Akalabeth said:
Bruden said:
Sure, people assume the Humans are good because we're human and we're playing the humans so obviously we're the good guys. That view doesn't really hold up under scrutiny though. In the course of the 3 primary games the humans let loose the flood into the galaxy and spend 1/2 the time destroying the only tools proven to exterminate the flood. Letting loose the thing that pretty effectively wiped out all life in the galaxy is not exactly what you'd consider a good thing.
They released the flood by accident. Morally it's irrelevant. Doesn't affect the view of humanity either way.
Letting them out, I'll let you have that one being irrelevant. It's still on rather shaky ground, ignorance is not the best excuse for galactic scale genocide. But you can not argue that blowing up the one thing that puts them back in the box is morally irrelevant.
And while we're at it lets talk about the idea that the writers are supporting the master race Spartan's sameness policy, what is the one thing that rings true for the whole of the series? It doesn't matter what Master Chief is doing, all that spartan gun slinging does nothing to prevent humanity losing every single battle against the covenant.
The Spartans don't have to be winning the war to be supported. Master Chief is the go to guy, the only one who gets things done. Not only that, but was the first Halo a defeat? Chief + Cortana blew it up.
Master Chief is the go to guy sure, he successfully kills a lot of enemy soldiers and not much else. After all, Master Chief's hard work we're still left with a burning earth.
As for blowing up the first Halo they found? Again comes that whole blowing up the one thing that puts the jack back in the box. If the flood spread across the galaxy preying on everything in existence before the only thing stopping them this time is... well... it's nothing now you blew it up. Way to go hero.
By the end of the second game it's been made clear that Earth is the only remaining human population center.
That's never stated in the game so far as I can remember. Earth is important, obviously, but only remaining colony/population centre? Nope.
you're right, they never say "if we loose earth humanity is extinct." They do make some insignificant little quips about what's in orbit being humanity's last line of defense, and a few trivial little things about the covenant wiping out every human world they find. So you're right the games don't specifically spell it out, just surround the hints in giant blinking neon lights, which the books proceed to fill in in bold.
Halo 3's ending leaves an entire continent glassed, people are worried about a little co2 causing global warming, after glassing Africa all of Earth is going to be uninhabitable. So where does that leave humanity?
Unsupported conjecture.
Did you see a stream of evacuation ships at the end of Halo 3?
Do you know what effect the energy beams from Covenant carriers have on a planet's habitability? From the GAMES that is. Not the novels.
From the game's themselves, the covenant use plasma weapons, and the energy of their beams are hot enough to cause dirt to turn to glass. If super-heating an entire continent in a single go doesn't spell global disaster nothing does. The end of Halo 3 is not filled with a dying Earth and humanity scrambling to evacuate because it's supposed to be a happy ending. The ending of Halo 3 is as happy an ending as the end of Star Wars 6, it's just the writers looking down in frustration at a terrible, but logical, end to their writing and going "screw it, celebration scene... and roll credits!" It's a cop out ending, it makes people feel happy and satisfied without having to sit through months of rewrites to get your plot to a point that the ending makes any sense at all.
Now then, how about the covenant. Obviously they're evil because they're against the humans. Again evidence doesn't really support this.
Covenant regularly kill unarmed civilians in the games. This is generally considered bad. They use suicide bombers and have little regard for their own troops, again this is bad. They take no prisoners, except those important to the plot. They lie and subvert the truth to their own people, etcetera, and so on. Hell every covenant we see is a soldier. Are there no technicians on spaceships? No one unarmed for the Spartans to kill? Even the guys in wheel chairs have big laser cannons. When does humanity get a chance to be bad?
Suicide bombers, or sending your soldiers on a suicide mission it's the same thing just one gets less firepower. The humans also take no prisoners even though the grunts often scream and try to run away, heck sometimes the player doesn't even get to kill the retreating grunts because an npc soldiers steps up to shoot them in the back. Lie and subvert their own people, read every politician ever, and specific example from the games "no spartan dies, they're marked as missing in action." All the covenant we see are soldiers... yeah that tends to happen when you're fighting on your own home turf against an invading army.
And here again we see the issue with the idea that the Halo games are anti diversity, as it's abundantly clear that the Covenant are not only winning, they're winning so hard that their most devoted troops have to flip sides just to stop the humans from going extinct by the end of Halo 3.
Anti-diversity is in the moralistic PORTRAYAL of the Covenant. Not in their successes. How "hard" they're winning is irrelevant. It's about morality, not their ability to succeed. The fact that they're winning just makes them a threat.
Except every negative portrayal of the covenant revolves around their religious zealotry. The game never pays any attention to the diversity of their ranks, but we pretty clearly see that the more religious the covenant soldier, the more evil he's portrayed.
The idea that Halo is in anyway promoting the Nazi master race ideals, or is preaching the evils of diversity is the uneducated man's surface reading from the game. The same kind of simplistic insight is what leads people to think Guy Fawkes wanted more freedom in his attempt to blow up Parliament.
It's a legitimate reading, that your post doesn't effectively counter. Is it one I support? No, not really. I'm just being devil's advocate, and movie Bob is largely reading between the lines. But the premise of his argument is interesting and is supported, however unintentionally, by the plot.
Though the clean shaven, eyes change to blue thing is a little suspect. Though it's in an advert, not the bonafide game so not sure it has any real weight.
It's not even close to legitimate. Unless your idea of supporting is watching the "master race" lose through the entire story to be saved by another race. Movie Bob is reading between the lines of Reach and Reach alone. Halo Reach is not intended to be played separated from the context of the previous Halo games. It's supposed to be a low quality bone tossed to rabid fan boys. Playing Reach and trying to make judgments about the Halo series as a whole is like jumping into a tv show for the season finale and using it to judge the entire series. Just don't do it, you obviously don't understand what the hell is going on and you're making an ass out of yourself by rambling on about a story you've barely gotten any portion of.
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