Can we just stop for a moment and appreciate how fucking insane it is that RWBY is an actual anime now?

It’s hard to remember a decade out from its premiere, but when RWBY first arrived on the scene, it was a very weird, very niche property. It was a an amateur passion project from the guys who made the funny Halo webseries, many of whom had little to no experience on a full-fledged original animated series like that. The writing was subpar, the actors were all pretty inexperienced, even the animation was pretty ramshackle outside the incredible fight scenes. But not only did RWBY persist, it grew. It improved on itself every season with better production values and storytelling, accomplishing things that never seemed possible in its early, rudimentary days. And as it grew in quality, it likewise grew in popularity, blossoming from a niche web property into one of the defining series of the modern animation landscape. And after ten years, it’s become so goddamn huge that it’s managed to snag an honest-to-god anime spinoff with some of the biggest names in the business working on it. Really, stop and think about that: Monty Oum’s love letter to anime has become such a huge success that it’s now being worked on by Gen fucking Urobuchi. Okay, yeah, Urobuchi just came up with the story concept, but still. Imagine telling anyone back in 2012 that the guy who wrote Fate/Zero, Madoka Magica, and Psycho-Pass would someday put his hands on RWBY. Wherever Monty is now, I hope he’s proud of how far his baby has come.

And to Ice Queendom’s credit, it starts from a very strong premise: what if we took one of the worst, most half-baked parts of early RWBY- namely, Weiss’ two-episode dalliance with racism- and flesh it so it actually works? The Faunus racism subplot has never been the show’s strongest aspect, something that even its creators have acknowledged. So if you’re gonna do a semi-canonical spinoff, choosing to go back and do that subplot’s initiation over is about as good an idea as I can come up with. The main issue with volume 1′s finale is how rushed the introduction and resolution of Weiss’ racism is. It’s brought up with no build-up, it’s so hilariously over-the-top that it’s impossible to take seriously, and in one of the single stupidest writing decisions I’ve ever seen, she just gets over it off-screen and it’s never brought up again. It’s not the worst RWBY has ever been (glares menacingly at Jaunedine), but it’s definitely up there, and it sets the stage for how awkward the whole Faunus plotline is doomed to remain going forward. If you’re gonna flesh out and re-work any part of RWBY, I can’t think of a better option than this.

So after a three-episode recap of volume 1, compressing events for time and sprinkling in new details that will form the basis of its plot, Ice Queendom launches into a good old-fashioned dream arc. Weiss is attacked by a Grimm that traps her in a nightmare, and the rest of her team has to travel into that nightmare to set her free. But it’s easier said than done, because this nightmare preys on its victim’s worst impulses, bringing their darkest fears about themselves to the forefront until they consume them. And that means Dream Weiss isn’t just a passive prisoner of her own dream: she’s the dictator of it. She’s every bit the cold, ruthless authoritarian that her family wants her to be, indifferent to the suffering of her kingdom and closed off from the people she truly cares about. It’s all of Weiss’ worst qualities made manifest, exaggerated and twisted and very much not solved by an off-screen decision. Which is actually helped by that reader’s digest of volume 1 I mentioned: with just a few key details tweaked, it’s made clear that even after resolving things with Blake, Weiss is nowhere near free from his demons. And if those demons aren’t gonna let her go on their own, then her friends are just gonna have to beat them out of her with the power of friendship. Because if RWBY’s gonna go full anime, it might as well go full goddamn anime.

As a premise, this is everything I could want. Sure, the volume 1 recap isn’t perfect, and it’s far from a perfect way to start things off. It cuts too much out to be welcoming for newcomers, and this show is clearly not aiming to be anyone’s introduction to RWBY. But it also doesn’t really change enough to be interesting to established fans beyond seeing their favorite volume 1 moments realized in classic 2D animation (which, to be clear, is pretty fun on its own; the Nevermore fight is basically unimpeachable). Once Ice Queendom branches into its own story, though, it’s a damn good time. It’s clear how much love the creators of this show have for RWBY, and how well they understand Weiss’ character in particular. Even in the smaller details of the dream, like the different ways Weiss’ family members are portrayed, you can tell the people making this show are as much fans as anyone watching it. And if the only reason for IQ to exist at all was providing a more satisfying conflict and resolution to the Weiss Racism subplot, then I’d say mission accomplished. I won’t spoil how things play out, but while it isn’t perfect, it sticks the landing where it needs to and makes this part of RWBY stronger. That, if nothing else, is cause for celebration.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t take long before some pretty significant problems start to crop up.

