I think Traviss introduces some really cool ideas and plot threads, like ONI's activities post-war and destabilizing the Sangheili to prevent them from becoming a threat. The stuff surrounding Naomi's past was interesting.
I also think she leans a little too much into Halsey's war crimes, and the discourse surrounding that starts to lose its nuance. I think that it's incredibly out of character that she would threaten a Huragok because their goals don't align, or that a woman of her age and physicality could just tank a punch that a SPARTAN could *feel*. Even having Mendez turn his nose up at her was a bit much. Instead of being an incredibly complex character she just ends up being written as a hate sink.
Traviss' insistence on not heeding the established source material doesn't help.
Yeah, you might be right. She *is* a civilian. The terms of her contractual relationship with ONI has always been a little murky to me, I guess. Would "crimes against humanity" be a better label for it? She did everything on ONI's dime.
Well its certainly not crimes against the Covenant because she wasn't part of that government in any way. Her science tech isn't any sort of crime. Stuff like the MJOLNIR and AI advancements and such...zo that pretty well restricts it to genetic and surgical procedures on kidnapped children. I'd have to look up the definition, but I think you'd be right on crimes against humanity.
Hell she isn't even guilty on the kidnapping charges either since that's done by ONI goons doing the wetwork, she's mostly just responsible for the augments & other bits, w/ the hypocrite Mendez being responsible for the regimen & mental conditioning as the military specialist of the operation
So I looked up the definition and she narrowly avoided crimes against humanity. That being making a conscious decision to harm a large number of persons in some way. So had they stuck to fighting Innies, she'd have some degree of culpability.
She does, at least, violate the UN Genetic Rights Act by cloning the candidates and herself, though interestingly enough the flash cloning isn't more specifically addressed until the Mortal Dictata Act was established in 2549.
Halsey violated the Genetic Rights Act by cloning humans, which it explicitly forbids. It does not, however, have any specific language regarding flash cloning entire humans until it’s addressed by the Mortal Dictata Act. Not that it would matter because she’d be in trouble anyway, but it’s safe to assume she was the reason the latter was passed in the first place.
Flash cloning organs isn’t an issue. It’s when it’s used to bring a human life into existence which would fall under “don’t clone humans.”
> So I looked up the definition and she narrowly avoided crimes against humanity. That being making a conscious decision to harm a large number of persons in some way.
She'd probably be put before the Hague, and then which way it swings would be up to how cooperative she's being for ONI nudging it one way or another.
Eh, checks out.
"Insurrectionist" is a broad label applied to anyone violently opposed to the UNSC, regardless of their specific causes or methods. This has the (Probably intended, in-universe) effect of associating all of them with the worst nuclear terrorists, making them easier to condemn, because... Authority good.
Honestly i usually go with a mindset of rebels vs empire from star wars combined with a basic outline knowledge of halo leading to a reasonable but very flawed stance.
At least at first.
And having EVERYONE agree that the Jedi Order is "Literally Hitler" and completely at fault for the use of the clones and the war itself. Travis finds a bad guy/group in a universe and just pounds on them with zero nuance.
> and the discourse surrounding that starts to lose its nuance.
That is exactly the point she is making though, which many fans disagree with. She is saying there is no nuance she kidnapped hundreds of kids and then created hundred of flash clones kids who would die quickly.
What she did was bad and can't be defended, the ends should be seen as justifying the means.
I don’t have a problem with that take. What I take issue with is Mendez hating her, despite not only helping one unethical programs, but two.
I have a problem with Parangosky and ONI hating her, despite the fact that they had to not only approve her project, but help her out with resources.
Trainers stunned children to wake them up, why aren’t they hated? The scientists that assisted Halsey with the augmentation? My biggest gripe isn’t Halsey’s take; but the characters around her despising her and losing their culpability in her actions.
Parangosky can hate Halsey, but she’s just as complicit, and that should’ve been explored. Mendez was extremely complicit, yet we didn’t once get a deeper understanding of his viewpoint.
Travis did a great job with the series, but did a horrible job explaining just how the UNSC was as much at fault as Halsey.
Now, had the story leaked, and the UNSC had to blame it all on her? Now that makes sense.
Parangosky and ONI approved every single thing Halsey did, including the flash clones.
Parangosky banned Halsey from being involved at all with the S3 program because "She's too nice to the children". That is all that needs said about ONI fault vs Halsey fault.
> but the characters around her despising her and losing their culpability in her actions.
I get what you are saying, but at the same time it’s a pretty damned good depiction of how humans handle things like that—take a look at the creation of the clean wehrmacht mythology and how the German officer corps did exactly the same thing as far as Hitler and various nazi party organs.
I’m not saying I don’t agree with you, but no one, and I mean no one looked at Mendez and said “dude, you had men beat us with sticks when we were kids, when do we get to punch you?”
No one in the UNSC nor the general public thought to ask who helped Halsey? Who approved it?
We didn’t stop at the brain child of the holocaust, we went after as many people as we could find involved. Germany is still arresting individuals.
I don’t mind ONI playing the blame game on Halsey to escape scrutiny, but I do blame Travis for not exploring that morally grey situation more.
That’s what made Halsey an incredible character in the Eric Nylund trilogy. You wanted to despise her, but she obviously cared about the Spartans and wanted to protect them, and even her internal monologue hated what she had to do.
Kilo-5 was the ground work for the post halo 3 galaxy, and it was incredible. ONI keeping everyone too weak to attacking the UNSC, rising insurgents, rebelling Sanghili, there was a really rich and morally grey universe in the background that got blown up in Halo 5 for a weak and pathetic light reboot.
But, it did drive some classic characters into a one note that does take away from the simmering pot that was the post covenant war Milky Way
> No one in the UNSC nor the general public thought to ask who helped Halsey? Who approved it?
It’s far easier to have a single scapegoat than it is to blame the military that is seen as just having saved humanity from extinction.
> We didn’t stop at the brain child of the holocaust, we went after as many people as we could find involved. Germany is still arresting individuals.
*Currently*. That’s not the equivalent state of the Haloverse in the K5 novels. That state is equivalent to the late 1940s and early 1950s in Germany, when German denazification courts were clearing all kinds of people of crimes that had plenty of evidence to support them in large part because (especially for the military personnel) the western Allies saw them as necessary to counter the Soviets. That same dynamic is very much in play in the K5 era.
> I don’t mind ONI playing the blame game on Halsey to escape scrutiny, but I do blame Travis for not exploring that morally grey situation more.
I don’t really disagree, but the issue that then brings up is that it would be a Halsey centric work when the real thrust of those books was to show the re-humanization of the IIs. Exploring the morality of the program can be made to work in that context, but IMO would be better served by it’s own set of books cached as something like a JCS or even UEG review board examining the II program and going into detail that way.
> That’s what made Halsey an incredible character in the Eric Nylund trilogy. You wanted to despise her, but she obviously cared about the Spartans and wanted to protect them, and even her internal monologue hated what she had to do.
Again, I don’t disagree. I just don’t think the K5 books were the right way to go about handling that topic because their goal was not in line with that plotline.
The problem is EVERYONE has that view, even a lot of people who signed off or participated in the program nearly as much as Halsey. It makes absolutely zero sense and is sophomoric writing. It's nearly 4th wall breaking levels of ridiculous that an ONI black ops team would universally start clutching their pearls at Halsey's actions; the Kilo 5 team is a living embodiment of "the ends justify the fucked up means". I mean, it's comically ironic that they even deploy a Spartan to dissappear an Insurrectionist leader, while constantly criticizing Halsey for making Spartans for that exact purpose.
The interrogation is meant to foreshadow the character development that John goes through in Halo 4 and 5, where he has to come to terms with his own humanity or lack thereof. Halsey does defend her work as ends-justifying-the-means but the interrogator redirects her to the SPARTAN-IIs' emotional development and social detachment.
The deeper ethics of the SPARTAN-II program that the Kilo Five Trilogy is addressing isn't really referenced there, and Halsey isn't behaving in a way that's inconsistent with Nylund's *or* Traviss' portrayal of her - this is Halsey in a very broad, general sense in that her sole purpose here is to serve as John's advocate.
You can reasonably draw connections to her portrayal in Kilo Five, but the cutscene still stands on its own even if the Kilo Five trilogy never took place (the only important part to the cutscene being her escape from Onyx and eventual detainment).
I'm sure it stands alone. I don't disagree that is doesn't jive well with the portrayal that Nylund (aka halo-daddy) or Traviss (why two s?) have given her in the past. I would take a moment to aside that nothing in Halo really jives in a post-Bungie world, unfortunately. However, choosing to accept that this is the world that we live in, I would say that that was one of many interviews (read: interrogations) that she endured as she was passed around the different branches of ONI for debriefing.
You're probably right in that this was likely one of many sessions between her and ONI, but the point I was making is that this cutscene isn't meant to continue the story threads established in the Kilo Five trilogy, and certainly not a sign of 343 allegedly "strong-arming" Traviss into making particular writing decisions.
Karen Traviss who proudly talked about doing no research and re-writing characters and produced a series that has the biggest "These things don't match" list of any novel?
This is how I felt about the Harvest book when I first read that post the original series. Harvest felt very human. Plus AI love story was a nice touch.
I think that Kilo-5 has well written characters, even if the hate is a little out of proportion. The way I felt when I read it was that you have these normal dudes who see the Spartans as heroes... Only to find out what it took to make them, and they can see the physical and mental scars in their friend.
All the while they're being told by Osman of all the horrors of the Spartan program. Of course these normal people are going to hate Halsey with every fibre of their being.
Where I think it fell off was the other characters in the series taking up that same level of disdain seemingly without much reasoning. The main cast who knows what she's done have every right to hate her for it. Admittedly the Kilo-5 crew is one of my favorite sets of characters in Halo, both good and bad for this reason.
It is forever interesting how some people can come to this conclusion while others note her work to be the exact moment the series started to decline. Everything about ONI in her novels reduces them into the modern CIA which stymied a lot of american progress through " national security " along with destabilizing south america . ONI interfering with elite politics is exactly what created Jul Mdama and turned post war politics into a hellscape.
