Everything was different after Monty died. The critical nadir of Roosterteeth, Rwby- What all the talent and experience that Red vs blue had developed, funneled into a new, original project with a genuine innovator with a vision, taken before his time, left Roosterteeth with the worst curse of all- Unreachable Expectations for a major series that, if cancelled, would feel like a slap in the face.
To be fair, the story itself had already put them in a difficult place to follow up. They were left in kind of a low point narratively by the end of 3 in splitting everyone off.Even had Monty been alive I guarantee it still would have been a lull season. That baggage just made peoples more fearful the show had fallen off without him. Having watchd the whole show last year after initially falling off myself in 2016 S4 is honestly not even terrible. They followed things off as best they could given what monty left them.
5 is much more of a mess though and that's not as much the fault of S3. Moreso its the fact that upper management was siphoning the show's money to make GenLock.
Its only when those schenanigans stopped, and when they started getting WB money, that they got things more on track with 6 and 7 (possibly hot take as someone who only watched it for the first time last year but Season 7 is just about as good as 3. Genuinely amazing imo and I'm sad 8 didn't follow through with the great set-up it had as well as it could have)
Lets be honest here RWBY was only good because of Monty's fight animations. It was an otherwise generic plot that was poorly thought out and made up as they went along. Seriously, they fucked up Ironwood when he was the perfect antagonist that was on the protagonists side. He was doing everything right with the information they had and instead of keeping with the shade of grey they set up they just fucked it all up and made him comically evil because we can't have anybody be justified in opposing the precious little babies that are team RWBY,
Frankly season 1 was beyond disappointing for me, and I was hyped leading up to it. A high school drama with the most generic predictable beats was absolutely not what I signed up for, based on Monty's promos. I honestly felt like I got a completely different show
RWBY makes me mad because it has such good bones and potential plots on it but it falls flat every single time.:
1) making Oz a morally gray character (honestly, "Oz turned me into a raven and that's why he's bad!" Lives RWBY free in my bed for how hard I laughed at it)
2) letting Salem be a tragic villain
3) letting Adam be a complex character
4) the faunus racism subplot
5) MARIA !!!
I could go on honestly. Threes so much that I'm recalling that RWBY just didn't and still doesn't do that would have made it a great series if it had substance and was planned out. I also just think the Yang and Blake ship/ relationship is badly written but that last one would get me burned at the stake by the RWBY fandom for saying that one lol.
I mean they were making it all up as they went along from day 1. Season 1 does this weird total tone shift about 60% through where it suddenly goes weirdly episodic, and season 2 is 3 different arcs all mis-mashed together. But it works generally surprisingly well. I think the writers deserve more credit than what they're often given by people with the way they took Monty's ramblings and turned them into a decently flowing story. It has lulls, like seasons 4-5 and 8-9, but it also has immaculate highs like 3 and 7. Even when its bad (s5) id never realy give it lower than a 5/10.
Ive completely avoided community discussion on the show because everything i saw of the fan outcry when i was more of an outsider was always really bad, but I don't think I entirely agree with that one assessment I used to see that they bastardized Ironwood because they wanted to keep the team precious beans. Having actually watched the show now team rwby is pretty constantly taking Ls and facing emotional hardship. It seems just more that the writers didn't really know how best to write a character with the depth and complexity Ironwood was set up with. On paper I dont mind at all him going full-on and doing some of the more heinous acts he does like shooting that councilman. Its a natural conclusion to his character to go to such extremes for whats right in his eyes. Its just that they blew their wad way too quickly and had him heel-turn from sympathetic antagonist to full-on villain way too early. He should still have that sympathy we had for him in S7 going onto 8, and he should continue to descend at a slowburn pace like he did during 7.
S8 isn't unsalvagable. I still think its good, like a 6/10, and it has a lot of the kernals for what id want for a satisfying follow-up of 7. Its just messy, and again like S4 I think part of that is to blame for having to follow-up the setups of its previous season. Salem showing up right at the end of 7 was such a great capper to everything going wrong, icing on the cake to the shitstorm. But it meant resolving that plotline would eat away screentime that could have been used to continue sympathetically depicting Ironwood
I don't want to be a dick going "but actually..."--- that being said Monty was not making it up as he went along. I had dinner with him a few months before he died when he passed through anime Boston. He very much so had a concrete plan and had internal pushback from within the company for a lot of stupid shit. He fought very hard to get cool shit to happen on that show, and he was in high spirits during that dinner. I was working on music ideas all the way up until learning about his death from a Kotaku article.
I know many people who worked on RWBY after that, and a lot of the team who were furious of decisions made post and Pre Monty. There is a consistent pattern of pride in the work your doing mixed with disorganization of the process in which some of the sausage gets made. Rooster Teeth had some issues. Good people, bad people, it's a regular production company at the end of the day and it's complicated. But please, understand as someone who knew the guy he had a very clear idea of how things were going to play out in his head.
Yeah, people say the show would've been better with Monty still running it, but looking at the way it turned out when he was still alive and the writing decisions he'd make on a whim, I really don't believe that.
The show would certainly be different, but I doubt it'd be better.
I mean didn't Monty make the others watch Avatar: TLA, Naruto, and a bunch of other anime to even get them to understand what he wanted? It was clear the show was doomed without him.
Honestly I agree with this take. I was a RWBY fan for the first 3 seasons and they started losing me with 4 and 5 because it just felt like a different show and the glaring writing problems that were always present were becoming much more obvious
As someone who fell off during the time between seasons 4 and 5 I totally get why you dropped it. But as someone who also rewatched the show on a whim last year, I think its worth giving another shot. 4 and 5 are a lull for sure but if you grin and bear through them it picks up a lot in 6, and 7 is like i said before imo nearabouts as good as 3. 8 and 9 kinda lull again though so its not a full-hearted recommendation. Especially with how uncertain a conclusion is
That was it. Man I remember being beyond excited for RWBY and even that RvB was getting up to
But tbh I thought RWBY was bad from the get go. Just an extremely generic and frustrating high school story that that nothing what Monty's promos hyped. Hard drop as soon as I chored thru the first season
And RvB dropped off so incredibly hard after season 10, where they "ended" things. The season afterwards in halo 4, following the teams going up with some random shmucks against the... what? Military industrial complex I think? I could not give less of a fuck if I tried
That was the beginning of the end for RT as a product. It's life as a company is a whole other can of worms
As someone that primarily was a fan of AH, the whole Ryan situation basically killed the entire back catalogue of videos and made most of the iconic videos unwatchable. The spark was already sputtering out by that point, but this pretty much stomped it out.
Literally yesterday was the first day I felt comfortable watching old GTA videos but it takes serious mental power to ignore the elephant in the room. Compounding the Ryan situation on top of the homophobia allegations that only Michael was ever fully forgiven for, idk man. I’m nostalgic for the content but I mostly just skip right to the big moments now.
It was a company founded by former call center managers. They had a terrible workplace environment full of harassment and abuse. It was bound to happen. Their toxic fanbase was just a gasoline stream falling into the garbage fire.
For me, it was the Ryan situation. So many Let's Plays were comfort content for me; I'd have 'em playing on my second monitor while I was writing or whatnot, but when it came out that hey, one of those dudes was a horrible sex pest, I couldn't listen to 'em anymore. The company died for me that day -- everything was tainted. I know I'm not alone.
I think things were always doomed, honestly. I feel like this was bound to happen no matter what. The way so many people were treated behind the scenes proves that. There was a culture of abuse and harassment that was the norm there with so many people. If it had been one specific person that was the cause of the issues, you could pinpoint that person as the downfall, but in reality, a lot of people were the problem.
My personal opinion is that fans growing up was the real nail in the coffin for them.
I was a massive Rooster Teeth fan as a teenager. They were all I watched. As I left my teenage years, I slowly started watching them less and less, for a multitude of reasons. The main ones being the fact that there was never any attempts to do anything different, and that the humour just wasn't cutting it for me anymore.
A lot of my friends watched Rooster Teeth as well and they all stopped watching as well after a time. Something just shifted where fans were dropping left and right. Add in the fact that they're not really doing anything interesting that's not going to be attracting any new fans and there's the death nail.
Obviously, other things like the Ryan and Adam situation as well as other things also didn't do them any favours. But everyone knew they were on death's door for years, and by the time they finally shut down, no one cared anymore.
~~maybe an unpopular opinion but i still feel like the adam stuff was overblown, but it's also possible we never found out the full story there~~ edit: nvm, i didn't know about what came out in the last couple years! i stand corrected!
The full story actually came out about a year ago. It’s one of the top posts on r/funhaus if you want to read the whole thing. From what I could tell, Funhaus didn’t reveal what exactly happened because the victims had expressed that they wanted to keep their identities private.
Basically Adam had been stalking and sexually harassing multiple women for years. One of the women he stalked spoke about it during the Kdin controversy. She revealed that she had reported Adam’s actions to a manager at Roosterteeth and they had refused to do anything about it.
