berate Sun several times. Her fans usually argue that Blake, as a victim of abuse from Adam, had her reasons for leaving and excuse some of Blake's behavior towards Sun as animation mishaps due to creator confirmation that some of her slaps were not intended to be so harsh. Her combat record has also been controversial since her original introduction forced her, unlike the other main characters, to share the limelight with another character in Adam; since then, her combat feats within the show have been a source of constant debate over whether or not she holds her own or is forced to look weak to boost her companions, usually Yang or Sun. Combined with her connection to contentious subplots such as the White Fang, Blake's popularity has been subjected to extensive debate.
  • Jaune Arc is by far and away the most controversial character in the franchise. Early on, fans assumed he was a self-insert for Miles Luna, and especially in the first season was criticised for being a screentime hog due to the Jaundice/Forever Fall two-parters (a criticism that persisted for the rest of the show), and his fanbase were criticised for turning Jaune into a generic harem anime lead in fan content that pushed him with every other female character. Even after the show began to tone back on his screentime and relevance to the plot, some feel that his character arc in the Mistral seasons was just used as a cheap way to milk Pyrrha's death for emotional reactions from the fandom and that time spent on his character could be better spent on more important characters like Ruby or Pyrrha. While Jaune has earned a loyal contingent of fans who like him specifically for being a deconstruction of the typical self-insert shonen protagonist and enjoy his dynamic with Ruby, Ren and Nora, turn, his critics have never left and the show/fandom has given various new reasons to dislike him, most notably his role in Penny's death in Volume 8 and being part of the Ever Arc plotline in Volume 9, which was accused of taking much-needed focus away from Ruby and only including him at all in the latter due to author favoritism.
  • While popular in the first three Volumes, Cinder Fall has become a more steadily controversial character as each Volume goes on. The primary points of contention lie in the quality of her voice acting, her personality and the lack of character growth and background that she's received. Despite being the longest running villain on the series to date, many detractors feel that Cinder is criminally under-developed or just not very interesting, with the only true hints to her background being in Volume 3 where she alluded to wanting power. Her fans argue that Cinder's background has been sufficiently hinted at or point to Volume 4 indicating that the power-hungry nature is just a mask hiding her true self. The end result is that as of Volume 7, Cinder is one of the most divisive characters in the show, with various arguments had over whether or not she should have been killed off or if it is too late to give her backstory and flesh her out after so long.
  • Adam Taurus's portrayal is extremely contentious as the fandom strongly disagrees over the consistency in his portrayal. He is introduced in the Black Trailer as a powerful warrior who looks after Blake even as he robs trains and doesn't care about collateral loss of life. In the show, Blake describes him as a hero who gradually fell into extremism while fighting for Faunus equality. However, his confrontation with Blake during Volume 3's Battle of Beacon solely focuses on his abandonment issues, portraying him as a domestic abuser who intends to punish Blake for leaving him and who never believed in Faunus equality. The fandom is split between those who feel he's consistently portrayed as a character whose full truth is revealed over time to both Blake and the audience, and those who feel there's such a dissonance in this characterization that he was derailed from a potentially interesting equal rights extremist into a one-dimensional abusive stalker with wasted narrative potential- especially regarding a potential conflict with him and Weiss, and that the White Fang faction/plotline suffers as a result of Adam's obsession over Blake. The fact he went through severe Villain Decay only made the base more split on whether it's a rational development of things falling apart for Adam or just makes him a less interesting character.
  • Volume 7 & 8's portrayal of James Ironwood, such as his actions deteriorating into madness and making him just as much of a villain as Salem (as seen in Mantle's lockdown) is divisive. Some fans view it as the natural end of his arc — sentiments backed up by Miles. Others say that said arc was either hastily rushed at best or flat out character assassination at worst. The fandom is divided further on whether the heroes who deceive and sabotage him, or his vaguely-defined Semblance, share any blame or if this was caused by Ironwood's Fatal Flaws alone.
• Better on DVD:
  • Volume 1 attracted some criticism for its short episode length, which was compounded by the wait between episode releases. These issues become much less pronounced when the entire Volume is watched in a single sitting on its various venues, since there's no wait to make the show feel like it's slogging.
  • Volume 4 has this reputation as well, as it's basically an entire Volume dedicated to world-building and Character Development and as a result has a slower pace that is better viewed all at once.
  • Volume 5 follows in this trend, with the main thrust of the season being a slow build-up to the climactic Battle of Haven and reuniting the main cast bit by bit. But in the meanwhile, individual episodes tend to have little action, which makes experiencing the season episode by episode on a weekly basis drag much more than being able to experience it in a single sitting. The Blu-Ray version of Volume 5 also went back and retroactively inserted some background fighting in one scene to address the criticism of everyone standing around for much of the Haven Battle episodes.
  • The Japanese dub is better on home release than its broadcast version, RWBY 1-3: The Beginning, due to the amount of scenes cut from the show to fit a 30-minute 13 episode series, which includes the removal of the controversial Jaundice arc.
• Broken Base:
  • Volume 3 marking a drastic tone shift from an archetypical high-school battle anime to a world-spanning save the world plot has divided viewers. People in favor of it argue that the Beacon chapters were only meant to be a prologue to the story at large and that this allows the show to explore Remnant in full and put the characters in more unique situations. Detractors criticize the show for inconsistent pacing, especially in Volumes 4 and 5 right after the tone shift, or argue that the series worked better when it played into its cliches.
  • The battle between Team RWBY and the Ace Ops has quickly become one of the most heated debates in the fandom. Those against claim it makes no sense that a group of teenagers who never officially graduated as Huntsmen were able to defeat a team of hardened, experienced soldiers described as some of the best Huntsmen in Remnant, while those who liked the battle point out that it makes sense due to the various handicaps the Ace Ops had at the time (Vine and Marrow were actively holding back to try and de-escalate the situation, Harriet underestimated Ruby, and Elm made numerous tactical blunders due to her anger over Team RWBY "betraying" Ironwood clouding her judgement).
  • The FNDM is rather split over whose side to take when Team RWBY and Ironwood's group come to blows at the end of Volume 7. One side agrees with Ironwood and rejects Team RWBY's argument, taking the position that it's better to evacuate who they can save in Atlas and concentrate on keeping the two Relics and Winter Maiden as far away from Salem as humanely possible, especially given that they had almost no time to prepare before her army of Grimm arrived at the kingdom's border. Another group sides with Team RWBY and rejects Ironwood's argument, taking the position that Ironwood is morally wrong to abandon Mantle and the rest of the world to die by Salem's hand, and taking the Relics and Winter Maiden into orbit will only delay Salem at best. There is also a third group that argues the narrative is clearly on Team RWBY's side and against Ironwood, and that his plan is terrible, but that Team RWBY's approach to dealing with it was so self-sabotaging that they're basically Right for the Wrong Reasons. While the first two groups can't find any middle ground between them, both groups argue with the third group due to being incompatible with how their preferred side is represented.
  • Was Volume 9 a filler season? Detractors regularly say as much, condemning the season for stalling on the Salem plotline to focus on Team RWBY's reactions to the Atlas Arc and needing to put them in an alternate dimension to do so when most of the major character beats the cast undergo can easily have been done in while in Vacuo instead of hitting the pause button on the rest of the show (and even then the team's development isn't given out evenly, as Weiss in particular spends most of the season just playing comic relief and not actually developing). Fans have alternatively defended it for the aforementioned character development, the canonization of Blake and Yang's relationship and insist on season finale revelations about Summer Rose and the Brother Gods to say that it wasn't filler.
• Captain Obvious Reveal:
  • Cinder's reveal as The Man Behind the Man: While there's not a lot of buildup or misleading per se, the first volume's Spoiler Opening places her very prominently in comparison to Roman, the supposed Big Bad up until then.
  • Based on Jaune's outdated weapons, lack of combat-related knowledge, overall clumsiness, and Glynda's mention that despite what his transcript said he wasn't ready for Beacon, people began to theorize he somehow got into Beacon outside the normal means. It is later confirmed when he admits to Pyrrha that he faked his transcript in order to enter Beacon.
  • Penny's Robotic Reveal in "A Minor Hiccup". It had previously been somewhat confirmed in the earlier episode "Black and White", which shows she has a large mechanical compartment in her body that holds her swords. Miles admitted in the commentary track for Volume 1 that Monty had shown Penny's abilities off earlier than intended.
• Cargo Ship: Ruby x Crescent Rose. It helps that she's cuddled it, called it her "sweetheart", and in general is quite attached to it, on top of being a weapons enthusiast and Lindsay Jones herself believing Ruby is asexual and wouldn't be interested in boys or girls.
• Cliché Storm: Though they were well-received, the first few episodes were criticized by some for having a lot of familiar anime tropes from the get-go, primarily in the classroom and character areas.^note To clarify: There's a cute, optimistic fifteen-year-old Little Red Fighting Hood who dreams of being a hero. There's a mysterious Ninja, clad in black, who likes to read and initially shies away from the protagonist's attempt at befriending her. There's a wealthy, arrogant Ice Queen who isn't as cruel as she seems. There's a Hot-Blooded Cool Big Sis who enjoys punching evil in the face. Oh, and a horde of mindless, ugly creatures preying upon humankind. Not to mention the four protagonists are explicitly based off fairy tale characters. However, it moves away from this in later seasons, using the setup as a jumping-off point. The fact that many of these common anime tropes are rare in Western animation probably also helps.
• Crack Pairing: Adam and Ironwood are shipped together despite never having met in the show. Weiss and Ilia took off after Volume 5: although they're both from Atlas, they've never actually met. Some interesting crazy ship ideas can be found here.
• Crazy Is Cool:
  • Can't think of a good covert distress signal? Consider a sloth. Need a mode of transportation? Ride an Ursa. Picking up a chess piece? Sing about it! Comrade can't make a proper jump? Destroy the bridge for propulsion. Team leader is being bullied? Offer to help by breaking the bully's legs. Not sure if Red Sap is edible or not? Consume an entire jar anyway. Nora does this all the time. Even her Semblance is pretty awesome.
  • Qrow firmly plants himself here by turning up drunk, goading Winter Schnee into fighting him and keeping pace with her the entire time.
  • Tyrian is quite literally Laughing Mad, and quickly became the most popular new villain added in Volume 4 with the standout fight of the season against Qrow. His blocking sniper fire with his tail without even looking endeared him quickly.
• Creator Worship: To a part of the FNDM, Monty Oum was considered the sole creator of RWBY, could do little wrong, and his unfortunate passing is when they accuse the show of entering Seasonal Rot. This group dislikes criticism of Monty, objecting both to anyone who dislikes Monty's fight animation or prefers the fights of later volumes. Any faults within the show that they do acknowledge are blamed on the show's writers, Miles Luna and Kerry Shawcross, who they accuse of ruining Monty's vision. This can also be attributed to criticism of the series before Monty's passing.
• Creepy Awesome:
  • Neopolitan acts cutesy and elegantly, even when curb-stomping Yang into unconsciousness, whimsically dancing and somersaulting around the fist-fighter while silently egging her on with mocking smiles. Once Yang is on the ground and unconscious, however, Neo casually strolls over to her, drawing out a hidden blade from her parasol. She raises the blade with the intention of stabbing Yang with a wide, creepy grin that shows all her teeth. She appears to be a mute, so her body language is often exaggerated and focused on mocking her opponents. Given the chance to do violence, however, she seems to take a visibly vicious delight in drawing her blade.
  • Tyrian is Ax-Crazy, can barely talk without breaking into insane laughter, his eyes are almost constantly unnaturally widened, he's thoroughly devoted to Salem, and oh, he's a scorpion Faunus. He also utterly curb stomps Team RNJR in a fight, and gave Qrow a good run for his money too.
  • Cinder Fall, thanks to a surprisingly chilling performance by Jessica Nigri. She's introduced with Glowing Eyes of Doom, she's almost sickly-pale at times, and constantly speaks in a very composed and enigmatic tone, all of which make her Curb Stomp Battles that much more intimidating.
  • Adam Taurus is a narcissistic, sociopathically unstable, yet incredibly skilled swordsman who embodies spite, hate, and evil. He engages in a frighteningly realistic depiction of abusive and stalker behavior toward Blake, his ex-girlfriend, and forcibly dismantles anyone serving as an obstacle in his quest for power.
  • Salem, the show's true main antagonist, is an immortal sorceress with the power to control the Grimm. Her appearance alone makes her unsettling, with chalk-white skin, Tainted Veins, and glowing red eyes. Jen Taylor's killer voice acting makes her even more unnerving and helps to make every scene she's in (such as her torturing Oscar in Volume 8) feel like a living nightmare.
  • The Hound from Volume 8 has quickly become one of the most popular Grimm in the series for its sheer scare factor. The way it's seen stalking Oscar's team throughout the episode, the fact that it frightens other Grimm, its near human-level intelligence, and the fact that it can talk all make for a memorable first impression. The Reveal that the Hound was a Silver-Eyed Faunus who was cruelly experimented on and turned into a Faunus-Grimm hybrid by Salem has only made it even more popular due to the horrific implications of this revelation.
  • The Curious Cat has become one of the most popular parts of Volume 9, for precisely this reason. They manipulate and break down Ruby without the group even noticing that they're doing it on purpose, and later possess Neopolitan, adding feline eyes, fangs and claws to make her appearance creepy. After showing their true colours, they become a complete Mood-Swinger, switching from Affably Evil to Laughing Mad to genuinely enraged at the drop of a hat. After being seperated from Neo, they enter their "Furious Cat" form, a feral, monochrome beast capable of deadly energy projection and enough strength to break Jaune's Aura. Suffice to say, many were sad to see them go.