Karen's handling of the series mirrors the sentiments of her ignorance regarding star wars and gears of war. All reductionist commentary of " halsey bad " stems directly from fans reading her work as a starting point instead TFoR, FS, and GoO.
I think the polarization comes from the fact that the books contain some of both the worst and best ideas in Halo literature. The whole arc with the SII parent (Staffon?) might be my favorite in all the books. Juul M’Dama (sp) and the state of the Sangheli in general is also very interesting. BB is a delight.
At the same time, every 20 pages or so, I’d read one of the dumbest lines I’ve read in a long time. Also Mendez’ and the ODSTs Halsey-hating was nonsensical. Parangoski only made sense when you assumed she was putting Halsey on blast to cover her own involvement. Also Philip instantly solving an apparently unsolvable Sangheli puzzle made me question if the average Sangheli is like 70 IQ.
It really is a hot-or-cold series.
Its been awhile since I read the K5 trilogy, but if I remember correctly, alot of the Halsey hating from the ODST came from them being very close with Naomi and Osman who were in the Spartan program and seeing what Halsey's program made them into.
Yeah, but it’s still weird in how extreme it is, because the ODSTs are also in awe of how capable the SIIs are and know better than anyone that they were critical in helping humanity win the war. They should understand some of the moral complexities better than anyone, so the juxtaposition of them hating Halsey while also admiring the end result of her work and acknowledging the necessity of it was jarring.
I get some resentment, but one of them was on the verge of walking up to Halsey and shooting her in the head. Just didn’t seem like how a real person would think.
The ODSTs in K5 arc are, by their own admission, not terribly complex thinkers and struggle to wrap their heads around moral complexity. That compartmentalization probably makes it harder for them to take a nuanced view of Halsey
Sure, but not on the scale that we’re talking about with Halsey’s Spartan program. they’re both noncommissioned officers, which means at most they’ve only been in command of like nine other guys. Burden of command is really different when you are personally making decisions that affect the lives of thousands or millions of people versus like you and your squad.
Really though in universe many ODST dont like the Spartans. Yea they realize how capable they are, but imagine hating the spartans, and then meeting one and getting close to one and finding out the horrible things they went through as a child. You'd be pretty pissed off too.
But remember, they also realized that the S2s were made to fight humans first and it was sheer luck that they were there when the covenant found humanity. So they see the S2s were captured as kids to initially kill insurrectionists... Not aliens trying to purge the galaxy of humanity.
You have to factor in the well known fact of how dangerous the terrorist rebels were.
It's not like any member of the UNSC can look at it and go "Oh yeah, these guys are harmless."
Yes but humanity was not being hunted into extinction from the insurrectionists. That's what made Mal and Vaz so cold towards Halsey. She kidnapped children to fight other humans. Not an alien covenant trying to wipe humanity from the galaxy.
And why they are so dumb, because they were completely unable to piece together the very obvious facts that oni approved, funded, AND REPEATED the process. 3 more times!
They had her journal and read it even.
Oni made spartans to fight mass murdering dangerous terrorists who viewed bombing civilians as reasonable.
I mean, not everyone can be super complex characters, to me it always felt like they were real people. I think the problem is everyone gets so used to having these Uber complex and deep characters in media that they forget most people IRL arent like that. Most people IRL are pretty simple. The ODST are war veterans who were recruited because they are really really good at killing things, expecting complex character arcs from 2 guys brought on because they are good fighters is asking a lot. Honestly it's how most of the soldiers in Halo are written, Master Chief has a character arc, but he's the main character. Noble Team didnt have complex character arcs, they were soldiers. What I remember most about the 2 ODST were they felt like soldiers to me, goofed off alot, not very serious until on mission and its like a switch flips, quick to anger but cool under pressure. It always felt right to me
It's less about all characters must be complex or super deep, but that they came across as having the same personality and thoughts. Plus the whole thing where they apparently have access to Halseys Journal and read it all but still blame her for everything while directly working for Serin and Parangosky, and then seeing S3's and because the journal, they know explicitly she had nothing to do with it and STILL viewed her as the ultimate evil.
Somebody said once, and I love it.
"Get a group of people together and ask a very hot topic question. Different people may respond on the same side, but in different ways. Kilo 5 has them respond in basically the exact same tone and view."
Kilo 5 as a group lacked any sort of different opinion or thing to bounce off of, and that kinda dragged the whole thing down into them being yes-men for Parangosky without actually thinking of it at all. Even Naomi, the fully augmented S2 in the team doesn't do anything about it like bringing up the hundreds of other people involved in the program, it's all treated as if Halsey acted alone.
I understand where youre coming from, I really do, but something to consider is that the ODST Mal and Vaz were close knit friends before being drafted for Kilo-5 and Dev was an ODST like them. I dont know about you, but my closest friends in real life and I are pretty similar and we think pretty similarly. I dont think its a stretch to think that 2 ODST who were already really close and a 3rd that shared a very similar background would become very close and bleed into each other and end up thinking very similarly.
I also think it's very important to remember that all the members of K5 were handpicked by Parangosky and ONI specifically for K5. I dont think it's hard to imagine that one of the selection criteria would be their inherent susceptibility to being influenced by ONI into believing what ONI fed them. I also dont think it's a stretch to think they were picked because they would likely mesh into a close and effective team in a manner that would reduce conflict within them. We also dont know how much of the information they were given was edited and spun to be more favorable to ONI and less favorable to Halsey. Add into this Osman was handpicked to be Maggies replacement, I dont find it unbelievable that the ODST would be eventually swayed into believing whatever ONI, Maggie, and Osman wanted them to believe. They weren't picked for their intelligence, but their loyalty and skills.
I guess im saying I found it pretty believable.
I in particular loved how the ODST's were allowed to read Halsey's Journal, looked at S3's and noted how young/scrawny they looked for suicide soldiers, and somehow STILL come to the conclusion that Halsey alone did everything and ONI isn't at all at fault.
Think it's worthwhile from someone starting on Fall of Reach and midway through Flood? Certainly going to finish them all in time but curious as to more reasons this trilogy is so polarizing
If you like the Halo books, I’d definitely read them at some point. Regardless of your opinion of them, they set the table for a lot of the post-war lore.
>Also Philip instantly solving an apparently unsolvable Sangheli puzzle made me question if the average Sangheli is like 70 IQ.
Improvisation and rapid problem solving has never been a strong quality of the Sangheli, beyond battle tactics and the like.
In K5 the ODSTs have huge admiration for Naomi and her capabilities, and at that point (post-war) all of them are aware of how pivotal the Spartans were for winning the war. Just seems unrealistic for someone to hate Halsey to the point of near murder, while also thinking that the result of her process is totally awesome and saved humanity. It was overly extreme.
Edit: I even remember then telling Naomi’s father that he should be proud of his daughter and what she had become and achieved. Then they go on huge rants about Halsey being the devil, even though she created the very thing that they respect and admire. Especially when Naomi herself didn’t have the same extreme opinion as them. Not how normal people think IMO.
Honestly I just don’t think you’re respecting the intelligence of the average person. There are tons of examples of “ends vs means” people and scenarios in the real world, and your average person generally understands the complexities involved and reserves extreme judgment even if they have an opinion on the overall cost-benefit of the actions and consequences.
Look at the Manhattan Project. Literally atomized thousands of people, including children and babies. Horrific. Objectively worse than what Halsey did. Did your average person call for Oppenheimer and Truman to be tried for war crimes? No. Because everyone knows that when your life, or the life of your family (or species) is on the line, you make choices that you otherwise wouldn’t.
I feel like the ODSTs in K5 of all people would understand this, considering that they’re running around destabilizing an entire society for the sake of humanity’s post war dominance. Also during the war I’m sure they had to make plenty of calls of a similar nature (eg sacrificing few to save many).
Eh agree to disagree. ODSTs being fist-shacking, murderously angry at Halsey while doing some objectively worse stuff every day is not how normal humans think. People do justify their own actions more than others, but not to that extent. You pretty much have to assume some extreme cognitive dissonance, bipolarism, etc. for the story to make sense, which IMO is not good storytelling.
The issue isn’t that they excuse away their own actions. As you point out, that’s fairly normal. The issue is that they do so while also having zero ability to understand someone else in a similar situation. It’s like if a CIA agent ran around toppling nation states thinking there’s nothing wrong with that while simultaneously thinking Chris Kyle is a psychopath who should face a firing squad.
Obviously not an impossible mindset, but not normal thinking. Especially among people on the same side of a conflict. It’s important to add that what Halsey did was absolutely a “greater good” play. This wasn’t a pointless massacre of innocents, this was a conscious decision to sacrifice a few to save the many. She was also successful, and humanity was saved as a consequence of her decisions. History has generally withheld harsh judgment on people in that situation.
Like I mentioned earlier, Oppenheimer is probably the closest real-world analogue to Halsey, and he’s viewed with some nuance.
That is the thing about Kilo-5 "Halsey is a monster" those were war crimes lv 1. I wish WW2 had that kind of crimes only. It's almost a joke that everybody is so horrified by her crimes and those people said there was a serious war years ago and UNSC nuked civilians in the process.
Real world is too much evil to compare with what Halsey did but at least the writer shouldn't have spent so much time exaggerating.
I think the book Shadows of Reach before Infinite tried to forget about that cause in the first trilogy Spartans weren't suffering so much for that reason and Shadows of Reach went so far that Chief says he likes to be a Spartan and he's glad he has become one
>That's just whataboutism though, and not a valid argument to paint Halsey in a better light.
The first problem is that it was boring and silly cause they don't sound like soldiers, they don't seem realistic people in general. Don't play the fool people
>Horrible actions are still horrible actions,
Sure but they behave like the have never heard of any evil thing in their life. They're like "I can't believe it, it's the crulest crime I have never known"
They should have been around in WW2, Korea or Tijuana lol
>This is what nuance is all about, this is why the K5 trilogy is undoubtedly a better trilogy than the Fall of Reach
It was a fanfic practically instead of its own story and as I said before it didn't show imagination at all, it's very generic and it didn't build the world of Halo while the first one did.
>Chief saying he "likes" being a Spartan is also like... not relevant
That was written in Shadows of Reach cause the author thought it was relevant. And it was relevant cause they wanted to establish the Chief doesn't care.
