As I sat down ready to re-watch the first episode of Red vs Blue I was hit with a wave of nostalgia. The show was a huge part of my childhood and I hadn’t watched the show in a while (since season 15). So instead of just watching episode one, I opened Netflix and decided to watch the entire first season (and maybe a little bit of the second). However, through this watch through I was not alone. My blast of nostalgia and all the funny moments from the show that i remembered led me to invite a friend who had never seen the show. I was excited to see her reactions to all the hilarious moments that the crew got into and the rich story that grows as you watch more. Well.... she quit three episodes in.
The rose colored glasses quickly came off when I had to show the show to someone. The once funny jokes were now very cringy due to their misogynistic punchlines, the characters that were once deep characters were instead just unfunny cardboard cutouts of the characters i remembered with none of the nuance nor emotional investment that I remembered. The show that essentially built my teenage humor was no longer the same show, instead it pushed away a new viewer that couldn't get past the flat writing.
However, I couldn't just leave my good memories to rot and instead after she left proceeded to watch more of the show, and even jumped to a later season to see if the rest of the show had also aged poorly. And while yes some jokes did not land in the context of today's society, I'm happy to at least say the show that I remembered was still there. The rich lore about the freelancers and the simulation troopers, the character growth between the reds and blues, and the amusing situations that lead to chaos were all still there. They were just hidden behind a very outdated first season. The machinima got better, in the sense that the shots used became more cinematic, the cgi used started to look more and more like a movie and less like Photoshop (I'm looking at you “switch” in season 1/2 ) but most of all the writing moved away from strictly “gamer” jokes and instead opened the door for more nuanced messages, about self discover, friendship, responsibility, love, and most of all why we should never created AI.
I guess i'm writing this as a response to those who were potentially turned off by the series first episodes. Red vs Blue is worth your time investing in even if it starts off rough. The shows grows and starts to look at serious issues though a comedic lens that might not always be focused on. And hey, if you could get through the first season of Parks and Rec, then you can make it to season 3 Red vs Blue, where the narrative becomes a story worth showing your friends and family.
Red and Blue reflected gaming culture at the time which was (and in my opinion still is) deeply misogynistic, but I don't think we should discredit the show entirely. I don't think it's just nostalgia talking when I say I genuinely liked the show, and I enjoyed the machinima art style of creating stories out of video game clips. I don't know why that viewing experience worked so well for me but it did, I liked how they turned something like multiplayer halo from an open-ended game into a strict narrative. It was creative, cool, and probably increased the appeal of halo (and video games in general). Of course it's still important to note the problematic parts of the game,…
I honestly felt the opposite. Red vs. Blue seemed unfunny and shallow when I first watched it, but I really enjoyed it last week. I felt like the things that may have come off as misogynistic were social critiques. The pink armor, bad-ass Tex, and other elements seemed to be lampooning normative masculinity. I also think I remember that the Rooster Teeth people were pretty vocal during Gamergate.
I also loved watching red vs blue growing up and can relate a lot to this. For me, a lot of the joy came out of watching voiceovers of characters from my favorite videogame franchise, Halo. RvB even would have special episodes when new Halo games would come out, as they would be "transferred to a new base" and similar chaos would ensue. Machinima in general is so entertaining because of not only how it can expand the lore of a videogame by creating "fan-fiction" style characters in the canon, but also from taking main characters and completely upending their personality. For example, Arby n the Chief is another machinima series on Youtube which puts a middle schooler mind in…
I'm really glad that the season has more depth in the third season because I also thought it was a little flat and un-engaging. One thing that you mentioned that really stood out to me, however, is that you stated how the cinematic shots in the later episodes made the machinima better. This stood out to me because it made me think about the differences of the mediums of film, video games, art-games, and art films. "Cinematic" is often a term used in traditional films and in narrative cut scenes of video games. However, machinima is a term used more in the "art" realm. This art realm often times breaks thew standard conventions of traditional film or game making that…
I can quite easily connect with your thoughts on this show and my own experiences with my past childhood memories of television. Shows I once loved are now simply empty without any sort of quality other than silly child-oriented content. However, this may be due to the expansion of my own mind and what I find to be a high-quality show based on many different factors, some of which could stem from the topics I have learned from this course that hide deeper meaning through a medium that may cause some people to not notice its greater implications.