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major-comet · 2 months

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I finally watched RvB: Zero, and I think I have more questions than answers

this tweet aged Quite Poorly

So while I was watching I took like, a whole page of notes. I'm going to try to break down / determine what exactly it was that wasn't working for me. This is long as shit, and I apologize for that, but this has been almost four years coming

Okay, starting off strong with possibly one of my more controversial takes:

it looked Bad (or at the very least, not like halo. which in part means it didn't look like red vs blue)

I was trying to figure out how to explain what it looked like to me, and the best I could come up with is that a lot of Zero looks like a Hunt Down the Freeman cutscene. linked here for context. It looks like someone made a show in Source Film Maker and then threw a bunch of weird lighting and filters over it (which tbh is probably how they made the HDTF cutscenes.) It's so weird because I don't remember it looking like that - the memory I had of the trailer in my head from 2020 looked a lot better. I think the jump to the Unreal Engine was not a graceful one - and I do recognize the effect that the beginning of the pandemic had on it, but I also just don't think it's the right direction for rvb. The machinima in Halo is like, a huge part of rvb's charm for me, and it's sorely missed. At some point it's stopped feeling like a Halo show. In trying to look cutting edge and New, it somehow has looped back around and feels very dated to me, and not in a charming way.

I think this really comes across in the cinematography and camera work. The camera in Halo works and looks a very particular way, and one of the things that gives rvb it's distinct look is the number of mostly static camera shots, focused mainly on dialogue. Church says it best in episode one - "That's all they EVER do, is stand there and talk." - and one of the things that continues to make Red vs Blue work so well after they started doing animation for it is the visual / narrative contrast between the slower / static / grounded machinima scenes, and the fast paced animated fights. Finishing a fight scene, and then going back to the machinima not only provides a narrative resting point, it also provides a visual rest. It makes all the cool shit you do in the fights stand out more, because it feels visually different from everything else.

Zero feels like everything is moving all the time, and all the time everything is moving very fast. It has this sort of frenetic energy throughout the whole thing: it never feels like the characters have any time to breathe - figuratively or literally. It felt like I was watching it on 1.5x speed. They never idle - they're always moving around, even when they're just standing in the background while other characters talk. It's overstimulating.

Narratively, it's easy to blame some of that on the poor pacing (which i know is not entirely the creative teams fault: I'm very familiar with how bad RT's animation department was about that sort of thing), but visually it was a Choice - a distinct departure from one of the iconic visuals of the 17 seasons that came before it. I think that's part of what makes it feel so much like Source Film Maker to me - I very much associate that kind of frantic camera work with TF2 and Half Life videos. I felt like I couldn't look at it for too long because I could feel myself getting a bit woozy (i'm Very prone to motion sickness, especially while watching animated shows)

I will say: the fights - whenever the camera would actually let me see what was going on - looked nice. They mostly fixed the weird floaty feeling that I seem to remember a lot of the fights in Shisno having, and hits felt like they had a decent weight to them (especially Carolina falling towards the end, that impact with the ground was Hard). Although [I think it was Phase?] kept doing this "kick the camera in a POV shot to make a transition" thing, and I don't think it ever felt like that kick actually connected with anything Once. However, and this is something my brother pointed out while we were watching last night, it felt less like I was watching people in a fight. That's part of the charm of using motion capture for your fight animations - you can tell that there's people and a real and tangible weight behind all of those movements. It was part of what made Monty's style so distinct, and it has basically become a part of the identity of Rooster Teeth Animation as a whole because of that. It's not perfect, it definitely has its roadblocks and issues, and when unsuccessful it can definitely look odd and floaty - but it's easy to overlook all that, because when they get it right? It's breathtaking. When the fight you're watching has that weight of reality to it, it's something really special.

In my opinion, Zero discarded the two most important things to RvB's visual identity: the Halo machinima, and the motion capture fight scenes. What we're kind of left with is something that wouldn't feel out of place during a Summer Games Fest or Game Awards - I think Zero really looks like the video RT did to announce that Master Chief was coming to Fortnite.

Important to note, because I think it plays into my thoughts about the show and everything surrounding it, is that Torrian thought that machinima was "a dying medium" and that going back to it would have been "going backwards".

I have, a lot of thoughts on an rvb director having those kinds of feelings about the medium that rvb is so famous for that there's chapters about it in books written on the medium, and acknowledgements and thanks to Burnie in others - but that's a whole other topic for a whole other time. At the end of the day: it doesn't matter that much, but I think it definitely plays into how visually different Zero is from everything that came before and after it.

Anyways, moving on:

the voice directing was wildly inconsistent, and often kinda Bad

This isn't something I want to pin on the VA's, especially since a lot of my issues were actually with Shannon and Jason. I think the first thing I said when Tucker started talking was quite genuinely "that doesn't sound like Jason" - and Wash sounded super weird in episode one as well. I had issues with how the new characters were directed too (Was it Phase who kept calling West "old man" but weirdly stressing the "old" and not the "man"? That's totally nitpicky, but it was weirdly noticeable to me), but it felt very strange to me for the ones who seemed to be given the worst directing to be the two who've been with the show the longest. Although I will say - Jen was acting like the fucking rent was due and sounded perfectly fine. Also I think the best line delivery Wash had was absolutely him telling Tucker that he missed him - he just sounded so goddamn fond.

