Since I did a longass meta on Jack, I want to do one on Gabriel now.
The thing I’ve been thinking about him is that to figure him out, you really need to take his history in the military into account.
Like, okay. At the point we meet him, we can’t really argue that he isn’t bad news. Revenge quest aside, he’s working as a professional killer for hire and is willing to take jobs from a known terrorist organization of which he was previously an enemy.
But you need to think about where he came from. Gabriel was in black ops. Since he was chosen to lead the first Overwatch task force, he was probably in black ops before he ever joined the SEP. And the thing about the military in general, but particularly work like that, is that it doesn’t work according to civilian moral codes. Just by dint of signing up for the military, you are agreeing to be involved in activities that civilian society tends to ingrain into us as Wrong.
(Have a cut for length.)
Anyone who goes into the military has to work themselves into a new mindset compared to what they got in civilian life. This is honestly part of the point of boot camp and why it’s so grueling. There’s psychological reconditioning involved. You re-learn your loyalties and you re-learn what’s acceptable in protecting them. You learn to accept that there are times when violence, even killing, is the appropriate and needed response. You learn that your team is the highest and most immediate priority, because their survival is synonymous with your survival.
So Gabriel–and everybody else on the original Overwatch strike force, because all of them were military–is starting from this point, where violence is acceptable and sometimes necessary in order to safeguard their own people and society at large.
Special operations in general, and black ops in particular, are several further steps down this road. If violence is sometimes necessary, then targeted violence may sometimes be necessary and preferable–because if you can take out a small group who are the real threat rather than have to shoot your way through an army of guys who’re just fighting for their own people, that’s preferable, right? If targeted violence is preferable because it can save lives and contain damage, then what’s the difference between that and other questionable actions you perform along the way?
One of the things the Army Special Forces (aka Green Berets) do in the real world is, they go to other countries and train the people in militias and rebellions there in how to kill and wage war. That’s one of the things they’ll admit to. Stuff that might fall under black ops is
supplying those people with guns (this is known as ‘arms proliferation’ and is illegal but it’s a matter of history that the US military has done it). Capture and interrogation of strategically significant enemies (with a side of torture). Assassination. Invading areas where they are not publicly authorized to operate (check out Cambodia during the Vietnam War). All kinds of stuff ranging from ‘so strategically sensitive we’ll lie to your face about it’ to ‘we’d be burned at the stake if anybody could prove we’d authorized this.’
And this is the kind of work we can figure Gabriel did when he was one of the ‘good guys’ with the US Armed Forces (and presumably, later Blackwatch).
But why do guys agree to sign up for this stuff? Each of them has to find their own reasons.
They’re not necessarily bad people.
Some of them might think that someone has to do the dirty work to keep the world safe and stable, so it might as well be them. Some of them like the challenge. Some of them are convinced they’re the ‘good guys’ and so whatever they do is right by definition. We don’t know Gabriel’s personal motivations for sure, but we know that he CARES. You don’t fuel a masked multi-year revenge bender on apathy. And the fact that he stuck around Overwatch for all those years before he ever made his move implies that either that he didn’t see something that required that sort of reaction till the end, or else that he spent a lot of time looking for less extreme methods of fixing whatever he thought was going wrong before he went for general mutiny.
So after Overwatch goes down, Gabriel goes off and becomes a masked mercenary. Well, now he’s killing people for money, rather than for duty and country. But as far as we know, he’s not killing civilians. He’s killing other people who put themselves out there as armed targets on the battlefield. It’s still seedy, but there’s an implied agreement there, when you walk into a conflict zone with a weapon, that you are willing to accept the potential consequences that go with it.
But he’s also doing it because he’s still got a cause–whatever it is, exactly. We’ve got hints that maybe he feels personally wronged. Or maybe, like Jack, he wants justice for what happened and he thinks he’s the only person who can get it. Whatever he’s after, he’s walking a nasty path to get it, there’s no denying that. But when you’re thinking about him as a character, it’s important to remember that a lot of that moral compromise happened a long time ago, back when he was squarely one of the ‘good guys.’ He didn’t suddenly flip into villain mode and throw away everything he’d believed in. This–at least most of this–is who he’s been for a good 30 years or more, even back when he was a friend and leader to many of the other characters. He’s always been a man willing to do some terrible things for what he believed were the right reasons.
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/2fGcoWL