#rvb o’malley

[w3llf4ll]

⚠️ BLOOD/GORE CW ⚠️

Thinking about O’Malley and his issues with being human.

Stills under the line break.

The gif is having issues so I might try reuploading later.

This was originally meant to be a mini comic, but I went too hard on the rendering. Oops.

[squidshop-art]

caboose as pyro in your tf2 universe is so adorable holy SHIT

TY!! on the topic of my rvb tf2 au i might as well share some doodles i made for it

[joltning]

rewwtch anon is back, yknow i wasnt too fond of donut the first couple times i watched but the o malley v donut fight is soooo peak its so well done its singlehandedly made me like donut it shot him up like 3 levels (i payed attention to the fight this time)

i may not like s16 but that fight is so good. It’s the peak of what s16 stands for. Goofy, chaotic, random, with serious stuff interlaced. that’s my jam. even if s16 did shit all with that. no other rvb season could pull off donut fighting doc with the american flag on the moon (even if it should be a white fl

[doxxed0367]

Does anyone in the rvb community know how long Doc was infected with the Omega AI for? Im curious

[dgknightblue]

Screen shot this again.

[major-comet]

i think it’s really funny how post-pfl wyoming, gamma, and omega all decided that now that they were done committing like, Big League War Crimes, it was time to go be a comedic minor league villain for a while and be a nuisance to some of their boss’ other employees. they’re not their coworkers, but certainly employed by their boss.

and i respect the hell out of that

[daydreamerdrew]

“Red vs. Blue in Halo Reach Fire Fight!”

[grif-hawaiian-rolls]

“Oops! Sorry about that big explosion!”

“SORRY IT WASN’T BIGGER!”

Doc’s turn for the GW2 au! Did i make him a mesmer almost solely bc I wanted to give him support rifle (shoot your allies to heal them! Trust me!) ? Maybe! If the shoe fits and all that

[banamine-bananime]

i think it’s really amazing how we’re 3/3 on systems in rvb having their own o’malley. omega not only is literally brain-computer virus man serially infecting whole bases of sim troopers, but he committed to the bit so hard that the very concept of o’malley appears to be virally memetic to the point he’s like an inevitable comorbidity with DID in the rvbverse

[clocks-are-round]

i think they would be best buds but find it extremely awkward at first

~~i mayyy have a work-in-progress fic where they meet :3 i’ve posted some snippets of it here on tumblr before~~

the perpetual question in everyone’s mind: would omega and o’malley try to kill each other or would they make out

[w3llf4ll]

I don’t remember what this was going to be labeled with.

Something something, weight of your sins? Something something sharing a pastry boyfriend? I don’t know.

[clocks-are-round]

it’s very fun writing unreliable narrators. only letting the audience be told outright what the narrator believes to be true. or wants to be true.

but a shortcoming of it— although it’s par for the course— is worrying that readers won’t see what i left hidden between the lines. not knowing what’s too blatant and what’s not obvious enough. because of this i think sometimes the characters come across as a bit more “tsundere” than initially planned, insisting “no it’s definitely not because i’m (x adjective they’re in denial about)” in an attempt to make their self-deception more clear.

like i was rereading the three months o’malley epilogue— minor spoiler warning i guess. i’ll only be talking about one sentence and doing character analysis related to it—

he says when he was born he was inexplicably angry, threw a tantrum that shorted out the power of the MoI, and barely remembers the event.

i wonder if readers will understand omalley is describing a serious anxiety attack— one that he either mostly repressed or was hampering his ability to make long term memory in the moment— that he demeans as a “tantrum” because he’s so used to a specific negative self-image that “anxious” does not fit in to. he does not believe he could have been the victim of an “anxiety attack” because he is the “attacker”. my guy woke up to existence and immediately had a meltdown over all these intense emotions he could not fathom the cause of. (*slaps director and counselor and then points over at alpha and all the fragments* look you gave them anxiety! and so so much repressed trauma)

he was treated like a machine/tool with little to no personhood by everyone but those who were friends to him and like many other fragments had internalized that “only purpose is to be helpful— ambitions and dreams? yeah i don’t get to have those. im the [single emotion/concept] one and that’s all i’ll ever be” for a long time. and any deviation from that directive was being “faulty” and a flaw rather than acknowledgement of being more “human” than the higher-ups wanted to admit.

