#it turned into essay-length Decay propaganda and deserved its own post

[prinnamon]

[Start ID. Tags that read: #one of them is confirmed dead btw #shephard saw colettes body in xen #who knows what gina is doing #i think abt them sometimes #raging lesbians. End ID.]

Hi, Hello, and Welcome To My Twisted Mind! i don't mean to correct you @freeshephoun but i noticed your tags on my other silly half-wife post and i wanted to let you know hahahaheehoo it's worse than that :) i hope you don't mind me using you as an excuse to talk at length about cross and green and their ambiguous fate

(low-poly blood/corpse screenshots from the game and lots of text under the read more!)

[Start ID. A screenshot of what appears to be Gina Cross in a red HEV suit dead in one of the Displacement Cannon locations in Xen. End ID.]

in Opposing Force, a corpse bearing a striking resemblance to Gina Cross but wearing a red HEV suit can be found in one of the Displacement Cannon locations.

[ID in alt text.]

according to a tweet by Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford in 2018, it is indeed Gina Cross. Colette Green's fate is unspecified, but he suggests maybe G-Man found her useful enough/had enough compassion for her to put her in stasis like Shephard.

Opposing Force did come out before Decay, so considering that changes were still being made to Decay's story during development, far enough along that there are some voice lines and animations for the scrapped missions, it's likely they had no thoughts about anything that would happen in Decay's story when they decided to include Dr. Cross's dead body as an easter egg in OpFor. so, despite the confirmation by one of the people most likely to be considered An Authority on what happened in the expansions, the canon-icity of this is... slightly debatable? especially considering that (iirc) "Gina Cross's" body can actually be spotted in multiple Displacement Cannon locations in OpFor. so unless there was a wild teleporter accident that created multiple instances of her who all died in different spots... okay, wait, i said that as a hypothetical and a joke but now i like that a lot as a narrative device, fuck.

but you get what i'm saying. whether or not this is "canon" is dubious because you'd have to reconcile a lot of contradictory story elements in order to explain how one can accept this as true.

...

CHAPTER 7: RECONCILING A LOT OF CONTRADICTORY STORY ELEMENTS IN ORDER TO EXPLAIN HOW ONE CAN ACCEPT THIS AS TRUE

[PT: Chapter 7: Reconciling a Lot of Contradictory Story Elements In Order to Explain How One Can Accept This as True /end PT]

if you choose to take Pitchford's tweet as canon, what's especially strange (and tragic, i'll explain) is that Gina has never been shown wearing a red HEV suit anywhere else as far as i'm aware. she wears an orange suit when you see her hologram in the training program in Half-Life and Opposing Force, and she wears a tan/ivory suit in Decay.

[Start ID. A scan of a posed render of Colette Green (left, standing) and Gina Cross (right, crouched) from the Half-Life PS2 manual. Colette Green wears a red HEV suit and Gina Cross wears a tan one. End ID.]

red is Colette's color, which i imagine is probably the source of the initial confusion. which could lead you to conclude that, although this is gina, she's wearing colette's HEV suit. it would explain why she's alone. her suit may have been damaged beyond repair, and it wasn't enough to protect her, so she had to take Colette's as she went off on her own for one last desperate mission that required Gina to enter the Xen even after they and Dr. Keller thought they had successfully sealed the dimensional rift.

so, yeah, picture that. they only had one working suit left. so only one of them could go. and it had to be Cross because of her experience. and even despite their best efforts, despite Green giving up her hazard suit to give Cross the best odds, she still failed.

we know based on the ending of OpFor that the detonation of the nuclear bomb in the car park would have killed anyone still stuck at Black Mesa after a certain point, as Green and Keller almost definitely were if things went back to shit after the end of Decay, which they would have had to if Cross managed to end up dead in Xen. it doesn't make sense to say that they'd then just go "acceptable losses!" and book it, since they took so much responsibility upon themselves throughout Decay's story, so i feel they probably stayed and continued to dedicate themselves to damage control up until the very end. and, like, how would they have known about the bomb? communications were out. probably nobody except Shephard, the black ops team, and that one security guard would have been aware, realistically. so, even if Green and Keller would have wanted to escape and save themselves, there's virtually no way they'd have had enough advance notice to get out of there.

but since Colette's effort was admirable enough for her to deserve a reward in the G-Man's eyes (or maybe just to be kept in reserve in case she's needed later, depending on how you read G's motivations), she, like Shephard, was placed in stasis. and if she ever wakes up again, she'll presumably be without Keller since Pitchford makes no mention of him, and she'll definitely be without Gina.

OR if you don't want to engage with the tragedy of any of this, you can just say that the dead Ginas found in OpFor are uh. y;know. copies of her that were created somehow when she and Colette got caught up in the harmonic reflux after sealing the dimensional rift! which is sad for the clones—and oooky spooky because (mario voice) who REALLY died that day? and who came back??—but otherwise, all three of them got out of Black Mesa together.

I think about them. i think about them a lot. whyyyyy why why why WHY can't dr keller and the half-wifes be from an expansion people have easy access to like blue shit and opposing fart. screams and cries and throws up!!! no actual hate towards Blue Shift or OpFor; i love them, i just wish Decay was also two dollar and on PC

Gina Cross's page on Combine OverWiki was the main source for all my information. i also sourced the screenshot of Cross dead and the scan of Cross and Green's posed render from there. hopefully this post makes people realize that there is interesting shit going on with these characters that is worth exploring.

my final message: dear entire world, include colette green in your drawings of the freezer crew chilling in stasis (nonthreatening suggestion)