RWBY: Ice Queendom

Episode 5

As team RWBY dives deeper into the recesses of Weiss's mind, Ice QUEENDOM continues to excel in a lot of its subtle implications, foreshadowing, and character acting. While Yang is primarily here for comedic relief and arguably has the least emotional stake in this whole thing – I don't think she shared any connection with Weiss prior to this point – she does that job well, and the moments of support she showed here were brief yet genuine. It's also interesting that Weiss might only really recognize Yang for her power given the detail about how explosive her gauntlets are in the dream world. I wonder if that will play a part in the plot moving forward.

The real emotional crux of this episode, however, revolves around the implied relationship between Weiss and Blake. We learn here that when someone enters a dream world, they end up replacing the versions of themselves envisaged in the dreamer's mind. However, Blake didn't seem to replace anybody, which led the team to believe that Blake isn't present within Weiss's mind. I'm not too sure about that theory, considering how Weiss seemed the most concerned about Blake being in her imaginary town. Then again, that concern could have stemmed from Weiss' ingrained bigotry that we learned about in previous episodes, or maybe it speaks to some deep-seated guilt that Weiss has deep down about her relationship with Blake. I like the little detail that Blake's dream version has a single cat ear merged with her bow, almost as if Weiss doesn't want to see her as one thing but can't fully see her as another given the information that she knows. Similar to Weiss and Ruby, an honest heart-to-heart between these two needs to happen before the season wraps.

We already know what Weiss thinks of Ruby, but we also know that she's in this constant tug of war between her true self and the imaginary version of herself that her family created. In that context, the gorgeous singing sequence in the middle of the episode may just be a cry for help. The way the whole scene was framed and the desperate looks on everyone's faces as Pyrrha was singing in that cage with the constant cutaways to Weiss makes me want to pay more attention to the background details to see if there are a lot more subtle or overt things that I might have missed. There are a lot of different directions that Ice QUEENDOM can take its plot from this point onwards, and I'm genuinely excited about the emotional and psychological growth these characters will experience along the way.

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RWBY: Ice Queendom is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.