EFFORTPOST The Decline of RoosterTeeth and RWBY — Meta Effortpost Part 2

In this thread we'll discuss the start of RoosterTeeth and RWBY's decline. I don't have a lot of space left so refer to the first thread for a proper introduction.

RoosterTeeth's Decline

"Viewers really like the chemistry of these 5 people playing Halo, let's hire another 300 people and... umm..."

-- @AverageBen10Enjoyer

Regarding the fundamental reason why RoosterTeeth failed, there are millions of small mistakes that all fed into the major problem of expenses exceeding profits. Even though RT grew more prominent by the year going into 2014, when WB announced the closure earlier this month they cited RT not being profitable for ten years as a major reason. RoosterTeeth grew too fast and ended up having to hope their endeavors would pay out down the line. Meanwhile the company's payroll grew from a handful of creators into scores of influencers, production crew, writers, animators, management, HR, accounting (at least I'm assuming they had accountants )

RWBY is especially notable in this lesson on growing expenses because while it did become popular, production costs also grew from indie to part of the problem. RWBY Volume 1 was Monty's passion project, voiced by amateurs and made in the same software Monty used for his fanfic YouTube videos. As the show went on the animation was upgraded, professional voice actors were hired...

In contrast RWBY Volume 9 cost roughly 6.6 million dollars to produce. RT apparently needed Crunchyroll's help to fund it at all. (More on that later) As big as it was it's entirely possible RWBY stopped being profitable after a while or maybe was never even profitable. And if RWBY was like that, there's no chance RT's other post-RWBY concepts made them money over time.

And so RT grew too fast and potential turned into bloat. Along the way there were also plenty of rDrama appropriate scandals and the particular problem of RT losing its original fans and failing to replace them with zoomers.

Business Strategy

They decided to turn themselves into a full on production company that dipped their toes into everything. Movies, games, dramatic series, podcasts, various comedic shows etc. Vast majority of them bombed.

-- @Squibbly

In 2014 going into 2016 RoosterTeeth seemed like a rising star, unparalleled success story for nerdom. Their Halo machinima series had evolved into a popular DVD and merch selling fullblown production complete with cgi. Their web show RWBY built more and more hype with every new season and proved itself popular in Japan too, with RT even cutting a deal with a real company like Warner Bros Japan to distribute the dub. RTX was popular and other bigdick companies were using it for promotions like demos for then upcoming games Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, Halo: The Master Chief Collection, and Rainbow Six Siege. It would soon spread internationally to Australia and Britain too. RT succesfully crownfunded the full length movie Lazer Team. The Funhaus division opened in Los Angeles to take the company beyond the Lone Star State. RoosterTeeth's growth in just a few short years was inspiring, so inspiring that it led to an entirely new business philosophy -- one of growth at any cost

Burnie Burns: Now we're not competing with the PewDiePies and the Homestar Runners of the world. Now we're competing with Netflix and HBO and Amazon. And we're more than ready for that challenge.

Burnie Burns and Joel Heyman in particular were big on growing and making RoosterTeeth into an anything they could get away with company. To facilitate this RT was bought out by Fullscreen, LLC. This was an entertainment company offering services and consultation to social media influencers. Their other clients included NBCUniversal, Fox, Fremantle, JASH, Fine Brothers Entertainment, Mattel, and WIGS. ScrewAttack had also been aquired by them, and a few corporate mergers later so was Machinima Inc.

Also in 2014 Otter Media and the Chernin Group aquired a controlling stake so Fullscreen itself ultimately came under AT&T. Flashing forward to '19 and AT&T started shopping around to try and sell RoosterTeeth and other brands. In the end RT was still there for the corporate merger that formed Warner Bros Discovery. This is what allowed RT content to start crossing over with DC Comics.