• Crosses the Line Twice: Basically the only reason why Roman is a likable character, between his Card-Carrying Villain status and his Large Ham personality. Blowing up an airship filled with soldiers? Horrifying. Pulling a What Does This Button Do? and then cheering like he's watching fireworks? Surprisingly funny.
• Crossover Ship: Yang Xiao Long has become the most popular character of the series to be shipped with others from outside properties.
  • Fans of Akame ga Kill! often pair Leone with Yang due to similar appearances and personalities.
  • In a sort of Opposites Attract manner with their personalities, Yang has also been paired with Izuku Midoriya from My Hero Academia due to both being brawlers.
  • There's a small following of Yang with Ben Tennyson. There's even a name for the ship, OmniDragon.
  • There are those who pair Salem with Seraphim. Both are humans that became demonic rulers after loss of a love one and decided to rage against the Gods.
• Cry for the Devil: Volume 4 generates some unexpected sympathy for Cinder, revealing she has lost an eye, is badly scarred and struggles to speak, managing only a faint whisper; having been strong, powerful, and commanding in Volumes 2-3, Volume 4 reduces her to a broken wreck. Although mocked by Salem's other subordinates, Salem regards Cinder as vital to the success of her plans. She forces Cinder to sit out Volume 4, remaining by her side to heal and train. When Salem reveals that Cinder has a crippling weakness to Ruby's abilities, Cinder's reaction makes it clear she didn't know what she was signing up for, something emphasized further by her absolute horror when Tyrian descends into insanity in front of her and maniacally tears a Grimm to shreds. Volume 5 ends this state when she returns to the front lines, her confidence, cruelty and callousness restored. The full reveal of her backstory in Volume 8 has generated even more sympathy.
• Cult Classic: While it didn't receive localization in South Korea, it did, however, gain a sizeable fandom there and Korean fans demanded to have an official Korean dub of the series.
• Die for Our Ship:
  • Sun and Neptune's individual introductions had them very quickly flirting with Blake and Weiss respectively, with them being dates during the school ball. The duo very quickly drew the ire of Blake/Yang and Weiss/Ruby shippers for being canon threats to those fanon favorites. The Sun/Neptune pairing was born from these spats but has since become a popular pairing in its own right.
  • Similarly, Oscar's increased presence around Ruby has infuriated both the Ruby/Weiss and Ruby/Jaune shippers during Volume 7 as Ruby hasn't had significant and meaningful interactions towards the latter two, threatening the fanon pairings.
• Draco in Leather Pants:
  • Roman Torchwick is often portrayed sympathetically in fanworks, being frequently made into a Lovable Rogue or an Anti-Villain of sorts. In canon, he is a violent criminal who commits armed robberies, gleefully blows up airships and is implied to engage in You Have Failed Me towards his underlings. His sole motivation is stated to be his own survival and he doesn't care how many people he has to hurt in order to ensure it. The only sympathetic quality he is shown to possess is his Villainous Friendship with Neo.
  • Neopolitan, Roman's partner in crime, is quite popular with the fanbase due to her character design and a unique combat style. While not much is known about her, she is established to be a remorseless killer and an accomplice in some of her partner's worst crimes. Fans still tend to show her a lot of sympathy and tend to give her redeeming traits, occasionally resulting in a full-blown Heel–Face Turn. Her grief over having lost Roman as shown in Volume 6 further encouraged fans to give Neo this sort of treatment.
  • Adam Taurus is a mass-murdering terrorist and emotional abuser, portrayed as an embodiment of spite and cruelty. Any well-intentions he had for his actions have long since been lost as he got Drunk with Power and began Slowly Slipping Into Evil in the backstory. His handling is regarded as contentious due to a large portion of fans thinking he would have worked better as a well-intentioned anti-villain. Then there are some fans who attempt to whitewash Adam's canonical nastiness, ignoring or excusing many of his villainous actions. For example, they downplay his abuse of Blake, justifying his emotional manipulation by saying that he wasn't lying to her during his character short and arguing that he only vowed to destroy Blake's life in Volume 3 because she "betrayed the White Fang". This became more common after Adam revealed his face, which not only proved he had a traumatic past but also increased his attractiveness significantly.
  • While she isn't necessarily evil, Raven Branwen's characterization in fanworks generally emphasizes her regretful, self-loathing side that is briefly glimpsed during Volume 5's finale. The other side of her characterization, specifically the It's All About Me aspect that directly leads to the final battle in Volume 5, tends to be played down.
  • The God of Darkness tends to get this, with much of the FNDM calling him the more sympathetic of the Brothers. In fanworks, he is often depicted as siding with humanity against the God of Light and trying to stop his brother from destroying them. The fact that he wiped out the first human race is often ignored, with many claiming both the Brothers or just the God of Light were responsible.
  • While James Ironwood is intended to be sympathetic as a tragic demonstration of someone who wanted to save the world from Salem, but was blocked from doing so by his flaws consuming him, a number of fans have instead insisted that he's in the right and that his actions, from closing off Atlas from the world to turning Mantle into a police state and later attempting to abandon Remnant as a whole, are harsh but necessary, and claim that he was simply doing what was logical in his situation. Many fans tend to ignore that his actions only cause more problems and that he has a habit of refusing to accept responsibility for said problems when called out on it, even blaming the heroes for being in his way and not his own flaws. These same fans continued these defenses even after James shot and attempted to kill the teenaged Oscar. Once he descended into full villainy in Volume 8 with actions such as killing Councilman Sleet and threatening to bomb Mantle, many claimed that his character was derailed rather than try to defend his actions like before.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Velvet was confirmed by the creators to be a one-shot character who was such a hit with the fans that she was given an expanded role. She is usually the member of Team CFVY that the main characters interact with.
  • Perry is a small, slim member of the White Fang who stood out to the fandom immediately. He wears small, round, bookish glasses over his mask which causes the fandom much hilarity. When he speaks, he's extremely polite and posh in manner. Both aspects are completely at odds with the terrorist work the White Fang is doing, and the over-excited behavior of his boss, Roman.
  • The White Fang Lieutenant is first introduced as an announcer for Roman at the White Fang gathering, where Roman promptly steals the show. He made a surprising appearance later as a hulking man who drags his chainsaw blade through the ground as he walks, and who relishes the chance to kill a Schnee when faced with Weiss as his opponent. While he does has a mask that is unusually patterned for the White Fang's plain white Grimm masks, it's only after his fight with Weiss where he beat her down and apparently forced Blake to flee that he's presented as Adam's lieutenant.
  • Thanks to the RWBY Character Status Charts, the nameless Atlas pilot who flies Weiss from Atlas to Mistral was picked up by the FNDM despite his short appearance. He was christened Pilotboi and managed to win one of /r/RWBY's character tournaments.
• Epileptic Trees:
  • The villainous actions of Volume 3 clearly involved some kind of ability to mind-screw protagonists or by-standers. Theories about what was happening included Emerald or Mercury having illusion powers; Neo having illusion powers being able to manipulate things while hidden or not existing and just being an illusion created by Emerald; Mercury using mercury poisoning; or Cinder using Fall Maiden powers. The speculation spawned a meme that "Everyone is Neo". While Cinder does indeed have Fall Maiden powers and Neo's Semblance does let her generate illusions, most of the villain actions have been facilitated by Emerald's confirmed hallucination Semblance which allows her to target one or (at most) two minds and trick the victim into seeing (or not seeing) whatever Emerald wants.
  • One long-running theory about Tyrian going back to Volume 4 is that he actually has very bad eyesight similar to scorpions in real-life, and that he realies on his other senses or can sense people through their Aura. This ties into another running theory chain about Tyrian (his special interest in Jaune when he meets RNJR), as Jaune's large Aura would make him stand out like a signal fire to Tyrian. Given that Huntsmen are said to channel their Aura into weapons, this is also why some fans assume Tyrian seemed so blindsided by Qrow resorting to punching him during their fight, as Tyrian couldn't track Qrow's fists as easily as he could Harbinger.
  • It has been speculated that Taiyang and Raven are the parents (either with each other or other partners) of several other characters, particularly Jaune (who has the same blue eyes and blonde hair as Taiyang) and Adam (due to having a similar color scheme, weapon and White Fang mask to Raven).
  • Many songs are fairly clear in which character(s) are involved, even if the meaning of the song is highly debatable. However, the Volume 2 song 'Sacrifice' raises a lot of debate amidst the FNDM over who is the singer and who is the subject. The song makes numerous references to the Secret War between Ozpin and Salem, and comes across as the singer calling out one or both of them in particular. Common ideas have been that the song is about Cinder, about Raven, given the similarities between the lyrics and Raven's canon feelings about the Secret War; or, as of Volume 6, Salem, primarily due to the lyrics working as a call out to not just Ozma, but the brother gods as well.
  • When Salem's domain was first shown in Volume 4, many viewers noticed that Salem's table had six seats, despite only having four enforcers including Cinder, with Mercury and Emerald conspicuously standing behind Cinder rather than at either empty seat. Due to this, many began wondering if they are just empty seats to space out the cast, or, much like she had Cinder working in Vale and Tyrian hunting for the Spring Maiden, she has two enforcers still out there who were just unable to return to her domain (one popular theory being that one of said agents is Summer Rose herself, having become a Fallen Hero).
    • Related, but during the third episode of Volume 4, the Seer Grimm is introduced and Salem is shown ordering it to "reinforce [their] numbers at Beacon. The Relic is there." Later Volumes would establish that the Seer Grimm is ultimately a communication device for Salem, with one used as a receiver and another a transmitter. Due to this, many began theorizing as to who Salem was speaking to in Volume 4, and if they were possibly one of the two missing enforcers believed to occupy the remaining two seats.
    • The confirmation that Tock was one of Salem's enforcers via RWBY: Amity Arena has only bolstered this idea, with many wondering if one of these possible enforcers is out hunting Silver-Eyed Warriors much like Tock was tasked with.
  • With the release of After The Fall, there have been theories on Tumblr that imply that both Bertilak and Carmine were hired by Arthur Watts based on the fact that they were Atlesian expats that are all based off of Arthurian mythology. Therefore, it stands to reason that Watts would try and capture Gus to provide Grimm bait through his Semblance - either to cause discord in Atlas, or to provide a convenient distraction when retrieving the Sword of Destruction in Vacuo. Before the Dawn debunks this, as it's shown the Crown has no connection with Salem or Watts.
• Evil Is Cool:
  • Roman Torchwick was a surprising example, given his apparent Non-Action Guy introduction. He proved himself to be quite the badass when he fended off both Blake and Sun at once and consistently gives his opponents a run for their money, all the while being stylish and snarky, and managing to look cool even while losing.
  • Cinder Fall's debut involved her showcasing her fire themes by glowing with fire and wielding it, and blocking bullets from Crescent Rose with her bare hands. Her subsequent battles showed off her materializing her bow-sword out of volcanic glass and brutally curbstomping most of her opponents. The first three volumes also show her to be an incredibly competent leader and organiser who had the flexibility to adapt strategies on the fly in response to new information or events. Even though the heroes know she's around and is carrying out the Big Bad's plan, she successfully hides her identity and manipulates everyone without them fully realising she's responsible. This culminates in her "PvP" speech where she creates mass panic, distrust of authority figures such as Ozpin and Ironwood, and triggers an invasion involving elements as diverse as Grimm and the White Fang. With help from Watts' pre-arranged hacking and virus skills, she seizes control of Atlesian military tech that was supposed to protect against her while increasing world-wide panic by broadcasting images of Atlas's apparent betrayal. While Salem arranged the plan and some of the resources, Cinder has the freedom to adapt it whenever she feels the situation on the ground changes, never losing her cool in the process. She only loses her composure when interrupted by an unforeseeable intervention at the last moment; it doesn't stop most of the plan from succeeding. After recovering from this setback, she quickly returns to her old magnificence, again only ever failing due to setbacks that are impossible for her to predict.
  • Raven Branwen is essentially RWBY's take on a Social Darwinist magical samurai Batman. Skewed morality aside, it is -at least- as cool as it sounds. She also shows her intelligence in "Vault of the Spring Maiden." She was the Spring Maiden and had Vernal masquerade as the maiden in a ruse that completely fooled everyone, including Cinder. Her following decisive victory against Cinder truly cements how cool this woman is.
  • Adam Taurus is a skilled swordsman, and capable of injuring Yang and sending the heroes running. Whilst he suffered Badass Decay in Volumes 4 and 5, he got to show off his charisma and skill once more in his own character short.
  • Volume 7 cements Watts and Tyrian in this role, as they tear apart Atlas and Mantle with flair and enthusiasm. After Cinder Fall ruined the attack on Haven by ignoring his warnings, Watts was sent to his home kingdom Atlas to set up the next stage of Salem's plan. During the attack on Robyn's rally, Tyrian massacres her supporters with horrific grace as Watts conducts the entire affair like an orchestra while framing Penny for Tyrian's acts and rigging the election for Jacques. Both of them are having the time of their lives and it is as enthralling as it is horrifying. He tricks Jacques into giving him access to Atlas' secure network through a shared desire to destroy Ironwood, allowing him to switch off the heating grid that protects Mantle's citizens from freezing to death. As with Cinder's plan in Vale, his aim is to cause a Grimm invasion by maximising the population's distress. However, unlike Cinder, his aim is to actually lose... by forcing Ironwood to sacrifice everything he can to stop Salem's plan, Watts is able to activate Salem's true plan: leaving Atlas, Mantle and Ironwood himself as vulnerable as possible for Salem's personal arrival. His badass cred only went up for fans when he delivered a scathing "The Reason You Suck" Speech towards Cinder, outlining many of the problems fans had with her character all while being dangled over the edge of a building, and lived.
