YMMV / The RWBY Loops

• Abandon Shipping: The thread OP was likely hoping for this concerning Ruby/Weiss considering his fixation on Ruby being an "eternal maiden" as noted below, but was ultimately Averted in the end when other writers added her to the Ruby/Penny ship.
• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Ruby and Weiss' insistence that they are not attracted to each other and actively shooting down any thought that they could be. Is it genuine or are they just railing against the notion because they don't want to forced to be together. Ruby for a long while insisted on being an "eternal maiden", rejecting any notion of romance, until she started dating Penny which shows she's not actually opposed to the idea of being with someone. Weiss meanwhile would have a revelation about being attracted to Ruby following the Volume 7 expansions.
  • There's also the idea that they genuinely started as lacking romantic interest in each other but it developed as time went by. The above instances in relation to the duo didn't occur until near the Volume 6 expansions for Ruby and after Volume 7 expansions for Weiss.
• Angst Dissonance: The so-called "War On Baseline", because the Loopers spent so much time whining about Baseline while not actually doing anything about it. Any experienced Looper has the tools to break canon over their knee even in a null loop, that they rarely if ever engaged in this did not earn many sympathy points. It eventually took Alucard stepping in and outright explaining to Weiss how they were more accurately just throwing a tantrum about baseline for any of them to realize just how badly they were screwing up.
• Arc Fatigue: Any of the big plots suffer this thanks to Masterweaver's tendency to try and micromanage everything, but the worst offenders were the Tale of Two Sisters arc for the unending Serial Escalation, the Blake/Yang wedding for the aforementioned micromanagement, and the "War on Baseline" for ultimately ending up as a whole lot of needless angst with nothing to show for it.
• Archive Binge: The RWBY Loops currently stands at roughly 180 chapters, each chapter comprised of various snippets. It is one of the longest entries in all of The Infinite Loops, and can take awhile to catch up on.
• Archive Panic: That length is often the reason why people don't bother reading the compilation.
• Ass Pull: Neo somehow getting away with what she did to Cinder without even the Admins noticing. This was eventually called out on the RWBY Loops thread itself as well as the community thread on SB, and was corrected to Marianne managing to find out.
• Captain Obvious Reveal: Mercury's reveal that he was looping was obvious well beforehand to anyone that was paying attention.
• Fan-Preferred Couple: Blake/Yang AKA Bumblebee given the high populations of its shippers among the writers. All the other ships seem to be too contested to count for this.
• Glurge: Ruby's All-Loving Hero routine is supposed to be inspirational and uplifting, but oftentimes it feels emptier than it should.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • In Chapter 20, Ozpin decides that after the disaster that is the Fall of Beacon, his methods in Baseline of constantly keeping secrets are ineffective, and decides to reveal to the others that he's been a Stealth Looper. While none of the other Loopers are happy to learn this and are understandably distrusting of him, they all accept him and don't let it get in their way. Come Volume 6 however, the exact opposite situation occurs. Volume 6 would heavily deconstruct Ozpin's secretive tendencies, with the protagonists having to force the answers out of him. What they learn he's been hiding is enough for him to become a Broken Pedestal in their eyes, and drives him into a self-imposed exile.
  • Written after the end of Volume 3 and her introduction, the various Loopers of Remnant come up with several ideas to the true identity of Salem, Ozpin in particular worried over some possibilities. Come Volume 6 and nearly three years later, one possibility Ozpin feared would turn out to be true: Salem is his former wife.
  • During the Volume 3 expansions after Roman's death in Baseline, Neo holds Cinder responsible for his death, and spends numerous loops all the way up to the end of the Volume 4 expansions plotting her revenge, slowly trying to drive Cinder insane with nightmares until she's an Empty Shell, only to mess up Slenderman's own attempts at manipulating Cinder, solidifying her mental breakdown and causing the Tale of Two Sisters storyline. Neo's role is eventually found out by Marianne and she's forced to come clean and put on probation by everyone, particularly landing on Cinder's shit list. Come Volume 6, The Bus Came Back for Neo, specifically because she was looking to kill Cinder due to blaming her for Roman's death. This time however, Cinder browbeats Neo into an Enemy Mine with her, convincing her to take her vendetta out on Ruby.
  • During the early volumes, one writer posted a loop where Cinder was an escaped former slave. Come volume eight and the reveal that Cinder was a slave.
  • Volume 9 serves as a massive deconstruction of Ruby's heavily optimistic and constantly smiling attitude, proving the above criticisms about Ruby's All-Loving Hero tendencies to be all too true, with Ruby ending up committing suicide as she hits an emotional rock bottom.
• Heartwarming in Hindsight: Early in the Loops, Yang and Blake become a couple and get married in a massive wedding with various Loopers getting invites. In Volume 9 of the series proper, they get a Relationship Upgrade for real, with it being implied by Word of God that Monty Oum had planned for it way back at the beginning.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Written during the airing of Volume 3, one of the entries in Chapter 17 has the remaining Maidens be characters already introduced, Raven being the Spring Maiden. Come Volume 5, almost two years later, and its revealed that Raven actually is the Spring Maiden.