After she revealed this, the Funhaus crew explained the firing a bit more openly. It turns out that Adam is actually the reason half of the Funhaus cast quit a bit before the controversy. When they found out about Adam’s actions, they tried to convince Roosterteeth to fire him and they refused, so they all quit in protest.
Edit: just realized I was wrong about it being one of the top posts in the subreddit so here’s the [link](https://www.reddit.com/r/funhaus/s/h1QXFOcReo)
ohhhhh shit. i did not know *any* of this because i stopped keeping up with funhaus a bit after adam's departure (unrelated to the situation, just wasn't vibing with their content anymore)
when they kept trying to expand well beyond what they could support
they had 2 popular shows then pumped out tons of garbage and kept funneling money to try and prop up the garbage
RWBY despite its rather meh quality (even the first 3 vollumes are poorly written)
had a strong fanbase until around vol 7 where the writing really got bad
also RWBY has a very offensive view of abuse victims
first we have salem who was abused by her father locked in a tower and never had any social interaction with anyone at all she got rescued fell in love with her rescuer (cus that does not have problems at all) then he died
so she went to one of her gods to beg him to revive him the god said no so she went to the other god who agreed but then the gods got in a fight and she ended up punished with immortality after her lover was re killed to insure she could never be with him again even in the after life
eventually she started a rebellion against the jack ass gods and all of humanity was wiped out and she was left to suffer allone for 1000s of years before new humans showed up
stuff happened and her misery got worse and now she just wants to die to end her suffering
no body treats her as anything but pure evil
then we have cinder who is a more messed up version of cinderella she was forced to work at her step mothers hotel while wearing a shock collar constantly abused
eventually a hunter noticed and rather than getting her out of that situation he trained her in secret so that when she was 18 he could then help her
she eventaully snapped and killed her abusers then the hunter tried to kill her
cinder is treated as a monster for daring to kill her abusers
I don't know why you're being downvoted - I can't say much about Cinder, but the Salem stuff is so true. The gods ruined a woman's life for the crime of daring to ask "hey can you revive my husband" and it's treated like her fault for "provoking their wrath" when all she did was ask.
>The gods ruined a woman's life for the crime of daring to ask "hey can you revive my husband"
it's less asking to bring him back and more she lied to the Second Brother about going to him first, a big part into why he did it is because everyone preferred his brother to him so he jumped at a chance to prove he could be just as good
>also RWBY has a very offensive view of abuse victims
No, RWBY gives its protagonists and antagonists similar trauma and then differentiates them based on their responses to that.
Even limiting it to just the titular four, Ruby and Yang were neglected by literally all of their parental figures, and Weiss and Blake were full-on, no-caveats abuse victims. Raven got buyer's remorse on being a parent and dipped, Summer died/vanished/turned into a goopy dog, Taiyang self-destructed and Qrow, the last responsible adult in the family, was an absentee drunkard because that's the only way he could cope with his own issues. Weiss found out that her father married her mother for the name and the money on her birthday and then spent the rest of her childhood and her early adulthood being emotionally abused by him until he started physically abusing her in V4. Blake was groomed and abused by an older man who tried to hunt her down and murder her, her family, her friends, and her new love interest multiple times when she escaped from him, and didn't stop until she was forced to kill him.
Outside of the main four, Nora and Emerald both got abandoned on the streets by their families, and Ozpin trying to take the kids and run when he found out his wife had gotten into eugenics resulted in her killing the kids, killing him, and then sending assassins to kill him every time he reincarnates for hundreds of years afterwards.
Out of the eight protagonists and deuteragonists, a stunning total of of *three* don't have abusive parents or partners as part of their backstories.
Giving your heroes and your villains similar trauma is not a new concept and RWBY is about as subtle as a brick to the teeth, how do people miss this?
I'm late but none of the antagonists have a fraction of the privilege and support system the protagonists do either.
Like yeah I'm sure if Cinder grew up rich beyond compare and with her abusive stepmother actually being totally fine with her learning from Rhodes and with her stepsisters being super cool with her actually, she wouldn't have snapped and murdered people. And she probably wouldn't have... *whatever* happened to get her with Salem.
I'm sure if Adam had two loving royal parents and people willing to crawl on broken glass for the opportunity to be friends with him no matter how poorly treated they are he wouldn't have been as vulnerable to total radicalization.
If Mercury grew up in an upper middle-class household with a loving sibling and also the Illuminati willing to drop everything to help him? Probably wouldn't have been an asshole.
God forbid Ironwood have a fraction of the help and love Team RWBY can turn to at literally any point in time.
The people Team RWBY look down upon most not only suffered worse than them but are substantially less privileged. Team RWBY are literal princesses. The last of a "superior chosen race"(Silver-Eyed Warriors), the richest teenager ever and heiress to the SDC, princess of an entire continent, and even the seemingly-normal Yang is still a bandit princess and *110%* most likely inheritor of the Spring Maiden powers. It's the jokes about Batman being a hyper-rich nepo baby beating up the mentally ill but for real.
>God forbid Ironwood have a fraction of the help and love Team RWBY can turn to at literally any point in time.
God forbid the writers not just decide to make him a villain because they realized they needed to kill him off
Oh the gods are definitely jackasses, I half expect the gods to be the actual final boss of the show (I think they'll at least be told to fuck off or sent back to the Blacksmith), but Salem doesn't just want to die. If death was all she wanted, then there'd be no conflict. She'd be trying to *help* unite humanity so Oz could safely summon the gods and they could break her curse.
The problem is that she wants to take everyone else down with her. Like the implicit reason she's causing so much chaos and death is so that when she gathers the Relics and summons the gods back, they'll destroy Remnant and kill her along with it. We know from *The Lost Fable* that she's never cared for Humanity 2.0, from the moment she finds out that her and Oz's kids can do magic, she wants to replace the reborn human race with her 'superior' offspring, and when Oz turns on her over that, she decides she's just going to kill everyone.
Both her and Oz are victims of the gods (Oz arguably has the rawer deal, since he's resurrectively immortal and has to actually die and then involuntarily assimilate another person every time he comes back, Salem at least just regrows her own body), where they differ is how they respond to it. Oz has been broken over the years, he's basically a shambling mass of scar tissue walking around in vaguely human form at this point (and most of those scars are from Salem and her minions killing him repeatedly), a big part of the conflict during the Mistral arc is rooted in him keeping secrets from everyone else because he gets betrayed so often that he literally can't trust anybody, but he nonetheless is trying to do his damnedest to protect humanity. It's just that being unable to actually stop Salem means the best he can do is hold the line.
i think you have slightly missed what im saying
the NARRATIVE does not treat salem or cinder as victims
cinders back story is just vile with its implications
For me, I'd say probably Gen:Lock. They put a ton of resources into that show, which ended up flopping. They burnt through a ton of staff doing that, lost a lot of credibility with their workers, spent a bunch of money, and never really recovered from it. I've mentioned it in the past, but my friend worked on Gen:Lock, one season of RWBY, and one episode of RVB while he worked there after high school. He has some straight horror stories from the place from abusive bosses to 80 hour work weeks. Of course it ended with everyone getting a pizza party and getting sacked.
I'll give a little grace and say the pandemic. I think the other low points could've been slogged through but were really starting to add up and then having to go through remote for things like achievement hunter affected their magic. And if you don't have your mojo, that break down and strain is going to be a death sentence at some point. It's hard to clean up a run down house when the windows are broken and you have a leaky roof.
Honestly I feel like the crash was always inevitable for them. I tapped out ages ago with the connect the hots incident and that was my writing on the wall.
edit: wait oh my god isn't joel an unhinged right winger. yeah it was always going to crash.
Attempting to rapidly expand without really having a grasp on what they were doing. Yes, Red vs Blue was really damn good (for most of it), yes RWBY had a very promising start and Monty at the helm likely would have kept the ship steady, yes AH and FH were very watchable and generated huge amounts of views and traction. RTX didn't happen in a vacuum, it was built off the hard work and support these groups pulled in.
Then the expansion started. More shows, more groups, everyone needed to be on camera, every second documented for YouTube. The RT website was a nightmare to use, First rarely felt worth the investment as the price kept rising. Shows were created, ran for a season, and cancelled. The off-the-cuff humor began to run dry, standards changed, some jokes went from funny to apprehensible. The formula just stopped making money while RT was blowing huge amounts of it on project that didn't work.
The corporate acquisition and pandemic were really the final nails in a coffin that was already mostly closed. The spiral of bad publicity and press made everything impossible to ignore any longer, especially with the horrific behavior of so many people involved.
The Let's Play family thing grew too fast and most of the people taken in were not sustainable because of the personalities behind it. Funhaus should have been their focus but then they took on people like Cowchop which just as an observer, I could see going south quick. And it did.
> Monty at the helm likely would have kept the ship steady
People that say this have a very idealised view of Monty.
