#dispatch meta

Mecha Man being Flambae's reason to live is INSANE it is INSANE to me how badly he needs Robert. how badly they need EACH OTHER to heal from this and learn to live beyond their numbness, the way Blazer said the powers "make it hard to feel anything" and Robert emulated that very same awful, isolating separation from his fellow man with only an unaffectionate father and a legacy too formidable to bs borne. he was raised to be an Atlas, but the pressure to live up to his father's invention made him an Icarus, flying too close to the sun.

it's awful that Robert maimed Flambae, but at the same time, he may have done that because Flambae was determined to die, and Robert simply refused to be complicit in that. there may have been no other option to deescelate. and Flambae could even resent Mecha Man more for NOT KILLING HIM than maiming him.

most everyone at SDN is a hero, actively or formerly. most everyone then, by proxy, is a super. this includes the z team. there are other non-super heroes, of course. but not many, not all of them are at SDN let alone the Torrance branch specifically (so most other normies at that branch have a decent chance of just being normal civvies).

but what if enhanced durability means that most supers don't really have scars? it's too difficult for their skin to break, so it usually has to be really bad for that to happen + not all wounds will leave scars.

so what if robert being absolutely covered head to toe in scars being actually a deeply unsettling (if not outright disturbing) sight for most heroes/supers? but not because they see it and think of him as being fragile or anything like that.

mecha man is slandered on LIVE TELEVISION for failing to avenge his father. even after years of being a hero the world only admonishes him when he finally can’t do so; invisigal tries to rebut robert’s criticism of her in ep. 2 by claiming that he’s “no real hero”; mandy confides in robert about how tired she is of the “Blonder Blazer” identity, saying that people see the hero before mandy; flambae refers to mecha man as a “real, actual hero” (really interesting considering how fast he called out mecha man in the superhero bar. . .); and there is a continuous choice in terminology when it comes to royd and robert’s conversations in “making the man mecha”.

there is a consistent theme of attempting to be a REAL hero— and the utterly crushing toll it takes when finally achieved. people don’t care that you’re a hero, they don’t care how well or long you’ve been doing your job, they will only watch and stare at you for doing what is considered the minimum. it only matters when you slip. one of the strangest writing choices in my opinion (and I think a lot of people share the same sentiment) was robert being forced to cut someone. I remember distinctly getting to that part of the game, hearing blonde blazer say it’s to “raise the bar” and being so utterly confused?? like, gee whiz what an easy way to make your team hate you. and the fact it happens so early in the game as well? you barely know this team. you don’t know a lot about the team members, none of their motives, stories, etc. you are essentially taking a complete stranger and deciding to cut them off from their support network, friends, and job.

and I do think the game understands this— when cut, sonar/coop both go to red ring, which while sounding extremely banal, does make sense when you think about it. they have no other place to go to besides the phoenix program. with criminal records like that, they won’t find any work other than that of crime. as I stated before, you basically strip everything they had from them when you cut them from the team. where else are they to go?

invisigal plays a HUGE role in this convo as well. we know that she is probably newest to the program, compared to the other z-team members who are all extremely comfortable with each other (blonde blazer saying she “sees a lot of potential in invisigal”, meaning she couldn’t have been in the program for that long); she’s the rowdiest, insubordinate, and generally a wildcard. she’s impulsive and reckless and extremely immature. these are likely the traits the player likely gets from her first impression, and that’s why her argument with robert was so confusing to me when i first watched it. why is this defiant, arguably least hero-like hero out of the whole z-team trying to define what it means to be a hero, and to mecha man of all people? and not even to mention that this convo comes right after invisigal’s failed attempt at capturing thunderstruck, ending with an injured civilian.

and I think it’s all really just a heady dose of projection. invisigal understands the standard on what it means to be a hero because she’s always trying to hold herself to it. it’s very explicitly stated that invisigal WANTS to be a hero, she wants to be good. she is always holding herself to the framework of being a hero, and yet it is so unattainable for her. to not just be one, but to look like one; she patently states that she isn’t like blazer in the manner of which she can effortlessly be a hero, but that invisigal innately has “villain powers”. she is destined to be evil, because she doesn’t have the look, or the powers, or the destiny that allows heroism within the life that was bestowed upon her. that she’ll never be viewed as anything more than vermin, an average villain.

