On the opposite end of the spectrum, Blake travels back home for the sake of reconnecting with her family after she left in a bad way, all the while nervous about crossing that bridge in the first place. Weiss is forced back home to a life with which she's largely splintered, forcing her to make a hard decision on where she stands with her family. Ruby travels with the now incomplete Team JNPR in an attempt to prevent further tragedy, but which largely turns into a big emotional journey for all of them as Jaune learns to live without Pyrrha in his life, and Rem and Nora are forced to confront a dark part of their past along the way (big thumbs up for actually characterizing the most shallow characters in the series). Tragedy strikes the team, forcing everyone to basically return home and reevaluate where they stand, and to understand what they stand for. Volume 4 centers itself, in a fit of tragic irony, on the one thing everyone in story and otherwise lost: Family. Oum's death was horrible, but in his wake was a huge chance for RWBY to really mature, and it did. What makes this victory a little bittersweet is that I don't think it would've been possible without Volume 3, both on the story front and on the production. I want to think that Volume 4 is the one where the team realized the same thing I've known for a while: these characters have a ton of potential, and this story can be absolutely phenomenal if it lets the core of its characters dictate the direction instead of letting the action completely take over (see also: Steven Universe). A lot of that calm stood its ground with a heavy emphasis on character development and emotional intelligence, and the show gave those ideas plenty of opportunities to breathe given all the insane tragedy that defined Volume 3. While Volume 4 started the same way every other Volume has up until now (with a big fat, mostly inconsequential fight scene), I would say it's the overall mellowest, calmest and best-tempered the story has ever been. I honestly think moving from Poser to Maya is one of the best decisions they ever made, and while they still have lots of room for improvement I hope they stick with their new guns. The biggest improvement I noticed right off the bat was the massive stride made on the animation front. Even at your lowest point, you're expected to rise to the occasion. But the World of Remnant, as well as our world, are not nearly so kind. In a kind-hearted world, RWBY would have every excuse available to give up the fight and look back fondly on "what could have been", and that would be fine. It's not really fair after all to hold such high expectations for a team that has been so emotionally and physically crippled. If we're judging purely by challenge, Volume 4 had to have been the hardest production Rooster Teeth had ever faced, even more so than Volume 1.
#RWBY POSER SERIES#
And of course, Volume 4 would be the first run of the series without Oum to guide the project. Not to mention the main cast was also split in four different places, which meant tons of new environments had to be made, mostly from scratch. To make things even harder, this would also be the first volume with a larger focus on "The World of Remnant", finally expanding out of the safety of Beacon Academy into the wide and wild world. For starters, the series had officially moved away from Poser and was now being animated in Autodesk Maya (which is an industry standard for 3D production), and all the characters had been completely redesigned/remodeled from the ground up. This was the volume that marked a lot of "firsts" for the series. Volume 4 wasn't just good, it was fantastic. So I think it's especially remarkable that, in the face of overwhelming sorrow and uncertainty, Rooster Teeth somehow did the impossible. Without the creator, the future beyond this point was only going to get harder.
On the front of the creative team, the death of Monty Oum had been, I guess "overcome" in that the team successfully completed Volume 3 without his guidance, but they had to have been feeling the loss in terrible ways. The story of RWBY had been left at its absolute lowest point, lamenting the death/disappearance of several key characters and the destruction of everyone's safe haven, all of which ultimately resulted in the scattering of the cast and the creeping shadow of doubt. Last time, we left things in a terrible place.
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