RWBY & Mistress

Roosterteeth is the company that brought us the popular web series Red vs. Blue, a show which started as a parody of the videogame Halo and transformed into an incredible space opera that kept up, if not surpassed, the previous level of humor.

Recently, they’ve released a new web series titled RWBY, pronounced “Ruby,” an anime-inspired story about a school of warriors, the main cast being female.  I applaud the effort; I love good old-fashioned cartoons and the fantasy world they’ve created is inspired.  What I’m having trouble with is the dialogue and humor.

Roosterteeth is known for its comedy; that’s their bread and butter and where the show should excel.  Maybe it’s because I’m not a high school brat anymore so the jokes don’t grab me, but it feels like they’re borrowing tropes from the anime genre.  They’re imitating what’s worked in the genre but they aren’t giving it their own spin.  I’m going to keep watching because they’ve earned a lot of trust with their prior work and it’s still a cute program, but I’m hoping that RWBY finds its own distinct voice soon.

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If it’s books you’re into, my book club just finished Mistress of the Art of Death by Ariana Franklin, and we all came out saying it was a very entertaining read.  It’s a historical crime fiction set in the Twelfth Century in Cambridge, England.  Children are being murdered and the Jews are blamed for it.  Adelia is a woman from Salerno, Italy, and is referred to as a “doctor of the dead.”  She’s been sent to study the bodies of the victim’s and see if they can’t prove the Jews’ innocence.

What I appreciate most about the mystery genre is how tight the plotting is and Mistress is no exception to that rule.  The world created was vivid and had some truly remarkable characters; I am especially a fan of the love interest, Sir Rowley, and the prioress that everybody fights with (can’t remember the name, but whenever she appeared on the page, I was hooked.)

I will leave a couple warnings before you pick it up, though:  the novel is very graphic, both with in sex and in violence.  The women in my group were especially put off by the detail on how the children were tortured and murdered.  While this is not a profound story by any means, it is not for the faint-of-heart.  Also, the love story is sweet enough, but I was extremely irritated that she decided not to get married because it would hamper her career.  That probably won’t bother every reader, but I found that to be the stupidest finish for a romance.