The first, and most obvious, issue is the animation. Shaft’s glory days as a studio are well behind them (cries in Sangatsu season 3 never), and after a mostly solid opening stretch of episodes, the animation really starts coming apart at the seams. So many awkward, unfinished cuts, off-model characters, sloppy in-between frames, and that’s just the obvious stuff I could pick up on with a cursory glance. It does pick up again in the final stretch, but this show was clearly a production nightmare, and I shudder to think how bad things were behind the scenes. But perhaps even more distressing is that even when Ice Queendom looks good, it also looks... well, boring. The character designs somehow have even less personality than the early stiff-faced poser models, colors are clashing all over the place, and there’s just so little imagination put into how to visually depict this dream world. This is the goddamn Monogatari studio setting a story inside an abstract, symbolic mindscape. Why the fuck does so much of it look so flat and basic? Yeah, early RWBY certainly wasn’t a looker, but just take a look at its most recent seasons! RWBY looks incredible now! I’d argue it’s one of the leading pioneers for CG animation, certainly for anime-style CG animation if nothing else. And it’s a shame that an actual veteran anime studio falls so short of what Rooster Teeth has been able to accomplish.

And then there’s the writing. Or rather, the lack thereof. See, all that good stuff I talked about with Ice Queendom fleshing out the Weiss Racism subplot and giving it proper closure? That’s just the first and last few episodes of the dream. There’s a huge dead space right in the middle of this show that I can only describe as plot blocking. A problem arises, the characters solve it, another problem arises, they solve it again, and the pacing practically drags to a standstill through an endless series of obstacles that don’t move the plot forward and only seem to exist to drag out the show’s runtime. It’s glaringly obvious that writer Tow Ubukata didn’t have enough ideas for how to stretch this story across a full cours, so most of its midsection is just spinning its wheels waiting for an excuse to start the actually interesting stuff again. And it doesn’t help that this is also where the animation really starts to fall apart, so for a while you’ve got a plot that’s going nowhere and looking pretty ugly while doing it. Which may have been forgivable if just for the sake of watching our favorite characters spend more time together, but, well...

Look, I feel like this is going to be a controversial take, but I have to say it anyway: Ice Queendom’s dialogue is terrible. The characters talk in the most generic anime aphorisms, there’s so little specificity to how they communicate, everyone feels like they’re Performing Anime Archetypes rather than actually embodying Ruby Rose, Yang Xiao Long, Weiss Schnee, Blake Belladonna, Jaune Arc, and so on. And whatever else you might say about OG RWBY, it has always had excellent dialogue. Even back in the first volume when Monty, Miles and Kerry were still finding their footing, they knew how to make a conversation flow with purpose. This, though? This just feels like fanfiction. Which, I mean, that’s essentially what Ice Queendom is, but it’s that awkward kind of fanfiction that understands how the characters are written but doesn’t really know how to portray their voice, so the dialogue is all weirdly off and impersonal and never quite sounds the way it’s supposed to. And I definitely put this on the writing more than the actors, because I recently watched the English dub trailer and it had all the same problems. Saori Hayami, Lindsay Jones, Yoko Hisaka, Kara Eberle, and all the other voice actors, JP and EN alike, are incredibly talented people, but they just cannot make this dialogue sound right.

You know, it’s funny. When Ice Queendom was first announced, the worst parts of the RWBY hatedom lauded it as Japan “taking custody of RWBY” away from evil Miles and Kerry who “ruined Monty’s vision” (by which they meant adding gay characters and not redeeming the evil male abuser). Finally, they crowed, based Nippon was going to do RWBY the way it was supposed to be done. And yet, not only is Ice Queendom a substantially weaker product than anything OG RWBY has put out in the past several years, it’s flaws are all a direct result of being an anime in the first place. The horrible production schedule leading to melty animation, the plot blocking that exists onto to perpetuate itself, the dialogue that makes the characters come off more like archetypes than characters... these are all problems that anime is very familiar with. They’re certainly problems familiar to anyone who’s kept up with Shaft’s recent output, particularly their horribly mangled Magia Record adaptation. Perhaps there’s a weird irony in that. RWBY may have started out as a love letter to anime, but it’s grown so far from those origins by now that it’s arguably better than most anime on the market. And when someone tries to turn it into anime, it only reveals just how much better off this show is for charting its own course away from the worst parts of the medium it was inspired by.

And yet... yeah, this is still really fucking cool. It’s a testament to how far this cute little indie project has come over the years. RWBY is a juggernaut now, something that’s so big it’s come around to influencing its own influences. And despite its many, many faults, I still came away from Ice Queendom feeling mostly positive (it doesn’t hurt that the last couple episodes really do kick a serious amount of ass). It’s as much a love letter to RWBY as RWBY is to anime, and seeing that mutual appreciation is just too damn inspiring to ignore. I hope this isn’t the last anime spinoff RWBY gets; I hope lots of different Japanese studios and creators get to try their hands at bringing the hidden pockets of Remnant to life. Maybe they could adapt all the tie-in novel I still haven’t read? That could be a really cool way of bringing those stories to life. But I’ll save my wish list for another day. For now, RWBY Ice Queendom was a deeply flawed, but deeply captivating experiment, and I hope it’s an experiment we see repeated- and improved upon- for quite some time to come.