red vs blue: the season 9 trailer, or, how i learned to cherry-pick canon

[sword_logic]

this isn't formally a crosspost, but more of an update to my very favorite rvb salt lick and an exploration of What We Could Have Had.

i don't know how many people coming in to rvb watch the trailers for previous seasons; i know i only watched the trailers for seasons 6 and 7 because i was told to when i first watched the show, and i had boots on the ground when the season 9 trailer was released. in general, i really love trailers, and there are a couple really well-cut trailers that are responsible for me getting into an entire franchise. just thanks to the trailer. (some good ones off the top of my head: watchmen, assassin's creed: revelation, tales from the borderlands episode 5, and, well..... the rvb12 trailer.). even if the thing ends up sucking, a trailer that makes you watch the thing has done its job.

so: did the season 9 trailer make me want to watch the thing? oh, fuck yes. nb: in this post i'm talking about the trailer, not the preview. (here's a transcript of the trailer.)

as a taste of what season 9 would be, this trailer showed off so many things:

• first and foremost, it established itself as a prequel/intro to the season a la the reconstruction trailer
• established the recovery beacons system as something that's in place before AI implantation
• showed that wash is friends with maine and york; at the very least, it showed that wash has a certain level of care for his peers in PFL
• established that project freelancer makes use of the simulation bases and the sim soldiers there
• established why maine sounds the way he sounds

all of these things are honestly, truly, emphatically, so wonderful. this is, in general, a good way to set up a prequel: you start it off with characters whose "faces" you know, you show/tease/etc something unspoken and established from the timeline we've already seen play out, and you lay groundwork for developing the things we know will happen. the S9 trailer did all of these things. we got:

• established tidbits in new light: the director, wash, maine, york, hints about AI, recovery beacons, and simulation troopers,
• backstory for why the meta doesn't speak in the recollection,
• the perfect excuse for eliminating the need to show maine with full use of his voice,
• the recollection taking on a different light, knowing that wash not only knew the person the meta used to be, but they were teammates and potentially friends.

of course, in season 9, we saw the director, wash, maine, york, and the AI (and many more things). what we didn't really get – if memory serves – is anything about the recovery beacons or the simulation troopers. given that the recovery beacons are a recurring plot point throughout the recollection, it sucks that we missed out on more about the beacons as a system. the director's comment about "knowing that system works" was one of those few words/big impact things; economical and informative and interesting. the reds and blues we know and love are also established as being directly related to PFL, which is another huge (!) plot point that the rest of the PFL flashbacks summarily ignore (again, if memory serves). just for the sake of a little more of a bridge between PFL and the blood gulch crew, i wish we'd had more of this.

maine's speech in season 9 is a very, very sore point for me. this is a very angry tumblr post detailing why i feel the way i feel about maine's speech in season 9, and i stand by all of it. i thought i had the dvd commentary transcribed somewhere, but i cannot for the life of me find it. tl;dr, it was extremely Not Good. on a level removed from that, i feel like RT really, truly shot themselves in the foot by deciding to show maine getting his throat injury halfway through the season. everything during the sarcophagus mission still could have happened had maine's injury remained in the pre-season mystery zone, and they wouldn't have written themselves into a corner as far as avenues for expressing maine's character go.

again, i don't have the dvd commentary transcript on hand, but it was clear that RT treated maine's voice and lack of chattiness as a total joke. it was bad. it was uncomfortable. while i know there are so, so many ways to express a character's personality, goals, feelings, everything without dialogue – even in a show like rvb that is, even in a mocap-heavy season like 9, still very heavily dependent on dialogue for character – i do not think that non-verbal, non-dialogue characterization was even remotely on RT's (well, i should say burnie's) radar when writing maine. and maybe keeping the trailer canon wouldn't have solved all of these problems; maybe we would have been faced with a fresh new crop of extremely shitty, ableist "jokes." who knows. but at least they would have had a reason to not show maine talking and giggle about it behind the scenes.

as far as the recollection being put into a new light... boy, there's a lot. first and foremost, it establishes that in recovery one and reconstruction, wash isn't just hunting down a random other freelancer — he's hunting down someone he ran missions with, he's hunting down someone he was concerned about, he's hunting down someone who he got along with enough to call a buddy. the "agent maine?"/"it's him; it's the meta" gains about a hundred times more meaning. wash's tense-at-best working relationship a post-meta maine (or a no-AI meta; ymmv there, i guess, but i'm firmly in the maine camp. see attached 80k-plus-word fanfiction.) in revelation changes with the knowledge that wash, at one point, had a good enough relationship with maine to worry about him and to be sent on missions together. wash understanding his speech and maine fucking with him in the desert gain more context and become more painful when you know they had some form of positive relationship before things in PFL deteriorated to the point we meet them in recovery one and reconstruction.