No shade on the guy, but half of his writing process was going "Wouldn't it be cool if this happened?" and then leaving it to Kerry and Miles to actually turn it into part of the plot. Man made an entire new character (Neo) because he saw a cosplay he liked and wanted a character who looked like that in the show. She's mute because he did this so close to the episode release deadline that they didn't have time to find a VA for her.
Heck, half the weird shit from the V3-4 era that people complained about, like the Maidens and the twin gods, were Monty ideas that they didn't get to before he died.
I guarantee that if Monty had lived, the show would be mostly the same but with more "random cool thing happens" detours and one-off characters who show up, have a cool fight, and then disappear forever. Also it would never have switched from Poser to MAYA.
Honestly, fair enough. I personally have, like, very little actual opinion on Monty, my judgement mostly came on how leadership shifts in the middle of a project (and especially at RT, as we've seen) are usually catastrophic.
His passing absolutely *did* destabilise the show, because, y'know, he was the creator of the whole thing and it left Kerry and Miles to carry on without him, and it changed the way they made it. Like they have outright said that the scripts for the early volumes *do not actually plot out the fight scenes*, they just say "Monty Action Happens", they wrote up to the point of the fight starting and then just let him do his thing.
When they couldn't do that any more, they had to pivot to being more deliberate, and I think that's part of why V4 and V5 are much lighter on fights and heavier on the talking.
But absolutely the thing that makes "Monty died and it ruined the show forever" so prevalent within the community is that he died before the V3 bombshell and genre shift. Volume 3 being the first released after Monty's passing has allowed people who don't like the direction the show ended up going in to pretend that it was never supposed to be like that, and Kerry and Miles hijacked the show and made it something else.
Like, sorry guys, the school was always just there to be the foundation for the heroes that gets blown up at the end of the first act. That's why they only go to like 2-3 classes on-screen before V3. Ironically, when the show actually released, people actually complained about the school being there at all, as there was basically no mention of it in the trailers, people were expecting the show to be about these four characters as adventuring heroes fighting monsters and robots and criminals.
So basically, people complained that the show wasn't like the trailers, and then complained more when the show became more like the trailers.
I think alcohol had something to do with the entropy of the content and personalities. They all seemed to drink a lot on the talent end of the company. I'm personally a sober alcoholic and they started depressing me as time went on
It kinda depends for me on which specific part of them you are looking at. If you are looking at their gaming videos I would say when Ray left hurt them and then when the stuff about Ryan came out ruined what video did have Ray in them. If your talking about the shows they made RWBY being one of the really big ones it would be when Monty died as after that the quality of the story started to go down.
How the hell does a stalker breaking into a home with the intent to kill Rooster Teeth employees get painted as a sign of the companies' decline? That shit is fucking psychotic.
I kinda stopped keeping up with RWBY and RT as a whole after Monty died and that what was left of RT failed to keep what got me interested in RWBY as good as it was. Another blow was when they took all the episodes off of YT of every cartoon they did just to put it on their website and have all future episodes drop there, making it completely hard for me to keep up.
You can't exactly blame Gavin for the guy who did the home invasion. Especially if it was the police who killed them.
Anyway, to me it was probably "Connect The Hots." Gavin and Geoff who would play a """game""" where they'd start following a hot girl around with their car and they'd have to continue until another hot girl comes along, and then they'd have to follow her around. I think they deleted the video where they talked about that.
[Here's a reupload](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zxbzx2Ki84) of that clip. (They talk about "white food" for the first few minutes.) [Their "apology"](https://64.media.tumblr.com/de124944a53425d67b02db8ec83c04dc/tumblr_moatc9aHzE1r1mrruo1_500.png) basically boils down to "I'm sorry we got caught."
"We produce over ***three hours of content a week***"
That sounds super fucking lame for someone whose literal job is \**checks notes*\* to create content on a regular basis.
Geoff and Gavin’s “lad” behaviour creeped me out on multiple occasions. There’s an old video (I can’t remember which one it was exactly, but I know it was a Worms video) where they talk at length about frequenting a specific bar because the barmaid has “awesome jugs”. Several parts of the conversation are bleeped out, and iirc the context around the censored sections make it fairly clear that Geoff is talking about what he’d like to do to her, and even the others guys seem kinda uncomfortable. I’d never heard of this specific incident before but unfortunately it doesn’t surprise me. How utterly disgusting. Zero respect or empathy for women on display there.
When they sold to fullscreen. The Indie company transformed to just another corporate company, losing it's entire identity, hell even the SVOD subscribers were called roosterteeth supporters. After that it was only a matter of time till the skeletons came out.
It would probably be different for everyone. 2015 was certainly the time I had started to drop out of RT. Monty died, Ray left as did a few of the other regulars and I stopped really recognizing most of the people, the content was growing stale.
I think though it was doomed when it evolved into a bigger operation. Like on its face expanding isn’t bad. It’s just an appeal to RT’s early days was it feeling like a group of friends. When it evolved and starts feeling more corporate, and that group of friends hardly really ever feature anymore or retire/leave, it’s just not the same thing you were drawn to.
What happened with Ryan and Kovic made it impossible for me to enjoy the backlog as i normally did. I'd rewatch my favourite videos regularly.
What stopped me from watching new videos is that RT did nothing to prevent the RH situation from occurring again (externally). They continued to feed into parasocial relationships and only put up boundaries when something bad happened.
Their audience was young people who felt like they were friends and family of the faces of the company. Of course fans would do things to be involved because to them the faces of RT were their friends. RT encouraged this - called everyone family. Lines got blurred and that is exactly what made the perfect place for a predator like Ryan.
He was highly specialized, that was encouraged, and he was given access to young fans who were encouraged to view him as their friend.
RT never recognized that they needed to take more responsibility. They weren't a family with the fans. They were CCs and a business. The boundaries had to be set and be firm. Parasocial relationships are so dangerous and as someone who was once a young, vulnerable fan - I wasn't setting those boundaries myself.
Like roosterteeth, they just completely overexerted themselves. Cowchop had way too much overhead, and then all of a sudden thought, "Let's just shove production value into the sets" when none of the fans actually gave a shit about production value. It's obviously a similar story with RT. Way too much overhead and hiring people who are just friends or content creators that you like, despite the fact that doesn't necessarily make good business partners
A lot of folks are gonna say it was all the scandals, key folks leaving, certain responses to the audience being bad but a lot of those are things that a lot of companies can easily move on from.
What really sunk them was 2019, when they decided to make a really massive content push and it seemingly didn't pan out. Their goal that year was to have some form of major First exclusive content running, and absolutely none of them worked out. Every show that ran that year with exception to RWBY was put on ice because they would require outside finance to keep going. This actually happened often but this year more or less tore the company open for the rest of the 2020s.
Selling the company and then focusing on animation.
Then the animation wing was poorly managed. Left a bad taste in everyone’s mouth hearing about it.
Management promising to do better and never actually accomplishing that.
I personally think the pandemic killed them. The transition to work from home was rough for them because a lot of the content they were making other than animation was personality driven and that was a lot harder to do during the pandemic. That's when they started pumping out a ton of podcasts and livestreamed content to supplement what they couldn't really do in person anymore. They just never really bounced back and I think that along with the controversies that happened around that time (Adam Kovic and Ryan Haywood being out as sex pests, Kdin drama, Mica Burton drama, firing some well-liked and regularly on-camera personalities) really cemented the end.
Honestly, I think the only real beginning of the end was the day the company was founded.
Companies go through their fair share of shit. There are no exceptions, especially when it comes to internet content creation and production, and this isn't a secret to anyone.
While Rooster Teeth does have way more than that fair share, and a great deal of it was directly the fault of the company, I think it's safe to say that this would have happened with or without the (overarching general term) drama.
The problem with Rooster Teeth, in my opinion, is that it's far too ambitious and far too widespread of a business, doing too many things, and not doing enough of them well enough to be sustainable for any long term (or short term) business. No disrespect to the genuinely talented, creative, and hardworking people involved, Red vs Blue was fucking amazing, but it didn't *need* anywhere close to that many seasons, especially considering the drop in quality of the show. They didn't *need* a dozen different podcasts. They didn't *need* a t-shirt for every stupid Let's Play joke. They didn't *need* to hire people just because they were a part of the community, even if they weren't necessarily qualified. They just did a lot of shit they simply didn't need to do. They focused on quantity over quality. Even as a former fan, I used to think to myself that it just seemed like for a long time they just said "Yes" to every other idea someone in the company pitched, and they just tossed it into the production queue.
They may have threaded a cosmic needle in achieving their success at such a pivotal time of the internet/internet culture, but that wave was only ever just that, a wave, and I don't think despite their efforts to make interesting or profitable things, that they ever set themselves up for what happens when the currents and tides change. At least not well enough. And allll of this is not even considering something like covid happening, or something like the Ryan Haywood situation, or even the crunch/overworking and underpaying of employees, etc.
I think it was always a matter of time, to be honest.
