@voiceofdoomcalling asked for my thought-dump on Soldier: 76 and why he’s so messed up, and shall receive.
Jack is just so BURNED by it all. I mean check out his Watchpoint: Gibraltar lines:
- “Lot of memories of this place. They weren’t all bad.”
- “Bring back Overwatch. What’s the point?”
- “Would have been better to let this all go…”
He’s done with Overwatch. He worked for it for so long, fought tooth and nail for it even when it was going down in flames, and it cost him Ana and Gabriel, his own reputation, and if it hadn’t been for the HQ explosion, it might’ve cost him his freedom. From the few specifics we have on the nature of the leaks, it sounds like they included war crimes and violations of military law, meaning he (and probably Gabriel and a number of others) would have faced court martial.
(Have a cut for length.)
But here’s the thing about the leaks: they were true! It wasn’t a false smear campaign. That stuff got leaked to the press, and then they investigated and discovered the accusations were well-founded. And Jack, the golden boy who’d stood atop it all for years, of course he was burned down along with his organization. Whomever was actually carrying all that stuff out, he was in charge and it was his responsibility to be aware and to deal with it.
And who knows? Maybe he did know. I have a hard time imagining that he could’ve been in any way an effective commander and have been utterly oblivious of that much questionable activity going on under his nose for so long. I mean, I’m pretty sure he didn’t know about ALL of it, but some?
The jury is out for me on that, but even if he did know, I don’t necessarily consider it a blanket condemnation of his character. The problem is that Jack was a soldier, not a superhero. He was trained as a soldier, thought like one. When it came to issues of world peace and stability, he would have tackled them as a soldier. If he believed that kidnapping or assassinating a single figure that HE KNEW was an active war criminal even if he couldn’t fork over the evidence on paper to prove it…would it have been beyond understanding if he’d done it?
We already have Ana talking about the dissonance between being a good person who wants to preserve life, and having to become a killer in order to do so most effectively. While it’s a particularly pertinent issue for a sniper, she can’t have been the only one of them to feel it.
“We’ve all got it coming” is one of his voice lines. He’s clearly carrying some guilt, whether it’s over the things he did as a soldier, the things he did as leader of Overwatch, or the things he failed to stop.
But whether targeted killing and covert manipulation of world affairs are the best, least lethal options for a peacekeeping military force or not, they’re not heroic. The world wanted them to be heroes, and whatever was going on beneath the surface, Jack seems to have done his level best to present himself and Overwatch in the image the world wanted.
The image the world needed, really. When the world came out of the Omnic Crisis, it must have been in a shambles. Maybe civilization was literally in tatters, with supply chains disrupted and shortages of food and fresh water and health care; or maybe it was just catastrophic social unrest, as humans as a species turned against the new sentient race they’d created to share the world with them and began to destroy them out of fear.
Either way, the world must have been a wreck, and people were terrified. They needed hope, they needed to
believe that things could be better, that someone was out there who had things under control. And Jack–regardless of anything else, this is the best and most important thing he ever did, and the reason I think he earned his position no matter what else happened–Jack worked to make people believe that they themselves could be better. That each person had it in them to be a hero and leave the world better than they found it. We’re told he led Overwatch to inspire an entire generation of people around the world.
But that must have come at a massive personal sacrifice. In the media materials, other characters
talk about how Jack was their moral compass, how he was the biggest hero
in a whole lineup of heroes.
Imagine trying to live up to that, in a
world even more saturated with media and connectivity than we are
today. Imagine having to live almost every moment of every day in this
persona that’s been created for you–because the world needs it.
And that sets up the dichotomy that ripped him and Overwatch apart. If you present yourself as a hero and then act as something else (whether Jack did so personally or just the organization as a whole, whether he even knew just what a big lie it was), eventually that’s going to come out, and when it does, all hell will inevitably break loose.
In their voice lines, Gabriel chews Jack out for playing Boy Scout. Jack himself says he’s ‘not playing by the rules anymore.’ This seems to imply that he tried to before, so hard and for so long that it became a point of contention. I can imagine Jack and Gabriel’s falling out being driven partly by this: Jack trying too hard to be perfect, to make Overwatch perfect, to live up to an ideal it could never reach and that perhaps actually handicapped its effectiveness. I can imagine them disagreeing about the most important objective: Jack arguing that what they needed most was to offer the world hope, to make people feel empowered, and Gabriel arguing that their mandate was to ACT, to preserve stability and peace. I can imagine them arguing because Gabriel always knew it would lead to what it did, with the world turning against them, and Jack arguing maybe that it didn’t have to come to that, or maybe that it would be worth it even if it did.
Jack definitely feels betrayed. In his Origins short, Jack talks about Overwatch being brought down by its enemies, from both within and without. It also seems likely that some of the things that came out, the command team HADN’T known about, because Mercy and Jack both say that Overwatch is better off gone, and we have Gabriel going on a revenge bender, either to keep it down or at least to take out the people he considers responsible. If any of them had known about ALL if it all along, then presumably they wouldn’t have such a problem with it now.
And I have no doubt that Jack contributed enough of his own bad calls to
help things along (the cold truth of leadership is that you WILL screw
up sometimes, and you and everyone you lead will have to live with the
consequences).
But maybe not everything he did was a bad call. Maybe some of it was altruistic, knowing that it was what the world needed even if it would cost him and the people who answered to him. And if he put that much of himself and everything he worked for on the line, only to have everything he’d worked for twisted and corrupted out from under him…can you imagine how much that has to hurt?
I’m sure it’s not just him, either. Mercy seems to feel it, too. Reinhardt’s big heart seems to ache because he STILL believes in everything they fought for, even though the way it came out did so much damage. I like to think Gabriel’s long burn comes from the same place. But Jack is where the buck stopped.
So you could see this whole ‘grizzled old soldier’ approach as an utter retreat from any trace of the heroic persona of Jack Morrison–maybe even a traumatized one, because trying to do the right thing for so long, trying to be the hero the world wanted him to be, burned him so badly. To him, it didn’t work, it played into destroying everything and everyone he cared about, AND it hobbled him from preventing what eventually happened. So now he’ll just be a soldier, no one important (which is probably a gigantic relief) except that he’s got a gun he can aim at whomever was responsible.
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/2gFtAJ5