If it feels like RoosterTeeth became a bloated and generic social media company, that's because they were purchased by corporate people who were that way that also offered big bucks to the RT founders who wanted to be that way. With the Fullscreen merger many of the relevant people assured fans RT wouldn't change, but the following years speak for themselves. Upper leadership started to be appointed by the owners starting at least with Fullscreen President and former COO Ezra Cooperstein becoming President of Rooster Teeth in '18 and Jordan Levin becoming general manager after the major layoff in '19. Also that year many of the original founders stepped down into creative roles: Matt Hullum stepped down as CEO and became Chief Content Officer, Burnie Burns stepped down as chief creative officer to executive producer and Geoff Ramsey became executive creative director. Ironically the two business minded founders left around this time, Joel was more or less dismissed from the company that year and Burnie left in '20.

It's not surprising that RoosterTeeth's mediocrity set in with the late '10s. Every generic policy you see out of media and social media slop servers these days, RT soon became guilty of. Milking franchises dry? The RWBY franchise expansion mentioned in this thread and the previous speak for themselves. Obsession with teen influencers and feel good diversity whatnot? In '21 RT announced the creation of the Rooster Teeth Digital Creators Program, which is intended to support "underrepresented" talent. Throwing money around to see what'll stick? Lazer Team 2 and Gen:LOCK got made. Trying to sponsor as much content as possible for the sake of having content? In '18, Rooster Teeth piloted five shows named Branded, Gorq's Quest, Achievement Haunter, Million Dollars, But ... Animated, and Rooster Teeth's Murder Room, and also announced Spikeface, a new 2D/dark comedy show to be coproduced with Rob McElhenney and his RCG Productions. Unnecessary premium service? RT relied more and more on their First program to try and drive dollars and views to their website, for example making RWBY episodes premier up to a month earlier for First members while also removing the vast majority of RWBY and RvB content from YouTube. On the other end of this you also have schizophrenic attempts to strike money-making deals with other services, i.e. partnering more and more with Crunchyroll even at the expense of those same First members.

Heck, they even went with the all to common generic minimalism for the new logo.

In the end the corporate mergers are what made RT's dissolution possible since Warner Bros simply decided to close the company and see about selling off the relevant creative assets.

Controversies

RoosterTeeth didn't necessarily fail because of any single major incident, but the problems they did have contributed to their bleeding out over time. There's a recurring theme of old fans disappearing and new fans not sticking around. Plus it's fun to point and laugh

Disappearing Founders

Neurodivergent basement dwellers pretending to be the moral authority

both sides end up devoured by their own hubris

you love to see it

-- @Christine

If 2015 was RT's golden year, it's fitting that '16 was the start of their decline. One of the earlier major controversies to really hit the company was the effective unpersoning of Joel Heyman, one of the company's original founders and the voice for RvB fan favorite character Caboose.

Aside from being a major part of RoosterTeeth's first big show, Joel apparently did a lot of early business deals for the company back when it was really just a group trying to be a company. Unfortunately Joel was heckin rightoid in Austin, TX so things broke down between him and the others as the Trump years went on.

As the 10's went by RT's fanbase evolved from Halo dudebros into types, partially because a few of the former changed into the latter and partially because RT went out of its way to court them. Trump derangement syndrome took hold hard with the rest of the team and this new community wasn't having it either. Even years later bringing up Joel's name in the main subreddit led to misremembered claims about disputes with and mistreatment of other employees.

Joel became quieter until finally departing the company in '19. RT stopped mentioning him in content and everyone in places like Reddit likes to pretend he was never involved. There was never even a larger controversy to cause this lmao he simply committed the crime of being a Republican and was turned on by the same people otherwise quoting Caboose lines

Borrowing a comment from BoomhauerInTheWind RT also lost other originals over time. Most weren't necessarily in trouble but their departures still contributed to the company's decline. Most longtime fans didn't appreciate their replacements as much, and while RoosterTeeth tried to get new fans over the years, we'll see how that turned out for them below

S*x Pests

how do you make a rooster teeth drama thread without mentioning adam kovic

— @Tim_Allen

In October 2020, Achievement Hunter's Ryan Haywood and Funhaus co-founder Adam Kovic were both involved in scandals involving their leaked nudes. Adam Kovic was previously part of Machinima Inc's Inside Gaming before leaving in 2015 to form RT's Funhaus division in Los Angeles. Ryan Haywood did a lot of production and acting work for RT and was best known for being part of Achievement Hunter and entertainment-news division The Know.