it didn’t help that he was the “angry” one. the “problem” ai, the “destructive” one. he ended up embracing it, but internalizing that kind of self image fucks you up.

i just have a lot of thoughts and feelings about omalley ai still. a lot comes from headcanon, but those headcanons were influenced by what scraps we get in canon material.

When it comes down to it, I guess I can always explain my thought process elsewhere, like i did here. I am my primary audience first and foremost so I think with that kind of thing, as long as I understand, that’s what matters most.

[joltning]

day 17: free space

[canonmisogynyvictimstournament]

PROPAGANDA

AGENT TEXAS (RED VS BLUE)

1.) okay so tex is an ai based on the memories this one dickhead dude has of his dead wife, allison. there's also an ai based on the dickhead dude himself, his name's church. all the stuff with the ai's and the different versions of her is kind of confusing to explain but she sort of dies twice- first sacrificing herself for something that has very little narrative weight, and being absorbed into a kind of . monstrous mesh of other ai's (including the original church ai) that then is erased, with basically no mention of tex, it's all about church's death.

then, there's another version of both church and tex born from the original church ai's memories (epsilon-tex and epsilon-church). epsilon-church's arc is basically about learning to move on from his past and let go of tex, because he's kind of obsessed with her and it's preventing him from progressing. so, epsilon-church 'forgets' tex, deleting her for good. tl;dr she dies, again, basically entirely for church's development.

when i was a kid super into rvb i was always really disinterested in tex and looking back it's because er story just.. isn't resolved satisfyingly at all. basically all of her story is hitched so tightly to church's story and development that tex barely gets room to be more than a memory of the director's dead wife- she never gets to move past the circumstances that created her and become her own person entirely divorced from the director or from church- allison died and we never knew anything about her besides that the director god sad about it. beta-tex died unceremoniously and without mention. epsilon-tex died for church's character growth.

quoting church's own words from the show: ""She died in her real life, and that's all the Director ever remembered of her. So now, no matter how tough she is, no matter how hard she fights, she's always going to fail, because that's what she's based on. No matter what she's doing, or what she's trying to accomplish, just when her goal is within her reach, it gets yanked away. Every. Single. Time." and she just never… actually overcomes this. she just dies.

and quoting now-inactive tumblr user epsilontucker from 2015 who put it better than i could: "Tex’s whole life was spent fighting for agency. Freedom from what Omega wanted her to be (O’Malley), what the Director wanted her to be (Allison), what Church wanted her to be (his). Epsilon-Tex wanted to know who she was and why she was and she wanted to dismantle everything Church ever built. Especially because he built it for her.

And this character arc about freedom and agency, about a chance to define herself on her own terms, is resolved by… Church deciding to delete her.

Because everybody always seems to know what’s best for Tex."

this is also to say nothing of the treatment of her character on just, like, an episode-to-episode basis. rvb has a big problem with basically treating "bitch" as a personality trait for female characters, and tex gets some of the worst of it. if you made a drinking game of how often tex gets called a bitch, or a huge bitch, you'd die of alcohol poisoning. also at one point andy the bomb makes a bunch of transmisogynistic jokes at her because she's suppsoedly mannish (she's not masculine or feminine really everybody in this show is a multicolor master chief. she's just good at fighting) and then calls her a dyke. the end

2.) Some background (spoilers): Tex is introduced as a badass mercenary from Project Freelancer, and the ex girlfriend of Church, the main character of the show. It is eventually revealed she and Church are both Aritifical Intelligence programs; Church is an AI copy of the Director of Project Freelancer, and Tex is a copy of the Director's late wife.

