![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Memory Is The Key: Red Vs Blue Seasons 6-10
Wrote this like two days ago for a friend's substack, a little guest spot. Figured it'd be fun to post here since it's still new. Gonna keep the whole thing untouched even if the intro won't really make sense when posting it here.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
What’s up kids? Same bat time, same bat channel, but a white guy writing? Yeah, I apologize about the cultural appropriation in advance. But ya’ll needed a substitute teacher. And because of that well, I can’t force you to watch a movie but I can still make you guys learn about the lowest common denominator instead of something high brow.
So let’s talk Rooster Teeth.The company best known for capitalizing on the Machinima boom of the early mid to late 2000’s, eventually pivot to RWBY, and then die an inglorious death. I won’t go over the whole sordid history of the company but it’s important to know that by the time of their death they were considered a bit of a joke of a company that didn’t know how to run one and didn’t know how to make quality stories. This is important because this wasn’t always true. There was a time when Rooster Teeth had one of the best sci-fi stories on the shelves in the form of their Halo parody Red Vs Blue.
The story of Red soldiers and Blue soldiers being put in a box canyon in the middle of nowhere for reasons they don’t know or care for and just being the worst soldiers slowly evolves to create more and more complex but still inherently comedic stories throughout its first 5 seasons. However as the title already spoiled our story really starts at season 6. This is when the writing took a turn for the truly serious, explaining away more comedic plot points and recontextualizing almost everything that has happened to the characters so far as in one way or another a plot by one man.
Season 6 starts with the last member of the mysterious freelancer program, Agent Washington going to collect the Reds and Blues for a mission to take down the other main remains of the Freelancer Program, The Meta. A man who was the worst of the freelancer program given form. A man corrupted by power, unable to even speak now, more beast than man as he’s directed by fragments of an AI to try to become whole again. I won’t do a play by play of the entire season, but throughout it we learn more about the mysterious Director via letters between him and an oversight committee that are looking over his work due to it being funded with military money.
Most of these letters are just to build up suspense but at the end of the season we learn two important facts. That the full AI was shattered into smaller fragments via mentally torturing it until it shed pieces of its personality in order to forget the horrors. With them going back to torture it again every time they wanted a new AI fragment. These fragments were then implanted into the Freelancers of the freelancer program to help run their advanced armor and equipment. This is how The Meta was born. Too many AI in one person’s head. All of them are victims to one man’s evil.
The other thing we learn is that AI in this world are based on an existing person, an existing personality. The personality used to build the original AI in this case is the Director’s own. His entire motivation is because he lost someone he loved to war and wanted to prove that if he was given the chance he could’ve been the type of man who could’ve saved her. Reducing himself to a nub of a human being twice over, both a sharp blade that will cut down anyone in his way while also becoming a dull point, unable to do anything in a world that’s so much bigger than his one moment of trauma. The way this all ties into the actual protagonists is besides them unknowingly being a small cog in his larger machinations that one of the characters turns out to be someone deeply affected by those machinations. That character then has to go through the same experience as the Director (Kinda, it’s complicated) and unlike him learn to let go and move on.
At the end of Season 6 The Director does not threaten, but calmly states that when he’s found, when this all does eventually finally crumble down around him that there won’t be a fight. All that’ll be left at the end is “an old man wary from a mind more filled with memory than it is with hope”. And in season 10, when the characters finally catch up with and confront the director in the modern day…that’s exactly what we see. We see a man replaying videos of one of the last times he saw his wife before she died. Died in a war that for reasons we’re never given he was unable to participate in.
This is a man hollowed out by reducing his entire life into a single failure that wasn’t even truly his. But the worse crime is reducing the woman he loves into not a person but a moment, a moment that’s only about how he feels. Her entire life AND death reduced into apart of him, the worst part of him…the only part of him now. Knowing it’s all over, he’s confronted by the two people most affected by his actions and despite it all he’s not even worth killing. Revenge would be…hollow. In the end they walk away as he erases every file about the evil he’s done. Every file except the video of his wife. That’s all that mattered for so long, that memory may no longer be able to sustain him but it will still live on as a testament to why he did what he did. Death, manipulation, self torture, and more all in the pursuit of a video on loop that can’t even begin to encompass a woman he no longer even remembers clearly. And then he puts a bullet in his mouth.
It’s genuinely insane that even as an almost entirely male led series and one that is far from perfect in terms of it’s representation of women it still manages to have a discussion about the harmful ways in which men see women, in this case specifically a discussion about the trope of fridging. Compare this to RWBY, a series in which all 4 protagonists are women which…does not do anything like this. Though maybe I’ll discuss the sordid history of RWBY another day. When I hate myself enough for that.
It’s genuinely a shame to see what Rooster Teeth used to be and the genuine talent they had in people like Burnie Burns (Even if his return for the series’ actual true fr this time final season kinda sucked) slowly get buried underneath the company getting too big for one run by a bunch of people who got famous due to capturing lightning in a bottle with this series. Red Vs Blue in its heyday was both genuinely great comedy and genuinely great Sci-fi that forged its own legacy. I ain’t saying Rooster Teeth deserved to live, but I am glad that Red Vs Blue was salvaged out of the fire and can still be watched on not just youtube but places like Amazon and Tubi of all things. I think it’s worth a watch if you’re down for silly little internet projects like I am.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
What’s up kids? Same bat time, same bat channel, but a white guy writing? Yeah, I apologize about the cultural appropriation in advance. But ya’ll needed a substitute teacher. And because of that well, I can’t force you to watch a movie but I can still make you guys learn about the lowest common denominator instead of something high brow.
