Meta: Lovers and Fighters (RvB s8)-- DFvQ

[xandromedovna]

CW: ableist language

“You ever wonder why we’re here?” (8x18). It’s a common question in RvB, but when Sarge asks it in his big speech, he’s asking why they’re still here, with each other, how they went from two rival factions in a box canyon who couldn’t stand their own teammates much less each other to a united (if dysfunctional) semi-competent unit that still hasn’t managed to kill each other despite ample opportunity to do so. The answer of course is that they’re a found family, and their incompetence fighting each other is what makes them strong as a group. They are much more skilled in soft power than in hard power, which despite all odds helps them win the war(s). The tragic angst of Project Freelancer’s (PFL) heteropatriarchal models is what got them into this situation and their queer failure in that model is paradoxically what makes them so successful.

 

When Carolina first begins working with the Reds and Blues (RnB), she notes the wide disparity between the approaches to military operations taken by the sim troopers and PFL: “I had a team once, a team with the best training, the best equipment, and despite everything that they had that made them the best, they still lied, and stole, and tore each other to pieces. So you tell me, how the Hell am I supposed to trust a rag-tag team of idiots when I couldn’t even trust the people that were closest to me?” (10x12). I believe the show argues it is precisely the rag-tag idiocy of the RnB that makes them a better fit for Wash and Carolina than PFL was. Because the RnB are ‘idiots’—i.e. not good soldiers—their mutual inefficacy as soldiers is what unites them through alternative exchanges of power, such as soft power:

Sarge: There’s one thing you Freelancers always seem to forget, and that’s the fact that we’ve [the RnB] managed to kick your ass time and time again. Oh sure, you’ve got all your smart plans and your fancy technology and your advanced training, but in the end, what has that got you? Without a team you can count on, without your fellow soldier by your side, all that doesn’t really amount to squat, now does it? (10x20)

Joseph Nye defines ‘soft power’ as the ability “to get the outcomes […] wanted because of attraction, rather than just threats of coercion or payment” (200). Because they’re in the military, the RnB are often rated in terms of military prowess, AKA hard power, and they were put together precisely because of their inefficacy (discussed below). Doc is a pacifist; Grif always forgets the ammo; Sarge is too paranoid and set in his ways to accomplish anything (when asked why he didn’t just kill Sister and declare victory in s6, he says he would never hurt a girl); Church literally can’t shoot a rifle to save his life. However, because the soft/hard power distinction is about behaviours and not resources, “some resources that are commonly associated with hard power in most contexts can also produce soft power in another context” (Nye 201). Jack Halberstam might describe their inadvertent success as the “queer art of failure”:

Under certain circumstances, failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world. Failing is something queers do and have always done exceptionally well; for queers failure can be a style, to cite Quentin Crisp, or a way of life, to cite Foucault, and it can stand in contrast to the grim scenarios of success that depend upon 'trying and trying again.' In fact if success requires so much effort, then maybe failure is easier in the long run and offers different rewards. (2)

They often stumble into to success through their inability to comply with the demands of hard power. Because Caboose never upgrades his helmet, his armour can’t be locked down with him in it, making it harder to confine him. Because Simmons deleted the Blues from the database, the UNSC couldn’t come confiscate Epsilon until they released Wash. The crashlanding on Chorus that brought an end to the civil war happened because they all independently accidentally broke something on the ship, causing it to “jump to slipspace, change course, and power down all at the same time,” which evaded the pirates’ mechanism for controlling access to the planet (12x15). When they are intentionally successful, it is usually because of their soft power skills and not their hard power skills. Donut is able to take the flag in s1 because he simply asks Caboose for it. Felix and Locus’s plan to destroy the RnB is defeated because they “forgot to count the genius and the dog”, i.e. Emily and Freckles respectively, friends they made along the way (12x8). The RnB are rescued from the Blues and Reds’ (BnR) lair because they send Lopez for help, who is found by now-friend Locus, who happens to speak Spanish and helps him track down Grif, who had a fight with them all before they left meaning he wasn’t there to be captured (and who also learned Spanish since they’ve been gone). Knowing he would be expected and caught, Grif uses himself as bait while Locus does the heavy lifting. Genkins can’t understand how the RnB are fixing the timeline until he realizes they’ve befriended Huggins. The best summary of this point is that when Genkins asks, “HOW ARE YOU LIKE THIS?!”, Caboose’s response is, “uhh…friendship?” (17x12).

Found family is a patently queer model for various important historical reasons, one Carolina eventually embraces: “I found people worth being strong for” (17x12). In RvB, it is specifically contrasted with a heteropatriarchal blood model represented by Project Freelancer. PFL, headquartered on the space battle cruiser Mother of Invention, becomes a metaphorical and literal representation of Carolina and Church’s birth family. Competition for the Director’s attention is built into the structure of the entire program, literalized by the leaderboard constantly comparing them. Carolina was the best the Program had to offer only to be supplanted by the ghost of her own mother, i.e. Tex. Carolina also happens to be the Director’s daughter. We don’t learn of the familial connection to Tex and the Director until s10, when the Director’s eyes are shown to be the same green as Carolina’s. Carolina’s professional interest in the mission to kill him is a screen for the nuclear family trauma at the heart of PFL.