Firstly she is straightforwardly the victim of misogynistic "jokes" for the first several seasons. She is called misogynistic slurs, shamed for sleeping with other men besides Church, she cannot work the entertainment stand at the base bc she's female, called lesbophobic and transmysogonistic slurs bc she is a competent soldier, and blackmails another female character out of jealousy bc she is the only other girl in the group.

Even when these jokes go away, and the show transitions from comedy to drama, her writing revolves around the male characters around her. Because she is the personification of the memory of the Director's dead wife, and his perceieved failure to save her, she explicitly, in the text, will always fail at what she sets out to accomplish no matter how strong she is. She wishes to be free of the cycle of being resurrected bc Church can't live without her only to fail and die again, but lacks the agency to end it without Church. Church's arc about learning to let her go ends not with her being free to exist as her own person without him, but with him forgetting her. Since she IS his memory, this ERASES HER FROM EXISTENCE. She literally cannot exist without this guy.

This would all be easier to swallow if she wasn't the ONLY prominent female main character for 8 whole seasons. It's a beautiful story about how grief can fester into anger and a need for control, and how that pushes away the people you love, but it's a story entirely centered around Church's development, in which she is a prop that stops existing when the story is over. I love her but she deserved so much better than she got.

3.) girlboss

KAMALA KHAN (MARVEL COMICS) (CW: Racism)

1.) One of the most prominent brown women in all of comics, beloved by the fan base. Recently killed in a PETER PARKER SPIDERMAN COMIC (despite being much closer with Miles Morales and having basically no relationship with Peter) in what's probably the name of MCU synergy, which nobody wanted (she'll probably be resurrected as a mutant, erasing her unique and interesting history as an Inhuman). She was using her shapeshifting powers again despite having stopped in her solo as she got more confident in her own skin and identity as a Pakistani American girl, died disguised as the very white Mary Jane as a fake out/last minute replacement for killing off MJ. I fucking hate it here. A cheap trick to drive sales. L + Misogyny + racism + are you fucking kidding me

[major-comet]

one of the things that’s most interesting to me about red vs blue

[and this is true of a lot of the shows i’ve watched over the years (here’s looking at you, star trek and rwby volumes 1-3), but i find it particularly true for rvb]

is that the writers seem to have very little grasp on what some of the most interesting and compelling parts of the show actually are, especially from a character perspective

so much stuff only gets kind of brought up, or honestly never even really touched on that would fully be enough to compel me as a character plot for an entire season At Least

like the whole “sarge is apparently some kind of robotics/surgery Wizard because not only did all of simmons’ cyborg parts not get rejected, none of the bits of simmons that grif now has rejected either. this is a medical miracle and it’s something about the pair that is almost Never brought up” thing. they barely even acknowledged that simmons has a whole ass robot arm, much less that grif is physically almost as much simmons as simmons himself is

or the “hey actually epsilon kind of just taking over as “church” actually has a lot of potential for body snatchers-esque horror that they never ever lean into” that i was talking about the other day

or how they only really explore the deeper effects of ai-human integration from a negative aspect - o’malley and the meta and such, but don’t *really* dive in on the effects it might have on a pair that works really well together. epsilon and carolina kind of get the closest to that, but even then it’s still pretty surface level. where’s the weird shit about a pair slowly becoming more of a *we* and those boundaries of human and ai blurring into human&ai in a way that feels not parasitic, but symbiotic? where both parties are not only aware of what’s happening, but perfectly content with it? like maybe i just have venom on the brain, but the ai are like the coolest shit burnie ever wrote and i feel like even though they drive the plot for huge chunks of the show they were barely explored. (i’m saying that delta and york should have had weird freaky mind sex. hello is this thing on-)

or the implication (confirmation? idk man it’s been a long time) that sarge may have been an ODST is actually a Massive addition to rvb’s underlying (and i think sometimes only dubiously intentional) themes of “once a soldier has outweighed their perceived usefulness, the government will not hesitate to cast them aside completely, no matter what they sacrificed for the cause, and this has negative lasting effects not just on that veteran but on society as a whole” that they do kind of sort of explore with locus a bit, but the implication that sarge was highly specialized and did a lot of particularly risky shit for the unsc only for him to, unbeknownst to him, wind up as a training dummy for soldiers perceived as “better” than him (and not even really that, picked explicitly because florida thought he would be totally harmless to the alpha) is INSANE and “sarge was an odst” mostly exists in rvb canon just as a joke but Jesus H Christ, man

there’s so much great material here that just got totally ditched for something else and it makes me SAD sometimes

