"RED and BLU mercs look the same because of the game mechanic! They represent different people while using the same models! YOU are the player, so YOU are the mercenary too!"
Fair, but. Even if it is just a game limitation... I can't help but be confused as to WHY those game characters are SO UNIQUE IN PERSONALITIES if they are meant to be a representative mass?
I have to questions to hl1 scientist. No question no hl2 citizens. To CS characters. They are plain and faceless, they are meant to be background masses.
Tf2 mercs, however? SO unique and distinct. Their shapes and bodies, their movements, their voicelines - even with no particular story about them, there's SO MUCH personality! They have to be heroes! Not JUST classes!
I've never understood the explanation "they are different people who look similar to eachother" because eeehh... Have fun as you want, but I'm personally not convinced. Even with a rhetoric "Heavies have to be strong af and scouts have to be fast and small and all medics are insane and Germans" that's still not it.
Obviously I don't think about it while playing the game, but when it's time to think about the lore... The comics never answered the question of who the teams are - retconed and ignored.
I was surprised and confused as to why it was never brought up anywhere in canon. Maybe because this case is so exceptional and unique to tf2, it was actually cursed by it's own greatness?
Let's be real, tf2 characters are heroes. Yet unlike Overwatch and such, players ARE allowed to have as many repeating classes as they want. Moreso - the opposite team is designed to be the same characters.
What the fuck.
Tf2 mercs exist in a superposition where they are more than just classes but not enough humans to be heroes.
And that brings us to my other point...
Now you might say "but the lore is goofy, they WOULD hire people with very specific features –" shhhhh. Don't you see? That's part of the issue.
For whatever reason people think is useful. In the comics they are shown to be absolute idiots for comedic effect, sometimes flanderizing them even, reducing any human feature that isn't funny enough.
In fandom it's enough to just dress a merc in different clothes for people to start calling them OCs. Even if you didn't mean to make an oc.
With the goddamn clone theory I've seen people often saying that since BLU are clones, they are subhuman/unworthy - authors thoughts, not just in-univrse rhetoric.
It's almost as... Tf2 mercs are not human but a species??? Creatures without autonomy?
Always been like this?
Maybe I'm the only one bothered by this, but... You know me, I'm a no fun who loves taking this kind of shit seriously.
...
I started from talking about why they look identical on different teams. I think the clone theory is very probable, even though many people say it's cringe. The clone theory would make so much sense if it was real.
Recently I've watched Mickey 17. It felt so good to be finally understood. Every point of this film is all the things I feel towards tf2.
Respawn makes you less human. And corporations treat you as expendable, always. If they find a way to dehumanize you, it will be easier to convince everyone that you deserve violence/it's not a big deal.
If in tf2 the two identical megacorps fight with eachother over power (tf2 wiki/ original game setting), it would make all the sense for them to just clone the 9 mercs and make them expendable. It's cheaper. Emesis Blue did it right.
And since everyone thinks that the mercs are subhuman, because they are stereotypes, because stupid illiterate criminals, because they're psychopaths, because they're clones, because they're expendable... No one ever thinks to look behind it and see them as people.
Cloning is inherently a horror. When I just entered the fandom, I was convinced there will be some horror level lore underneath the silly game. It made sense.
But there was none of it.
I might be the one stupid here for thinking about tf2 that way. But I can't change my perspective now. To me the whole tf2 lore situation is just a recursive mirror on itself: the whole thing almost begs to be analyzed existentially but isn't because the goofy part of it is so sacred, it cannot be destroyed. As if taking tf2 seriously is almost a taboo.
"Don't look there, there's nothing there, don't think about it, they're silly, it's just a game" then why do I keep seeing holes on this curtain???
Purposefully not thinking about the lore is constant effort. It cannot be truly silly at least because it's war. If there's no respawn, it's scary because they can die anytime. If there is respawn - it's triple scary, because they don't belong to themselves.
In-game voicelines suggest that respawn does exist. Even if they love fighting and treat it like we treat videogames - since they are practically immortal - it's still inherently horror. Even if it's a comedy, ignoring the basic technical aspects of the world and covering up with "everything is unserious and stupid" agenda... Is ironically suspicious. For me.
It's almost as if they're trying to hide something underneath all this silliness. I know they don't. But it feels like it. It feels like a propaganda so people don't dare to try explaining how this world logically works.
A second you try to dissect the lore and it crumbles apart. It contradicts itself and it overcompensates for what it's not. It crumbles. I've stumbled upon it a hundred times for all these years in the fandom...
When you play the game you see so much environmental storytelling - the coverups of spy tech, the cold war, nukes and stuff... The early wiki info told us about megacorps who want to rule the world. It's realistic and pragmatic and so fun. Close to earth. When I play on the older maps I keep wondering what it was really about. I wonder about who the characters are, how did they get on this war?
But what I got was "the mercs are very stupid, and everything in this world is stupid because old people fight over nothing, and once they die everyone lives happily ever after AFTER SACRIFICING NOTHING". The mercs aren't even the main characters. We still know fucking nothing about them, about why they fight– they don't even fight for the same thing as in game. Everything is retconed.
I feel so conflicted. I know people love the comics but I can't help but hate it, I'm sorry. The same questions I had joining the fandom almost 2 years ago - I still have them now. It's itching, it's uncomfortable to stand in a lore which is a mess and will never be explained.
I looked at the lore with a suspicious squint, trying to compromise: maybe there IS something about the worldbuilding that I've missed that would make sense. I've analysed left and right– no. There's nothing of my interest. I had to explain things myself and it only started make sense once I stopped relying on the comics, like, at all.
And once you strip away the comics, there's barely anything left. Just the game, the bits and crumbs from the wiki...
The tf2 I enjoy now is the tf2 50% of which I created in my head to overcompensate. But who am I? I'm not Valve. I'm uncomfortable with that. Because while the lore now makes sense in my head, it's still just headcanons.
People don't know it.
I feel pretty lonely in this situation.
(This post should've been be just about dehumanization in the context of tf2, but I've noticed that everything I hurt about this media is a one big thing and one doesn't go without another. Someday I will let go.)