• Fan-Disliked Explanation:
  • At RTX 2020, the writers revealed that Ironwood's Semblance, Mettle, allows him to hyper-focus when decision-making. The information is so vague that fans don't know how to apply it to the show, sparking numerous debates such as whether it feels like an excuse for Ironwood's villainy or whether it should be ignored completely since it's never addressed in the show or given a cue to signify it's active like other Semblances. Discussions have ranged from debating when and how much it influences Ironwood to interpreting it as superpowered autism or PTSD.
  • Word of God is that during Season 7's fight involving Tyrian, Qrow and Clover, Clover saw Qrow as the bigger threat and is partially a reason Qrow was Clover's primary target during the clash, in addition to Clover's Undying Loyalty. This was immediately rejected by fans, who feel that Tyrian being an unhinged Serial Killer should make him a greater threat than a former friend-turned-reluctant-enemy like Qrow.
  • After Jaune's actions at the end of Volume 8, some fans were anticipating a showdown in Volume 9 when Ruby learns what he did. However, Weiss' explanation fades off-screen as Ruby faints, leaving these fans confused as to how much detail Ruby was given and dissatisfied when her later confrontation with Jaune doesn't address it. The writers confirmed that they thought there was enough on-screen information to make it clear that Ruby knew the details and just wasn't the kind of person who would blame Jaune. While they were surprised this wasn't clear to fans, fans felt the Weiss' update was off-screened and were angry that Ruby wouldn't want to confront Jaune.
• Fandom Heresy:
  • Originally, the big draw to the show was that its creator was Monty Oum, a web animator known for his dramatic and Rule of Cool fight sequences. During the first three years of the show, it was difficult for fans who didn't know who Oum was and didn't like his fighting styles to state that without experiencing backlash. Even after a decade, the fandom still tends to target fans who don't like Oum's fighting style, or who prefer post-Monty fights to the Monty-era fights.
  • For those fans who dislike the direction of the show after Volume 3, it is considered unfathomable that anyone could like it or the quality of it. However, while there is fandom consensus that Volume 5 hit Seasonal Rot, there's also a consensus that the show started Growing the Beard from Volume 6. New fans coming into the show post-Volume 6 also tend not to understand the hate for Volume 5 that exists among older fans, and have experienced backlash from older fans for admitting as much.
  • There's a consensus among both the show's fans and hate-watchers that it's not acceptable for people to state Monty Oum would dislike the show's direction after his death or would do things better. Some Internet forums even impose rules to enforce this.
• Fanfic Fuel:
  • Team STRQ is mentioned in the show as the team that Ruby and Yang's parents were part of when they were in school. It contained their mutual father (Taiyang), each of their mothers (Summer and Raven respectively), and their uncle Qrow. They were the elite student team of their day but the show doesn't detail the things they did, it just leaves a couple of hints: Qrow says there are lots of inappropriate stories he could tell his nieces, but won't. The teachers mention there was once an incident involving Qrow wearing a skirt, and Raven bitterly recalls how favoured they were by the headmaster for special missions that she doesn't elaborate on. Beyond these titbits, there is no solid information about Team STRQ at all, the team having disbanded by the present day due to an unexplained comment by Taiyang about Raven's character flaws tearing the team apart. There is just enough tantilising pieces of information for the fandom to have spawned many prequel fanfic stories exploring Team STRQ's school days such as their outrageous exploits, how Taiyang ended up producing children with both female members of the team, the missions they went on, the reasons for them breaking up, how Summer "died", and how Qrow became The Alcoholic.
  • Volume 9's finale has a three-for-one special:
    • Team RWBY and Jaune end the volume by entering a magic portal, that will specifically take them when they are needed most. The potential for time-travel and/or Peggy Sue fics practically list themselves.
    • Somewhat and Juniper take off to have their own adventures in the Ever After.
    • And of course, what Neo might become after she chose to Ascend.
• Fanwork-Only Fans: The series has a vocal amount of fans (and even haters) who adore the setting and characters, but not the show itself. As such, many of them are drawn towards fan works, with some of the most well-known ones even promoting themselves as being improved retellings of the show's narrative.
• Fight Scene Failure:
  • The Battle of Haven is choreographed as a set of individual battles that are all occurring at the same time, in the same room. There's very little integration between the characters, so both they and camera angles warp around with no rhyme or rhythm. This leads to odd pauses in the middle of fights or between different fights and characters standing around instead of fighting to allow a different fight in the room to 'catch up', so that interaction can happen between groups. There is also a lot of off-screen fighting so that characters enter fighting poses but the camera cuts away before the fight sequence commences. The battle was widely regarded as messy and anti-climactic as a result.
  • Of all of Volume 7's final battles, Jaune, Ren, Nora and Oscar vs Neo is usually considered the worst fight of the season and one of the worst fights of the series since the Battle of Haven. The heroes all take a dive intellectually as they only charge Neo one at a time, with Ren and Nora, in particular, getting a bad showing after spending much of the season training under the Ace Ops. Alongside sloppy animation and inconsistent continuity (Oscar goes from landing a sucker punch on Neo to being on the back foot for the entire portion of his fight) and the fight did a massive number on JNR's credibility, especially coming off the RWBY vs Ace Ops battle.
• First Installment Wins: A lot of spin-off material such as RWBY Chibi, the manga anthologies, and various games are all either set during or use outfits from the Beacon Era (Volumes 1-3) with very rare exceptions. The first three volumes are also the most iconic ones and the ones generally better regarded.
• Franchise Original Sin: From the very beginning, RWBY was criticised for several traits that would haunt the series for years to come, including awkward dialogue, weak character growth and excessive character bloat. However as many early fans were more there for the spectacle of the fight scenes, the show could ignore those traits. But in Volume 5, much of the screen-time consists of lengthy scenes of exposition while there are very few fights of generally lower quality, making the flaws much more apparent and resulting in the volume gathering a very poor reception compared to the others.
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • The show has this kind of relationship with Black★Rock Shooter ever since the early 2010s when both shows were still relatively new at that time, thanks to the various similarities^note The two shows feature female warriors who wear color-coded clothes, and wield large weapons that can shift to several forms. At least in the opening sequence of the 2012 Black★Rock Shooter anime, the other selves have their own unique logos, much like the characters of RWBY have theirs. Oh, and the similarities are even obvious when one compares the protagonists of both shows and any other characters with similarities. Black★Rock Shooter and Ruby Rose wear hooded jackets that have contrasting colors (black-blue for B★RS and black-red for Ruby), they use high-caliber guns too (a cannon and Gatling gun for B★RS and a sniper rifle for Ruby) and said guns can transform into melee weapons (a large sword versus a scythe). The list does not end there though, as both series have characters that wield scythes (Dead Master and Ruby), sword and shield (Chariot and Pyrrha with Jaune), and gloves that also act as firearms (Strength and Yang). Fans of both series made crossover fictions and artwork between the two, such as this one.
  • It wouldn't be hard to find a Kill la Kill fan in the RWBY community, especially considering they were both released the same year. Fitting, as a similar work to Kill La Kill was also Monty's favorite anime.
  • Also with Bloodborne of all things. Many have pointed out similarities between the works, like the crazy trick weapons, monsters out of old fairy tales and horror stories, and the protagonists being Hunters.
  • As well as The Witcher Franchise. Both protagonists are monster slayers from Hunter schools who have magical powers, monsters from fairy tales and folklore whose tropes are being played with, racism that led to the creation of a terrorist group and political intrigue from different kingdoms. Some say jokingly or seriously that the RWBY series is by accident and/or coincidence a very Lighter and Softer version of The Witcher.
  • Thanks to BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle, the BlazBlue, Persona 4, and Under Night In-Birth fandoms have become even friendlier with the FNDM. Though BlazBlue has had a longer history with the FNDM thanks due to both creators being fans of each other's works, with many crossover fics due to how similar both franchises are.
  • Many RWBY fans have also become fans of Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury due to its main characters Suletta and Miorine having very similar personalities and dynamics to Ruby and Weiss, and are even paired together as a couple, to the point they are considered the "Gundam version of White Rose". Miorine in particular was even given the fan nickname "Space Weiss" due to having a lot of similarities to Weiss.
  • Given that both are high-octane action series featuring gothic elements, fantastical demons inspired by myths and legends, and over-the-top weapons and abilities, it should come to no surprise that RWBY fans would mesh well with Devil May Cry, even more so once one inspects the dynamics of Qrow, Yang, and Raven and note how eerie similar it is to Dante, Nero, and Vergil's relationship.

G - M

• Genius Bonus: There are subtle references to fairy tales, mythology, literature and history everywhere, particularly in the form of meaningful names:
  • Jaune's bully in Volume 1 is named Cardin Winchester, whose contact details are "Beaufort-1374". Henry Beaufort, the Cardinal of Winchester, presided over Joan of Arc's trial and execution, and his date-of-birth is estimated to have been approximately 1374 (give or take).
  • Fans especially knowledgeable about Ancient Greek philosophy will notice that Pyrrha's training speech in episode 6 references the traditional principles of Arete, the Greek ideal of self-excellence.
  • Although most fans figured out that Pyrrha Nikos's name meant "Pyrrhic Victory", which helped them identify her character inspiration, people with more in-depth knowledge of Greek myths and legends were able to identify exactly where the name "Pyrrha" comes from. Although the association with "Pyrrhic Victory" allowed fans to guess she was based on Achilles, it's not well known that Achilles had a name while living under cover as a woman. This is because the names aren't often listed in the most popular Ancient Greek stories and are much debated. The three names that are candidates for what Achilles was called are Issa, Kerkysera and Pyrrha; the third name is often favoured because it refers to red-headed people, and Achilles was believed to have red hair.
  • In the first episode, the number on Roman Torchwick's mugshot is 274761453. Scholars of the history of Rome will know that these numbers correspond with the "end" of each stage of Rome's history: 27 BC was when Octavian became the first Roman emperor, 476 AD was when the western Roman Empire fell and Emperor Romulus Augustus was deposed, and 1453 AD was when Constantinople fell and the eastern Roman Empire finally ended.
  • Some of the Grimm are named after the scientific names of species that have influenced their design. The Beringel comes from Gorilla beringei (the mountain gorilla); the Boarbatusk is a pun on the Babirusas (a genus of Indonesian "deer-pig" swines, noted for their huge tusks).
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: This series seems to have found a dedicated audience in Asia, to the point that there is both a Chinese and Japanese fan-dub. Japan in particular absolutely adores RWBY, to where it eventually got picked up by Warner Bros. Japan for an official Japanese dub with an All-Star Cast, as well as several manga adaptations, exclusive merchandise and eventually an anime adaptation by Studio Shaft.
• Gotta Ship 'Em All: The fandom is incredibly open minded about the characters. A single one is always shipped with just about every other existing character to some extent regardless of sexual preference. If they exist, shipping fanworks about them will exist with the entire cast.
• Growing the Beard: Volumes 2 and 3, particularly the latter, are generally considered when the show picks up the pace and starts consistently improving.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • In Volume 1, Jaune makes a suicide joke about his predicament at school to Pyrrha. Later on, Pyrrha dies in battle against Cinder that is a Heroic Suicide and Jaune develops a genuine death wish. Much later, he becomes an accessory for an assisted suicide and also witnesses his best friend being Driven to Suicide.
  • In Volume 3, an argument between Ironwood and Qrow ends with Ironwood declaring he'd shoot Qrow if he was one of Ironwood's men, and Qrow humorously retorting that he'd shoot himself if he was one of Ironwood's men. In Volumes 7-8, it becomes clear that Ironwood was not joking. He shoots Oscar for trying to talk him down from abandoning Mantle, and he shoots Councilman Sleet for objecting to martial law. The only reason he doesn't shoot Marrow for refusing to support him any more is because Winter quickly disarms and arrests Marrow before Ironwood can fire, thereby saving his life.
  • Nora's Big Eater tendencies, usually played for comedy, take a darker turn in Volume 4 when we learn she was once just a Street Urchin who spent many days scavenging in the trash for food and came close to starvation more than once. No wonder she takes nearly any opportunity to eat her fill as a young adult...
  • In Volume 1, RWBY and JNPR get a front-row seat to Cardin and his team bullying Velvet, with team CRDL pulling on her rabbit ears and mocking her for being a Faunus. While Pyrrha expresses disgust over Cardin's actions and Yang remarks on how hard the Faunus must have it, none of them actually do anything to stop Cardin's discriminatory treatment or even speak up about it despite finding it reprehensible. Four volumes later, Ilia lumps all humans into two categories; The ones who hate the Faunus, and the ones who stand by and let that hatred happen, which is exactly what happened in the first volume.
  • The RWBY creative team is based in Texas. A major plot point in Volume 7 involved Mantle's heating grid going down, leaving the city's residents facing life-threatening freezing conditions. A year later, the team was affected by real-life power blackouts during a heavy snowstorm that left Texans facing life-threatening freezing conditions for two weeks.
