Meta: Theseus's Body (RvB s2)-- DFvQ

[xandromedovna]

(CW: body horror, suicide, brain damage)

In a show like RvB, where we don’t usually see people’s faces, the soldiers’ bodies are subject to rich fan theorization and narratively pliable. There are a lot of visual codes in RvB fandom that allow fans to tell at a glance who a piece of fanart is meant to represent. Armour colour is the most obvious, with the character’s colour scheme inevitably being reflected in their outfit. However, some conventions have arisen, mostly from events and lines in BGC. Donut is almost always depicted with hearing loss and facial scars on the right side of his face because of the ‘spider’. Simmons, who’s Dutch-Irish, is invariably pale and skinny with cyborg parts, and Grif, who’s from Hawai’i, has brown skin except for the parts of him that are Simmons and is fat. Tucker and Doc are almost always drawn as Black (Tucker because of throwaway jokes about his race, Doc because he went to Jamaica State University). Sarge and Caboose have the most variety in how they’re drawn, but Sarge is usually depicted as older with a white beard and Caboose is usually much larger than everyone else. However, until and unless official art is released, these fanon codes are simply the most common ways of integrating the sparse and sometimes contradictory information we’re given about the men beneath the armour.

 

I’ll have a lot more to say about how the ‘everyman’ body functions thematically, but what I find fascinating about RvB and BGC especially is how malleable the body is, to the point of calling into question what counts as one’s body. It is implied that by the 26^th century, the human body has developed alongside technology in such a way that it is significantly more resilient than contemporary bodies. Partially this is due to their experimental space armour and the demands of plot or humour, but even so, all the soldiers of Project Freelancer from sim troopers to Agents are remarkably hardy—Donut survives a grenade stuck to his helmet, Iowa survives 20 minutes without oxygen, Maine survives being shot repeatedly in the neck, Caboose and Carolina both survive falling off a cliff, Tucker survives alien childbirth, etc. Even before the Project though, there is evidence they’re preternaturally strong, such as Kai surviving being trapped under ice for three hours. This is taken to the extreme with the Battle Creek sim troopers in s3, who all kill each other repeatedly only to miraculously respawn minutes later (which is normal in Halo but bizarrely unremarkable in RvB).

The relative impermanence of death is a major theme in the show, one it zigzags fairly regularly. There’s a running joke that someone will think Donut or Caboose is dead only for them to show up two seconds later completely fine. In fact, the first death on the show, Church, is quickly undone by him and later Tex returning as ‘ghosts’. However, we learn later that (spoilers) he and Tex are actually AI, not ghosts, and the original Allison on which Tex is based died long ago. Eventually, all versions of Church and Tex are fully dead, but their constant resurrection makes it very difficult for Caboose to understand the concept of death. Because most of his relationships are with machines (Church, Freckles, Sheila), ‘death’ is rarely applicable, not because they’re not alive per se but more in the ‘you-cannot-kill-me-in-a-way-that-matters’ sense. Lopez continually makes backups of himself so that when he inevitably gets decapitated again, he’ll still be himself (he even survives the Big Bang, which doesn’t seem physically possible for any complex structure but whatever it’s funnier this way). Freckles’ main software is transferred from a MANTIS droid to a chip to a gun to a mini-MANTIS, and Sheila—who’s a unique instance of FILSS—is transferred from a tank into a pelican (the ship not the bird). Similarly, Huggins and her family, as ‘sentient lens flares’, cannot die because “light is information and cannot be destroyed” (17x6).