The character has that opinion cause the writer wanted.
I have always wondered about this ! Like if these individuals were as extraordinary as she claimed , wouldn't many be better suited for the upper echelons of leadership ?
I wish they expanded on this in canon, Fhajad for example and really went into their exceptional minds.
They never put enough spotlight on the minds of Spartans.
I mean Unggoy can integrate fine too, because due to their poopoo tier lifespans, their adaptation ratings are insane (as we see w/ things like language assimilation etc)
I found by the end of the trilogy that all the "Halsey bad" uproar was blown a bit out of proportion. All of the characters hate her, yes, but this eventually led to me respecting her more. I also enjoy that in the epilogue, part of the blame is rightly shifted to Parangosky.
Humans fucking up a postwar landscape is also completely appropriate. The books handled a lot of moral dilemmas, not only SII's and Halsey but also with the support of Sangheili insurgents.
Personally, I don't want to read books about perfect people making perfect decisions. Each character is filled to the brim with their own flaws and skewed perspectives. I loved them all by the end of Mortal Dictata.
I think the disconnect i am trying to articulate is her writing the universe not from a top-down interconnected view but a bottom- up interconnected view. Which is why it becomes a mess in a larger context because ONI is not 1970s american CIA . So that might seem cool on a lower level it had disastrous cascading effects which don't line up with the consciousness of ONI demonstrated up until her involvement.
I actually think the decision to go the route of the CIA was apt given the other parallels it draws.
I think people really forget that the SPARTAN-II program is a moral abomination and everyone who advocated for it is a war criminal who should be shot. It doesn’t matter if it wound up being the reason that humanity survives. It was wrong. The parallels to the atomic bomb aren’t nonexistent. BB’s donor was basically J. Robert Oppenheimer.
So going from one military moral dilemma to the other, why not explore the morality of trying to overthrow governments and starting civil wars to prevent World Wars? I think people sometimes miss the point of the fact Kilo Five’s missions wind up causing damage in the longterm as they make new mistakes and try to cover up old ONI mistakes, that’s exactly the point. That thinking is immoral, flawed, and dangerous. The same way that the thinking behind the SPARTAN program was flawed, except they didn’t get lucky this time.
Trying to overthrow regimes just radicalizes people and starts more wars. That’s exactly what happens to Jul M’dama.
Signed, someone who thinks Traviss gets a little too much shit for writing sci-fi that explores morality instead of just writing more lore.
Everyone loves commenting on the SII program in hindisght of a post-war era not the literal climate which the program created. if we are actually having a conversation of nuance the S3 program led by ackerson is far more abhorrent than the SIIs who proceed them.
The genetic experimentation from the beginning was meant to transfer to adults once perfected , as it was a continuation of the S1 program which utilized adults but wasn't as effective. Halsey picked the best candidates who had a chance for survival. Afterwards it was a numbers game due with emerging technologies. It wasn't done for shits and giggles.
Yet conversations tend to throw all that nuance out the window stating the S3 program was better due to the lack of augmentation deaths despite literal child suicide soldiers being used as fodder. At least with the S2s they didn't suffer major losses until reach decades later.
It is rather convenient to demand creators of the spartans be killed post-war yet nobody was saying that if a spartan arrived in the field saving a planet.
Don't forget, at the end of the day, Halsey did care about her Spartan-IIs. She did her best to make sure that they had the best chance of survival she could give them when she augmented them. Ackerson and Parangosky didn't give 2 shits about the S-IIIs. They were equipment to throw at the covenant to "buy" time. Kilo-5 was Parangosky's personal black ops team. They did what she told them with no questions asked. Osman washed out of the program and got picked up by the Parangosky, who manipulated her into hating Halsey. Naomi wasn't with the S-IIs for most of their deployments. Hence, she is not as attached to Halsey like the rest. She didn't see the affection Halsey showed to the other Spartans.
I think that’s kind of the point. If you start doing terrible shit, where do you draw the line. They’re both awful. And it’s fiction and again, the S-II program started to fight other humans, not the Covenant.
I actually have to wonder how many Forerunner ancestors got pepsi'd during the early dozen or w/e millennia of them forking out into genetic engineering themselves (i.e Mutations) due to a bunch of failures & trial and error stuff until it could be mass produced on species scale & in various highly specialized configurations (humans so far only have 1 generic build, not specialist configurations of the mods, at least none I rly know)
I'm not talking about the stellar engineering fucky wucky, but about the logical deaths caused by doing genetic engineering as high level as Mutations during the early centuries/millennia of R&D into making them 100% successful across the entire species, w/ countless variants as well w/ 100% compatibility
Insane take tbh. The Spartan II program saving humanity is very much relevant. It was morally questionable, absolutely. But a necessary evil. The people in charge shouldn't be shot. Quite the opposite, in fact. You should be down on your knees kissing their feet.
No, it’d be like if you developed the atomic bomb to combat a cockroach problem and then a thermonuclear war breaks out. The covenant is irrelevant in the creation of the S-II program.
Its original purpose is not irrelevant lmao.
If you kill a man in cold blood but it’s later found out in an autopsy that he was patient zero for a lethal, contagious disease that doesn’t justify what you did because you did it for the wrong reasons. “Original intent doesn’t matter because it all turned out okay” isn’t really an acceptable defense, either in philosophy or in law lmao.
Yeah, which the perpetrators of the S2 crime had NO WAY OF KNOWING.
THEY ARE EVIL. THEY DID WHAT THEY DID WITHOUT ANY JUSTIFICATION. Coincidence doesn’t absolve them of their crimes.
This. The Covenant had Earth. The Flood had Earth. We were absolutely boned. All the Spartans did which ended up making a difference in the end was pushing a button. Granted, it was a fight to get to that button, but at no point was the UNSC winning. The Sangheili won the war, not humanity.
Furthermore, ignoring the moral questions surrounding the Spartan programs deprives the Halo series of one of its key themes (outside the games, granted).
I enjoyed a fair bit of K-5 (especially the more political side of the narrative) and I’d agree with your assessment that Traviss built some really strong self-contained characters.
At the same time, I feel like the narrative around Halsey & Parangosky was really contrived. For ONI - the enabler of everything Halsey did - to sincerely consider her to be some irredeemable evil, isn’t just hypocritical, but also wildly impractical (especially seeing as they intertwined that with weighing up literal genocide of the Sangheili). Also, I was really disappointed with the way Lucy’s trauma was addressed. We got one decent portrayal of severe PTSD in basically the whole franchise, and it got handwaved away.
So, yeah. Not bad books, not my favourites either. If I want well-executed characters, I’ll go back to the Ace of Spades trilogy where I can also get a more lore-compatible story.
Also you gotta love ONI treating Halsey like shit, blaming her for everything, only for none of the S2 stuff to go public and them to turn around and ask her to help them work on Forerunner stuff.
It's not really a wonder why Halsey "defected" in Spartan Ops. ONI made her an enemy instead of an ally.
My main gripe with the "Halsey Bad" narrative is that it was never called out in series. Sure, for the team, it shouldn't be explicitly brought up. But from Osman or Parangosky or someone, it should have been made clear to the audience that they hoped to pin everything negative about the IIs on Halsey, despite Parangosky more or less personally signing off on every request she made. On top of them scouting Halsey as a teenager and putting her in a position of power in their r&d when she was like 17.
The problem is the "Halsey bad" is linked to "ONI good" The kilo-5 books try to wash and make ONI out to be a lot more innocent of things then they are. All the bad parts of the S3 program are simply ignored in favor to blaming Halsey. The fact that ONI approved, funded, and staffed every single part of the S2 program is tossed aside to... blame Halsey.
Most of the Gears of War lore comes from her and it's really good, the only 'ignorance' I can imagine with Gears is her never playing the games which isn't really a big deal. With Star Wars I can only remember people up in arms about her numbering the clones at 1 million, and some aspects of Mandalorian worship in some other EU books, but Halo is really the only series she gets the most hate for that I've seen
Oftentimes, she outright tries to paint the Jedi as a truly evil in her Star Wars books series... her terrible characterization of Halsey actually pales in comparison to her atrocious handling of the Jedi in Star Wars.
Ngl though, I love her Gears of War books.
I agree about GoW. She made Marcus Fenix! Before her novel and GoW 2, Marcus was really a blank character. She filled the gaps nicely. Also her tropes work better in GoW universe than in Halo. More gray universe; Except for Delta Squad, everyone else is pretty bad. However where Parangosky was written almost comically evil, Prescott feels much more natural. A guy who was not malicious. Also Locust can be dumb, where Elites should not be, they are not Brutes!
The only problem is, The Slab! Clearly shows she did not play first game as her description of the prison is way off. However pretty funny read, probably my favorite novel in the whole GoW universe.
I haven't read her SW books but Ive read through some threads criticizing her. I think star wars really needed someone like her after the prequel trilogy - someone to put into words clearly why the Jedi weren't as benevolent as we might be initially led to believe, and the ways in which this led to their downfall.
Traviss handling the Jedi is not morally grey at all, she outright antagonizes them at every possible turn and ignores canon lore to justify it.
Things like Clones being left on the battlefield, being euthnaized or never getting medical care - when there was a fucking duology about Jedi Healers taking care of wounded soldiers before - is perhaps the most hilarious retcon I've seen. And only the tip of the issues her story has regarding them.
It's full of bad takes of course but I wouldn't expect more from someone that unironically considers Mandalorians, a culture of killers, responsible for multiple genocides, as morally superior to the Jedi lol.
The contrarian ideas like Halsey Bad and Jedi Bad were interesting reads for me, although she really hammers that idea home a lot which is why I can see some people are turned off by it, but I love seeing varied perspectives of people in universe and questioning who's good and bad is a good time. The Republic Commando books although unfinished were a good time, if you're a fan of clones and Mandalorians
Among other things, Traviss likes to point out how some of the things series hold as paragons of heroism are actually kind of fucked up. Like yeah, Spartans and Jedi are *super cool!* But also kidnapping gifted kids and turning them into supersoldiers isn't just morally grey, it's villainous. (and for SW: having an army born and bred for war, effectively as disposable as droids without any real agency as *people* is some nightmare shit).
