There is something so chilling and incredible about remembering the fact that Red vs. Blue is a war story.
It’s a workplace comedy, it’s a goofy ensemble show. It’s everything a silly, off the cuff web series should be, so relaxed its characters feel realistic, so unconstrained its world feels alive. It establishes in a few lines what some shows takes seasons to not even accomplish at all; that every faceless person is, fundamentally. A person.
And people are silly and bored and have their own little small scale lives and they don’t think about the grand story they’re telling, their part in the tapestry of the universe. They think about how hot the afternoon is. They bitch about their coworkers. They throw rocks at complicated military equipment and then get together to ooh and ah over ‘Oh wow, the rocks got all ashy and sizzley.’
Every soldier in the show has those moments of down to earth humanity. And the down to earth humanity is having dumb conversations to pass the time and doing very dumb shit because you’re bored. Every. Soldier. The guards in the tower at the sarcophagus heist. (“Did you hear something?” “The sound of you being an idiot?”) The soldiers at Rat’s Nest (”Seriously?!?! How have you never met another person named Jones?? It’s very common!) The freelancers, both top agents to the so-so agents to the worst agents to the dozens of people that work for PFL that aren’t even freelancers. (Wash’s twirly straw and skateboard, the triplets and Five Things, 479er’s never-ending feud with the guy who moves the crates.)
Everything has a face, and that face is human.
Which is why it comes out of nowhere when the show starts waxing philosophical on the atrocities of war, how flexible our societal morals become, the aftermath and the tragedy of it all. It’s a gutpunch to be forced to take a step back and be told “You are nothing. You are disposable assets, names on a sheet of paper, and only used to further more violence.” To see the characters be told that.
I find it fascinating that, due to the strange relationship between rvb and Halo itself, we never actually see the war. Never really learn what started it, what’s hypothetically being fought for, only the fallout it creates. That outside the lens of our ragtag heroes, people are dying and lives are being ruined for?? What? We don’t know. But one very sad and very twisted man saw an opportunity, and the loosened ethics and the institution of war gave it to him. No one thought to look into PFL, no one batted an eye, until the dust had settled, until lives had been ruined and ended. Because when faced with extinction, every alternative isn’t just preferable. It’s encouraged.
War is just the broad, inhumane system that gives real, human people the chance to excuse atrocities. The director. The counselor. Felix. Locus. Wash.
There’s something so poignant, so heartbreaking, and so goddamn fundamental to the story of rvb in Kimball’s speech.
“When you spend every day fighting a war, you learn to demonize your attackers. To you they’re evil, they’re sub-human. Because if they weren’t, then what would that make you? What I’m trying to say… is I’ve been afraid to see you for what you really are. You’re our brothers. Our sisters. And the things we’ve done to one another are unforgivable.”
The audience knows, has had it shoved in their faces, over and over and over again. Everyone in this universe is human. We see, from our omnipotent (yet incredibly limited) perspective that everyone in this show is a distinct person beneath that helmet. That no one is unattached from humanity.
And what do the soldiers see?
A crowd of faceless bodies, all wearing the same color armor.
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