- Wrath Vengence
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- Exalted Member
Whens there's no one to turn to, just aim ahead
Posted by: ajw34307
Halsey's guilt and self-loathing has already been covered in TFOR, First Strike and Ghosts of Onyx. Traviss goes out of her way to demonise Halsey in the eyes of every single human being, like the ODSTs when Parangosky explains everything Halsey did.
Hold the phone, what about those other Spartans that ONI created? The ones made to be DISPOSABLE SUICIDE TROOPERS, but no, we're told that it is HALSEY that is unethical...
It's also worth noting that ONI gave Halsey the go-ahead for the Spartan-II program twice, Parangosky is butthurt because Halsey never told her about the flash clones... How does this make Halsey unethical again? Her reasons are justified so she can give closure to the families, instead of making them live in fear that their child has been raped or something. And what's Parangosky's justification for this? Saying that Halsey has committed actions "likely to aid the enemy"...
...
What? This woman has devoted decades of her life to researching and creating soldiers capable of defending humanity after Carver's analysis that: "Unless the political situation throughout the colonies is stabilized (preferably by force), the Government will collapse and civil war will rip human society apart."
Of everything she's done to help the UNSC, why would she suddenly commit acts "likely to aid the enemy"? I get it, she's being used as a scapegoat, but it's a shoddy way to try to get this point across. It make no sense at all and is just another way of making the audience think that Halsey is bad.
Then there's Mendez... good ol' Mendez. Oh, wait, now he's more depressing than Bella from Twilight... After aout 3 books of being told that he is more than willing to carry on doing what he does because it's for the preservation of humanity, following Halsey and then ONI for the Spartan-III program, all of a sudden he starts hating on Halsey.
And we know why, don't we? Drama. Clear-cut, soap opera, cringey drama so that the characters have something to do in the Dyson Sphere - the largest known structure in the Halo universe, and THIS is the best that Traviss can come up with.
And now, the mother of all questions:
What is wrong with Parangosky?
Here's a better question: What isn't wrong with Parangosky?
Old Maggie says that the Spartans will be given full access to their parental records and every detail about their past. Apparently she is completely unaware of the consequences that this is going to have... Here's a scenario that follows:
- Fred finds out about his family, all seems tickety-boo as they're still alive so he decides to go pay them a visit, this is his chance to integrate himself into normal human society for the first time since he was 6.
- Fred turns up on their doorstep, awkwardness ensues as he reveals to the woman 3 feet shorter than him that he's her son.
- WHAM! Chain reaction! Other Spartans reveal themselves to their families and there is a massive amount of backlash in the media for Halsey, the woman who turned these children into "monsters" and "freaks". Spartans are segregated from their families because they can't accept what has been done to their children, most of the parents would have moved on from the loss of their children anyway and now they've come back and revealed that they never died. Mental trauma abound!
- Oh, here's a totally unforseeable and cruel plot twist! Halsey reveals that it was ONI that gave her the green light for this project and funded it, and that ONI themselves got over 930 other children for another Spartan project designed as disposable supersoldiers. Talk about awkwardness in the court room!
- Everyone rises up against ONI, their other twisted experiments are revealed (as Halsey had access to a lot of classified records and spills the beans, for example the experiments that John Smith was conducting by infecting humans with the Flood).
Result - Maggs has just somehow unknowingly signed a death warrant for ONI because she hates Halsey.
And then Parangosky starts talking about making more Spartans in a similar fashion to the ORION project, because that went down really well last time, right? Where will the funding come from for this? I guess rebuilding is no longer a priority only a few months after the end of the war then if more Spartans are going to be made for some reason we're not told? Spartan-IVs? Is this some kind of fan fiction? Why not just recall Gamma Company? That would make a lot more sense.
So Spartans are now going to get the Clone Trooper treatment, they'll just start being pumped out again and again... but look who the author is, are any of us really all that surprised.
And then what the hell is Fred doing the entire time? He outranks EVERYONE there. He'd definitely push Halsey to the side when it comes to communicating with Earth, you'd think that this would be his priority.
We lose every one of the Spartan-IIs and all but one of the IIIs as characters. They're made into machines, herpicus derpicus as the Latin phrase goes.
Then you've got Halsey "abducting" the Spartans. What the hell? How does Parangosky, or anyone outside the Sphere, know she abducted them? Hood sent the Spartans. For all anyone knows, they all bloody died, so let's just go and just stick around this mystery object, when we have most of Humanity wiped out.
And then Halsey pops up, and everyone is all like "Y U TOOK THEM AWAY WEN WE NEEDED?!?!?!?!?!", yet nobody is getting mad at Lord Hood in the least for sending them in the first place. No. It's HALSEY'S fault.
And then there's Anton's point: Where did the whole "Humans are utter liars" stereotype come from? I have noticed that this was, above all of the other insults coming from the Sangheili, the most prominent quip. It is almost like a running theme in the novel, that Humanity somehow have the stereotype as being profuse liars in the galaxy. This has just come out of the blue. As far as I am aware there was no indication at all in the canon that the Sangheili thought of Humans as being liars in particular above anything else. It was always just the usual "Heretic" or "pathetic" or "weak/stupid" etc quips coming from the ones that were over-zealous like that. However no one quality in particular was ever singled out and aggrandized above the others, as if it were a common stereotype.
Jul said that Humans hold compassion and fair play as the staples of their society, and then says that this is a lie (huh!) because there is "copious amounts of evidence to the contrary". What evidence? And how can he know this? How the -blam!- does this guy suddenly know so much about humanity?
What about this next bit in chapter 7 somewhere:
"But he also knew just how successful humans had been using the most underhand and dishonest tactics; not just bluff and feint, but the most complex and disgusting deceptions. They were prepared to forfeit the lives of their own people to achieve it, too."
What evidence is there for "underhanded and dishonest tactics", and of Humanity "sacrificing their own in order to achieve it"? and how does he know about these things? How can you even have "underhanded and dishonest" tactics and "disgusting deceptions" coming from the losing side in a war of genocide? There are, evidently, no rules and absolutely no civility to be found in such a scenario in the first place. So what does any of that even mean?
How does 'Telcam know about humanity's religions, enough to say that the major ones are corrupt? In order to know that he would need to have a decent knowledge of these institutions, of their history and of their effects on society. How can he know all this?
I get the impression that all of this has been stuck on where it either never existed before or does not make sense just to give the Sangheili a good excuse to hate humans. Because that is all Glasslands is about. Hate, hate, a side dish of hate and a dessert of hate with hate custard on top.
This was a terrible Halo book, Traviss completely ignored important details from the canon (things like Lucy punching Halsey with enough force it made her arm vibrate, yet Halsey escapes death with only a bloody nose) and basically writes out of fear of becoming too fond of and familiar with the universe she's writing books for.
Bravo. I completely agree.