More meta from my Twitter account, on Jack as a soldier and the symbolism of his Vietnam commando skins:
Just think about completely Jack identifies as a soldier. There’s so much there, both good and bad. He’s been doing this since he was eighteen. He’s never been anything else, never known anything else.
Like he does it because he believes what he’s doing is right, but also there are issues of indoctrination there; both military and maybe from his family background, if he comes from your conservative blue-collar flag-waving ‘rah rah USA’ midwestern kind of home. He’s not dumb. He’s clearly aware of politics and the potential for moral compromise and that kind of thing. I don’t think he has an uncritical belief that the military can do no wrong. It’s just that I wonder how much of the soldier thing is “this is what he wanted to be” and how much of it was kind of his environment deciding his path for him?
And yet he HAS made the best of it. I don’t think you can argue against that. He’s clearly tried hard to what he believed was the right thing. He helped save the world. He built basically a superhero team. Inspired an entire generation to try to be better. To stand up as heroes in their own right.
But still it feels a bit like he never got to be anything else, whether he wanted to or not, and eventually he stopped even trying. There’s no glimpse of the multiple facets you see with the other characters. Even Gabriel shows a wicked sense of humor and an artistic interest in costume design. But Jack? I mean. MAYBE golf, but that’s only assuming the whole Summer Games deal wasn’t just a total lark. He seems to have made soldiering and Overwatch his entire identity.
SO HOW ABOUT THOSE COMMANDO SKINS.
Okay so those skins are specifically VIETNAM COMMANDO skins. That’s when Army Special Forces was founded. And there are a few things about the Vietnam War.
1: It resulted in lots of broadly heroic yet melancholy war movies about personal sacrifice & loss for the greater good and/or FOR YOUR BROTHERS. Because let’s be clear about a thing regarding the Army: your #1 loyalty above all is to your brothers. Sisters. Teammates. Over god, country, or even your commanders. That whole ‘band of brothers’ deal, that’s where a lot of the drama comes from in those movies, and it’s not just Hollywood theatrics.
2: Infamously, the vets who came back from the Vietnam War were essentially cast out of US society.
They went and fought a war for their country, because they were told to. A lot of them were drafted. And when they came back, they got spit on. THEY DIDN’T WANT TO BE THERE EITHER, but they were the ones wearing the uniforms, and so all that hate for Vietnam as an unrighteous war got aimed right at them. All they went through, and in return many of them, those who hadn’t already t given their lives, lost their sanity, health and every tie they had left.
I grew up in the 80s & 90s (yeah I’m dating myself), when entertainment media was saturated with a push to rehabilitate the image of those veterans. At that time, a lot of the guys who fought in the war had risen to positions of influence, and many of them used it to try to question what had happened and rehumanize Vietnam veterans as people, even heroes. Whether you want to call it propaganda or making amends, a generation of us steeped in that as cultural context. In Jack’s time, all that media would still be out there for the enjoyment of any fan of war narratives.
And we know Jack likes war narratives. More than one of his voice lines are quotes from the movie “Patton.” So he probably marinated in that stuff.
And in some ways just as importantly, if they’re around my age, then so did the game’s writers and creators. Because they’re the ones who choose the symbolism and associations for each of these characters.
So. The Vietnam War means something specific to people–at least Americans–my age. It means years of struggle against power, a generation fighting for a voice or choice in their own destiny. “Old enough to die but not old enough to vote” was one of the slogans of the time (the reason the voting age was lowered? Vietnam War). A generation of young men forced to fight and then abandoned to suffer when it was over. Who had to spend years in the aftermath working to make their own justice and healing if they wanted it. The current state of Veteran’s Affairs, of PTSD treatment, of so many other things? A RESULT of the Vietnam War. Those things weren’t there for those soldiers. To this day, a disproportionate number of the nation’s homeless and untreated mentally ill are STILL veterans, and in particular Vietnam veterans.
(I know, little of this is new or different for black people & many others. And who’s surprised that the ones who suffered most were black kids, latino kids, poor kids, and others with little recourse to start with? Fun fact: if you could go to college, you could defer the draft till graduation. And with a college degree and skills, you could try getting in as an officer or in some other less cannon foddery position. Chances were you’d still get shot at, but at least you’d have perks and maybe some protections.)
So all of this means that associating Jack with those skins–regardless of whether they’re a depiction of Jack’s own self-image or not–is Saying Something about how the creators see him, his current situation and mindset.
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/2qXzKLF