  • Ruby's Volume 1 pep talk with Jaune about leadership is played as heartwarming at the time; she affirms that, as leaders, they're not allowed to be failures otherwise they'll bring their teams down with them. However, Ozpin warns Oscar in Volume 5 that being a role-model for others is a terrible burden and Volumes 7-9 explore exactly how this mentality is impacting both Ruby and Jaune. Always putting others first and never tolerating their own failures crushes them under the weight of The Chains of Commanding. They both reach their Rage Breaking Point in Volume 9, Chapter 7, revealing just how much their mental health is suffering from Jaune feeling like a Failure Hero and Ruby feeling like everything's her fault and that her pain is invisible to others. This leads to Jaune experiencing Sanity Slippage and Ruby crossing the Despair Event Horizon.
• Heartwarming in Hindsight:
  • Nora's famous "Boop" moment was heartwarming on its own, but after her Image Song in Volume 2 revealed that's her way of telling Ren she loves him, the scene became even more heartwarming.
  • Ren and Jaune share a funny moment in Volume 2 which Jaune pours his heart out asking Ren for advice and calling him the brother he never had while Ren is only wearing a towel. Ren's tone and the funny nature of the scene make it seems that he is returning Jaune's feelings only for politeness, but in Volume 4, it's pretty clear that they have grown to have a really strong bond, even hugging each other before having to go their separate ways, and Ren's claim about Jaune being like a brother to him was really genuine.
• He Really Can Act:
  • Miles Luna shows off his acting talent during The Reveal that Jaune faked his transcripts. There's also his raw, heart-rending scream when Jaune is helpless to save Pyrrha from her suicide mission, and again in season 8 as he heeds Penny's last request. This is complemented by his anger, self-loathing, and impotent rage at Qrow in season 4, and at Cinder in season 5. Finally, his performance and much deeper voice in season 9 as the Rusted Knight- an aged-up, jaded and embittered Jaune, was also well-received.
  • For years, Garrett Hunter was derided as being the worst voice talent for the show as Adam, but come Volume 6 and he finally became comfortable with the character, to the point where many fans said Garrett has had the most improvement of any of the actors in the show.
  • Jason Rose gets plenty of time to shine as Ironwood throughout Volume 7, delivering what many felt to be one of the strongest performances in the entire show to date.
• He's Just Hiding:
  • After certain character deaths in Volume 3, many theories started popping up to explain why they might still be alive. The creators confirmed the deaths had been planned from the beginning; while they have been ambiguous about whether they'd ever brought a character back, they have mentioned that bringing back even one would open a flood gate they're not in a hurry to experience. Penny is a robot, so the fandom's assumption is that she can be rebuilt or fixed which paid off in Volume 7. Pyrrha's body disintegrated on screen because the creators hoped fans wouldn't latch onto the No Body Left Behind trope; however, fans theorised that she was teleported or Ascended to a Higher Plane of Existence. Roman's demise triggered so many theories that the creators announced he'll never come back; the fans rely on the Lying Creator trope to counter that, along with Coco surviving a similar incident in the novel After the Fall.
  • Volume 6 triggered further examples of the fandom theorizing how characters can come back from the dead. Adam's death involved the creators having him fatally stabbed twice and bounce off a rock with a sickening crunch as he falls over a cliff, and then confirming on RWBY Rewind that he's dead; however, fans observed that Cinder had survived her own fall over a cliff despite being completely frozen in ice as she fell, and therefore theorize how Adam could return.
  • Although fans accepted Clover's death in the back half of Volume 7, fans immediately latched on to several theories to undo the death, including Oscar's Semblance allowing him to travel back in time and prevent the events that led to the death or the Staff being able to revive the dead. The same carries true into Volume 8 with Penny's death, with theories such as Pietro building a new Penny and bringing her back, thinking the realm RWBY fell in is the Afterlife, or even suggest that Penny's mind is now part of Winter.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Some (possibly) less informed fans assumed it was a Japanese animated series and demanded that Crunchyroll make the Japanese version available. Well, it seems Japan likes this series too, resulting in both fan and offical dubs. Later, it came full circle and RWBY got official manga and anime adaptations.
  • As of Volume 4, Yang Xiao Long is a hot-blodded, Demon Slaying Cyborg who lost her arm to a katana-wielding maniac, who's descendant of other highly-respected Huntsmen including her irresponsible, yet well-meaning Cool Uncle with his own laundry-list of personal issues, and an Aloof twin sibling with a Dimensional Cutter katana, who uses a twisted sense of strength as a façade to hide how truly broken she is and remained at odds with her brother because of it. Either through coincidence or maybe because Hideaki Itsuno is a simple fan, this can also be used to describe the family dynamics of Nero, Dante, and Vergil in Devil May Cry 5.
• Idiosyncratic Ship Naming: The show's name RWBY, while standing for the four main characters of Ruby Rose, Weiss Schnee, Blake Belladonna and Yang Xiao Long, also stands for the four colors each girl is defined by: Red, White, Black and Yellow respectively. Every character in the show is represented by a color so the fandom tends to name ships in honor of the show's emphasis on color themes, such as Ruby and Weiss being called White Rose and Blake and Yang being called Bumblebee. A full list of shipping names is being collected at a fan site here.
• I Knew It!:
  • Pretty much everyone predicted Episode 15's reveal of Blake as a Faunus, and to a lesser extent Episode 16's clarification of her former membership in White Fang.
  • After the release of the promotional material for Volume 2, namely, the group silhouette for Velvet's team, it was pretty much a given that her team would somehow be named "Coffee."
  • Penny Polendina being a robot.
  • Many people speculated that Ruby and Yang are half-sisters, sharing a father, but fewer speculated that it was Yang's biological mother that she has been searching for in the Yellow trailer, and that Summer Rose, Qrow, the sisters' father, and Yang's mother were on the same team.
  • The name of Yang's mother was ludicrously spot on: Raven Branwen.
  • After the Volume 3 trailer, many fans suspected that the Elegant Gothic Lolita shown there was Neo in disguise, which was confirmed in the first episode of Volume 3.
  • The majority of the fanbase predicted that Penny vs Pyrrha would happen during the tournament arc of Volume 3, and that it would end with Penny in pieces.
  • Many people were able to figure out that Velvet can copy weapons and styles with her camera from the first snapshot of Sun.
  • Considering his The Wonderful Wizard of Oz character inspiration, nobody was surprised that Ironwood is truly a tin man. He's got a cybernetic arm, and a large part of his body is made of metal.
  • People were calling Pyrrha dying since her introduction back in Volume 1.
  • Remember the narrator from the first episode? Well, people were able to guess that A. She's a character, and B. She's a villain. Say hello to Salem.
  • Quite a few fans predicted that Jaune would take up Pyrrha's equipment in some capacity following her death. He gets an updated set of equipment reforged from her gear at the end of Volume 4's first episode.
  • Yang getting a prosthetic limb from Ironwood was quickly predicted after Volume 3.
  • More than a few fans predicted Oscar having a connection to Ozpin, and so decided that his name must be the given name of the Wizard of Oz.
  • After the World of Remnant episode "The Four Maidens" streamed in early 2016, several fans immediately predicted that Ozpin was the Wizard from the tale. This was confirmed in the fifth volume.
  • Cinder surviving the Battle of Haven was predicted by nearly everyone even before she was spotted in the Volume 6 poster, and chapter 2 opens with her as if to say "We all know she survived, let's get it over with."
  • Fans called Maria having silver eyes as early as the moment that the opening of Volume 6 was released to the general public. It was finally confirmed by Volume 6's "Alone in the Woods".
  • Virtually everyone predicted that Penny would return during the Atlas volumes due to her robotic nature making her a prime candidate for cheating death. Sure enough, Volume 7's first episode shows her alive and well.
  • RWBY's habit of pulling Red Herring plot points, especially regarding who gets Maiden powers, meant few people seriously figured Winter would become the Winter Maiden after how blatantly she was set up to be the next candidate, with Nora and Penny being the most popular alternatives. Sure enough, Penny winds up becoming the next Winter Maiden in the Volume 7 finale "The Enemy of Trust". Then she dies and passes the power on to Winter in the next volume, showing that the setup wasn't for nothing.
  • Multiple people theorized about the identity of the Rusted Knight in the Volume 9 trailers, with most answers settling on Jaune Arc. Episode 5 confirms that to be correct, though fewer fans predicted he'd also be aged up.
  • In season 9, during the first few appearance of the Curious Cat, several fans have guessed that they were in fact not the nice character they appeared to be. Noting that their actions seem suspicious such as giving his heart to the Red Prince and the Herbalist and seemingly (un)intentially misleading Team RWBY away from the tree. This was proven to be correct in Episode 8 when the Cat revealed their true nature where they tried to possess Ruby while giving a motive rant and then possess Neo.
  • Several fans posted comments on Twitter that Morgan Garrett would be revealed to be Summer Rose 'that week'. When Episode 9 came out, it was finally confirmed they'd been right all along.
• The Inverse Law of Fandom Levity: RWBY is a fantastical show that carries a lingering air of optimism, but a large section of the fanbase seems to focus in on the sociopolitical aspect of it. While such topics are given a fair amount of focus in Volumes 5, 7, and 8, the rest of the show mostly devotes itself to high-octane action and encouraging morals, but the sociopolitical underbelly influences a large amount of fan discussion, especially concerning the ideologies and actions of individual characters such as the controversial General Ironwood.
• Iron Woobie:
  • Ruby Rose. During the Vytal Festival tournament, she watched a close friend gruesomely dismember another friend, knowing both had been manipulated by the villains but unable to intervene in time to save them. This triggers a cascade of trauma that eventually leads to her apologising to Jaune to for dragging him into everything; Jaune tells her that she's actually a source of inspiration and bravery for others because she keeps on fighting even when she's lost so much. However, it's Oscar who later forces her to admit how she really feels and how she keeps going despite it. Volume 3 involves a battle where she sees her school destroyed, her sister lose an arm, Pyrrha murdered in front of her eyes, and her entire team be disbanded. This leaves her experiencing nightmares of Pyrrha's voice, hinting at Survivor Guilt. This becomes more obvious when her uncle Qrow intervenes to help her fight Tyrian; when she keeps helping Qrow despite his protests, he has to save her from his own Semblance, allowing Tyrian to poison Qrow. Volume 7 hints at her trauma over her mother's death when she collapses after Salem implies she killed Summer, but she's back on her feet minutes later when she realises how much danger Mantle is in.
  • Nora Valkyrie spent her childhood as an orphan Street Urchin, often having to steal food from the garbage in order to feed at all, being bullied by other kids, she was alone when the Nuckelavee attacked the village, being stuck below a house until Ren saves her, she then goes on to survive with him by her side, deciding to suppress her feelings for him. Way later, she faces the death of her good friend Pyrrha, and to find answers, she agrees to leave everything behind and go with Ren, Jaune and Ruby to Haven, at which point, she has to face with the Nuckelavee again, in a battle that almost costs Ren's life due to his own Unstoppable Rage, until she has to snap him back to sanity. Despite having a hard life, she keeps her cheerfulness, bravery and keeps the spirits high in her team; it fuels her passion and rage to help Mantle in Volume 7, challenging General Ironwood's hurtful policies when even the other heroes don't.
  • Ozpin has... had a rough existence. He was originally a great hero who rescued an imprisoned, lonely girl named Salem. The two fell in love, but he soon fell ill and died. His lover tried to bring him back by asking the gods to revive him, but her methods triggered a war that turned the gods against humanity. The God of Light asked him to guide humanity to salvation, but he would be forced to keep reincarnating until this day came and, if he fails, the gods will destroy humanity once and for all. Although reincarnation reunited him with Salem, her method of helping unite humanity eventually made him realise how dangerous she had become. Trying to save their children from her machinations led to a terrible confrontation between them that got their children killed, causing him to spend many lifetimes reeling with grief until he was able to pull himself back together and return to his divine mission. He has spent thousands of years trying to unite humanity, such as creating the Huntsmen Academies to teach humanity the value of team-work and cooperation while also teaching them how to fight the Grimm. However, Salem's quest to destroy everything he ever achieves and to divide humanity makes his task impossible while she lives; but she cannot be destroyed, forcing him to keep fighting an Invincible Villain with no end or resolution in sight. After having experienced too many times how the truth about Salem's immortality turns people against him by destroying their hope through fear, he has created such a web of deceit to protect humanity from despair that he has lost sight of who he used to be and struggles to retain his ability to believe in the best of people. Despite this, he keeps struggling onwards and trying to put a brave face on things, no matter how terrible things become, how many mistakes he makes, or how alone he feels.
  • Oscar Pine. A small boy, living with his aunt on a dirt farm in bumblesquat nowhere, finds his mind invaded by the soul of an ancient, horrifyingly powerful man, suddenly has memories he didn't have before, loses all sense of privacy, and starts going insane before Ozpin gets the explanation through to him. A sense of moral obligation - and Ozpin's pestering - force him to abandon his aunt without warning, then charge through the rain to a train station, where he can't afford a ticket. He gets spooked by a member of Salem's group, then has to make his way to Mistral, all the while Ozpin floods his mind with knowledge of the ancient conflict between himself and Salem. By the time he finally meets Qrow and team RNJR, he's scared, alone, and confused. Luckily, he does gain some confidence later on, until he figures out the extent of Ozpin's deceit, forcing him to fight Ozpin for control over his own body just to warn the heroes what's happening. Not only is Oscar now aware of how hopeless the quest he was drafted for is, but he is facing the potential loss of his entire identity as he merges into the gestalt entity the heroes know as "Ozpin". And, as the physical vessel of Ozpin, Oscar discovers that if anyone becomes violently upset with Ozpin, the person they're actually punching or slamming into walls is him. Despite this, he vows to keep going and tells the heroes that he intends to help them against Salem for whatever time he has left. Even when he is shot and send tumbling down Atlas to Mantle below without any Aura to protect him, he doesn't allow panic to overwhelm him, which enables him to discover the power he needs to unlock to save himself. Instead of being left shaken by the near-death experience, he simply picks himself up and orders Ozpin to help him save Atlas next. Despite being tortured by Salem in Volume 8, he never gives in, turns some of Salem's subordinates against her, then single-handedly nukes the monster that is destroying Atlas, putting Salem out of commission just long enough for the heroes to save the kingdom's people.
