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This Week in Anime
The Politics of RWBY: Ice Queendom

by Nicholas Dupree & Christopher Farris,

The original web series gets a fresh coat of paint and unique story beats in its first major anime adaptation. You can read more about the the efforts the staff made to bring RWBY: Ice Queendom to life in our interview with executive producer Mitsutoshi Kubota, scriptwriter Tow Ubukata, character designer huke, and Good Smile Company's CEO Takanori Aki. Nick and Chris check out the series reimagining and its sick references to Cool Boarders 2.

This series is streaming on Crunchyroll

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network.
Spoiler Warning for discussion of the series ahead.


@Lossthief @BeeDubsProwl @NickyEnchilada @vestenet

Chris
Nick, I don't know about you, but I'm worried the current crop of modern anime might be losing its luster for me. I want to rekindle the love I had for the aesthetic and energy of the medium, and maybe the best way to do that is to revisit an earlier phase. To return to the simpler times in the far-off past...of 2013.
Nick
Alright, I've got my iPod Mini loaded up with Daft Punk's latest album and the other 3.9 gigabytes are dedicated to sick anime wallpapers my friend made in GIMP. Let's get down to business, Team TWIA!
That's right, everyone's favorite western-originating web-series for weebs at last has its own actual anime. RWBY: Ice Queendom brings all those color-coded kids together for a new* adventure. This one's animated by Studio SHAFT, in keeping with the theme of things that had their heyday pass nearly a decade ago.

*Sort of. Eventually. We'll get to it.

It's certainly one of the most unique productions I've seen, on paper anyway. There have been the occasional western property that got an anime or manga adaptation, especially in the 2000s when the US market was bubbling up. I still remember middle school me being shocked to find out there was an official Cirque Du Freak manga.

But RWBY is probably the first series I can think of that started off so blatantly trying to be like an anime that eventually made the leap to a full Japanese TV production.

For all the things I could say about the overall quality of the originating RWBY series (which is still going, mind!), I must give fair play to the late, great Monty Oum. The dude did what all of us had dreamed of doing since we were 12: He actually got to just make his own anime, and for all that show's awkward walk cycles and specific flavors of 2010's cringe, you can feel that love for the personal creation. I like to think Oum, at least, would be happy at the idea of his baby making this jump, with that headlining studio and big-name artists contributing ending cards.
I have a lot I could say about the three seasons and change I watched of the original show, most of it...less than complimentary. But if nothing else I won't say no to any excuse to get more Yoshitoshi ABe art in 2022.

Speaking of 2013 nostalgia, I'm remembering a time when I wanted to see Despera happen.
Or a time when you were imagining how amazing-looking a Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer anime would be.
Further proof that nostalgia is a sucker's game, which is why RWBY basically being torn out of the pages of every 13-year-old anime dork's doodle notebook is a funny quirk, but not enough for me to actually like it as a professional entertainment product.

Sure, if I was a teenager in 2013 I would totally have had a crush on Blake, but now as an adult I can just envy her eye shadow game

Truly, revisiting our past is about realizing how much we've actually grown up. Anyway, for those of you out there that did miss out on that initiating web-series, don't worry, because Ice Queendom is happy to lay out the beginning of it for you across its first three episodes here!


The best part of this for me was that, due to the haphazard way information was dispensed in the original RWBY, SHAFT necessarily had to include adaptations of trailers in this introductory set.
Honestly they didn't even need to do that much. RWBY's premise is going to be familiar to anyone who's read a shonen jump manga since 1995. Blah blah world with magic monsters yadda yadda monster hunting school etc etc cute girls with big weapons themed after fairy tales. Bada bing bada boom, you're Rweady to Rwck.
The first 'Season' of the original RWBY barely ran longer than this three-episode premiere here, but I still think Ice Queendom's treatment of the material benefits from trimming a lot of the screwing-around-at-school bits to concentrate on setting up all the team formations and monster-fighting combat tests that will always be the main appeal. Some things are still missed though, like the legendary scene of Ruby awkwardly scarfing down armfuls of polygonal cookies.

