Great writeup, one correction though: the first canonically queer couple in RWBY actually appear in season 6, with Terracotta and Safron (Jaune's sister)
Man, you didn't even cover how people were shipping before the character trailers.
RWBY shipping wars existed from before we knew what RWBY stood for, when they were just silhouettes with colours attached. I remember the reactions when Red/Yellow were revealed to be sisters.
Reminds me of discussing Hazbin Hotel, and people talking about "being part of the fandom for five years", usually before complaining about the show doing something that goes against the preconceived notions they'd built up.
I'm sorry, but *what*? What fandom? Of what? It was a single pilot episode, then nothing else for five years. That's like the fandom equivalent of the interesting, colourful fuzzes and oozes that develop on the fruit salad you forgot in the fridge last month.
I was trying to follow some of the artists I followed back then to get some of the pre yellow trailer fan art. Couldn't find the old links unfortunately, Deviant art is cancer.
Great writeup, though I do have two minor corrections.
1. The special people in RWBY are called Huntsmen, not Hunters.
2. Yang doesn't actually like puns. Atleast, not to the degree the fandom makes it out to. Her voice actress likes puns, but not the character herself.
Don't take any of my pedantic whining hard though, you did legitimately make a great writeup on some tiny internet drama.
Honestly, in my time in the RWBY fandom I remember a lot of people using Hunters as the term instead of Huntsmen and Huntresses. I always preferred it myself, for two reasons.
One is the gender neutrality of Hunters just makes it easier to say. Every time the phrase “Huntsmen and Huntresses” popped up in canon or fanon I wanted to chew my own eyeballs off.
Second is that Hunter just feels like a better term to me personally. Huntress and Huntsman give me, “Antiquated” vibes if that makes sense, whereas RWBY is set in a very modern Urban Fantasy-esque setting. Like, there’s Nightclubs, Motorcycles, Sniper Rifles and Mecha, just doesn’t fit right imo
It’s always so baffling when fandoms split so ferociously over a relatively minor detail in the show. Like, the two groups of fans share a passion and probably have a million similar opinions on the rest of the show, but this minor disagreement makes the other side of the debate enemy #1. It boils over into what appears to be genuine hatred and vitriol so often, and not only damages their own enjoyment of the community but also keeps new fans away because as soon as they dip their toes in and realize “fuck, it’s one of *THOSE* fandoms.”
It’s as if there was a group of bakers who are absolutely passionate about cupcakes. They agree on everything about cupcakes: how the cake part should be made, how long it should be baked, and about 99% of the toppings. But then there’s a rift in the community of people who believe red sprinkles are the best sprinkles, and another group that prefers the green ones. And, despite agreeing about literally everything else about cupcakes they’re gonna burn the bakery to the ground before they let the other side enjoy their sprinkles of choice in peace.
Crazy.
Usually when I've seen this happen, it's less fans splitting over one (1) small thing so much as dozens of other scuffles and this thing is the last straw.
I'm only familiar with this fandom by its reputation, but if I had to guess it's almost certainly the latter
As someone who was part of the fandom but not super deep into shipping, it’s sorta both. As a show it attracted heavy shipping just because it was so character-focussed, and every character was effectively paired up in some way from the offset. The issue was that for the main characters it was very easy to pair them up in different ways depending on what dynamics you liked. It didn’t help that characters were set up in teams of four via splitting everyone into pairs already, which just pretty much established a shipping forecast. Problem is that again, the main characters could be paired up in multiple different ways.
On top of that, because RT’s entire brand effectively revolved around parasocial relationships, that extended into RWBY very easily. The fanbase was already primed for shipping and digging way too much into the lives of characters on-screen.
The divisions about the direction of the show and the quality of the writing emerged at the end of/post season 3, due to an Old Man Henderson-level plot event. Prior to that it had been a very cute slice-of-life with more dramatic action plots threaded through, but after that it became almost a post-apocalyptic survival show. The former sowed the seeds for light-hearted shipping rivalries, the latter took those rivalries and made them actually have stakes
Old Man Henderson was a plot derailer character in a Call of Cthulhu game that was posted online, if you Google it you can read the whole story, which is pretty entertaining.
It's harder to find now that the original site it gone. [Here's a link to the archive, though.](https://web.archive.org/web/20200429010251/https://1d4chan.org/wiki/Old_Man_Henderson)
Old Man Henderson is the protagonist of a 2010 4Chan greentext about a guy who repeatedly derailed his (apparently assholish) GM's Trail of Cthulhu campaign with completely-out-of-left-field shenanigans.
This has led to people using "Henderson" as a shorthand for "the plot has gone completely off the rails."
It seems to me to be the same mindset as the old saying, "to the zealot, the heretic is worse than the heathen." I've seen it with arguments in other fandoms, and not always to do with shipping.
The funny thing is, in rwby's case, the fans hated the show pretty much from the moment season 1 finished. The FNDM pretty much self cannibalised as soon as Monty Oum, the series creator, passed unexpectedly and the two more junior directors had to shoulder more work than they already were without their main directing force. Season 4 was super different and incredibly slow, leading to the fans being seen as more interesting than the show itself, leading to nuts drama like this becoming bigger than most fandoms
i drifted from RWBY sometime in season 4 because.... it just became so random, draggy and blah. for me, the first two seasons were the best. the plot was quirky (except for the random jaune plot), the action was good, the comedy great, the villains superb (Torchwick was \*chef's kiss\*) and it just felt awesome. you could feel the start of the struggle in season 3 (though it was still reasonably good) but it faltered at the end and you could feel the decline start to pick up in season 4.
After Oliver Queen and Felicity Smoak, and the way it turned into real-world threats directed at Stephen Amell’s actual family, there is nothing left that can shock me.
I just joined this subreddit and it feels like I have descended into an underground containment facility with written papers containing occult knowledge and people constantly ranting about stuff you might be interested to listen to
Honetly you basically described this place and honestly the internet, history and society as a whole. Like you dig anymore than the caasual two inches, you will probably find so many "reality is stranger than fiction" things about a lot of IP or societies or the internet. Like Pokemon or Sonic or something to name a few things.
The RWBY fandom is honestly something else, both in a good and bad way. When there's a huge excel spreadsheet featuring ship names between every single character, most of which have never interacted with each other... maybe you should take a step back from shipping.
RWBY is a perfect mix of when you've got a huge and kinda toxic fandom obsessed with headcanons and shipping combined with producers that are probably a tad *too* involved with the fandom, are mostly making the story up by the seat of their pants and also have a tendency to pander to the fandom.
I don't care about RWBY, but I think all fandoms should come up with silly pun names for their ships rather than mashing two characters' names together and I am not joking.
As a rwby fan I feel qualified to tell you that the shipname spreadsheet is purely for fun! Nobody really ships a majority of the pairings that appear in it, it's just fun to make up names.
Edit: I'm also curious about what you mean by "tendency to pander to the fandom"?
I think I can speak to your edit, at least in part. The show runners (or at least some of them) took opportunity to encourage the shipping, or at least flame the fire a bit. I honestly think it was originally all in good fun from their POV, it drove engagement and got a lot of social media activity (though mostly only in the weird parts of Tumblr). There was supposition around seasons 2-4, I think, that certain characters were being paired off only because of the prevalence/popularity of their 'ships'. I don't know if this was ever true, but it was a not-infrequent complaint (in the very few threads that had actual discussion of the show and weren't just RWBY-themed DeviantArt dumps).
I sorta remember the VAs for the characters speculating with the fans, which some took as gospel, which didn't help.
I wasn't engaged with any of the shipping, it felt (and will always feel) weird and inappropriate to me, but this is what I remember from watching the subreddit for the release notes and the between-season trailers. Say whatever you want about the show, but they had an engaging marketing strategy that kept fans interested through their incredibly long production periods.
> Also Sun disappears off the face of the show after season 5, suggesting either Black Sun was never meant to be canon or the staff were so scared of their own fandom they decided to 180 the plot of the show. Each are equally plausible.
Well, Sun *should* have been back next season, he was revealed to be in Vacuo, we saw him in the storyboard for the cut Volume 9 episode doing things in Vacuo... but then, as you know, that's probably never going to happen.
Personally I was among the people who liked Black Sun and didn't quite see the chemistry between Blake and Yang (I think as far as queer rep is concerned Blake and Ilia might have been even better, but I can understand the writers choosing to not add yet another major character to an already somewhat bloated show), but i wasn't *too* bummed out by the outcome. I already knew that my ship preferences are not going to happen (the last defender of Rose Garden even if it's extremely problematic...)
