It is of no surprise to anyone that Rooster Teeth has had a very rough couple of months and that is putting it lightly. Everything from long time employees jumping ship month after month, allegations of a toxic workplace environment, bad hot takes from prominent voice actors and staff, drama between RT and both current and former employees, threatening legal action against RWBY fan creators, to destroying the hopes and dreams of an aspiring RWBY fan artist by pulling her entry from a contest for being deemed too culturally inappropriate. It has been a complete PR nightmare of their own making.
In a truly bizarre turn of events, seemingly out of nowhere, on 8/7/2020, Rooster Teeth announced on both twitter and on the official RT blog that they will be canceling themselves. It appears they have finally succumbed to the grim realization that they have been abandoned by much of their former fan base that once used to praise them for their creative works and have since awakened to the cold, stark reality that they now have almost nothing left to their name save for some small amount of self-dignity. Which in turn was quickly taken from them, largly due in part to a recent tweet from the original and iconic voice actor of Optimus Prime, Gary Chalk from Beast Wars, in regards to their dubbing of the recent Netflix Transformer series War on Cybertron.
Since Rooster Teeth has nothing left to lose, they have all but decided that the only option left for them is to go full on woke and start self-censoring all of their content moving forward. At the same time, they will be going back through their entire content portfolio and either add trigger warnings, disclaimers, edit out offensive slurs, or just out right delete videos entirely. All at their discretion.
Official RT Blog Post:Twitter Post:Depending on where you look, the reaction to this announcement appears to be very divided among the community. On twitter some endlessly mocked RT for this insane decision while most of them praised RT for doing the right thing and hoping they will become more inclusive then they already are. As if they are not already inclusive enough.Also, since RT bent the knee so much that they more than likely fractured it in the process, their small woke fan base is now making their own demands of the company.Meanwhile on the official Rooster Teeth subreddit and on the official blog post, there appears to be plenty of push back against Rooster Teeth’s latest move.
RT Subreddit:
Official RT Blog Post:As a fan of RWBY, I am very concerned for the future of RWBY at this point. No joke. Between this bizarre self-cancellation move coupled with Rooster Teeth’s recent actions against deemed offensive Grimm designs and fan projects, as well as certain voice actors and staff in recent panels caring more about characters sexuality and representation rather than actual character development and good story telling, RWBY is seemingly headed toward disaster. I certainly cannot wait to have all my favorite RWBY volumes be updated with disclaimers to educate me about how RT does not condone the oppression that the humans place upon the Faunus population or how my favorite Grimm has its roots based in problematic origins. I am sure this will work out very well for this once thriving and now decaying franchise. As a person on the RT subreddit puts it, the views and buzz surrounding Rooster Teeth content is down across the board even before Viro-Chan happened.As much as I want to hope for a better Rooster Teeth, I do not think anymore can be done to help them. Rooster Teeth has fully caved to the woke mob and is giving them everything they want and more. If the alleged rumors that are floating around about Warner Media turn out to be true, then Rooster Teeth may not be around much longer as its own separate division. Until that day comes pull up a chair, sit back, relax and toast some delicious marshmallows over this ongoing dumpster fire of a company.
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