Rooster Teeth's gen: Lock

True. Either !Sinclair was not briefed very well at all on what the mission entailed, or there's some more mystery around who/what Nemesis is.

Seriously? After just five episodes?

How on earth would they survive reading a series of novels that keeps the villainous forces a mystery until Book 2... when there's a year or two gap between you finishing the first book and the second book even being published? Only to find that the villains don't start getting explored until Book 3, after yet another two year gap between publications?

Five episodes is nothing.

It's far too early to be searching for tropes for an undefined villain. They're still introducing the Polity side of the setting right now, never mind anything else.

Edited by Wyldchyld on Feb 19th 2019 at 1:48:39 PM

Yeah, RWBY took 6 seasons to actually flesh out any of the main villains beyond nebulously evil.

Holy crap.

It's a war after all. Logically speaking, any soldier learning about the true goal with absolute clarity of their enemies attacking them during the war would be remarkably blessed.

...and the ones attacking them too, really.

The problem is that there's no reason the audience shouldn't know more about the Union at this point. If their whole schtick was "they're a mysterious force attacking the world and that's all anyone knows about them", then that would be one thing. "What's the Union's deal?" would be one of the driving mysteries of the story and finding out would be part of the reason people keep up with it.

That's not what's happening in Gen:Lock. So far as we can tell, the Union is not a mysterious force that no one knows anything about. Even in episode one, before the timeskip, the Union is presented as a known quantity that people are familiar with. There are people in NYC who are Union sympathizers. The Vanguard has established anti-nanotech protocols. The Union attack is not a surprise, even though the fact that they launched a full-scale invasion of NYC catches them off guard. But it catches them off-guard because it doesn't fit the usual Union MO — which suggests that the Union has been around long enough to establish an MO.

Everything points to the conclusion that the characters have knowledge of the Union, know what they represent and what their power base is, are familiar with their technological and military capabilities, etc. But the show never deigns to tell the audience any of this, which leaves viewers feeling frustrated because they feel like they're being left in the dark unfairly. It's a pretty basic storytelling technique to bring the audience up to speed so that we know what the characters know at the beginning of a story. Why hasn't Gen:Lock done that? In what way is Gen:Lock improved by withholding information about the Union from the audience when the characters already have it?

Not going over things in the first episode I can forgive, because it starts very In Medias Res and pausing to infodump would break that flow. But we should have gotten a few minutes of very basic exposition in episode 2, at least. It doesn't need to be super detailed, it just needs to give us a high-level overview. The Union is [blank]. They want to [blank]. Their military strength comes from [blank]. Pretty much just those three sentences would add so much context to the rest of the action in season one that the fact that Rooster Teeth hasn't filled us in yet is bewildering.

Here's an example: The Union is a geopolitical ideology founded by a genius billionaire scientist. They want to achieve world peace by destroying all nation-states and letting people live in one unified planet. Their military strength comes from force-multiplying technology invented by the Union's founder, like automated factories, autonomous drones, and nanomachine swarms.

Here's another: The Union is a quasi-religious tradition popular worldwide before the war started. They want to use technology to allow people to achieve "unity", by which they mean acting in harmonized pursuit of a single shared goal, theoretically to the point of all humanity sharing a single hive mind. Their military strength comes from the fact that individual soldiers are fearless in combat, as they believe that the death of an individual is meaningless as long as the Union endures.

And one more for fun: The Union is a grassroots social movement that began online before erupting into offline action in multiple simultaneous revolutions around the world. They want to overthrow what they see as oppressive political systems worldwide and replace them with strict direct democracy, where every citizen has an equal vote on every issue. Their military strength comes from their wide network of sympathizers from all walks of life all over the world, giving them an incredible level of intelligence on their enemies and allowing them to weaken foes from the inside with covert action from loyal agents.

There. Three different scenarios that each paint things in a rather different light and bring their own set of different implications and potential plot threads to the table. Just knowing he very absolute basics about the Union gives us a ton of additional information by giving us additional context for what's going on. You could cover this level of information in about 90 seconds of screentime, so it's not like there couldn't find room to work it into an episode. And yet, we still know almost nothing at all about the Union.