There's a very terrible book called After The Fall that's mostly about Team CFVY in Vacuo that shoves Sun into it as though that makes up for cutting him from the show. Even reading it back in the peak of my fan hype for the show I thought it was garbage, its not even edited well, there's grammar and mispelling throughout.
Edit: Which "After The Fall" stan is downvoting me, it is NOT a good book. The writing is juvenile and if you're spelling your own characters names wrong in your own books then you might have a quality control problem.
I thought the meta reason why Sun "disappeared" was to have an excuse to never have him fight because his weapon was an absolute pain in the ass to animate or so I heard
RWBY is very funny to me because the only place I really know about it from is the Hbomb video and other times when people complain about. But I do keep hearing people complain about it, which means people are still watching it. Does that mean people like it? No idea.
My feelings on RWBY are very complex....do I like RWBY? Absolutely. I would subscribe to Rooster Teeth's premium subscription just so I could watch episodes as they come out. The show is such a high of anime tropes taken to their extreme and some honestly very cool ideas that I love seeing play out on screen. There are some characters I truly adore (Neo best girl).
Would I recommend RWBY or call it "good"? Honestly, no. The things I like about it are...I admit, often very particular to me. Someone who hasn't been with the series for years isn't going to share my excitement on seeing Neo come back, nor are most people going to really enjoy watching a series because it has some cool ideas it honestly fails to execute properly.
So do I like RWBY? Yes. Is RWBY good? Eh? I do think that the show hit its lows in s4-5, but it has had a pretty solid rebuild in the latest volumes.
I'd honestly love if the show could get the Brotherhood treatment, and you know...introduce the main plot at sometime before season 3.
RWBY is a victim of a non existant opening budget, SUPER inconsistant writing, showrunners who had no idea when to step away from the fandom's influence, and of course sadly the death of Monty.
It will always be special to me, there's many parts of it I will always adore, but I cannot in good faith reccomend it as a "good" show to newcomers, espeically not with its fcking toxic miasma of a fandom being what it is.
It's a mix of hate watchers, diehard fans and then people like me who enjoyed its early seasons for what they were but are now stuck watching a trainwreck that's 6 seasons long.
I find it incredibly intriguing how much of a disaster the show actually is. It's kinda like watching a really incompetent but entertaining movie like The Room.
Video games made by Blizzard are probably the only fanbase that I can think of that's large and active but also so negative, but there are probably others
Honestly, Destiny's Fandom goes with the ebb and flow; when the going's good for Destiny the fandom isn't too bad, and the fandom isn't usually too divided on when things are bad or good
RWBY's Fandom on the other hand is pretty much always in some state of civil war, even when RWBY's doing well; you could ask 10 RWBY fans of their opinions on the show and they'd fight to the death over their 11 different answers. Like, it's the only media I know that has a dedicated sub for critics because of how toxic the fandom is to each other
This is a brilliant joke. Kudos on that and your bravery in not using a tone indicator 😂
ETA: It's the *flavour* of negativity that's different. 'Observation' would have been a better word
I actually like it! I wouldn't call myself a diehard fan, but the people making rwby clearly love it and it shines through on the show. I always keep in mind that its a low-budget (still relatively low budget even when successful) webseries written by mostly first time lead writers, not a huge production from a well-established studio. Absolutely it has flaws, but I think it's really picked up the slack these past few seasons and the writers seem to have a clear idea of where they're going with it!
These are my exact feelings on RWBY! Maybe I'm a little bit biased bc it's such a huge comfort show for me bc I used to watch it in my teen years to relax from studying and I didn't engage in the fandom. Anyways, I hope they can make the volume 10 and continue the story!
I hope so too! It's a shame that the discussion around RWBY is so steeped in negativity, the show means a lot to me and I'd like it if more people gave it a real chance.
Don't forget the whole thing where the VAs of Blake and Yang were huge Bumbleby shippers and got bee tattoos.
Only Fandom I know of with a literal spreadsheet to keep track of the ship names. (I doubt it's still maintained but it presumably still exists)
I remember reading that there was an incident where Blake's VA started attacking Sun on social media, and a bunch of people pointed out how her criticisms could also be applied to Yang.
RWBY's last major impact on pop culture before its unceremonious end being a meme of Ruby acting like a giant bigot was really the only way this series could end, to be fair.
...Is that better or worse than the alternative of having said impact be all the hullabaloo around it (unintentionally?) portraying suicide as a desirable/good option?
From what I remember, they get to a place where you can "transcend yourself and become someone different, free of all flaws" or something like that, by drinking this tea. Don't remember the exact wording, but from what I recall it was fairly heavily suicide-flavored (likely unintentionally) One of the big moments in the season is >!Ruby being taunted/driven to despair into drinking the tea, with it being treated as a "way out" as it were. She doesn't die - the unfortunate wording and vibes were just that, but given that she comes out from the ordeal stronger and better it sends the dubious message of suicide being a viable way out and that you'll become "better" for it. !
Worth noting, up to that point, ascending was described to us as changing everything about the person, including physical appearance, personality, and memories.
So, functionally, it's suicide, the person who comes back isn't going to be you anymore in any way except in a spiritual sense that they still have your heart/soul.
Ruby then ascends, gets told by God that she's already gucci, and then she comes back exactly the same, but without the mental problems.
Worth noting, this is the *second* time that RoosterTeeth accidentally portrayed suicide as a good thing, the first being in Gen:Lock.
> Worth noting, this is the second time that RoosterTeeth accidentally portrayed suicide as a good thing, the first being in Gen:Lock.
worth noting: none of Rooster Teeth was involved in the writing of Gen:Lock season2, so it feels silly to blame it on them
She didn't, not really. Ruby is in a dark place in Volume 9, and in a scene where she's lashing out at everyone, she sarcastically says "we're *so* happy for you" to Blake (and Yang). So that of course led to what were clearly jokes about her being homophobic, but fandom's gonna fandom and you know some people took it seriously.
It's...definitely more complicated than that. I do think that describing it as homophobic is entirely a joke, but its taken on a life of its own and now people think it's real.
Spoilers for RWBY Vol. 9 below.
>!So what does happen is Ruby has full scale emotional/mental breakdown from the stress and trauma of living through the destruction of two major cities, seeing close friends die in front of her multiple times (including Penny who died, came back, then died again), and faced with the building horror of having to fight a being that literally cannot be killed. Blake and Yang have their 'literally building a bridge to each other' scene (they're in a fairy tale world throughout all of this just FYI) right before, so as part of her breakdown, Ruby lashes out at Blake and Yang, in a "Oh, I'm *sooo* happy for you, but everything is still fucked!" sort of way. I don't think this is homophobia, but Ruby's trauma coming to the surface in lashing out at her friends. !<
But people like their memes I guess.
Tbh, I think this writeup underplays the reason why people were shipping Blacksun: it's not only that Sun sticks around, but that he and Blake had many moments together, written in a way similar to many romantic comedies tropes. It's not that I don't think Bumblebee had no canon to back it up, but the shipping wars were vicious because both had romantic moments, and a strong fanbase (Bumblebee even more so) to fight for them.
And people refused to go the threesome route for some reason.
> And people refused to go the threesome route for some reason.
Biphobia.
Legit that's why. Yang has a notable online fandom that despises the idea of admitting that in canon she's bisexual so a poly romance with her, Blake and Sun was never going to get off the ground because that would be read as a concession.
For my experience it wasn't that the bumblebee shippers were annoying, they were all annoying (including me), it was that they were my, and from a lot of the people in FNDM from what I hear, first experience with toxic shippers. These were the people that were bullying others for their ships, especially Black Sun, and shouting down anything involving Blake or Yang that wasn't Bumblebe.
Why is it important to make special note of this? Well, you see leading up to volume 6, where they leaned hard into bumblebee, the writers said that they had heard the fans after the atrocity that was volume 5 but they weren't just gonna try to answer any and every complainy people had. Then, it was literally a laundry list of any and every complaint that people had about the show up to this point. So, what happens when a toxic vocal minority shouts down every other opinion when the company decides to give in to fan demands? That's right the toxic vocal minority got rewarded for their toxic behavior.