it also establishes that wash and york were friends, that wash was also concerned about york's well-being, and that wash doesn't get sent to collect some random freelancer's body in recovery one — that york was someone he liked well enough to check up on after an injury. it establishes that wash liked people and that he had friends and teammates he'd worry about.

i have a lot of negative feelings about season 9; actually, i struggle to find any positive feelings about season 9. a lot of the cool parts of it are entirely overridden by everything i either disliked or genuinely hated about this season, and this trailer is a huge source of frustration, too. it feels like RT had a perfect starting point that stood really well on its own, and then scrapped it entirely for the sake of... i don't even know, really. drama? flashy fight scenes? who knows.

maybe one day i'll write up a post on how things would be different in the PFL arc if the trailer had stayed canon; that'd be cool to explore. in the meantime, i'll continue to alternate between being mopey and salty over what we could have had if this trailer had remained canon.

Comments

[anneapocalypse]

Ah, the season 9 trailer. A taste of what could have been, if not for... well, if not for Epic Space Battles in Space. And Monty Oum. Not Monty in and of himself, but the fact that RT had Monty available to them and were completely high on the possibilities of what they could do with animation. There is just no other reason for season 9 having such a thin and unintelligible thread of a plot, for the Freelancer base of ops being aboard a ship (which I'm pretty sure wasn't originally the plan, because in the trailer they're clearly on a Pelican coming from a sim base and had they been heading home to a shipboard HQ, they would've had their own medical bay and no need to crash a civilian medical station).

I guess wacky sim base adventures and a groundside training facility like we were always led to believe Freelancer had... wasn't cool enough. :/

I still love the season 9 trailer, for all the reasons you said here. It was a great set-up, leading us inside the shadowy world of Project Freelancer for the first time by way of characters we already knew. (The unreasonably long Wash essay I'm writing devotes a whole section to that trailer despite it being non-canon because of the way it sets up the role Wash will play throughout the Freelancer saga, that of the audience proxy--hence him asking questions like "what do you call them--AI things?" which ultimately ends up kind of being to the detriment of the narrative and Wash's characterization, but that's its own rabbit hole.)

I have very complicated feelings about season 9. It's a narrative disaster, a very poorly-planned opening to a very rushed story arc that discards continuity (not to mention effective storytelling) in favor of flashy fight scenes. It also gave me my favorite character, not just in RvB but in anything, ever. Season 9 shows off a whole line-up of beloved characters--and sacrifices characterization and relationship development in service of a plot that barely holds up around the flashy action sequences that comprise most of its runtime.

But probably my most complicated feelings come from what season 9 does to Maine. In many ways, the Maine that I now know and love would not exist without the season 9 we have--because that Maine is based almost entirely on nonverbal characterization and that characterization is pretty entirely the creation of Monty Oum because no one else gave one single fuck about making Maine a character. Maine as I think of him is largely built on what Monty brought to the table--the way he fights, the way he interacts with his teammates in and out of the field, even the little gestures and the way he moves. (That Maine and Wash were friends is something I cling to fiercely, not only because of the trailer but because of what interaction we get between them in season 9 before Sigma, little though it is.) How little Maine speaks even before his injury, itself became characterization to me. And all of that, I'm fully aware, was unintentional on the part of writers who did not care and did Maine incredibly dirty because of it.

[sword_logic]

"unintentional" is absolutely the key word there, lmao. there's nothing wrong with unintentional symbolism, characterization, metaphors, etc. (and sometimes the coolest stuff comes out of it!) but when the backstory of the, uh, (checks notes) titular villain of three previous seasons is relegated entirely to unintentional characterization? looks bad, todd. it really sucked to see so much handwaved for the sake of "ooooh shiney" that we fans have to do a lot more digging for character than we have any right to be doing. for almost everyone in the cast, to boot!

the entirety of the Patented Season Nine Whiplash boils down to the "monty's devotion to expressiveness in his animation work" vs. "making said animation work carry the entire season" deathmatch, and it honestly ends up being... miserable. i so very much wish we could have gotten a PFL arc that was more balanced and cohesive and like, planned to any capacity. season 9 (and 10, to an extent) were so viscerally disappointing to me that it took a huge amount of work for me to be able to set them aside as canon i don't have to acknowledge if i don't want to — and in the process i've come to find that there are a lot of little things i really do enjoy, including what we get of pre-sigma maine. i'd say i've made my peace with it, but that sounds a lot more condescending than i mean, and i am clearly still very salty. :B plus, as we all know, an AU is the best balm for disappointment.

BIG eyes emoji at a wash essay. i'm looking forward to your thoughts on him!

[anneapocalypse]

It's a really bad look, yeah. Not just for Maine but for all the Freelancers really; I think the wildly varying interpretations of those characters speaks for itself. (Another example that comes to mind is the Dakota twins and the failure to really show the growing rift in their relationship in anything beyond the shallowest "South jealous" sense.)

