RWBY: Ice Queendom

Episode 6

For a split second, I almost thought we were approaching the climax only six episodes into the season, but things obviously aren't going to be that simple. The team gets as close as they ever have to saving our ice queen, but the deeper they go into her mind, the more confused they are and the less power they seem to have. We see Blake, Yang, and Ruby's insecurities creep up in relation to Weiss with her dream self commenting on everyone's faults. I was surprised that some of them traced back to as early as the first episode, such as how Yang felt insecure as an older sister and how she might've negatively impacted Ruby's development, or how Weiss let slip that she wanted Ruby to understand her more than anybody else. The three girls are once again forced to retreat, and it's here that I think we really hit the most pivotal turning point of the season.

All three girls attempt to rationalize on their own about what's the best course forward, and some of the conclusions they arrived at are actually quite interesting. My favorite was definitely the conversation between Sun and Blake; the latter is clearly bothered by the fact that Weiss seems the most hostile towards her in her dream, but Sun suggests that maybe part of the reason why that's the case is because Blake is the one person that Weiss can't seem to get out of her head. It doesn't seem like anyone has quite made the connection that Weiss is the way that she is because of her upbringing, but she's clearly in rebellion with herself. Blake in a lot of ways seems to represent the opposite of everything Weiss had been taught about the Faunus race, so if her dream world is supposed to represent a dystopian fortress imposed on her by her family, then the fact that she wants Blake to be left out or the fact that she wants Yang and Ruby to be kept away somewhere private could very well be borne out of a desire to protect them. She doesn't want her friends to be touched or tainted by her, but the only way she can think of expressing that is through her rather twisted sense of hostility.

I must admit that I find it a little odd and surprising that Ice QUEENDOM is also introducing Jaune to help out the crew for the latter half of the season. I guess it sort of makes sense narratively that a person who's already overcome this type of Grimm would be able to navigate things better, albeit with its own risk involved. It just kind of came out of the left field for me because the show is already doing such a good job for team RWBY's dynamic, and while Jaune isn't a bad character or anything, this doesn't feel like his story to get involved in. To be fair, this was probably one of my bigger complaints about the character in the original series as well. It can work, but I'm just a bit worried that his presence might end up taking away more than it ends up adding. Still, all of the building blocks are in place for our main characters to go through some major relationship developments, so now we just have to see how everything plays out.

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RWBY: Ice Queendom is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.