We’re alive again, there’s no real special excuse this time. Honestly I’m not happy with how I’ve been unable to keep my promise to get back on schedule this past year. It’s just been one thing after another where my personal time is not up to the job at hand, distractions and just plain creative slumps I’m starting to get over gradually. But we’re back, we have a new chapter, another one soon after that and I’m attempt to stimulate myself creatively through other minor projects. Also, new keyboard! Less annoying than the last one! So maybe fewer mistakes, we can hope.
I do want to make up for the lack of content though and I know a lot of you are probably itching to ask the same question concerning a certain show based off a certain game this fanfic is dedicated 50% towards. Well like all of you I have opinions. So to get this out of the way and so I won’t have to answer the same questions concerning it over and over, here is my lengthy general response about the Halo TV Series... and why I refused to watch it.
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To preface this upfront, this is not a review. Reviews are a thing you write after experiencing something, all of something. If you do not watch a movie, or look at a painting, or eat the food, or read the book the whole way through you cannot review it in good faith. It would be like your teacher only grading you on your first paragraph of your essay. It’s not fair to call it a review if you don’t give it some modicrum of attention or at least try to finish something. So this isn’t a review, it is an explanation why I don’t want to watch this show because I know I would not like it. That might seem contradictory. Like I’m not giving it a chance, but I don’t need to give something a chance to know I’ll hate it if the baseline summary of a thing sucks on principle to me. This is why I haven’t watched other popular shows honestly, I know I won’t like them, why would I give this thing a chance if it sounds like something that doesn’t work for me? It would just waste my time and enrage me.
That said, I must also address the elephant in the room concerning the criticism of the show. Let it be known, my reasons are not even close to the very loud, outrage shills who only care about attacking this show because they see it as a way to grow their grift empire based on nerd rage. These people will remain nameless, but suffice to say, they hate this show because it features women and people of color in prominent roles. I don’t like the Halo show because it’s fucking stupid and incredibly insulting to the source material. We are not the same and frankly they have not helped the discourse at all with their fake fan bullshit. They have only helped perpetuate the idea that FPS fans and Halo fans by proxy are a bunch of far-right, sexist, racist, bigoted assholes who hate something just cause it’s “woke” or whatever word is being used to describe something that they disagree with politically this week.
If you know who these people are just by me describing their opinions, please do yourself a favor and stop watching their videos. Do not give them revenue for their shitty opinions. They don’t actually care about the elves in the Lord of the Rings show being black, they just know some people will be angry about it and they are leeching off those shitty opinions. They are grifters, do not support their grift.
So, with that out of the way, here are my actual reasons why I refuse to watch this show and why I think the Halo TV Series is a mistake on many levels. I’ll start with the most obvious, the UNSC’s villain upgrade is absolutely wretched. Every aspect of it just feels incredibly wrong, alien to the franchise and outright heretical. You know me, I don’t pretend the UNSC is squeaky clean, I did a whole arc in the story about how the UNSC has failed to live up to its standards, but the Silver Timeline’s version is so cartoonishly fucking stupidly evil it hurts. This isn’t even comparable, the insane levels the show goes to in order to upgrade the UNSC from “Morally Grey Space America” to outright “Galactic Empire Level-Fascists” is appauling to me. Some people said “Hey the UNSC was always kinda messed up, this is just removing the soft-touch and acknowledging that.” Bullshit! The UNSC on it’s worst days would never be okay with the crap this version of itself pulls! EVER!
Case in point, Cortana is apparently still created using a clone of Halsey’s brain... but to amp up the evil factor Halsey created a full fledged, sapient, consciously aware clone of herself apparently. And then... she fucking killed her! She shoved her in a “Easy-Bake AI Oven” chair, flash-fried her mind and that’s how we get Cortana everybody! Direct, outright, ridiculously unnecessary murder!
Halsey is changed from a troubled, morally grey, but repentant scientist to an outright monster on the levels of Joseph Mengele from everything I’ve read. It is ridiculous the lengths they’ve gone to in order to write her as this abject supervillain for no really good reason other than, apparently, a genocidal alien army just isn’t antagonistic enough. That’s not even getting into how the Spartans are basically turned into robots by their modifications and whatnot. They have their emotions supressed, they are cold-blooded, calculating, they do not care, they're just pure killers. They have none of the heartfelt comraderie and familial ties that made them compelling interesting characters. Their entire existence is to just be weapons, that’s all Halsey sees them as! That’s all the UNSC sees them as!
