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xandromedovnaCW: death, exploitation, capitalism
I love RvB, which turned 20 yesterday. And as someone who hates change and gets anxious when things end, I appreciate that there’s still new content being produced, that I get a little more time with these characters. That’s one of the main appeals of fanworks. However, I also love it enough to know that every show ends, and it deserves to end with dignity. Unfortunately, ending with dignity is antithetical to capitalist models of media engagement that bleed a property dry and abandon its soulless husk for the next quick buck. At a certain point, the demand for more content is cruel instead of affectionate, and shows like RvB and SPN show the consequences of that refusal to let things die. (Weird, it’s almost like that’s a major theme of both and it’s depressingly ironic that the shows themselves can’t seem to die.)
If Are You Making More Red vs. Blue? is to be believed (it hasn’t been wrong yet), chances are a s19 is in the works. It’s doubtful it will continue the story from Zero, but it’s an open question where it could even go. What’s more, between the personnel shake-ups and controversies at Rooster Teeth, the recasting of Lopez and Caboose, and the fact it’s been two years since they released a canon episode, the question is no longer “are they making more Red vs. Blue?” but “should they make more Red vs. Blue?” In dramaturgy, a theatre role tasked with researching and midwifing plays, the central question of the discipline is “why this play now?” Do we still need new episodes of RvB, and why? If they haven’t done so already, the creators should take a hard look at themselves and answer this question honestly.
Part of the problem is the tension between a model that sees television and web series as art versus a model that sees them as products. The vast majority of TV production companies are companies first and artists second, meaning it often doesn’t matter how production decisions affect the storyworld artistically as long as they make the company more money. We see this in shows with the opposite problem such as Julie and the Phantoms (Netflix, 2020), cancelled after one season despite having a strong, dedicated fanbase and being pretty great (I’m still bitter it’s fine) or that whole controversy over summarily deleting shows for tax write-offs. This also gets to larger concerns about circumventing labour laws and working conditions for animators, but even if we assume proper compensation and treatment of workers, the underlying logics of capitalism are incompatible with a storyworld’s artistic integrity. Characters in this framework are not beings in their own right but are money factories to be discarded the second they become unprofitable and kept in suspended animation until then.
Because of this, their lives are often artificially extended way past any charitable or even reasonable point. Showrunners of Archer, SPN, RvB, and many others have at various points in their runs tried to end their series only to be overruled by producers and be stuck trying to figure out where the hell to take the story next. Fans too play a part in this through our refusals to let a story die. There’s an increasing attitude in fan spaces—even towards other fans—where demands of more content from creators are made instead of letting the story stand on its own terms and reacting to it from there. One consequence of this is that often continuing the story past the intended end breaks the story world. The ancient curse “may you live in interesting times” plays out in these shows, because to keep things interesting they have to go through more conflict. We’ll definitely see this with SPN, but even here they got pulled out of retirement in s15, which Grif did not take too kindly to, and ended up having to rescue the entire multiverse.
The problem with endings is that you need to tie up all the loose ends you’re capable of tying up and leaving the remaining loose ends for fans to speculate about and expand on. The more unfinished business left for the fans, the more the text remains a writerly instead of readerly text. For Roland Barthes, a writerly text is one that “make[s] the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text” (4). A writerly text belongs to an ever-expanding collection of texts and is maintained by a repertoire of bodily practices that interpret the readerly archive:
Whatever texts a culture continually reperforms, restages, comments upon, rereads, and so on--whatever is reembodied by the individuals of that culture, over time--comprises the culture's canon. When a work drops out of the repertoire, then, and it fails to be restaged and reperformed and reread for a generation or longer, one calls it a 'forgotten' work. Such a work exits the canon and enters the archive. Also, texts can also [sic] move from the unperformed archive into the performed canon. Canon = texts + performance. Archived texts sit unaccessed most of the time, unread most of the time, unperformed most of the time. (De Kosnik 66)
However, fully activating the archontic valence of a text requires that “the work in progress among the creators [shift] to the work in progress among the readers” (Busse and Hellekson 7). If the original content creators are still telling that story, readers are often expected to fall into a more passive readerly position, which unbalances the power dynamics over the storyworld. By staying in a writerly position to the text, content creators emphasize the relationality of the creation process by incorporating the feedback of audiences, but this allows them to eschew responsibility for the meaning of the story because ‘they’re not done telling it yet’, consistently deferring ethical judgement. This ignores, as does Barthes at times, that there are important pleasures for a creator in consigning the work to being a readerly text, as it is no longer demanding energy from them.
RvB is well aware of this and has lampshaded it several times. In the “Spice It Up” PSA, Grif introduces himself as being “from the reluctantly immortal series Red vs. Blue”. Made prior to s18, this PSA is all about the conundrum of how “to stay relevant in this era of instant gratification and fickle yet powerful social media fan bases”. They propose different strategies such as new characters, retcons, literally jumping the shark, gimmick episodes, and other attempts to remain relevant, ultimately settling on continuing to do what they always do “‘til it stops being funny”. A similar take-it-or-leave-it attitude (or in fanspeak ‘Don’t Like Don’t Read’) is evident in the first QvsA episode “RvB Seasons 14-18, Watch or NOT?”: “take a page from our book and do whatever the hell you want to for however the hell long you want to do it”.
Now I personally like the later seasons (minus s18 obviously), but I also know from a story perspective that the main storyline should have ended at s13. Honestly, if they released nothing else except anthology series like s14 and PSAs for however long, I’d be fine with that, because while they sometimes extended canon, it was more an opportunity to experiment with form and fill in the gaps in the story. There’s a joy in it that I find important. I think that might also be why they keep releasing PSAs and miniseries such as QvsA instead of releasing s19, and I think that ending the main series at s18 and filling out the world in semi-canon and apocryphal extensions might be the best way to both continue to keep these characters with us without cursing them with a never-ending story.
I give the last word to Church and Grif:
Caboose: […]and then we got you and took you and saved you, the end.
Church: But why would you do that? Why?!
Sarge: Well clearly it wasn’t to hear ‘thank you’. […]
Church: Thank you?! You fucked everything up! I was at peace, I had it figured out, it was over. Put me back! (9x20)
Grif: You show up here, you drop the bomb on us, and then everyone goes springing into action. We are supposed to be done. I don’t want to go on another adventure. I don’t want to listen to Sarge. I don’t want to get shot at. I don’t wanna shoot at other people. I want to chill. I want to sit and chill. […] Why can’t he just stay dead? (15x6)
Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. S/Z: An Essay. Translated by Richard Miller, Hill & Wang, 1974.
Busse, Kristina and Karen Hellekson. “Introduction: Work in Progress.” Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, edited by Hellekson and Busse, McFarland & Co., 2006, pp. 5-32.
De Kosnik, Abigail. Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom. MIT P, 2016.