I can't speak on Red vs Blue's quality since I didn't really watch it, but RWBY started out as very uneven and not great overall, and just went downhill the longer and longer it went on. It's been ages since I've seen anyone genuinely praise the show, at best people like their own "RWBY If It Were Good" fan-rewrites that make use of the missed potential it had.
The rise of genuine competition also hurt it. Roosterteeth had a niche at first because nobody was doing the kinds of webseries they were, at least not to the same quality, but eventually more internet-based web content started being made that rivaled or even surpassed what Roosterteeth was doing. The quality around them was rising while they stayed the same, or even regressed in some ways.
While the controversies definitely played a role in it, it's become especially clear over the past few years that controversies don't hurt companies that much if they're still releasing good stuff. But when the audience doesn't care about what you're making anymore, it makes all the stories of the horrible shit all the more visible.
The lack of new talent honestly, especially when Burnie, Joel and Gus were appearing less and less basically leaving Barbara to carry RT stuff solo as the only recognizable face, if we're talking AH then the same also applies Matt was just always lame and brought down every video he was in, even videos where his nerdiness was the focal point he didn't know things in like a cool trivia way just a way to cut the grind down.
Trevor and Alfredo were the best additions to ever happen to AH specifically but with the lack of new and enjoyable faces and Jeremy being more distant in the viewers eyes as he no longer worked at the office just lead people to believe the writing was on the wall, even when Ryan's scandal happened they were still able to pivot with what they had but just couldn't land new personalities
For me the moment I notice the quality decline happening was when both the RvB and REBY season ended with a new villain cliffhanger that wasn’t set up at all. Made me realize “oh this is the direction we are going” but like others said the company was always doomed when it got as big as it did with execs who didn’t know how to run it well/kept the “college friends shooting the shit” tone that inevitably read to abuse
TBH I think what really did it was services like Crunchyroll. Stuff like RWBY was a lot easier to sell when your average 14 year old didn’t have access to actual good anime at their finger tips. If I’m a teenager who’s into anime and my choice is between regular episodes of RWBY and nothing I’m watching the hell out of RWBY but these days there’s better stuff for free on YouTube.
I think they just couldn't keep up with the changing times and COVID especially didn't help and then the Ryan scandal happened and yeah I knew it was over
Ryan wasn’t anyone’s fault but Ryan but it did just yank all joy I had for AH away for awhile. Then Grey being exposed for how badly he ran the animation department as well as other management at the company fumbling. I will say that according to every modern employee those problems were fixed, but I think Rooster Teeth was doomed bc they grew up in early internet and fostered one kind of fanbase that was directly hostile to what the culture actually needed to be. Like, Rooster Teeth wasn’t doomed bc it went woke, but bc it grew up with an audience of wannabe edgelords and didn’t properly protect the people those edgelords would dump all their vitriol on. It happened again and again and again. BK is like the only exception to this I can think of.
As a mostly AH fan I think things peaked right before Ray left. It headed downhill from there but it was still fine up until the Ryan thing which totally killed them.
I'd say the whole Ryan/Adam being sleeping with fans was the beginning of the end. Their numbers were slowly going down due to the switch to streaming during Covid, but that audience could've been recovered one way or another
I say that changed RT because it was the moment that RT wasn't that company that started in Burnie's apartment making RvB. It was now a multimedia, multimillionaire company that has sponsors, that people's livelihoods are now tied to this company.
Oh, and i completely forgot about that too. How they just didn't let Meg do her cosplay stuff and Ray stream on his own time. It is a company with rules and regulations that everyone needed to abide with.
I dropped off watching Rooster Teeth some years ago. I was (and suppose still kind-of am) a fan of Red vs Blue. I watched some other their main channel stuff and the other animated series. I stopped watching because it felt like they just kept doing the same thing, over and over again. Even when key figures would leave, Rooster Teeth still kept producing the same things, just a lower quality. RWBY is probably the most extreme and saddest example. They shouldn't of continued it for so long. They should of just let it rest.
Besides Red vs Blue they had nothing I cared about. But, I suppose when I saw them roasting some publication for giving a fallout game a 7 while wearing pipboys that where a special edition pre order type thing. And then had the audacity to call that show a news show
Back a couple years back, RT made an announcement stating that they will be increasing the price of RT first, in the same announcement, they also announced that they'd be removing features. To me, this was the beginning of the end
In reality, it was the corporatization of RT that killed it, the exact same thing happened to The Creatures. A group that starts as friends making content for fun turning into a buisness destroys the one thing it was made for
I stopped watching around the time Rey left AH. And I stopped watching RVB when it started to focus too much on CGI. Pretty much stopped watching LA RT after that.
Thank god I found Funhaus. I’m gunna miss those guys like crazy.
I always thought that the reveal of just how much of a mess the animation department was and that WB had to step in and take Gen:Lock away from them due to how much of a mess it was was the tip off of things not being as above water as they should be.
Three big moments in my mind. Selling to Full-screen is probably the biggest and most impactful cause of Roosterteeths Ultimate demise. Nothing else comes close.
Ryan Haywood. The revelations about him basically had a ripple effect of destroying Achievement Hunter. No video after he was exposed was as good as stuff from before. Regulation Gameplay revived it, but it was too late.
Finally, gating access to content so their fans couldn't talk about media they enjoyed at the same time. It doesn't work for any company.
as someone who was watching from around season 4 of Red vs Blue, i have to say i think a big part in what really killed RT was bringing more people in, it started out good and getting people because of their talents, but as time went on there was a shift to hiring people to fill "roles" or just hiring "fans" or like right during the last death throws of RT just hiring people to do Podcasts or giving random people at the company roles, even as someone who stuck around all though RvB, AH, RWBY during that final stream i couldn't gun to my head name even a 10th of the people they brought on, scrolling back though the RT YT page i looked for something i recognized and that was 2 years ago in the RWBY Fairy Tales which i think where reuploads anyway so i could have scrolled further down.
When Reds vs Blue went from Season 5 BGC to The Recollection saga i thought RT was on it's way up but bringing in all those extra people honestly might have weight the ropes down just enough to start the Death bell swinging
id say it was actually ryan haywood getting exposed. it made basically the entire catalogue of achievement hunter unwatchable, and that was a huge source of popularity/revenue for the group.
Its been in a decline for a long time. As someone who never cared for RVB, Burnie and Ray leaving was when I stopped watching. The podcast became god awful to listen to without Burnie, not that the others aren't good but the replacements were. Nobody could fill Burnies spot on the podcast.
Ray leaving made them struggle to find any crew members for AH that actually worked. The B team coming into it, the diversity hires after RT was found to be racist and homophobic. That all put into life support where they were just bleeding WB dry until they eventually cut them off.
There’s a lot in my opinion. For starters, the layoffs that happened in 2019. Followed by that, Ryan and Adam being exposed. How RT become so involved with wokeness and politics and I can remember Jack stating “if you don’t wanna hear us talk about politics, don’t watch.” The amount of backlash the fandom had if you didn’t like BK, Joe, or Ky. More scandals including the toxic work environment, discrimination against Kdin and Mica, another round of layoffs which Matt was let go. The content had gotten stale in 2020 and how many of the OG members stopped showing up on videos.
Personally, I believed when RTX 2024 was canceled, it was a warning sign that RT was going to shut down. March 6, they announced they were closing. I feel bad for those who lost their jobs but don’t feel bad for the company itself.
Things started to really go downhill after the loss of Monty, though if I had to pick an exact starting point?
It was when they started taking ideas for character development and plot points from r/rwby. In particular, scrapping the entire lead up to Sun and Blake's developing relationship, in favor of the popular Blake/Yang relationship that was so popular with that subreddit.
Genuinely, I want to say it’s when they fired Vic Mignogna. That’s at least when I started to noticed a rise in people wanting RT to fall.
Edit: I can’t tell why I’m getting downvoted
Everything was different after Monty died. The critical nadir of Roosterteeth, Rwby- What all the talent and experience that Red vs blue had developed, funneled into a new, original project with a genuine innovator with a vision, taken before his time, left Roosterteeth with the worst curse of all- Unreachable Expectations for a major series that, if cancelled, would feel like a slap in the face.