That's not how this is supposed to work. The Spartans were made to be heroes, the way they were forged into those heroes was incredibly fucked up and in no ways legal, but they were always meant to be more than weapons. Halsey always saw them as more than weapons, the UNSC saw them as more than weapons, they were symbols to strive towards, the best of the best, the few and the proud, the Green Berets, mothertruckin’ Seal Team 6000! What the hell is this emotion suppressor, memory suppressor, fucking off-switches? They pair Chief with Cortana in an attempt to control him, the fuck is going on?
From that alone, the fact they made the UNSC basically evil, would be enough to turn me off the show. It’s everything else they did that made it impossible for me to ever want to watch a single second of. The Insurrectionists being presented more positively in contrast to the UNSC is a very clear indicator of what’s happening here. Rather than trusting the source material that provided them with a perfectly ready-made, instantly viable world to play in. They decided to just crib notes from other popular Sci-Fi shows, like the Expanse, and just do that but with Halo skins over everything. It’s like they didn’t trust the material they were given. It also denotes how the series seems so anti-thetical to the sub-genre that Halo’s roots come from, military sci-fi. And while that sub-genre is loaded with problematic elements, Halo did its best to smooth over the rough patches in my opinion. Making the Innies the good guys just feels like throwing the baby out with the bath water in that regard.
The Insurrectionists aren’t good people, they never were. They weren’t hardluck, downtrodden, disenfranchised working joes. They are terrorists! People who refused to seek peaceful means to resolve their legitimate greivances concerning Earth’s overbearing authority. They lost the moral high ground the second they started bombing civilians and shooting at anyone in their way. But no one likes to poo-poo on the rebels anymore, just make them good guys! It’s not like there’s any bad connotations with the name “Insurrectionists” right now. HA HA! Fuck this! If their answer to the concerns of being pro-army propaganda with the UNSC was to make the terrorist organization of the game the good guys than they’ve already lost the plot.
Maybe they could’ve salvaged this idea though, if only the Innie characters weren’t so terrible. I’m surprised people honestly thought that the character of Kwan Ha was going to take over the show from the Master Chief. A notion I found nonsensical because it was based on a thing that happened on another show from an entirely different company on a wholly different streaming network on a series where the title character was only really gone for one episode and most of the show was his story anyway. Kwan didn’t replace Chief, she never was going to, her crime is just being a rock stupid fucking character I could never sympathize with. Ever.
Kwan is taken into custody by the UNSC after watching her entire colony get wiped off the map by the Covenant. The UNSC however, apparently is merciful. They want her help in getting her Innsurrectionist friends on board with fighting these guys, show a united front against these new alien enemies who are clearly hostile and intent on wiping out humanity. Their forces are clearly incapable of handling this threat on their own, if Kwan’s entire dead cell is any proof of that. So seriously it would be in their best interests to actually ally with the UNSC, as many Innies did in the regular universe. Because as much as they hated Earth, they weren’t fucking stupid and knew that the Covies weren’t going to make distinctions.
Kwan has several options open to her. She could agree and be released to go back to her people and warn them of this threat. It would make the most logical sense given everything she has seen. She could also just lie, claim she’s going to help but use it as a means of escape. She could even totally fake allegiance with the UNSC, work with them against the Covenant, but work silently against them, gathering intelligence for her people, weapons, supplies, just outright playing the UNSC while enriching herself and biding her time. Preparing for when they’re too weak fighting the Covies and strike at their heart.
Kwan decides on a much better plan though! Reject the offer outright, declare that she intends to keep fighting the UNSC and, apparently, says that when she gets back to her people she’s going to false flag this shit and say THEY killed the colony, even though she KNOWS that’s a lie! Intentionally inflaming relations further with the UNSC while gaining nothing in return to help protect her people against the Covenant threat!
This fucking brilliant plan instantly makes the UNSC decide to execute her, because they are cartoon villains now, and she only lives because Chief decides to go rogue like... just now, probably way too early in the show honestly for this to be an effective turn of events for his character because he’ll instantly come back to the UNSC in the very next episode. All so Kwan, this rock stupid character, who should be fucking dead because she was stupid enough to tell the UNSC she was going to Gulf of Tonkin them, could live and go on to be the center of a subplot that, apparently, not even fans of the show like if what I’ve heard is correct.
