#how does one make the unsc gay?

[berat-adil-emre-yukime]

It's Pride Month, you know what that means

Huh, what?

Do you want me to like, make the UNSC gay? What?

[dukeofriven]

Reflections On Blood Gulch

The strange thing about Red vs Blue is that there’s the original five seasons... and then there’s the real show. Well, that’s not exactly fair, but I don’t think it’s entirely unjust, either. There’s a time when I would have praised the original Blood Gulch Chronicles to high heaven - that was during its original airing, when I would have been, uh... a teenager of mid-aughts internet culture. So, obviously, take that guy’s word with a handful of salt. Dude would not admit to anyone he maybe kinda wanted to perform blowjobs, and also thought The Amber Spyglass’ “Republic of Heaven” was profound and not, y’know, deeply silly. He also thought The Belgariadi was one of the funniest fantasy series ever written - little “man” didn’t know shit.  Adult me - wiser, better-educated, a touch more comfortable in my self, somehow more undersexed alas - has a less clear-cut relationship with The Blood Gulch Chronicles. I just rewatched the first five seasons-and-mini-series for the first time since... hrmmm... first year university, when I finally got my roommate to break down and watch it. If not quite a decade, near enough to make no meaningful distinction. Parts of it are funny. Parts of it are still very funny - I said a few days back that I was shocked at how much of season 1 I could quote from memory: the production values are terrible, the audio objectively crap (especially in the early episodes), the acting often flat, but the quotability? Through the roof. But as the seasons drag on they... well, drag. If it wasn’t for a handful of scenes I recognized, I would have sworn I had never seen season 4: very little is worth remembering. The pacing is dire, with one character shunted off a quest that feels pointless throughout. The show’s attempts to take a silly joke machine and give it a story and a little gravitas are clumsy at best. I remember at the time finding the ending of season 5 really moving, but looking back at it now it was really the effects of the journey I was responding to: five-ish real time years of loving this weird little web show coming to -what felt at the time - a definitive end. (The future of Rooster Teeth was going to be The Strangerhood. Obviously.) Watching them all in a lump twelve years later, deprived of that “long journey” feelings it’s... it’s fine. I guess. Honestly, vast stretches of seasons 3-5 are just dull, and I was squirming in my seat, laughing occasionally but mostly just wanting them to get on with it - or, often, just get through it as I cringed in my seat. It’s an artifact of the bro-heavy internet culture of its time. Do you love the r-slur? Casual misogyny? Gay panic? A joke about a masculine woman having testicles? Slut shaming? Gay terror? Not-so-casual misogyny? Did I mention the r-slur? Then you’ll love Seasons 1-5 of Red vs. Blue. Calling them ‘offensive’ gives them a veneer of malice they don’t posses - what they are is just stupid. It’s unreconstructed schoolyard crudity straight out of the 90s: it’s a minor miracle nobody ever gets called a ‘fag’. (Well, they might have buried that in the audio mix for the Stereotypical Halo Multiplayer Gamerz, where it would at least be period-accurate.)  It is... an acquired taste, to put it politely. In a word of fairness I think its heart is in the right place: its got a callous, grudgingly belief in the power of losers and outcasts, like so much nerd-dominated media of the era. It showcases those friendships I always have a soft spot for: the people who constantly dump on each-other like total enemies but who will gouge the eyes out of any outsider who voices a similar sentiment. Curiously for something that came out so close to 9/11, after the first flush of the Iraq when even anti-war protests paid lip service to the Services, it has a withering contempt for war, armies, and soldierly in general. Nobility and honour appear in Red versus Blue only when uncaring and indifferent organizations are opposed: as the series will go on to show, the UNSC is no better than the Freelancers: there is no better army out there, no more-just war by empires, only patterns of venality and corruption recurring again and again. But much of that was in the future. In its original five season run, there’s a lot that’s just bad. Unfunny. Stupid. Tired. Badly paced. If you asked me where to begin with Red vs. Blue I would hesitate to say “at the beginning” because it might really turn you off. All which is context for why season 6 is such a shock to the system. I was surprised to learn that there was less than a year between the end of Blood Gulch and the start of Reconstruction, because damn does it live up to its name. Reconstruction gutted the original RvB down to its foundations - quirky characters, pointless conversations, tsundere philia - and rebuilt it from there. It feels like real adults are in the room now making the show - which is strange, given that Season 5 and Season 6 share the same sole writing credit to Burnie Burns. It’s like Burns took a three week vacation and found out how to write: the pacing in season 6 is so much stronger than in Blood Gulch: scenes flow naturally in to one another, the dialogue that isn’t jokes actually sounds like dialogue, with emotional weight and heft. The story works, is compelling, even if its left unfinished around the edges. And it’s still really funny, this time with a lot less r-slurs, misogyny, and other hallmarks of internet bro-ism But that trailer? It’s the trailer that boldly, confidently strides forward and says “things are going to be different.” It’s still a great trailer - hell, the most amazing thing about Season 6 is that the strongest dramatic element is series of testy letters exchanged between two brand-new characters, never seen on screen, on a subject of bureaucratic oversight. It sounds tedious - but it’s the driving force behind the entire season. Season 6 is where Red vs. Blue ‘gits gud’ and man do I want a book about what changed between Blood Gulch and Reconstruction because on so many key ways it is a fundamentally different show.

This trailer doesn’t play before you watch the season on Netflix and that’s a god-damn crime.