Meta: Facing Race (RvB s10)--DFvQ

[xandromedovna]

CW: imperialism, racism, white supremacy

One of the things that sets the PFL arc apart is that we finally start getting characters with faces. Prior to this, only VIC and the Counselor were seen out of armour, but even these early instances set up a strange dichotomy with faced villains and faceless heroes. Generally speaking, because of the medium, the reason we never see faces is that there are no faces in multiplayer, and economic/technical limitations of the early-00s meant that animating VIC’s face involved a crude, uncanny overlay of lips that move over a still. The reason PFL has so many faces (and why they stopped having faces afterwards) is because of the significant increase in non-machinima animation in the Monty Oum era. Thematically, however, the faces of the Freelancers emphasize the facelessness of the sim troopers and draw attention to the complex operations of race, power, and anonymity in RvB.

 

One of the main themes of RvB is how a superficial focus on armour colour obscures the commonalities between the men beneath the armour. Because we never see the bodies of the RnB, armour is used rhetorically as a stand-in for skin, allowing discourses of race and ethnicity to circulate in complex and problematic ways. Regardless of the wearer’s actual race, certain armour colours, namely white, brown, black, and pink, attract racialized comments targeted at the wearer. The most obvious example is Lopez, who, despite being a robot with no body underneath his brown armour and having been assembled in Blood Gulch, is still consistently referred to as ‘Mexican’. His name, his armour colour, and the fact that he only speaks Spanish converge to Other him in relation to the rest of the team. His marginalized status as a robot often gets substituted in for his coding as Latino, such as in the “Diversity” PSA (brackets are the subtitles provided).

Simmons: Moving on, we have Lopez, a proud Latino. Hispanic? Cholo?

Lopez: Incorrecto [Incorrect-o]

Simmons: Help me out here.

Lopez: Soy mero Robo-Americano [I am a Bad-Ass Robo American]

Simmons, who is a Dutch-Irish cyborg and whose actor is of Mexican descent, often makes both anti-robot and racist/xenophobic microaggressions against Lopez, allowing the show to critique (though sometimes simply reproducing) common missteps of white people in interactions with racialized people.

Tucker—whose armour is aqua except when it goes through a teleporter, at which point it inexplicably comes out covered in black soot—is ambiguously coded Black and similarly deals with microaggressions. When he reveals his first name is Lavernius, Church immediately asks him, “are you Black?”, to which he responds:

Tucker: Does it matter?

Church: No, I’m just curious.

Tucker: Well if it doesn’t matter then why are you curious?

Church: I don’t know, I guess that’s just something I should have picked up on after all this time.

Tucker: You know what else you should have picked up on? My fucking first name! (3x16)

Throughout the series, Tucker continues to take a non-committal stance on his racial identity, preferring instead to turn the question back on the askers (e.g. “Diversity” PSA). The only time he seems to confirm it is in s8, after he’s been beat up by Tex. She sent him through a teleporter, giving him the soot on his armour, then punched him so hard the soot flew off and his armour returned to being aqua. From the sidelines, Sarge comments, “wow, she knocked the black right off of you”, to which Tucker replies, “that’s racist” (8x10).

Tucker is not the only racialized human member of the RnB. Doc is sometimes coded Black, and Grif and Sister are from Hawai’i. Additionally, Church is Jewish but white-passing. But again, we’re only inferring this information; we have no idea what they really look like. Donut is implied to be biracial, but this comes from another conflation of race and armour colour, as well as the queer nationalism common in the 00s. Despite important differences between ethnic and racial groups and queer communities and the ways intersectionality complicates such an easy analogy, in the 90s and 00s (and sometimes into today) being queer was often treated culturally as an ethnicity. Partially this is due to political strategies of queer nationalism common in the 90s modeled on Black, Latine, and Indigenous rights movements (e.g. Queer Nation, pride flags). But it also reflects homonationalist projects of assimilation into a neoliberal model of difference that considers queers just one of many distinct interest groups reflecting the diversity of the legitimated state (Puar xii). Just as there’s no logical reason to assume black or brown armour indicates a racialized body, there’s no reason to assume pink armour indicates a woman or a queer person, but this association sticks strongly with Donut. From the moment Donut arrives in pink armour, he faces homophobic remarks, leading him to defensively insist on calling his armour “lightish-red” throughout the series (at least until his big speech in s17):

Donut: Pink? My armour’s not pink!

Grif: PINK.

Simmons: Yeah, definitely pink.

Donut: You guys are colour-blind. Why would they give me pink armour?