The animation really is the only thing carrying season 9, and that's such a shame, because... in another season that didn't have a serious and vital-to-the-entire-series plot to carry, that could have been all right. Maybe not great, but less bad. Season 7 uses the flimsiest of plot excuses to move characters around to different maps, but it doesn't sacrifice characterization for it, and more importantly it does what it needs to do to set up season 8, when the more serious plot returns. (And I actually think the problem of sacrificing characterization for Cool Fight Scenes begins all the way back in 8 with the e!Tex battle in the warehouse--no shade on the ice fight, which to this day I think holds up as one of the best animation sequences in the show's history--but that's another essay probably. Tune in next time for "Animation Killed the Machinima Star!")

For me, at first watch I actually had a lot more visceral disappointment with season 10. In part this is just because I was watching a lot more closely then (I had a lot of other stuff going on when season 9 aired), but I also think it is largely that problems set up in season 9 proceed to then ruin season 10--the lack of exposition especially, and lack of attention to characters. Season 10 devotes some actual time to character moments, but in my opinion it largely mis-prioritizes them. (Who needs to actually show the protagonist's POV and maintain her sympathy with the audience, or show-not-tell what's happening to Maine, or show Wash having actual human reactions to things happening around him, when we can have dick jokes!) It hammers through plot points because they need to happen, with no regard for maintaining continuity with established canon or even with the characters as they've been established one season earlier! (Ask me about how Wash, between 9 and 10, mysteriously develops a fear of heights!)

Yeah, I'm still salty too. I have mostly made my peace with it and have worked with it enough in fic that I've made it work for me. But it's still a cautionary tale in The Making of Prequels to rival Star Wars.

[sword_logic]

that comparison to season 7 is a really good one – i don't particularly like season 7, it's not a standout to me, but there are some great, hilarious character moments ("i'm not a geographist" is, bar none, my single favorite tucker line, and i vividly remember crying from laughter over church deleting his short-term memory the first time i watched it) and the plot is... functional? ish? in the way that scraps of plot throughout BGC were mostly functional. it doesn't do any heavy lifting, but it also doesn't really break anything. hard agree on the e!tex fight being the canary in the coal mine for 9 and 10, though.

i know a lot of people really seriously disliked season 11 when it was airing, but to me it felt like a reversal of "animation killed the machinima star" and i was so relieved that i loved it immediately. (plus i really loved wash nudging tucker towards some growth, caboose's grief being actually addressed, the hints of chorus as a setting we got... etc. etc. etc.) it was back to basics and it was sorely needed, after the whole. everything. it was BGC antics with a touch more maturity in the first half, and a pretty well-done ease into Plot in the second. it worked the way (and the reason) 9 and 10 didn't. man, it just really sucks that seasons 9 and 10 were, on the whole, Just Not Good.

[anneapocalypse]

I am very glad I am able to enjoy season 11 now for what it is, a breather season and a lighthearted prelude to the Chorus arc. It was very hard for me to enjoy it while it was airing. I already had a lot of, uh, feelings about Carolina's writing in season 10 and then to see her just unceremoniously written out immediately felt... not great. Tex was also gone, so there went my two favorite characters, with no indication that either of them would return (and in fairness, I don't think Tex should have returned, but Carolina was another story), and honestly I came very close to walking away for good.

Then Carolina showed her face at the very end, and they had me again.

I understand why Carolina was left out of 11 (that being that no one at that time had any idea how to integrate her into the main cast or how to write her in a non-serious context), but I still will always be a bit sigh about the fact that Wash got instant adoption and Carolina got years of hedging before they would really admit she was part of the family.

With the benefit of knowing what's coming, though, I enjoy the heck out of season 11 now and I've come to appreciate a lot more what it does with all the characters, especially Wash and Tucker.

[sword_logic]

i did walk away from rvb after season 10 with the intention of doing it for good, and in a fit of nostalgia and softness i decided to watch all of season 11 a few months after it had finished airing. aaaaand here we are now. :B

i completely understand all criticism of 11 both from the time it was airing (wow. that was really 5 whole years ago, huh.) and in retrospect. i'm really glad i was able to experience it positively. i'm also glad for people who were able to experience 9 and 10 positively – i've been told that 9 and 10 apparently seem like less of a car crash in shiny slow motion watched as a whole but i sure can't vouch for that myself – but my lived experience was so different that i really can't put myself in those shoes.

but i mean, hey, bottom line, all this is what fic is for.

[anneapocalypse]

I have also found that a lot of fans who watched 9 and 10 later seem to have a less critical view of them, for whatever reason. I think to some degree fans in general will skew toward being more forgiving of past material, more enthusiastic about the arc they rode in on, and more critical about whatever comes after their favorite arc--and I very much include myself in that.

We'll always have fanfiction!