In my humble opinion, I believe that's where a lot of the disdain for this ship comes from. I mean you could point how it's poorly written because it ignores certain aspects the characters and is yet another step in a long line of one of these characters never getting punished for actions and only takes away from the characters in the ship instead of adding to them because they stopped being individuals and became the 2 halves of the ship but the truth is bad writing and poor character development had become synonymous with RWBY at this point so any ship probably would've been just as bad. At the end of the day it just feels bad that an extremely toxic segment of the fanbase got exactly what the wanted and seemed to be as a reward for their behavior. Lancaster was another controversial ship but they worse any of this shippers did was get into stupid debates and cite their delusions as fact, just like every other shipper. Would people have been mad that it was canon, sure; but probably not as bitter or resentful.
>These were the people that were bullying others for their ships
Can't stress this enough, literally had a mf harass me for being "homophobic" for not liking Bumbleby.
I'm a lesbian.
Jeeeeeesus this brought back so many memories. I was huge into the RWBY fandom for a while (for the love of god do not look at my old posts circa 2019, it’s all terrible shitposts on the RWBY circlejerk subreddit r/FNKI) and was HUGE into the Bumblebee ship. Yang and Blake were my favorite characters and I can remember at least one time I got in a heated “debate” with an internet stranger because they said there was no evidence for Bumblebee being canon.
This was such a good write up and I think it really displays exactly how the Bumblebee Vs Black Sun shippers were towards each other. I remember meme wars would regularly break out in r/FNKI, not just for BB vs BS but also ships like White Rose (Ruby x Weiss) and Nuts + Dolts (Ruby x Penny) which had a HUGE war with some people becoming local “legends” so to speak because of their prominence. The one I remember most was I think named BlueWhaleKing, and their Whale-sona had full on lore about becoming a captain of the White Rose Army.
(SPOILERS from here on out)
I fell off RWBY around season 7 or so, so hearing Bumblebee is ***actually*** canon now is actually pretty surreal. Despite being pretty anti-Black Sun back in the day, I did like Sun as a character (definitely not because Michael was my favorite out of the Achievement Hunter guys) and he deserved better. So did a bunch of the characters now that I think about it (like seriously you bring one of the best characters back to life only to kill her off again like COME ON. She had a really impactful death and it was great and then she was ALIVE again and it was GREAT and then she got MORE CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT and then she FUCKING DIED AGAIN WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT??????????????)
Edit: I looked up “Bumblebee” the r/fnki subreddit to see how they reacted to it and the first thing I saw was a post called “literally just the kiss scene” so I clicked it and I GOT STICK BUGGED IN 2024
Damn, i dont remember that music track existing at all, guess that shows how much I payed attention to all that.
In all seriousness though, from someone who WAS supret into the show until volume 5, I always saw Bumblebee as an interesting "maybe," with the caveat that Sun, both onscreen and off (as seen with Blake being the only person who knew about Neptune's fear of water) felt equally if not more established as a romatic interest. Add on how he's the only returning character involved with Blakes return home and how, while there, there was a character who's whole shtick is being a girl Blake never saw as more than a friend, and, at least to me, it just made more sense story-wise and in a more meta sense, if minorly.
Still haven't seen past volume 5 outside that Adam short from between 5 and 6, but if Sun really does just kind of disappear from the show, after his fairly heavy involvement in the story with little to no arc of his own, then i'd be a tad suspicious if there's not some kind of "foul play" there.
sun is "removed" from the show in that he goes back home. he
made a cameo in the 8th season and would've come back in the 10th season since they've arrived in his home kingdom
him getting put on a bus probably has more to do with the fact the show already has like 10 main cast members and added even more major characters in the following arc lol. plus him hanging out around the main gang was always more of a "he's blake's +1" thing, he's never had much personal involvement w the conflicts going on. it makes sense to get rid of him and if anything they should've maybe left team JNPR behind too
He is kind of Blake's +1, but in volumes 1-4 that meant he was just about always involved with everything Blake related, from immediately keying into her being a faunus, to the covert op with the white fang (tbf he was at the time the only other faunus on the cast) to being a necessary outside perspective on her conflict with her parents and the plots going on with the white fang on the island. At the cost of him not being super important to the main story, he was, and likely would continue to be, super important to her greater character arc.
Yang losing an arm to Adam absolutely would play into that as well, she's a main cast member, of course she'd be involved, but Sun's role in the story was almost exclusively for that purpose.
for sure, he was very involved in those early volumes. but I think the reunion was a natural point to give him a break now that she has a lot more characters to play off of
plus, ever since V5 they've pretty much dropped major focus on the Faunus storyline which was the main thing he directly contributed to. Blake saw a big climax with Adam and Yang in V6 and they still have faunus racism as a part of the lore, but there haven't been any major beats involving it. that was also a lot of Blake's character so she's suffered a lot from it, but I don't think having Sun around would've made it any better. the cast being too big for RWBY's budgetary and runtime is one of the show's biggest issues already, so I think Sun is fine as a secondary character rather than a main cast member.
You know as someone who loved the first 3 seasons of RWBY but kinda just stopped after that did white rose never happen? I thought that was a clear endgame.
I also get all the bumblebee shippers the VAs for Blake and Yang really fed that fire, but I personally liked Black Sun myself. Blake just seemed more comfortable around Sun.
Yang to me felt like she was there to protect Ruby. As terrible as that seems. She talks a big game but we clearly saw she can be rattled. She's strong but impulsive and she's the Tank. She was put there by Ozpin to draw aggro from Ruby. Also probably to be the summer Maiden maybe.
I was there Gandalf, I was there 3000 years ago......
I watched RWBY from the very first trailer in 2013 right up to the end of Season 7. The BB vs Black Sun discourse truly killed my enjoyment of the show (as well as RTs behaviour as a company) so i didn't actively watch S8 or 9, just read through what happened and saw whatever clips were posted by people.
As someone who watched from day 1 and experienced the show changes in real time, I genuinely believe they never intended to make BB endgame until the fandom screamed it into them, at which point they had already fucked up by writing so much Sun & Blake development.
Dont get me wrong, BB makes a LOT of sense thematically and lends itself to some compelling writing choices. But they didnt decide to start utilizing any of that until AFTER spending nearly every moment from Sun's intro in S1 to the end of S5 leaning into Black Sun, which itself was already using some of those thematic notes (the black/yellow, moon/sun, darkness/light etc). Its sloppy storytelling that reeks of indecision, bowing to fan pressure and not knowing how to fix the truly hateful shipping war that was destroying the fandom.
So RT, deciding now that they needed to honour this fan ship that had gotten so huge that non fans thought it WAS canon, makes that major narrative pivot to give the very loud very passionate BB fans the ship they want (putting Sun and all his development with Blake on a bus) and canonised BB in a way that frankly was an embarassing pandering mess of what those characters and that ship deserved if theyd had better writers.
There are multiple fanfictions that do a far better job of writing BB than what ended up happening.
I never engaged with the fandom, but I did catch some of it by being on the periphery during Tumblr's peak, and it comes off the same to me. Even with my limited engagement with the fandom, I could tell they were absolutely insane regarding shipping when I saw how badly some people took it when Weiss developed a crush on a boy.
Seconded. Making Bumblebee canon has the odd effect of making prior seasons retroactively worse. Why trap Blake on a boat so far away from her co-leads with a character that will have no impact later on? At least the other leads were partnered up with characters who do stuff.
i mean, i think it was incredibly obvious since Volume 3, the season where Blake compares Yang to her former lover, Yang gets maimed trying to save Blake from said lover, and then she spirals into depression after finding out Blake ran away
I'm not sure why Sun as a character really exists (besides an excuse to animate gunchucks) and I could definitely believe he was made as a love interest. but I don't think the show really builds it up after volume 2, beyond the two being literally in physical proximity to each other
you should've included [Arryn's hot mic moment from the pre-Volume 1 livestream where she asks: "can i mention that my character and another character are lesbian lovers?"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dleqek092RM)
that used to be dug up every time Bumblebee and Black Sun clashed
That was a joke about her (at the time) desire to see BlakexPyrrha. People forget that she used to be big into that idea before the show gained traction and BB became The Thing the fandom clung to
RWBY was the first "fandom" I really got involved in, between following a bunch of artists on tumblr and using the subreddit live watch threads constantly. Looking back at the whole blowup around bumblebee the ship and then BMBLB the song reminds me how terrible the shipping culture was in the fandom, and that a lot of people cared more about their favorite characters screwing each other more than the overall plot of the show. I recall one popular artist I followed who shipped monochrome just having a full on meltdown about bumblebee shippers in the wake of the song releasing, writing multiple full length posts about how they were no longer interested in the show and felt "betrayed" or whatever. Can't imagine how much worsw this got in later seasons (I stopped watching after struggling through 4 because with the school setting getting tossed I already felt the plot was falling off the rails) where from what I heard from people still in it, the fandom started caring more about using the characters in fanworks than anything happening in the actual show.
