By the power of truth, I, while living, have conquered the universe.
Posted by: ThePredkiller2
Posted by: ajw34307
Posted by: anton1792
Unfortunately Terminal 7 isn't as simple as that. Begs the question of where John and Cortana went if Bungie intended for Humans and Forerunners to be one and the same.
Bloody hell, I never knew they intended humanity and the Forerunners to be the same. That's absolutely retarded when they sanctioned things like The Cradle of Life and the Terminals which give absolutely no indication towards the races being related. The Librarian discovered humanity in a Tier 7 state, exactly how could they have been related when there wasn't the slightest inclination towards a relationship there?
It's like Mass Effect 3 and the Dark Energy plot, they foreshadow something (Contact Harvest, for example) and it amounts to absolutely nothing. Well, at the very least, Halo replaced that with an infinitely better story.
Lol, Mass Effect's story is waaaay superior to Halo.
Lol, just...lol.
Sigh... This place would be an awful lot better if you just stopped posting. Nowhere did I state Halo's story was better than Mass Effect's, I said that the way they handled the change in plot was done much better than what they did with Mass Effect 3 because Halo's made sense whilst Bioware got a -blam!-load of controversy over their change they're even having to release DLC to plug the holes they made.
How about you actually read what the post says before commenting?
Posted by: anton1792
"There are other forms of intelligence on Earth, Doctor. Only human arrogance would assume the message must be meant for man."
- Spock, Star Trek IV
We all played into that. We saw the Librarian talking about "special denizens" but never stopped once to think about the possibility that she was not talking about Humanity. The thing about IRIS and the terminals is that they do not actually reference Humans explicitly, or at least I recall no direct mention of them. It only refers to some special group on Earth. Naturally, we all automatically assumed that it was Humanity.
What Scarab points out later in that thread is that the pictures that came with the IRIS file text do not have pictures of Humans, but of other forms of life - bacteria, plants and I think some animals. What it was, in the theory anyway, was that the Forerunners stumbled across a world in which they find the resident non-intelligent species having improbable genetic similarities to themselves; a world in which they slot nicely into an evolutionary tree. The plants, animals and other stuff were the special denizens. Essentially, a Human origins story about a lost Earth.
Contact Harvest threw things into disarray when MB called Humanity his "Makers". Given how it was written by Joe Staten, it could not really be handwaved away as a mistake on the writers part. The only other alternative was to say how MB was rampant and had not a clue what he was talking about, which we also used to explain 343 GS calling John a Forerunner. His statement of "Last time you asked me" in Halo: CE can be understood better if it was not a personal statement to John, but a statement towards Humanity in general. "You" as in "All of you; Humanity", which makes sense if there was no significant difference between what is called Humanity and what was called Forerunner. I also remember 343 GS saying that the PoA contained a record of "all our lost time" or something like that as he was scanning the computer consoles.
As I said I don't mind the change as I had assumed that they were different anyway, and the Forerunner trilogy is a good enough story. The only loose thread now that remains unexplained is that comic that you pointed out, which does appear incompatible with the idea.
The parts with Guilty Spark that you mentioned would have been interesting, however I do not think that the 'special denizens' were anyone other than humanity. For instance, in one of the Terminals:
The anomalous world is in a perilous location beyond the line. The secrets it holds must be preserved, plans within plans within plans. The inhabitants; these unique denizens, must be researched. They may hold answers to our own mysteries. What irony that we discovered this treasure, only at the end of things. But what fortune that we still had time to save them. The thing we built on that world will vouchsafe their lives, but perhaps one day it will be used for its intended purpose. If the plan succeeds, and they are saved, it will be a good world. If the plan fails, and the adversary succeeds, it will remain an enigma forever with no one left to reclaim it.
Evidently, she's referring to the Ark's portal and suggests that it may be "used for its intended purpose" - going to the Ark and firing the Halos, so it seems. There's also the idea of reclamation here, we know that humanity were made Reclaimers by the Forerunners because we are able to use their technology and they aren't. With these two things in mind, I don't think that that theory bore fruit.
It's an interesting idea though.
[Edited on 05.03.2012 5:43 AM PDT]