I've heard different versions of exactly what happened with both of them, but my understanding is as follows. Both were catfished because they tried to engage in erotic roleplay with fans.

Furthermore Ryan Haywood was fricking fans at conventions and apparently one of them was 17. Also he was married. Also many of these girls thought they were the only one and didn't like that he had multiple sidepieces. Accusations of groomercord grooming started flying and many people got it in their mind that he was effectively a male feminist. Others maintain he was just a regular Z-list celebrity sexpest. In any case his reputation was shot.

Meanwhile Adam Kovic was apparently just a He took nude selfies involving things like riding a dildo and deadlifting anal shots and the Funhaus office bathroom. As RT became increasingly HR-esque this was blown into a major scandal especially since it came out alongside Ryan's drama. Coworker Lawrence Sontag made statements about how Adam was gross and never washed his hands. All this mutated into claims that he'd done coomer stuff including literal cooming all over the office and that he'd harassed female coworkers like Elyse Willems. The RoosterTeeth subreddit even years later circulated a lot of these claims and he's often accused of being a male feminist much like Ryan.

RT amputated them to survive. Ryan obviously stopped working with the company and Adam's Funhaus content was removed. Alas this content was some of Funhaus' best in the eyes of longtime fans. Meanwhile a named Charlotte was hired and for better or worse became a new face for Funhaus. The Subreddit attracted trains and had frequent posts like "Charlotte made me realize I'm a train" to give an idea on the changing audience. Overall the scandal contributed heavily to RT's falling YouTube ratings.

Unless I'm forgetting someone Ryan and Adam represent RT's main s*x scandals, but the company has also had more minor incidents with partners and new hires and the like. One example of these indirect incidents is RT cutting ties with actor Vic Mignogna over sexual harassment accusations. (Famous for being Edward Elric in Fullmetal Alchemist. For RT he voiced in RWBY)

Diversity Hires

She played a huge role in Rooster Teeth's drawn-out implosion; she was unfunny, sucked at games (to the point that she constantly had to be reminded how to play), and had no charisma with the rest of the group, who sucked up to her in an attempt to gain Levar's favor. These factors caused the fanbase to bash her, and of course she played the race card and famously made Geoff cry on stream for being a filthy cumskin moid.

— @AllFunAndGames

I'm sure there's a million billion examples of random and in RT but the famous and dramatic example would be Mica Burton and her successor. Mica is none other than the daughter of LeVar Burton — Geordi La Forge in Star Trek TNG Mica joined RT in 2016 and was part of Achievement Hunter and The Know. She has nothing better to do than has been involved with other gaming content such as Overwatch League and multiple DnD events for Wizards of the Coast.

Mica ultimately wasn't popular and many fans complained about her. She would generally accuse them of racism in response. She picked beefs with the founders too and while I don't have a clip she at one point made Geoff Ramsey do the Brendan Fraser face meme by reminding him he's an overall mayo Also she made her dad hate the company which is hilarious because they clearly kept her around to try and court his favor

She was replaced by another sassy kween named Ky who was also loud (quite literally louder than average) and prone to racial grifting. She famously stated that RT's OG days weren't actually good because of a lack of diversity. This sent the few remaining chuds into a kerfuffle.

The War on Chuds

The "this isn't an airport, no need to announce your departure" tweet and then Loud is What We Do nonsense drove me away.

— @AverageBen10Enjoyer

Related to the above, Ky and Achievement Hunter were part of some sort of chud trap for reasons incomprehensible to people with normal business educations.

Many RT fans disliked Ky for being much louder than other hosts. One Redditor made a post about this where he politely and objectively made a point about the audio.

RT responded by trying to make this a race issue. Ky went on Twitter and made complaints along the following lines,

everyone yells, but we [black women] get the shit

I BABY - I GET SCARED - I SCREAM

I'm working on my gain lvls but if you think that's gonna make me, any less loud & expressive?