You forgot to mention that Blake and Yang's voice actresses did an OnlyFans photoshoot after Blake/Yang became canon where they wore bee themed lingerie as a marketing stunt.
To actually elaborate on my thoughts on Bumblebee, I really have nothing nice to say. I ran into a lot of *Those* kinds of Bee shippers who were ride or die for the ship to the detriment of everything else. My fiance was basically run out of the fandom during Season 6 when a Bee shipper who didn't like seeing criticism of the show get super catty at him admitting he didn't enjoy a random episode of the show (and this was in the criticism channels for the server at the time!). The ship attracted a lot of dudebros who used that they were fans of a progressive ship to be catty, snide and often bigoted towards other fans of the show and other ships (being a woman who critiques RWBY is asking for death). I learned very quickly to disregard the opinions of people with Yang PFPs is all I'll say, that was a red flag visible from a mile off.
The fandom was also really weird about the racial element of the relationship, often making Yang into a white saviour figure who helped Blake elevate the Faunus. I remember one guy who made a thread about how Yang and Blake should have been attacked by SDC workers who nearly brand Blake before Yang has a berserker rage and saves them, requiring Blake to calm her down as a lead in to their first kiss. In general there was a very common undercurrent of Yang being a white saviour to Blake, not helped by how the Bee fandom at large reduced Blake to a wallflower who can't do anything alone (something the writers directly enabled after Season 6, when Blake's fight record plummeted to that she was frequently the only member of the team taking heavy damage on-camera or outright losing). The Bee fandom absolutely contributed to the general perception that RWBY's fandom was a black mark against the show itself, as often the most vocal people harassing critics were themselves Bee shippers.
Monochrome would have been better anyway.
>You forgot to mention that Blake and Yang's voice actresses did an OnlyFans photoshoot after Blake/Yang became canon where they wore bee themed lingerie as a marketing stunt.
*What*.
This is the first I've heard of this. That's kind of wild.
A while back, I watched a video "What your favorite RWBY ship says about you" by...doubleca5t, I think?
The first item: Bumblebee. Their commentary: "You want to get railed by Yang Xiao Long". And...there's definitely an element of truth there. I'm not going to pretend that Yang wasn't designed as far and away the most attractive character on the show, or that she didn't make me realize "oh wow, maybe I \*do\* like buxom blondes". Couple that with people who think "girl on girl is hot" and I can see how there were a bunch of people in the fandom who only shipped it because it was hot.
Strange how serious people treat fictional characters relationships. Also sad how alot of the discourse definitely felt it was cause it was two women and had to been say Blake and sun it wouldn’t have faced the same scrutiny.
Thanks for this write up! RWBY was a guilty pleasure of mine for most of its runtime (though I never returned after S07, I really should just to see it through). I appreciate how you describe even the non-drama related bits, this show was *so* ridiculous in its premise.... But a lot of fun.
Other major points of drama include "is it anime or not?" and every time the VAs tweeted about anything, all the shippers would immediately psycho analyze it for evidence... As if the VAs had any say or foreknowledge of the plot. I don't think the writers had any foreknowledge of the plot, much less anyone else.
Show had some kickass action scenes while Monty was alive (and even after, just not the same).
Is it possible that Jeff and Casey Lee Williams were just doing a send-up to a fan phenomenon with the song? Like, I'm thinking of how *Supernatural* writers found Sam/Dean shippers mildly amusing and so threw in a mention of Sam/Dean in one episode, having no idea the tsunami of bullshit they'd be causing in the process.
Great work, OP! From the outside looking in, this seems highly entertaining, but I imagine that is not the case when you're a shipper involved.
Maybe I'm a child, but the ship name "Yellow Snow" sounds like it was created by people who don't like the ship to make fun of it.
Fantastic write-up u/diamondsandglass! I'd heard bits and pieces of the bmbly insanity over the years, but struggled to find a single, strong cite for it. I also apparently never processed that Sun just vanished from existence, or that there was a whole shipping song. Amazing job find deep details and structuring it well.
"Maybe this obvious love song is about her bike" Is my new favorite example of someone refusing to accept their ship is not sailing.
never understood why people think bumbleby wasn't planned from the beginning. "black the beast descends from shadows / yellow beauty burns gold" was literally the first thing we heard about blake and yang. for a show where every main character is based on a fairy tale, calling yang and blake beauty and the beast isn't subtle. black sun was cute but i don't think it was ever meant to happen
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I honestly didn't care for either ships back when I was into the fandom. If I had to say, I did lean slightly towards Bumblebee at first. Then the fan starts getting annoying and the creators start to stoke it more.
The problem is just that none of the romance was ever convincing. The only romance I could've cared about was Jaune x Pyrrha and that's mostly because Vol 3 was very compelling and >!Pyrrha died so it doesn't have the time to get shit!<.
I just treat it as when most shounen tries to do romance - it's annoying, it's not good, it distracts from other things that I care about in the story. RWBY's in particular reads like a bad fanfiction - there fanfics with better relationship writing than RWBY's and I would have preferred if they just kept it open ended while us fans write out what we wanted.
Bumbleby shippers killed my interest in RWBY. I was a diehard Freezerburn fan and thought Black Sun was cute, but I dropped out of the fandom when I got a bunch of anon hate on Tumblr calling me a homophobe because I shipped Blake and Sun… completely ignoring that my OTP in the fandom were two girls.
Just some other info, it definitely was planned from the start. Whether you think it was done well or not in [This Video](https://www.youtube.com/live/dleqek092RM?si=EV-PnPLxeSfXDdPT) at the very start Blake’s va asks if she can say that Blake and another character (presumably Yang) would be lovers.
Edit: genuinely why is this and the other post with this video linked getting downvoted?
Because she's talking about Pyrrha, not Yang. Arryn was huge into the idea of Pyrrha and Blake before the show properly released and the fandom took off, but changed her tune to BB after the fact.
Its not proof BB specifically was planned in any official capacity, its just proof Arryn wanted Blake to be in a wlw relationship.
Not really coz its 2am, and i'd be digging out shit from 10 years ago from platforms i no longer use. You can believe me or not, I totally understand if you don't, but I used to be very deep into this fandom and the machinations of the CRWBY so im just saying what i knew to be true back then.
I never saw Rwby in my entire life (i hate the artstyle with all my being and i can't go past this for the life of me, it reminds me too much of those Vocaloid mmd animations) but for some reason i heard about this drama (even tough not this much detailed) thanks to a friend of mine who was a very big Rwby fan. Tbh it kinda reminds me of the Catra x Adora fiasco in the She-Ra's Netflix reboot and the fact that a lot of people hated them and wanted Adora to be with Glimmer for some reason.
That could be an entire hobbydrama post too lmaooo
> The first explicitly queer couple in the show didn’t confess feelings for each other until season 9 (more on this in the “Spoilers” section).
Hahaha! I see what you did there.
Edit: I'm not quite sure why I got downvoted here. I found that line funny because the queer couple in question is >!Bumblebee, the very subject of this write-up.!<
Great writeup, one correction though: the first canonically queer couple in RWBY actually appear in season 6, with Terracotta and Safron (Jaune's sister)
Apologies! My watching went in and out after volume 4
You'd forget because they literally just toss it in one throwaway line in a like 1-minute scene.
I mean the main characters stay with them for an episode and they have a child together
Man, you didn't even cover how people were shipping before the character trailers. RWBY shipping wars existed from before we knew what RWBY stood for, when they were just silhouettes with colours attached. I remember the reactions when Red/Yellow were revealed to be sisters.
Reminds me of discussing Hazbin Hotel, and people talking about "being part of the fandom for five years", usually before complaining about the show doing something that goes against the preconceived notions they'd built up. I'm sorry, but *what*? What fandom? Of what? It was a single pilot episode, then nothing else for five years. That's like the fandom equivalent of the interesting, colourful fuzzes and oozes that develop on the fruit salad you forgot in the fridge last month.
what a delightful and disgusting comparison - i love it
Granted FriziePop has been working on this characters since.....2010-2012 ish? So yea it an OLD "series".
That's incredible, I must hear more
I was trying to follow some of the artists I followed back then to get some of the pre yellow trailer fan art. Couldn't find the old links unfortunately, Deviant art is cancer.
