@bluesrat hat
gesagt: On that note…your thoughts on trash Wash? I feel
awkward asking anybody about this because on one hand yes, he is a
sad puddle of a man who would benefit from kittens. But on the other,
I can’t help feeling like he seems okay with a general policy of
“I’ll feel bad about this later” and he’s pretty stingy about
who qualifies as “Not okay to shoot.”I’ll answer Wash and Locus first, then my
fics. Please blacklist “bearhc” if you’re uninterested in my
headcanons, or “long post*” if you’re just sick of scrolling.I think it is because we have seen him gone
through so many arcs, that it has kind of been established that he’s
actually really broken. But, on some level, I think the narrative of
RVB essentially is also responsible for this point of view.You’re right about this, of course.
But the thing is, with great power (ha ha)
comes great responsibility. I’ve seen it mentioned a lot in this one
particular blog I follow, and it is the idea that the person who is
the most trained generally has a lot of responsibility to do the
least harm.Wash wasn’t trained as a kid, when he acted
out against people who were tormenting him.Later, he was only trained as a corporal.
Again, he acted out against authority which was sending him and his
team to a certain death. Now, again. The authority is the one with
more responsibility. Not just to grand strategy, but also to his men.Later, he was trained as a special ops
agent. Then we know what happened.But here’s the thing. In the heat of the
moment, it is often far more necessary to act. There is no room for
hesitation. Hesitation often is deadly, so it is far more important
to act first. Not only that, one has to leave no margin for errors.
Everything has to be precise, and conscience can get in the way of
that.That is also why training often is
conditioning. Not just physical conditioning, but a conditioning of
reflexes. Mental conditioning, to keep a clear mind.HOWEVER, there is still a lot of moral
ambiguity with regards to this character even outside of combat
situations.Him shooting Donut proved your point, in a
way; Donut never harmed Wash. Wash knows the Reds and Blues are harmless, based on his encounter with them. He just shot him to show his
allegiance, and to get what he wanted.I personally love him because of it, and I
don’t think a lot of people actually understand how the ambiguity
works or how it comes from. It doesn’t necessarily make him evil.
Somebody can be selfish sometimes, and selfless in other situations. People do things that they regret, because of a lapse of judgment, or a lapse of morality.Wash is one of those characters who are complex, and in general a
tough nut to crack. That’s why he’s real to me.Think of it this way. At that point, doing
the right thing just got him into hot soup.You’ve gotten the short end of the stick all
your life. You follow your inner compass, which says that this is
wrong. You seethe, repress those emotions. Years later, they come
back. You smash the head in of the guy who’s been tormenting you.
…Because, frankly, he deserves it. Years pass. Again, you realise
that somebody who is entrusted with you and your friends’ lives is
doing something that would constitute betrayal under any normal
layman’s terms. You sock him in the face. …Finally, you have
nowhere to go. You blow that shit up because it has come to light
just how much of a traversty the whole institution is.Everything is rotten from the ground up.
Right now, it’s spring. Flowers are
finally blooming. But you wouldn’t ever see them bloom in winter,
when the ground is frozen over. That’s Wash’s background. He’s not
inherently a bad person, but everything that he has been through
tells him that he shouldn’t ever give a shit about anybody but
himself anymore. That he should just blindly follow orders, and it
doesn’t matter what atrocities he had to do to achieve those orders.Because, look what happened the last time he did the right
thing. He got sent to jail.At the same time, that is also my personal
interpretation. This brings me to the final point. We have seen him
redeem himself to the Reds and Blues by stepping into Church’s role.
He’s helped to train an entire army against the Mercs. He’s helped to
blow up Project Freelancer.If his character was undeveloped, and if he
wasn’t put on the side of the protagonists, would he be put on the
pedestal that I’ve often seen him put on? I highly doubt that.This
brings me to the final point. Yes, it is true that he has done a lot
of things, but isn’t essentially a terrible person. He has been
through a lot. But it is also how the narrative frames him. There are
all sorts of possibilities. There are so many turning points in which
Wash’s character could have taken a worse turn. One of them is
undoubtedly the part where Caboose takes in Washington as Church’s
replacement, and both Caboose and Sarge convince him that he could
trust again. That he has it in him to trust again.(…Now I have Sargington/Caboosington
feels. @rootbeerflotsam please let there be sargington)
For me, Wash’s morality seems to be very oriented toward loyalty to individuals. I don’t know if it was always that way. He’s had a lot of chances to learn not to trust systems, and by the time of Freelancer I don’t know whether it was the UNSC he was putting his faith in, or the Director and his team.
At any rate, by this point he seems to have narrowed down his circle of care and trust to…these guys, basically. Dumb enough to be trusted, and bizarrely lucky enough not to get themselves killed in all the idiocy they keep dealing with.
I just get the strong impression he’s ready to let the rest of the universe go fuck itself. Everything he’s tried–right thing, wrong thing, leading, following–all of it has been screwed. All his trying has never given him anything but pain, and now all he wants is to be left alone in this little corner with this small group of people. And if you mess with them, then he’ll come at you like a cornered dog. But otherwise, you’re just not his problem. And if he does make the effort to reach out–probably because his team decided to first–then he’ll give you one chance. If you fuck him or his over, then he writes you off. He was even ready to do that to Church and Carolina.
He’s one of those people that ‘good’ and ‘bad’ falls through for, I think, because it really depends on how you define them. He’s nobody’s hero; he’s learned that the hard way. And is it good or bad when you’re willing to go as far as you need to in order to protect your people?
He says he’s trying to be better, and I think he is. But if he had to stone-cold murder someone to protect his team, I’m pretty sure he’d do it and only feel kinda bad about it afterwards. Certainly not to the point where he’d go back and change it if he could.
One thing about Wash, though, is that he owns his shit. Locus is a great foil for him, because in the past, Wash seems to have had a Locus-like streak of, “My only job is to follow orders.” In Freelancer, he kept asking the right questions, but not even really looking for the answers. But unlike Locus, he got driven face-first into the reality of the consequences. And so when he and Locus look at each other, it’s kind of like seeing alternate universe versions of themselves. It makes me wish we had more of the two of them interacting.
(Bringing it back to the subject of trash, it also makes me ship them, because terribleness is how I roll.)
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