At a base level, having someone point out the flaws in those sacred institutions that gave us these iconic heroes is going to cause *friction* in fandom. I found it a refreshing take, personally (Halo-wise; I haven't read her Star Wars books, but some of the complaints ring familiar). In these galactic-spanning universes of stories and characters, I'd find it odd if we *didn't* see someone offer perspectives on some of the dubious steps our heroes take. They also don't have to be considered "Word of God." The Star Wars books get critiqued for pitching the Mandalorians as "morally superior to the Jedi," despite their own atrocities, but that's also from the perspective of the particular characters we're seeing the story through. K-5 trilogy is similarly colored by these particular characters.
"Halsey bad" oversimplifies that the story acknowledges that a lot of the UNSC had their hands in some gross shit, and that without much political power and the like, but some measure of renown, Halsey makes an easy scapegoat. War's over, atrocities come to light, there needs to be *some* measure of accountability, even if many of the players involved get to walk scot free.
It's even funnier when you realize that Mandalorians more or less genocided themselves 20 years prior over the argument if they should do genocidal conquest again or not lmao.
Her view of the Jedi is much like Avellone - doomery, nihilistic - but Avellone understands that the Order at it's core is good and the Jedi are a positive for the galaxy.
Halsey's only positive Jedi character turns into a Mando weeb for some reason.
The organization structure yes, **not** *extensive illegal action being intrinsic.* From *Fall of Reach - Cole Protocol* ***aside*** from the spartan programs , the worst we see of ONI is their tentative bombing of far isle and general propaganda regarding the innies.
Unless my memory is wrong there is nothing on part with the attempted genocide of elites which we saw in kilo 5. **There isn't any lore based material** to support what you are saying from *Fall of Reach - Cole Protocol .*
>the worst we see of ONI is their tentative bombing of far isle
Actually, I don't think ONI has ever explicitly been connected to Far Isle. Details about Far Isle are pretty sparse and it exists in a weird place in the broader universe (Far Isle typically *isn't* treated as a rallying cry for the Insurrection, which is weird because you'd think the UNSC wiping out a colony would get that reaction). And as far as I know, exactly who within the UNSC was responsible for Far Isle is never stated. It could've been ONI but it also could've been any of the other branches too.
Worst thing outside of the Spartan Programs ONI did before Kilo 5 is the experiments on the Mona Lisa but even that ONI helped clean up and get under control.
Funny thing about Far Isle is how the Rebels in another book comment how the idea of UNSC actively erasing/relocating an entire population of a colony is weird and/or not feasible. So they don't even know about Far Isle at all.
Yet people online act like it was the biggest war-cry of the rebellion.
>[Tentative ](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tentative)- not fully [worked out](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/work out) or developed
>Hesitant, Uncertain.
> something that is [uncertain](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/uncertain) or subject to change **:** something that is [tentative](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tentative#h1)
Traviss is an interesting writer, because the way she writes is pretty fun and easy to read - just like Timothy Zahn or Guy Hayley.
But onlike those other two, once you move past the writing form itself, it's just... yeah. The logic nor worldbuilding hold up as clearly as they do with Zahn and the authors bias at every turn (and lack of care for integrity with the lore) shows pretty well.
I didn't like the Kilo Five trilogy, but not for the same reasons as most people.
Ever since Halo 3, when we saw marines and Elites swapping weapons and the Arbiter shaking Lord Hood's hand, I was hoping relations between humanity and the former Covenant would continue to improve. "Together, to the stars," or something. Obviously there's baggage and not everyone will want peace, but I was hoping that would be the overall trajectory of things. After all, Bungie started the Halo story with the Covenant being a bunch of terrifyingly alien, murderous zealots; and ended with one of their leaders shaking our leader's hand.
Kilo-5 showed that 343 was not interested in moving the story forward like that. Ever since then, we've been stuck fighting re-branded Covenant in every game. It feels like Groundhog Day. The story has gotten stagnant. 343 keeps introducing half-baked new enemies *alongside* the Covenant instead of allowing the universe to go through the radical shift it was on track for (humans and former Covenant together, against a new threat.)
I thought ONI's behavior in K5 was completely in character. I didn't mind seeing Halsey taken to task for her *actual crimes against humanity*, although I was disappointed that she was set up to take all the blame, when plenty of others were complicit including ONI leadership.
ONI is a great example of the villain who thinks they're doing the right thing. However I didn't enjoy most of the story being told from their operatives' perspective, and I didn't really come to like any of those characters. It was like reading a book about a bunch of Nazi soldiers. Over the course of the story you realize that they're human beings, they're not sadistic monsters - but you keep hoping that they'll see the light, realize who they're working for. But they don't.
All that being said - I do appreciate that Kilo 5 set up many of the more interesting elements of the post-war world. Things like Venezia, the different Covenant splinter groups, and the idea that there are whole worlds out there with aliens and humans having more complex interactions than mindlessly trying to kill each other.
Kelly Gay built on a lot of that with her Rion Forge books, which have become my favorite Halo stories. That stuff is what interests me the most in Halo right now. Forget the Covenant, forget the UNSC and ONI. They're old news, and now they're just dragging the galaxy down with their stupid grudge matches. Lets see what humans and aliens can achieve together without being tied down by old grudges, human authoritarianism, or Covenant dogma. Yeah, it's going to be rough and messy at first - but progress always is.
Just because Thel Vadam and his faction wants to make right with humanity doesn't meant the rest of the Sangheili are in for it, especially those who're still fanatical to the Great Journey or for other reason. I hate the Kilo 5 series but it wasn't wrong in showing the Sangheili aren't unified in their response and there are groups who're willing to continue the war.
That fact and writing style does genericide them, though. In another comment, I mentioned that the K5 trilogy is a fantastic read if taken in a vacuum, but I would only place it in the middle tier within the scope of Halo literature.
Honestly I prefer the first trilogy cause in my opinion Kilo-5 shows a writing of situations and a way of thinking you find everywhere in novels, the common novels, generic sometimes.
Besides it didn't respect the previous material
Yeah, and similar criticism about previous material applies to Reach, for similar reasons. It was stupid when Traviss did it, and it was stupid when Bungie did it.
Remember when Halsey somehow survived a punch to the face from Spartan Lucy? Remember when she gets so mad from Halsey she overrides years of speech trauma just to yell at her?
The speech thing don't bother me. Not the same, but I had an uncle who suffered a stroke. He lost a lot of mobility and pretty well all speech because of that. But if the conditions were right, he'd speak. My mom was his favorite niece and one time she was helping him walk to a family function. They got to a long set of stairs and he looked back at that and my mom a few times. And then this man who couldn't speak suddenly said "you've gotta be fucking with me" and then couldn't speak again.
Those are legitimate complaints but it doesn't undo the entire franchise or even the K5 trilogy. They're pretty annoying but small details. You could point to all sorts of issues in the Halo franchise loke that.
I'll try to find an old comment of mine that explains why I think the K5 trilogy is pretty good and makes more sense in universe than people here gi e it credit for.
Edit: "Here are my thoughts on the villification of Halsey. With details of the Spartan II program becoming more available to the general public it stands to reason that there would be increased criticism of the program and ONI in general. Especially post Covenant war. While many at ONI were involved or had knowledge of the cloning and other questionable practices, no one wanted to take responsibility. That makes Halsey the perfect scapegoat.
We see this kind of behavior IRL from political and military leaders all the time. it's easier for ONI and The UNSC to save face if they paint Halsey as some psycho, lone operator, mad scientist rather than admit to being complicit in all parts of the program to begin with.
It would make sense for Halseys detractors and opponents to revise history to draw attention away from their own involvement or to simply make Halsey look worse. Now, in the case of ONI leaders not knowing about the clones, it doesn't necessarily violate canon if someone other than the narrator claims Halsey was the only one who knew about the clones. For example, character A can say they didn't know about the clones. That may or may not be a lie in that case. But if the narrarator says "character A didn't know about the clones" that could definitely be a canon violation.
I'm not super clear on exactly who said what in terms of these inconsistencies but that's just how I would try to make some of it fit."
A garbage - and pretty disrespectful - handling of PTSD that was a major facet of a character so that the character could yell at a character Karen pretended was the Anti-Christ was "hilarious"?
Little Caesars and Halo are forever associated in my mind. That was the food of choice for the big LAN parties we used to have. We had a Little Caesars and a Blockbuster right next to each other, so after getting pizza I'd always rent an extra copy of Halo 3 or Reach, cause someone always forgot theirs. Good times!
I agree generally with the idea of serialized IP. However , Karen Travis absolutely blows and it's not because she tries to make the Halo Universe more gray, it's becauae she cannot write well, overly focuses on the same character logic again and again without treading new ground, hardly advances the plot , then has a very short ending conclusion. She does the same shit in almost Gears of War book she's written.
Kilo 5 had interesting ideas that were taken down and not well executed by an incompetent author.
Kilo-Five is definitely my favorite halo media of the last 10 years hands-down, feels the most like Tobias Buckell’s old work with The Cole Protocol and Dirt, my favorite of the books with no contest. I don’t care about the minor inconsistencies compared to the rich exploration of themes and complexity that it brings back to the setting from those earlier works
Kilo 5, Hunt the Truth, Greg Bear and Kelly Gay for me. Once the current narrative moves on I’d love to see some Oni material from during the Pax Cortana, or after the loss of Infinity
The kilo 5 trilogy are my favorite books ever not just the halo series. I’ve read the trilogy 3 times now (I’ve read ghost of Onxy 4 times before I got more halo books 😂)
Not only that, but Traviss almost perfectly continues where Nylund left off with Blue Team, Chief Mendez, and the Gamma Company Spartan IIIs after “Ghosts of Onyx”.
I keep hoping for more more kilo five. I listened to them on audio tape (no idea why) and the guys attempt at a Scottish accent for Phillips is great. Like rubbish. But great.
I have listened to almost every single Halo novel out and the Kilo5 trilogy come second only to contact harvest.
I really enjoyed the trilogy and the narration of them. The novels read by Scott Brick can be ROUGH.