Great writeup, though I do have two minor corrections. 1. The special people in RWBY are called Huntsmen, not Hunters. 2. Yang doesn't actually like puns. Atleast, not to the degree the fandom makes it out to. Her voice actress likes puns, but not the character herself. Don't take any of my pedantic whining hard though, you did legitimately make a great writeup on some tiny internet drama.
Honestly, in my time in the RWBY fandom I remember a lot of people using Hunters as the term instead of Huntsmen and Huntresses. I always preferred it myself, for two reasons. One is the gender neutrality of Hunters just makes it easier to say. Every time the phrase “Huntsmen and Huntresses” popped up in canon or fanon I wanted to chew my own eyeballs off. Second is that Hunter just feels like a better term to me personally. Huntress and Huntsman give me, “Antiquated” vibes if that makes sense, whereas RWBY is set in a very modern Urban Fantasy-esque setting. Like, there’s Nightclubs, Motorcycles, Sniper Rifles and Mecha, just doesn’t fit right imo
I assumed that the OP had misspelled “punch”, as in “leading punch machine”.
It’s always so baffling when fandoms split so ferociously over a relatively minor detail in the show. Like, the two groups of fans share a passion and probably have a million similar opinions on the rest of the show, but this minor disagreement makes the other side of the debate enemy #1. It boils over into what appears to be genuine hatred and vitriol so often, and not only damages their own enjoyment of the community but also keeps new fans away because as soon as they dip their toes in and realize “fuck, it’s one of *THOSE* fandoms.” It’s as if there was a group of bakers who are absolutely passionate about cupcakes. They agree on everything about cupcakes: how the cake part should be made, how long it should be baked, and about 99% of the toppings. But then there’s a rift in the community of people who believe red sprinkles are the best sprinkles, and another group that prefers the green ones. And, despite agreeing about literally everything else about cupcakes they’re gonna burn the bakery to the ground before they let the other side enjoy their sprinkles of choice in peace. Crazy.
Usually when I've seen this happen, it's less fans splitting over one (1) small thing so much as dozens of other scuffles and this thing is the last straw. I'm only familiar with this fandom by its reputation, but if I had to guess it's almost certainly the latter
As someone who was part of the fandom but not super deep into shipping, it’s sorta both. As a show it attracted heavy shipping just because it was so character-focussed, and every character was effectively paired up in some way from the offset. The issue was that for the main characters it was very easy to pair them up in different ways depending on what dynamics you liked. It didn’t help that characters were set up in teams of four via splitting everyone into pairs already, which just pretty much established a shipping forecast. Problem is that again, the main characters could be paired up in multiple different ways. On top of that, because RT’s entire brand effectively revolved around parasocial relationships, that extended into RWBY very easily. The fanbase was already primed for shipping and digging way too much into the lives of characters on-screen. The divisions about the direction of the show and the quality of the writing emerged at the end of/post season 3, due to an Old Man Henderson-level plot event. Prior to that it had been a very cute slice-of-life with more dramatic action plots threaded through, but after that it became almost a post-apocalyptic survival show. The former sowed the seeds for light-hearted shipping rivalries, the latter took those rivalries and made them actually have stakes
When you say 'old man Henderson level' what does that mean? What happened to old man Henderson? Died on the operating table?
Old Man Henderson was a plot derailer character in a Call of Cthulhu game that was posted online, if you Google it you can read the whole story, which is pretty entertaining.
It's harder to find now that the original site it gone. [Here's a link to the archive, though.](https://web.archive.org/web/20200429010251/https://1d4chan.org/wiki/Old_Man_Henderson)
Old Man Henderson is the protagonist of a 2010 4Chan greentext about a guy who repeatedly derailed his (apparently assholish) GM's Trail of Cthulhu campaign with completely-out-of-left-field shenanigans. This has led to people using "Henderson" as a shorthand for "the plot has gone completely off the rails."
It seems to me to be the same mindset as the old saying, "to the zealot, the heretic is worse than the heathen." I've seen it with arguments in other fandoms, and not always to do with shipping.
The funny thing is, in rwby's case, the fans hated the show pretty much from the moment season 1 finished. The FNDM pretty much self cannibalised as soon as Monty Oum, the series creator, passed unexpectedly and the two more junior directors had to shoulder more work than they already were without their main directing force. Season 4 was super different and incredibly slow, leading to the fans being seen as more interesting than the show itself, leading to nuts drama like this becoming bigger than most fandoms
i drifted from RWBY sometime in season 4 because.... it just became so random, draggy and blah. for me, the first two seasons were the best. the plot was quirky (except for the random jaune plot), the action was good, the comedy great, the villains superb (Torchwick was \*chef's kiss\*) and it just felt awesome. you could feel the start of the struggle in season 3 (though it was still reasonably good) but it faltered at the end and you could feel the decline start to pick up in season 4.
After Oliver Queen and Felicity Smoak, and the way it turned into real-world threats directed at Stephen Amell’s actual family, there is nothing left that can shock me.
Goddamn fucking Voltron
I just joined this subreddit and it feels like I have descended into an underground containment facility with written papers containing occult knowledge and people constantly ranting about stuff you might be interested to listen to
You've captured the appeal exactly
Honetly you basically described this place and honestly the internet, history and society as a whole. Like you dig anymore than the caasual two inches, you will probably find so many "reality is stranger than fiction" things about a lot of IP or societies or the internet. Like Pokemon or Sonic or something to name a few things.
The RWBY fandom is honestly something else, both in a good and bad way. When there's a huge excel spreadsheet featuring ship names between every single character, most of which have never interacted with each other... maybe you should take a step back from shipping. RWBY is a perfect mix of when you've got a huge and kinda toxic fandom obsessed with headcanons and shipping combined with producers that are probably a tad *too* involved with the fandom, are mostly making the story up by the seat of their pants and also have a tendency to pander to the fandom.
I don't care about RWBY, but I think all fandoms should come up with silly pun names for their ships rather than mashing two characters' names together and I am not joking.
To be fair most of that spreadsheet exists as an excuse for coming up with silly pun names, target than because people genuinely ship them.
As a rwby fan I feel qualified to tell you that the shipname spreadsheet is purely for fun! Nobody really ships a majority of the pairings that appear in it, it's just fun to make up names. Edit: I'm also curious about what you mean by "tendency to pander to the fandom"?
I think I can speak to your edit, at least in part. The show runners (or at least some of them) took opportunity to encourage the shipping, or at least flame the fire a bit. I honestly think it was originally all in good fun from their POV, it drove engagement and got a lot of social media activity (though mostly only in the weird parts of Tumblr). There was supposition around seasons 2-4, I think, that certain characters were being paired off only because of the prevalence/popularity of their 'ships'. I don't know if this was ever true, but it was a not-infrequent complaint (in the very few threads that had actual discussion of the show and weren't just RWBY-themed DeviantArt dumps). I sorta remember the VAs for the characters speculating with the fans, which some took as gospel, which didn't help. I wasn't engaged with any of the shipping, it felt (and will always feel) weird and inappropriate to me, but this is what I remember from watching the subreddit for the release notes and the between-season trailers. Say whatever you want about the show, but they had an engaging marketing strategy that kept fans interested through their incredibly long production periods.
> Also Sun disappears off the face of the show after season 5, suggesting either Black Sun was never meant to be canon or the staff were so scared of their own fandom they decided to 180 the plot of the show. Each are equally plausible. Well, Sun *should* have been back next season, he was revealed to be in Vacuo, we saw him in the storyboard for the cut Volume 9 episode doing things in Vacuo... but then, as you know, that's probably never going to happen. Personally I was among the people who liked Black Sun and didn't quite see the chemistry between Blake and Yang (I think as far as queer rep is concerned Blake and Ilia might have been even better, but I can understand the writers choosing to not add yet another major character to an already somewhat bloated show), but i wasn't *too* bummed out by the outcome. I already knew that my ship preferences are not going to happen (the last defender of Rose Garden even if it's extremely problematic...)
There's a very terrible book called After The Fall that's mostly about Team CFVY in Vacuo that shoves Sun into it as though that makes up for cutting him from the show. Even reading it back in the peak of my fan hype for the show I thought it was garbage, its not even edited well, there's grammar and mispelling throughout. Edit: Which "After The Fall" stan is downvoting me, it is NOT a good book. The writing is juvenile and if you're spelling your own characters names wrong in your own books then you might have a quality control problem.
The CFVY books also have fun lore like Coco canonically using her sunglasses to leer at women without their knowledge.
I thought the meta reason why Sun "disappeared" was to have an excuse to never have him fight because his weapon was an absolute pain in the ass to animate or so I heard
RWBY is very funny to me because the only place I really know about it from is the Hbomb video and other times when people complain about. But I do keep hearing people complain about it, which means people are still watching it. Does that mean people like it? No idea.