So let’s talk Rooster Teeth.The company best known for capitalizing on the Machinima boom of the early mid to late 2000’s, eventually pivot to RWBY, and then die an inglorious death. I won’t go over the whole sordid history of the company but it’s important to know that by the time of their death they were considered a bit of a joke of a company that didn’t know how to run one and didn’t know how to make quality stories. This is important because this wasn’t always true. There was a time when Rooster Teeth had one of the best sci-fi stories on the shelves in the form of their Halo parody Red Vs Blue.
The story of Red soldiers and Blue soldiers being put in a box canyon in the middle of nowhere for reasons they don’t know or care for and just being the worst soldiers slowly evolves to create more and more complex but still inherently comedic stories throughout its first 5 seasons. However as the title already spoiled our story really starts at season 6. This is when the writing took a turn for the truly serious, explaining away more comedic plot points and recontextualizing almost everything that has happened to the characters so far as in one way or another a plot by one man.
Season 6 starts with the last member of the mysterious freelancer program, Agent Washington going to collect the Reds and Blues for a mission to take down the other main remains of the Freelancer Program, The Meta. A man who was the worst of the freelancer program given form. A man corrupted by power, unable to even speak now, more beast than man as he’s directed by fragments of an AI to try to become whole again. I won’t do a play by play of the entire season, but throughout it we learn more about the mysterious Director via letters between him and an oversight committee that are looking over his work due to it being funded with military money.
Most of these letters are just to build up suspense but at the end of the season we learn two important facts. That the full AI was shattered into smaller fragments via mentally torturing it until it shed pieces of its personality in order to forget the horrors. With them going back to torture it again every time they wanted a new AI fragment. These fragments were then implanted into the Freelancers of the freelancer program to help run their advanced armor and equipment. This is how The Meta was born. Too many AI in one person’s head. All of them are victims to one man’s evil.
The other thing we learn is that AI in this world are based on an existing person, an existing personality. The personality used to build the original AI in this case is the Director’s own. His entire motivation is because he lost someone he loved to war and wanted to prove that if he was given the chance he could’ve been the type of man who could’ve saved her. Reducing himself to a nub of a human being twice over, both a sharp blade that will cut down anyone in his way while also becoming a dull point, unable to do anything in a world that’s so much bigger than his one moment of trauma. The way this all ties into the actual protagonists is besides them unknowingly being a small cog in his larger machinations that one of the characters turns out to be someone deeply affected by those machinations. That character then has to go through the same experience as the Director (Kinda, it’s complicated) and unlike him learn to let go and move on.
At the end of Season 6 The Director does not threaten, but calmly states that when he’s found, when this all does eventually finally crumble down around him that there won’t be a fight. All that’ll be left at the end is “an old man wary from a mind more filled with memory than it is with hope”. And in season 10, when the characters finally catch up with and confront the director in the modern day…that’s exactly what we see. We see a man replaying videos of one of the last times he saw his wife before she died. Died in a war that for reasons we’re never given he was unable to participate in.
This is a man hollowed out by reducing his entire life into a single failure that wasn’t even truly his. But the worse crime is reducing the woman he loves into not a person but a moment, a moment that’s only about how he feels. Her entire life AND death reduced into apart of him, the worst part of him…the only part of him now. Knowing it’s all over, he’s confronted by the two people most affected by his actions and despite it all he’s not even worth killing. Revenge would be…hollow. In the end they walk away as he erases every file about the evil he’s done. Every file except the video of his wife. That’s all that mattered for so long, that memory may no longer be able to sustain him but it will still live on as a testament to why he did what he did. Death, manipulation, self torture, and more all in the pursuit of a video on loop that can’t even begin to encompass a woman he no longer even remembers clearly. And then he puts a bullet in his mouth.
It’s genuinely insane that even as an almost entirely male led series and one that is far from perfect in terms of it’s representation of women it still manages to have a discussion about the harmful ways in which men see women, in this case specifically a discussion about the trope of fridging. Compare this to RWBY, a series in which all 4 protagonists are women which…does not do anything like this. Though maybe I’ll discuss the sordid history of RWBY another day. When I hate myself enough for that.
It’s genuinely a shame to see what Rooster Teeth used to be and the genuine talent they had in people like Burnie Burns (Even if his return for the series’ actual true fr this time final season kinda sucked) slowly get buried underneath the company getting too big for one run by a bunch of people who got famous due to capturing lightning in a bottle with this series. Red Vs Blue in its heyday was both genuinely great comedy and genuinely great Sci-fi that forged its own legacy. I ain’t saying Rooster Teeth deserved to live, but I am glad that Red Vs Blue was salvaged out of the fire and can still be watched on not just youtube but places like Amazon and Tubi of all things. I think it’s worth a watch if you’re down for silly little internet projects like I am.