And it wasn't just Ky at work here because it didn't take long for RT to come up with "Loud is what we do” merchandise. As if the whole thing was some elaborate setup for organic marketing or guerrilla marketing or whatever the r-slurs who didn't get real degrees call it these days

Do you think this merchandise sold well? Do you think this endeavor solved Achievement Hunter's ratings problem? I'll let you infer for yourselves

Work Culture

It's like the people who 20 years ago would bust their asses as starving artists trying to make it in Hollywood or Broadway, except really pathetic and not respectable in any way.

— @Redactor0

Every once in awhile RoosterTeeth would get in trouble for its "crunch culture" and management practices. In true Texas fashion the company was always criticized for being a gold ol' boy club regarding the original founders and whether they knew you or not. RT was created by cliquish nerds so I'd believe it

In June 2019, dozens of anonymous reviews from Glassdoor highlighted long and unpaid hours, poor management, and over-reliance on temporary employees. Gray Haddock, Rooster Teeth's Head of Animation, stepped down two days after the allegations.

Gray Haddock was notably the driving force behind Gen:Lock, another RT animated show like RWBY that I'll bring up again later. Gen:Lock and RWBY, due to coming out back to back, had a hellish production cycle where the animation department worked massive amounts of unpaid overtime. One source estimated that both GL and Volume 6 had about a third of their seasons made entirely for free thanks to not paying overtime. Apparently RT Animation hired tons of interns on 90 day temporary contracts, all unpaid, but with the promise of a full, paying job upon completion. But when March rolled around they were shown the door

Flash forward to 2022 and RT has another crunch scandal featuring crossovers from social justice weirdos

Coinciding with RoosterTeeth's overall bloat and corporate expenditures, 2022 saw massive layoffs including Achievement Hunter's Matt Bragg, who was apparently big with the neckbeards of the subreddit. The layoffs also notably included the entire events staff, a massive red flag in retrospect since RTX was always a big deal to the company. Matt's firing upset the community and weakened the hardcore RoosterTeeth stans enough for criticism to start slipping through.

One of the more dramatic agitators was Achievement Hunter's Kdin. If you want to know what kind of person this is, xir's furry avatar is the picture featured above.

Kdin complained about working crunch hours and only getting paid $40k even after 7 years. Xir also claimed RoosterTeeth was problematic

Within a few weeks of working at Rooster Teeth I was given a nickname, that nickname was a slur. Every day I came into work I was called “F_gg_t” - but they could not use that name in content so when anyone was recording I was called “Fugz” instead.

Apparently Fugz was a common in-joke for AH content but for years the fans never knew what it meant. Suddenly every RT employee who had ever said "fugz" was under fire

Other people who chimed in include Funhaus member Alanah Pearce, who is both loved and hated by dramanauts for being the token booba foid and Arryn Zech, the voice of RWBY character Blake Belladonna

I personally have had my own issues with Rooster Teeth, from the second-hand effects of crunch through a partner to being threatened with recasting on RWBY if I didn't accept what they were willing to pay me.

She kind of downplays that her partner was Miles Luna, one of the original showrunners and not someone like a hapless intern

Mica Burton also came back to complain about RT being racist again. Geordi Jr. claimed she'd once seen the n-word randomly written on a whiteboard. Another employee clarified that what she saw was N_ggers — a reference to a bit from a South Park episode

The situation deteriorated. RT released a statement that did nothing Subreddit users started looking for any reason to tear down RT some more like hating on Geoff for a "problematic like" There were plenty of complaints along the lines of the image below.

Alas, the mob eventually turned against the initial hero of this story when they discovered Kdin had a naggers moment of xir own. This wasn't just a random floating n-word like with Mica either, but a whole rant apparently centered around The Cleveland Show of all things

The zoomers promptly turned against their would-be labor champion so this is a story where no one wins. Certainly not the poor, overworked sub jannies

Overall the incident turned many of the woke zoom-zooms RT had been carefully cultivating against the company and by this point very few of the original fans were left.

Declining Ratings and a Changing Internet

Oh no their Twitter is getting ZERO engagement. Looks like about an average of 300 likes per tweet, with 1 million followers That's so much worse than having actual controversy

— @texthere

Despite its expensive investments in content and influencers, RT suffered a long decline in ratings as the ‘10s went on. The image above represents May 2022 YouTube views for Achievement Hunter, a staple of RT that had dozens of full time employees behind its production. They simply couldn't sustain a company on view counts this bad, especially considering this once popular channel had 3.7 million subscribers.

