you gonna have to explain how the gods ruined ozpin, chief, because I'm not seeing it.
You know how in a conversation you sometimes can choose to answer a question in such a way that essentially kills the conversation, right?
Like, for example, a friend texts you and goes "Hey, how are you doing?" and all you say is "Fine."
Sometimes a follow-up would happen. Maybe they'd ask about something specific, like for example, "So, what are you doing?" and you once again answer with something like "Working." or something. And just like that, the energy is off, the convo cuts off. You are clearly not interested in the conversation, and you haven't provided anything the other person can use to continue it. Maybe your friend even clues in that you are not interested in continuing this conversation right now and leaves you alone.
That's the kind of thing RWBY did with the Brother Gods flashback.
It's mostly completely self-contained, completely objective bottle episode that invents entire massive concepts out of thin air for no other reason than to answer a single question.
The show doesn't approach it with the goal of "developing" Ozpin or Salem, nor does it do it to expand the worldbuilding. The show does it with the sole goal of "explaining" them.
The Brother Gods are living sentient cases of Deux Ex Machina. They appear, do something that specifically explains away the specific things the episode exists to explain, and then are taken out of the setting completely.
The way the show, for example, uses them to explain the broken moon is the distilled example of how the whole flashback fails. The moon mystery reigned over the community since the original trailers. Thousands of theories were made. The Broken Moon was an iconic element of the setting, and the fandom obviously would assume there had to be a reason behind such a frequent and impactful iconography. Multiple songs reference what happened to it, after all.
The show randomly shows one of the brother gods crashing into it as they leave.
That's it. That's the moon backstory. The Moon is broken because God did it. Nothing comes from that. It leads nowhere. The scene exists to answer a single question and nothing more.
One of the key aspects of how "reveals" are done in fiction is that the end of something is the beginning of something. The reveals are often structured in a way to "keep the ball rolling". Every answer the audience gets provides new questions and new directions, adding complexity to a character/location/story-beat. Every effect is a cause for something else.
When we learn Darth Vader's identity, it doesn't make Darth Vader irrelevant. We, as the audience, start to wonder what happened and also have the character's actions—and other characters' interactions with them—recontextualized. It also significantly contributes to the character conflict at hand and to the protagonist's character development and goals!
Even in RWBY when we learn Blake is a Faunus, it doesn't close off her relevance or backstory. Not only it raises new questions and expands the character, it also introduces additional conflict for her.
Creating Answers that don't really lead anywhere is a common issue with the later volumes of RWBY. One of the more notable examples people often notice is how Blake's character arc basically completely disappears after Menagerie, or how Menagerie as a whole vanishes from the story after that.
Another commonly mentioned one is Qrow and Raven's anger at Ozpin being literally just about being turned into birds. Or, for example, the Maidens story in V3, which many people expected to continue some lie or something unsaid, but after the show presents it, it treats it like a 100% straightforward fact, rather than a tale.
So it's not just with Brother Gods that the show keeps doing this. It's their most common way to "answer" things nowadays.
The Brother Gods case is simply the most egregious one and has the most impact on the quality of worldbuilding.
The Brother Gods flashback doesn't exist to enhance the characters or to make their motivations more complex. It doesn't lead anywhere new for the characters.
The fundamental "motivations" for Ozpin OR Salem don't really change.
The only thing it does is to, without a doubt, close off anything about the mystery behind their existence.
There's nothing to debate or theorycraft in terms of motivations, because the way the Relic works is meant to be 100% Objective, which means there's no nuance or hidden meanings beyond what is being shown.
So, in turn, the two most mysterious characters that are tied to the biggest mysteries in the show and most of the character motivations now have complete 100% objective backstories that state only one thing:
"They are this way because Gods Did It. All of this happened because Gods Did It. The moon also blew up because a God Did It."
An equivalent of a dry, straightforward PowerPoint presentation.
Once again, these are the two characters deeply entwined with the biggest mysteries in the show: the Silver Eyes, Summer Rose's fate, the reason behind Raven's mistrust of Ozpin, etc.
And, this is Volume 6. There were THREE more volumes made afterward, so it's not even near the end of the story.
Now that's a showstopper.
They are just done now. And there's no new bigger mystery that would manifest out of this.
By introducing Brother Gods and using them the way it did to "answer" something, the show effectively cuts off the story's most interesting mysteries without really contributing anything to the narrative.
