Just the Ticket X RWBY Tuesday: Justice League Crossover

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

Thankful to Be Crossing Off Another SCW.

I hope all of my Ticketholders had a great Thanksgiving yesterday, full of great tastes that taste great together, and that your guests didn't act like they were from a completely different reality.

BTW, SCW stands for "Shoulda, Coulda, Woulda," for those of you who haven't read the previous entries in the RWBY Tuesday series. And if that's the case, why are you starting here? Go read the rest of it at the above provided link!

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Yep, we're jumping right in, Ticketholders!

Justice League x RWBY: Super Heroes and Huntsmen is a two-part crossover film animated in the RWBY style, and based on the crossover comic book series, DC/RWBY and RWBY x Justice League. I did not read these comics, so my opinions herein will be based exclusively on the movies themselves and their relation to the RWBY series.

The first thing to note here (because it has become something of a sticking point or a profanity, depending upon which side of any particular fandom you happen to land) is the canonicity of the films to either of their source properties. I can't speak to their DC Comics canonicity because I am almost exclusively a Zenescope reader, but as to whether they are canon to RWBY, the answer is a resounding "yesn't." Part One references events as recent as the Volume Eight finale (such as the deaths of Pyrrha, Ozpin, Penny, and Jacques Schnee, the crashing of Atlas, and the flooding of Mantle), but doesn't seem to acknowledge Team RWBY's fall to the Ever After (I will talk more in depth about my expectations regarding this a bit later). Part Two makes reference to a scientist named Doctor Merlot (who was the main villain of the Grimm Eclipse video game that takes place between Volumes Two and Three, and was partly responsible for the destruction and abandonment of the Mountain Glenn settlement, and I have some opinions on this reference that I will address later as well).

Part One has Teams RWBY (minus Weiss) and JNPR (minus Pyrrha) with their Volume One designs (though Yang has her upgraded prosthetic arm from Volume Seven onward) taking on Grimm that have somehow developed the ability to absorb and use Dust, as seen from the point of view of a teenaged Clark Kent (this "opening eyes" perspective is one of many things the films have in common with Volume Nine, which was produced concurrently with the crossover, and the fungible creativity and divided attention are glaringly apparent in all productions, especially in Part Two).

The positives in Part One are many, such as the creative reinterpretation of the League's powers into Semblance form (Superman's Semblance kind of makes him Nuclear Man from Superman IV, Wonder Woman's bracelets and lasso are now Aura constructs, Vixen, the Flash, and Cyborg are pretty much one-to-one conversions with the exception that Vixen is now a Faunus, Jessica Cruz--the Green Lantern of this iteration of the Justice League--can see through deceptions in similar but more visual manner to Robin Hill's handshake as well as wielding a Power Ring, and Batman is a bat Faunus with echolocation vision and projectile spit), the interplay between characters on both teams (such as Weiss and Bruce's almost Moonlighting-ish partnership, Ruby and Clark sharing leadership burdens, Jaune helping Jessica activate her Semblance in a nice role-reversal from his early dynamics with Pyrrha, and Yang and Blake having a bit of a warrior-maiden crush triangle with Diana), the balanced fight-to-character moment ratio, and the youthful redesigns of the League to fit the RWBY aesthetic, which also provides some solid personal conflict for Bruce, who never got to enjoy his teenage years and is tempted by the prospect of a world where he has powers.

Unfortunately, the problems show themselves pretty quickly with the rushed introductions of Vixen, Cyborg, Flash, and Green Lantern, as well as the Scene One usage of a glitchy, digital static effect that makes it stupidly, immediately clear that the Justice League and Team RWBY are facing one of a conspiracy theorist's many worst nightmares: they are trapped in a simulation of Remnant and nothing is real!

So, this is where I talk about my blind expectations regarding the movie's canonicity and how I think it could have been done better. In Volume Nine's first episode, Blake asks Weiss what happened after they fell in the Gateway Space, and Weiss dodges the question, hinting that there was more to the fall than falling and landing in the Ever After, and she remembers what that was. So, Justice League x RWBY could have easily been written as one of those extradimensional stops on the way to what Volume Nine would eventually reveal as the origin of all life and realities in its as-yet-unexplored multiverse. Hell, screw all the licensing red tape and do what every comic book publisher has been doing for the past thirty-plus years. Do a series of these dimension-hopping crossover films where Team RWBY and the original Power Rangers have to fight Salem and Rita, or they wind up in New York helping the Ninja Turtles fight mutagen-enhanced Grimm and a Grimm Shredder, or Ash Williams misreads a spell in the Necronomicon and winds up in Remnant while Team RWBY fight the Army Of Darkness, or they wind up in the Monarch MonsterVerse fighting kaiju with Blake and Yang befriending Kong, or be completely on-the-nose and unoriginal and have them team up with their Zenescope counterparts. It may be obvious, but it would have given more time for Ruby to explore her reluctance about being a leader (rather than just having her suddenly blow up at everyone in Volume Nine after some too-subtle foreshadowing), and at least it's a better series of premises than "RWBY villain happens upon digital Justice League villain on the internet and they trap each other's nemises in virtual reality because that's how the internet and multiverses work, and both teams just happen to have been doing tech stuff at the exact same time." Yeah, the Justice League were fighting the A.I. villain, Killg%re, and Team RWBY were doing a VR training mission on an Atlas airship, which makes no sense considering this is set after an alternate version of Volume Eight where the Atlas/Mantle crash still happened, and they were marked persona non grata by the Atlas military as of the Volume Seven finale.