Thank god they still find a moment to let us know how much she likes books, though.

Well of course! How could she not like such incredibly on-the-nose metaphors?
Man, good to know RWBY can still be just as blunt as I remember it. I sure hope Ice Queendom's later plot points don't devolve into even more ham-fisted symbolism!
With dialogue like this? You know subtlety is their forte.
Yyyyyeah, despite some of the opener's better decisions, it still replicates RWBY's formative troubles with its face-first approach to communicating themes and tackling issues. Meaning the third episode may have to awkwardly cut off the robotic reveal and resulting cool fight for Penny, but they're still sure to make time for the series' always-appreciated fantasy racism subplot.
There's rarely a time when a fantasy racism plot isn't some kind of clumsy, but man is RWBY's bad. Its conception of prejudice is entirely based on the question of whether furries are all innocent souls or terrorists, and it's communicated through the haughty ojou-sama character deciding in an afternoon to stop being racist.

Which only ends up resulting in another awkward element of this show's odd combination remake/side-story status, since despite supposedly getting over it here, Weiss's anti-Faunus attitude still ends up being a motivating factor of her mind-palace interactions with Blake once the Ice Queendom part of Ice Queendom kicks in.
Honestly I do not get the thought process here. What fan of OG RWBY was like "You know what I want from a spinoff series? More catgirl discrimination and considerably fewer cool fights!"

Cuz like, literally the most engaging part of the first season was watching Monty Oum go HAM with his OCs, and Ice Queendom has on more than one occasion managed to make something equivalently cool in 2D.

And you're right, that is what I was here for in the first three episodes. SHAFT knew they couldn't hope to recreate Oum's particular kind of flowing, three-dimensional action. But instead they were able to come up with ways to adapt the fights in ways that made use of their medium instead.

Like you could argue that their take on Ruby's swooshy rose-petal powers actually looks cooler than the original version! It shows that all they really had to do with this project was craft something people were going to be rushing to post gifs of on Twitter and call it a day.
Granted this is a SHAFT production post Kizumonogatari, so it's uh, inconsistent in that regard. But at its best, these fights manage to be as eye-catching and Anime Cool as anything you could ask for. Like they didn't need to make Blake look this cool in a shot where she's not doing anything, but they did anyway.
I've personally always felt that RWBY's character designs were already one of its strengths, so getting to see them rendered as actual anime characters rather than Poser models is something of a treat, even with that aforementioned inconsistent chunkiness....which just makes it sting even more when they can't prioritize for that kind of showing off, as in the aforementioned passing-over of Penny.
Sorry, no time for a cool battle with the robot girl or the monkey guy. We need to introduce the anime-original story via the worst character in the franchise.

Yeah fuckin get 'em, rabbit sword.
That's what I get for letting my guard down. At first I was praising Ice Queendom's intro for considerably cutting down on Jaune, a decision I think virtually anybody familiar with this series would agree with. But then they had to go and drag him back in to set up this show's particular brand of vision-quest plot.

Though the fact that they quite literally dragged him into the office for this consultation was admittedly pretty funny.
Yep, so the twist of this spinoff is that instead of following the story of Volume Two, they skitter off into an alternate timeline where an evil monster that takes over people's dream starts possessing people. And while Jaune is the albatro- I mean guinea pig for explaining this, it does also introduce a pretty cool looking character as our nightmare hunter.
I was talking about character designs a moment ago, and Shion is pretty cool for an anime-original new one. They still fit with the general vibe of the series while also communicating the more mystical, ethereal kind of plot they bring with them.
I'm pretty sure they on their way to Genshin Impact, but I'm glad they brought their dream catcher staff to look cool with them.

Also the way they send people into dreams is via cute crocheted dolls of them which is just adorable. Can't wait to see Funko Pop versions of those things in the anime section of Target.