Part of RoosterTeeth's problem was the changing nature of YouTube. Despite Burnie's initial skepticism of having content off the company's own website, RT ultimately was very dependent on YouTube for their popularity. Most of the podcasts and meta gaming channels earned the majority of their views with YouTube and both RvB and RWBY got heavy exposure on YouTube. RoosterTeeth's own website was never popular enough to bring in consistent streams of new fans if all RT content had been exclusively hosted there.

YouTube became way more algorithmically driven. The site just shows me whatever it thinks I'll watch, regardless of what I tell it. I honestly don't think I've subscribed to a channel in years

— @Pibbles

I've made the same observations of YouTube and it's evolution as many other dramanauts. Heck I wasn't sure if it was just a thing with my account or not until I heard similar stories from others.

YouTube has sorta done a 360 over the years. When it first started the majority of viral videos were coming from completely random people and even the famous ones hardly made a career out of their meme status. A lot of this was America's Funniest Home Videos esque content and not anything with production quality. Red vs Blue originally owed its popularity to this era.

As the years went by though YouTube became more obsessed with influencers and endless content mills. I remember some of them were so heavily favored that their videos would be force fed to you if ever you searched anything tangentially related to their genre, for example the same soyboy creators if you watched anything gaming. God forbid you sat through any of their videos because then half your suggestions would be for that same channel.

Unfortunately RoosterTeeth was getting on in years and YouTube wasn't really pushing them in particular. They seemed to prefer newer and cheaper influencers that really appealed to the youngins RT itself also chased this demographic but YouTube wasn't giving them any assistance.

But this has changed again at least in the past few years. With the brand growing larger and more saturated, modern YouTube seems more dependent on its algorithm than ever and is almost right back to showing people random videos again. Anecdotally it's not uncommon for the app and site to show me videos from 5, 8, even 12+ years ago and the comment sections for these will be filled with users with a similar experience. There also seems to be a kind of "hot" feature allowing newer videos that have achieved a few thousand views to get boosted to people's front pages. Imo this is YouTube's way of courting the youngest zoomers and Gen Alpha. Kids these days prefer short and sweet meme videos over long running content channels, to say nothing of YouTube shorts as a direct TikTok competitor.

Alas RoosterTeeth didn't benefit from this system either. If we could all consult the charts.

We'll see that RoosterTeeth only gained subscribers in one of twenty-two months. Things haven't been much better for their specific brands.

These days all the longrunning channels still following their old formulas are seeing gradual declines in views and channel subscriptions matter less than ever. YouTube doesn't seem to even put videos from subscribed channels on your front page anymore. Longtime fans started to fall off year by year and younger viewers were less and less likely to ever stumble on content at all. Meanwhile the RoosterTeeth site remained gimmicky and under trafficked so the company had no real solution to YouTube's developing away from their tried and formerly true model.

When i was fully neurodivergent, i used to love drunk tank/ early rt podcast because i was a friendless loser

— @Jimbo_B_Beterson

Over twenty years on since the start of noughties internet culture, it's become an inevitability that channels will lose old fans to time and shrink without constant growth. Even loyal channel subscribers will eventually grow up and move on from what entertained their younger selves. There are countless examples of old channels that still have millions of subscribers but end up with dismal contemporary view counts. RoosterTeeth's initial fandom of Xoomers and Millennials was never properly replaced with Zoomers and Alphags, and the company couldn't survive this inverted population pyramid.