I do also want to give a shout-out to the guy that replaced Ryan after the everything came out and they needed to recast him - that role drips like it was written for Ryan and his voice and general line delivery, and I know that redoing those lines must have been a Nightmare. Honestly he did really well with those circumstances.

the pacing was nightmarish

Again, very willing to blame a lot of this on the higher ups, but I also think it was trying to do way too many things in the limited time they had. Trying to put importance on our returning characters (well, Carolina at least), but also make the Axel & Zero thing feel important, but also give the Phase/East & West thing the weight it needed, and somehow fit in "caring about what happens to One, Raymond, and Tiny" - and somehow that means we're left in a situation where a character we've had since the first episode of season one almost dies and it's given almost no weight compared to the villain reveal of a character we've known for 5 episodes. Everything suffers from this pacing, the characters especially. You're introducing a whole cast of new characters into a show that had been running for almost two decades at this point - it takes time to endear the audience to 6 (?) new protagonists. And none of the characters are given that time to breathe that they desperately need.

also a visual thing, but: everything is too shiny and/or glowy

Part of what makes the energy sword so cool, both in Halo as a whole (or at least the Bungie games, which are all I've played so far) and in RvB is that it stands out from the environment. It looks cool and different and, well, alien. It's part of why I hate the remastered anniversary version of Halo: Combat Evolved so much - everything looks so glowy and bright all the time, and it means that the little things get lost. If everything glows, nothing glows - the show is just brighter. Everything glows in Zero.

Speaking of the energy sword:

why in gods name was Tucker even here, and what the hell happened to Locus

Tucker existed in this story just to do a fake-out death and provide the villain with his sword. I think I almost would have respected it more if they had committed to actually killing him - I wouldn't have Liked it, but I think I would have almost respected the balls it would take to do that. Tucker's sword was apparently the last one they needed, which means the two options we're left with are that A) they killed Locus, fan favorite Locus, unceremoniously off-screen without so much as Mentioning him, or B) they just. forgot about him. neither of those are great options.

Part of this is complicated by the fact that Gray left RT on not so great terms, but like fuck they could've at least mentioned him. let Zero do a long narration over a flashback of him killing Locus, or even just some dumb throwaway line about how they just needed one of the particular kind of keys that Tucker and Locus have (they're visually distinct from all of the other keys in Zero and I don't think I remember them mentioning that fact At All why do all of the other keys look like Cloud Strife's Buster Sword) - something would have been nice. Tucker was brought in for an episode and a quarter just to move the plot along - the plot that really didn't even need to involve him in the first place, even though he's had his key since season 3 and it has been an integral part of his character literally ever since. It really kind of feels like they needed to bring him in to fake-out his death because they wrote themselves into a corner with the keys.

Hey, here's an interesting question:

why did we need to tie this into the keys at all?

This kind of brings us into my main thought about Zero, which is that not only is Zero maybe not so great for rvb - rvb isn't great for Zero. Zero is not served in any way shape or form by being a season of Red vs Blue - in fact I think that a decent chunk of my major issues with the show would be almost completely solved if I was watching some new show called Shatter Squad or something, instead of season 18 of a show I've been watching for years.

So many of my issues with it are with how clunky all of the rvb stuff feels - which obviously isn't helped by the pacing, but think about how much nicer the pacing could have felt for all of the shatter squad stuff if we weren't also trying to fit Carolina, Wash, and Tucker in there. Why did this villain plot have to involve the keys at all - why couldn't Zero have had it's own macguffin? hey speaking of the weird rvb stuff;

stop calling him David & other such grievances

this next section is just a direct sampling of my notes from while i was watching.

stop calling him David. why did Wash willingly put more electronics in his head - that seems odd for him? and also; wasn't his whole arc through the time travel stuff about coming to terms with being disabled? it's kind of shitty to the disabled fans who saw something of themselves in Wash to then immediately turn around and say that basically nothing that happened in 16 and 17 mattered At All because the technology existed to just, erase his plot motivating disability, right? stop calling him David. has Carolina ever called him Lavernius before? stop calling him David. i wish Gray was still around so Locus could have been dragged into this. why didn’t Wash and Carolina just stay retired with the Reds and blues Caboose? why the fuck did Tucker not retire. why the fuck is he just off somewhere else, without his friends or even his goddamn KID where’s Junior - you're doing a whole plot about the alien keys without a single goddamn alien showing up?

okay now back to new / cleaned up thoughts. just a few more things.

I don't have anywhere else to really fit this in, but the cars looked Abysmal. Like a cybertruck but somehow worse.

Do you remember those 2020 tiktok cosplay videos where they were constantly switching from pose to pose? That's kind of how the characters move - I really noticed it the most in episode 5. They never stand there and idle, it feels like they're always posing. It's also kind of like RWBY in that regard - very "I'm queen of the castle", in a way.