This consanguineous notion of family is bolstered by the inclusion of “The Twins”—AKA North and South, who are actual twins—and “The Triplets”—AKA Iowa, Ohio, and Idaho, who are not related—among their ranks. We see the ‘birth’ of Delta and Epsilon aboard the MOI. The AI call each other brother (Theta mentions a sister at one point, perhaps Beta), except Alpha, whom they call father. During the break-in in 10x19, North dismisses Tex and says “this is a family matter” as he goes off to fight his sister. It should not go unnoticed that Tex had already abandoned her PFL ‘family’ before this point, adding a second layer to this line, and a third appearing retroactively with the reveal that Tex is the memory of the Director’s dead wife. The nuclear family trauma of the Churches causes a complete breakdown of the extended family of Project Freelancer.

PFL explicitly ties the bio family to empire and capital, as part of the reason for its founding was to research ways to fight the Covenant, and they are commonly fighting the Insurrection for control of resources. The Triplets, who are kicked out of Freelancer, are actually the perfect demonstration of this coding in that they are not literal blood relatives: their sibling bond is affective instead of genetic. The nickname is at first applied pejoratively by the other Freelancers because they’re consistently in the bottom three of the leaderboard, but it comes to be an ironic indicator of their failure to fit in with their metaphorical birth family and their emphasis on interpersonal bonds over scores. Eventually the Counselor sends the Triplets on a “special assignment” (i.e. disappears them) due to their lack of success in the program, but the justification is interesting: “as you may have noticed, you consistently rank toward the bottom of our regular assessment of the abilities of members of Project Freelancer. But as you also know, most operations happen in teams of three or four. In this regard, you have shown remarkable cohesion. In fact, in assessing your abilities to work as a group, you rank at the top of that metric” (14x21). Their team cohesion and lack of military prowess get them stranded on an ice planet by PFL.

The Triplets are actually the prototype (or at least the archetype) for both the BnR and the RnB. When banished to the ice planet, they come across three Charon Industries troops (Sherry, Darryl, and Terrill), who were also evidently abandoned there. They begin on friendly if untrusting terms, comparing notes until Iowa shoots at what he thinks is a spider, wounding Darryl. This starts a begrudging conflict between the two factions, who now have their mission:

Idaho: But they just said they aren’t doing anything! Why do we need to watch them?

Ohio: That’s where you’re wrong—they are doing something now: they’re watching us, because now we’ve shot two of them.

Idaho: Seriously? You’re saying the only reason we need to be here is because they have a base over there, and the only reason they need a base is because we’re here?

Ohio: Dude, yes! We finally have a purpose in life! (14x22)

They don’t actually want to hurt each other, they simply want something to do now that the powers that be have abandoned them in the middle of nowhere. (It also bears noting that Ohio and Sherry, the team leaders, are openly wlw, making this a queer model.) Similarly, the BnR of Desert Gulch are equal parts incompetent and uninterested in killing each other. Temple, a Blue, and Biff, a Red, were friends before they became sim troopers, so they purposefully try not to hurt each other when they fight. When Biff asks Temple to injure him for real so he can get leave to see the birth of his child, it backfires when Tex and Carolina kill him. In the incident report after Biff’s death, the Director tells the Counselor that “before today, they were the only team still locked in total stalemate. I want their team compositions noted should we need to recreate a similar scenario” (15x13). This comes to pass when they need to hide the Alpha in Blood Gulch, hence Florida’s recruitment of the RnB (14x1-3).

While there are biological ties in Blood Gulch, they are queer ties that are still occurring in a larger context of found family. Grif’s sister Kai, who arrives in s5 after following her brother into the service, is openly bi, and their mother is implied to be intersex (Grif himself is probably not straight). Tucker’s son Junior is… let’s just say not the product of heterosexual reproduction. Their strength is that, while they can't actually choose their found family, they all chose to keep staying together. For example, in “Rally Cap” (8x18) Sarge finally acknowledges (for now) the futility of Reds fighting Blues and gives a speech convincing them to go help Church and Tex, Blues, when they need them; this is important both because Sarge has finally become disillusioned with the institution he has blindly supported all these years and because it is one of the first times that the Reds and Blues acknowledge themselves as found family, and that this is how they will win:

Maybe you're all here because this is the only place you fit in. Maybe you're here because you don't have anywhere else to go. Maybe you're all here because deep down, you want to be here. The reason doesn’t matter, what matters is that you’re here. For all we know, Tex and Church are dead. That means we're the only ones who know what's happened; the only ones who can prevent them from covering it up. So the way I figure it, these Freelancer guys wanna use us, take us away from our families, and send us all over the dag gum galaxy just to test if their agents are ready for the big fight? Well, I guess I'm interested in showing 'em exactly what a big fight is all about.

 

Works Cited

Halberstam, Judith. The Queer Art of Failure. Duke UP, 2011.

Nye, Joseph. “Soft Power: The Evolution of a Concept.” Journal of Political Power, vol. 14, no. 1, 2021, pp. 196-208.