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Gettin' all Herodotean up in here!
Posted by: ajw34307
Could one not argue that the events happening around the character are what defines the emotional and internal change of the character? ... These factors taken into consideration and going back to the point about events defining a character, one can apply these to Thel throughout Halo 2 as it can be seen to be what brings about his change of character from the Supreme Commander that burned Reach into cinders to a sympathetic figure who grows a bond with the human characters around him.Okay, bizarrely enough, you've almost got me convinced. But from a literary standpoint, it seems tough to say that the Arbiter is fully characterized, because there's nothing about the way he acts or the decisions he makes that are unique to him. Any rational being, given similar circumstances, would behave the same. If you were given the choice between being "hung by your entrails" and becoming the Arbiter, which would you choose? In the same vein, if you had been the Arbiter, and Tartarus hammered your ass down a hole after informing you that it was on the order of the Heirarchs, wouldn't you be open to side-switching? I feel like two minutes worth of cutscenes from the game would have me on your side in this, but as it stands I'm not convinced that Thel's zealotry is somehow a unique and defining aspect of his character. He seems like every other Elite in the pre-Schism Covenant, and you could drop any one of them into his shoes and they would behave essentially the same way.
You do make a good point about the relationship we see between him and John, but it's also something where I feel Halo 3 could have used a couple extra minutes of cutscene interaction between the two. For the most part, the time they spend together is entirely military in nature. They're hanging out when they're killing things. In the case of normal soldiers, yeah, you'd expect the development of close bonds. But the problem I have there is that we never actually see the relationship in development. At the beginning of Halo 3, John's about half a second from blowing Thel's brains out. At the end, they're all pals. But we never really see them drawing closer. I would've liked it a bit more if they'd actually showed them warming up to each other. As it stands, the relationship is just kinda there.
I think you may have misinterpreted my argument there, or were just going off on a tangent. I absolutely do not believe John to be a character of any deep emotional integrity in the games. He's a stone, and the only times his character comes close to any kind of significant development is with his partnership with Thel. Fair enough. Tangent it is.
This is the same of just about every Spartan-II though. She was seen as their surrogate-mother figure, there's absolutely nothing new there from something established a decade ago.
Alright, I'll give you that. But I feel like it's something that needs explained. The Spartans are all pretty smart, highly adaptive, and yet (almost) none of them recognize, or at least acknowledge, the darker side of what she did to them. It's bizarre and unsettling.
I never saw any evidence of this in the game. He never does anything in the game except asking whether it's wise to pick up some civilians, it's like he's just along for the ride. The game would honestly have made absolutely no difference if he wasn't in it.
You play through a whole level with Jun, going step for step with the guy, and 99% of his dialogue is directly related to what's happening in the Op. I think that's the definition of "distant." And in my mind, a super-soldier even having the thought to question orders speaks toward an internal tendency toward defiance. Although I'll go ahead and give you the fact that this is a stretch.
Distant and defiant is pretty much what defines John, and you just argued that he's not a character of much worth emotionally atall - I do not see this argument working the opposite way for Jun.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying there's a large emotional breadth there. I'm just saying it's a quirk, and John has none of those. John's not distant. At no point does he shy away from interaction with anyone. And John's certainly not defiant. We never, ever get a sense that John even thinks for two seconds about what his orders are before he sets out to fulfill them, and he definitely never suggests that leaving a squad of troopers to die would be hunky-dory. John is the single most consummate soldier in the Halo Universe. We don't ever see anything to suggest that he even knows what defiance means.
Kat is the only Spartan in Noble Team I'd say had something interesting about her character. But her interaction with Six made no sense, surely they'd have known each other when they were training in Beta Company? Why wasn't this explored? Why couldn't they have made the 'implied relationship' between Kat and Carter be between Kat and Six? Or have a sort of triangle going on and there comes a point in the game where she's forced to choose between saving Six or Carter, there'd be a deep sense of emotional involvement if something like this was done. Alas, she just sticks to tech-talk. I'll agree with you on that one. An expansion on their possible dealings in the past, as well as the way those shared ties affected their dealings in the present, would have been fantastic. I'm guessing that the problem would have been that only people familiar with the lore in GoO and the bios of Noble team here on the website would have been able to understand. It's one of those casualties born of trying to make a mass-appeal game that ties in well with the deeper aspects of the story; you're rarely able to do justice to both.
Like Jun, Emile could have been taken out of the game and there wouldn't be any difference made to [what can laughably be called] the story. He's just... there. The game would have benefited without him, there's like 1 scene where Emile appears condescending to Jorge and that's the full extent of his character. That's his 'moment' and then it's done. Yeah, he didn't effect much real change, but I would call to mind the fact that he's NOT a main character. He's not there to be a Johnson to Six's John. He's more of a Sergeant Stacker. Most of Noble team fulfills the roles played by the marines in the original trilogy. The problem is that Bungie created them as Spartans, so we expect more of them. They're there for background noise, essentially, but because they're constantly present and obviously different, we expect more from them.
Additionally, Emile's character is the only one made entirely visible. The fact that he's got to have a bigger knife than everyone else, the fact that he ONLY carries a shotgun, the fact that he's got a big ol' skull carved into a massively expensive piece of armor...
Holy crap, I can't do it. You're right. There's freakin' nothing there. Guy's obviously crazy, but outside of that we can't say jack. The more I think about it, the less I can defend Jun, too. So you win those two.
I've already explained my reasons for Sir Splitface Shinyhat, but with John I guess we can from an agreement there. But come Halo 4 with 343i's new policy on his character development, I'm sure we won't be saying this about him for long.
One would hope. The problem is, I've never perceived John as having any real character qualities. Even in the novels, the most we really get are glimmers of understanding about the importance of life and the pain of sacrifice, and one dream sequence about his fear of powerlessness. The guy's almost a blank slate, and it's not easy to take such a sterile character and make him deep.
I'm intrigued as to how they'll do.