• It Was His Sled: Volume 1 introduced Blake and Penny in ways that were supposed to hide their true natures and reveal them at the end of the volume for Blake, and early in Volume 2 for Penny. However, Blake being a Cat Girl and Penny being a Robot Girl have become such widespread knowledge, people who haven't seen the show don't even realise they were originally spoilers.
• Jerkass Woobie:
  • Whitley Schnee. In all of his appearances, Whitley is portrayed as a snobby little shit, with Weiss taking satisfaction when the boy gets shut down in some way. When she confronts him about his knowledge that Jacques would disinherit her if she became too uncontrollable, he merely states that it's foolish to oppose their father's wishes. When Willow later indicates she wants Weiss to help Whitley escape just as she and Winter have been able to, Weiss points out that Whitley wants nothing to do with her. Willow reveals that's because Whitley was left all alone, at the mercy of an abusive father and alcoholic mother, when his two sisters left home. Unlike his sisters, Whitley has no Semblance to give him an escape route through the Huntsmen Academies; he's therefore had no choice but to allow Jacques to turn him into what he wants: a mirror image of himself. When Jacques is arrested for his crimes due to a combination of Willow and Weiss's actions, Whitley watches as his father is led away in handcuffs, huddled into a tiny ball in the middle of the grand staircase. It's the first time he's shown to be as alone and abandoned as Willow earlier described. However, freedom from Jacques allows him to grow out of his Jerkass traits as he takes command of the company resources to help the heroes save the kingdom's people, digging the heroes out of their Heroic BSoD in the process.
  • James Ironwood. After Volume 3, he begins Slowly Slipping Into Evil; after the Battle of Beacon triggers his PTSD, his behaviour grows increasingly paranoid. He is so determined to protect his kingdom from Salem without making Leo and Ozpin's mistakes that he can't see the mistakes he makes through fear and mistrust. After successive manipulation by Watts, Tyrian and Cinder, he snaps; unable to handle the protagonists' withholding information from him and Salem showing up with a massive army of Grimm, he turns on his allies, Mantle and even his subordinates, ultimately dooming the kingdom he's trying to save. He dies alone and broken, abandoned by the heroes and dismissed by the villains.
• Jerks Are Worse Than Villains: Volumes 1-3 includes both school bullies and villains. As ringleader, Cardin demonstrates Fantastic Racism towards Faunus, kick-starts Jaune's development via blackmail, and highlights Pyrrha's exceptional abilities. He's therefore a flat character the fandom loves to hate while the villains all have interesting hooks. As leader, Cinder is a mysterious woman with unusual powers. Her team includes: the stylish, charismatic Roman; the flamboyant, acrobatic Neo; and the sassy Emerald and Mercury who really enjoy their work.
• Just Here for Godzilla: Monty Oum had a famous and recognizable style of choreographing and animating fight scenes. His name alone was a draw for people familiar with his work to give RWBY a look when it first started airing. After his death, new animation teams and software took over the show, changing the style of action scenes. This created a divide between fans that are only interested in Monty's work and fans that are interested in the show regardless of the fight animation style used.
• Launcher of a Thousand Ships: Due to the fandom's openness with shipping, as well as their love for Crack Ships, just about any character can become this (hell, there are so many ships that an entirely dedicated spreadsheet exists just for cataloging them!). Yes, that includes background characters like the shopkeeper that appeared throughout the first volumes.
  • On the female side, Ruby and Neo are the most often-shipped female characters due to their bubbly personalities and (potential for Ruby, canonical for Neo) sadistic sides.
  • For the male characters, Jaune and Qrow have the largest number of distinct ships, with Jaune having at least one art piece or fanfic shipping him with every female character in the series (and an entire sub-genre of fanfiction specifically about making him a harem lead), while Qrow's Ambiguously Bi traits are often used to ship him with male characters on top of the women Jaune is often shipped with, particularly Ozpin, Ironwood, Taiyang and Clover.
• LGBT Fanbase: From very early on in the series, Monty and the cast, several of whom are members of the LGBTQ community, were open about the show having LGBTQ characters who would gradually come out to the audience. This attracted fans from that community to the work, including some prominent fan artists. In Volume 5, Ilia became the show's first openly LGBTQ character, with Volume 6 introducing the first LGBTQ family unit through Jaune's sister, Saphron, and her wife and son. They have since been joined by other named characters, such as Blake Belladonna, May Marigold and Coco Adel.
• Like You Would Really Do It: As the title characters, fans are convinced that Team RWBY are safe from being killed off until the final volume; any situation that looks like any of them will die prior to then therefore doesn't incite fear of death. Examples include believing Team RWBY would survive the dark events of Volume 3, near-fatal injuries sustained during the battle at Haven, and the grave danger they were put in during Volume 8's evacuation. While Yang's Volume 3 arm loss was shocking, Weiss's near-fatal impaling at Haven was correctly interpreted as a reveal set-up for Jaune's Semblance. Yang's Volume 8 fall into the Void Between the Worlds was portrayed in-universe as "death" but interpreted by fans as Volume 9 set-up; her team's subsequent fall and The Stinger were seen as "proof".
• Love to Hate: The Red Prince's every action and line is filled with spoiled cruelty, but it's so over-the-top you can't help but laugh. It also makes it all the more cathartic when he loses.
• Magnificent Bastard:
  • Ozpin, born Ozma, is an unfathomably old wizard who has walked Remnant for centuries. Having once built an empire with his evil former lover Salem before leaving when seeing the monster she became, he would oppose and war with her for centuries to come. In his life as the King of Vale, Ozpin thwarted Mistral and Mantle's final plan in Vacuo, wiping out their armies in a horrific battle where he would inspire legends of his greatness and terror as "The Warrior King". Ending the war with all bowing to him, Ozpin went on to restructure the governments of the world according to his own design, ensuring he would have allies in each government's Council and sealing away the Relics to hide them from Salem. As Ozpin, he is nearly able to damage Cinder Fall's machinations, and even after the Fall of Beacon, he ensures that the Relic of Choice is hidden far away and that he reincarnates into Oscar Pine earlier then the villains plan for. After being captured by Salem, Ozpin helps with Oscar's plan to divide Salem's group before Oscar is able to briefly destroy Salem herself by blasting her with the cane, a secret weapon Ozpin had been preparing for centuries.
  • Neopolitan, aka "Neo", was once Trivia Vanille, the abused daughter of the corrupt manager for Vale's council. She would eventually grow into one of the most formidable criminals in Remnant: allying with Roman Torchwick, she assists with his schemes throughout Vale, and eventually defeats her sinister parents and brings down the Spider Syndicate's plot to take over Vale's underworld. After joining the forces of Salem, she and Roman assist with Cinder's sinister plans, and after Roman's death she becomes fixated on avenging him. She is able to skillfully steal the Relic of Knowledge from the heroes, and she later steals it from Salem to force Cinder to help with killing Ruby. After being thrown into the Ever After, her semblance grows more powerful and she quickly adapts to use these new skills and become an even greater threat to the heroes, even successfully driving Ruby to attempt Ascension. Eventually, she is able to move on from Roman's death and gives the heroes a graceful goodbye before she gives herself to the tree to find a new purpose.
  • For RWBY: The Official Manga examples, see here.
  • Fairy Tales of Remnant can be found here.
• Mandela Effect: In a minor but surprisingly common example: fans often refer to Torchwick being killed and devoured by a Nevermore. It was, in fact, a Griffon.
• Memetic Badass:
  • As the show's most popular villain, Roman Torchwick never stopped being top dog of the antagonists, is only toying with Cinder by pretending to be unaware and compliant with her nebulous grand scheme as he builds up his dragon's horde of Dust, that furthermore his humoring her is the only thing that is keeping her in a position of power at all, he can pimp-slap any of the heroes into submission without missing a beat no matter the odds, could pickpocket the whole cast blind without a single person becoming aware, rules over all human and Faunus gangs alike with Machiavellian absolute authority, and is only deigning to remain in Ironwood's custody because he can make use of the position he's in. Those are often the same fans who don't believe he's actually dead.
  • Mercury Black, thanks to being in three of the best fights of Volume 3, his constant smug demeanor and a rip-roaring metal song in "I'm The One," to the point where some chan boards nicknamed Mercury "The One," out of respect during Volume 3. Even with his lessened screen-time in the Mistral Arc, Mercury managed to only add to this status in Volume 6 with the revelation that he doesn't even have a Semblance thanks to his father. Many fans took this as a sign of Merc's utter badassery that even without a Semblance, he was able to go toe-to-toe with Pyrrha and Yang, and both only won because he threw both fights.
  • After his dressing down of Jacques Schnee, many fans insinuate that James "Two Seats" Ironwood replaced both of his testicles with some form of God chairs. Most also believe that, should Ironwood get a third seat on the council, he would become all-powerful and single-handedly destroy Salem and the Grimm. His Amity Arena art confirms that he dual-wields revolvers which just made him even more of a badass in the eyes of his fans.
  • Kali Belladonna. While she had little actual screen time during the attack at her mansion and was mostly shown to be a Combat Pragmatist with a skill to improvise and adjust to a dangerous situation, even taking out Yuma with a tea tray, most fans consider her to be on equal footing with her husband or possibly even above him in skill and strength. She became especially known for her badass one-liner when shooting Mooks that cornered her in the library.
    Kali: GET OUT OF MY HOUSE!
  • In Volume 8, the manner in which The Hound was introduced was badass enough to make it the first Grimm to score a victory against main characters. It kicked the asses of Oscar, Ren, Yang and Jaune because it can shapeshift new body parts as needed, employed human-level intelligence, and it can talk.
• Memetic Loser:
  • Jaune; he's joked a lot on how he's clueless about things and how incompetent he can be in battle. Admittedly some of this was intentional since he's a normal dude surrounded by insanely powerful huntsmen and huntresses but there are many fans who tend to only focus on his earlier bumbling attitude rather than his increased fighting skills and leadership capabilities shown in later volumes. When he (unintentionally) contributes to Amber's death by getting distracted by Pyrrha's screams, fans made him memetically responsible for Pyrrha's death as well. Although that's not the case in canon, even the creators now join in making fun of Jaune's perceived uselessness. This lessened somewhat after he stopped the Nuckelavee's charge cold in the Volume 4 finale (but not by much), then got reduced even further in Vault Of The Spring Maiden when he unlocked his Semblance and saved Weiss with it.
  • Weiss has earned herself this reputation over time, due to having sustained a number of defeats over the course of the show. She had to retreat from a pack of Beowolves after starting a fire during the fight in Volume 1's Initiation arc, lost to Adam's Lieutenant, performed a near-Senseless Sacrifice against Flynt, lost to Winter's summons back when she was still training (becoming the only character to date to lose a fight in her own trailer), lost in a duel with Vernal and nearly got killed by Cinder shortly afterwards — after which she had to be saved by Jaune, the show's other Memetic Loser. All of the above made Weiss a target for jokes regarding her perceived uselessness and poor tactical skills.
  • Oscar after Volume 6. He'd already gotten mocked during Volume 5 for being used to deliver exposition through Ozpin while not getting much time in the spotlight to develop himself, but after Volume 6 saw his coming to terms with Ozma's curse and get an outfit upgrade offscreen (while Jaune got an extended scene to mourn Pyrrha and all of the Volume 7 costume changes were shown on-screen), it became common to joke about how even the writers forgot Oscar was his own character. This lessened following Volumes 7 and 8, where many have come to see Oscar's character growth as some of the better parts of the two volumes, to the point he's nearly supplanted Ozpin in terms of focus.
  • The Grimm are presented as a dangerous force in-universe, with frightening visual designs and unsettling behaviors. However, because they get frequently slaughtered in the majority of fight scenes without seriously harming anyone, a lot of fans have joked about them being akin to the Stormtroopers from Star Wars or other ineffectual, easily-stomped Mooks. However, there are a few exceptions to this, such as the Nuckelavee, the Apathy or The Hound.
• Memetic Psychopath:
  • Though Neo has shown some signs of being Cute and Psycho in the show itself, the fandom has taken it to insane proportions, portraying her as murdering random people whenever she can. There is also more than a few fan artists who have portrayed Neo as being sexually excited as she attacks/kills people, usually Yang.
  • Nora has been known to get very aggressively enthusiastic when offering support to her friends, particularly if it involves a (potential) fight of some kind. Because of how eager Nora gets during these moments, especially the whole "We'll break his legs" incident, many fanworks make Nora out to be a violent person who gets off on injuring or murdering random people on a whim and someone who frequently encourages her friends to do the same. Amusingly enough, this is always Played for Laughs.