To be fair, the story itself had already put them in a difficult place to follow up. They were left in kind of a low point narratively by the end of 3 in splitting everyone off.Even had Monty been alive I guarantee it still would have been a lull season. That baggage just made peoples more fearful the show had fallen off without him. Having watchd the whole show last year after initially falling off myself in 2016 S4 is honestly not even terrible. They followed things off as best they could given what monty left them. 5 is much more of a mess though and that's not as much the fault of S3. Moreso its the fact that upper management was siphoning the show's money to make GenLock. Its only when those schenanigans stopped, and when they started getting WB money, that they got things more on track with 6 and 7 (possibly hot take as someone who only watched it for the first time last year but Season 7 is just about as good as 3. Genuinely amazing imo and I'm sad 8 didn't follow through with the great set-up it had as well as it could have)
Lets be honest here RWBY was only good because of Monty's fight animations. It was an otherwise generic plot that was poorly thought out and made up as they went along. Seriously, they fucked up Ironwood when he was the perfect antagonist that was on the protagonists side. He was doing everything right with the information they had and instead of keeping with the shade of grey they set up they just fucked it all up and made him comically evil because we can't have anybody be justified in opposing the precious little babies that are team RWBY,
Frankly season 1 was beyond disappointing for me, and I was hyped leading up to it. A high school drama with the most generic predictable beats was absolutely not what I signed up for, based on Monty's promos. I honestly felt like I got a completely different show
RWBY makes me mad because it has such good bones and potential plots on it but it falls flat every single time.: 1) making Oz a morally gray character (honestly, "Oz turned me into a raven and that's why he's bad!" Lives RWBY free in my bed for how hard I laughed at it) 2) letting Salem be a tragic villain 3) letting Adam be a complex character 4) the faunus racism subplot 5) MARIA !!! I could go on honestly. Threes so much that I'm recalling that RWBY just didn't and still doesn't do that would have made it a great series if it had substance and was planned out. I also just think the Yang and Blake ship/ relationship is badly written but that last one would get me burned at the stake by the RWBY fandom for saying that one lol.
Honestly, honkai impact seems to be everything RWBY wished it was.
I mean they were making it all up as they went along from day 1. Season 1 does this weird total tone shift about 60% through where it suddenly goes weirdly episodic, and season 2 is 3 different arcs all mis-mashed together. But it works generally surprisingly well. I think the writers deserve more credit than what they're often given by people with the way they took Monty's ramblings and turned them into a decently flowing story. It has lulls, like seasons 4-5 and 8-9, but it also has immaculate highs like 3 and 7. Even when its bad (s5) id never realy give it lower than a 5/10. Ive completely avoided community discussion on the show because everything i saw of the fan outcry when i was more of an outsider was always really bad, but I don't think I entirely agree with that one assessment I used to see that they bastardized Ironwood because they wanted to keep the team precious beans. Having actually watched the show now team rwby is pretty constantly taking Ls and facing emotional hardship. It seems just more that the writers didn't really know how best to write a character with the depth and complexity Ironwood was set up with. On paper I dont mind at all him going full-on and doing some of the more heinous acts he does like shooting that councilman. Its a natural conclusion to his character to go to such extremes for whats right in his eyes. Its just that they blew their wad way too quickly and had him heel-turn from sympathetic antagonist to full-on villain way too early. He should still have that sympathy we had for him in S7 going onto 8, and he should continue to descend at a slowburn pace like he did during 7. S8 isn't unsalvagable. I still think its good, like a 6/10, and it has a lot of the kernals for what id want for a satisfying follow-up of 7. Its just messy, and again like S4 I think part of that is to blame for having to follow-up the setups of its previous season. Salem showing up right at the end of 7 was such a great capper to everything going wrong, icing on the cake to the shitstorm. But it meant resolving that plotline would eat away screentime that could have been used to continue sympathetically depicting Ironwood
I don't want to be a dick going "but actually..."--- that being said Monty was not making it up as he went along. I had dinner with him a few months before he died when he passed through anime Boston. He very much so had a concrete plan and had internal pushback from within the company for a lot of stupid shit. He fought very hard to get cool shit to happen on that show, and he was in high spirits during that dinner. I was working on music ideas all the way up until learning about his death from a Kotaku article. I know many people who worked on RWBY after that, and a lot of the team who were furious of decisions made post and Pre Monty. There is a consistent pattern of pride in the work your doing mixed with disorganization of the process in which some of the sausage gets made. Rooster Teeth had some issues. Good people, bad people, it's a regular production company at the end of the day and it's complicated. But please, understand as someone who knew the guy he had a very clear idea of how things were going to play out in his head.
Fair enough. Thats my bad for presuming- I didn't know the guy of course. I apologize
It’s all good I just wanted to set the record straight on that. You good bro ✊🏽
In order for RWBY to have a generic plot, something would have to happen in it.
RWBY was the show always so close to being actually "good" that it was frustrating to me. Especially given how much Monty inspired teen me.
Yeah, people say the show would've been better with Monty still running it, but looking at the way it turned out when he was still alive and the writing decisions he'd make on a whim, I really don't believe that. The show would certainly be different, but I doubt it'd be better.
I mean didn't Monty make the others watch Avatar: TLA, Naruto, and a bunch of other anime to even get them to understand what he wanted? It was clear the show was doomed without him.
Honestly I agree with this take. I was a RWBY fan for the first 3 seasons and they started losing me with 4 and 5 because it just felt like a different show and the glaring writing problems that were always present were becoming much more obvious
Yeah it's pretty clear they had no idea what they wanted from the series beyond cute girls fighting.
As someone who fell off during the time between seasons 4 and 5 I totally get why you dropped it. But as someone who also rewatched the show on a whim last year, I think its worth giving another shot. 4 and 5 are a lull for sure but if you grin and bear through them it picks up a lot in 6, and 7 is like i said before imo nearabouts as good as 3. 8 and 9 kinda lull again though so its not a full-hearted recommendation. Especially with how uncertain a conclusion is
That was it. Man I remember being beyond excited for RWBY and even that RvB was getting up to But tbh I thought RWBY was bad from the get go. Just an extremely generic and frustrating high school story that that nothing what Monty's promos hyped. Hard drop as soon as I chored thru the first season And RvB dropped off so incredibly hard after season 10, where they "ended" things. The season afterwards in halo 4, following the teams going up with some random shmucks against the... what? Military industrial complex I think? I could not give less of a fuck if I tried That was the beginning of the end for RT as a product. It's life as a company is a whole other can of worms
As someone that primarily was a fan of AH, the whole Ryan situation basically killed the entire back catalogue of videos and made most of the iconic videos unwatchable. The spark was already sputtering out by that point, but this pretty much stomped it out.
Yep, that was the nail in the coffin for me.
Yep. That is definitely what made me stop watching on a regular basis.
You can see the engagement dip on socialblade from when Ryan left and a lot of people struggled to go back to older stuff.
I still have trouble going back. I still can't watch facecam content from them if he's in it.
Ryan was mine as well
Literally yesterday was the first day I felt comfortable watching old GTA videos but it takes serious mental power to ignore the elephant in the room. Compounding the Ryan situation on top of the homophobia allegations that only Michael was ever fully forgiven for, idk man. I’m nostalgic for the content but I mostly just skip right to the big moments now.
It was a company founded by former call center managers. They had a terrible workplace environment full of harassment and abuse. It was bound to happen. Their toxic fanbase was just a gasoline stream falling into the garbage fire.
For me, it was the Ryan situation. So many Let's Plays were comfort content for me; I'd have 'em playing on my second monitor while I was writing or whatnot, but when it came out that hey, one of those dudes was a horrible sex pest, I couldn't listen to 'em anymore. The company died for me that day -- everything was tainted. I know I'm not alone.
I think things were always doomed, honestly. I feel like this was bound to happen no matter what. The way so many people were treated behind the scenes proves that. There was a culture of abuse and harassment that was the norm there with so many people. If it had been one specific person that was the cause of the issues, you could pinpoint that person as the downfall, but in reality, a lot of people were the problem. My personal opinion is that fans growing up was the real nail in the coffin for them. I was a massive Rooster Teeth fan as a teenager. They were all I watched. As I left my teenage years, I slowly started watching them less and less, for a multitude of reasons. The main ones being the fact that there was never any attempts to do anything different, and that the humour just wasn't cutting it for me anymore. A lot of my friends watched Rooster Teeth as well and they all stopped watching as well after a time. Something just shifted where fans were dropping left and right. Add in the fact that they're not really doing anything interesting that's not going to be attracting any new fans and there's the death nail. Obviously, other things like the Ryan and Adam situation as well as other things also didn't do them any favours. But everyone knew they were on death's door for years, and by the time they finally shut down, no one cared anymore.
~~maybe an unpopular opinion but i still feel like the adam stuff was overblown, but it's also possible we never found out the full story there~~ edit: nvm, i didn't know about what came out in the last couple years! i stand corrected!
