Poll: Well, RWBY volume 2 trailer is out, Time to start talking

[Alexei F. Karamazov]

Basically, RWBY is going to need a few seasons to come into its own, primarily because everyone from the voice actors to the animators is stepping into their first official projects. There are no big names, no people experienced with the format. And that's unfortunate, because it does have a lot of potential, a view I've seen around here a lot. I'm thinking that this is going to go the same way RvB did - looking back at the first few seasons, they were quite frankly horrible compared to what they have now, their twelfth season. But Animes generally don't run twelve seasons, so the question is, can the RWBY production team improve enough to stand on its own by the third season, and will they still have fans by then? I think the answers to those questions will be no and yes. But that first no is going to be a problem, because I can't see RWBY running more than five or six seasons (one for the 2nd semester of the first year, and the other three for the other three years at Beacon, four if it is a 5-year institution). They can certainly push the number of seasons higher if they split every year into two semester-long seasons like they seem to have done with year one, but they risk pissing off anime fans for having a series that has outstayed its welcome. They've already pissed off the purists, and general anime fans are not too impressed. If they aren't careful, they'll fall to being an anime for people who haven't yet seen anime.

And the problem there is that RWBY actually takes effort! The early seasons of RvB are literally just recordings of Halo that were voiced over, and it took them a good 7 or 8 seasons to actually get custom animation into the videos. RWBY, on the other hand, is all custom animation. I'm guessing that's considerably more expensive and much more time intensive, and it's only going to become more-so as the fans (or just most people in this thread) demand longer episodes. I wonder if RWBY will eventually just be hastily concluded at some point because production will become so much of a bother?

OT: I don't really watch anime, but I watched RWBY. I didn't really enjoy it, but it was 5 minutes per episode, so it was pretty harmless. Nothing really caught my interest, and the only reason I started was because Rooster Teeth produced it. I'll probably keep watching it, since it's still going to be pretty harmless in terms of time consumption, and who knows, maybe it'll actually grab my attention.

I do think that it's pretty impressive that Rooster Teeth has been able to (more or less) pull off RWBY. Going back to what I said earlier, this seems like a pretty massive undertaking for them, and a very alien thing for most of their staff, I'm sure. For a content producer on the internet, it's pretty impressive; but then again, my perception of most anime is that it comes from massive companies with a bajillion employees churning out frames of animation, so my admiration is most likely poorly placed.