Karisse said:
it's Halo. As Bob said, no one plays it for the story or subtext
Well I don't know about most people but I sure as hell do, I absolutely love it.
I will say good one to bob for actually being semi fair about halo, instead of just trolling it like in EttM, which is both impressive and quite pleasing.
I also did pick up on the whole racial subtext thing going on in the Halo universe but, it is worth noting that the spartans were created BEFORE the covenant showed up, to basically enforce a totalitarian, almost republican ideal of control over human colonies, the UNSC were painted as the bad guys in the books and comics a whole lot of the time, especially when the mass child suicide missions signed off by Colonel James Ackerson in Ghosts of Onyx pretty much explains just how much worse the ONI (and by extension, the UNSC) had become since the Human/Covenant war had started, so the idea that the almost racist undertones picked up on is valid as a slight on the series itself is partially true.
As they say, history is written by the victors, the winners are almost always made out to be the good guys, so there is no way to say that any particular war was won by the bad guys, just as is true with Halo, at the end of Halo 3, the Covenant has been broken, and will always be remembered in human history as a genocidal collective of aliens (which, to our credit, they were), but the SPARTAN project? It will be the greatest success in the field of nanotechnological science ever, the soldiers will be remembered, not as children who were taken from an early age and raised to be near faceless super soldiers, but rather heroic veterans of a terrible war who enlisted in a top secret project to make them the best that the human race could offer, the war crimes committed by the humans would be forgotten by everyone but the remaining spartans and Dr Halsey, that is, if ONI doesn't order that those with knowledge of the project mysteriously "disappear" after the human race begins to rebuild. Because unfortunately that is how the system works, and throughout the history of the halo universe, that has always been shown to be how the ONI do things, and that is the beauty of it, the humans aren't the heroes of the war, the UNSC are not the "good guys", they are the winners, just as blind and ignorant to the machinations of their political overseers as the races of the covenant are to the prophets actions, lest we forget, the prophets knew all along that there was no "great journey" and were completely aware of the nature of the human race to begin with, they just chose to use their religion to their own ends to instigate a holy war, not unlike certain modern day figures.
I appreciate that going through all of this information would take ages, and indeed would not really be worth it for someone with a recorded hatred of the Halo series, but I do think it is worth noting that the humans are never portrayed as the heroes of the war, people like GySgt Edward Buck is shown as a hero in ODST because of the lengths he goes to to protect his team and his friends, but Ackerson? Halsey? they are not the good guys, and certainly don't get seen as such.
thoughts?