I don’t know how exactly this plays out in the episode proper, but it sounds just fucking dumb, Like the most fucking stupid thing ever. Who wrote this? Did they think this would make Kwan sound badass? Did they think fans would love this moment of defiance? Did they honestly think Halo Purists would side with her over such a petty bullshit response to the UNSC asking for human unity in the face genocide? Why would I ever like a character this blatantly stupid?
This brings us to the Covenant, who should be the main threat, but because this series has a garbage ass cheap budget, we don’t see much of them. Probably part of why they decided to go with the “Let’s just do Expanse” route. They don’t have the money to have the Covenant on screen all the time as the primary antagonists. Which makes me wonder how they’re going to pull off Reach or Halo itself when they get to those plot points. I doubt they’ll do the Flood because if they can’t have the Elites running around for many episodes, zombie versions are less likely to show up.
This is why Halo can’t really be a TV Show, the budget isn’t going to be there to truly capture the alien designs of the Covenant. TV Show aliens are simple, humanoid, ease to create makeup for. They’re decidely less interesting by default imagination wise, but that’s by neccessity, not because the artists working on them can’t do it. Halo needs a movie level budget to truly capture the Covenant in all their glory and it is painfully obvious they cannot deliver them all the time. When they do it apparently works, I’ve heard good things about the action scenes involving the Covenant, but otherwise these designs were made for a video game where the aliens could look alien. And they simply do not have the budget to maintain their prescense in the show. As a result, they exist in short bursts and then they’re gone.
But they can’t not involve the Covenant in some capacity! They’re the main bad guys of the franchise! So, the solution is to make the human-hating alien alliance of genocidal religious fanatics... adopt a human to work as an agent against humanity.
No. Just no. This is fanfiction levels of stupid, I literally saw a fanfic where an Elite does this with a human kid and even then it was only partially justified because he somehow was able to conceal the fact she was human even from her. This is dumber somehow. Facilitated by a few plot points about how she knows how humanity operates, how she can infiltrate them and then apparently she fails on all of those accounts because they find her out pretty much instantly. Or she drops the cover and slaughters a bunch of them, whatever.
The other plot point robs Halo of another unique element of its world-building, she’s one of a few humans who can use Forerunner tech, In Halo, all humans can use Forerunner tech because humanity as a whole has genetic markers that allows them to. In the show, only a few can do this. One of them is the Covie Human Lady, the other is Chief who is now just an outright chosen one instead of a very accomplished soldier in the right place at the right time. Great job, show, you’ve made an Sci-Fi FPS criticised as being too generic even more generic!
I guess this brings me to... Chief. Goddamn it, what the fuck happened here? Let me make something clear, I don’t hate he removed his helmet. Chief has removed his helmet before, we’ve seen his face. Never in game, never in live-action, never fully, but we’ve seen his face. We know what he looks like. Hell we saw it in commercials and promotional art, we know what Chief looks like. He does not look like this actor at all. Making the reveal not really all that impressive.
That’s not even really the problem, it’s the fact they did it so damn soon and then do it so damn often that it becomes monotnous and no longer special. When the Mandalorian removes his helmet, it’s a big deal. Even when Boba Fett removes his helmet, it’s a big deal because its seeing Temura Morrison in the role fully. Apparently, Chief can’t be bothered to keep his helmet on for more than a minute because it’s just so damn stuffy in there or something. He keeps ripping it off every fucking second he gets, and then he strips down fully because this show needs to show off his fucking ass all the time. And hey, I’m not against giving something for the ladies and men of that persuasion to gawk at, fanservice is for everyone, but when a show does it enough in so few episodes for the character to be named “Master Cheeks”, that’s a problem. One I can address further in a minute, but let’s focus on the issue with Chief removing his helmet.
Some people claim that Chief having no face works for the games because it was meant to allow people to insert themselves into Chief’s role. Ignoring that, again, we know what Chief looks like he just doesn’t take off the helmet because he’s working, the suggestion that we cannot empathize or connect to a character without a face emotionally on their own merits is preposterous to me. That these characters can never have a personality, that without a face they are just avatars for the audience to inhabit is false in my mind. The only reason to rip off the mask is so the actor behind it can get credit for being on screen for promo shots. Dredd didn’t need to take off the helmet in the Karl Urban movie. The Mandalorian didn’t need to take off his helmet for the majority of the show. You don’t always need a face to sell a personality, you just need to be creative in using body language and dialogue.
