 Hello everyone and welcome to the Ruby Volume 9 Roundtable. I am your host, Jack Petillo. You might know me as The Voice of Junior from Volumes 1 and 2. Nine years ago, I guess at this point. Let's introduce everyone starting over here. Who are you, sir? I'm Eddie Rivas, head writer of Ruby. I'm Barbara Dunkelman, voice of Yang Xiaolong. I'm Carrie Shockross, and I'm the showrunner. I'm Lindsay Jones, and I voice Ruby. And I'm Erin, I'm the art director. Yay! Claps for us. Roundtable claps. Let's dive into it. So, Volume 9, a little bit different from the rest of Ruby that we've seen before. So, where did the idea for Ever After come from? That's okay. That's a big question. There's a lot of history there. So, way, way back in the day, this is like, I think between Volume 1 and 2, we had this idea of like, yeah, we could maybe do the Alice in Wonderland kind of themed thing. That was actually going to be a tangible place that was between the fall of Atlas and what came next. And that was eight years ago at this point. We kept writing, we kept writing, and we got to the end of Volume 8 and Atlas Falling, and we're like, well, we still want to do this, but maybe we'll do it a little different. Yeah, the idea with Volumes 7 through 9 was always that it was going to kind of culminate in like a personal story with Team Ruby. Okay, maybe this Island Ever After idea could be worked into at the end of Volume 8, and it would be a really great place to kind of reset, get away from the main narrative, and actually let Team Ruby all have some time together, make it feel a little bit more like Volume 1, just in the sense of being more focused. Pair things down a little bit, you know. Most crazy volume there. Pair it down a little bit. Back to basics. Yeah. Extreme visuals, simple themes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So is that why you want to do it right now? Like, it's a good spot to fit it in. I'd say so, yeah, because I think we knew, even before we wrote them, that Volume 7 and 8, the fall of Atlas, was going to be. It's going to be a low point. It's going to be a low point, and it was going to be a lot. I think we all kind of felt like, let's take a little bit of a breather, you know, and do something different. So you're saying this is like a pressure valve, essentially, where you can have some fun with it, sort of bring some energy and some positivity back? A little bit. I mean, I think this is probably something that we'll get into later, but it can be kind of hard to get to some of these more like character-driven things when the world is also ending. Right. How do we take away that threat a little bit, or at least temporarily, so that we can address these things without it feeling like, hey, I know this character's sad, but things are on fire. What are you going to do about that? Everything kind of sucks. Yeah. So this is a way for us to balance that a little bit. Yeah, it would feel really weird to kind of pause it while everyone's kind of still on remnant, you know, trying to figure things out. We really wanted time for the four main girls to be able to do that with themselves. Yeah. From an acting standpoint, just from Ruby's perspective, I like that we already had her kind of attempt to escapism or a little bit of a pause on all that disaster that's happening in front of her through the wishes with Jin. Now we get to experience that in a bigger playing field, a literal world that they're exploring in where you can divulge into your feelings. Yeah, when you cry, it rains. Yeah. And maybe we're going to get in some feelings, I don't know, maybe. It also felt really good to get a little bit more meta with it and dive into a fairy tale setting, and it just felt like a really appropriate place for the show to go. That's always been such a core of Ruby and the creation of all the characters and the plot lines and everything like that. Like every character is based off of storybook character, mythology, everything like that. And so to like really dive into that fairy tale atmosphere, I think is like so cool for this volume. Cats are real. I will. Imagine this. They are. Cat ears. Sorry, I should have known. I've seen plenty of cartoons. It's the ninth volume, you know? And I think we want to take a step back and kind of ourselves look at the series and these characters and this world and be able to have like a little commentary on that too. So I think with all of that and all of this production going on during the pandemic, I think this is a volume that we all needed. And that'll become more clear as you watch. What the heck's an Aerofell? Thanks for watching this deeper dive into this week's episode of Ruby. If you want more, come back every Tuesday after the episode and we'll talk about it and have fun. And go watch the episodes on Crunchyroll every Saturday. Please go watch it. Bye.