Without the Reds and Blues around, and by virtue of not being fully limited by game assets anymore, you had all the colors of the rainbow to choose from. Why do we have two new orange characters (both protags, even) and two new blue characters? (the red ones are fine because that's a narrative thing that connects them, like North and South). It's kind of a bad character design choice, especially for the orange ones because it means that I can't easily tell who's in a lineup of characters at a quick glance - and with everything always moving so fast in Zero, the ability to do that would be really helpful.

I almost respect how stupid the whole "ultimate power" thing was. Zero was giving Shadow the Hedgehog at points, which I kinda liked. (maybe that was just because he had a red and black color scheme paired against One's primarily blue armor)

I honestly really liked Tiny, but I'm worried that that's just because she was hardly in it. Her armor was like, Lakers colors, and I thought it looked really nice in this style.

There were a few points where I looked at in and thought that it looked like a Skylanders cutscene

I feel like I came out of those 8 episodes knowing almost nothing about One. By playing her against Zero, it comes off like she's supposed to be the primary protagonist, but all of the character development time has to be devoted towards East & West for there to even be a Hope of that plot line having an impact. It made her big "why are we here" rally speech towards the end feel really undeserved because actually No, One, I have no idea why you're really here. (and they did Not earn a big "why are we here" rally speech in general, rvb didn't even earn one of those until they were like, 8 seasons in.)

If I say “the writing in rvb needs to feel at least a little bit dated.”, do you know what I mean? does that make sense? Where’s the Battlestar Galactica jokes? Where’s all of Sarge’s references that are way outdated even by early 2000s standards? Where's the Reds and Blues re-creating Reservoir Dogs just to cheer up Tucker?

I feel like one of the issues I have with Zero (which to be fair is also a problem with how the higher ups and creatives seem to have viewed RvB more generally - looking at you, Burnie and Restoration) is that it seems like it fundamentally misunderstands the kind of audience rvb actually had by that point in time - the people who were still watching rvb all the way through 2020 were people who liked all of its little quirks and its characters enough to stick with it - and Zero has like, none of that. It feels more like I'm watching a futuristic sci-fi version of RWBY than it does rvb. I understand that Zero was obviously trying to court a new audience, but they did so in a way that makes the show feel completely different than everything that came before it.

OH MY GOD there was this song that played I think during the fighting in episode 5 that sounded scarily like Not Gonna Die Tonight by Skillet, and it made us cry laughing after I pointed it out

I wish they had leaned more into Raymond being a frenetic inventor/tech guy, I thought he really shined in those moments

Carolina and I don't always get along, but goddamn watching her be reduced to revolving around Wash like this just sucked. made me feel bad for her. Like they bring Wash back and re-able (?) him just for him to be a damsel/plot device for Carolina in a way that feels weird and bad for both of them. Like fuck, when he was a plot device in Shisno it still at least mostly felt like he had his own agency as a character and didn't just exist to motivate Carolina and Tucker.

Full disclosure here, it's been so long I don't quite remember exactly what ended up keeping me from watching Zero just a few short days after I said I was looking forward to it. If I had to make a guess though, I'd say it was the Wash thing - I probably heard about it, and immediately decided I wasn't gonna fuck with Zero. I think I'm even more upset about that now than I was back then. I haven't rewatched seasons 15-17 since before I finally got sick enough that I started to actually consider myself disabled, but I know that arc is going to hit Very Different now compared to when I was in high school - before I had to change career paths because of my disability and feeling like i was losing a part of myself in the process. Idk, I still feel like I just don't understand why they would even do that.

Anyways: besides my fix of "just let it stand on it's own as a shatter squad show and not make it be rvb", I do have one thing that I think would have really helped it

Just focus the conflict in on Axel and Zero and how it all affects One, who I think was supposed to have been the main protagonist?

Part of the problem Zero faced is that it was trying to do too many things. I think if they had really focused in on Axel and Zero for this season, and then held onto that East/Phase reveal until a later season it would've been leagues better. So much of the Phase reveal hinged on the audience caring very deeply about East, and it totally just did not land for me. It's an eight episode season, and that reveal happens in Episode 5. If that reveal had been allowed more buildup by being saved for a later entry in the series (that yes, may or may not have ever even been made, but work with me here), it would have had way more impact, and would have made way more sense for it to affect Raymond so hard - Raymond, who has only known East about as long as we have. None of the plots really felt like they had room to breathe, even the East/Phase stuff which absolutely felt like it was given the most space and weight, even though the show is literally named after Zero.

OKAY I wrote way more about that than I had planned to, and tbh I still feel like I haven't covered it all but this is now over 3,300 words and I think I have to stop at some point. Zero has some strong bones to it, but I don't think the execution does them justice.

#comet posting #rvb #red vs blue #rvb zero #sometimes i post things less for a general audience #and more specifically for my brother to read and comment on #this is kinda one of those?#idk man zero was weird

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