An Autist Reviews: RWBY: After The Fall

*All Reviews Are Spoiler-Free Aside From Any Spoiler Sections*

This was an amazing book, without doubt, and I will definitely be thinking about reading it again in the future. The book takes place largely in 2 halves, with half being the adventure set some time shortly after Sun Wukong left team RWBY and JNR behind, and half being a collection of snippets from team CFVY's time at Beacon going from their first meetings all the way to their choice to leave Beacon behind and enroll at Shade academy to finish off their Huntsmen educations. The main story is engrossing, exciting, and equal parts fun and devastatingly sad. We see how team CFVY has been affected by the fall of Beacon, by events even before that, how they're handling their new lives, and it makes what happened so tangible, especially since in books you can get inside of the heads of the characters, which is what happens, with each new chapter of the main story switching perspectives from one member of the team to the next as dictated by whichever one's silhouette is on the page at the start of the chapter; the Beacon chapters have a silhouette of Beacon on their first pages and change perspective often throughout each chapter, but noticeably and smoothly enough for the changes not to hinder one's reading of them. In a RWBY book, however, while a strong emotional through-line is important, the fights are more so. RWBY is known for its fluid and complex fight scenes, with them being, alongside the music, in my opinion, the main draw of the show. This means two things: The fight scenes have to live up to the ones in RWBY proper, and the fight scenes have to be extremely detailed. Both of these things are hard to do when writing, as you have to rely heavily on a reader to be able to envision the fight while you draw them a rough diagram of it with words that can be misconstrued easily, all while you have to keep the writing snappy so that the action feels intense and epic rather than slow, tired, and boring. Luckily, the writer of this book is pretty darn good at describing action. Often I had to reread the action scenes in the book, but that's because I read fast and my brain moves fast, which means that I skim over some things, which, when every single little word matters, as they do in this book's fights, can make reading a bit hectic. Still, with only one or two rereads I was able to pretty clearly envision each and every fight scene, even if some were better described than others. Now, it's about time I bring up an issue I noticed when reading this book. It starts out with longer chapters, but the final chapters take up very little space, and whether this was because the writer wasn't allowed to go beyond a certain page count or they were rushing to meet a deadline, it's noticeable. While the first three-quarters of the book takes its time, developing complex fight scenes and describing everything in rather vivid detail, the final quarter begins to rush, skipping around and making the reader miss out on parts of fight scenes, sometimes forgetting the logic and continuity of the story, and ending, in general, far too fast. I wouldn't say that the ending was bad, but what could easily have been stretched over either a larger number of chapters or longer chapters, instead get's crushed into about 5 chapters that take up a very small amount of the book, despite having some of the most important and epic scenes of the entire book within them. And I mean that the scenes SHOULD be the most epic and important, the scenes that should be important still are, but the importance feels vague and fake, while the scenes that should be epic feel just plain rushed and rather bland and unsatisfying. The ending didn't anger me, it's not like the RWBY episode 'Risk' where everything rushes so fast that nothing feels at all special or cool, but it is still a disappointing ending that I can only assume is down to the publisher telling the author to either hurry up or keep the page count beneath 300. Still, the ending does have a pretty good scene with Coco in a rather slimy situation and for the first half of it, it's pretty damn well written, even if the writing really begins to rush again by the end of it. The fight scenes aren't the only part that suffers at the end, as the emotional core of the story does as well. Instead of taking their time, the writer rushes through the team deciding to leave Beacon, Velvet accepting Shade as her new home, and Velvet's confrontation with Coco about not wanted to come to Vacuo largely being forgotten as soon as it happened. The emotional core is the least affected, but it still is noticeably shallow at the end, especially considering the brutality of earlier chapters, with the reveal of what happened that shook Coco and the team so badly legitimately shaking me to my core, as well as the team. The prologue is also very good at sticking the knife in and twisting it just right. The end, however, really does just feel kinda empty when it comes to the emotions presented within it. Now, I think it might be time to talk about the dialogue because the dialogue is one of my biggest issues with the book. The writer is very good at embodying the character they're writing, but they aren't good at connecting points and ideas at a small or large scale much at all. Allow me to explain. Whenever two characters are talking they sound like they should, but how they respond to each other and change the subject, while what is written is perfectly in character, is just unnatural. They