RWBY Volume 2 2×3 Review: A Minor Hiccup

A Minor Hiccup starts with something we’ve all been looking forward to, new character outfits! Okay, maybe it’s just me and my fellow cosplayers going all sparkly eyed at finally seeing our girls in civvies, but the new outfits are predictably wonderful, keeping with the girls colour coding and personalities perfectly. The girls make plans to investigate the recent string of robberies and are overheard by Sun who invites himself and his friend Neptune into the gang. The six split into partners and we follow Ruby and Weiss for the remainder of the episode.

The really interesting thing about this episode is that we start to see more of this world’s technology. We get a string of exposition from Weiss as she and Ruby walk to the Cross Continental Transmit Tower, explaining how the towers were created in Atlas, her home kingdom, to communicate across all four kingdoms after the great war. The girls have what look like iPhones, and use them to take pictures as well as swipe them as their personal identification. Ruby and Weiss split up when Ruby sees Penny and goes off to talk with her. Weiss continues into the tower which seems very high tech, with hologram workers and stations with visual screens to talk with. I guess the towers work as giant cellphone towers, but ones that still require an operator to patch them to different locations.

Weiss is connected to Schnee Dust Company, and is able to obtain data on any Dust-related robberies. We see her talk to the receptionist who offers to patch her through to her father, the company president, and mentions her older sister; Weiss declines. It’s a theory that Weiss has a strained relationship with her father, though her sister being mentioned makes me suspect that we have the trope where the older sibling is favoured and the younger struggles to measure up.

While Ruby and Penny are talking, they pass an Atlas, who I’m now convinced are the technology junkies of the kingdoms, android demonstration. Some workers spot them, and Penny takes off running. Ruby chases after her, determined to find out what’s going on. At one point Ruby stumbles in the road, and just as a truck is about to hit her, Penny stops it with her bare hands. And here we have the not-so-secret secret revealed; Penny is indeed an android.

I’d say it was a fairly average episode. The highlights were the beginning when all the girls were together. The interplay between characters is definitely the series’s strong point, just after the fight choreography. Later, when they split up, it’s just not as engaging, though that could be more due to my dislike of Weiss – the stuck up, rich girl who’s actually just lonely with a tragic past – yeah, I get it already, still don’t like her. Ruby is still excitedly adorible, but she needs the other characters to bounce off of. The reveal that Weiss has family issues and Penny is an android were something we all saw coming, and the tidbits of world information just weren’t enough to feel satisfying or particularly intriguing. I wouldn’t call the A Minor Hiccup bad, it’s just that it’s not on the same level as our first two episodes. But hey, how about them new outfits? Am I right?

RWBY is available for stream via Roosterteeth and Crunchyroll

Author: Ashley Dawn

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