Review: RWBY Beyond “A Knight’s Journal”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Still acclimating to being back in Remnant, Jaune starts writing a journal that chronicles his thoughts and his time in the Ever After as the Rusted Knight with Alyx and Lewis. He shares some of this with Oscar and asks if he thinks they’re all going to survive, to which Oscar asks if it mattered when Jaune was among his friends. Jaune says it didn’t.

OUR TAKE

Oh, Jaune Arc. Your presence has never not been divisive in things, so it feels almost fitting that your possibly last appearance should be as well. Ever since his four episode story arc in Volume 1, where he got the spotlight before even Blake or Yang, his inclusion in certain moments has been eyebrow-raising, with him even getting special attention in the Ice Queendom anime and being the only other good guy to follow RWBY into the Ever After in Volume 9. For a long time, for better or worse, he’s ostensibly been the fifth main character of the show, so it would make sense that RWBY Beyond, which described itself as “telling the untold stories happening in Remnant during Volume 9 and beyond”…would use one of its four episodes to add a coda to a Jaune’s story, which was already very thoroughly told and occurred outside of Remnant. If the last episode focuses on Team RWBY like people are speculating, that “and beyond” is sure doing a lot of heavy lifting. That said, out of the several episodes they apparently planned, doing the one about the OTHER character voiced by a head writer, Miles Luna, was probably the easiest to get done within the suddenly crunched timeframe they had.

This episode is also the first that explicitly takes place after the V9 epilogue, specifically referencing Jaune’s off-screen adventures with Alyx and Lewis when he was flung back in time. How much time was unclear at the time, but this confirms that the twins came from Vacuo before The Great War, a major event which took place eighty years before the start of the main story. This clears up how Lewis could go onto write The Girl Who Fell Through the World while keeping his anonymity (he’s very likely dead in the present day). But more importantly, it essentially means that, considering Jaune still hung around the Ever After long after Alyx and Lewis left (in one way or another) and until he found Team RWBY again, that he is mentally over a century old, having spent the vast majority of his existence in another plane of reality. Him discussing this with Oscar (who still seems to be steadily merging with Oz’s collective memories) is interesting since, as Jaune points out, Oz is the only one who could even remotely relate to that, but even his experience of reincarnating into random people’s minds and absorbing their consciousness is still lightyears away from what Jaune went through. It at least puts them on good terms, which is nice since Oscar often ended up the punching bag of Jaune (and Qrow) for things Oz did early on.

But I still find myself puzzled by what giving Jaune these extra mental decades was meant to add to his character. He did learn some very important lessons during his time as The Rusted Knight, though a lot of those seemed to happen near the end, so now he’s a hundred years old for no real reason and I can’t imagine that really coming in handy in the rest of the story. However, if there’s anything that Jaune’s personal story has been defined by, it’s people seeing greatness in him even when he can’t and giving him the push needed to live up to that, which is certainly what this short taps into the most. Also worth acknowledging is that this episode was recorded just a couple days after the announcement that Rooster Teeth was shutting down, making Miles asking “Do you think we’re gonna make it?” even more poignant. He’s been playing Jaune for over a decade, the majority of his professional career, so you can definitely tell from this that his acting has only gotten sharper, made even clearer acting against VO veteran Aaron Dismuke. And again, as one of the original creative forces behind the show’s creation alongside Monty, Kerry, and a scant few others, giving him a chance to say a personal goodbye, or at least a “see ya later”, is by no means unexpected. I can’t say that we really needed one more Jaune story in this, but that’s what we got, and it’s the best version of that we could’ve asked for. We’ve got two more of these Beyond shorts to go, but while I couldn’t tell you who we’ll see next, I can tell you they’re gonna hit you right in the feels.