this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2024
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Oh that's why that image looked so familiar
(And why there's actually a Black man in the front row, as much shit as I give Halo nowadays about being basically ex-hard-sci-fi military slop, it was always surprisingly diverse relatively to the rest of its contemporaries.)
Assuming they're sampled from America, a single black person in a group of 21 is below the proportion of the population that they make up. Should be 2-3. ODST needs affirmative action!
What are you criticisms of Halo?
I've been a fan of it for almost 2 years now, and I love the franchise.
The UNSC are imperialistic fascists that purged Earth of communists in a genocidal war that claimed billions of lives, and continue to exterminate communists that fight on in the colonies in a decades long guerrilla war. The UEG has no freedom of speech, no elections, no civilian participation in government, forced conscription, and a litany of other problems, and thats all before even meeting the Covenant.
Outlaying territories are valued only for the resources that can be exploited from their planets and systems. Everything else is meaningless, even the human life in them.
ONI are the Gestapo and operate with similarly horrifying tactics and reprisals. This is treated as a necessary evil.
Spartans are also brainwashed child soldiers designed to “put down” rebellions by “any means necessary” through clandestine operations with no oversight and extremely high tolerance for civilian casualties.
Oh, I meant as in like the series as a whole, rather than like how the story is set up, per se, if you catch my drift.
I'm very familiar with the lore, and yeah, the Koslovics were fucking badass, I wished we had seen more of them directly.
The UEG/UNSC are fascist genocidal nazi-like pricks, fully agreed. I think much of the fandom seems to disregard or forget that.
I would say that the ONI are simultaneously cartoonishly and realistically evil, just like the CIA. This is why I love that the Paramount series adequately treats the ONI as a villain equally on par with the Covenant and the Flood, and fans gloss over that the ONI literally nuked rebelling planets.
The ONI created Spartans to be fascist Stormtroopers, of course, and that purpose can never be forgotten about or removed from the context, but despite all of that, I have a great deal of respect for Spartans. The vast majority of them seem to be decent people that genuinely care about humanity, and rightfully despise the ONI, and most of the worst onscreen/offscreen oppression was conducted generations before the first Spartans, so I think that leaves them with some distance and humanity. Despite the Spartan origins and their ever-decreasing numbers, I like to picture the Spartans as somewhat of a bulwark of the common people against the fascist tentacles of the ONI and the UNSC military imperialist industrial complex.
All of the reasons you listed are exactly why I love Halo so much.
I find Halo to be very unique among science-fiction, because I view it as a prime example starting point/refinement of numerous tropes that I love or that I understand in sci-fi.
My headcanon is that some period of time after the events of Halo Infinite, the Koslovics experience a dramatic resurgence, through a combination of the Covenant as an enemy faction being destroyed, the naked imperialism of the UEG lay bare for all to see, and the suffering and deaths of billions of lives culminates in Master Chief teaming up with Arbiter once again to lead a galactic communist revolution against the very last holdout planets of the UNSC, finally freeing hundreds of worlds from the chains of imperialism, and leading to a new relatively peaceful era of stability where humanity and the disparate remnant races of the Covenant work together to bring multi-species socialism to the Milky Way, wiping out the last remnants of UNSC fascism and theocratic Prophet rule, and taking the fight to the Endless, and possibly coming up with a way to prevent the Flood from returning for good, and maybe even creating new technology/science to make Spartan enhancements available to all, without the nasty and horrific side-effects or fascism.
I love the bits and pieces of hard-science fiction with elements of science-fantasy, the sheer dread and tension with the excitement and hope and non-neoliberal optimism that radiates through the franchise.
I also love that and Precursors and the Forerunners both had positive and negative aspects, and time periods and archetypes repeating.
It really is a perfect time capsule of post 9/11 America.
Admittedly, the ENTIRE reason I give Halo flak in the first place is because I was a child of Doom and Unreal; and I've always had an axe to grind about how Halo not only slowed down, but simplified multiplayer gameplay. Beyond that, I hold Halo responsible for giving CoD and Battlefield a blueprint to explosive popularity, further burying arena shooters-- so if I'm slagging CoD and Battlefield, Halo's never far behind because I see it mechanically closer-related to CoD than Quake or Unreal.
tl;dr super-strong bias and a distaste for human-focused sci-fi. I'm never comfortable when an alien race is presented as genocidally-minded, it feels like projection of the Amerikan condition to me.
I can understand feeling uncomfortable at fighting an alien race presented as genocidally-minded, but in Halo's defense, the story shows that most civilian Covenant have no idea about the truth of the actual war, and are misled by the Prophets. And many of the combatants later turn against the Prophets and join humanity's side, so I don't think the point it's true that all members of the Covenant are evil.
But I can understand the bad taste it might leave in your mouth.