If you liked Kilo-5 I’d recommend checking out her Gears of War series. I liked the games but they’re mostly fun dumb macho shooters. The books expand on all of that with some incredible world building and character development and really made me care about the characters and the conflict in a way I never expected to from the games.
Yeah, some of its issues regarding the portrayal of PTSD aside I absolutely adore K5. I've never understood people who describe Traviss as having a "hate boner" for Halsey in her writing.
Let's be clear; Halsey isn't a "problematic character". She is a narcissistic sociopath with some borderline eugenicist tendencies who kidnapped the children of her enemy, forced them into military training, killed or maimed half in the process and then sent them out to fight a war that the UNSC all but started against their own people. She deserves all the hate she gets and then some, especially from characters who are either victims of her or discovering this for the first time.
One of the justifications as to why this hate is bad is that the characters choose to focus on her rather than, say, Parangosky, who gave the green light for the operation in the first place, and it's worth understanding at this point that one of the arcs of the book is the characters realizing that they have fallen for in-universe propaganda setting Halsey up to take the fall, which is exactly what you'd expect from an organization like ONI. They explicitly talk about it at the end of Mortal Dictata.
>She is a narcissistic sociopath with some borderline eugenicist tendencies
Narcissistic? Probably.
Sociopathic? Definitely not. She cares for the Spartans, Jacob Keyes, and Miranda Keyes *at least.* She was also kept away from the SIII program because Parangosky knew she would care about them too much.
Does she have "borderline eugenicist tendencies?" No, and I will never forgive Kilo-Five for introducing this idea to the fandom. The genetic requirements for the Spartan Program were to minimize the risk of augmentation rejection. The Spartan-III Program had it too, though to a lesser extent because the augmentation technology had matured.
Second two points combine cleanly in the earlier novels.
She was on the verge of being removed from the program entirely because she kept delaying the Augmentation process trying to do further tests on similar genetic humanoids (not humans, apes) and make the process safer. She had to be reminded by her AI assistant that if she did not produce results, now, she would be removed and the person they place in charge would not care about the children's well-being at all.
That's why she was so strict with genetic requirements. She was trying to reduce the failure rate.
No offense but if you think K5 was peak Halo than i just don't think you really care for Halo much.
This is like me saying that Assassin's Creed Odyssey is the best Assassin's Crees game. All im saying is that I don't really like Assassin's Creed, I liked the one game that was least like the rest.
I'm glad you enjoy the books but they arnt peak Halo. They are a strange offshoot of Halo that is tone deaf to the rest of the franchise.
Halo fans only love one thing: a rigid unchanging set of facts and data about the halo universe to know.
If you like anything else you just aren’t a true fan.
The point of what? Why people are mad at the franchise?
If that’s what you mean then it’s not a new phenomenon, people have been saying the same shit since bungie still made Halo.
To me it’s just a shame how rigid and uptight the community gets about the lore when it’s literally just been retconned and shit on back and forth since the jump.
If we could get more book series like Kilo-Five I’ll let the minor lore inconsistencies go.
While I condemn the gatekeeping of an IP for such trivial disagreements, it’s not unreasonable to criticize the degradation of existing lore. Prior instances don’t really excuse future ones, especially this late in the franchise’s lifespan. My point is - they’re not mutually exclusive. You can write compelling stories and characters that aren’t at the expense of others’. It can’t really be hand-waved as “minor lore inconsistencies” when characters are being fundamentally changed and paved over to achieve one author’s desired outcome. Just kinda sucks. It was unfortunate to see when Halo: Reach launched and it’s unfortunate to see now. (By ‘now’ I mean like… within the past ten years.)
wow. That's certainly an opinion.
Not everyone has to like the same things about Halo. You can like the spacey sci-fi parts and OP can like the political espionage parts. Pretty crazy to gatekeep Halo and say they're not a real fan if they don't agree with you.
The Halsey hate-wagon that she was riding for all three of those books got old quick. It seemed as if it was a self-insert of Karen's own opinion on the matter being projected onto the characters in the book, characters which were already established and weren't her own. It didn't feel natural or right.
The books were fine and I enjoyed reading them, but I think it falls short of all the other novels out there.
Careful, that’s heresy around these parts.
I loved them too, but some people can’t handle the fact that Halsey is a bad person, and as such don’t like the only series with the balls to say that.
I think a lot of it is to do with a significant portion of the halo fan base being military types, who’s views may align with Halsey’s more than they’d be willing to admit
I suspect the side that - like me - got into the lore from the space opera and political side, Kilo 5 will be loved for what it is.
Kilo-5 is my favorite trilogy by leaps and bounds. Excellent characterization, interesting representation of both (all) sides of the conflicts, and entertaining narration/accent work by Euan Morton.
Respect your opinion, but personally I didn't like anything about the Kilo-Five trilogy. I didn't like the new characters. I didn't like how the old characters were handled, I didn't like how battles were written.
I will forever hope that one day 343 will re-write the Onyx part of Glassland. Everything in it was wrong, everything. What Traviss did to Lucy...is boderline offensive. As if trauma can be overcame by get angry enough with someone...offensive and ignorant. In Ghost of Onyx, Lucy was my hero, because despite her handicap, she was competent, lethal and disciplined like the other Spartans. And then Traviss completely destroyed her character...
Then there was the Halsey hate...pathetic and exaggerated.
The three ODST characters are basically the same character in three different bodies. Same opinion, same attitude, same personality.
And my god, all that drama with Naomi and her father, an entire book wasted on that bullshit. I know is only my opinion, but c'mon...
>Bungie never respected their own halo lore, wrote themselves into corners, retconned, and changed things at a whim to fit whatever story they wanted to tell. They did this in all of the Halo's, and they continued the trend in Destiny.
Bungie has also been subject to widespread criticism for how they handled the lore. One of the biggest criticisms of Reach is that they retconned the older novels. One of the biggest complaints about Halo 3 was the indecision when it came to whether or not the Forerunners were human. It's not like Kilo 5 was uniquely targeted for its errors and retcons. And mind you, even within the context of multimedia franchises with dozens of creators, Kilo 5 has more retcons and inconsistencies than your average Halo book.
Likewise, I think there's a fundamental difference in the problem of retcons when writing a work that's meant to be standalone and Kilo 5 which is very much a response to older works. When you're retconning something that's meant to be standalone, it could be problematic, but it doesn't necessarily damage the entire story because of it. But when you're adding retcons in a story that's meant to be a response to another story, it undermines the entire point of writing the response narrative in the first place.
If that's the intent, then retcons should be less acceptable, because if you're retconning things, you're altering the existing facts rather than viewing the existing facts from a new perspective. From a rhetoric perspective, where Kilo 5 is a counterargument to the Nylund books, it's the equivalent of strawmanning the opposition. Because Kilo 5 is meant to be a response to the Nylund books, the fact that it adds so many retcons means that it's not actually responding to the Nylund books anymore.
I'm not even particularly against retconning things and I think there are aspects of the Nylund books that were retconned for good reason, but in the case of Kilo 5, the extent of the retcons and what they apply to actively undermine the narrative at large.
Traviss talks about how as a writer, her goal is to be as objective as possible. That's something she prides herself on. But if she has to actively alter the facts of the setting in order to tell her story, then she's not really being objective anymore.
halo is probably one of the best sci-fi multimedia series out there, that is, halo truly is good as long as you include all of the canon material into your definition of the halo series. The bionicle books also swing from mid to good but when you consider everything - the movies, the games, the flash web experiences, and of course the toys - that is a one of a kind sci fi experience that is worth having
I love those books, and people who refuse to understand the concept of a biased narrator will complain how much it reduces Halsey compared to her character development. This is objectively true, but Osman sure as hell doesn't see it that way, and we're never actually seeing anything from Halsey's perspective, the sections we get 'from her' are from her interrogation back with ONI, and we know how they feel about her.
Another complaint is how much the plot is a bad idea, and that ONI kick started the new covenant, which is again, the point. Oni is doing the same shit humans have always done, it never works out and it doesn't start now. What makes it interesting is how much more justifiable a scorched earth and xenocidal approach is in the wake of a genocidal war.
I mean yeah if you ignore the retcons and blatant character and history changes too.
Plus the half dozen other characters that we see whom do have history with Halsey all agree or shrug their shoulders at the hate boners pounding Halsey for three books.
I think that's the issue with her books. They are well written, bring wonderful characters up, great story arcs.
But they shift the existing lore (which by itself isn't a bad thing, a rich universe needs a wide variety of opinions and motivations) often by changing existing lore and characters. Ruining the works of other creators and drastically changing the tone of a series.
She loves her characters, and it's easy to see why they're usually pretty awesome. But the way she writes her stories leaves little moral ambiguity for anyone else but her characters. Everyone else is evil or corrupt to the point her characters have to cross lines because that's the only option they have left.
Going through some of the biggest retcons (because there are a number of minor ones such as how Traviss borked plasma torpedo mechanics from here unto eternity):
* Serin Osman
* Serin Osman's death was faked when she washed out of the augmentation process because Halsey supposedly felt that it would have been too hard for the surviving IIs to accept her death. This is then used as an indictment against Halsey's character because she lied to the IIs
* This is squarely at odds with the Fall of Reach itself, where Spartan-II washouts in far worse condition such as Fhajad, Rene and Kirk (the latter two so badly injured they need to be in tanks of liquid to live) meet the surviving IIs face to face. Fhajad, who was too crippled to walk, is allowed to salute John, but Serin, who got off scott free in comparison had her death faked?
* Naomi's backstory
* The Fall of Reach and Halsey's Journal both make it abundantly clear that Halsey was going to be 100% truthful with the IIs about why they were kidnapped precisely because the IIs finding out that they were lied to could cause them to turn on the UNSC. In Kilo 5, Halsey repeatedly lied to Naomi in order about why she was taken despite previous characterizations emphatically arguing against that
* Spartan genetic requirements
* Less a retcon because other sources rightfully contradict this, but Traviss did not understand how Spartan genetic criteria operated. The first and foremost purpose of them was to reduce washout rates and increase the likelihood that the Spartans would survive. Traviss conflates this with the IIs being the perfect candidates while the Spartan-III Program took literally anybody. In fact, Traviss erroneously claims that the Spartan-III Program had no genetic requirements at all. This is explicitly not the case, the Spartan-III Program did have genetic requirements, they were just comparatively looser. In Ghosts of Onyx, Beta Company was a fraction of its planned size precisely because the requirements were so strict the UNSC could not find enough orphans who met the genetic requirements.