It has to be a deliberate decision on the part of the writing staff, and quite frankly it's a bizarre one. I really don't know what benefit they think they're getting out of it.

I think the issue isn’t that we don’t know the inner workings of the Union so much that we have no human perspective towards their actions except a guy who died in half an episode.

That complete lack of human perspective on the other side is what’s making the Union feel so...underdeveloped. It doesn’t have to explain everything, even showing a jerk Union soldier get punched because he thought someone’s name sounded like it was a girl’s name would at least show how the Union acts, what they do, and what kind of personalities work for them.

The show is good enough so far that it’s forgivable but you have to see how it would be frustrating.

If they want to show what the Union is about, perspective from the Union side would be the way to do it. The problem with exposition is that they are so ubiquitous and well-known that any sort of exposition would come off as forced. They'd need an Audience Surrogate character who has no idea what's going on to explain it to, and considering the global nature of the conflict, that would also seem contrived.

One suggestion I saw on reddit was something set in East Asia, where the union seems to be doing rather poorly compared to North America. My choice would a flashback involving the circumstances of Yaz's defection, and the reason two union fronts in China seemingly collapsed between 2068 and 2072.

Being able to see how other regions look in this future and how they are dealing with the Union would be great, but at the same time I dunno if they're gonna invest that much time and effort into showing other areas.

Which would be a damn shame for a show about World War 3

Edited by CaptainCapsase on Feb 21st 2019 at 9:44:44 AM

That’s your video game spinoff right there. A new gen:Lock squad in Southeast Asia and China. It’s worked before.

Was that Peter freakin' Cullen.

Peter Cullen (or someone who sounds very much like him) did a lot of the narration and show blurbs for Toonami back in the day.

That was actually one Peter Cullen, not an impersonator.

Thought so. Wasn't completely certain.

Ah, Toonami. Childhood memories.

So I just found out Gen:Lock is first exclusive. Fuck

The series is almost finished lol

You can just wait do a free trial and the final episode will come out before it ends

Or even just a one month subscription to watch the whole thing

Edited by Saiga on Feb 20th 2019 at 10:27:40 PM

Wait its almost over?

Wait almost finished?

Edited by slimcoder on Feb 20th 2019 at 4:31:18 AM

Yeah it's only 8 episodes for season 1. Episode 6 is out this weekend.

According to the Reddit, during their award show, Crunchyroll said it would air there after the season ended.

Also it's on VRV, because VRV includes Rooster Teeth First.

Yes. It is a basic storytelling technique to do that, but it's also a basic storytelling technique to leave the audience in the dark for some time (regardless of how much the characters know). Neither technique (by itself) is better or worse than the other. I mean, the novels I mentioned? Sometimes the characters were as much in the dark as the audience, sometimes the characters were split between those who knew and those who didn't, and sometimes the characters knew, but the audience didn't. The technique itself doesn't make much of a difference. It's the author that makes the difference.

I am so used to storytelling taking forever to introduce significant villain information that the thing that fascinates me is what an impatient, instantaneous world we now live in.

I think Yaz is a bit under-used at the moment. As former-Union, it makes sense (since we're currently seeing the world from the Polity perspective) for us to gain a bit of an introduction to the Union through her eyes. We could also gain a bit of information on the Union from Valentina, who mentioned what the Union does to people like them.

That would give us the enemy insight into the Union. We can later learn about the people who support the Union, and why. Especially if Sinclair was on a suicide mission (Marin and Weller currently seem to be of the opinion that he didn't know he'd be killed by the Holon technology, but I'm not convinced that's the case. At the moment, I'm thinking that he knew he was on a suicide mission, and I'm wondering if his real mission was to hack the Cyberbrain rather than steal a Holon. It would certainly explain why Nemesis is showing signs of being aware of (and even connected to) the Mindshare). While we're seeing things from the point-of-view of people who want to fight the Union, there are clearly people who support the Union, and fight for the Union. So, that's also a question to ask.

Edited by Wyldchyld on Feb 23rd 2019 at 4:23:37 PM