But we can angst about Caboose processing Church's death any time, right now I’m interested in how the series presents cyborgs. Technically speaking, all the Freelancer personnel are cyborgs by virtue of their implants (assuming we don’t take Midson’s point that humans are always already cyborgs to begin with). Genkins demonstrates this when he attempts to influence Tucker through his AI slot; prior to this he is only shown possessing other technology because (spoiler) he's also an AI. The fact that Church, Tex, and O’Malley can possess all of them is a unique feature of the sim troopers and Agents being AI-ready, which is an invasive surgical procedure at the base of the head allowing AI to interface directly with a soldier’s brain. This is actually a quite traumatic process. Wash doesn’t allow AI in his brain ever since Epsilon tried to kill himself while plugged into Wash. Carolina ended up in the infirmary because having two AI fragments (who malfunctioned simultaneously at the mention of Allison but that’s a whole other thing) nearly drove her insane. Caboose once had three AI fragments in his head simultaneously, and the subsequent fight between Church, Tex, and O’Malley in his brain is implied to be one of his major sources of brain damage. This intersection of bodies and technology is fraught, but it is integral to their embodiment nonetheless.

Then again, a large part of the destructiveness of the relationship is that AI are portrayed as an invading foreign body and not a unified part of a whole. Some of this has to do with the fact that they’re technically AI fragments not full AI, but it also stems from the mind-body dichotomy. In “Anima ex Machina’” I argued, following Gilbert Ryle, that the mind-body split is actually more characteristic of machines, and therefore a cyborg perspective should account for both body-minds and this evacuation narrative where the body is a vessel for a separate mind. RvB’s presentation of AI firmly maintains the mind-body split, but in a way that shows the relationship between body and possessing AI as more intra-active. In “Head Cannon” (14x16), we see O’Malley’s perspective for 5x23 as he occupies various hosts. Any time a fragment possesses someone, their experience of the event is depicted as an interior space populated by a representation of the host and all their memories of other people. In this ep, O’Malley has to deal with the eccentricities of the likes of Simmons, Grif, and Donut while he tries to find a way out of Blood Gulch. What’s interesting about these characters when they’re possessed by O’Malley is that the result is simply an eviler version of the character. Unlike when Church does it, when O’Malley possess someone his personality changes in response to the host’s. He’s more dangerous when he’s with Tex, menacing with Caboose, feminist with Donut, rebellious with Simmons, and megalomaniacal with Doc. And what’s especially interesting about Doc is that long after Omega has left, his O’Malley personality retains the characteristics Omega brought out in him, and only in s17 does Doc integrate these two aspects of himself, showing how strongly his time with Omega affected him.

Because of this mind-body split, robot bodies call into question the very idea of ‘having’ ‘a’ body of one’s own. Is Private Jimmy—Church’s meatsuit—Church’s real body? Is Lopez? (I have Thoughts about this later.) Is Robot #2? Is the Monitor? Is Wash or Carolina? Is the Director? If Epsilon is a digital fragment of a copy of a human brain, is he still Church? (His answer would be a vehement yes!) Grif and Simmons interestingly raise a similar question about what constitutes ‘your own body’ this season. Grif is blown up along with the warthog, but instead of simply making Grif a cyborg to save him, Sarge requires Simmons to give his organs to Grif and for him to become the cyborg. If we replace most of Simmons’ body with prosthetics, is he still Simmons, and how does disability activism inform our answer? If Grif’s body is like 70% transplants from Simmons, is he still Grif? (Or is he Grimmons? Don’t worry, we’ll absolutely talk about Grimmons later.) What’s fascinating about RvB is that technological enhancement is ultimately not an advantage or a detractor—it’s simply one way of being. Sure there are some things Simmons and Church can do that the others can, but there’s also some major inconveniences that make being a cyborg neither utopic or dystopic, simply mundane. We accept that Church is a computer program, Simmons is a cyborg, and Grif is by some definitions technically a Simmons clone, and move on with our lives as if that’s normal, because for them it is.

Neat.

Works Cited

Midson, Scott A. Cyborg Theology: Humans, Technology, and God. I.B. Tauris, 2018.

Publius, Xavia. “Anima ex Machina: Meatsuit Realness and Transformative Reenchantment.” Digital Performance in Canada, edited by David Owen. Playwrights Canada Press, 2021, pp. 83-109.