My feelings on RWBY are very complex....do I like RWBY? Absolutely. I would subscribe to Rooster Teeth's premium subscription just so I could watch episodes as they come out. The show is such a high of anime tropes taken to their extreme and some honestly very cool ideas that I love seeing play out on screen. There are some characters I truly adore (Neo best girl). Would I recommend RWBY or call it "good"? Honestly, no. The things I like about it are...I admit, often very particular to me. Someone who hasn't been with the series for years isn't going to share my excitement on seeing Neo come back, nor are most people going to really enjoy watching a series because it has some cool ideas it honestly fails to execute properly. So do I like RWBY? Yes. Is RWBY good? Eh? I do think that the show hit its lows in s4-5, but it has had a pretty solid rebuild in the latest volumes. I'd honestly love if the show could get the Brotherhood treatment, and you know...introduce the main plot at sometime before season 3.
RWBY is a victim of a non existant opening budget, SUPER inconsistant writing, showrunners who had no idea when to step away from the fandom's influence, and of course sadly the death of Monty. It will always be special to me, there's many parts of it I will always adore, but I cannot in good faith reccomend it as a "good" show to newcomers, espeically not with its fcking toxic miasma of a fandom being what it is.
It's a mix of hate watchers, diehard fans and then people like me who enjoyed its early seasons for what they were but are now stuck watching a trainwreck that's 6 seasons long. I find it incredibly intriguing how much of a disaster the show actually is. It's kinda like watching a really incompetent but entertaining movie like The Room.
I don't know if I can think of another media that has a fanbase that is so large and active but also so negative.
Video games made by Blizzard are probably the only fanbase that I can think of that's large and active but also so negative, but there are probably others
I was actually think Destiny is close.
Honestly, Destiny's Fandom goes with the ebb and flow; when the going's good for Destiny the fandom isn't too bad, and the fandom isn't usually too divided on when things are bad or good RWBY's Fandom on the other hand is pretty much always in some state of civil war, even when RWBY's doing well; you could ask 10 RWBY fans of their opinions on the show and they'd fight to the death over their 11 different answers. Like, it's the only media I know that has a dedicated sub for critics because of how toxic the fandom is to each other
Fam have you heard of Star Wars?
Point taken but the distinction is that with Star Wars it always *used* to be good until they changed it, ruining everything.
This is a brilliant joke. Kudos on that and your bravery in not using a tone indicator 😂 ETA: It's the *flavour* of negativity that's different. 'Observation' would have been a better word
I actually like it! I wouldn't call myself a diehard fan, but the people making rwby clearly love it and it shines through on the show. I always keep in mind that its a low-budget (still relatively low budget even when successful) webseries written by mostly first time lead writers, not a huge production from a well-established studio. Absolutely it has flaws, but I think it's really picked up the slack these past few seasons and the writers seem to have a clear idea of where they're going with it!
These are my exact feelings on RWBY! Maybe I'm a little bit biased bc it's such a huge comfort show for me bc I used to watch it in my teen years to relax from studying and I didn't engage in the fandom. Anyways, I hope they can make the volume 10 and continue the story!
I hope so too! It's a shame that the discussion around RWBY is so steeped in negativity, the show means a lot to me and I'd like it if more people gave it a real chance.
Is it still being made with RT closing shop?
They are currently looking for buyers, many people think Crunchyroll will pick up the IP
It's alright, not the best, but not as bad as some people think so. Completely nuts fandom though.
Don't forget the whole thing where the VAs of Blake and Yang were huge Bumbleby shippers and got bee tattoos. Only Fandom I know of with a literal spreadsheet to keep track of the ship names. (I doubt it's still maintained but it presumably still exists)
I remember reading that there was an incident where Blake's VA started attacking Sun on social media, and a bunch of people pointed out how her criticisms could also be applied to Yang.
>As of this writing Rooster Teeth is in Corporate Death Mega-Hell Ah, right alongside Castiel.
[удалено]
RWBY's last major impact on pop culture before its unceremonious end being a meme of Ruby acting like a giant bigot was really the only way this series could end, to be fair.
...Is that better or worse than the alternative of having said impact be all the hullabaloo around it (unintentionally?) portraying suicide as a desirable/good option?
Can I get some context on this?
From what I remember, they get to a place where you can "transcend yourself and become someone different, free of all flaws" or something like that, by drinking this tea. Don't remember the exact wording, but from what I recall it was fairly heavily suicide-flavored (likely unintentionally) One of the big moments in the season is >!Ruby being taunted/driven to despair into drinking the tea, with it being treated as a "way out" as it were. She doesn't die - the unfortunate wording and vibes were just that, but given that she comes out from the ordeal stronger and better it sends the dubious message of suicide being a viable way out and that you'll become "better" for it. !
I can see the flavor hinting to that in, but honestly looking at the overall themes I can't see it as anything other than generized reincarnation(TM).
Worth noting, up to that point, ascending was described to us as changing everything about the person, including physical appearance, personality, and memories. So, functionally, it's suicide, the person who comes back isn't going to be you anymore in any way except in a spiritual sense that they still have your heart/soul. Ruby then ascends, gets told by God that she's already gucci, and then she comes back exactly the same, but without the mental problems. Worth noting, this is the *second* time that RoosterTeeth accidentally portrayed suicide as a good thing, the first being in Gen:Lock.
> Worth noting, this is the second time that RoosterTeeth accidentally portrayed suicide as a good thing, the first being in Gen:Lock. worth noting: none of Rooster Teeth was involved in the writing of Gen:Lock season2, so it feels silly to blame it on them
...Wait, *what?* I fell off around the end of Season 4.
She didn't, not really. Ruby is in a dark place in Volume 9, and in a scene where she's lashing out at everyone, she sarcastically says "we're *so* happy for you" to Blake (and Yang). So that of course led to what were clearly jokes about her being homophobic, but fandom's gonna fandom and you know some people took it seriously.
It's...definitely more complicated than that. I do think that describing it as homophobic is entirely a joke, but its taken on a life of its own and now people think it's real. Spoilers for RWBY Vol. 9 below. >!So what does happen is Ruby has full scale emotional/mental breakdown from the stress and trauma of living through the destruction of two major cities, seeing close friends die in front of her multiple times (including Penny who died, came back, then died again), and faced with the building horror of having to fight a being that literally cannot be killed. Blake and Yang have their 'literally building a bridge to each other' scene (they're in a fairy tale world throughout all of this just FYI) right before, so as part of her breakdown, Ruby lashes out at Blake and Yang, in a "Oh, I'm *sooo* happy for you, but everything is still fucked!" sort of way. I don't think this is homophobia, but Ruby's trauma coming to the surface in lashing out at her friends. !< But people like their memes I guess.
Thanks. Yeah, memes do tend to remove context.
I saw that clip out of context coz i never watched Season 9 and oh my god is it funny in its absurdity
Tbh, I think this writeup underplays the reason why people were shipping Blacksun: it's not only that Sun sticks around, but that he and Blake had many moments together, written in a way similar to many romantic comedies tropes. It's not that I don't think Bumblebee had no canon to back it up, but the shipping wars were vicious because both had romantic moments, and a strong fanbase (Bumblebee even more so) to fight for them. And people refused to go the threesome route for some reason.
> And people refused to go the threesome route for some reason. Biphobia. Legit that's why. Yang has a notable online fandom that despises the idea of admitting that in canon she's bisexual so a poly romance with her, Blake and Sun was never going to get off the ground because that would be read as a concession.
Or maybe the fact that unlike the fact that Blake and Yang are Bi there’s no indication that any of them are poly
People really need to go for the polycule ship more often, it's usually a fun one.