This mentality makes me fear for how they’re going to adapt the Quarians to live-action, Tali most of all. What? Are they gonna completely junk the core tennant of their lore, the thing that drives their hatred of the Geth so explicitly, just so the actors don’t have to wear the helmet all the time?
It just doesn’t make sense for them to reveal the face this early and this often. You’ve now intentionally made the moment even more unremarkable. We see Chief’s face, and the rest of him, so much that you’ve de-emphasized his legendary hero status. It’s like Indiana Jones not having his hat for the majority of the film’s runtime or the Shark from Jaws being on screen too much. You lose something by giving too much away or abandoning an aesthetic look. It’s just not special anymore.
And frankly, Chief should not be taking off his helmet in a lot of these situations. It just seems really short-sighted and stupid to rip that thing off during a mission or on a battlefield. It’s not like it’s obscuring your vision, it’s got a HUD, clear view, a holographic display. If you really needed to see the actor’s unimpressive mug that much, just do what Marvel did and have the camera go inside the helmet so we see his face up close. Oh what, were you worried about ripping something off there? You’ve already stolen from the Expanse and Firefly, what one more thing?
And you know what’s funny? This isn’t even the real problem with Chief in the show, it’s just a bad aesthetic choice that follows an all too common trend in genre media these days. Even Marvel, successful as it is, finds far too many excuses to have its heroes rip off their masks. But that never breaks the movie and it can’t break this show. It cheapens it, makes it less special, but ultimately it’s not the dealbreaker, it’s just a bad idea. The real problem is Chief’s character, because this ain’t Chief, period. Nothing that I’ve seen or heard about this version of the character is recognizable, partially because of the really shitty changes to how Spartans work and are created in this universe as addressed above. Mostly because of the personality they give Chief in response, a beligerent, whiny, extremely pissy, indecisive, excessively repugnant person who I can’t buy as an effective leader let alone soldier.
Just hearing how he goes rogue, helps Kwan escape and then after a short excursion immediately returns to the UNSC is laughable to me. Not only does that make no sense narrative wise, it makes no sense character wise. He’s just had a major revelation that his whole life is a lie. Why in the hell would he return to the people who lied to him expecting to be given answers? Especially after he aided and abetted a terrorist’s escape! The fact this clearly supervillain version of the UNSC doesn't just throw him into a damn brainwashing machine or some other such bullshit astonishes me. It makes them and Chief look stupid because how are they supposed to control him if he could run off this easy and why would the Chief come back to these people with no plan to insure they don’t do just that? And don’t mention the off switch, that shit makes no sense to me. Why didn’t they use it when he was breaking Kwan out? It reeks of a last minute change. What, does only Cortana have access to it? Why?
Oh and Cortana, wow did they mess this up. First of all though, I was right, they colored her blue, I knew they would, I called it. Everyone got pissy at how Cortana looked in the trailer, all flesh tone and shit, they made her blue. Try to remember this for next time, between this and something like She-Hulk, special effects are rarely finalized in trailers and promotional material.
The real problem with Cortana though is how Chief treats her and how we’re seemingly meant to approve of his treatment of her. Namely he treats her like a pest, like an annoyance, like an intruder in his head. That she’s a bad thing and useless and only serves to keep him controlled. The way he apparently bad mouths her and dismisses her is so unlike Chief even in the early days of their partnership it just reads all kinds of wrong. This is not how Chief treats his teammates, this is not how Chief treats people. He reads as a petulant child who’s getting bitchy with the babysitter and the fact Cortana is apparently meant to control his body seemingly confirms he is right to do so! What a fucking load! They’ve ruined one of the most poignant and beloved partnerships in video gaming history just to make Cortana the enemy Chief has to bully into turning against Halsey. Fuck this, fuck all of this.
