Ive been enjoying your series of mini-essays on various media youāve been doing! Since I saw you mention it in the Fargo retrospective, any takes on Red Vs. Blue? Or the life and death of roosterteeth in general?
Red vs. Blue is conceptually mindboggling, it's essentially a story like Catch-22 made in a video game by a bunch of dudes who had definitely never been in the military before, there is an incredible originality to what it is doing but it is also being made by people with essentially no narrative or comedic talent or creative vision whatsoever beyond the (sometimes actually impressive) technical ways they pulled off certain shots, especially in the early seasons before Bungie put sophisticated theater mode tech into Halo 3. But then when Halo 3 does roll around and Rooster Teeth is unleashed, so to speak, there does start to be some real cinematic flair. Then Monty Aum emerges out of a Master Chief vs. Samus video on YouTube and somehow gets attached... then he dies... it's kind of a bizarre series of events. There is, despite the wave of imitators it spawned, nothing really like Red vs Blue, and all of this without it even being particularly good.
I love the way Blood Gulch looks. This I guess is more credit to Bungie than RT but the original Blood Gulch is so washed out, so big, so empty, it adds a surreal edge to everything happening on screen no matter how stupid it is. (Bro... what if Church died... and came back as a ghost?!) There are so many shots of that Warthog cutting across the far distance (done to conceal the fact that in Halo 1 only players on the same team, and thus same armor color, could be in the same vehicle) over a massive grassy hill and it's like an even more nostalgic Windows XP background. So much of the first season especially takes place in the big empty dead zone between the bases with no geographical markers at all. It evokes something, at least.

















