Gunther Reinhardt does not exist

So after my character assassination of Blessed Saint Leonard (the greatest, most skilled, most amazing, most charismatic and all around most awesome military commander in the history of history) I had somebody asking me ‘hey, why don't you lay into Gunther Reinhardt'. And you know what, that's a good question. After all, this is the guy who was willing to blow up the Earth rather than let the Invid have it. And the answer to why I haven’t is that he's largely a non-entity otherwise. But you know what? Let's take a look anyway.

Gunther was born in what was then Germany in 1990. He's the son of Adam Reinhardt, a career military officer who fought during the Global Civil War and then became a part of the UEDF. Following the Rain of Death, Adam R became a senior part of the reborn UEDF, part because of his experience and part because he was actually alive. In 2022, Adam became the commander of the UEEF's ground forces and was eventually killed in action against the Invid. So now we have context.

As you can imagine, Gunther followed in father's footsteps at every stage. He rose to eventually take his father's position on the back of his own talent as an officer and perhaps a little nepotism. So nothing even remotely unusual there. During the UEEF’s civil war he's a staunch Hunter loyalist, and is a key part of bringing down Edwards' renegade forces. Really, the only notable part of all this is just how mundane it all is.

Where things get even remotely interesting is in the lead up to the UEEF's third Reclamation Force. Reinhardt is a strong advocate of having the Neutron S Missiles as an option, largely because he's genuinely afraid of what the Invid could do now that they have access to an effectively unlimited Protoculture supply, which is an entirely reasonable fear. (And, by the way, its' not because he and Rick Hunter were vengeance-fuelled baby eating bastards, despite what some might have you believe). Even then, he’s given the order to only use the missiles if it seems that the Recapture force is going to be destroyed. Again, jot that down, it'll be important.

Reinhardt is made the third in command of the fleet. What do you know, the SDF-3 and the Hunters go missing and he effectively falls into command of the offensive. Reinhardt choses to press ahead anyway, because you know, operational schedules, forces already in place, ticking clocks and all that sort of thing. Things don't go to plan, the UEEF's ground forces are risking being destroyed, their fleet is being torn apart and the Invid seem endless. Reinhardt has his Captain Ahab moment and choses to fire the Neutron S Missiles rather than risk the Invid destroying the fleet and being left in control of Earth for the foreseeable future. Invid depart, missiles are destroyed, et cetera.

And by the simple default of being alive, Reinhardt is effectively the highest ranking official in the entirety of Earthspace and now has to deal with Protoculture depletion, sabotaged technology and the UEEF's allies turning out to actually being evil all along.

So there you go. There's really not much to say about him apart form his making a judgement call based on the available information. And in hindsight yes, it wasn't the right call, but really how can one read the intentions of an unknowable alien mindset? But you know what, this is a conspiracy infocast. So let's go a little wild here.

Now I know I try to keep this out of the deep crazy. I'm not going to start ranting about how the SDF-2 was on the moon, about how Lisa Hayes was dead all along or about how the Sentinels were a hoax and the UEEF spent twenty years fighting micronized Zentraedi. But I am going to look at some of the crazy conspiracy that has formed around Gunther R along the way.

So if some claims are to be believed there might have been a more sinister motive behind Gunther's firing the Neutron S missiles. No, it's not vengeance for his dead dad either. Nothing that sane. Naw, as the story goes, the Neutron S were the end-run plan of a transhumanist cabal within the UEEF led by officers born on Mars and other off-world colonies. See, they were concerned that once the UEEF retook Earth, it would become the centre of the human sphere again and sideline them and their own agenda.

Their plan was to effectively de-terraform Earth, rendering it uninhabitable and thus forcing humanity to evolve along their own specific path that they had planned. To this effect, they had seeded the UEEF with a sting of clones of a single loyal officer in order to ensure that their plan would be followed through, while also placing their own loyalists into positions of command. They'd also invested heavily into cybernetics, including heavily augmented special ops soldiers, and even using advanced tech to ‘resurrect' dead soldiers as zombie cyborgs.

Furthermore, the Neutron S missiles were in fact their back up plan. They didn't want to blow up the Earth as their first option, but rather transform it into being something more akin to Mars. To that effect, they'd built a special missile that would be used to flip Earth's magnetic poles, strip the atmosphere and leave the planet effectively uninhabitable unless you had been modified to live on Mars.

However, their plan was foiled when a renegade UEEF SpecOps team (which included a cyborg, a zombie cyborg and a hundred year old psychic schoolgirl) collaborated with an Invid clone of one of their own and used a Global Civil War-era space defence laser hidden in the ruins of the Cape Canaveral launch centre to blow up the missile before it could be used. Oh, and also killing one of their clone officers who had a prototype Shadow Fighter along the way.

So there you have it. Either Gunther R is a boring person who’s most notable because made a decision based on the available information in a bad situation or he was a part of an insane transhumanist plot. Now I might be a little nuts, but I'm personally inclined to go with the former.

But that's just me. And as I always say, find your own truth and keep it weird.