We’ll get to the controlling Chief’s body crap, but let’s focus on what I found to be the dealbreaker for me when it came to presenting the Master Chief in this way. I haven’t watched this scene outside of silent gifs, so I don’t know how it reads in dialogue... but this was abhorent to me. Chief apparently shoves Halsey into a room that will kill her if he doesn’t open the door. I don’t remember what it was, but it was going to do something that would either suffocate or fry her. Chief stands there, basically eyeing Halsey as she tries to open the door in what can only be described as a very sick torture scene. Cortana tries to convince him to open it, but he just stands there, smug, he supposedly laughs or chuckles about it. He is fully willing to watch Halsey die before his eyes, murder her in cold blood... and he takes pleasure in that Cortana can’t do anything to stop him and Halsey is helpless.
This is sick. This is deplorable. This isn’t heroic or justified or good. This is disgusting to me. Chief would NEVER do this, not even to this version of Halsey who is, as I’ve described previously, basically just absolutely horrible. This isn’t about what Halsey has done, so much as it’s the pleasure Chief derives from it. How he lords this bit of power over Cortana and Halsey. How he can kill her outright and get away with it and force Cortana to watch him murder an unarmed woman, monster that she is, but just outright murder her.
The Doom Slayer wouldn’t do this, Gordon Freeman wouldn’t do this, Duke Nukem would never do this, not even the one from DNF who made a tasteless joke about two women being raped by aliens before the alien babies inside exploded out. The only FPS character I can think of who would do this is Caleb from Blood, and that’s because he’s an outright villain! This is sociopathic behavior from a character who is meant to be a hero. He lets her out, he doesn’t cross the line, but just the fact that he took a sick sense of pleasure in watching Cortana and Halsey squirm repulses me. This is not the Master Chief, this is a very disturbed individual wearing his armor... some of the time anyway.
You might say that’s a valid interpretation given what the Master Chief went through. That his sorta life would lead to a very unstable, broken individual. Well maybe, but that’s not the Master Chief I know and I’m not sure why you’d want to follow a hero that is so morally reprehensible and compromised as this one. Chief is damaged, I won’t claim he isn’t, and I don’t think he’s a paragon either, but I do believe that he is an ultimately moral person. Loyal to a fault, devoted to protecting lives and doing what is right. And the fact he earnestly believes that is his mission despite everything done to him shows a strength of character that is aspirational and inspirational, that from all that pain someone could emerge a hero that saves the galaxy.
But who gives a shit about that emotional throughline of resolve and perserverance. Let’s just get him laid... in the worst possible way! Yeah, I heard about this and it felt so wrong. Clearly someone thought we’d only take Halo seriously if they sexed it up some like Game of Thrones. This isn’t your stupid little shooter game for little boys, this is Hot Halo that Fucks! Everyone got really flippant about the reactions to this, saying fans were just pissy that Chief isn’t a virgin anymore. No, they were probably angry for other reasons. For a bunch of them it was probably because it wasn’t Cortana. For me and many others though, it was the fact he had sex with an enemy prisoner. Which is both treason... and rape. The treason part is obvious, he’s fraternizing with the enemy and this allows her to alert the Covenant to Reach’s position, basically making Chief responsible for every human death that results from this. The rape part is simple, by the rules of the Geneva convention, prisoners of war cannot give consent to sexual intercourse. Chief having sex with an enemy prisoner makes him a rapist by law.
Holy fuck, was this a stupid oversight on part of the writers.
If you suggest that this is unfair and bring up an example you think is comparable, like Liara in Mass Effect, let me shoot that down right the hell now. Liara is not a prisoner, she is a civilian aboard the ship and is not subject to any restraint or confinement. She is free to leave at any time. She has volunteered her services willingly to the crew, but is not an Alliance Military Officer. She can give consent. An admitted enemy agent who Chief barely knows to begin with and is confined and directly declared a prisoner cannot give consent. This scene made the Master Chief a rapist traitor for a shameless TV sex scene and there’s no getting around that. But go ahead, IGN and countless other nerd news websites, joke about how fans were just upset Chief popped his cherry and they haven’t yet, that’s why we’re all mad. Fuck you.
So let’s finally address that bit at the end, Chief supposedly being dead and Cortana puppeting his body. One, this out of context reference to a line from the first game is frankly rather annoying. Cortana was just commenting on the armor being similar, she isn’t going to actually do anything with it that could force Chief to do anything. She can’t puppeteer him, maybe activate armor lock or the like, but she can’t force his arms to move around. No matter how many fanfics people write where she forces Chief to jack himself off, that’s never happening, please stop doing that you people are the reason this happened on the show.