• Misaimed Fandom:
  • Many regard Team RWBY as the only main characters and feel that Team JNPR, Oscar and Qrow are a Spotlight-Stealing Squad, resulting in a backlash when these characters take centre stage, such as their focus during Volumes 7-8, or Jaune's arc in Volume 1. They desire the others to be Put on a Bus so that Team RWBY receives sole focus, and dislike Jaune joining Team RWBY in the Void Between the Worlds. The show itself is clear that there is an ensemble cast; Team JNPR have been deuteragonists since the beginning, even though marketing usually focusses on Team RWBY. The writers' confirmed in the supplementary RWBY: Companion that it was always intended to be a larger story, they just couldn't introduce that world until Volume 4.
  • The subplot revolving around the heroes shaming Ozpin was meant to serve as a stepping stone for the group learning to make their own decisions without the mentor's help. However, the way in which Ozpin is displaced rubbed fans the wrong way; the heroes' reactions to Ozpin, and lashing out at Oscar, indirectly proved Ozpin's point about keeping secrets from others. It's not helped by how fans believed that their decision to lie to Ironwood had little to no prompting, which — while meant to be seen as them learning why Ozpin kept secrets — came off to some fans as a moment of hypocrisy.
  • A significant part of the fandom is sympathetic to authority figures who uphold the law, which generated controversy during Volume 6's Cordovin arc. Fans perceived Cordovin to be reasonable, just doing her job, and that actions such as deploying a Mecha against trained Huntsmen were necessary; they were shocked and angry at the protagonists stealing a military airship, blaming them for consequences such as the Grimm attack on Argus. The writers portrayed Cordovin as petty, prideful and vindictive, so they were surprised by the controversy; they wanted a fun, straight-forward climax without moral ambiguity to counter Adam's darker sub-plot, and revealed that the Atlesian military considered Cordovin annoying and assigned her to Argus because they thought she couldn't bother anyone there.
  • Ironwood has a devoted fanbase who see him as a strong military leader who can make the tough choices when his allies cannot, and who dislike the protagonists as naïve heroes endangering lives with their idealism. They feel Volumes 7-8 portrayed Ironwood as being the only person with a plan to save some lives in contrast to Team RWBY, who wanted to endanger everyone's lives due to having no plan to save anyone and no will to make the tough call to guarantee the salvation of some. They therefore believe that Ironwood was derailed into the role of a ruthless, impotent villain in favour of Protagonist-Centred Morality. The backlash was so strong that the writers pointed out that Ironwood had been portrayed as a deeply flawed individual from the beginning, and that he was meant to be regarded as unambiguously villainous by the end of Volume 7.
• Mis-blamed:
  • After the season 3 finale, many fans accused Miles and Kerry of killing off Pyrrha solely as one final tragedy in a season that was already divisive due to its massive change in tone and threat level. Thankfully, this died down quickly after it was confirmed by both Monty's widow and Pyrrha's voice actress that Monty himself planned it before the series even began.
  • Miles often gets accused of writing Jaune (who he voices) as a self-insert and giving him an abundance of screen time. A Reddit AMA revealed that Monty and Kerry were behind most of Jaune's prominence and that Miles actually became averse to writing scenes with Jaune because of the accusations.
  • Eddy Rivas is often misblamed for the supposed queerbaiting that happened between Clover and Qrow, but little actual dialogue suggests a romantic bond between the two. Most of the blame for this can be laid at the social media team deliberately pushing the idea of the ship, several animators deliberately adding flirtatious content like Clover's wink when the script didn't call for it, and the voice actors of Qrow and Clover for underselling that they were meant to be more antagonistic.
• Moe:
  • Ruby is just adorable, with her tendency to geek out over weapons, woobie tendencies, and tiny size.
  • Velvet, her timidity and bashfulness made her a fan-favorite in no time, and her eagerness with both photography and helping her friends leave the impression of a precious bunny.
  • Oscar, being even smaller and younger than Ruby with the same wide-eyed admiration for Hunters and Huntresses, naturally falls into this as well. Just look at him.◊
  • Blake, a Cat Girl that comes across as aloof, but is actually very sweet and overly hard on herself.
  • Penny, a cute android who wants nothing more than to find friends and live a normal life.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • While James Ironwood is presented as Volume 7 and 8's Arc Villain, he starts off as a Well-Intentioned Extremist who genuinely wishes to protect the Kingdom of Atlas from Salem's forces. The moment that cements him as having gone too far is when he cold-bloodedly shoots Oscar, who was just trying to talk him out of abandoning the city of Mantle to a Grimm horde. From that point onward, he's portrayed as having Jumped Off The Slippery Slope, committing such atrocities as murdering councilman Sleet, shooting down ships meant to help Mantle's citizens evacuate to safety, and forcing Penny to come back to his side by threatening to nuke Mantle if she doesn't comply.
  • For many, Neo crossed this when she tortured Ruby to the point of Suicide. Even the writers of the show acknowledged that Neo was Irredeemable as the person she was and had her Ascend to explicitly avoid redeeming her.
• Most Wonderful Sound: Any time Crescent Rose or Ember Celica unfold, cock or fire.

N - Z

• Narm Charm:
  • The first time Adam encounters Blake after the Black Trailer, his first line is delivered with almost no emotion and therefore doesn't even seem to be a question. When he's about to try and murder Blake, the line is supposed to show how far he's fallen and how he can't be reasoned with anymore.
  • In Volume 8, Ren and Nora's discussion while alone is very cheesy, sappy and wouldn't be out of place in a tv drama, works due to the sheer hell these two have been going through emotionally these last two volumes, and just how long they've been denying their feelings. Ren's Anguished Declaration of Love seals the deal, as it turns it into a heartwarming scene as he finally stops pushing people away. And while Nora asks they wait until she can find out who she is without him, it's clear Ren is fine waiting as long as she needs, and that they do love each other; Ren even giving her a boop on the nose as they give each other a Headbutt of Love.
• Never Live It Down:
  • Weiss calls Ruby a dolt once, very early in the first volume. The fandom has made it her catch-phrase and go-to insult whenever anyone, but especially Ruby, annoys her.
  • Jaune is initially introduced as a character who struggles to do anything right, from throwing up in his first introduction because of travel sickness to bumbling through his very first lesson. He only attempts to hit on Weiss a couple of times in the first two volumes but has been defined by the fandom because of his hopeless crush and his terrible attempts to woo her. The fandom portrays him as hitting on her on a daily basis, something that sometimes overlaps with parts of the fandom who prefer portraying the two characters in different ships.
  • Nora eagerly suggests breaking Cardin's legs only once in the entire series as a response to the fact her friend and team-leader, Jaune, is being bullied by Cardin. However, this line is the reason why fanfic writers commonly make Nora comically violent in ways that far exceed her canon character. For the same reason, Cardin is popularly portrayed as having his legs broken in various ways as karmic retribution for his bullying.
  • Yang's voice actor is (in)famous for her pun-making skills and Yang's appearance and personality are similar to her. The fandom, therefore, jokes that Yang is a relentless pun-maker. However, Yang's first pun occurs in Volume 2's first episode, and her total number of puns can be counted with one hand.
  • In Volume 8, Ruby's team is confined to Schnee Manor while they deal with critical injuries, hide from the soldiers who are searching for them, and try to cope with how overwhelmed they feel by the scale of the crisis. Although only one scene involves them drinking tea as they discuss Nora's condition and how they can help the entire kingdom survive, the fandom exaggerates and jokes about them doing nothing but drink tea while other characters are on the front lines trying to save lives, sometimes even roping in Yang into the joke; Yang was one of the front liners, who were themselves captured for a bit by the Ace-Ops.
• Nightmare Retardant: After the release of the volume 4 finale, The FNDM was quick to point out that the Nuckelavee's stretching arms combined with its jerky movements make it look like a demonic inflatable air dancer. The comparison makes the monster go from disturbing to downright goofy for some.
• No Yay: The penultimate episode of Volume 3, "Heroes and Monsters", does this for Blake/Adam. His downright abusive expression of how he'll make Blake suffer for leaving him, not to mention what he does to Yang who tried to save her, has done a lot to turn people away from shipping them. And with Rooster Teeth later officially confirming that their past relationship had been an abusive one, Tauradonna shippers have all but disappeared. See that page's entry for more.
• Older Than They Think:
  • Several years before the series was made, Monty made a short that used "shotgun nunchucks". Both RWBY and the short use the same animation for the fight scenes. There's also a girl in the short who leaves copies of herself behind and dual-wields.
  • Characters in Monty's ''Dead Fantasy'' series use some of the same powers and fight moves that would later be seen in RWBY. (Something very similar to Weiss's time-stopping Semblance shows up here, for example.) In a larger sense, Dead Fantasy serves as a sort of prototype for RWBY's style of combat, in which super-powered heroes engage in a little good-natured sparring with weapons and attacks that would be lethal to ordinary humans.
• One True Threesome:
  • Blake had ship tease in the show with both Sun and Yang across the first five volumes. One solution to the fandom shipping wars between Blake/Sun (Black Sun) and Blake/Yang (Bumblebee) was to create the fairly popular ship Sunny Bees, consisting of all three characters together.
  • Once Volume 5 confirmed that Ilia used to be in love with Blake, threesome ships of Ilia/Blake/Sun and Ilia/Blake/Yang exist. However, the big solution, given the already existing Sunny Bees threesome, was to simply add Ilia into the mix and make it a One True Foursome.
  • Taiyang has two daughters by two different mothers who are two years apart in age. Both of their mothers were in Taiyang's team in school. Instead of arguing about whether Taiyang/Raven or Taiyang/Summer is the better ship, fans went for the threesome. This generated the meme "Entire Team, Qrow" due to there being no hint that Qrow was ever a likely love interest for Taiyang; the joke is that, as the only member left out of the ship, Taiyang must be determined to land Qrow and score the entire team.
  • Ruby Rose is most commonly shipped with Weiss Schnee, her Defrosting Ice Queen partner, and Penny Polendina, a Robot Girl to whom she is the first friend. After a moment in the Volume 7 finale where both Ruby and Weiss cuddle up to Penny at the same time to comfort her, Ruby/Penny/Weiss has become a common ship.
• Only the Creator Does It Right: The show was originally advertised as an animation created by Monty Oum, who had built up a reputation around having a signature style of choreographing flashy, high-speed fights. For fans who follow the show because it's a Monty Oum creation, the quality of fights and the development of his original vision are both extremely important. Ever since Monty's untimely death after Volume 2's end, there have been fans who feel no subsequent animators can do the fights justice and that the original vision of the show has been lost. Sadly, there are numerous fans who seem to think that Monty did everything in the show, thus they consider the "original vision" to be everything in-series.
• Periphery Demographic: The show is aimed towards adults, but attracted a sizable fanbase of children during the early years. The creators acknowledged this in a message that doubled as a warning that the show was going to get darker in Volume 3. A possible explanation for the RWBY Chibi spin-off is born out of a desire to provide this younger audience (and also adult viewers who were drawn to the light-hearted comedy and slice-of-life aspects of RWBY's earlier episodes) with a non-alienating alternative to the Darker and Edgier direction the main show is taking.
• Preemptive Shipping: Four promotional trailers introducing the titular team created White Rose (Ruby/Weiss) after the second trailer dropped, based on personality assumptions. A Pair the Spares ship for the unreleased trailers became Bumblebee (Blake/Yang) once released; the Black Trailer also created Tauradonna (Blake/Adam). The show shattered White Rose assumptions, leaving it just one of many ships, and revealed Adam was a Psycho Ex-Boyfriend, killing off interest in Tauradonna completely. Bumblebee, however, became the dominant ship, supported by its two LGBTQ+ voice actresses, and increasingly teased from Volume 2 onwards. Its popularity overshadows Black Sun (Blake/Sun; teased between Volumes 1-5); shipping wars were solved via "Sunny Bees" (Blake/Yang/Sun). Bumblebee is upgraded from Ship Tease to Official Couple in Volume 9.
• Platonic Writing, Romantic Reading: Qrow and Clover were initially supposed to be antagonistic towards each other and only become friends over the course of Volume 7. However, fans mistakenly thought the pair was being set up for a romance due to several unplanned events that forced writer Eddy Rivas to acknowledge with hindsight that it could have been better handled: the voice actors so underplayed the early antagonism that fans didn't realise they were supposed to dislike each other initially; certain animators improvised scene animation to make the characters' body-language more flirtatious than intended; and the official RWBY social media account pushed the pairing via the use of Ship Tease. This created a backlash from the LGBTQ community, who felt like they'd been queerbaited when Clover's death ended the opportunity for some rare male representation in a show dominated by females.
• Portmanteau Couple Name: The fandom mostly uses Idiosyncratic Ship Naming to create colour themes, but a few characters have combined names instead, for example: Arkos (Jaune Arc/Pyrrha Nikos); Renora (Ren/Nora); Renorarc (Ren/Nora/Jaune Arc); IronQrow (Ironwood/Qrow). Popular portmanteau alternatives to idiosyncratic options include: Neiss (Neptune/Weiss); Emercury (Emerald/Mercury); Pyrruby (Pyrrha/Ruby). There have also been a few joke ship names, such as S.S. Arse (Jaune Arc/Ruby Rose) and Blang (Blake/Yang).
