Some headcanons for your entertainment about Jack and Gabriel and Overwatch.
Basically it’s what stuff from the game and media implies if Overwatch military works like it does in the real world. Not that Blizzard always cares about how things work in the real world, so this isn’t necessarily true (and also I’m assuming things don’t change too much for the US Armed Forces in the next 50 years). But hopefully it’s at least interesting.
First, have you noticed Blizzard’s been vague about what branches of the military
Reyes and Morrison started in? But they went through the ‘Soldier Enhancement Program.’ In the real-world US military, only Army
personnel are properly called ‘soldiers.’ Any member of the other US Armed Forces will get pissed off if you call them that. So I’m starting with the theory that they were Army.
BUT HEY, maybe the SEP was open to personnel from all the branches.
In which case they could have been from different branches. Jack’s honestly so Army it hurts, but imagine if Gabriel was, like, a Navy SEAL before he signed on for the SEP.
Gabriel Reyes: It isn’t explicitly stated anywhere that I’ve seen, but there are a bunch of clues that Gabriel was career military. (One of these is that Jack is specifically stated as NOT having planned to be career military, which is something I’ve never seen anybody include in a background unless it’s for a reason.)
This is so long, I’m sorry, I hope it’s at least a good read.
Gabriel’s profile stuff says he reached a ‘senior officer’ position in the US military before he joined Overwatch.
(Then again it also says he achieved a coveted ‘veteran’ status, which in reality means ‘someone who served in the military,’ so whatever.)
In the real world, ‘senior officer’ is military speak for ‘holding the rank of major or above.’
Major is a high rank! Typically they command combat groups numbering from 80 to 300 people, depending on their purpose. He would have had to make strategic and tactical decisions for his units, dealt with personnel, logistics and management issues, and at that rank he would’ve been sucked into military politics whether he liked it or not–especially if he was a career soldier looking to continue to rise in rank.
I’m gonna say he was a major at the point he joined Overwatch, because did you know that ranks in the US Army have a service length component? It’s not always 100% followed, but typically, achieving the rank of Major takes about 10 years of service. If Gabriel’s mid/late 50s now, he would’ve been mid/late 20s then. If Gabriel put in 10 years of service before reaching major, that’d mean he signed up before he was legally able to do so, so we can reasonably assume that he did some badass stuff to advance faster. AND ALSO he almost certainly spent a lot of time in active combat, which is usually how you advance through the ranks a lot faster than average. (Which does beg the question of what wars the US was fighting in those days, but anyway.)
Being ranked higher than major would really be stretching it, and we’ll just pretend Blizzard doesn’t play fast and loose with characters’ ages all the time. But if anybody’s interested, next one up is Lt. Colonel and then full Colonel.
Anyway, as a corollary this means Gabriel almost certainly started as a commissioned officer. This can happen in four different ways, but given how young he must have started, two seem likely: either he did ROTC (which means he graduated college, BTW) or he went to West Point (which also means he graduated college; in fact these days you have to have a college degree to be an officer no matter how you do it).
I’m betting on West Point because the prestige and training of West Point propel an officer’s career faster and farther. It’s a way to get access to an incredible education and opportunities, nearly for free–if you’re good enough to make it in and endure the make-or-break-you training and discipline. An ambitious, talented young man aiming for a military career would absolutely go for it, especially if his family didn’t have much money.
The other thing about West Point and its extensive officer training: all leadership does not come equal. It would mean Gabriel had especially extensive training and experience in military
history, tactics and strategy. He would have studied the great battles of
history and how to win them. He’d have learned all kinds of things that
somebody who hasn’t been through that background just won’t know. ROTC or Officer’s Candidate School are just not the same amount of immersion or time invested.
One more thing is that I’d bet Gabriel was some kind of special ops before Overwatch. In the Army the main ones are Army Rangers, Special Forces (aka Green Berets) and (if you want to go whole hog) Delta Force. I’d imagine they took the best of the best for the SEP, which would be those guys. Also since he later got put in command of a black ops operation, he almost certainly had prior experience. Plus these guys are ridiculously badass, and that’s fun to write about. Check out the qualification courses:
Army Ranger School | Special Forces Q Course (You can’t find much on Delta Force, because it’s basically the Army version of the CIA.) If you like insanely competent Gabriel (and who doesn’t?), make him ex-Special Forces and check out the incredible things they learn how to do.
So this all adds up to Gabriel being an appropriate rank, with the right background and experience, to
head up an international strike team of the world’s best military
personnel in order to save the world from the omnic threat. If you
have a super-special ops strike force that you need to get it done, you
put a guy like Gabriel Reyes in charge–someone with not only the will
to win at any cost, but also the training and education to lead and win
specifically in combat.
