YMMV / Red vs. Blue: The Project Freelancer Saga

• Complete Monster: See here.

Season 9

• Broken Base: Some fans enjoy the Freelancer segments and Monty Oum's animation, while others prefer the more lighthearted moments set in Blood Gulch. Again others love the abrupt switches between the hyper competent Freelancers and the horribly incompetent Reds and Blues.

• Harsher in Hindsight: All of Wash's interactions with the Meta have to be seen in a different light now since the Season 9 trailer revealed that both he and Maine used to be friends.
  • The trailer's contents make their interactions throughout The Recollection HURT. With its focus on urgently getting Maine medical attention following the failed mission that turned him mute, Wash is seen hot on the medical team's heels, becoming frustrated when they wouldn't allow him into the operating theater, followed by him standing to watch from the observation window as the surgeons start their work.
    Wash: Come on, buddy, hang in there.
  • While the Season 9 trailer has since been declared non-canon, they still do get moments that hint at some level of friendship, such as Maine showing his newly acquired Brute Shot off to Wash, in which he responds with a nod and a very approving "It's a good look". When questioned by York upon seeing him check into medbay, Wash tells him that "[Maine]'s been having a lot of headaches lately", hinting that he knew to some degree of the developing issues surrounding Sigma's implantation.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The transition from the Epsilon capsule to the real world happens with a giant Caboose head showing up in the sky. Then when the series was added to the Rooster Teeth Animation YouTube channel, one of the post-episode bumpers is Caboose going "OH MY GOD! A GIANT PERSON!"
  • During the mission at the cryogenics facility, North spots two heat sigs heading towards South, only for her to turn around and find it's just some guy carrying two coffee cups. Funny enough on its own, but then comes The Shisno Paradox: Namely, when it's revealed why he had those cups. Because Caboose ran into him and asked for some coffee. Meaning the only reason he was even going there, the reason the entire fight happened in the first place, was because of Caboose. It's even funnier when thinking of that guy's perspective: He just runs into some blue armored idiot asking for coffee, actually gets it for him, then finds a woman in a similar suit of armor pointing a gun at him. One can only imagine how confused this chain of events made him.
• Ho Yay: Church "hitting on" Caboose in Episode 7.
  Caboose: I've been preparing for this role my whole life.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: Half the season is a retread of the first season, with several jokes and plot points from the first season, and none of the Character Development the cast has gone through. Might be an Invoked Trope, since Church's experiences in the memory unit lead him to realize that he needs to let go of the past.
• Jerkass Woobie: Church's memory of Simmons is slowly turning into this, having more emotional hang ups and inferiority complex issues than the real Simmons.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Like with Revelations, a good deal of fans don't like the fast-paced, dramatic CGI parts and prefer the in-engine moments that are more like the old days. May be leading to a Broken Base, as there are people who like the story of the freelancers better, and feel like the time spent in the Epsilon Unit is retreading on old ground and taking up space that could be used for more character development.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • The portion with the Blood Gulch characters ends rather abruptly.
  • Not to mention the initial parts of the Reds all having the wrong personality is quickly forgotten, or at least resolved quickly.
  • In retrospect, the Blood Gulch plot has been criticized for being a screen time drag given how compressed 10 feels in comparison. Church's adventures looking for Tex just aren't strong enough a plot to carry the entire season, leaving some fans wishing that they'd been relegated to a miniseries like Recovery One or Out of Mind while the machinima segments instead focused on Carolina working with the Reds and Blues to rescue Church.
• Trapped by Mountain Lions: The plot with the Blood Gulch characters feels like the same kind of plot we were given in the Blood Gulch Chronicles. This feels completely unconnected to the more serious, action and drama focused plot with the Freelancers. The two plots do however manage to connect by the end when it leads to Church realizing he needs to let go of the past, and actually does connect with the Freelancer plot with The Reveal that Carolina is alive.