Grif: Hey, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell

Simmons, laughing: That’s not funny

Grif: It’s a little funny (1x16)

The historical context here is important; “A Slightly Crueler Cruller” was released in 2003, the year Lawrence v Texas decriminalized sodomy in the US and during the height of the US military’s Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy (1993-2011). Their razzing as well as their begrudging acceptance of Donut simultaneously mark him as queer and as part of the team. 2003 was also the beginning of the Iraq War (2003-2011), and RvB thus puts forward a vision of the military consistent with Jasbir Puar’s point in Terrorist Assemblages:

However, even as patriotism immediately after September 11 was inextricably tied to a reinvigoration of heterosexual norms for Americans, progressive sexuality was championed as a hallmark of U.S. modernity. For despite this reentrenchment of heteronormativity, the United States was also portrayed as “feminist” in relation to the Taliban’s treatment of Afghani women (a concern that had been previously of no interest to U.S. foreign policy) and gay-safe in comparison to the Middle East. […] For a brief moment there was talk of a retraction or suspension of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy in the face of the need for greater recruitment. (41)

To be clear, RvB is deeply critical of the military-industrial complex and its treatment of both purported enemies and its own soldiers at a time when the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were very popular. Nevertheless, the propagandistic view of the military as defender of freedom and melting-pot democracy that permeated early-00s US culture subconsciously underpins the presentation of the RnB throughout the series as a multicoloured, diverse force for good, and I argue this starts with their inclusion of Donut.

Importantly, Donut’s queer expression comes after his armour assignment. As the series progresses, the jokes shift from external ascriptions of queerness to an increasingly expressed interior queerness, as if his pink armour made him queer instead of the other way around. While we could argue that being treated as queer gave him space to explore his own queerness without having to worry about outing himself, from a Doylist perspective it’s a case of a homophobic joke ossifying into queerbaiting and eventually queer coding. However, his lightish-red armour is also treated at times as a racial marker. A running joke in the series is for them to be fighting soldiers with white armour and to make racial comments about it:

Sarge: Our enemy is nigh; we must stand and fight. Our very lives and our very livelihoods are at stake. We must fight back against these whites!

Simmons: Whoa ho hoooa…

Sarge: I knew the day might come when the white team once again raised its plaintive face at our war-friendly valley. They’ve done it before: the Meta, Agent Wyoming, and now, the whites are back to take it all!

Simmons: Umm, Sarge? You’re bordering on really offensive territory.

Sarge: Borders? Ha! Whites don’t care about borders, they go where they want, take what they want, and leave nothing in their wake but indie rock and smoothie shops! Blah!

Donut: But Sarge, I’m reddish-white.

Sarge: That’s why you’re our ace in the hole, Donut. You are the only one who can walk between worlds. You’ll be our white spy.

Lopez: Tumblr va a odiar esto. [Tumblr is going to hate this.] (15x6)

Literal and metaphorical whiteness is mapped onto orderly, cold, violent institutions whereas the chaos of the RnB allows for, well, the full rainbow. It’s also worth pointing out at this juncture that the US military contains a disproportionate number of people of colour for reasons of precarity and the military’s predation on lower-class populations (Puar 1). This association between whiteness and the military-industrial complex extends to PFL as well, though with a focus on white embodiment. The Freelancers also have differently-coloured armour similar to the sim troopers, but importantly they have (white) faces under that armour that we see. The only face in the first five seasons is VIC’s, as the representative of Command, and we learn not to trust him because he is Command for both the Red and Blue armies. The second face is the Counselor’s; while he is the prime counterexample of PFL’s whiteness as the only visibly racialized person in the series (minus the Locus/Felix/Siris arc in s14 and some background characters), we still have the association with facedness and evil. Hargrove and the Director are always shown out-of-armour and with faces, except for the Director’s green eyes, which humanize him with their reveal at the end of s10. We see the faces of Carolina, York, North, South, Wyoming, and both CTs, as well as the back of Meta’s head. (Tangent: We never really see Maine’s face; we see the Meta symbol on his head, and his face is obscured by Sigma. Meta is the villain, not the poor guy who got taken over by it.) We importantly never see Wash’s face, even in situations where we would reasonably expect to, although in the “Diversity” PSA he is explicitly identified as being white.

In RvB, we never see the faces of our heroes, and we only see faces when we are encouraged to see someone as a villain. This points to an unexpected inversion of traditional usage of masks in sci-fi military works. A prominent example would be the Star Wars universe. The stormtroopers in their faceless white uniforms are the hallmark of evil. It is only when Finn (a Black man) removes his helmet that he becomes a hero for the rebellion. The implication is that facelessness hides the individual allowing them to commit atrocities, while marking the individual restores their humanity. What RvB does is flip the standard representational framework: it remarks (on) whiteness as a particular institution of violence, and makes the faceless armour, which could look like anyone who identifies with the character, un-remarkable (Phelan 5). Whiteness is no longer a universal(izing) subject position; the universality lies in the ability to project any-body into those suits. Even when we are given specific information about their lives, there is still plenty of room made for headcanons, especially facecasting.

This is part of the larger association in the series between competence and villainy, where the more one knows what they’re doing and has the means to do it, the more likely they are to be the villain. In RvB, the blame for the military’s injustices is firmly on institutions instead of the comic-relief foot-soldiers. Even one-line characters who exist only as red-shirts are portrayed as hapless victims instead of the source of the problem. This technique of only showing the faces of villains is weirdly Brechtian, emphasizing the soldiers as a class instead of individuals. It encourages us to continually place the blame where it truly lies: with the white supremacist military-industrial complex furthering these wars in the first place.

 

Works Cited

Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. Routledge, 1993.

Puar, Jasbir. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Duke UP, 2007.