• Idiosyncratic Ship Naming: Inherits this from the greater RWBY fandom, the biggest examples of which are Bumblebee (Blake/Yang), and Dolts And Bolts (Ruby/Penny or Ruby/Penny/Weiss).
• Jerkass Dissonance: Raven being a bandit queen that leaves her victims behind as fodder for the Grimm is often brushed over or ignored in favor of her trying to make up with Yang, or being more motherly in general.
• Jerks Are Worse Than Villains: Compare Cinder or Neo and Roman's treatment in snips to Jacques Schnee's.
• Memetic Personality Change: RWBY itself has an entire page of these. Ruby gets saddled with the Sad Clown and Stepford Smiler tendencies, as well as a love of cookies (to the point she got turning things into cookies as a looper ability) and weapons. Blake gets the cat qualities overblown, Ozpin the addiction to coffee and over-complicated plans, and you'll find nearly all the others mentioned on the linked index in there somewhere to various degrees.
• More Interesting as a Villain: Cinder, flat out. The ultimate end result of the Tale of Two Sisters arc left her far too wishy-washy in either direction of good and evil, to the point where most writers no longer knew what to do with her.
• Never Live It Down: The thread OP and other frequent posters gleefully bragging that they broke Cinder on the Miscellaneous Loops thread is something that gets brought up repeatedly as an example of their lack of foresight.
• Recurring Fanon Character: There was much back and forth over getting Summer Rose looping, and she even featured in a major arc as a non-Looper, but all of her characterization is completely Fanon.
• Ship-to-Ship Combat: Over Ruby/Penny and Ruby/Weiss...
  • Many of the earliest snips were firmly shipping a potential Ruby/Weiss pairing, including that the intention of the RWBY loops was that each looper was paired with their partner.
  • The pairing was then shot down when Masterweaver introduced the Ruby/Penny relationship, with some early cute moments, only to stop working with it, but the damage was done.
  • Even when a compromise was attempted, with Weiss being added to the Ruby/Penny ship, Masterweaver and a relative newbie made their displeasure known. When both were told they were just complaining about shipping they didn't like, neither returned to the thread.
• Strangled by the Red String: The Ruby/Penny ship felt like this, especially after Masterweaver started it and then did nothing with it. It was to the point where other writers eventually rerailed the ship with the Recalibration arc because it just felt so hollow otherwise.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Many of the later Activations fall under this, but the ones who especially got the shaft were Sun Wukong and Maria Cavalera. Sun only got Activated to try and force some drama with Blake and Yang and was generally forgotten about as Bumblebee ended up the dominant pairing of the thread. Maria wasn't used much and her appearances were mostly one note 'quirky old lady does shenanigans' snips.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The War on Baseline could've been very interesting indeed, if the characters had done any of that warring they were so supposedly intent upon. Nope, instead of actually breaking Baseline over their knees, there was a whole lot of Contemplate Our Navels and angsting about it.
• Toy Ship: Neo and Oscar seemed to be heading in this direction.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: The entire heroic cast and Cinder too during their so called "War Against Baseline", as from outside observers' points of view it looked like needless Wangst that the characters did nothing but whine about.
• Values Dissonance: The subplot regarding Ruby's sexuality works a lot better at its time of release in the mid-2010's than it does in the 2020's. At the time of its release, Ruby claimed she was asexual, but the rest of the loopers were quick to call out that she more accurately just had a Paralyzing Fear of Sexuality and was otherwise capable of sexual attraction, which was proven true when she entered a relationship with Penny and later Weiss, which didn't cause much issue at the time.^*Notable contributor "diesal" was the only one with a notable issue in the original thread on spacebattles, but the general consensus by the majority for a long time was that Ruby was asexual. The second thread would see "SwapAUAnon" raise similar issues, but be met with claims she was never asexual. In an age though where asexuality is much more openly recognized as a legitimate sexual identity like the 2020's, it can make the treatment given to Ruby, by the other loopers and even herself, be seen as more disrespectful to asexual people, for accusing her of being in the closet or misappropriating a term, especially the notion that asexuality could be "self-imposed" as Ruby claimed and treating "asexuality" as something akin to "celibacy". Not helping matters is that later entries made in the 2020's would try to retcon the idea that Ruby was never asexual to begin with and that they never intended so, in spite of the original thread still being up, making it appear more as damage control.^*User "BIOS-Pherecydes" would state the idea she was "asexual" was only an excuse to avoid shipping and was more intended to mean "celibacy", and was thrown out the window after Masterweaver decided to canonize "Nuts and Dolts", with the In-Universe justification for the retcon being that Ruby was in the closet.