#rvb season one spoilers: church gets shot by a tank

[asphodeldreams]

it's actually insane to me how many rvb fans have only gotten into the show in the past like 2 years. looking at the survey results so far is breaking my brain i think because 2022-2024 is in the top three for that question currently. like in the time between zero/family shatters and restoration there was practically NOTHING happening with the series what do you mean this many people STARTED watching it then?? also i see so many people on my dash who are like "watching for the first time i'm on season 6 teehee" HELLO?? should-should i tag for spoilers on my rvb posts??

[died-but-not-dead-propaganda]

Leonard Church Propaganda

he died 10 episodes into the story and comes back as a “ghost” and spoiler-y stuff but he dies again and comes back again multiple times

HIS WHOLE THING IS BEING DEAD BUT NOT DEAD OK he is the most dead guy ever. he spends the first five seasons being a ghost and still managing to die repeatedly. he’s technically a robot but he’s an ai copy of an ai copy of a guy and BOTH OF THOSE GUYS ARE DEAD. HE IS SO DEAD ALL THE TIME BUT NOT BECAUSE HES ALIVE. he is in a constant cycle of dying but not being dead. half of blue teams kill count is just caboose repeatedly killing church on accident. he can’t die so hard that he won’t let his dead wife die either until the THIRD ITERATION OF HIM finally lets her go because he realizes he doesn’t even know her at that point he’s so many degrees of separation away from the original allison. and then he TRIES TO DIE WITH HER BUT STAYS ALIVE BECAUSE HE’S ETERNALLY CURSED TO LIVE. his death count is literally in the double digits he DESERVES a place on this tournament. most alive dead guy ever. ok thank u for ur consideration if he doesn’t win I will burn this webbed site to the ground /j

Iterations of church have died and come back multiple times. In season one he gets shot by a tank and comes back as a ghost. in like season six (it's been a while) it's revealed that he was not a ghost but an AI the whole time and then sacrifices himself. and then a copy of his ai self comes back. it's a meme in the fanbase at this point that church dies and comes back and after the ai copy (epsilon) died they had to devote a whole sub-plot to "WE SWEAR HE IS NOT COMING BACK AGAIN. HES GONE." anyway part of me is still suspicious that they lied about it and there's another part of the alpha ai out there somewhere but like, it's been like five years and i'm starting to think they got us for realsies this time

This dude has died like seven times. It's unreasonable the number of times he's died. Like it's kind of insane. He had a bunch of time travel clones at one point that all died. He sacrificed himself because he was convinced he WOULDNT die because he thought he was a ghost (he wasn't) and couldn't disappear again (he could and did). His SECOND VERSION OF HIMSELF (ai cloning sort of) ALSO DIED. ALSO by sacrificing himself (this time he actually knew what was coming though). The way he died the first time was by getting shot by his own best friend who killed him with a fucking tank. Then the sacrifice. Then the sacrifice again. Not to mention all the other times where he went missing/fucked off somewhere. And also the time that the Epsilon version of him tried to self destruct in another guy's brain. Jesus fucking christ this dude has problems. Please include him. Please.

the original leonard church (the director) made an exact copy of his mind as an ai (the alpha) that he tortured, which in turn made a copy of itself (epsilon) to cope with the trauma, so in total there are 3 Churches.

death count: the director killed himself. the alpha died when he was shot with a tank, then he possessed someone else's body and got shot in the head, then he possessed a robot that exploded so hard it melted all of the ice on an entire planet, then he got erased from existence by an EMP. then he came back as Epsilon who went on to also get erased.

Well it’s. It’s complicated okay. So hold on alright.

So Dr. Leonard L. Church was initially this guy who was the Director of Project Freelancer (PFL) and he liked to fuck around with AI because the Halo lore is like the background setting for RvB. Anyway the Director made an AI copy of himself, and called it “Alpha”. Well, the Director wanted to have more than one AI for his experiments so he could give them to his Freelancer Agents (all named after the 50 states), so what he did was he tortured Alpha until Alpha split itself into fragments; essentially he gave an AI so much trauma that Alpha developed DID. (Forgive me, even though I have friends who are systems I still know very little and am still learning about proper/respectful terminology). Well anyway one of the fragments of Alpha, Epsilon, was given “memory”. So Epsilon remembered all of the torture Alpha underwent, and when Epsilon was implanted in Agent Washington, Epsilon tried to kill himself, inadvertently almost taking Washington with him. Epsilon was removed and put into storage, and PFL fell apart. The Alpha, under the protocol “AI must not fall into enemy hands”, was sent to a secure location, and was reprogrammed to have his memory of the Project and everything with it removed. He was then implanted in a human, and was told he was Private Leonard Church of the Blue Army. (Side note; the Red and Blue armies are made up simulation armies designed to test Freelancer Agents in the field. The Reds and Blues do not know they are simulation troopers; they think the war is real.)

This whole shit slowly gets revealed throughout the course of the series, but yeah. Anyway. Church (Alpha, important distinction you’ll see why) dies a few times as a running gag in seasons 1-6. Then, at the end of season 6, he dies permanently to an EMP. But, the plot of season six involves our main characters rescuing the Epsilon storage unit, who eventually regains the identity of “Church” as well, as Epsilon was a fragment of Alpha initially, but there are a few tweaks. Alpha and Epsilon are different in a few ways, but they’re both “Church”. So it’s technically a revival. But if that’s too vague and too complex, in season one Caboose (Blue Team Rookie) blows up Church with a tank and then Church comes back as a ghost. It’s funny.