RT did themselves no favors in mangling their attempts at a forced culture shift. Going into the content dark ages of Current Year and the dreaded Drumpf Reich they started to lean towards social justice and overly dramatic grandstands they believed the kids would appreciate Following the corporate mergers it's probable RT ended up with the same kind of consultants that caused this trend with other media companies. You could also sorta blame RWBY since it was now their most popular show and a major recruiter for RT as a whole. When Monty died his animation fans started to lose interest. The scriptwriters-turned-total-showrunners gravitated more towards the peripheral tumblr/yuri-thumping demographic to make up ratings, and in a classic feedback loop these people soon represented the only real influx of new RT fans.

their remaining fanbase is just weird culture war cat ladies whose high school boyfriends introduced them to rt in the first place.

source: i was the high school boyfriend

— @BoomhauerInTheWind

As RoosterTeeth prosecuted this war on chuds, many of the Halo dudebros heckin chuds! that formed the original fanbase began to lose interest in the company and were replaced by an endless stream of slash pfp using Twitter types. Of course these types of people have a tendency to form circular firing squads and they regularly accused the company's mayo scrote leadership of not doing enough for x or for y-phobia. It didn't help that actual RT personalities like Kdin, Geordi Jr, and Ky were happy to hop on these bandwagons. When the aforementioned Glassdoor and labor scandals came out many of these moral grandstand types turned on the company, and so RT was left with no real core demographic anymore.

Yet another long term problem for the company was the handling of their own website and their paypig service RoosterTeeth FIRST RT's premium was their first way of making money back in 2003 and Burnie always believed in focusing on the website and this program. The eventual corporate overlords in AT&T and WB also supported expansions to the service as a way of making money back from RT. FIRST offered paying members access to content before being offered to the public, in addition to extra site features, exclusive videos and merchandise. An even higher-level tier called Double Gold included such perks as: a 10% discount on all Rooster Teeth items, first access to live event VIP passes and a box of merchandise carrying a value more than $60.

RT always had an awkward relationship with YouTube especially when it came to their shows. They flip-flopped on pulling Red vs Blue and RWBY episodes from YouTube at least three times, with the most recent and final time in ‘23. RT wanted fans to follow these shows to the site but not everyone made the transition. The website was infamous for terrible UI and crashes and many felt it made for a poor video player.

Freeloaders had always complained about the benefits and as RT began to disintegrate many FIRST users started to complain they weren't getting enough and that too much of the premium content only existed on a website few people wanted to use. One particular sore point was RWBY's season 9 getting a one year exclusivity deal with anime streaming service Crunchyroll. They paid RoosterTeeth money just to not watch the flagship show!

FIRST got more expensive over time and at one point RT rug-pulled people that had previously been grandfathered in to lower pricing. Many people started unsubscribing over the years out of simple boredom when new shows failed to recapture RWBY's popularity, and the gradual cancellation of RWBY spin-off content coupled with the Volume 9 incident cost them those fans as well. People also cancelled in response to the regular controversies of RT's later years.

In the end their first and last means of keeping the lights on wasn't enough. Meanwhile the website remained so unpopular that paid services Crunchyroll and Amazon Prime had better viewing numbers for RWBY and RvB than the RoosterTeeth site itself.

RWBY Post Monty

I liked the episodes where they hit people with big weapons and I didn't like the episodes where they talked

—

So how was RWBY doing throughout all this? Despite Monty Oum's death in 2015 RoosterTeeth's breakout hit chugged along, growing both in scope and production value. The continuation of the series was greenlit year after year up until Volume 9 and its success at a multimedia franchise of their very own further inspired RoosterTeeth to launch other animated programs alongside RWBY spin-offs and crossovers.

However, the FNDM (four letters geddit? ) never recovered from the tragic end of the Monty era. The show's writing received harsher criticism going forward and the fight scenes no longer carried the built in marketing of being Monty's fight scenes. A divide formed between those who hated the scriptwriters and those who were fine with RWBY's direction. The integrity of the property was also threatened by scandals revolving around RT's business practices as a whole.

Ultimately RWBY started to deteriorate alongside the rest of RoosterTeeth going into the end of the decade.

RWBY 2: The Search for More Money

As mentioned in the first thread, RT wasn't shy about milking RWBY for all it was worth. The main show soon spawned a few supplemental animated shows like Chibi and World of Remnant alongside behind the scenes stuff like the FIRST exclusive show CRWBY (It sounds like crew-by geddit? ) An official dub fueled a fanbase in Japan which ultimately led to several mangas and another animated show. The WB aquisition allowed for DC published comics and a Justice League crossover that also got animated. Several RWBY video games were produced and the main characters also featured in the fighting game Blazblue Cross Tag Battle. RWBY characters also cameo in the films Doctor Sleep and Ready Player One and in the video games Crusader's Quest, Puzzle of Empires, Knights Chronicle, SMITE, Paladins, and Black Rock Shooter FRAGMENT.

