Review: RWBY Vol.9 “A Place of Particular Concern”

Overview

After falling off the path to Vacuo, Ruby grapples with a murderous Neo before sinking into a void. Waking up on a strange beach without her weapon, Ruby journeys through a jungle and meets a talking mouse who she names “Little” (Voiced by Luci Christian). Weiss and Blake reunite before both are caught in a trap laid by Little’s tribe of mice, but Ruby arrives with Little and they convince the mice to relent. While searching for Yang, the group encounters a creature called the Jabberwalker, which is driven off by a pursuing Yang. Though Team RWBY is reunited, Yang is now missing her mechanical arm, and Weiss’s tearful confession that Penny “sacrificed herself” causes Ruby to faint. As Blake looks around, she tells the team they have landed in a world resembling a fairy tale.


Our Take

Picking up from the chaotic and screwed up ending of Volume 8 that left such a bad taste in my mouth, the presumed dead team RWBY (along with Jaune and even Neo) have all fallen into some otherworldly ether and into a “wonderland”-like Island that’s full of talking mice, Cheese that grows in the ground and potential danger. With everyone trying to comprehend the aftermath of Penny being killed, and all of them are now on a quest to get their weapons back.

I also really loved how Blake is the one to identify them as being in a fairy tale – because in any other part of the show, that would be Ruby, who grew up on fairy tales far more than all of the rest of them. But here Blake is the one to take the lead and define the world they’ve fallen into because she grew up on stories in the same way Ruby did, but their positions as cynic and hopeful have entirely swapped now. Ruby is fucking depressed and disillusioned, and can’t see the world for what it is when the whole world for her was a fairy tale before, and now Blake, who once thought Ruby was naive for that, has regained her hope and optimism with the help of the connections she’s made.

The vibe I’m mostly getting from the intro so far is that this volume is potentially more focused on character development and personal growth, rather than action and fight scenes or multiple subplots where the writers want to force us to sympathize with otherwise despicable characters. And considering all the insanity that happened in Volumes 7 and 8, I’m not opposed to that. I remain cautiously optimistic that this season won’t suck. No more “Invincible Cinder” doing Cinder things (for a while at least) no forced plot contrivances outside of their current disadvantages, and hopefully they somehow escape this crazy colorful acid trip of a world somewhere down the line…