Two, he’s not dead people, come on. You know he’s not dead, I know he’s not dead, they ain’t kiling him off. How else can they show off his ass more next season if he’s a lifeless corpse? If you honestly think they wasted this much time trying to convince you this guy was the Master Chief, only to kill him so Cortana puppets him around, come the fuck on man. You’re not that stupid, I know you’re not that stupid. Please don’t be that stupid. This is a cliffhanger to drag you back for next time to see how they resolve it. Don’t fall for it, just let the show die in season two and get cancelled like Netrflix’s Cowboy Bebop before the second week post the premiere is even finished. Seriously, I’m begging you here, let this show die quick before we get a season three.
Finally three, the implication of what this scene is saying is insulting. It’s not about Cortana replacing the Chief in his body, that’s fucking dumb because we know that isn’t happening and it would at least give us a more likable character in the suit anyway. No, the implication is that this is the creators on the show trying to make us regret getting what we the fans wanted. Once Cortana takes over she kicks all kinds of ass in Chief’s armor, showing us the Spartan hero we all wanted from episode one. But now he’s a brain dead man being puppeted around, much like the video game character he actually is. But this is what you wanted, right? You wanted your faceless, voiceless protagonist to insert yourself into. Well now Cortana has done that and he’s just like the games now, except he’s dead basically. Don’t you feel guilty now for wanting this? We gave you exactly what you wanted and like the Monkey’s Paw it’s fucked you over cause you now lost John. He’s dead! Totally dead and it’s all your fault, viewer! All your fault because this is what YOU wanted. This is what you would’ve preferred. Feel bad now?
How about fuck you, assholes? This show is evidence you clearly don’t know what fans of this series want. You shoved in sex for a series that never needed sex to begin with to sell millions of copies. You turned the good guys into Nazis and the Libertarian Terrorists who don’t wanna pay no taxes to Earth into the heroes. You fucked up the Covenant. You made the setting more generic. And you made the Master Chief a fucking sociopathic treasonous rapist! I’d be happy if he was dead, because he’s a fucking shitty person! You honestly think you can guilt me into being sorry that he’s a puppet now? Are you kidding? You believe I’m gonna buy that sticks? Let alone that it somehow proves I should be careful what I wish for? Fuck off.
I didn’t want a faceless, emotionless, personalityless proxy to insert myself into. Mainly because the Master Chief isn’t any of those things. The fact you felt the need to basically alter everything about him in order to give him a “personality” shows how you didn’t understand the character to begin with. You thought he was broken, that he wasn’t good enough for mainstream audiences, that there wasn’t enough there to make a show out of, so you just fucked up his character, made him an even more generic protagonist and then tried to make us feel bad that he’s “dead” as proof that you made the right call. Well fuck off, you didn’t. You just proved you don’t know why people like this character or this franchise. I haven’t seen such a monstrous betrayal of a franchise’s premise, world and character since Wolfenstein: The New Order and I at least finished that game. I at least tried to give it a chance to win me over. This, as I’ve explained, I was turned off almost from the get go the more I learned about the series itself. Everything about it just made me not want to watch it more and I will not watch it ever so long as it is currently in production because I refuse to support this. I refuse to support something that was just not worth the wait.
If you like the show, don’t take any of this as a personal attack on you. This is about me and only me as a person who loves this franchise and simply cannot get behind this iteration of it. I can only say I’m glad this is a seperate timeline and not the new main one or whatever. Because at least that means I can more easily erase this from my mind when I write the story. It’s another universe, it effectively does not exist. Strangely enough that gives it one advantage against the new Wolfenstein games, which keep trying to insist they are part of the main canon going back to the first game and even RTCW despite none of that adding up, but that’s a whole other story and I’ve rambled on for nine pages about this, that’s more than this show desrves and we need to move on.
So yeah, I will not watch this show, I have no intention of watching it, maybe some of this information is inaccurate because I’ve heard it second hand from fans who have seen it, but it’s very clear this is not for me. This is a Halo TV Series born out of compromise and trend chasing and just a general lack of respect or reverence for the source material. I want no part of it and do not wish to have any of it taint my process. The show can fuck off and die already. I hope it does. And I hope this answers all your questions about my opinion on the show and makes my position clear. I’ll make it even more clear, this series should not have starred the Master Chief at all. It should’ve been about a bunch of Marines fighting the Covenant and sometimes they run into the Master Chief. That would’ve been a better series and far less infuriating.