• Realism-Induced Horror:
  • One of the main reasons Adam is considered one of the show's scarier villains is because he comes off as all too real in some respects. When one strips away the fantastic elements of the show's in-universe prejudices, Adam is a terrorist with views and goals that are radical even by his organization's standards, who carries out brutal attacks on innocent people to sow fear and further his goals, and who tries to drag his organization to even greater extremism. In spite of some of his more cartoonish aspects, like his edgy fashion sense and over-the-top anger, he still cuts disturbingly close to real-life terrorists in how he descends into further and further extremism, especially when coupled with his equally-disturbing obsession with Blake.
  • In the months following the loss of her arm, Yang lingers at home, spending her time in front of the television or doing household chores. Taiyang tries to cheer her up, but she remains quiet and moody. He goes out of his way to find out if it's possible to get her a replacement limb, but she doesn't want anything to do with it. When she's in the kitchen, she drops a glass and freaks out as she suffers a flashback to the moment she lost her arm. Unknown to her, Taiyang witnesses this and disappears silently into another room. In a supernatural fantasy show, the scenes where he is forced to helplessly watch the depression and PTSD that follows major limb loss overwhelming his once vibrant and larger-than-life daughter unfold in a very real, human way.
• Seasonal Rot: Volume 5 is considered drastically inferior to other volumes due to budget issues that resulted in a lack of well-animated action and narration that was slowed by over-reliance on exposition, unnecessary dialogue, and the main plot occurring in a single room for most of the volume. While the creators acknowledged the concerns, and the fans largely agree that later volumes have improved, there remain trust issues about how house-based storylines are handled; in particular, Ruby's team in Volume 8 being confined to a house for several episodes while they deal with critical injuries, leaving other characters to deal with the Big Bad.
• Self-Fanservice: Fan artists tend to make the female cast bustier than they actually are in canon. There is also a trend of drawing the members Team RWBY — Yang in particular — with more muscular builds to match their warrior lifestyles.
• Ship Mates:
  • Within the fandom, it's not uncommon to find Ruby/Weiss shippers that also support Blake/Yang. This isn't limited to Team RWBY members; supporters of Jaune/Pyrrha and/or Ren/Nora also exist. The trend continues even if characters are mixed and matched; for example, Ruby/Blake shippers often support Weiss/Yang.
  • If someone ships Sun/Neptune, it's a good bet that they were and are big fans of a pairing of Blake and one of her teammates (usually Yang) first.
  • Most people split Team JNPR into Jaune/Pyrrha and Nora/Ren, with double dates being a common fanfiction setup.
  • The major ships involving Ruby tend to be very protective of her. White Rose (Ruby/Weiss) is the most popular next to Nuts and Dolts (Ruby/Penny), Lancaster (Ruby/Jaune) also became popular in Volume 4 and Rose Garden (Oscar/Ruby) in Volume 5 skyrocketed, and the disagreements within the shipping camps are intense at times.
• The Ship's Motor:
  • The four prequel trailers led to the fandom creating sexual orientations for Team RWBY based on assumptions about characterisation and preferred ships. The Red and White Trailers led to a preference for the White Rose ship (Ruby and Weiss), and the Black and Yellow trailers led to a preference for the Bumblebee ship (Blake and Yang). When Volume 1 indicated Yang may like boys and began a Ship Tease arc between Blake and Sun (Black Sun), the fanon evolved to portray Blake and Yang as bisexual to allow both Bumblebee and Black Sun to exist in the fandom; this was helped by the voice actresses being bisexual and later volumes introducing Ship Tease between Blake and Yang. Ruby and Weiss are sometimes depicted as being unaware of their sexuality yet, especially Weiss who has had canon hero worship of Pyrrha and her memetic status as a "Useless Lesbian". Due to a canonical apparent lack of attraction towards any characters, Ruby is sometimes depicted as an aromatic asexual.
  • Many fics about Ren and Nora have them platonically sleeping together. This helps to ramp up sexual tension if the fic is romantic, but it's also an extrapolation of the very close partnership they have in canon.
• Ship-to-Ship Combat:
  • There’s a lot of tension between shippers of Bumblebee (Blake/Yang) and Black Sun (Blake/Sun), especially after the focus on Blake and Yang's friendship at the end of Volume 3 and the release of what was seen as a Black Sun-themed song "Not Fall In Love With You" gave both fandoms hopes for canonization. Williams has since stated at NYCC that it was a generic love song from his boy-band days and not dedicated to any particular character. Escalation factors include the Volume 4 soundtrack, where "Like Morning Follows Night" can be interpreted as a ship song for Sun and Blake while "Bmblb" is interpreted as Yang singing about her feelings for Blake, though the latter apparently didn't get creative consultation from M&K according to Blake's VA. The shipping war has eventually become Bumblebee vs any other ship with Blake or Yang that gets popular, such as Freezerburn (Weiss/Yang), Catmeleon (Blake/Ilia), and Monochrome (Weiss/Blake).
  • Not as bad as the above mentioned but some small parts of the Renora ship can be quite vocal about their dislike of the Martial Arcs (Jaune/Ren) ship, which has gained quite a bit of support with Volume 4's increased focus on Jaune and Ren's relationship. It's not all that uncommon for Martial Arcs shippers to receive nasty messages on Tumblr about how Renora is clearly superior and canon already. The Martial Arcs side of this rarely retaliates though because the Renora fans massively outnumber them.
• Ships That Pass in the Night:
  • Ilia and Weiss have never interacted on-screen. However, they are a relatively popular pairing due to them being the same age and having both attended high-class Atlesian schools; this makes it possible for them to have attended the same school together, which the fan pairing runs with.
  • Winter and May don't come into direct contact during the Atlas Arc, but are a popular ship due to both having similar ages and backgrounds as Atlesian elites who are estranged from their families. They are commonly depicted as having been friends or lovers before May moved to Mantle. May being a Mantle-rights activist and Winter enforcing Atlesian oppression of Mantle also creates story hooks for friends-to-enemies-to-lovers scenarios; some stories also play with Old Friend, New Gender twists.
  • Jaune Arc and Velvet Scarlatina are a surprisingly popular ship even though both characters have never interacted. A common reason given is both were bullied by Cardin, and thus a common scenario is Jaune helping Velvet deal with Cardin in some way, leading her to develop a crush on him.
• Shocking Moments:
  • In Volume 7, the airship transporting Tyrian back to Atlas produces a very shocking twist. Ironwood's order to arrest Qrow leads to a conflict between Robyn, Qrow and Clover that allows Tyrian to kill the pilot and crash the ship. With Robyn unconscious, Tyrian obtains freedom while Clover and Qrow fight. When Qrow tries subduing Tyrian, Clover keeps attacking Qrow. The first shock is Tyrian's offer to team-up with Qrow to subdue Clover actually being accepted by Qrow to produce a very unexpected Enemy Mine partnership. The second shock is Clover and Qrow ending their fight in an argument that distracts them both from what Tyrian is doing: killing Clover with Qrow's weapon.
  • In Volume 8, a new Grimm is introduced in a way that leaves everyone in-universe and out-of-universe equally stunned. The Hound is capable of thinking and strategising like a person. It stalks Oscar until the perfect ambush moment presents, then brutally knocks him out seconds later. It tanks anything that's thrown at it, kicks Ren and Yang's asses, and uses Oscar's body as a Human Shield. Ren tells the Hound to give Oscar back, but the creature shapeshifts its throat and retorts "No".
• Signature Scene: The show's alpha and beta teams coming together in Volume 1, Chapter 8 to take on an enormous Death Stalker and Giant Nevermore. This fight was the defining moment of Volume 1, and remains the scene people recommend for anyone who doesn't know if they want to watch the show.
• Signature Series Arc: The original Beacon arc from Volumes 1-3. Not only did it introduce the world and characters and was the only arc with input from Monty Oum prior to his passing, but its culmination in the climax of Volume 3 which featured Beacon's destruction, Yang losing an arm, Ozpin and Pyrrha being killed off, Team RWBY splitting apart and the true Big Bad being revealed is widely considered a Tough Act to Follow for every subsequent arc finale.
• Spoiled by the Format:
  • The layout of Rooster Teeth's website ensures that thumbnails for a volume's future episodes can be seen by viewers who have yet to reach that episode. Most volumes have at least one that damages reveals or plot twists that the volume is building towards. The most significant spoilers are below:
    • The goal of the Volume 2 White Fang plot line is exposed in the Chapter 12 thumbnail. What they're up to is the big mystery of the volume, but the thumbnail reveals that it's a Grimm invasion.
    • Certain twists from Volume 3's finale are partially revealed in the Chapter 13 thumbnail. The appearance of the Wyvern is supposed to be a shocking moment, but it's visible right outside Ozpin's office while Cinder's standing inside Ozpin's office; this gives away both the Wyvern and the fact a second Grimm invasion occurs in Volume 3.
    • The Volume 5 Spring Maiden's reveal is spoiled by the Chapter 13 thumbnail. Vernal being a decoy for the real Spring Maiden is spoiled by the thumbnail showing a close-up of Raven's face with the signature Maiden fire streaming from her eyes. This is made worse with the Chapter 14 thumbnail, where it immediately reveals that Raven would win her fight against Cinder.
    • There is an unexpected character appearance in Volume 6 that is spoiled by the Chapter 11 thumbnail. Adam's return to sabotage Blake's ability to help the heroes against Cordovin is the plot twist of Chapter 10. However, the Chapter 11 thumbnail shows Adam and Blake fighting.
    • An unexpected character appearance in the first episode of Volume 7 is spoiled by the Chapter 6 thumbnail. Penny's return to the show is built up to a reveal in the first episode, but her presence in the Chapter 6 thumbnail immediately gives the game away. And an early chapter in Volume 8 reveals that she's the next Winter Maiden due to the same tell-tale 'flames from the eyes' animation.
  • As with RT, Crunchyroll's website ensures all the thumbnails for a volume are exposed at the same time. While most of the RT thumbnail spoilers are resolved, not all are and some new ones crop up:
    • Volume 2 uses the same thumbnail as for Rooster Teeth's wesbite, thereby spoiling the goal of the Volume 2 plotline long before the final episode is reached.
    • Volume 3 resolves the Rooster Teeth spoilers, but the final episode's thumbnail makes the same mistake as the Volume 2's final thumbnail, giving away the climax of the volume.
    • Volume 7 has multiple thumbnails giving away the same character reveal that occurs on the Rooster Teeth website. Penny's return to the show is therefore obvious before the volume can be watched.
    • Volume 9's original thumbnail gave away the appearance of an unexpected character in the episode. When Crunchyroll corrected this, the second thumbnail gave away even more spoilers. They corrected this again to a generic image of Ruby at the beginning of the episode that spoils nothing. The first thumbnail revealed Roman appears in the episode and the second revealed other deceased characters like Pyrrha and Penny also appear in the episode.
• Starboarding: Some Qrow/Summer shippers believe (or like to portray) that Qrow was a Romantic Runner-Up, in love with Summer but that decided to step aside and let Tai be with her, both because she liked him more and because of his own semblance.
• Stoic Woobie: Lie Ren. Despite being very calm and polite most of the time, his backstory is easily among the most traumatizing of the main characters: during one night, a devastatingly powerful Grimm invaded his village; during said invasion, his mother died before his eyes and his father died attempting to give him time to survive; the trauma awoke his Semblance in time for him to save himself and Nora, which leaves them as the two sole survivors of the entire village. Volume 4 makes it clear that the same Grimm that killed his father and destroyed his village is back and just a few meters ahead of him. His bottling of emotions and trauma become a problem in the Atlas Arc, as he struggles with the overwhelming truth that Salem cannot be killed; in Volume 8, his unbottling leads to a Semblance evolution and a much better mindset; now he is The Empath, able to discuss his and others' emotions in a healthier way.
• Superlative Dubbing: The Japanese dub is seen as one of the better language tracks of the series, as it brings an All-Star Cast of great and well known voice actors to the table and the delivery is fairly good.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: The intro to "Not Fall in Love With You" sounds a lot like "Looking for the Magic" in a higher key.
• Take That, Scrappy!: After spending Jaune's arc bullying and forcing Jaune to take part in his vicious schemes, Jaune stands up to Cardin at the end of "Forever Fall". When an Ursa interrupts them, Cardin's team abandons them, leaving Cardin's life to be saved by the very boy he's been bullying. His team is later demolished in a sparring match when Pyrrha single-handedly defeats them.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • A lot of fans felt that, aside from Sun himself, Team SSSN has been criminally underused, as they mostly show up as secondary characters, with two team members, Scarlet and Sage, being only shown in a couple of episodes despite showing up in the opening title for Volume 2 and being one of the first teams Monty designed, even earlier than team JNPR. Scarlet being the one openly gay male character in the series only to have been written out of the show years before he was outed made the reception to his LGBT status colder than it would have been had he been more fleshed out. Neptune gets more scenes but is still a secondary character who only appeared in Volumes 2 and 3 with a quick cameo in Volume 6. Things were exasperated in 2020 when the light novel Before the Dawn came out, which promised to flesh out the team after years of waiting, only for the results to be contentious at best, with Sage still getting no proper character.