How far RWBY's come since it began in the days when you could only go to Hot Topic for your anime merch. Shion also pretty much immediately provide SHAFT's production with the chance to get that much...SHAFT-ier in its presentation, as people might expect from them.
Though not all of the visual ideas here work. I still don't know why they went with this split screen approach, but it works only about half as often as it doesn't.
Toshimasa Suzuki is no Akiyuki Simbo, but you can tell he is...trying. Once the dream-world segments kick in, they try for depictions of that kind of odd, slumbering logic which works on the same hit-or-miss principle as those split-screens. Crazy street signs? Check. Anachronistic apparitional telephones? Check. Refreshed character designs supposedly based on Weiss's perceptions so they can sell new Nendoroid figures? You know that's a check.

I do like the implication that Weiss just thinks all her teammates would look cooler if they had fashionable winter outfits. Like they're alt costumes from an X-Games side story in a RWBY gacha game.

To be fair I would also probably waste a 10-pull to get Ruby shredding powder.
There are some clever bits that come out of this element, like the way Weiss apparently doesn't know how Ruby's absurd Scythe-Gun (which is now a Scythe-Gun-Snowboard) actually works, leading to this running gag about Ruby having to flip it around every time she tries to use it here.

I'm curious about what even led to this. Did Huke genuinely just prefer it if the gun-barrel came out the other end of the scythe, design-wise?
Personally I think it's that nobody could actually figure out how the original worked, and they were tired of drawing it like normal.

But yeah, little details like that are probably the best part of this whole (ongoing) plot line. Because the plot sure ain't doing it for me.

Oh yeah, once this arc got underway (rather abruptly, actually) in the fourth episode, my response was basically "Wait, they aren't going to be trying to stretch this out for the entire rest of the season, are they?"

It definitely doesn't help things that the overall structure of the arc has necessitated Ruby and the crewby having to go through the same motions in Weiss's sleepy snowscape multiple times, as they effectively keep failing the mission and having to retry from the beginning.

Yeah that's not great, and this is also where Ice Queendom hits a major speed bump for a segment of viewers. Despite technically being a standalone series, it is very much banking on the assumption that you're invested in these characters and their relationships from the web series. Because it sure as hell didn't do any legwork to get you invested in Weiss and Ruby's frienemies shtick before sending them in to Reverse Inception her.

The entire emotional throughline is built on assuming you care about Weiss, her backstory with her domineering rich family, and believe that her teammates care about her enough to desperately want to save her from herself. When she's known them in-canon for like a week.
Hey, that's at least enough time for them to learn how to roast her effectively.


Everything about this storyline is hamstrung by the wire it's trying to perform that balancing act on. It's not like Weiss's trauma and hang-ups are especially original by storytelling standards, and lord knows Ice Queendom's use of Baby's First Dream Symbolism makes it easy to understand.

But while we can easily grasp "blah blah rich girl family pressures", neither we nor the characters going after Weiss have been given enough for her latter complexities, like her repressed childlike indulgences or whatever the hell is going on with her feelings on Fantasy Racism, to land.
There's even a whole ongoing plot where Dream Weiss is conflicted about letting Blake into her inner sanctum as a friend, because it would mean violating her family's staunch Anti-Furry teachings. And that could be compelling drama if they actually felt like friends. But Weiss' entire relationship with Blake in this story is that she decided not to call her a catgirl equivalent of a slur.

I just don't buy it at all, and that means any drama for the entire season is kinda fucked.
In this way you can definitely see how they might be leaning on the established viewers to do that character-invested heavy lifting themselves. Snippets of Weiss and Ruby's interactions here are clearly predicated on some sort of expectation that we're shipping them, for instance.

