Sarge

Sarge is a main fictional character in the machinima comic science fiction video series Red vs. Blue. Sarge is the staff sergeant and leader of the Blood Gulch Red Team. He is voiced by Matt Hullum, co-creator of the series, and first appeared at the end of Episode One. A military man with a Southern United States accent, Sarge exhibits more discipline than the other Reds (and most of the Blues, for that matter), but is also somewhat sociopathic, bloodthirsty, and the only Blood Gulch soldier on either team, although eccentric, actually serious about the war.

Character overview
Rooster Teeth has noted that they initially modeled Sarge after Full Metal Jacket ' s Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, but, by the middle of Season 2, the character had evolved into, in the words of voice actor Matt Hullum, "every 1950s in film stereotype character...melted down into one", exhibiting characteristics of a mad scientist, used car salesman, and "grumpy old dad".

Matt Hullum states that he initially modelled Sarge's voice on that of R. Lee Ermey, the actor who portrayed Hartman in the film "Full Metal Jacket", but by Season Four the character's voice became more gruff and less nasal. The change in the voice is such that Hullum notes people will often ask who voice-acted Sarge in the initial episodes, believing that Hullum himself did not.

Role in the plot
Introduced in the first two episodes, Sarge's disposition is quickly established, particularly his relationship with Grif and Simmons, in a conversation that the writers modeled on one that they themselves had over the resemblance of the Warthog to a Puma. When the Blue Team launched an attack sometime after, Sarge was possessed by the dead Blue team leader, Church and shot in the head by the Blue rookie, Caboose. Thanks to Grif's use of CPR, he survives.

In Season 2, Sarge is forced to build two new, permanent robot bodies for the Blues, and implants a microphone in one and a bomb in the other. This leads to both teams being blasted into the distant future during Season 3. Once there, Sarge leads both teams in an assault on a fortress occupied by O'Malley, the common enemy of both teams. During a battle against O'Malley and a robot army, Sarge and the Red Team leave the Blues to battle alone, in order to go in search of the source of a distress signal and end up returning to Blood Gulch.

In Season 5, Sarge, and the rest of the Reds, return to Red Base. The team then finds Lopez, a robot built by Sarge who had defected to the Blues and then been captured by O'Malley. From late in Season 2, Sarge had been attempting to retrieve the orders from Red Command that are stored in Lopez's head. Due to the fact that Lopez only speaks Spanish, and had translated the message into spanish, Sarge kidnaps Andy, the Blue Team's talking bomb to translate the orders, which turn out to be useless. The Reds are then attacked by the Blues, and Sarge radios command reinforcements. When a ship arrives, the pilot (Sister) informs them that she was sent to replace a dead commanding officer. Sarge's undying trust in command causes him to believe that he is in fact dead, and the other Reds bury him.

By Episode 85, he has disappeared from his grave, having fallen into the underground cavern. In Episode 88, Sarge believes that he is in hell since he's underground. He confirms this when Donut arrives. He soon gets contact from Simmons and Grif, who are in the cavern to rescue them.

As of Episode 2 of Reconstruction, he is the only Red left in Blood Gulch; he vowed not to leave until all the blues were wiped out (even though the only Blue left is Sister), even though his refusal to leave with the rest of his team would be considered going AWOL. It should also be noted that he has repaired Lopez, who now has his entire body. Later on, the Meta deceives him into thinking the Blue Team has been reassembled under Washington's command. He appears again in Episode 8 with Grif and Simmons, attacking Washington and Church on sight in his fanatical attempts to wipe out the Blues once and for all. In episode 9, it shows that Sarge had saved Grif and Simmons from death by firing squad. Sarge couldn't come to terms that Grif was now the same rank as him, assuming that their real commander was invisible instead of believing Grif had been promoted. After an incident where the Meta threw the Warthog at Grif, he agreed to work with Washington after the latter guessed his secure codeword that only Command knew (it turned out to be "codeword").

It is revealed in Chapter 3 of Relocated that Sarge now understands Spanish since he apparently knew that Lopez was giving him an answering machine message and disabled Lopez's lying ability. In previous series, Sarge would just ramble on and assume Lopez was either agreeing with him or complimenting him.

Relationships with other characters
Sarge's relationships with his team members are often strained by his disregard for them, particularly Grif. From the outset, Sarge has been evidenced as holding a deep dislike of Grif for unknown reasons, although one is clearly Grif's laziness. If a situation is presented where Sarge can get rid of Grif, he tries to take it; he has been heard to order other men to kill Grif, devise strategies involving Grif's death, and admitted to attempting to kill Grif in his sleep. In Episode 78, after Sister crash lands a ship onto Donut, Sarge asks Simmons, "No-one accidentally got shot in the face when someone else's shotgun just accidentally went off during the incredible distraction of a spaceship crash landing? Purely by coincidence? No one orange?" When Grif says that he is okay, Sarge replies with, "Dammit, I really need to adjust the sights on this thing." In an ending of Episode 100, Sarge is told to have died very shortly after killing Grif. It then goes on to say, "Sarge died exactly the way he wanted to, after Grif." Nevertheless, when Tucker severely injures Grif by accidentally running him over with Sheila in Episode 33, Sarge does save Grif's life by transplanting Simmons' organs into him. Although Sarge's solution is usually to have Grif killed, he has been heard on one occasion to tell Grif, when the latter asked to quit, that if he could, he would make it happen. Also, in a PSA, his apparent XBOX 360 account is GrifKilla51.