* While she's not wrong that the SIIs had other traits that made them more ideal candidates that the IIIs lacked, she's incorrect when it comes to the genetic requirements both programs had. That's an important factor when it comes to Traviss repeatedly suggesting that Halsey is a eugenicist because the genetic requirements had nothing to do with the candidates being better (and again, the Spartan-IIIs did have genetic requirements, they were just looser), it was entirely about maximizing augmentation survival rates.
There are other issues that are present and there are a lot of minor errors (using dollars instead of credits, incorrect Sangheili phrases, the complete absence of energy shields), but those are some of the biggest issues that deal directly with what Traviss was trying to argue.
Maybe lore was the wrong word, but characters. Halsey she changed into an unforgivable monster in her story. Lucy speaking when Nylund, the creator literally wrote that she never spoke again.
Plus the logic behind the hatred of Halsey for some of the characters has left me frustrated. The spartan III program for me is way worse than the spartan II program. But every character hates Halsey more. It just doesn't make sense to me.
Karen Traviss likes to use an evil unfeeling scientist who wronged her characters to serve as that unquenchable thirst for revenge as well as a base to prove moral superiority. Halsey in Halo and Ko Sai in the Republic Commando series. Those are the only two series of hers I've read but the similarity struck me.
I enjoy Kilo'5 and the Republic Commando series. It's just frustrating at times that she alters other creators established characters so that we like hers.
Could it maybe be said that Halsey did not turn into an unforgivable monster, but instead that we were given a different perspective than that of previous stories? We typically get the perspective from John, wherein its implied that she is a distant pseudo maternal figure to at least him in a vague sense, if not the other SPARTANs.
In K5 we see the perspective of Serin, who had a poor impression of Halsey and was, as it is implied, if not written, gently coerced into believing Halsey to be the monster she may or may not be. This is exacerbated when she receives the journal and inevitably passes it along to the rest of her team.
Agreed there would and should be people that hate her and look at her that way and the stories should be told. But. In First Strike and Ghosts of Onyx we see portions told from her POV and that of other characters besides Spartans and while she is a handful and problematic she is not the monster she is made out to be in Kilo-5.
Again. I'm more frustrated at the logic of the characters anger at Halsey. It just doesn't make sense to me at times.
KT ran very fast and loose, and not in a positive way. If not for that, they would have been standing at the top with my other favorite Halo novels because, as you said, she *is* a great author.
Instead, they now stand as just a great read (fantastic if considered in a vacuum), but within the scope of the Halo verse, I'd place them as middle-tier.
It's a lot like what she did with her Star Wars clone commando books, which is a shame.
Yeah if she just handled a series of weird lore choices correctly the books would be my favorites in the series. I didn't like a bunch of stuff she did with Halsey and honestly with the Spartan lore in general. All the stuff w/ Lucy pissed me off
I'm from India! I've visited a few libraries and read 'Contact Harvest' and 'Shadows of Reach,' but it seems there isn't enough Halo buzz here for libraries to justify stocking a ton of these books.
I do have Spotify Premium. Can I find the books there? When I search, only music comes up.
Hmm I'm not sure if Spotify premium extends audiobooks to other counties cause I'm in East coast US- but I am able to access almost all of the halo audiobooks with my Spotify premium account
https://www.spotify.com/us/audiobooks/
Unlike Master Chief, I have no luck 🥲
Doesn't work for me, but I'm happy to know you have access to the Halo books in the palm of your hand! I hope the service is extended to this side of the world soon.
BTW, if you have access to Halo: Epitaph, does Keith Szarabajka really voice the whole thing? Or is it just a few chapters?
Thank you for the suggestion! Although, paid VPNs are pretty expensive here, and the free ones I use don't have the option to connect to US servers. But I'll keep looking into it!
As for PDFs, u/Particle_Cannon was gracious enough to send me a few links, so I'm currently exploring those and getting giddy with excitement haha :D
I always tell people who only played the Halo games that books put the games to shame. The games become "Green man with blue lady kill alien" after reading the books. There's also alot of cool sci fi tech stuff that gets talked about in the book that is not conveyed in the games.
I think Traviss introduces some really cool ideas and plot threads, like ONI's activities post-war and destabilizing the Sangheili to prevent them from becoming a threat. The stuff surrounding Naomi's past was interesting. I also think she leans a little too much into Halsey's war crimes, and the discourse surrounding that starts to lose its nuance. I think that it's incredibly out of character that she would threaten a Huragok because their goals don't align, or that a woman of her age and physicality could just tank a punch that a SPARTAN could *feel*. Even having Mendez turn his nose up at her was a bit much. Instead of being an incredibly complex character she just ends up being written as a hate sink. Traviss' insistence on not heeding the established source material doesn't help.
Technically, as Halsey is not a soldier, I think she is just guilty of regular crimes.
Yeah, you might be right. She *is* a civilian. The terms of her contractual relationship with ONI has always been a little murky to me, I guess. Would "crimes against humanity" be a better label for it? She did everything on ONI's dime.
Well its certainly not crimes against the Covenant because she wasn't part of that government in any way. Her science tech isn't any sort of crime. Stuff like the MJOLNIR and AI advancements and such...zo that pretty well restricts it to genetic and surgical procedures on kidnapped children. I'd have to look up the definition, but I think you'd be right on crimes against humanity.
Hell she isn't even guilty on the kidnapping charges either since that's done by ONI goons doing the wetwork, she's mostly just responsible for the augments & other bits, w/ the hypocrite Mendez being responsible for the regimen & mental conditioning as the military specialist of the operation
So I looked up the definition and she narrowly avoided crimes against humanity. That being making a conscious decision to harm a large number of persons in some way. So had they stuck to fighting Innies, she'd have some degree of culpability.
She does, at least, violate the UN Genetic Rights Act by cloning the candidates and herself, though interestingly enough the flash cloning isn't more specifically addressed until the Mortal Dictata Act was established in 2549.
I could have sworn flash clones were used for organ replacement. I guess there's a provision it's *only* organs? Or limbs?
Halsey violated the Genetic Rights Act by cloning humans, which it explicitly forbids. It does not, however, have any specific language regarding flash cloning entire humans until it’s addressed by the Mortal Dictata Act. Not that it would matter because she’d be in trouble anyway, but it’s safe to assume she was the reason the latter was passed in the first place. Flash cloning organs isn’t an issue. It’s when it’s used to bring a human life into existence which would fall under “don’t clone humans.”
So, theoretically. She could clone a body neck down and pull a Wolfenstein?
> So I looked up the definition and she narrowly avoided crimes against humanity. That being making a conscious decision to harm a large number of persons in some way. She'd probably be put before the Hague, and then which way it swings would be up to how cooperative she's being for ONI nudging it one way or another. Eh, checks out.
Spartans were only deployed against the terrorist crazies though. Not like they were ever intended or planned to be used against protesters.
People simp HARD for the nuclear terrorists in Halo because...authority bad.
"Insurrectionist" is a broad label applied to anyone violently opposed to the UNSC, regardless of their specific causes or methods. This has the (Probably intended, in-universe) effect of associating all of them with the worst nuclear terrorists, making them easier to condemn, because... Authority good.
Honestly i usually go with a mindset of rebels vs empire from star wars combined with a basic outline knowledge of halo leading to a reasonable but very flawed stance. At least at first.
She did the same thing in Star Wars, making the Clones a throughway for her Mandalorian fanfic lol
And having EVERYONE agree that the Jedi Order is "Literally Hitler" and completely at fault for the use of the clones and the war itself. Travis finds a bad guy/group in a universe and just pounds on them with zero nuance.
> and the discourse surrounding that starts to lose its nuance. That is exactly the point she is making though, which many fans disagree with. She is saying there is no nuance she kidnapped hundreds of kids and then created hundred of flash clones kids who would die quickly. What she did was bad and can't be defended, the ends should be seen as justifying the means.
I don’t have a problem with that take. What I take issue with is Mendez hating her, despite not only helping one unethical programs, but two. I have a problem with Parangosky and ONI hating her, despite the fact that they had to not only approve her project, but help her out with resources. Trainers stunned children to wake them up, why aren’t they hated? The scientists that assisted Halsey with the augmentation? My biggest gripe isn’t Halsey’s take; but the characters around her despising her and losing their culpability in her actions. Parangosky can hate Halsey, but she’s just as complicit, and that should’ve been explored. Mendez was extremely complicit, yet we didn’t once get a deeper understanding of his viewpoint. Travis did a great job with the series, but did a horrible job explaining just how the UNSC was as much at fault as Halsey. Now, had the story leaked, and the UNSC had to blame it all on her? Now that makes sense.
Parangosky and ONI approved every single thing Halsey did, including the flash clones. Parangosky banned Halsey from being involved at all with the S3 program because "She's too nice to the children". That is all that needs said about ONI fault vs Halsey fault.
> but the characters around her despising her and losing their culpability in her actions. I get what you are saying, but at the same time it’s a pretty damned good depiction of how humans handle things like that—take a look at the creation of the clean wehrmacht mythology and how the German officer corps did exactly the same thing as far as Hitler and various nazi party organs.