Jack Morrison: We’re specifically told that Jack did not initially intend to be career military. They say he went in at the age of 18 with the intention to ‘serve a brief stint.’
Now that’s weird phrasing, because if you want straight into the military these days, what you do is enlist (officers have to have college degrees). Sure, a farmboy might do that–free career training, a few years to see the world and get adulted whether he likes it or not–but that’d push his promotion over Gabriel from ‘hm’ to ‘WTF is even happening.’
But we’ll keep pretending Blizzard cares, and imagine that Jack went in through ROTC, which is a common path for adventurous kids who want tuition assistance,
a few years to see the world and get adulted roughly. In college, ROTC works like a club. You get your college degree (yay, Army scholarships) and on the side they give you military training. It’s not West Point, but it’s not easy. I had friends in ROTC and they got their asses kicked by it on a regular basis (and came back with stories about learning to shoot machine guns and getting lost in the woods all weekend while being hunted by the opposing capture the flag team). When you graduate, you start your service as a shiny new baby 2nd Lieutenant.
Obviously, somewhere along the way, Jack changed his mind about that ‘short stint’–presumably some time before he committed to letting Uncle Sam genetically re-engineer him. And I’m thinking that he, too, went into special ops. Four reasons:
1: I seem to recall that he and Gabriel knew each other before the SEP, and this would be a good way for them to meet.
2: Jack seems like the kind of guy who never met a challenge he didn’t like. You wave a qualification course in front of him and tell him it’s nearly impossible, and he’ll do it just to see if he can.
3: As Soldier: 76, he’s really good at operating independently, which is a skill set the average soldier doesn’t learn so much but that they teach in Special Forces.
4: The Soldier Enhancement Program was probably a thing that happened under
US Special Operations Command (SOCOM), so it’d make sense that they looked for recruits to it from among the existing special operations groups (Rangers, Green Berets, maybe SEALS if they went outside Army, etc.)
Bonus: It’s incredibly badass for those of us who have a competency kink. *cough*
So Gabriel and Jack go into the SEP. They come out and now humanity is facing imminent doom at the hands of the omnics. They go into Overwatch (I don’t recall offhand if it says so anywhere, but I can only imagine the whole team was hand-picked). Gabriel is a hardass who Gets Things Done, and that’s a good thing in this scenario. Blizzard keeps giving us photographs of everybody being happy together, so apparently nobody has major complaints about his approach, and besides, the fate of the world is at stake. A ruthless hardass is EXACTLY who you want in charge at that point. Let’s be honest: nobody signed up for that job with the aim to survive. They were there to save everybody else.
Then there’s the whole “Morrison really made the team come together and shine.” You know, he probably did. Hardasses Who Get Things Done are typically not the group people person. But that’s fine, because it’s actually a pretty great way for a command team to pair off, if they work well together and communicate well. For a high-performance team, you want somebody who looks out for the wellness of the members and does the whole ‘wind beneath your wings’ thing to really get the best out of them and keep morale up, but that doesn’t have to be (solely) the team leader, as long as you can trust the team leader to listen to concerns when they’re brought to him. (And just think of those two working that closely and trusting each other so much that Jack just pops up to whisper in Gabriel’s ear when there’s a problem and Gabriel takes care of it.)
Overwatch:
This bit is just some thoughts and wild speculation. Why would the UN hand Overwatch to Jack afterwards?
Some fans say racism. Could be. I’m not sure how the fictional UN feels about American-style race politics, but since Jack and Gabriel are American, I like to think the question came up at some point. (Blizzard’s character design choices based on what we know so far are a different issue.)
Could be international political wonkery. Well. It’s the UN so there was definitely some political wonkery.
Could also be that there was corruption and conspiracy, and this was one of the early plays in a long game. Maybe they were worried that Reyes would have too much influence due to his Big Damn Hero status. Maybe they thought Jack would be easier to control (oops, probably). Maybe some secret bad guy had already identified those two together as a Big Damn Problem and began laying the groundwork to eventually break them up.
It could be due to actual nuanced reasoning. It’s true that the guy you want to stave off imminent destruction is not necessarily the same person you want for a longer-term, calmer, more peacekeeping-oriented initiative. Also true is that the UN has enough problems with over-militarizing their ‘peacemaking’ operations. If Reyes’s approach was very militaristic (which we’re told it basically was), it’d be reasonable if they worried that’d actually work against him and he’d take too combative an approach.
Or PR concerns, if they picked Gabriel initially for that great special ops record, but then later they worried that it would reflect badly on the organization if the media got wind of it. (And/or if they picked Jack as a poster boy.)
IDK, I really wish we knew a bit more about Blackwatch and how, why and by whom it was formed. That’d help.
God, this is so long. But hey, in case anybody wants to have fun with it!
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/2biFVAZ