YMMV / Emesis Blue

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • The Undertaker. Secret tenth class member? Another employee under Jules' thumb? Ludwig's split personality? Some mixture of the three?
  • Are the undead mercenaries mindless killing machines just out for blood? Or do they recognize their once-enemies as BLU mercenaries and lash out at them for it?
  • When Ludwig knocks Maynard's goggles off, there are only two blank walls of flesh where his eyes would be. Further, the man doesn't fight Ludwig or even scream, only giving a bone-chilling chuckle. Another one of Ludwig's hallucinations? Or has the slaughterhouse also twisted Maynard like it did the undead mercenaries? We later learn that his younger brother Dell also has an Eyeless Face, making it more unclear.
  • Is Dell really dead and running an afterlife bar? Or is it just a Dying Dream, and his presence is just the dying mercenaries' way of coming to terms with the death of a friend, if he even is dead?
  • Soldier laying his head on Cyclops's frozen chest. Is he mourning a fallen comrade? Or just succumbing to the shock of seeing his only remaining travelling partner dead immediately after finding out about the "backup" Does?
  • Blutarch's line to Murnau during Archibald's funeral: "Did you kill him? [...] Did you kill the bastard or not?". Was he genuinely asking about what happened to the suspected murderer? Or was he aware of Murnau's lies, and was subtly accusing him?
  • Assuming that in the ending Ludwig really is in the afterlife, Archibald smiling after seeing Ludwig seems odd. Has him being in the afterlife softened him up, or is he simply just smug that he’s also dead along side him?
• Alternative Joke Interpretation: Stalingrad and Murnau get into a fight, with the latter beaten to an inch of his life. When Doe shoots Stalingrad and Murnau chews him for killing their lead, the response is "Oh, so you were just...talking?". Is the joke that the Soldier is genuinely asking if Murnau was talking with him? Or is the joke that the Soldier was being sarcastic, recognizing that shooting Stalingrad was the only way and questioning why the inspector isn't happy about being saved from death?
• Complete Monster: Jules Archibald, the Governor of New Mexico and the head of the Jules Archibald Foundation, is responsible for most of the suffering in this story. Prolonging the Gravel War for as long as possible just for the sake of profit, Jules experimented on countless death row inmates in order to perfect his Respawn Machine, leading to only 9 mercenaries surviving, with the possibly side effects of the machine causing disgusting malformations to the subjects which drives them insane and, at best, traps them in an long agonizing state until they can respawn again, with the effects so bad the tenth class commits suicide. After perfecting the respawn machine, Jules sells the machines to both of the Mann Brothers without their knowledge while using the hundreds of thousands of corpses to donate organs to the brothers to keep them alive for as long as possible, while hiring Jacques Morneau to cover up his crimes and kill anyone he needs.
• Crosses the Line Twice:
  • The Smoker's scorched body lying in hospital would be disturbing...if not for the fact that he's still smoking that cigarette.
  • During a phone call, Archibald reveals to Blutarch that the facility is filled to the brim with corpses thanks to the Respawn Machine trials, in the numbers of thousands. This revelation would be horrific were it not for the fact he does so as an off-hand mention while casually offering to sell their organs to Blutarch, listing off the different organs available like he's a door-to-door salesman. It becomes even funnier when Blutarch excitedly asks for "one of each".
• Harsher in Hindsight: Twofold with one of the first things Doe tells Cyclops: "I've already lost one man, I'm not gonna lose another." Not only is he proven wrong when he gets separated from Cyclops and finds his frozen corpse in the cryogenics lab, but finds out that the man he "lost", Jacques, had him killed and cloned just to have a personal assistant, and then later forces him to go along with framing Ludwig as Archibald's killer.
• Memetic Mutation: Many of the jokes from the community revolve around the little in-jokes that have to do with the film's setting:
  • 2FORT IS A TERRIBLE MAP ^ExplanationReferring to this image◊ claiming that everyone interpreting the film as a psychological horror story misses the point and that the movie is instead about how bad 2Fort is, since the Conagher Slaughterhouse is where most of the movie takes place, and is implied to have been 2Fort prior to its takeover.
  • The psychopathic nature of Conagher brothers and the location of their encounter with Ludwig is often joked as being a reference to how Engineers tend to camp in that spot in 2Fort.
  • The references to how the time between dying and respawning "feeling like an eternity" is often seen as a jab at 2Fort's respawn times.
• Narm Charm: Murnau's insistence on smoking even after he had his whole body severely burned is borderline comical, but it also illustrates how deeply unhinged he has become at that point. The cigarette's flame also casts an eerie red light onto his face, making his already gruesome appearance even more sinister.
• Signature Scene: The scene where Jeremy's mom decapitated head is looking at him from a corner. It is considered one of the most disturbing parts of the film, being the most played part on it, it was used on the trailer, and it has been even parodied.
• Spiritual Successor: The film is essentially one to fellow Team Fortress 2 fan work Respawn of the Dead, as it tackles the same subject matters of respawning and the undead, while retaining the Medic's status as a central character.
• Tear Jerker:
  • Doe, right after discovering he's one of several clones of himself, finds Cyclops frozen to death in the cryogenics lab. All Jane can do is crawl up to his corpse and slump defeatedly on his chest.
  • Medic and Scout reuniting at Dell's bar in the ending is this no matter how you interpret the nature of it: If it's all a Dying Dream, then it seems like getting to see Scout one last time bought him peace in his final moments, and if you believe that Dell's is an Afterlife Antechamber, then Medic and Scout have finally been freed of the madness and death that had plagued them for so many years and are now able to rest for good. This is assuming that Medic's Resurrective Immortality hasn't kicked in.
• The Woobie:
  • Poor Scout. He starts the story having lost his job after getting in a "work accident" that left him mentally disabled...and then he and his mother are attacked in their home, with him being kidnapped and his mother viciously murdered. He learns that his best friend was complicit in the accident that crippled him before being chained up in a coffin, and when he's finally rescued, it's by said "friend". Then his captors catch him while he's trying to escape, and he's tortured to death with an electric drill. Finally, he ends up getting liquefied after said friend's attempt to revive him goes horribly wrong.
  • Soldier gets hit hard as well, being a war veteran who is heavily implied to have PTSD and is frequently belittled and demeaned by Murnau while helping him find Archibald and get to the Slaughterhouse. While inside the Slaughterhouse, he ends up being chased by the undead monstrosities, getting separated from Murnau and befriending the sole surviving RED mercenary Cyclops in the process, only to be confronted with the hard fact that he is nothing but a clone of the real Jane Doe (who was executed by the state) and finding the dead body of Cyclops soon after. In the end, he's forced to help cover up the corrupt Archibald's crimes and is later branded as an assassin.

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