My head hurts, and the premise of this whole thing is stupid. Also, they do the whole, "superhero names sound stupid because they were thought up seventy-plus years ago by people on drugs" joke that every superhero movie (particularly MCU entries and the lighter-tone DC projects from the tail end of the DCEU and the beginning of the Gunn Era) from the last decade has made. Also again, its runtime is barely half that of the average modern movie. So let's move on to Part Two and find out why it didn't need to exist.

Starting out positively, Justice League x RWBY Part Two does the logical thing that any good crossover should by reversing the dynamics of its previous part (bringing Team RWBY to Earth, expanding the DC side of the roster, reinterpreting their Semblances as super powers that each of them have to learn to use, and turning the enhanced Grimm into Amazo/Parasite-like power replicators). The adult redesigns of Team RWBY into more superhero-esque forms and the decision to make Weiss non-powered and arm her with an old Mr. Freeze gun that Bruce gave her are obvious highlights for me, as are the expansions on the DC side (Black Canary and enemy-of-my-enemy allies like Killer Croc, Weather Wizard, and Mirror Master--though these latter two still get their share of "character names are stupid" shade from Team RWBY). Having Flash deal with PTSD from being possessed by Killg%re in Part One was pretty interesting character work, too. But it seems that, beyond Weiss' brief stint as a Freeze Gun-toting Ice Queen and making Ruby a teleporting scythe ninja, the creative team ran out of creative and fell back onto putting everyone in a digital world where their powers and Semblances all work because heroes using villain plans that don't make sense to beat those villains totally, sarcastically not-sarcastically makes sense, and turning Yang's amplified counterattack strength and Blake's shadow clones into superpowers was just too hard to think through. Yay, creative team?

The worst offenses by Part Two have to be the fights and the villains. The villains here are Dr. Watts (who died in this continuity and gave himself the Dr. Gero treatment--digitizing his consciousness and putting his mind in a mechanically enhanced body--but was a pompous chump in life and is now a pompous chump with a shiny new body with two extra arms who gets wrecked fairly easily, and should have been replaced by someone else--like Dr. Merlot, who invented the Grimm modification process that Watts used here, and might have been more interesting or threatening, if not made more sense given the scenario and Weiss name-dropping him early in this Part) and the aforementioned Killg%re (who is essentially a stupider, less interesting, less threatening Curious Cat, and only poses a challenge when in his own domain and able to possess one of our heroes or Huntresses). As for the fights, with Part One having already done the heavy lifting with respect to character establishment, Part Two is almost an hour of non-stop fights that are monotonously under-choreographed (with the exception of a few cool teleportation bits from Ruby) and become nearly devoid of stakes once Bruce, Canary, and Weiss figure out how to literally give everyone power hacks. While visually unique, even Cyborg getting corrupted while trying to hack Killg%re and Watts out of their endlessly replicating horde of enhanced Grimm feels like a Nothingburger with a side of Nonion Rings and an empty 20oz of Caffiene-free Nope Zero. I actually fell asleep multiple times during this, and so had to run it back, doubling the length of my viewing experience to 300% longer than it needed to be.

Imagination is still more important than reality, and a good night's sleep is more important than watching Justice League x RWBY: Part Two. I would subject myself to finishing Ice Queendom before I'd watch this crossover again.

Re-watching RWBY (and near-daily doses of caffeine from drinks that exist) has given me the idea to continue RWBY Tuesday in the future, especially in the form of a "Build the Roster"-style post, but I might also explore other media, such as playing the Grimm Eclipse and Arrowfell games or reading the comics or novels. Let me know in the comments what RWBY media you'd like to see content about in 2024, and as always, please remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, help out my ad revenue as you Scroll, cross over to Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to follow me and like what you make eye contact with, and to summon that rocket-powered gym locker full of the latest Relics of news, Knowledge, and Creation on my content.

Ticketmaster X Animeister,

Crossing Over,

and Out.