- ROBERTO jh
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Posted by: Fearing
Posted by: anish panchalin
Posted by: antony X1000
I haven't read the book myself, but from what I've heard it changes a lot of the characters personalities significantly.
Same. I heard a lot of complaints about the Halsey hating Mendez issue but that was gathered only from chapters 1 and 2, before the release of the book. Also there seems to be a timeline mishap as ajw pointed out in a waypoint thread "glasslands complaints" about when thel returns to sanghelios.
Halsey hating Mendez doesn't seem like it would be a big issue or out of character to me. They used to get along, but for one, Halsey has long since had a change of heart on what she did to the Spartan kids, and secondly, Mendez went off and trained Ackerson's SIIIs behind her back... for Ackerson. I can't imagine Halsey would be too thrilled with him (or Kurt for that matter) after that.
Mendez's life was getting to him. In an argument he has with Halsey over the Spartan programs, Mendez says "if you work in the sewer long enough, you don't notice the smell until you step outside." Explaining why he never said anything before and seemed to be okay with it. After having a while stuck with Halsey after not seeing her for 20 odd years brought back some things that were more powerful in reflection then in the moment.
Again, people confuse character devolopment and psycho-analysis with mischaracteriztion on this site very easily.
I do think people were unfair to expect bad things from her just because they disliked her work on star-wars or gears of war.
(at this stage they had not even seen chapters 1 and 2).
They were exaggerating their negative opinions here and spreading it amongst the bungie universe forum to generate hate/dislike for Travis before the novel came out.
Having read the above posts I do not know whether ajw s glasslands complaint is valid anymore but I will get the book and at least judge it for myself.
The people who disliked her work in Star Wars were the kind of people who see Star Wars as a religion. If Wars is a religion, then George Lucas' word is akin to God. So when he kicked her off the team, people automatically threw a -blam!- fit and called her out on things I can't even fathom (one noted example is when a Lucas fanboy called her a bloated asian whore. How that applies to a british author I have no clue).
Anyway, people were jumping to conclusions way to damn fast and those same people refuse to accept the fact that they are wrong about their initial assumptions; they cling to their beliefs stubbornly, refusing to change like they refuse to accept that people change. They went in with preconceptions of her based off of what topics were being discussed without even having read anything from the book. I have yet to see a legitimate reason as to why this book is bad (and I damn well was looking for canon errors too, not a single one was found). Really the only reason I see is that people here can't seem to grasp the concept of progressive change in humans, which Traviss has been lauded over by critics, authors, literary buffs and everything in between on her ability to do.
The people who some of the fans thought these characters were, are not human beings if they were as they wished. The people who would bash the devoloping characters are the people who thought only of 1 dimensional robots who would never dynamically change beyond their perfect mental image of them. I'm not saying all bashers are like this, but from what I've seen, most are.
Here's an interesting little quote by Chief Mendez that I thought was fitting: "You know what regular recruits are like when you draft them? A mixed bag. Some are down right psychopathic. Some are bone idle. Some are scared of their own shadow. All kinds. But dumb guys like me make them into fighting men and women by giving them discipline and pride. That's the way the armed forces always ran before we even started designing soldiers....You know something? It's the way the rest of the UNSC still runs. What you call abnormalities, I call different personalities. You want to medicate and tweak and modify people into one vanilla definition on perfect, lady, and it's not what humans are like."
So going into Glasslands, you need to ask yourself if you're a perfectionist like Halsey or understands people like Mendez.