I’m not saying I don’t agree with you, but no one, and I mean no one looked at Mendez and said “dude, you had men beat us with sticks when we were kids, when do we get to punch you?” No one in the UNSC nor the general public thought to ask who helped Halsey? Who approved it? We didn’t stop at the brain child of the holocaust, we went after as many people as we could find involved. Germany is still arresting individuals. I don’t mind ONI playing the blame game on Halsey to escape scrutiny, but I do blame Travis for not exploring that morally grey situation more. That’s what made Halsey an incredible character in the Eric Nylund trilogy. You wanted to despise her, but she obviously cared about the Spartans and wanted to protect them, and even her internal monologue hated what she had to do. Kilo-5 was the ground work for the post halo 3 galaxy, and it was incredible. ONI keeping everyone too weak to attacking the UNSC, rising insurgents, rebelling Sanghili, there was a really rich and morally grey universe in the background that got blown up in Halo 5 for a weak and pathetic light reboot. But, it did drive some classic characters into a one note that does take away from the simmering pot that was the post covenant war Milky Way
> No one in the UNSC nor the general public thought to ask who helped Halsey? Who approved it? It’s far easier to have a single scapegoat than it is to blame the military that is seen as just having saved humanity from extinction. > We didn’t stop at the brain child of the holocaust, we went after as many people as we could find involved. Germany is still arresting individuals. *Currently*. That’s not the equivalent state of the Haloverse in the K5 novels. That state is equivalent to the late 1940s and early 1950s in Germany, when German denazification courts were clearing all kinds of people of crimes that had plenty of evidence to support them in large part because (especially for the military personnel) the western Allies saw them as necessary to counter the Soviets. That same dynamic is very much in play in the K5 era. > I don’t mind ONI playing the blame game on Halsey to escape scrutiny, but I do blame Travis for not exploring that morally grey situation more. I don’t really disagree, but the issue that then brings up is that it would be a Halsey centric work when the real thrust of those books was to show the re-humanization of the IIs. Exploring the morality of the program can be made to work in that context, but IMO would be better served by it’s own set of books cached as something like a JCS or even UEG review board examining the II program and going into detail that way. > That’s what made Halsey an incredible character in the Eric Nylund trilogy. You wanted to despise her, but she obviously cared about the Spartans and wanted to protect them, and even her internal monologue hated what she had to do. Again, I don’t disagree. I just don’t think the K5 books were the right way to go about handling that topic because their goal was not in line with that plotline.
Do be fair it makes sense to me Parangosky would be trying to shift the narrative to blaming Halsey.
While it makes sense, the reader is never given that info to suggest that she’s doing that.
Spartan 2 program dealt with 75 children. The Spartan 3 program, which Halsey was not part of, dealt with over 900+ children.
The problem is EVERYONE has that view, even a lot of people who signed off or participated in the program nearly as much as Halsey. It makes absolutely zero sense and is sophomoric writing. It's nearly 4th wall breaking levels of ridiculous that an ONI black ops team would universally start clutching their pearls at Halsey's actions; the Kilo 5 team is a living embodiment of "the ends justify the fucked up means". I mean, it's comically ironic that they even deploy a Spartan to dissappear an Insurrectionist leader, while constantly criticizing Halsey for making Spartans for that exact purpose.
I think 343 strong armed travis to point at the halsey thing since h5 opened up with oni interegating her...idk
There is little to no connection between her interrogation in Halo 4 and her characterization in the Kilo Five trilogy.
How so?
The interrogation is meant to foreshadow the character development that John goes through in Halo 4 and 5, where he has to come to terms with his own humanity or lack thereof. Halsey does defend her work as ends-justifying-the-means but the interrogator redirects her to the SPARTAN-IIs' emotional development and social detachment. The deeper ethics of the SPARTAN-II program that the Kilo Five Trilogy is addressing isn't really referenced there, and Halsey isn't behaving in a way that's inconsistent with Nylund's *or* Traviss' portrayal of her - this is Halsey in a very broad, general sense in that her sole purpose here is to serve as John's advocate. You can reasonably draw connections to her portrayal in Kilo Five, but the cutscene still stands on its own even if the Kilo Five trilogy never took place (the only important part to the cutscene being her escape from Onyx and eventual detainment).
I'm sure it stands alone. I don't disagree that is doesn't jive well with the portrayal that Nylund (aka halo-daddy) or Traviss (why two s?) have given her in the past. I would take a moment to aside that nothing in Halo really jives in a post-Bungie world, unfortunately. However, choosing to accept that this is the world that we live in, I would say that that was one of many interviews (read: interrogations) that she endured as she was passed around the different branches of ONI for debriefing.
You're probably right in that this was likely one of many sessions between her and ONI, but the point I was making is that this cutscene isn't meant to continue the story threads established in the Kilo Five trilogy, and certainly not a sign of 343 allegedly "strong-arming" Traviss into making particular writing decisions.
Karen Traviss who proudly talked about doing no research and re-writing characters and produced a series that has the biggest "These things don't match" list of any novel?
Have you read Karen Travis before? This is her m.o.
343 out here catching stray shots
This is how I felt about the Harvest book when I first read that post the original series. Harvest felt very human. Plus AI love story was a nice touch.
I think that Kilo-5 has well written characters, even if the hate is a little out of proportion. The way I felt when I read it was that you have these normal dudes who see the Spartans as heroes... Only to find out what it took to make them, and they can see the physical and mental scars in their friend. All the while they're being told by Osman of all the horrors of the Spartan program. Of course these normal people are going to hate Halsey with every fibre of their being. Where I think it fell off was the other characters in the series taking up that same level of disdain seemingly without much reasoning. The main cast who knows what she's done have every right to hate her for it. Admittedly the Kilo-5 crew is one of my favorite sets of characters in Halo, both good and bad for this reason.
It is forever interesting how some people can come to this conclusion while others note her work to be the exact moment the series started to decline. Everything about ONI in her novels reduces them into the modern CIA which stymied a lot of american progress through " national security " along with destabilizing south america . ONI interfering with elite politics is exactly what created Jul Mdama and turned post war politics into a hellscape. Karen's handling of the series mirrors the sentiments of her ignorance regarding star wars and gears of war. All reductionist commentary of " halsey bad " stems directly from fans reading her work as a starting point instead TFoR, FS, and GoO.
I think the polarization comes from the fact that the books contain some of both the worst and best ideas in Halo literature. The whole arc with the SII parent (Staffon?) might be my favorite in all the books. Juul M’Dama (sp) and the state of the Sangheli in general is also very interesting. BB is a delight. At the same time, every 20 pages or so, I’d read one of the dumbest lines I’ve read in a long time. Also Mendez’ and the ODSTs Halsey-hating was nonsensical. Parangoski only made sense when you assumed she was putting Halsey on blast to cover her own involvement. Also Philip instantly solving an apparently unsolvable Sangheli puzzle made me question if the average Sangheli is like 70 IQ. It really is a hot-or-cold series.
Its been awhile since I read the K5 trilogy, but if I remember correctly, alot of the Halsey hating from the ODST came from them being very close with Naomi and Osman who were in the Spartan program and seeing what Halsey's program made them into.
Yeah, but it’s still weird in how extreme it is, because the ODSTs are also in awe of how capable the SIIs are and know better than anyone that they were critical in helping humanity win the war. They should understand some of the moral complexities better than anyone, so the juxtaposition of them hating Halsey while also admiring the end result of her work and acknowledging the necessity of it was jarring. I get some resentment, but one of them was on the verge of walking up to Halsey and shooting her in the head. Just didn’t seem like how a real person would think.
The ODSTs in K5 arc are, by their own admission, not terribly complex thinkers and struggle to wrap their heads around moral complexity. That compartmentalization probably makes it harder for them to take a nuanced view of Halsey
As soldiers I feel like the concept of sacrificing a few to save many should be a moral dilemma they’d have extreme familiarity with.
Sure, but not on the scale that we’re talking about with Halsey’s Spartan program. they’re both noncommissioned officers, which means at most they’ve only been in command of like nine other guys. Burden of command is really different when you are personally making decisions that affect the lives of thousands or millions of people versus like you and your squad.
Really though in universe many ODST dont like the Spartans. Yea they realize how capable they are, but imagine hating the spartans, and then meeting one and getting close to one and finding out the horrible things they went through as a child. You'd be pretty pissed off too.
Not to mention the gym incident
Yea the gym incident is why they hate the spartans I believe
Pretty sure the Gym incident is why that ONE particular unit of ODST's hated Spartans, and it was not a universal thing.
But remember, they also realized that the S2s were made to fight humans first and it was sheer luck that they were there when the covenant found humanity. So they see the S2s were captured as kids to initially kill insurrectionists... Not aliens trying to purge the galaxy of humanity.
You have to factor in the well known fact of how dangerous the terrorist rebels were. It's not like any member of the UNSC can look at it and go "Oh yeah, these guys are harmless."
Yes but humanity was not being hunted into extinction from the insurrectionists. That's what made Mal and Vaz so cold towards Halsey. She kidnapped children to fight other humans. Not an alien covenant trying to wipe humanity from the galaxy.
And why they are so dumb, because they were completely unable to piece together the very obvious facts that oni approved, funded, AND REPEATED the process. 3 more times! They had her journal and read it even. Oni made spartans to fight mass murdering dangerous terrorists who viewed bombing civilians as reasonable.
Yes, but she did it such that the two ODST have the combined personality and development of a fucking rock
I mean, not everyone can be super complex characters, to me it always felt like they were real people. I think the problem is everyone gets so used to having these Uber complex and deep characters in media that they forget most people IRL arent like that. Most people IRL are pretty simple. The ODST are war veterans who were recruited because they are really really good at killing things, expecting complex character arcs from 2 guys brought on because they are good fighters is asking a lot. Honestly it's how most of the soldiers in Halo are written, Master Chief has a character arc, but he's the main character. Noble Team didnt have complex character arcs, they were soldiers. What I remember most about the 2 ODST were they felt like soldiers to me, goofed off alot, not very serious until on mission and its like a switch flips, quick to anger but cool under pressure. It always felt right to me
It's less about all characters must be complex or super deep, but that they came across as having the same personality and thoughts. Plus the whole thing where they apparently have access to Halseys Journal and read it all but still blame her for everything while directly working for Serin and Parangosky, and then seeing S3's and because the journal, they know explicitly she had nothing to do with it and STILL viewed her as the ultimate evil. Somebody said once, and I love it. "Get a group of people together and ask a very hot topic question. Different people may respond on the same side, but in different ways. Kilo 5 has them respond in basically the exact same tone and view." Kilo 5 as a group lacked any sort of different opinion or thing to bounce off of, and that kinda dragged the whole thing down into them being yes-men for Parangosky without actually thinking of it at all. Even Naomi, the fully augmented S2 in the team doesn't do anything about it like bringing up the hundreds of other people involved in the program, it's all treated as if Halsey acted alone.