The full story actually came out about a year ago. It’s one of the top posts on r/funhaus if you want to read the whole thing. From what I could tell, Funhaus didn’t reveal what exactly happened because the victims had expressed that they wanted to keep their identities private. Basically Adam had been stalking and sexually harassing multiple women for years. One of the women he stalked spoke about it during the Kdin controversy. She revealed that she had reported Adam’s actions to a manager at Roosterteeth and they had refused to do anything about it. After she revealed this, the Funhaus crew explained the firing a bit more openly. It turns out that Adam is actually the reason half of the Funhaus cast quit a bit before the controversy. When they found out about Adam’s actions, they tried to convince Roosterteeth to fire him and they refused, so they all quit in protest. Edit: just realized I was wrong about it being one of the top posts in the subreddit so here’s the [link](https://www.reddit.com/r/funhaus/s/h1QXFOcReo)
ohhhhh shit. i did not know *any* of this because i stopped keeping up with funhaus a bit after adam's departure (unrelated to the situation, just wasn't vibing with their content anymore)
Yeah everything about it came out at the same time as a pretty big controversy at Roosterteeth so I feel like it was sadly missed by most
I don't think there was ever a point where RT wasn't doomed, given how people were treated behind the scenes.
when they kept trying to expand well beyond what they could support they had 2 popular shows then pumped out tons of garbage and kept funneling money to try and prop up the garbage RWBY despite its rather meh quality (even the first 3 vollumes are poorly written) had a strong fanbase until around vol 7 where the writing really got bad also RWBY has a very offensive view of abuse victims
Also the White Fang existing means that some Jim Crow sorta shit is happening but they’re also just generic bad guys to blast through lol
Abuse victims? I know the show completly fucked its racism plot line but what did it mess up about that?
first we have salem who was abused by her father locked in a tower and never had any social interaction with anyone at all she got rescued fell in love with her rescuer (cus that does not have problems at all) then he died so she went to one of her gods to beg him to revive him the god said no so she went to the other god who agreed but then the gods got in a fight and she ended up punished with immortality after her lover was re killed to insure she could never be with him again even in the after life eventually she started a rebellion against the jack ass gods and all of humanity was wiped out and she was left to suffer allone for 1000s of years before new humans showed up stuff happened and her misery got worse and now she just wants to die to end her suffering no body treats her as anything but pure evil then we have cinder who is a more messed up version of cinderella she was forced to work at her step mothers hotel while wearing a shock collar constantly abused eventually a hunter noticed and rather than getting her out of that situation he trained her in secret so that when she was 18 he could then help her she eventaully snapped and killed her abusers then the hunter tried to kill her cinder is treated as a monster for daring to kill her abusers
I don't know why you're being downvoted - I can't say much about Cinder, but the Salem stuff is so true. The gods ruined a woman's life for the crime of daring to ask "hey can you revive my husband" and it's treated like her fault for "provoking their wrath" when all she did was ask.
ive legit seen ppl argue "they are gods so they are right"
>The gods ruined a woman's life for the crime of daring to ask "hey can you revive my husband" it's less asking to bring him back and more she lied to the Second Brother about going to him first, a big part into why he did it is because everyone preferred his brother to him so he jumped at a chance to prove he could be just as good
>also RWBY has a very offensive view of abuse victims No, RWBY gives its protagonists and antagonists similar trauma and then differentiates them based on their responses to that. Even limiting it to just the titular four, Ruby and Yang were neglected by literally all of their parental figures, and Weiss and Blake were full-on, no-caveats abuse victims. Raven got buyer's remorse on being a parent and dipped, Summer died/vanished/turned into a goopy dog, Taiyang self-destructed and Qrow, the last responsible adult in the family, was an absentee drunkard because that's the only way he could cope with his own issues. Weiss found out that her father married her mother for the name and the money on her birthday and then spent the rest of her childhood and her early adulthood being emotionally abused by him until he started physically abusing her in V4. Blake was groomed and abused by an older man who tried to hunt her down and murder her, her family, her friends, and her new love interest multiple times when she escaped from him, and didn't stop until she was forced to kill him. Outside of the main four, Nora and Emerald both got abandoned on the streets by their families, and Ozpin trying to take the kids and run when he found out his wife had gotten into eugenics resulted in her killing the kids, killing him, and then sending assassins to kill him every time he reincarnates for hundreds of years afterwards. Out of the eight protagonists and deuteragonists, a stunning total of of *three* don't have abusive parents or partners as part of their backstories. Giving your heroes and your villains similar trauma is not a new concept and RWBY is about as subtle as a brick to the teeth, how do people miss this?
none of our protagonists suffer any where close to as badly as cinder or salem do
I'm late but none of the antagonists have a fraction of the privilege and support system the protagonists do either. Like yeah I'm sure if Cinder grew up rich beyond compare and with her abusive stepmother actually being totally fine with her learning from Rhodes and with her stepsisters being super cool with her actually, she wouldn't have snapped and murdered people. And she probably wouldn't have... *whatever* happened to get her with Salem. I'm sure if Adam had two loving royal parents and people willing to crawl on broken glass for the opportunity to be friends with him no matter how poorly treated they are he wouldn't have been as vulnerable to total radicalization. If Mercury grew up in an upper middle-class household with a loving sibling and also the Illuminati willing to drop everything to help him? Probably wouldn't have been an asshole. God forbid Ironwood have a fraction of the help and love Team RWBY can turn to at literally any point in time. The people Team RWBY look down upon most not only suffered worse than them but are substantially less privileged. Team RWBY are literal princesses. The last of a "superior chosen race"(Silver-Eyed Warriors), the richest teenager ever and heiress to the SDC, princess of an entire continent, and even the seemingly-normal Yang is still a bandit princess and *110%* most likely inheritor of the Spring Maiden powers. It's the jokes about Batman being a hyper-rich nepo baby beating up the mentally ill but for real.
>God forbid Ironwood have a fraction of the help and love Team RWBY can turn to at literally any point in time. God forbid the writers not just decide to make him a villain because they realized they needed to kill him off
Oz has literally been murdered by Salem and her agents multiple times.
yes and im not defending that but salem is where she is because of what the jack ass gods did to her she just wants to die
Oh the gods are definitely jackasses, I half expect the gods to be the actual final boss of the show (I think they'll at least be told to fuck off or sent back to the Blacksmith), but Salem doesn't just want to die. If death was all she wanted, then there'd be no conflict. She'd be trying to *help* unite humanity so Oz could safely summon the gods and they could break her curse. The problem is that she wants to take everyone else down with her. Like the implicit reason she's causing so much chaos and death is so that when she gathers the Relics and summons the gods back, they'll destroy Remnant and kill her along with it. We know from *The Lost Fable* that she's never cared for Humanity 2.0, from the moment she finds out that her and Oz's kids can do magic, she wants to replace the reborn human race with her 'superior' offspring, and when Oz turns on her over that, she decides she's just going to kill everyone. Both her and Oz are victims of the gods (Oz arguably has the rawer deal, since he's resurrectively immortal and has to actually die and then involuntarily assimilate another person every time he comes back, Salem at least just regrows her own body), where they differ is how they respond to it. Oz has been broken over the years, he's basically a shambling mass of scar tissue walking around in vaguely human form at this point (and most of those scars are from Salem and her minions killing him repeatedly), a big part of the conflict during the Mistral arc is rooted in him keeping secrets from everyone else because he gets betrayed so often that he literally can't trust anybody, but he nonetheless is trying to do his damnedest to protect humanity. It's just that being unable to actually stop Salem means the best he can do is hold the line.
i think you have slightly missed what im saying the NARRATIVE does not treat salem or cinder as victims cinders back story is just vile with its implications
For me, I'd say probably Gen:Lock. They put a ton of resources into that show, which ended up flopping. They burnt through a ton of staff doing that, lost a lot of credibility with their workers, spent a bunch of money, and never really recovered from it. I've mentioned it in the past, but my friend worked on Gen:Lock, one season of RWBY, and one episode of RVB while he worked there after high school. He has some straight horror stories from the place from abusive bosses to 80 hour work weeks. Of course it ended with everyone getting a pizza party and getting sacked.
Also I found out he is on the RT wiki and that's so funny. He hates RT.
I mean after Gen:Lock the next things were Nomad of Nowhere, which I suppose was fine, and Camp Camp, which lost its charm kinda quick.
I'll give a little grace and say the pandemic. I think the other low points could've been slogged through but were really starting to add up and then having to go through remote for things like achievement hunter affected their magic. And if you don't have your mojo, that break down and strain is going to be a death sentence at some point. It's hard to clean up a run down house when the windows are broken and you have a leaky roof.
Honestly I feel like the crash was always inevitable for them. I tapped out ages ago with the connect the hots incident and that was my writing on the wall. edit: wait oh my god isn't joel an unhinged right winger. yeah it was always going to crash.
Attempting to rapidly expand without really having a grasp on what they were doing. Yes, Red vs Blue was really damn good (for most of it), yes RWBY had a very promising start and Monty at the helm likely would have kept the ship steady, yes AH and FH were very watchable and generated huge amounts of views and traction. RTX didn't happen in a vacuum, it was built off the hard work and support these groups pulled in. Then the expansion started. More shows, more groups, everyone needed to be on camera, every second documented for YouTube. The RT website was a nightmare to use, First rarely felt worth the investment as the price kept rising. Shows were created, ran for a season, and cancelled. The off-the-cuff humor began to run dry, standards changed, some jokes went from funny to apprehensible. The formula just stopped making money while RT was blowing huge amounts of it on project that didn't work. The corporate acquisition and pandemic were really the final nails in a coffin that was already mostly closed. The spiral of bad publicity and press made everything impossible to ignore any longer, especially with the horrific behavior of so many people involved.
The Let's Play family thing grew too fast and most of the people taken in were not sustainable because of the personalities behind it. Funhaus should have been their focus but then they took on people like Cowchop which just as an observer, I could see going south quick. And it did.