except that’s EXACTLY what the z-team aims to disprove, and that’s why I absolutely love them. the z-team is a fucked up group comprised of infamous, boisterous, unruly former villains, with their dishonorable lives and lewd humor. and yet they also saved the city. and yet they were able to pull together as not just a team, but the team that rescued la from a crime gang. and yet they care so very deeply for one another with their own flawed yet so very loud ways. yes, they were never the ideal group of elite saviors— they’re an insanely strange bunch of people. but they’re heroes, and they protect lives and community and their city. because they were given the chance to finally grow instead of being perceived as outcasts.

i find the way the company treats the z-team to be so interesting. this phoenix program supposedly "reforms" villains by giving them the chance to be superheroes. and yet, when it was time to cut sonar/coupe, it was obvious they genuinely do not care about their "rehabilitation". they even consider layoffs as a point of motivation for the z-team to become better at work, but their attitudes changed not because coupe was cut but rather because robert treated them better than the previous dispatchers.

the z-team genuinely do not even bolster the idea of being superheroes, too. they are not here because they want to save the day. a lot of the time, they stay because they are literally wage slaves. working class. they Remain because they need A Job. it's also a point of motivation as to why people would become a villain instead — it's the fucking money man. they need to fucking survive

which leads me to the point of — holy cow what an interesting way to present estranged/alienated labor. for those who don't know it, estranged labor is a term coined by marx describing how the things we do for work tend to be sooo divorced from our sense of self. we literally sell our time and personhood to survive, which is why working feels so exhausting or inhumane. in the case of these superheroes, they are literally alienated from the idea of being a superhero, of having powers.

and that's what the superhero agencies in dispatch get so wrong — literally incentivizing heroism through their little meritocratic system. if you grow up in great environments, then great, you still have some love for the game. but the reason why the z-team dgaf abt their rehabilitation is because of this alienation — these agencies don't care abt heroism as much as it is abt selling a business. the z-team work hard not to prove themselves but to get up the ranks and earn a wage to literally survive.

and to exacerbate this even more, whenever one of the z-team is cut or fired, the agency never blame the company or the system. rather, they make the cut person carry that blame alone. when sonar/coupe get cut, they blame them and their "lack of effort", veering away any blame for the company that literally game-ifies these employees' rehabilitation.

i think it's especially terrifying to think about the fact that the company particularly estranges these superheroes from the act of doing good. by game-ifying superhero work, they condition these employees to not gaf abt the meaning when it comes to saving this or that. so the company genuinely should receive more blame from being unable to reform the z-team, because they game-ify and commercialize committing good deeds.

which is why i think it's important that robert demanded he meet the z-team. it's implied the previous dispatchers don't rlly need to meet the team they're dispatching, which adds onto the whole theme of dehumanizing workers. the z-team trust robert not because he's just good at his job, but because he views the other superheroes as equals with smth to prove. i am particularly endeared by the scene where the team have a meeting about whether they cut visi or not, because even if i am a huge fan of visi, i think there's smth so compelling abt the fact that the z-team felt comfortable enough to exercise their bargaining rights with their dispatcher and do a collective vote. that is super rare in the real world, because workers oftentimes aren't a priority amongst the higher-ups.

so, I'd love for him to have an arc of gaining back all of the muscle mass and body fat he must've lost due being in a coma for months. if he has a sense of body dysmorphia or just some general sense of feeling disconnected from this current state of himself. that his body feels like a stranger that he woke up to after the coma. and everyone around him is always saying how he looks like a "skinny twink" now or "doesn't have it anymore" or being "washed up". or people who look at how he was before as mecha man pre-coma, reminding him of how he had a nice build and that he should get it back. as if he doesn't already know that his body has physically changed due to something awful that happened to him.

him trying so hard to get back to how he used to be, when his body was more familiar to him and not this "stranger" that he sees in the mirror. trying to get some semblance of control back by exercising and working out, but its hard because sometimes it feels like his body is against him as well.

Your dad said he’d help me build a mech if I helped him build the Astral Pulse. Just another promise he didn’t come through on.

this comic has so many contradictions with the game but the one thing that's consistent is that Robbie made promises to Eli he didn't keep. and I just KNOW Robbie is thinking about Robert here and all the times his fucking kid tried to hold him accountable for some promise he made and didn't keep.