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

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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

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.

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.

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!

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

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