Season 10

• Abandon Shipping: During Seasons 9 and 10, Agent Carolina had three major pairings associated with her: York/Carolina (which was somewhat canon), Director/Carolina, and Tex/Carolina. The last episode of Season 10 reveals that the Director is her father, and thus Tex is an AI based on her father's memory of her mother. A mass exodus from both those ships ensued.
• Awesome Music: Jeff Williams continues to impress, this season. One of his best, named "Fragments" which plays during Tex's massacre of the project mooks, captures both the tremendous rage Tex carries with her, and what every agent and AI fragment of Project Freelancer eventually boils down to in time.
• Broken Base: Wash as a blond, as revealed in episode 6, has been met with a lot of resistance. Especially considering general fandom consensus was he was a brunet, based on Luke McKay's work, and that Burnie said he would never reveal Wash and Maine's faces.

• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Net Surfing Guy from Episode 1 is pretty popular. Some parts of the fandom started shipping him with coffee guy from the last season not long after he first showed up.
  • Burnie Burns has stated that he started the season with York and Delta due to both being fan favorites, particularly Delta.
  • The unnamed blue Freelancer (better known as Agent Florida, or Captain Butch Flowers) who cameoed in the previous season shows up again with Wyoming. He gets taken down by the leader of the Insurrection throwing an axe across a bunker in Episode 9, but gets up in Episode 10 and gets rid of the Twin Turret Soldiers.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Episode 10 showed that the CT encountered in Recreation was in fact CT's lover, the Insurrectionist Leader, instead of CT using a voice filter to sound like a man (as some viewers had predicted) after CT was revealed to be a woman in Season 9; the REAL CT died in the Leader's arms after being fatally wounded by Tex in a fight. This can put some of the actions and mannerisms that the Insurrectionist Leader displayed during Recreation in a more tragic light, as finding the artifact was Connie's final request to the Leader before her death.
  • Episode 12 reveals that York was still obsessed over Carolina during the events of Out of Mind, and was bitterly disappointed when he found out the rogue female Freelancer he was hearing so much about turned out to be Tex. It makes you think about why he really joined up with Tex at the time.
  • Episode 15 shows every Freelancer present breaking down and screaming for Allison. The only one who wasn't at that moment? Wash. Talk about irony.
  • Episode 17 shows that Connie left information about the Director in Tex's care because she was the only one that could be trusted with it. Considering that Tex was the one that killed Connie...
  • With the finale revealing that Carolina is the Director's daughter, all of her interactions with him get cast into a much harsher light.
  • Also, Episode 22 shows us the true purpose of Project Freelancer. The Director didn't form PF to fight the Aliens or the Insurrectionists, but to find a way to resurrect Allison.
  • As of Episode 22, the "Poor Florida" incident is cast in a much harsher light. It wasn't just a one-off joke, but rather Project Freelancer (possibly) destroying the entire state to justify there not being an Agent Florida.
  • A more fandom related one, but Carolina's more popular ships involved her with Tex, York and the Director. Carolina ends up being related to two out of the three of them.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • When seeing Theta for the first time, Wash comments on how small he is and wonders if that's as big as they come. Fast forward to Episode 18 where Epsilon's hologram, his AI, grows to three times the size of the main cast.
  • Speaking of Episode 18, Caboose shows himself to be a Shipper on Deck for Wash/Carolina in this episode despite all of their interactions prior to this point being rather acrimonious and at best platonic. Starting roughly five seasons later in The Shisno Trilogy, Wash/Carolina received a ton of Ship Tease, to the point where Wash/Carolina became a Fan-Preferred Couple among the show's shippers.
• Ho Yay:
  • In Episode 1. "...I think I just got dumped by Caboose." "It's not me, it's you." And the implication that Caboose has transferred his odd obsession to Wash.
  • Also a bit for Doc and Donut. Let's see... one is very camp, the other is noted for being into "alternative lifestyles" and they're living together in a small shack in the middle of a large canyon.
• Jerkass Woobie:
  • Agent Maine at the end of Season 10, when we find out why he became so monstrous. He'd been a vicious bastard before, but he had been loyal to his teammates until Sigma completely wrecked his mind.
  • Agent Carolina in both the past and the present. In the present, she is an absolute Jerkass to the Blood Gulch Crew, dragging them along into her revenge plan while only seeing them as a cannon fodder. But she used to work with a team that were supposed to be True Companions, whom turned on each other. No wonder she has difficulty trusting others. Even worse is when we see the rest of her past when she started losing her position the leaderboard to Texas whom later killed her friend C.T. She inadvertently caused Maine to become the Meta when she gave Sigma to him to allow him to speak, and later almost died for her attempt to help her friend. When the Freelancers did start fighting each other, her wounded pride caused her to fight against the side that was trying to help her. On top of all this is the implication that the Director was her father, meaning that her actions as a Freelancer were the only thing she could to get his attention.
  • The Director of all people. When we finally see him, he turns out to be a pathetic man who was devoting himself to bringing back his dead wife. For all the horrible things he did, deep down he does regret what he did to Carolina. In the end he chooses to kill himself after some prompting from her causing him to realize how pathetic he was, and that in the end, he failed in his goal.
• Memetic Molester: Sigma has become a minor one, due to the way he "bad-touches" Delta in Episode 9.

• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Gamma seemed for a long time like the most harmless of the evil A.I's but when it's revealed that It was actually him that drove Alpha permanently insane, by making him believe that he had caused the death of Tex (Something even the Director feels is out of line), Gamma crosses the line.
  • At first much of the harm Sigma causes could be seen as accidental "collateral damage", but when he possesses Maine and uses him to attack Carolina (a woman that Maine once took a bullet for), brutally rip her A.I's out of her head, and throw her off a cliff, it's clear that there's no way to redeem this guy.
  • The Director has done terrible things, yes, but is generally played off as a Jerkass Woobie. However, Episode 21 shows that in the process of making Allison come back to him through the use of Texas, he induced a hefty dose of Mind Rape on Tex, who is technically Allison, through the process of making the army of Tex robots, to the point of putting her into a similar state to that of the Alpha by the end of Episode 19. Any justification that the Director used to have has apparently been completely thrown out the window in his growing insanity. He may have crossed it earlier during Carolina's breakdown - the fact that he coldly left his own daughter screaming on the floor is irredeemable.
• Narm: The female insurrectionist falling to (what is presumably) her death by drowning in full armor is taken a lot less seriously than it should, due to the fact she looks ridiculous with her limbs spread everywhere and the way she hits the edge.
• One-Scene Wonder: Sigma has the least screen time of the series' major villains, but is no less memorable for it.
• Special Effect Failure: Some have noticed the quality of the animation tends to vary from scene to scene, likely because of all the new animators.
  • Interesting example. Episode 8 has a well animated and interesting fight throughout most of the episode. Episode 9 shows the ending of that fight, but the CGI is notably worse. Within the same episode however, there is another sequence that shows markedly better animation.
  • Episode 11 shows us our first extended view of people out of armor. It isn't that impressive.
  • Some of the movements in Episode 13 were a bit painful to watch.
  • Some people believe that the animation of the Robot Texas army in Episode 20 is pretty bad, mostly due to the most notable action given is done out of sync with each other, but at the same time, making them all look sort of ridiculous.
  • In 21, Carolina's helmet and unique armor pieces are a different color than her armor for most of the episode. Though it might just have the wrong shaders, it seems "off" to some people.
• Squick: When the Gatling Good duo get crushed, the splatter on the ground under the crate that fell on them is yellow, not red. However, this might just be from spray paint cans.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • Carolina and Washington's mental breakdowns end up being nothing more than a few seconds each, despite both of those scenes being hyped up for several seasons. Washington's is particularly noticeable, since it's implied to be the defining moment of his life that turned him into the Byronic Hero he is in The Recollection, yet he seems basically the same, with no known memory of events in the breakdown, when he wakes up with no AI in him anymore. Of course, knowing he remembered nearly everything Epsilon drove into his head, one might look at it as him deceiving the other freelancers when he woke up, making it somewhat awesome.
  • The Insurrection subplot cuts off abruptly when all of the Elite Mooks from the previous season are killed in Episode 9, and their leader escapes only to be Doomed by Canon, accomplishing nothing of importance before his death. However, the end of the season implies that this plot line might be revived in a later season. At the end of Season 12, it seems that the plot has been revived after it's revealed that not only are the Insurrection and the Space Pirates in the same faction, but also that the ultimate leader is the Chairman of the Oversight Subcommittee.
• The Woobie: The Alpha definitely comes across as this when we see him in the flashbacks.

---