Bear Ribs
Well-known member
I don't really see the anime fandom and Harry Potter fandom as particularly separated myself. The people that loved Naruto and wrote fanfic about him wrote fanfic about Harry Potter and Ranma Saotome too.Eh, I don't see much overlap between the RWBY and Harry Potter fandoms TBH. I see much more overlap between RWBY and the anime fandom. Anime was beginning to blow up in the West around that time, with Crunchyroll's rise in popularity, the explosive popularity of Attack on Titan, Fate/Zero, and Sword Art Online, and Netflix deciding to put popular shows like F/Zero and SAO up for streaming.
I also feel you're putting the anime boom far latter in time that it was. Toonami got it's start in 1997, Princess Mononoke was released in theatres in 1999, well over a decade before RWBY appeared. The anime boom had been well underway a long time before RWBY showed up. What RWBY really hit was the rise in home production and small-time operators as technology caught up to where a few people on a shoestring budget could actually make something like RWBY instead of it requiring a major company's resources.
Agreed, it doesn't absolutely need a Dark Lord but it does need enemies beyond the Grimm, beings with some characterization and plots and the like, instead of the cast just fighting dumb animals. Villains of the season like Torchwick would work.I don't think RWBY needed an overarching big bad or a dark lord or anything. It could have different arcs with different villains. Torchwick was a simple, charismatic thief who only existed for the first three seasons, and to this day appears to be the well received villain in the franchise. The White Fang were also a far more interesting antagonist faction than generic doomsday cult #9123, even if they were utterly botched.