His relationship with Simmons is more peaceful, although it is also strained. In one case, after Church had taken over Lopez's body, Sarge decided to make an android out of one of the characters on Red Team, where Sarge had preferably chosen Simmons. In the end he willingly did it to save Grif. It is later revealed in the series, Sarge had actually made a bug in the process, showing that Simmons occasionally shoots himself in the foot, but he either doesn't care, or doesn't know its Sarge's fault. Simmons is characterized by his sycophantic attitude towards Sarge. Also when Simmons disagrees with him, however, Sarge turns against him, most notably when Simmons suggested they look for Sheila. Sarge then demoted Simmons, gave his rank to Donut, and exiled him. After Simmons returns to the Red Team, Sarge appears to treat him as before, though he has referred to him as a traitor. In Chapter 2 of Reconstruction, Sarge calls Grif and Simmons traitors because they followed their orders for reassignment when the battle in Blood Gulch "wasn't over". However, the flashback in Episode 9 reveals that he saved both Grif and Simmons from execution, showing a possibility of him forgiving their "betrayal" or he didn't know what was going on.

Sarge has a more complex relationship with Agent Washington. At first believing him a blue, he calms down after finding out this isn't the case and helps Washington by giving him details of Caboose's location. After Agent Maine sends him a false transmission, he immediately flies into a rage, believing Wash an enemy. He later shows a degree of respect for Wash in the final episode.

Sarge has criticized Grif and praised Simmons for the same action. When Grif saves Sarge's life by performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) after being shot in the head by Caboose in season 1, Sarge initially thanks Simmons. However, upon learning who had actually resuscitated him, Sarge proceeds to berate Griff at length for the illogicality of using CPR "for a bullet wound in the head". Rooster Teeth had initially considered making this event a turning point in Sarge's relationship with Grif, but decided in the end that friendship would be too far-fetched.

Sarge also generally despises the Blues, assuming that everything that goes wrong in the canyon is their fault. Despite this, he is willing to submit to the various truces that the Reds and Blues hold over the course of the series. This can be seen as taking on a common foe, such as O'Malley or the Meta, although the Reds skipped out on the battle with O'Malley in order to investigate a distress call, and took the opportunity of breaking into the Freelancer base to delete all the Blue details from the system, much to the annoyance of Church. Despite their differences, in the final episode of Blood Gulch Chronicles after Tex and Tucker's Alien son were killed by a Red planted bomb, Sarge allowed them to leave, noting lightly that "they've had their asses kicked enough for one day" - an amazingly marked change from normal behaviour, especially given that in the Insert Quarter alternate ending he immediately tries to get reinforcements or an airstrike from Vic to wipe out the blues, while in the Fight, Fight! ending he taunts the Blues over the death's of Tex and Junior - and is shot dead by Church and Tucker for it.

Delusions
Sarge's battle plans tend to be delusively grandiose and seriously flawed, and he favors overly complicated plans that involve heavy casualties in his own forces, primarily Grif, sometimes making suicidal plans even when there is no actual problem to solve. Even if his plans rely on the strength of numbers, he may see fit to have Grif killed anyway. He displays frequent periods of nostalgia and compares his plans to notable figures from film, such as John Wayne and Indiana Jones. At other times, he devises plans that take ideas from popular culture, most of which are purely fiction anyway, including the Incredible Hulk, Star Wars and Spider-Man. Sometimes he makes incompetent blunders in his plans that are not immediately evident to him, but the rest of the team will criticize him for. He is also rather paranoid, and often concocts implausible theories to explain simple events. Many of these will revolve around the Blues as their primary antagonists, as a result of Sarge's intense hatred of them.

Recently, a complete dependence on command has been showcased; when a new arrival in the canyon, who the Reds think has joined their team, informs them that command sent her to replace a dead commanding officer, Sarge at first refuses to believe it, but when Grif makes a few clever comments about how command could be wrong about other things which Sarge staunchly believes in, he believes that he is dead and due to his complete trust in red command, allows the other Reds to bury him alive.

Skills
Sarge has skill as a soldier, having managed to capture Tex as well as fight off, with the assistance of Caboose, the attacking hordes of soldiers in Battle Creek. In episode 99 he kills several Wyoming clones with his shotgun despite the Freelancer's skill. His rank suggests that he is a veteran of combat. In addition, during one of the Episode 100 endings, he is explained to have commanded many Red forces over the years after his tour in Blood Gulch. He is also skilled to some degree in mechanics, having built three separate robots, two of which were assembled simultaneously in a short period of time from color-coded robot kits. Although he initially claims that he is unable to repair their jeep, he later manages to fix a derelict near-identical jeep with little equipment in the wasteland. However, his work is not flawless, as when he turned Simmons into a cyborg, the latter claimed that he would occasionally shoot himself in the foot for some unknown reason, which Sarge claims is "user-error".

Sarge also appears to act as the Red Team's medical officer, as he has performed surgery on both Simmons and Grif in a relatively short amount of time, and both seem to be healthy. However, Sarge clearly knows very little about bodily functions, as he uses a diagram of a cow as an aid during Grif's surgery, claims that the body can produce any oxygen it needs when under stress, claiming that "the chest is strictly reserved for digestion" and advises Caboose to lift a heavy weight with his back as opposed to his legs, although, Sarge maybe deliberately attempting to injure Caboose.

Weak Passwords
Sarge seems to have a habit of making weak passwords. (i.e. Making his password, "password" or the access code, "access code".)