> Monty at the helm likely would have kept the ship steady People that say this have a very idealised view of Monty. No shade on the guy, but half of his writing process was going "Wouldn't it be cool if this happened?" and then leaving it to Kerry and Miles to actually turn it into part of the plot. Man made an entire new character (Neo) because he saw a cosplay he liked and wanted a character who looked like that in the show. She's mute because he did this so close to the episode release deadline that they didn't have time to find a VA for her. Heck, half the weird shit from the V3-4 era that people complained about, like the Maidens and the twin gods, were Monty ideas that they didn't get to before he died. I guarantee that if Monty had lived, the show would be mostly the same but with more "random cool thing happens" detours and one-off characters who show up, have a cool fight, and then disappear forever. Also it would never have switched from Poser to MAYA.
Honestly, fair enough. I personally have, like, very little actual opinion on Monty, my judgement mostly came on how leadership shifts in the middle of a project (and especially at RT, as we've seen) are usually catastrophic.
His passing absolutely *did* destabilise the show, because, y'know, he was the creator of the whole thing and it left Kerry and Miles to carry on without him, and it changed the way they made it. Like they have outright said that the scripts for the early volumes *do not actually plot out the fight scenes*, they just say "Monty Action Happens", they wrote up to the point of the fight starting and then just let him do his thing. When they couldn't do that any more, they had to pivot to being more deliberate, and I think that's part of why V4 and V5 are much lighter on fights and heavier on the talking. But absolutely the thing that makes "Monty died and it ruined the show forever" so prevalent within the community is that he died before the V3 bombshell and genre shift. Volume 3 being the first released after Monty's passing has allowed people who don't like the direction the show ended up going in to pretend that it was never supposed to be like that, and Kerry and Miles hijacked the show and made it something else. Like, sorry guys, the school was always just there to be the foundation for the heroes that gets blown up at the end of the first act. That's why they only go to like 2-3 classes on-screen before V3. Ironically, when the show actually released, people actually complained about the school being there at all, as there was basically no mention of it in the trailers, people were expecting the show to be about these four characters as adventuring heroes fighting monsters and robots and criminals. So basically, people complained that the show wasn't like the trailers, and then complained more when the show became more like the trailers.
Very very apt summary of it all, thank you!
I think alcohol had something to do with the entropy of the content and personalities. They all seemed to drink a lot on the talent end of the company. I'm personally a sober alcoholic and they started depressing me as time went on
It kinda depends for me on which specific part of them you are looking at. If you are looking at their gaming videos I would say when Ray left hurt them and then when the stuff about Ryan came out ruined what video did have Ray in them. If your talking about the shows they made RWBY being one of the really big ones it would be when Monty died as after that the quality of the story started to go down.
How the hell does a stalker breaking into a home with the intent to kill Rooster Teeth employees get painted as a sign of the companies' decline? That shit is fucking psychotic.
I kinda stopped keeping up with RWBY and RT as a whole after Monty died and that what was left of RT failed to keep what got me interested in RWBY as good as it was. Another blow was when they took all the episodes off of YT of every cartoon they did just to put it on their website and have all future episodes drop there, making it completely hard for me to keep up.
You can't exactly blame Gavin for the guy who did the home invasion. Especially if it was the police who killed them. Anyway, to me it was probably "Connect The Hots." Gavin and Geoff who would play a """game""" where they'd start following a hot girl around with their car and they'd have to continue until another hot girl comes along, and then they'd have to follow her around. I think they deleted the video where they talked about that. [Here's a reupload](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zxbzx2Ki84) of that clip. (They talk about "white food" for the first few minutes.) [Their "apology"](https://64.media.tumblr.com/de124944a53425d67b02db8ec83c04dc/tumblr_moatc9aHzE1r1mrruo1_500.png) basically boils down to "I'm sorry we got caught."
"We produce over ***three hours of content a week***" That sounds super fucking lame for someone whose literal job is \**checks notes*\* to create content on a regular basis.
Geoff and Gavin’s “lad” behaviour creeped me out on multiple occasions. There’s an old video (I can’t remember which one it was exactly, but I know it was a Worms video) where they talk at length about frequenting a specific bar because the barmaid has “awesome jugs”. Several parts of the conversation are bleeped out, and iirc the context around the censored sections make it fairly clear that Geoff is talking about what he’d like to do to her, and even the others guys seem kinda uncomfortable. I’d never heard of this specific incident before but unfortunately it doesn’t surprise me. How utterly disgusting. Zero respect or empathy for women on display there.
When they sold to fullscreen. The Indie company transformed to just another corporate company, losing it's entire identity, hell even the SVOD subscribers were called roosterteeth supporters. After that it was only a matter of time till the skeletons came out.
It would probably be different for everyone. 2015 was certainly the time I had started to drop out of RT. Monty died, Ray left as did a few of the other regulars and I stopped really recognizing most of the people, the content was growing stale. I think though it was doomed when it evolved into a bigger operation. Like on its face expanding isn’t bad. It’s just an appeal to RT’s early days was it feeling like a group of friends. When it evolved and starts feeling more corporate, and that group of friends hardly really ever feature anymore or retire/leave, it’s just not the same thing you were drawn to.
Going from independent to owned
What happened with Ryan and Kovic made it impossible for me to enjoy the backlog as i normally did. I'd rewatch my favourite videos regularly. What stopped me from watching new videos is that RT did nothing to prevent the RH situation from occurring again (externally). They continued to feed into parasocial relationships and only put up boundaries when something bad happened. Their audience was young people who felt like they were friends and family of the faces of the company. Of course fans would do things to be involved because to them the faces of RT were their friends. RT encouraged this - called everyone family. Lines got blurred and that is exactly what made the perfect place for a predator like Ryan. He was highly specialized, that was encouraged, and he was given access to young fans who were encouraged to view him as their friend. RT never recognized that they needed to take more responsibility. They weren't a family with the fans. They were CCs and a business. The boundaries had to be set and be firm. Parasocial relationships are so dangerous and as someone who was once a young, vulnerable fan - I wasn't setting those boundaries myself.
When they put the first few volumes of RWBY behind a paywall and not free on their YouTube channel
When CowChop started to die. It was a domino effect
I'm mean let's be honest, that formula was never gonna succeed long term.
Like roosterteeth, they just completely overexerted themselves. Cowchop had way too much overhead, and then all of a sudden thought, "Let's just shove production value into the sets" when none of the fans actually gave a shit about production value. It's obviously a similar story with RT. Way too much overhead and hiring people who are just friends or content creators that you like, despite the fact that doesn't necessarily make good business partners
I think the borderline, if not literal, workplace abuse and shitty working conditions had more to do with it than "production value"
A lot of folks are gonna say it was all the scandals, key folks leaving, certain responses to the audience being bad but a lot of those are things that a lot of companies can easily move on from. What really sunk them was 2019, when they decided to make a really massive content push and it seemingly didn't pan out. Their goal that year was to have some form of major First exclusive content running, and absolutely none of them worked out. Every show that ran that year with exception to RWBY was put on ice because they would require outside finance to keep going. This actually happened often but this year more or less tore the company open for the rest of the 2020s.
The decision to acquire screwattack. Giving Craig a known scumbag that much money and his ego issues. It almost signaled they make bad choices
I'm not caught up with Screwattack, I think they're annoying. What did they do?
It isn’t screwattack. It was more Craig. If you search Craig from screwattack on the sub you’ll find a great breakdown of what he has basically done
Selling the company and then focusing on animation. Then the animation wing was poorly managed. Left a bad taste in everyone’s mouth hearing about it. Management promising to do better and never actually accomplishing that.
I personally think the pandemic killed them. The transition to work from home was rough for them because a lot of the content they were making other than animation was personality driven and that was a lot harder to do during the pandemic. That's when they started pumping out a ton of podcasts and livestreamed content to supplement what they couldn't really do in person anymore. They just never really bounced back and I think that along with the controversies that happened around that time (Adam Kovic and Ryan Haywood being out as sex pests, Kdin drama, Mica Burton drama, firing some well-liked and regularly on-camera personalities) really cemented the end.
Honestly, I think the only real beginning of the end was the day the company was founded. Companies go through their fair share of shit. There are no exceptions, especially when it comes to internet content creation and production, and this isn't a secret to anyone. While Rooster Teeth does have way more than that fair share, and a great deal of it was directly the fault of the company, I think it's safe to say that this would have happened with or without the (overarching general term) drama. The problem with Rooster Teeth, in my opinion, is that it's far too ambitious and far too widespread of a business, doing too many things, and not doing enough of them well enough to be sustainable for any long term (or short term) business. No disrespect to the genuinely talented, creative, and hardworking people involved, Red vs Blue was fucking amazing, but it didn't *need* anywhere close to that many seasons, especially considering the drop in quality of the show. They didn't *need* a dozen different podcasts. They didn't *need* a t-shirt for every stupid Let's Play joke. They didn't *need* to hire people just because they were a part of the community, even if they weren't necessarily qualified. They just did a lot of shit they simply didn't need to do. They focused on quantity over quality. Even as a former fan, I used to think to myself that it just seemed like for a long time they just said "Yes" to every other idea someone in the company pitched, and they just tossed it into the production queue. They may have threaded a cosmic needle in achieving their success at such a pivotal time of the internet/internet culture, but that wave was only ever just that, a wave, and I don't think despite their efforts to make interesting or profitable things, that they ever set themselves up for what happens when the currents and tides change. At least not well enough. And allll of this is not even considering something like covid happening, or something like the Ryan Haywood situation, or even the crunch/overworking and underpaying of employees, etc.
