Remaquel talk: Unnerving characterization

I never really liked the core cast of the remaquel, but I didn't really see fit to talk about it on Vigaroe because the plot is deliberately thin and the failings of the characters are fairly generic at first glance; Vahlen is a Scientist Character as written by someone who doesn't understand the Scientific Method and is only peripherally familiar with Actual Science, Bradford is mostly a boring non-character, and Shen is decently-written but has so much less screentime/actual lines than Vahlen and Bradford that it doesn't help much. These are normal failings, so normal there's little point in going over them in real detail.

But in going through the game's plot again via Long War, I've been noticing that the characters are really also just disturbing.

Some of this is a kind of accident, understandable. Bradford rambling about civilian deaths leading to panic is the game trying to fill the player in on a game mechanic without breaching the fourth wall. The fact that it makes him seem to only care about civilian deaths due to the panic issue, no concern for human lives being lost... whoops! But okay, I can see how this happened and cut the game slack for that particular case.

Except... the first Terror Site cinematic is surprisingly consistent with this writing. Bradford, Shen, and Vahlen put on their thinking caps, adopt thoughtful poses, and wonder aloud why the Aliens would do this, with zero indication it's registering on any of them that unarmed civilians are being butchered. The closest to an emotional response any of them brings to the table is Vahlen...'s non-sequitur expressing confusion as to why such advanced technology would be turned to 'such barbaric' ends. What, does Vahlen think modern war crimes occur in the form of rounding up the civilians to be brained to death with heavy rocks, in honor of our caveman ancestors?

There's no rush to do something about it. No horror or real outrage. Not even confusion of a simple, honest sort. (The lost staring at nothing sort, where you can't even put into words how unimaginable events in front of you are)

And it's all over the place. Vahlen's dialogue is all SCIENCESCIENCESCIENCE, always talking up the revolutionary potential of what's in front of them, and not even really framing it in terms of how it can benefit people. The only time Bradford shows concern for a fellow human being is when Vahlen is suggesting the soldiers get in close to capture an Alien, and even then it takes no time to convince him to go for it without even a 'but can't you make something safer?' to suggest he's still worrying about the lives of the men and women under him. Even Shen, who is down-to-earth and shows moments of low-key depth, doesn't really seem to have a place in his heart for empathy. He's got room to make a joke aimed at the player implying you, the player, are being truly terrible by playing the remaquel... but not to be appalled at the Aliens butchering people.

Part of this is that the remaquel seems to be shooting for a vibe like Star Trek: The Next Generation. Military officers who are calm under pressure, talented at their jobs, and who largely lack real friction with each other. That's an admirable goal to shoot for, but it's difficult to write well (The first season of TNG was... not good, particularly when it came to characterization. It took them a while to get it to work), and it's also probably one of the worse possible models to pick for a story where a technologically superior race shows up and starts murdering and kidnapping people for giggles. What kind of person stays calm in the face of that kind of a situation, exactly?

I can, at the broadest level, sort of see how it happened, but it's distinctly uncomfortable to actually sit through.

On a tangentially related note: it also occurred to me in thinking about the Terror Site cinema that one of the weirder thematic decisions of the remaquel is the implementation of Panic. At the broadest level? Yeah, okay, the remaquel is trying to provide clearer feedback on how soon a given country is liable to leave the project, if at all.

But XCOM is supposed to be a super-duper-top-secret organization, which only really answers to the council of funding nations of the XCOM Project.

So why is XCOM effectively answerable to the public?

Which itself leads into the deeper issue of the remaquel trying to weld an action hero plot wherein humanity is united against the Menace Of The Alien Invasion atop a story that's fundamentally a shadow war whose general circumstances make the most sense if you take a cynical bent and assume the XCOM project is secret precisely so each nation can go either way -if XCOM wins? Awesome, take credit for funding them. If XCOM loses, and the Aliens take over? That's fine, deny any knowledge or association with XCOM and earnestly claim you would've joined with the Aliens sooner if you'd had any idea it was an option.

(Mind, the psionic abilities make that a dangerous plan, but nobody knows about those when XCOM is activated, in either classic XCOM or the remaquel)

But that's really a topic for another day.