But if that's the case, then why bother with the opening first-season retelling, before spinning this off into specifically an independent alternate-universe story? Unless the reason was just because they knew that, even as decompressed as this plot already has been, they still wouldn't be able to fill twelve episodes with it alone.
I believe that ship's called "White Rose" colloquially. And honestly I couldn't tell ya. It's a weird half-measure that just makes this less satisfying for new viewers and adds about 50 minutes of homework for established fans. It also means Yang has basically nothing to do, because she had even less interactions with Weiss than everyone else.
Sorry, no time for the elusive big-boobed lesbian to get anything cool to do. Now we need to continue the anime-original story via the worst character in the franchise again.
Speaking of somebody with no connection to Weiss. Literally the only time this guy interacted with her was when she left him hanging in a tree to avoid having to be around him. But he has plot immunity to the evil dream monster so in he goes!
As with the original RWBY, the staff behind Ice Queendom seem to have some inexplicable attachment to Jaune. So he doesn't just get to be a living plot-device for the team's supposedly-last attempt at Weiss's mental Roguelike dungeon. Upon going in, he also just stumbles into major revelatory shifts for this girl he's barely spoken to, like her carnival prison filled with a toddler army.

He also gets weird, barely sentient dream versions of his teammates to hang around. Including Pyrrha who the franchise insists on shipping with him despite him having the personality of skim milk ice cream.
Like I know Team JNPR are supposed to be the deuteragonists of RWBY, but it definitely sticks out when it's just their dipshit dead-weight character getting to do all the important stuff, while the others are relegated to oddly-placed musical numbers or just looking high as fuck.
The nadir for me was them insisting that these guys are actually an exemplary team. Like nah, they are generally the least engaging characters of either version of this universe.

Also, their name is dumb. There, I said it. Thnks fr the mmrs ass squad name.
Like people who have never watched RWBY can have a laugh at the name 'RWBY', but they'll never know the whiplash I got way back when I watched the original and was told they expected me to pronounce JNPR as 'Juniper'. But for real, we've even reached a point in this latest episode where it's being implied that Jaune and Team JNCO's teamwork are going to have something to do with pulling Ruby out of her own personal bad brain prison she just slipped into.
It's amazing to see the story scrambling to extend this plotline. I hope each subsequent episode is some new character getting sucked into The Nightmare Zone until we're 18 Inceptions deep and it's up to Captain Crunch here to save the day.
If it at least gives them more visual variety to play with after all this time in the titular Ice Queendom, I'll take it. As artificially agonizing as Ruby's succumbing here comes off for the length of the story, her entering her own personal Evangelion TV ending gives the show a chance that it can still furnish a flourish or two.


It makes you wonder what this show could have been had it gone for doing dedicated, more contained, arcs like this for all the main characters, rather than just Weiss. Maybe more varietous vectors of interactions would have helped those issues with being driven by shallow, assumed characterization.

But then it seems like wasted potential is always the story of RWBY, isn't it?

Pretty much! On its own merits this show isn't much more than a curiosity. But there are certainly some fun bits from a meta perspective. Like hearing some of the biggest Japanese voice actresses handle these characters, or watching Ruby do That One Shaft Thing.
Yeah, the fact that a RWBY anime even exists in this form is probably the most interesting thing about it. And even as Ice Queendom has slowed down, it's still had a couple more standout fights, occasionally some of that familiar SHAFT directorial flair will come through, and I gotta admit I enjoy a lot of the backgrounds they've presented for this place thus far.


But then it also must be mentioned that SHAFT's production efforts have still been stymied at points where they've had to replace the RWBY characters with...CGI models.

The more things change.
I probably laughed too hard at that bit. Ironically they're way better 3D models than the original, but are used in the worst possible way for a kinetic fight. It's Bizarro RWBY. YBWR if you will.

But overall, this isn't really something I can recommend. If you're a RWBY super fan, then maybe you can do the heavy lifting and experience this story as an engaging what-if. But as somebody who never made it through Volume Four, I can't say I'm interested in finishing it.

Same. I was honestly feeling mildly compelled as I reached the eighth episode readying myself for this column, since it seemed like it would at least end this arc on a clean place to talk about with an indication of what else the show might do for the remainder of its season. But then it cliffhanger'd with the revelation that this series really doesn't have any other ideas beyond this Evanescence AMV mind-palace, and I realized maybe some things really are better off left in 2013.
It may be cringe, but at least we are now free.
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