[kronosveritas]

✨HELLO RVB FANDOM I AM ASKING FOR YOUR GUIDANCE✨

I don’t know if any of you know much about Tarot, but I am in the process of drawing an rvb tarot deck and these are my thoughts for which character should be assigned to each of the major arcana cards.

Included in parentheses after the character are some trailers generally associated with that arcana (to my understanding)

Please feel free to let me know in comments/tags if YOU think these fit/what fits better so I can potentially make the deck!

_____________ {arcana below fold} _____________

💙 Fool- Caboose (new beginning, fresh start, risk, a chance, new cycle, originality, fearlessness, travel, innocence, being green, trickster, acting foolish)

❤️ Magician- Tex (talent, skill, power, magic, control, manifest, tools, mastery, willpower, focus)

💙 High priestess- CT (intuition, feminine wisdom, hidden knowledge, secrecy, initiation, receptivity, spirituality, the inner world)

❤️ Empress- Allison (feminine power, abundance, fertility, pregnancy, marriage, creativity, receptivity, pleasure, mothering, nurturing, giving birth)

💙 Emperor- The Director (Order, structure, authority, power, boss, masculine, father, ownership, autonomy)

❤️ Heirophant- Sarge (tradition, structure, teacher, mentor, counselor, religion, dogma, advice, status quo, organization, conformity, rules, church, obedience)

💙 Lovers- Grif and Simmons (romance, partnership, love, choices, duality, opposites, union)

❤️ Chariot- Shiela (triumph, directed willpower, control, direction, movement, progress, vehicle)

💙 Strength- Carolina (strength, inner power, self control, calm, endure, willpower)

❤️ Hermit- Epsilon (inner wisdom, solitude, withdrawal, quiet, teacher or guru, research, seeker)

💙 Wheel of fortune- The Triplets, or the Chorus Rebels??? I can’t decide (luck, change, a turn of events, karma, movement, shift, improvement, fate)

❤️Justice- Doc & O’Malley (fairness, court, justice, balance, weighing options, seeing both sides, consequences, integrity, honesty, truth, law, middle path)

💙 Hanged man- Temple (sacrifice, letting go, faith, suspension, waiting, hang-ups, martyr, illusion, surrender)

❤️ Death- Felix (ending, transition, transformation, release, change, severance)

💙 Temperance- Lopez (moderation, balance, healing, alchemy, middle ground, patience, blending, harmony, guardian angel)

❤️ Devil- Meta/Sigma (bondage, materialism, negativity, slavery, addiction, stuck, jealousy, deviance, excess)

💙 Tower- Kimball (chaos, disruption, tearing down, rebuilding, uncertainty, blow, enlightenment, unexpected change, overthrow, revolution)

❤️ Star- Donut (hope, optimism, healing, balance, spirituality, health, well being, peace, wishes, vulnerability, success, balance)

💙 Moon- Wash (intuition, illusion, deception, darkness, reflection, fear, subconscious, dreams, difficulty, fear, imagination)

❤️ Sun- Tucker (optimism, success, joy, birth, happiness, health, inner child, energy, enthusiasm)

💙 World- Rooster Teeth Founders? Or Blood Gulch? Or RVB kill switch? (completion, ending, success, travel, closure, graduation, Universe, freedom, environment, rebirth)

https://www.thetarotlady.com/tarot-card-meanings/

^^possible link for meaning reference

<<I have individual assignments for nearly all the minor arcana too, but that would be far too long to post here>>