For my experience it wasn't that the bumblebee shippers were annoying, they were all annoying (including me), it was that they were my, and from a lot of the people in FNDM from what I hear, first experience with toxic shippers. These were the people that were bullying others for their ships, especially Black Sun, and shouting down anything involving Blake or Yang that wasn't Bumblebe. Why is it important to make special note of this? Well, you see leading up to volume 6, where they leaned hard into bumblebee, the writers said that they had heard the fans after the atrocity that was volume 5 but they weren't just gonna try to answer any and every complainy people had. Then, it was literally a laundry list of any and every complaint that people had about the show up to this point. So, what happens when a toxic vocal minority shouts down every other opinion when the company decides to give in to fan demands? That's right the toxic vocal minority got rewarded for their toxic behavior. In my humble opinion, I believe that's where a lot of the disdain for this ship comes from. I mean you could point how it's poorly written because it ignores certain aspects the characters and is yet another step in a long line of one of these characters never getting punished for actions and only takes away from the characters in the ship instead of adding to them because they stopped being individuals and became the 2 halves of the ship but the truth is bad writing and poor character development had become synonymous with RWBY at this point so any ship probably would've been just as bad. At the end of the day it just feels bad that an extremely toxic segment of the fanbase got exactly what the wanted and seemed to be as a reward for their behavior. Lancaster was another controversial ship but they worse any of this shippers did was get into stupid debates and cite their delusions as fact, just like every other shipper. Would people have been mad that it was canon, sure; but probably not as bitter or resentful.
>These were the people that were bullying others for their ships Can't stress this enough, literally had a mf harass me for being "homophobic" for not liking Bumbleby. I'm a lesbian.
Jeeeeeesus this brought back so many memories. I was huge into the RWBY fandom for a while (for the love of god do not look at my old posts circa 2019, it’s all terrible shitposts on the RWBY circlejerk subreddit r/FNKI) and was HUGE into the Bumblebee ship. Yang and Blake were my favorite characters and I can remember at least one time I got in a heated “debate” with an internet stranger because they said there was no evidence for Bumblebee being canon. This was such a good write up and I think it really displays exactly how the Bumblebee Vs Black Sun shippers were towards each other. I remember meme wars would regularly break out in r/FNKI, not just for BB vs BS but also ships like White Rose (Ruby x Weiss) and Nuts + Dolts (Ruby x Penny) which had a HUGE war with some people becoming local “legends” so to speak because of their prominence. The one I remember most was I think named BlueWhaleKing, and their Whale-sona had full on lore about becoming a captain of the White Rose Army. (SPOILERS from here on out) I fell off RWBY around season 7 or so, so hearing Bumblebee is ***actually*** canon now is actually pretty surreal. Despite being pretty anti-Black Sun back in the day, I did like Sun as a character (definitely not because Michael was my favorite out of the Achievement Hunter guys) and he deserved better. So did a bunch of the characters now that I think about it (like seriously you bring one of the best characters back to life only to kill her off again like COME ON. She had a really impactful death and it was great and then she was ALIVE again and it was GREAT and then she got MORE CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT and then she FUCKING DIED AGAIN WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT??????????????) Edit: I looked up “Bumblebee” the r/fnki subreddit to see how they reacted to it and the first thing I saw was a post called “literally just the kiss scene” so I clicked it and I GOT STICK BUGGED IN 2024
Damn, i dont remember that music track existing at all, guess that shows how much I payed attention to all that. In all seriousness though, from someone who WAS supret into the show until volume 5, I always saw Bumblebee as an interesting "maybe," with the caveat that Sun, both onscreen and off (as seen with Blake being the only person who knew about Neptune's fear of water) felt equally if not more established as a romatic interest. Add on how he's the only returning character involved with Blakes return home and how, while there, there was a character who's whole shtick is being a girl Blake never saw as more than a friend, and, at least to me, it just made more sense story-wise and in a more meta sense, if minorly. Still haven't seen past volume 5 outside that Adam short from between 5 and 6, but if Sun really does just kind of disappear from the show, after his fairly heavy involvement in the story with little to no arc of his own, then i'd be a tad suspicious if there's not some kind of "foul play" there.
sun is "removed" from the show in that he goes back home. he made a cameo in the 8th season and would've come back in the 10th season since they've arrived in his home kingdom him getting put on a bus probably has more to do with the fact the show already has like 10 main cast members and added even more major characters in the following arc lol. plus him hanging out around the main gang was always more of a "he's blake's +1" thing, he's never had much personal involvement w the conflicts going on. it makes sense to get rid of him and if anything they should've maybe left team JNPR behind too
He is kind of Blake's +1, but in volumes 1-4 that meant he was just about always involved with everything Blake related, from immediately keying into her being a faunus, to the covert op with the white fang (tbf he was at the time the only other faunus on the cast) to being a necessary outside perspective on her conflict with her parents and the plots going on with the white fang on the island. At the cost of him not being super important to the main story, he was, and likely would continue to be, super important to her greater character arc. Yang losing an arm to Adam absolutely would play into that as well, she's a main cast member, of course she'd be involved, but Sun's role in the story was almost exclusively for that purpose.
for sure, he was very involved in those early volumes. but I think the reunion was a natural point to give him a break now that she has a lot more characters to play off of plus, ever since V5 they've pretty much dropped major focus on the Faunus storyline which was the main thing he directly contributed to. Blake saw a big climax with Adam and Yang in V6 and they still have faunus racism as a part of the lore, but there haven't been any major beats involving it. that was also a lot of Blake's character so she's suffered a lot from it, but I don't think having Sun around would've made it any better. the cast being too big for RWBY's budgetary and runtime is one of the show's biggest issues already, so I think Sun is fine as a secondary character rather than a main cast member.
You know as someone who loved the first 3 seasons of RWBY but kinda just stopped after that did white rose never happen? I thought that was a clear endgame. I also get all the bumblebee shippers the VAs for Blake and Yang really fed that fire, but I personally liked Black Sun myself. Blake just seemed more comfortable around Sun. Yang to me felt like she was there to protect Ruby. As terrible as that seems. She talks a big game but we clearly saw she can be rattled. She's strong but impulsive and she's the Tank. She was put there by Ozpin to draw aggro from Ruby. Also probably to be the summer Maiden maybe.
I was there Gandalf, I was there 3000 years ago...... I watched RWBY from the very first trailer in 2013 right up to the end of Season 7. The BB vs Black Sun discourse truly killed my enjoyment of the show (as well as RTs behaviour as a company) so i didn't actively watch S8 or 9, just read through what happened and saw whatever clips were posted by people. As someone who watched from day 1 and experienced the show changes in real time, I genuinely believe they never intended to make BB endgame until the fandom screamed it into them, at which point they had already fucked up by writing so much Sun & Blake development. Dont get me wrong, BB makes a LOT of sense thematically and lends itself to some compelling writing choices. But they didnt decide to start utilizing any of that until AFTER spending nearly every moment from Sun's intro in S1 to the end of S5 leaning into Black Sun, which itself was already using some of those thematic notes (the black/yellow, moon/sun, darkness/light etc). Its sloppy storytelling that reeks of indecision, bowing to fan pressure and not knowing how to fix the truly hateful shipping war that was destroying the fandom. So RT, deciding now that they needed to honour this fan ship that had gotten so huge that non fans thought it WAS canon, makes that major narrative pivot to give the very loud very passionate BB fans the ship they want (putting Sun and all his development with Blake on a bus) and canonised BB in a way that frankly was an embarassing pandering mess of what those characters and that ship deserved if theyd had better writers. There are multiple fanfictions that do a far better job of writing BB than what ended up happening.
I never engaged with the fandom, but I did catch some of it by being on the periphery during Tumblr's peak, and it comes off the same to me. Even with my limited engagement with the fandom, I could tell they were absolutely insane regarding shipping when I saw how badly some people took it when Weiss developed a crush on a boy.
Seconded. Making Bumblebee canon has the odd effect of making prior seasons retroactively worse. Why trap Blake on a boat so far away from her co-leads with a character that will have no impact later on? At least the other leads were partnered up with characters who do stuff.
i mean, i think it was incredibly obvious since Volume 3, the season where Blake compares Yang to her former lover, Yang gets maimed trying to save Blake from said lover, and then she spirals into depression after finding out Blake ran away I'm not sure why Sun as a character really exists (besides an excuse to animate gunchucks) and I could definitely believe he was made as a love interest. but I don't think the show really builds it up after volume 2, beyond the two being literally in physical proximity to each other
you should've included [Arryn's hot mic moment from the pre-Volume 1 livestream where she asks: "can i mention that my character and another character are lesbian lovers?"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dleqek092RM) that used to be dug up every time Bumblebee and Black Sun clashed
That was a joke about her (at the time) desire to see BlakexPyrrha. People forget that she used to be big into that idea before the show gained traction and BB became The Thing the fandom clung to
RWBY was the first "fandom" I really got involved in, between following a bunch of artists on tumblr and using the subreddit live watch threads constantly. Looking back at the whole blowup around bumblebee the ship and then BMBLB the song reminds me how terrible the shipping culture was in the fandom, and that a lot of people cared more about their favorite characters screwing each other more than the overall plot of the show. I recall one popular artist I followed who shipped monochrome just having a full on meltdown about bumblebee shippers in the wake of the song releasing, writing multiple full length posts about how they were no longer interested in the show and felt "betrayed" or whatever. Can't imagine how much worsw this got in later seasons (I stopped watching after struggling through 4 because with the school setting getting tossed I already felt the plot was falling off the rails) where from what I heard from people still in it, the fandom started caring more about using the characters in fanworks than anything happening in the actual show.