  • There is a widespread complaint within the fandom that Sienna Khan was too underused after being introduced in Volume 5. In her introductory scene, she displayed an interesting character design, combining Faunus traits and tiger-striped tattoos with a detailed fashion design that made her stand out from the outset. When she revealed her motives for turning the White Fang militant and how her philosophy of achieving equality through violence actually works, she introduced a moral ambiguity that the White Fang appeared to be lacking in Volumes 1-4. However, the focus in Volume 5 is on Adam's black-and-white view of the world and his morally unambiguous opinion about humanity instead of exploring the grey area between violence and peaceful protest that Sienna's outlook introduces. Adam murders Sienna in the very same scene that introduces her precisely so that he can turn the White Fang to his cause instead of Sienna's, leaving the fandom's interest in the moral issues Sienna introduces unsatisfied. In acknowledgement of the fandom's criticism about how they used Sienna, the creators deliberately designed the Volume 6 Character Short to give Sienna a significant role, introducing her fighting style and weapon choices, and revealing how she was involved in inadvertently setting up Adam's dark path.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • The White Fang racism plot was set up at the beginning of the show to not just be important for Blake's background, but also for Weiss's, given her family's role in perpetrating Faunus inequality in Atlas. The writers acknowledged they struggled to handle racism well, and eventually wrapped up the storyline at the end of Volume 5, with Blake's connection (Adam) being wrapped up at the end of Volume 6. However, the wrap-up reveals the importance of Atlas and Weiss's family to Adam's story and the earlier racism plot just before the Atlas Arc begins; this suggests the storyline ended too early, shying away from an on-screen exploration of its origins in favour of a storyline about Mantle's economic inequality with Atlas.
  • In Volume 6, Team RWBY learns the Awful Truth about Salem first, and Team JNR learns it later on. Both occasions focus on their reactions rather than Oscar, who receives abuse as characters lash out at Ozpin. Oscar disappearing after Jaune attacks him seems like a set-up for exploring Oscar's reaction and Loss of Identity situation, but instead is a plot device for Team JNR — Jaune especially — to come to terms with the loss of Pyrrha while Oscar is handled off-screen. Although his storyline kicks off in Volume 7, Volume 6 appears to set up and then avoid a storyline about how Oscar comes to the decision to accept his fate and find his own place in the team, one that's independent of his connection to Ozpin.
• Too Cool to Live:
  • From the beginning of the show, Ozpin is searching for his mysterious Guardian. He describes to Qrow a maiden who is "strong, intelligent, caring..." and "most importantly, she's ready". Unfortunately, Ozpin's search for the perfect warrior ensures she's too perfect to survive long in this world. Pyrrha is introduced as an ace warrior with global fame, a child prodigy who has won the Mistral tournaments four years in a row — and she's only seventeen. She's kind and compassionate to everyone who needs support, she doesn't judge Jaune for his weaknesses and instead helps him find a path to overcome them. Ozpin regards her as the perfect candidate to become the next Fall Maiden, a person who needs to be kind, compassionate and capable of taking on crushing burdens to protect the world against an Ancient Evil. It brings her into direct conflict with Cinder, who is in the process of stealing the Fall Maiden's power for herself, and results in her death by Cinder's hands.
  • Qrow finds some solace from his Semblance in Volume 7 when he is teamed with Atlas Ace operative Clover, whose controllable Semblance of good fortune helps to counter Qrow's own uncontrollable Semblance of misfortune. Out of all the Ace operatives, Clover is easily the most friendly of the group towards RWBY and their allies, and works the best with them. When they are forced against one another due to Ironwood's orders, he's initially one of the most rational in attempting to settle matters peacefully. But ultimately he is forced to fight his new friend, and he is murdered by Tyrian with Qrow's weapon, who had been egging on their conflict the whole time.
• Tough Act to Follow: The quality of the animation and choreography of all the fights in newer seasons following Monty's death is often a point of contention among the FNDM, as many fans have said that many fights in Volume 3 were lacklustre compared to the flow, momentum, and impact that resulted from Monty's touch. Many fans have pointed out that Monty kind of set the bar a little high and think RT is doing an okay job, while others feel the fights in newer seasons leave much to be desired. Volumes 4 and 5 were also criticized by many fans for having fight scenes that were perceived as far less complex or fluid than even Volume 3.
  • The climax of Volume 3, the Fall of Beacon, is widely held up as the best climax for any story arc, with fans often complaining that similar incidents such as the Fall of Haven and the Fall of Atlas don't quite measure up. Many believe that they should have, as with the Fall of Beacon, happened three seasons into the arc rather than two.
• Trans Audience Interpretation:
  • In the Atlas Arc, Nora Valkyrie wears an outfit consisting of the colors white, blue, and pink, which are also the colors of the trans pride flag, which led to many headcanons that she's a trans woman. It helps that her childhood self seen in volume 4 is androgynous enough to not completely joss the idea, and the fact that she's an orphan means she could have easily introduced herself by her chosen name to Ren.
  • Neopolitan, as revealed in Roman Holiday, was raised under a different name, until she got away from her abusive parents and reinvented herself as the Neopolitan seen in the show. This, along with her semblance letting her change her appearance at will (something many trans people would love to have), makes it common for trans fans to project onto her.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: Ozpin in Volumes 6-7. He didn't tell the group that the Relics attract Grimm or that Salem is immortal and apparently can't be killed. However, the group only learns the latter by watching his greatest regrets and mistakes play out in front of them, including having to watch the love of his life become a monster and his children die. Being forced to relive the trauma drives him to tears; in spite of knowing this though, Yang and Qrow (and later Jaune) tear into him while the others just watch in disapproval. Although he tried to explain why he kept secrets, they don't let him speak, resulting in them denouncing him just as he feared. A lot of fans, therefore, think the group is too hard on Ozpin, and that he was justified in his behavior, which is reinforced during Volume 7. Namely after Ruby repeats Ozpin's lie to Ironwood, and Oscar later admits that Ozpin's true fear was that the truth would destroy people's hope, which has been the case for almost every character who found out: Raven, Leo, Qrow, and Ironwood.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic:
  • RWBY and Qrow's collective actions towards Ozpin when the Awful Truth is revealed in Volume 6. While they have every right to be angry, the depth of their aggression towards him shows no regard for Oscar's innocence as Ozpin's host, or the fact that they've been shown such a personal, tragic back story that Ozpin has been reduced to tears right in front of them: Qrow punches Oscar as he disowns Ozpin; and Yang's rage is complicated by the audience not knowing whether she's ever revealed the secret she's keeping about Raven. Their behavior towards Ozpin is exacerbated in Volume 7 when Ruby decides to keep the same secret from Ironwood that Ozpin kept from them, leading to Ironwood eventually turning on them the way they turned on Ozpin, and at most Ruby is simply questioned on her decision or the others express frustration at the secret-keeping in general. This is eventually rectified in Volume 8: having gone through two volumes of learning what it really means to place trust in others and dealing with the consequences of keeping their own secrets, Teams RWBY and JNR are able to forgive him for not trusting them with the truth about Salem and accept his request to trust him once again.
  • During Volume 4, when Blake ran away to return to Menagerie, Sun was discovered to have followed after her. Following a fight against the Sea Feilong, Blake slaps Sun across the face. At other moments throughout their time at Menagerie, Blake continues yelling at Sun and upon accidentally interrupting a moment between her and Ghira, she slaps Sun numerous times and when he tries showing her a picture on his Scroll of a White Fang member, she throws it into the trees. Even upon waking up after being stabbed by Ilia, Blake yells at him. While her yelling was most likely intended to be Anger Born of Worry, fans felt she came off as rude and unconcerned about Sun possibly dying. It was pointed out how Blake acted like an abuser, with Arryn saying that abuse victims can act like their abusers. Although Sun eventually calls out Blake for her selfish behaviour, some fans don't feel it's enough; they view Blake as an unlikeable character who is as abusive as Adam and undeserving of either Sun or Yang.
  • At the beginning of Volume 8, Yang's argument about how to deal with Atlas and Mantle's plight leaves many fans finding it hard to side with her due to actions she took in Volume 7. When Yang questions Ruby's leadership abilities, she insists on saving Mantle while Ruby opts for completing Amity Tower to warn Remnant about Salem. While both plans are carried out, fans struggled to sympathize with Yang because her and Blake's decision to leak the Amity information to Robyn contributed to Ironwood turning against the heroes; this was done without Ruby's knowledge nor her consent, making Yang seem like she's deflecting blame onto Ruby.
• The Un-Twist: After all the subtle and unsubtle hints that Blake is a Faunus, it was theorized that she was not a Faunus herself, but merely connected to them in some way. Turns out, no, she really is a Cat Faunus.
• Values Dissonance: The different cultural norms between the US and Japan means that Japanese fans sometimes struggle with events, character behaviours and decisions made within the show, often mentioning that the show or characters come across as "very American" to them. Examples include:
  • It is common for some of the female characters like Ruby and Nora to take a "crab stance" when excited or battle-ready; their knees and toes splay outwards, which is regarded as inappropriate by Japanese fans. In Japanese media, girls will instead splay their feet, while keeping their knees locked together.
  • Ozpin's Volume 2 diversity speech generated comment among Japanese viewers because Japanese society tends to value conformity and not standing out from your peers.
  • In Volume 3, Nora belches loudly after eating ramen. While this is considered bad etiquette in general, it doesn't work as a joke in Japan, so the dub changed it to a modest "Guhhh".
  • At the end of Volume 3, Japanese viewers observed that Ruby telling Yang she loved her wouldn't commonly occur in Japanese society as such expressions are rarely used.
  • During dinner in Volume 5, Ruby gestures and points at Ren with her chopsticks; this is extremely rude behaviour in Japan, so many Japanese fans found the scene uncomfortable to watch.
  • Blake's Volume 6 Declaration of Protection to Yang comes across as very romantic to Japanese viewers. Western reactions tend to regard Yang's offence as being about the implication she can't protect herself whereas Japanese reactions tend to be confused about why Yang would be offended at all.
• Viewer Name Confusion:
  • Jaune's name is sometimes mistaken for the similarly sounding "John" or the similarly spelt "Juane". The fandom's confusion was even lampshaded in the Atlas Arc with a joke about Marrow struggling to get Jaune's name right in Volume 7, and him calling Jaune "Juane" on one occasion in Volume 8.
  • There was confusion over whether Neo's name was 'Neopolitan' or 'Neo Politan', as information about it tended to be contradictory and the characters only referred to her as 'Neo'. The artbook eventually confirmed her name was 'Neopolitan', which was further canonized in Volume 7 when Nora exclaimed "Neopolitan!".
• Viewer Pronunciation Confusion: Weiss Schnee's name comes from German to reflect her Snow White connections. However, the Standard German pronunciation of "weiss" is "veiss". This pronunciation is heard in the White Trailer, but is never used again in the main show. Fans were confused about what pronunciation was correct for her, until Monty pointed out that the show is an interpretive world and that Germany doesn't exist in the setting. It still confuses people who are new to the show, but fans generally settle into the show's pronunciation once they're used to it.
• Visual Effects of Awesome:
  • For Volume 3, the face rigs were severely updated across the board. This allows for a far greater variety of expressions than in past volumes. This is evident right from Episode 1.
  • From Volume 4 onwards, the team switched from using Poser to Maya for the animation software. Although the opening credits are regarded as having clumsy movements and a narmy Blake-Adam confrontation, the episodes themselves use a gorgeous cel-shaded artwork with plenty of visual treats to spare.
  • The animation used for Volume 5, while minor in comparison, is noteworthy when they manage to capture a look of pure terror on Weiss' face when she's pinned down by Beowolves during her character short. It also focusses heavily on the lifelike tree canopies while Yang is riding through the forest in the fifth episode, as tree design underwent a massive upgrade with new software for creating better-looking plants.
• Vocal Minority: While Adam has attained Draco in Leather Pants status, it's only for a very vocal minority of the FNDM. Most see him either as the show presents him, a not so well intentioned stalker, or as wasted potential.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: The show initially caused confusion when it first aired as it was described by Burnie Burns and others as being something they could watch with their kids, thus favoured no swearing and Bloodless Carnage. However, in Volume 3, they released a message to the fandom asking parents/guardians to vet episodes before letting children watch it as the show was always meant to get darker once the plot kicked off. From Volume 4, violence, betrayal, mild profanity began increasing as the stakes became ever more dangerous, with Volume 8 even including on-screen torture.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Political?: The White Fang, a Western Terrorists group that gives a bad name to an established minority group. Related, Weiss, a character represented by the color white, is presented as a racist, while Blake, who is represented by black, is a former member of the group. It hurts that exposition in episode 16 reveals that despite Faunus officially being recognized as equal, they are still commonly mistreated. Even worse, it's mentioned that Schnee industries used "Faunus labor" and with the way it was said and how Blake mentioned back in episode 2 that the company was at the center of a lot of controversy, it's implied that the workers are either overworked, underpaid, or have poor safety conditions. It really does seem similar to how slavery was outlawed after the American Civil War, but not long after the Jim Crow laws were passed, creating more or less slavery in all but name. There is also a comparison between the Schnee dust company and the real-life deBeers diamond company, which uses questionable labor practices in their African mines. The two companies even have Germanic names.
• Woolseyism:
  • The Japanese dub includes a little something extra for Yang. What does she say when unleashing a flurry of punches on an enemy? Why "ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA!!", of course!
  • Within Korean fandom, the term "Faunus" translated as "Suu-in" (수인/獸人), which literally means "human with beastly characteristics"/"anthropomorphic animal" or simply "furry".
• WTH, Costuming Department?: From Volume 7, Jaune's appearance is altered to give him a more mature appearance. He is given short blond hair, skin-tight jeans and top, heavy knee-high boots, and a more Heroic Build appearance overall. The fandom's response wasn't to regard his new appearance as cool or badass, but to instead view it as a walking Chad meme — a reaction that the creators admitted took them by surprise.

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