My Thoughts on RWBY Volume 3, Chapter 1

if you've never seen RWBY, you can just go ahead and ignore this post (until you binge the series, which is on YouTube and Rooster Teeth's website). If you have, and wanna know what I think, read on.

I've been aching for this episode for ages. The first episode gives me a taste of the tone of this Volume, and that tone seems to be despair. It's all quite hopeless and depressing sounding: Ruby visits her mom's grave* for the first time on screen, Weiss' dad cuts her off of her Lien, Nora casually mentions that Jaune is a worthless fighter and he'll be the reason they lose, and that both she and Ren are orphans whose entire lives depend on being successful Hunt(smen/tresses). It all sounds very grim, if you'll pardon my pun.

You'll notice I have an asterisk by the word "grave". That is because I am dubious about exactly how dead Summer is. The whole thing seems a bit fishy to me. Raven, who is all but confirmed to be Yang's mom at this point, disappeared and reappeared without any sort of warning. On top of that, Qrow clearly knows more about the Cinder/White Fang situation than perhaps even Ozpin. I can't think of a good reason for Summer to have faked her death, but, then again, I can't think of a reason for Raven to leave her lover and her daughter.

Speaking of Cinder, I truly love her casual clothing that she wears around when she's in disguise but not in uniform. What's more, the thing with the popcorn made her seem more of a person than an entity (I also adore the idea of people with superpowers using those powers for dumb things like that). Cinder seems to be becoming more of a character than she was before, an actual being instead of some sort of big bad over the horizon. Still, it would help to know what her plan actually is, or even her goal. She clearly wants to use the Grimm for something, something involving Grimm and Dust. I have my theories, of course. Perhaps she wants to eradicate all Grimm, thus disrupting the balance of the world. Maybe she wants to turn Grimm into weapons, or people into Grimm, for some sort of gain. Perhaps she's secretly a Faunus (she could be tucking a tail someplace) and she's trying to cleanse the world of humans. I don't quite know what it is, but I hope it's a little more than "evil tyrant for sake of evil tyrant".

Finally, I'm going to speak about that little mystery wrapped inside a moe riddle, stuffed inside a kawaii enigma: Neapolitan. What exactly is she? She can't quite be human, can she? She has to be more than that, with what we've seen her do. First off, her "Semblance", and that is in quotes because I'm making a huge assumption, is unlike anything else in the series. That thing where she teleported her and Roman, I don't know what to make of it. It really throws a wrench in my attempts to decide what Neo actually is. On top of that freaky mirror-teleport thing, she seems to be able to shapeshift to that little gothloli girl. I'm also now of the growing suspicion that Neo is mute, but the reasons why, I can only speculate (right now, I believe that she's some sort of being Cinder made from Dust, kinda like Nui from Kill la Kill). Whatever she is, she certainly seems to work for Cinder rather than Roman, although I have the nagging suspicions that she has her own agenda.

This Volume seems to be off to a rolling start, with a bump or two here and there (I'm sorry, Neath, but you have big shoes to fill as Lie). There have been some improvements to the art and animation, and some that were just changed (Magnhild is black now, and I think I'd be okay with that if it was either black from the start or they explain why it changed color). Overall, this Volume looks to be as good, if not better, than the past two. I can't wait to see what more is in store.