So let’s actually talk about today’s chapter, shall we?
Sugar Trade: It’s finally come to fruition, the seeds planted in the early phases of the story have born fruit as Zek and Retz get their Sugar Business of the ground. If you haven’t guess by now, the ichor and sugar rackets Zek has been setting up are a clear call back to the Golden Era of Piracy, when Sugar and Rum were high priced commodities for Pirates to steal and sell off. So here is Zek trying to get in on that action several hundred years out of date. I just threw in some drug culture aspects specifically to modernize it a little. Plus it makes sense, sugar does look a bit like a certain white powder. I really should have Zek review Scarface at some point honestly. The question of course is, how long can Zek and Retz keep this going without anyone else finding out about it? Probably not terribly long, they can’t exactly hide this sort of thing forever. It’s why they’re moving so fast, the second anyone who isn’t Kasumi gets wind of this, is when the house of cards starts to tumble and they all get in trouble. Stay tuned for when that blows up in Zek’s face.
Zix: I was starting to feel like I haven’t been doing credit to Kig-yar culture, too many dudes in a matriarchal society. BioWare can get away with that for a while with the Salarians, but for me it was becoming a sticking point. That and I just don’t have enough female villains, I need to break out of that compulsion honestly. Ladies can be just as evil as men, I should know, I’ve had crushes on more than a few villainous women in cartoons and such. Zix is my latest attempt at balancing the scales. While not an outright villain, she is clearly an antagonist in this case. An important one that will help push some of Retz’s development, but antagonistic all the same. Retz is a joy to write, but it’s nice to finally have someone who can get under his skin and make him drop his more confident, refined gentelmen pirate mystique.
Being a spy is not easy given how hard it is to trust anyone. Being a pirate spy has to be worse, because that’s amplified two-fold. Zix is the reason Retz, more than anything, feels that way about the Syndicate. We can go into why in the next chapter, but for the most part it’s because Zix is just like Retz... but a true believer. She honestly thinks the Syndicate is the best option for the kig-yar and piracy. She will do what it takes to defend it, which is why she’s here now. She wouldn’t be using Retz at all if she felt there was a better way to get what she wants, what the Syndicates wants. If the best way to defend the Syndicate was to just kill Retz right here and now, she’d do it in a heartbeat. She is no one’s friend. You can’t and shouldn’t trust her.
It was the best way in my mind to switch up the dynamic, to force Retz into a position of caution and reserve where he frankly sides with the UNSC’s concerns over Zek’s eagerness. He actively discourages this plan, he doesn’t like it, even if he knows it’s too big a deal to pass up for them. That’s probably the most frustrating part, that he has no say in this, just like Zix predicted. He hates knowing that in a small way, she’s already out maneuveured him. Which drives him to find a way to get himself and everyone now currently trapped in this situation she’d led them into out alive. Retz might be a scheming liar, but he knows who his friends are and aren’t. And if he can protect others from those he knows aren’t his friends, that’s a win in his book.
Approaching First Strike: With the name of the Covenant Invasion mobilization point on the line, we are getting closer to Operation: First Strike. It won’t be long before we actually adapt the final events of the novel that will lead us into Halo 2 proper. I don’t know for sure WHEN it will come out, but I intend to close in and wrap this up. Once we’re done with the Plunder Nest, it’s more or less a straight line to the final arc of the story. And if you’re bummed out about missing a fun part of the novelization before we get there, don’t worry. The chapter involving the final relic will address that soon enough. We’re almost there everyone, just stick with me a little longer. I promise, I’ll do what I can to make this all worth it.
Well, I better wrap this up, upload the chapter and post this blog before the enormity of the task somehow gets to me again. I’ll see you all again soon for the next few chapters of this and maybe some other stories in due time. I don’t just mean Liara’s either, assuming all goes right of course. See you around guys, and if you’re honestly interested in my thoughts on something other than the Halo TV Series... feel free to ask but be warned... you might be in for a mouthful if this post was any indication. Bye for now!
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