The made spin-off RWBY: Ice Queendom deserves special mention since it got a lot of attention for being an actual anime. Ice Queendom was fairly successful and was given a chance by people who wouldn't watch the "PS2 Cutscene" regular show, but in a way it also highlighted the problems of mainline RWBY. People who praised the animation here still weren't fans of 3D and many felt it still couldn't help the series' script. Others felt that it was too short and sweet and would have preferred a condensed anime retelling of the whole series.

Despite its own popularity, Ice Queendom also galvanized existing criticisms of RWBY and made a lot of people feel the franchise needed to be in better hands. It may have honestly contributed to — rather than help reverse — the disdain for RoosterTeeth's animation department.

Fatherless Behavior

The "divide" is due to groups with different preferences. Group 1: People who appreciate a good action scene (Monty's choreography was every bit as brilliant as the best of Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Donnie Yen, etc.) Group 2: those who just want to hop on a popular fandom with their friends or whatever (i.e., capeshit). The entire reason for RWBY's initial popularity is Monty, without Group 1, Group 2 couldn't exist. Hence the demise of RWBY was completely unavoidable, and every season after his death was purely made to milk Group 2.

— @aydyn

Despite all this growth there was trouble on the CRWBY homefront. Monty's death forced a restructuring of how the show was made and led to a longstanding schism in the viewer base. RWBY has an infamously spergy and schizophrenic fandom with a tendency to complain about the stupidest things imaginable but for the most part you can zoom out and divide it into two camps. The Monty fans who believe the show lost its SOVL without him and the fans who don't mind scriptwriters Miles Luna and Kerry Shawcross and think the current show is fine or even better than it was. Many of the former are simple noughties action neurodivergents while the latter are more of the slash types.

Shane Newville was a RWBY animator who worked with Monty Oum going back to the RvB days and was sort of an apprentice of his. In 2016 he released a letter complaining about how the show was being handled after Monty's death. It makes sense he'd expect more creative freedoms since RWBY did start as a uniquely animator driven creation. The scriptwriters didn't take over fully until after Monty. Shane was dismissed from RT and a few others like animator Dillon Gu and producer and voice actress Kathleen Zuelch followed soon after. Many in the FNDM are bitter about this and dramatically accuse CRWBY (which is often shorthand for Miles and Kerry) of purging the Monty loyalists

The show's fight scene animation from Volume 4 onward is a particular sore point for fans who believe it's just not SOVLFVL without Monty. Compare and contrast for yourselves between Volumes 1 and 9.

While the latter has better overall animation (I would hope so for 6 million) the emphasis on choreography isn't really there anymore.

It also shows how ridiculous RWBY's writing got over time. This is supposed to be the climactic final battle of Volume 9 and it's literally Team RWBY vs… a cat

Another issue RWBY suffered from was the strain RoosterTeeth's animation department faced from having to work on both RWBY and the new shows that used it as a springboard. From ‘17 to ‘19 they worked on the time consuming and expensive show Gen:LOCK. Gray Haddock, the creative lead, was also in charge of the entire animation department so he freely seized resources from RWBY's development while still expecting animators to stay on schedule. This whole incident led to the ‘19 RT labor scandal and contributed to the company's growing expenses.

But before we focus on when RT's decline became terminal, I'll bring up a few more RWBY scandals because we all love laughing at nerds.

SHIT (four letters geddit ) Nobody Cares About Enthusiasts

I'm pretty sure RWBY turned my cousin into an AGP trans girl.

He was always a huge g*mer and got into Rooster Teeth through their Halo series. Then he started watching RWBY. Had a poster and everything on his wall. And now he is a she.

So yeah. Maybe this will happen to you?

