We're talking Ruby Volume 9 Spoilers. If you're not caught up, go get caught up and then come back. Please. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ Cats out of the bag. Hey! We're so big. So now we've seen the cats' true intentions. What was like navigating around that? Difficult. Yeah. You know, I think even starting the design and then the writing and the voice acting and everything, people are probably going to figure out that something's like a little off with the cat. But how do we delay that as much as possible and also make it still feel rewarding? And I'm really happy with how we turned out and Robbie Damon's amazing job. You know, that's so good. Having that low moment where, you know, it looks like, okay, the cat's finally coming in to save Ruby one more time. And then, no, not this time. I know I had a cat betraying me before. This is the first time I've had a cat betraying Lindsay. It's a ironic situation. Extra cruel. I feel like we put a lot into some of the earlier beats of the cat throughout of, like, look, they're only doing positives. They're saving this person. They're helping out here just so that we could point and be like, look, they haven't done anything wrong yet. I still trust them. Yeah. Well, and part of it, too, it's like, we were okay with audiences watching it. It's like, oh, this doesn't feel entirely like something's off here. And then, John kind of points it out and then making it feel like it ends there. But one of the things we want to do and now it feels like we can talk about it, right? Is to have something that ties this back into what's going on in Remnant and for the cat to reveal that, like, oh, wait, the same brothers that made humans and stuff on Remnant also made the cat. And so that blew my mind. Yeah, cool. Yeah. I think it really early on, people might think this is like a filler season or has nothing to do with the main plot. But it is quite the opposite. One of the most important things. Super nod. And then, you know, there's already so many connections and there's more coming to that, you know, deviation does not have to be a filler, I guess. Yeah. It's always fun, too, and you know, a character goes bad. It's fun to go back and be like, or they're all tearier motives to this earlier stuff. So it gives you a chance to kind of rewatch it all. I appreciate that. So this is a very, very low point for Ruby. What was that, like, for you to see this character that you've grown very attached to, hitting probably like the lowest of the lows? Rock bottom has a basement, surprised. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Found it. Yeah, genuinely, we already have Ruby has been isolated in the ever after from her teammates. We had someone of her union, but it was very skewed. She could not physically help her team in a lot of ways. So she relied on someone like the cat to guide her through this. So the ultimate betrayal is, oh, this person who I thought I could trust leading me through this whimsy world is actually bad. It's a great and necessary reflection on herself in the moment. Ruby needs to look at that and just stop trusting people around her. Just trust yourself for once. Just for once. Early on, we had the idea for, you know, if we're doing an Alice and One and Only thing, we need like a mad tea party scene, right? And Madhatter and the scenarios, Nio slash Torchwick. And all these people that there's a part of Ruby feels like she failed or was a part of their demise. And to have them like in some senses, like literally beat it into her, you know, it was seen. It was really tough. It's very tough. It's very tough. There's a lot of nightmarish things in this episode. The Cat and Nio, all that. I mean, we wanted this to be a shift and the season and really get into, okay, we're, you know, coming to the last couple episodes now. Like the tone is gonna be shipped a little bit. Yeah. And then there's the little stop. Oh. That's that pro-paying heart. You're watching that. Oh my goodness. There's a couple of times where I was like, is this two? Is this two? I mean, wow. I still don't know. We absolutely put a lot into not making it, the grotesque or making it as nonviolent as possible, which is hard to imagine. Like the whole episode is very mean. That's what it should be called. The mean episode. But I think there's a little bit, at least for me, justification about is, because of how whimsical the season has been up to this point. Yeah. Is actually we kind of needed to set that there were going to be some consequences to this very, you know, like you can get small and get big again. But I mean, like it would be drinks this tea, like what's going to happen? Yeah, there's going to be a tree. The dark and kind of twisted chapter in the fairy tale. So this is the grim portion of the fairy tale. I suppose the Disney portion. Yes. Yes. Got it. Yeah.