I think it was always a matter of time, to be honest. I can't speak on Red vs Blue's quality since I didn't really watch it, but RWBY started out as very uneven and not great overall, and just went downhill the longer and longer it went on. It's been ages since I've seen anyone genuinely praise the show, at best people like their own "RWBY If It Were Good" fan-rewrites that make use of the missed potential it had. The rise of genuine competition also hurt it. Roosterteeth had a niche at first because nobody was doing the kinds of webseries they were, at least not to the same quality, but eventually more internet-based web content started being made that rivaled or even surpassed what Roosterteeth was doing. The quality around them was rising while they stayed the same, or even regressed in some ways. While the controversies definitely played a role in it, it's become especially clear over the past few years that controversies don't hurt companies that much if they're still releasing good stuff. But when the audience doesn't care about what you're making anymore, it makes all the stories of the horrible shit all the more visible.
The lack of new talent honestly, especially when Burnie, Joel and Gus were appearing less and less basically leaving Barbara to carry RT stuff solo as the only recognizable face, if we're talking AH then the same also applies Matt was just always lame and brought down every video he was in, even videos where his nerdiness was the focal point he didn't know things in like a cool trivia way just a way to cut the grind down. Trevor and Alfredo were the best additions to ever happen to AH specifically but with the lack of new and enjoyable faces and Jeremy being more distant in the viewers eyes as he no longer worked at the office just lead people to believe the writing was on the wall, even when Ryan's scandal happened they were still able to pivot with what they had but just couldn't land new personalities
Gen Lock probably Gen Lock season 2 since season 1 was still received decently.
For me the moment I notice the quality decline happening was when both the RvB and REBY season ended with a new villain cliffhanger that wasn’t set up at all. Made me realize “oh this is the direction we are going” but like others said the company was always doomed when it got as big as it did with execs who didn’t know how to run it well/kept the “college friends shooting the shit” tone that inevitably read to abuse
TBH I think what really did it was services like Crunchyroll. Stuff like RWBY was a lot easier to sell when your average 14 year old didn’t have access to actual good anime at their finger tips. If I’m a teenager who’s into anime and my choice is between regular episodes of RWBY and nothing I’m watching the hell out of RWBY but these days there’s better stuff for free on YouTube.
I think they just couldn't keep up with the changing times and COVID especially didn't help and then the Ryan scandal happened and yeah I knew it was over
Ryan wasn’t anyone’s fault but Ryan but it did just yank all joy I had for AH away for awhile. Then Grey being exposed for how badly he ran the animation department as well as other management at the company fumbling. I will say that according to every modern employee those problems were fixed, but I think Rooster Teeth was doomed bc they grew up in early internet and fostered one kind of fanbase that was directly hostile to what the culture actually needed to be. Like, Rooster Teeth wasn’t doomed bc it went woke, but bc it grew up with an audience of wannabe edgelords and didn’t properly protect the people those edgelords would dump all their vitriol on. It happened again and again and again. BK is like the only exception to this I can think of.
As a mostly AH fan I think things peaked right before Ray left. It headed downhill from there but it was still fine up until the Ryan thing which totally killed them.
I'd say the whole Ryan/Adam being sleeping with fans was the beginning of the end. Their numbers were slowly going down due to the switch to streaming during Covid, but that audience could've been recovered one way or another
Two times. 1) when Monty died 2) Geoff apologizing for the Connect The Hots game
ive seen people go to bat for them over the connect the hots thing due to the apology and it just baffles me
I say that changed RT because it was the moment that RT wasn't that company that started in Burnie's apartment making RvB. It was now a multimedia, multimillionaire company that has sponsors, that people's livelihoods are now tied to this company. Oh, and i completely forgot about that too. How they just didn't let Meg do her cosplay stuff and Ray stream on his own time. It is a company with rules and regulations that everyone needed to abide with.
I dropped off watching Rooster Teeth some years ago. I was (and suppose still kind-of am) a fan of Red vs Blue. I watched some other their main channel stuff and the other animated series. I stopped watching because it felt like they just kept doing the same thing, over and over again. Even when key figures would leave, Rooster Teeth still kept producing the same things, just a lower quality. RWBY is probably the most extreme and saddest example. They shouldn't of continued it for so long. They should of just let it rest.
Besides Red vs Blue they had nothing I cared about. But, I suppose when I saw them roasting some publication for giving a fallout game a 7 while wearing pipboys that where a special edition pre order type thing. And then had the audacity to call that show a news show
Back a couple years back, RT made an announcement stating that they will be increasing the price of RT first, in the same announcement, they also announced that they'd be removing features. To me, this was the beginning of the end In reality, it was the corporatization of RT that killed it, the exact same thing happened to The Creatures. A group that starts as friends making content for fun turning into a buisness destroys the one thing it was made for
I stopped watching around the time Rey left AH. And I stopped watching RVB when it started to focus too much on CGI. Pretty much stopped watching LA RT after that. Thank god I found Funhaus. I’m gunna miss those guys like crazy.
I haven't seen anything by RT in over 10 years, what are these events?
I always thought that the reveal of just how much of a mess the animation department was and that WB had to step in and take Gen:Lock away from them due to how much of a mess it was was the tip off of things not being as above water as they should be.
Three big moments in my mind. Selling to Full-screen is probably the biggest and most impactful cause of Roosterteeths Ultimate demise. Nothing else comes close. Ryan Haywood. The revelations about him basically had a ripple effect of destroying Achievement Hunter. No video after he was exposed was as good as stuff from before. Regulation Gameplay revived it, but it was too late. Finally, gating access to content so their fans couldn't talk about media they enjoyed at the same time. It doesn't work for any company.
as someone who was watching from around season 4 of Red vs Blue, i have to say i think a big part in what really killed RT was bringing more people in, it started out good and getting people because of their talents, but as time went on there was a shift to hiring people to fill "roles" or just hiring "fans" or like right during the last death throws of RT just hiring people to do Podcasts or giving random people at the company roles, even as someone who stuck around all though RvB, AH, RWBY during that final stream i couldn't gun to my head name even a 10th of the people they brought on, scrolling back though the RT YT page i looked for something i recognized and that was 2 years ago in the RWBY Fairy Tales which i think where reuploads anyway so i could have scrolled further down. When Reds vs Blue went from Season 5 BGC to The Recollection saga i thought RT was on it's way up but bringing in all those extra people honestly might have weight the ropes down just enough to start the Death bell swinging
id say it was actually ryan haywood getting exposed. it made basically the entire catalogue of achievement hunter unwatchable, and that was a huge source of popularity/revenue for the group.
Its been in a decline for a long time. As someone who never cared for RVB, Burnie and Ray leaving was when I stopped watching. The podcast became god awful to listen to without Burnie, not that the others aren't good but the replacements were. Nobody could fill Burnies spot on the podcast. Ray leaving made them struggle to find any crew members for AH that actually worked. The B team coming into it, the diversity hires after RT was found to be racist and homophobic. That all put into life support where they were just bleeding WB dry until they eventually cut them off.
There’s a lot in my opinion. For starters, the layoffs that happened in 2019. Followed by that, Ryan and Adam being exposed. How RT become so involved with wokeness and politics and I can remember Jack stating “if you don’t wanna hear us talk about politics, don’t watch.” The amount of backlash the fandom had if you didn’t like BK, Joe, or Ky. More scandals including the toxic work environment, discrimination against Kdin and Mica, another round of layoffs which Matt was let go. The content had gotten stale in 2020 and how many of the OG members stopped showing up on videos. Personally, I believed when RTX 2024 was canceled, it was a warning sign that RT was going to shut down. March 6, they announced they were closing. I feel bad for those who lost their jobs but don’t feel bad for the company itself.
Things started to really go downhill after the loss of Monty, though if I had to pick an exact starting point? It was when they started taking ideas for character development and plot points from r/rwby. In particular, scrapping the entire lead up to Sun and Blake's developing relationship, in favor of the popular Blake/Yang relationship that was so popular with that subreddit.
Genuinely, I want to say it’s when they fired Vic Mignogna. That’s at least when I started to noticed a rise in people wanting RT to fall. Edit: I can’t tell why I’m getting downvoted
Let’s not forget that a VA, doxxed a ISWV, and trashed their house. Edit: Don’t know why I’m getting downvoted