— @tejanx

As RWBY's reputation turned to poo so it was with the dwindling and increasingly entrenched FNDM. They notably separated into two distinct forms of autism, those who rapidly supported the show and those who learned to have fun hating on it. To this day most who really hate the show rather than just groan at it are former Monty era fans that fled from CRWBY's tyrannical reign The hardcore fans also tend to be soys and the alphabet obsessed who decry the haters as chuds Meanwhile the haters are an odd coalition of chuds Dead Fantasy era action lovers and soys who would still be RWBY fans if the sub jannies hadn't once mopped their shipping memes

FNDM Civil War

The "mainstream" RWBY fans these days, the CRWBY camp has long been taken over by tumblr type shut-ins and is filled with people like this. Supported in their fandom culture war by the showrunners themselves and the overwhelming power of the /r/RWBY jannies they have resorted to increasingly esoteric purity spirals so as to establish proper RWBY fan praxis. They almost have their own language built off show references -- for example the furry creatures being stand ins for real life civil rights movements and "Adam Taurus fanboy" can be another term for chud They tend to post things like this,

Speaking for Reddit at least, /r/RWBY fell into a habit of banning anyone who didn't fit the narrative and in doing so created their own AfD coalition of rival fans. In spaces like /r/RWBYcritics they gather and lament on what went wrong and how it could be better. Some of these posters are just tumblr fans of a different persuasion. Others lean chuddy. Either way they're on the backfoot in the struggle for RWBY's SOVL and have largely resorted to shitposts.

Bumblebee

I won't get into the full breadth of RWBY shipping drama but the notable flashpoint would be "Bumblebee", the canon pairing between main characters Blake and Yang (cos they're black and yellow geddit? ) Tumblr types and one-handed moid viewers think it's the greatest thing ever and that only a CHUD would take issue. In response to chudpaganda talkpoints like "They had nothing in common" and "Didn't Blake have a boyfriend?" they will mobilize on all fronts and force the poor and overworked moderators to lock threads Still liking the pairing between Blake and her original male love interest is the highest form of chuddery one can commit

Driven from the public space once more, critics of the pairing could only articulate their frustration through shitposts

It was also this plot development that spawned homphobic Ruby

Volume 9 as a Crunchyroll Exclusive

From Volume 6 onwards CRWBY and RoosterTeeth's animation as a whole suffered from troubled productions. Gen:LOCK and Gray Haddock ate resources and interns until the higher-ups restructured the department. Shortly after, CRWBY had to combine Volume 8 and 9's production on a narrow timetable. RT alleges this was done for no particular reason whatsoever but it's probably because the RWBY animators also had to make the Justice League direct to home video crossover movie.

In the end Volume 9 was not only pushed back to '23, but ended up with a one year exclusivity deal with Crunchyroll. Even people paying for RT FIRST couldn't watch it and the full season is only just now coming to RT's website in the year of its shutdown

Let's be honest, the founders are long gone or have no say at this point. The RT they built is gone. This is the corpse of RT and it'll be put out of its misery soon enough.

-- /r/RWBY

The dwindling FNDM didn't take well to this one.

THIS MIGHT BE THE MOST IMPORTANT THING YOU READ TODAY

We realize that many of you will assume that it is now “ok” to pirate the show because it's on a big media platform and the IP is owned by a big media conglomerate. Let me be clear: PLEASE DON'T PIRATE THE SHOW. Pirating RWBY hurts us in so many ways and has a direct impact on the content and CRWBY.

I cannot stress this enough: RWBY lives and dies by how it is monetized by you, our fans.

Many folks assume that, given that RT is wholly owned by Warner Bros Discovery (WBD), that we have an endless pool of cash just laying around. You could not be further from the truth. While we are indeed owned by WBD and love being a part of the family, we typically tend to run RT as an independent business within the larger framework of the organization. Contrary to popular belief, we do not receive an annual bucket of money to fund the show.

If you care about the show and you want to see future seasons, spinoffs, etc, then please watch the show using legal means. The bigger splash we make on CR, the better the future is for RWBY. Please - don't be a jerk. Don't pirate our show.

Also the RT website had to beg people not to pirate it

And that's all I have space for. I really didn't expect this to be a series but the good news is there's more than enough content for Part 3

Also be sure to check out Kang's review of the RWBY Justice League movie