After the climactic Shadow Lugia battle, RWBY follows up with quirky Degrassi-esque high school drama. I can't say I'm surprised - the characters are school children - but it can be hard to get through. It's exactly what you'd expect from a teen melodrama: bullying, kids wondering if they fit, the rich girl acting bitchy, our heroine being quirky and relatable~
You do occassionally get an action scene, and they're still as fun as ever, but the stories surrounding them don't compliment it much. Things are sort of settling into a formula here: two-parter episodes that establish who's personalities are clashing that week, throw in some wacky Disney Saturday Morning animation gags, and then the drama reaches a crescendo and we all learn an Important Lesson about teamwork and friendship.
But drama can be fun, too. I don't think this is meant to be marathoned, even though you could get through all of season one in about two hours. A lot of these were put on in the background while I did simplistic, mindnumbing tasks like playing Pokemon.
Some indications of a larger plot start to show, most of it weirdly involving racism against furries? That whole plot point really jarred with the cartoony humour: imagine if Donald Duck was an oppressed minority and it was played completely straight - and it's not even the Kingdom Hearts Donald.
But eventually the mobsters that talk like Scooby-Doo show up again and things go completely bonkers. Spoilers: there's a fight scene involving a cat girl, Sun Wukong, a robot, a Clockwork Orange cosplayer and helicopters and it owns. Things basically end on a cliff-hanger, but there's enough of a climax that this works as a stopping point, even though this last episode introduces about a million unanswered questions.
That doesn't really matter to me though! I have another two seasons to barrel through before I can be free from this curse.