Meta: The Vital Unimportance of Armour Colour (RvB s5)-- DFvQ

[xandromedovna]

By the fifth season, it has become pretty clear to both the audience and most of the Reds and Blues that they aren’t in fact at war and that the same Command is in charge of both armies. It is also clear that they have much bigger issues than their petty rivalry, namely the potential enslavement of an entire race of aliens, which was the real goal of the previous season's odyssey. And of course, none of this changes the fact they hate each other’s guts.

 

A minor but more telling theme in RvB is colour-blindness. In “Grey vs Gray” (14x14), a different set of Reds and Blues (there are many such sets besides the Blood Gulch Reds and Blues) is all locked in a room trying to solve a murder of one of their teammates. The only problem is they’re all colour-blind—well, and also each of them is the murderer, leading to them massacring each other. Despite being colour-blind, they are all fiercely loyal to whichever team they think they’re on. Similarly, Kai (also called Sister) is colour-blind, which causes a great deal of confusion upon her arrival at the beginning of s5. Kai’s armour is yellow, which is not an obvious member of either Red or Blue, being the third primary colour. However, because she’s Grif’s sister and she meets the Reds first, she assumes her brother’s team is the Blues, which is her actual assignment. Grif thus becomes invested in not grievously harming the Blues after he hands his little sister over to them when the mistake is realized.

In general, perhaps the biggest clue to the farcically simulated nature of the war, especially in Blood Gulch, is that the perception and categorization of armour colour is more ideological than logical. First of all, if they were real soldiers, being brightly coloured and easily identifiable is not an advantage. (The Freelancers can get away with this because of their abilities, and their overpowered tech means they don’t really need to hide because the enemy won’t be able to do much anyway—if they really need stealth, they have enhancements for that.) Second of all, as demonstrated by “Fight the Good Fight!”, the simulation troopers were chosen because they’re “soldiers deemed easily influenced according to psychological evaluations administered prior to enlistment” (14x12). In that episode, a mock recruitment propaganda video, it’s very clear Freelancer simply swapped out the terms Red and Blue and used the same video for both teams. Only in Blood Gulch (and Desert Gulch, but we’ll get to them later) are brick, crimson, pink/lightish-red, orange, and brown all Red and aqua, cerulean, cobalt, black, and yellow all Blue.

Importantly, virtually all the other outposts with sim troopers comprise teams solely of regulation red and regulation blue. While it’s unclear why Desert Gulch had soldiers with mismatched armour, Blood Gulch was specifically modelled on Desert Gulch to reproduce a stalemate in order to protect Church. Retaining the soldiers’ individuality humanizes them, which is crucial to preventing bloodshed, because they come to care about each other, however begrudgingly. By s5, they can start integrating beloved members of their bio families (Kai, Jr.) because they have already laid the groundwork of a found family amongst themselves. Granted, this is a family built on hate; when Caboose and Church echo back to the initial “Why are we here?” scene, Church says:

You know Caboose, I used to not care. I just went along with orders, and hoped that everything would work out for me. But after all that's happened, you know what I've learned? It's not about hating the guy on the other side because someone told you to. I mean, you should hate someone because they're an asshole, or a pervert, or a snob, or they're lazy, or arrogant or an idiot or know-it-all. Those are reasons to dislike somebody. You don't hate a person because someone told you to. You have to learn to despise people on a personal level. Not because they're red, or because they're blue, but because you know them, and you see them every single day. And you can't stand them, because they're a complete and total fucking douchebag. (5x23)

This is arguably the core message of the show: what we call ourselves isn’t nearly as important as how we treat each other has individuals, and our differences make us stronger together, however much we may personally dislike it.

In some ways, RvB thus functions as a political allegory for US Libertarianism. US politics is infamously divided between red-states and blue-states, where Republicans and Democrats respectively hold sway (swing- or purple-states, like Doc, are expected to eventually pick a side, though which one changes each election/battle). Despite many important ideological differences between the two parties, such as the far-right influence on Republicanism, they are both centre-right parties, and third parties are all but useless. What RvB seems to be arguing, in line with several activists within and outside both political parties, is that despite our interpersonal conflicts and ideological commitments, we have a lot more in common with each other than with those ‘in charge’ pulling the strings, and we need to work together if we have any chance of overthrowing those that oppress all of us. (Of course, the main issue with this on the political side of things is virulently antisemitic conspiracy theories that create misinformation and dissensus about who is actually doing the oppressing.) RvB advocates a literal and metaphorical colour-blindness that puts aside difference in favour of working together. Unfortunately, this doesn’t attend to the power dynamics between individuals with different group affiliations, such as the homophobia Donut experiences (but we’ll come back to that, as well as the many racial metaphors employed throughout the series in reference to armour colour), or the material conditions propagated by a given party. It is also predicated on a model of individualized anti-government liberty to do whatever instead of mutual aid and functioning collectivized social supports.

At any rate, the Reds and Blues’ understanding of the war is more nuanced in s5 because it is less ‘Red vs. Blue’ and more ‘Red vs. Blue vs. Purple vs. Robots vs. AI vs. Aliens vs. Freelancers’. Each of them has their own agendas, affiliations, and allegiances, and it’s only by attending to that complexity that they can work together to stop the Freelancers—or work against each other and end up blowing up the ship with Tex, Jr., Sheila, ANDY, Omega, and another Alien on board in order to save the tentative peace between the UNSC and the Covenant. Because sometimes you have to hate someone enough to help them.