>>23577Again, I can't speak to how well he did with RWBY, but Miles writes best when he or whoever he's working with has a clear vision. He obviously lead the Chorus trilogy, and he was brought on for a few episodes of Season 17. This leads me to believe that Kerry's writing was the issue and that Miles should've intervened or disagreed instead of sucking up, as you said.
Speaking of Season 17, that's a great example of how deferring to another writer can affect the quality of your show. In this case, Joe Nicolosi (lead writer for Seasons 15 & 16) had to work on another project, so Jason Weight (co-writer for Season 16) took over with Joe's outline for the remaining plot beats. And it turned out really well! Despite writing arguably the worst episode of the worst season (up to that point), Jason turned things around and wrapped everything up nicely. It helps that, funnily enough, he also wrote the best episode of that season (i.e. Wash learning about his
cerebral hypoxia), the quality of which carried over when he helmed Season 17.
In retrospect, I think everyone was a little too harsh on Seasons 15 & 16 - they're a mess, sure, but there's a genuine and heartfelt story at the center of it that needed a proper script doctoring for it to stand out (which thankfully happened with Season 17). Honest to god, I would take them over Zero any day of the year - at least Joe and Jason bothered to follow heavy story beats and understood where they wanted to take the plot and characters.
>>23580I don't think constraints is the issue - RWBY just felt aimless and confused, it had all sorts of creative freedom but didn't make the most of it (or wasn't very competent about making something with it). I can't speak for the seasons I haven't watched, but that's definitely how it felt early on. As for why this is the case, well, Miles proved with Chorus that he can come up with original characters and plot threads without having to rely on existing material (even if he likes bringing it in to tie things together), and it sounds like he deferred to Kerry a lot, so that would leave Kerry as the root of the problem.