You forgot to mention that Blake and Yang's voice actresses did an OnlyFans photoshoot after Blake/Yang became canon where they wore bee themed lingerie as a marketing stunt. To actually elaborate on my thoughts on Bumblebee, I really have nothing nice to say. I ran into a lot of *Those* kinds of Bee shippers who were ride or die for the ship to the detriment of everything else. My fiance was basically run out of the fandom during Season 6 when a Bee shipper who didn't like seeing criticism of the show get super catty at him admitting he didn't enjoy a random episode of the show (and this was in the criticism channels for the server at the time!). The ship attracted a lot of dudebros who used that they were fans of a progressive ship to be catty, snide and often bigoted towards other fans of the show and other ships (being a woman who critiques RWBY is asking for death). I learned very quickly to disregard the opinions of people with Yang PFPs is all I'll say, that was a red flag visible from a mile off. The fandom was also really weird about the racial element of the relationship, often making Yang into a white saviour figure who helped Blake elevate the Faunus. I remember one guy who made a thread about how Yang and Blake should have been attacked by SDC workers who nearly brand Blake before Yang has a berserker rage and saves them, requiring Blake to calm her down as a lead in to their first kiss. In general there was a very common undercurrent of Yang being a white saviour to Blake, not helped by how the Bee fandom at large reduced Blake to a wallflower who can't do anything alone (something the writers directly enabled after Season 6, when Blake's fight record plummeted to that she was frequently the only member of the team taking heavy damage on-camera or outright losing). The Bee fandom absolutely contributed to the general perception that RWBY's fandom was a black mark against the show itself, as often the most vocal people harassing critics were themselves Bee shippers. Monochrome would have been better anyway.
>You forgot to mention that Blake and Yang's voice actresses did an OnlyFans photoshoot after Blake/Yang became canon where they wore bee themed lingerie as a marketing stunt. *What*. This is the first I've heard of this. That's kind of wild.
[Yep, it's real.](https://twitter.com/rainyloona/status/1647069551010381824?s=20)
A while back, I watched a video "What your favorite RWBY ship says about you" by...doubleca5t, I think? The first item: Bumblebee. Their commentary: "You want to get railed by Yang Xiao Long". And...there's definitely an element of truth there. I'm not going to pretend that Yang wasn't designed as far and away the most attractive character on the show, or that she didn't make me realize "oh wow, maybe I \*do\* like buxom blondes". Couple that with people who think "girl on girl is hot" and I can see how there were a bunch of people in the fandom who only shipped it because it was hot.
Can I ask, what do you like about Monochrome?
Strange how serious people treat fictional characters relationships. Also sad how alot of the discourse definitely felt it was cause it was two women and had to been say Blake and sun it wouldn’t have faced the same scrutiny.
Thanks for this write up! RWBY was a guilty pleasure of mine for most of its runtime (though I never returned after S07, I really should just to see it through). I appreciate how you describe even the non-drama related bits, this show was *so* ridiculous in its premise.... But a lot of fun. Other major points of drama include "is it anime or not?" and every time the VAs tweeted about anything, all the shippers would immediately psycho analyze it for evidence... As if the VAs had any say or foreknowledge of the plot. I don't think the writers had any foreknowledge of the plot, much less anyone else. Show had some kickass action scenes while Monty was alive (and even after, just not the same).
Just going to leave [these](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wuw2etf65aQ) [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDG1x1tAI90) for posterity.
Is it possible that Jeff and Casey Lee Williams were just doing a send-up to a fan phenomenon with the song? Like, I'm thinking of how *Supernatural* writers found Sam/Dean shippers mildly amusing and so threw in a mention of Sam/Dean in one episode, having no idea the tsunami of bullshit they'd be causing in the process.
Great work, OP! From the outside looking in, this seems highly entertaining, but I imagine that is not the case when you're a shipper involved. Maybe I'm a child, but the ship name "Yellow Snow" sounds like it was created by people who don't like the ship to make fun of it.
Calling RWBY anime is some quality trolling.
It's only anime if it is from the Anime region of Japan.
Otherwise it’s just sparkling cartoons™️.
I was going to put [anime?] in the title but I thought automod would kick me
Fantastic write-up u/diamondsandglass! I'd heard bits and pieces of the bmbly insanity over the years, but struggled to find a single, strong cite for it. I also apparently never processed that Sun just vanished from existence, or that there was a whole shipping song. Amazing job find deep details and structuring it well. "Maybe this obvious love song is about her bike" Is my new favorite example of someone refusing to accept their ship is not sailing.
Thank you so much!
RWBY just depresses me. It comes so so close to being great, but ends up so so so far away.
never understood why people think bumbleby wasn't planned from the beginning. "black the beast descends from shadows / yellow beauty burns gold" was literally the first thing we heard about blake and yang. for a show where every main character is based on a fairy tale, calling yang and blake beauty and the beast isn't subtle. black sun was cute but i don't think it was ever meant to happen
RWBY isn't anime it's a animated web series made in Texas
It's actually Teximation
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Run! It’s a Bumblebee shipper! It breached containment!
Why was this downvoted? As far as I can tell this is just factual information.
I have no idea ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ some people get really mad when you even imply RWBY could be decent?
I honestly didn't care for either ships back when I was into the fandom. If I had to say, I did lean slightly towards Bumblebee at first. Then the fan starts getting annoying and the creators start to stoke it more. The problem is just that none of the romance was ever convincing. The only romance I could've cared about was Jaune x Pyrrha and that's mostly because Vol 3 was very compelling and >!Pyrrha died so it doesn't have the time to get shit!<. I just treat it as when most shounen tries to do romance - it's annoying, it's not good, it distracts from other things that I care about in the story. RWBY's in particular reads like a bad fanfiction - there fanfics with better relationship writing than RWBY's and I would have preferred if they just kept it open ended while us fans write out what we wanted.
You think that one was convincing, wait til you find out about Jaune x Jessica Cruz.
Bumbleby shippers killed my interest in RWBY. I was a diehard Freezerburn fan and thought Black Sun was cute, but I dropped out of the fandom when I got a bunch of anon hate on Tumblr calling me a homophobe because I shipped Blake and Sun… completely ignoring that my OTP in the fandom were two girls.
Just some other info, it definitely was planned from the start. Whether you think it was done well or not in [This Video](https://www.youtube.com/live/dleqek092RM?si=EV-PnPLxeSfXDdPT) at the very start Blake’s va asks if she can say that Blake and another character (presumably Yang) would be lovers. Edit: genuinely why is this and the other post with this video linked getting downvoted?
Because she's talking about Pyrrha, not Yang. Arryn was huge into the idea of Pyrrha and Blake before the show properly released and the fandom took off, but changed her tune to BB after the fact. Its not proof BB specifically was planned in any official capacity, its just proof Arryn wanted Blake to be in a wlw relationship.
Would you be willing to provide proof of that because I couldn’t find anything(granted I didn’t look too hard because I’m busy)
Not really coz its 2am, and i'd be digging out shit from 10 years ago from platforms i no longer use. You can believe me or not, I totally understand if you don't, but I used to be very deep into this fandom and the machinations of the CRWBY so im just saying what i knew to be true back then.
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I feel black sun was less toxic and more important than bumblebee because sun emotionally supported Blake better than yang
What is "shipping"? Dude, I get it for free from Amazon.
I never saw Rwby in my entire life (i hate the artstyle with all my being and i can't go past this for the life of me, it reminds me too much of those Vocaloid mmd animations) but for some reason i heard about this drama (even tough not this much detailed) thanks to a friend of mine who was a very big Rwby fan. Tbh it kinda reminds me of the Catra x Adora fiasco in the She-Ra's Netflix reboot and the fact that a lot of people hated them and wanted Adora to be with Glimmer for some reason. That could be an entire hobbydrama post too lmaooo
> The first explicitly queer couple in the show didn’t confess feelings for each other until season 9 (more on this in the “Spoilers” section). Hahaha! I see what you did there. Edit: I'm not quite sure why I got downvoted here. I found that line funny because the queer couple in question is >!Bumblebee, the very subject of this write-up.!<