don't bridge ideas when they're talking, none of the characters do, and the prose doesn't either. It's not like that's some stylistic decision, it's not a decision, it's a failing of the writer that holds me back from enjoying the book, and even if it were a decision, it'd be a bad one that the writer should know better than to make. The writer also has a bad habit of saying things very weirdly, meaning that he replaces some common words or sentence structures with less normal ones that just sound out of place. He will replace 'flew' with 'winged' for instance, or he'll use passive voice to describe things when everybody knows not to use passive voice ever because it's slow and boring and breaks up sentences in really weird ways. Another failing of the writer is in how he handles Fox's semblance. His semblance is telepathy, he can speak to people in their minds and they can speak to him, he can also sense people's minds and animals' minds and the Grimm's lack of minds. The way this is shown is by the use of italics, which is a very good idea as italics often denote though, however the writer is either being inconsistent with a lot of things or one thing that makes it seem like a lot of things. These inconsistencies could be in his use of italics when it comes to Fox specifically, or he is inconsistent with his use of the words 'sent' and 'said,' or he is inconsistent with his quotation marks. I am too lazy to flip through the book and track down if he always uses quotation marks and italics for telepathic speech or if he swapped between them, and the fact that I don't know for certain if he always did or not is a major issue. I almost never knew if Fox specifically was speaking telepathically or normally, because so often his speech was italicized and yet the author wrote that Fox 'said' something, so was that both telepathic and spoken or was it one or the other or what? The fact that I have no clue is a major failing on behalf of the author and it's one I hope he rectifies in the second book in this series which I will hopefully be reading within a week's time. Oh, but I'm not done taking issues with this book yet, but before I continue, allow me to reiterate that this book is amazing, I just have a lot of issues with it and I remember them in more detail than I remember specific things to compliment the book on, so just take my word here, alright? This book contains multiple twists, none of which I will spoil, but the first is one that I saw coming from a mile away, and I think that Velvet did as well, and yet the way she behaved never really indicated that despite the writing acting like it somehow did. That's certainly an issue. The second twist was really fucking good and I really didn't see it coming despite the fact that looking back on it, it was pretty obvious. The third twist is one I knew was coming, but not one I had predicted. I knew a twist was coming, and honestly, I could tell you who it involved and it wouldn't spoil anything, but I'm not going to just to be kind, but despite knowing the twist was coming I had no idea what it would actually be. Now, this isn't a bad thing in and of itself, but the reason I knew a twist was coming wasn't because the hints were sprinkled in and I could piece them together, it was because the book hit me over the head with the fact that certain characters were acting strange and that they must be hiding something, so when the twist was revealed I didn't feel surprised or even like I had earned something, it just felt like I finally knew something new and while what I learned was awesome and cool, so much impact was lost because of the fact that I was beaten over the head with the fact that there was going to be a twist. Another thing I need to mention isn't a problem with a twist, as it isn't a twist so much as an answer to a mystery that both myself and the characters forgot even existed. (and I don't mean that as an insult, it's actually good writing that I was so wrapped up in the story that I forgot about a small mystery that was kinda shrugged aside early on) The reveal comes near the end of the book and when it comes it once again feels like something that was unearned and the reveal actually makes the story kinda fall apart in some small areas. It involves the Caspians, and sadly I can't go into detail, but let's just say that the reveal leads to some information about the Caspians that makes me question why on earth they were doing some of what they were at all, like, really, after the reveal it feels like they have to be complete idiots in order for the basis for the story to actually make sense. Now I know I've been shitting on this book for like 6 pages now, but it really is just because it's easier to remember and talk about things you hate than it is to talk about things you like. I love this book. It really was an amazing and quick read that engrossed me in the world of RWBY and in the lives of these side characters. The flashbacks are absolutely phenomenal, and while the writing has many flaws, the prose is generally really nice and sleek. The characters are all written amazingly, the settings are brilliantly described, and there's nothing quite like getting a good bit of information on people's trauma before getting a good fight before getting a good bit of comedy and some emotional moments, and then getting it all over again. This book deserves its 8/10, but it really does earn those 2 missing points. Also, dear god, I love all of team CFVY SO MUCH!!!

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