Red vs. Blue as a Mythology, and Why This Makes Everything Better
In Season 11 Episode 13, Lopez makes a comment that he only enjoys telling his stories about the Reds and Blues in five minute intervals, humorously framing the entire series as a set of stories told by one robot to another.
And ever since then, Iâve been thinking.
What if instead if a static and unchanging history (because letâs be honest, when has RvB ever been static or unchanging) we thought of Red vs. Blue as a mythology among machines?
This is why the story is so inconsistent. Like any myth, there are many versions, some more outrageous than the others. And like any old god, Church appears in many forms. Sometimes he is a man and sometimes he is a machine. Sometimes he is the hero and sometimes the villain. Like many gods, sometimes he dies, but he usually comes back again in some form.
The story of Freelancer itself is muddled at best, reconstructed from the stories of Wash and Carolina and retold by Lopez as best he could. Of course the details got lost, of course he mixed some things up. Nevertheless, the story endures.
Some figures have their stories simplified; some have truisms placed in their mouths for the sake of appending a moral, to the erasure of what they might really have said or done. Agent Carolina gets the worst of this, because Lopez had never met her, and had only her reputation among the Reds and Blues to build on. Nevertheless, her story endures.
It is said that Agent Texas visited the Reds and Blues in Blood Gulch, but some versions of the story say she came during the war, while other versions claim it was after the warâs end. Nevertheless, her story endures.
It is said that Agent Washington, this storyâs Angel of Death, visited the bodies of five freelancers to collect the AIs from their broken vessels and take them home. The names of some of those five are lost to time, and the tales of the Freelancers have condensed somewhat to center around those who are remembered. Nevertheless, their story endures.
Red vs Blue is a story about what makes us human. Itâs about death and loss, friendship and love, obsession and sorrow, arrogance and greed. The fragments are Muses, embodiments of human emotion, the best and the worst of each, a reminder of the best and worst of what humans can do to machines, and machines to humans, and humans to themselves and to each other.
It is a story about being torn apart, and the terrible lengths to which we will go to be whole again.
Some find redemption in this myth, some do not.
The mythos of Red vs. Blue is at once a story about what it means to be human, and a caution against being too human.
And as the aliens once embraced and worshipped the technology that gave them the life they knew, the machines in turn embrace the humansâflawed and broken as they areâwho brought them to life. They do not worship them. They are too smart for that, because in this myth God dies at the end and death is where all roads lead.
But they remember, because memory is the keyâflawed and broken as it may be. And like Epsilon (that final avatar of the old god, whoâs said to still roam the galaxy) reconstructing Alphaâs past from Cabooseâs stories, they make do.