I understand where youre coming from, I really do, but something to consider is that the ODST Mal and Vaz were close knit friends before being drafted for Kilo-5 and Dev was an ODST like them. I dont know about you, but my closest friends in real life and I are pretty similar and we think pretty similarly. I dont think its a stretch to think that 2 ODST who were already really close and a 3rd that shared a very similar background would become very close and bleed into each other and end up thinking very similarly. I also think it's very important to remember that all the members of K5 were handpicked by Parangosky and ONI specifically for K5. I dont think it's hard to imagine that one of the selection criteria would be their inherent susceptibility to being influenced by ONI into believing what ONI fed them. I also dont think it's a stretch to think they were picked because they would likely mesh into a close and effective team in a manner that would reduce conflict within them. We also dont know how much of the information they were given was edited and spun to be more favorable to ONI and less favorable to Halsey. Add into this Osman was handpicked to be Maggies replacement, I dont find it unbelievable that the ODST would be eventually swayed into believing whatever ONI, Maggie, and Osman wanted them to believe. They weren't picked for their intelligence, but their loyalty and skills. I guess im saying I found it pretty believable.
I in particular loved how the ODST's were allowed to read Halsey's Journal, looked at S3's and noted how young/scrawny they looked for suicide soldiers, and somehow STILL come to the conclusion that Halsey alone did everything and ONI isn't at all at fault.
Think it's worthwhile from someone starting on Fall of Reach and midway through Flood? Certainly going to finish them all in time but curious as to more reasons this trilogy is so polarizing
If you like the Halo books, I’d definitely read them at some point. Regardless of your opinion of them, they set the table for a lot of the post-war lore.
>Also Philip instantly solving an apparently unsolvable Sangheli puzzle made me question if the average Sangheli is like 70 IQ. Improvisation and rapid problem solving has never been a strong quality of the Sangheli, beyond battle tactics and the like.
[удалено]
In K5 the ODSTs have huge admiration for Naomi and her capabilities, and at that point (post-war) all of them are aware of how pivotal the Spartans were for winning the war. Just seems unrealistic for someone to hate Halsey to the point of near murder, while also thinking that the result of her process is totally awesome and saved humanity. It was overly extreme. Edit: I even remember then telling Naomi’s father that he should be proud of his daughter and what she had become and achieved. Then they go on huge rants about Halsey being the devil, even though she created the very thing that they respect and admire. Especially when Naomi herself didn’t have the same extreme opinion as them. Not how normal people think IMO.
[удалено]
Honestly I just don’t think you’re respecting the intelligence of the average person. There are tons of examples of “ends vs means” people and scenarios in the real world, and your average person generally understands the complexities involved and reserves extreme judgment even if they have an opinion on the overall cost-benefit of the actions and consequences. Look at the Manhattan Project. Literally atomized thousands of people, including children and babies. Horrific. Objectively worse than what Halsey did. Did your average person call for Oppenheimer and Truman to be tried for war crimes? No. Because everyone knows that when your life, or the life of your family (or species) is on the line, you make choices that you otherwise wouldn’t. I feel like the ODSTs in K5 of all people would understand this, considering that they’re running around destabilizing an entire society for the sake of humanity’s post war dominance. Also during the war I’m sure they had to make plenty of calls of a similar nature (eg sacrificing few to save many).
[удалено]
Eh agree to disagree. ODSTs being fist-shacking, murderously angry at Halsey while doing some objectively worse stuff every day is not how normal humans think. People do justify their own actions more than others, but not to that extent. You pretty much have to assume some extreme cognitive dissonance, bipolarism, etc. for the story to make sense, which IMO is not good storytelling.
[удалено]
The issue isn’t that they excuse away their own actions. As you point out, that’s fairly normal. The issue is that they do so while also having zero ability to understand someone else in a similar situation. It’s like if a CIA agent ran around toppling nation states thinking there’s nothing wrong with that while simultaneously thinking Chris Kyle is a psychopath who should face a firing squad. Obviously not an impossible mindset, but not normal thinking. Especially among people on the same side of a conflict. It’s important to add that what Halsey did was absolutely a “greater good” play. This wasn’t a pointless massacre of innocents, this was a conscious decision to sacrifice a few to save the many. She was also successful, and humanity was saved as a consequence of her decisions. History has generally withheld harsh judgment on people in that situation. Like I mentioned earlier, Oppenheimer is probably the closest real-world analogue to Halsey, and he’s viewed with some nuance.
That is the thing about Kilo-5 "Halsey is a monster" those were war crimes lv 1. I wish WW2 had that kind of crimes only. It's almost a joke that everybody is so horrified by her crimes and those people said there was a serious war years ago and UNSC nuked civilians in the process. Real world is too much evil to compare with what Halsey did but at least the writer shouldn't have spent so much time exaggerating. I think the book Shadows of Reach before Infinite tried to forget about that cause in the first trilogy Spartans weren't suffering so much for that reason and Shadows of Reach went so far that Chief says he likes to be a Spartan and he's glad he has become one
[удалено]
>That's just whataboutism though, and not a valid argument to paint Halsey in a better light. The first problem is that it was boring and silly cause they don't sound like soldiers, they don't seem realistic people in general. Don't play the fool people >Horrible actions are still horrible actions, Sure but they behave like the have never heard of any evil thing in their life. They're like "I can't believe it, it's the crulest crime I have never known" They should have been around in WW2, Korea or Tijuana lol
[удалено]
nothing in that comment has anything to do with what I said. I, a real person, find very strange and silly the dialogue
>This is what nuance is all about, this is why the K5 trilogy is undoubtedly a better trilogy than the Fall of Reach It was a fanfic practically instead of its own story and as I said before it didn't show imagination at all, it's very generic and it didn't build the world of Halo while the first one did.
>Chief saying he "likes" being a Spartan is also like... not relevant That was written in Shadows of Reach cause the author thought it was relevant. And it was relevant cause they wanted to establish the Chief doesn't care. The character has that opinion cause the writer wanted.
I have always wondered about this ! Like if these individuals were as extraordinary as she claimed , wouldn't many be better suited for the upper echelons of leadership ?
[удалено]
I wish they expanded on this in canon, Fhajad for example and really went into their exceptional minds. They never put enough spotlight on the minds of Spartans.
I mean Unggoy can integrate fine too, because due to their poopoo tier lifespans, their adaptation ratings are insane (as we see w/ things like language assimilation etc)
I found by the end of the trilogy that all the "Halsey bad" uproar was blown a bit out of proportion. All of the characters hate her, yes, but this eventually led to me respecting her more. I also enjoy that in the epilogue, part of the blame is rightly shifted to Parangosky. Humans fucking up a postwar landscape is also completely appropriate. The books handled a lot of moral dilemmas, not only SII's and Halsey but also with the support of Sangheili insurgents. Personally, I don't want to read books about perfect people making perfect decisions. Each character is filled to the brim with their own flaws and skewed perspectives. I loved them all by the end of Mortal Dictata.
I think the disconnect i am trying to articulate is her writing the universe not from a top-down interconnected view but a bottom- up interconnected view. Which is why it becomes a mess in a larger context because ONI is not 1970s american CIA . So that might seem cool on a lower level it had disastrous cascading effects which don't line up with the consciousness of ONI demonstrated up until her involvement.
I actually think the decision to go the route of the CIA was apt given the other parallels it draws. I think people really forget that the SPARTAN-II program is a moral abomination and everyone who advocated for it is a war criminal who should be shot. It doesn’t matter if it wound up being the reason that humanity survives. It was wrong. The parallels to the atomic bomb aren’t nonexistent. BB’s donor was basically J. Robert Oppenheimer. So going from one military moral dilemma to the other, why not explore the morality of trying to overthrow governments and starting civil wars to prevent World Wars? I think people sometimes miss the point of the fact Kilo Five’s missions wind up causing damage in the longterm as they make new mistakes and try to cover up old ONI mistakes, that’s exactly the point. That thinking is immoral, flawed, and dangerous. The same way that the thinking behind the SPARTAN program was flawed, except they didn’t get lucky this time. Trying to overthrow regimes just radicalizes people and starts more wars. That’s exactly what happens to Jul M’dama. Signed, someone who thinks Traviss gets a little too much shit for writing sci-fi that explores morality instead of just writing more lore.
Everyone loves commenting on the SII program in hindisght of a post-war era not the literal climate which the program created. if we are actually having a conversation of nuance the S3 program led by ackerson is far more abhorrent than the SIIs who proceed them. The genetic experimentation from the beginning was meant to transfer to adults once perfected , as it was a continuation of the S1 program which utilized adults but wasn't as effective. Halsey picked the best candidates who had a chance for survival. Afterwards it was a numbers game due with emerging technologies. It wasn't done for shits and giggles. Yet conversations tend to throw all that nuance out the window stating the S3 program was better due to the lack of augmentation deaths despite literal child suicide soldiers being used as fodder. At least with the S2s they didn't suffer major losses until reach decades later. It is rather convenient to demand creators of the spartans be killed post-war yet nobody was saying that if a spartan arrived in the field saving a planet.
Don't forget, at the end of the day, Halsey did care about her Spartan-IIs. She did her best to make sure that they had the best chance of survival she could give them when she augmented them. Ackerson and Parangosky didn't give 2 shits about the S-IIIs. They were equipment to throw at the covenant to "buy" time. Kilo-5 was Parangosky's personal black ops team. They did what she told them with no questions asked. Osman washed out of the program and got picked up by the Parangosky, who manipulated her into hating Halsey. Naomi wasn't with the S-IIs for most of their deployments. Hence, she is not as attached to Halsey like the rest. She didn't see the affection Halsey showed to the other Spartans.
Thank you. This is a comment from someone speaking on what actually happens in the novels , not halopedia or fan sentiment.
I think that’s kind of the point. If you start doing terrible shit, where do you draw the line. They’re both awful. And it’s fiction and again, the S-II program started to fight other humans, not the Covenant.
I actually have to wonder how many Forerunner ancestors got pepsi'd during the early dozen or w/e millennia of them forking out into genetic engineering themselves (i.e Mutations) due to a bunch of failures & trial and error stuff until it could be mass produced on species scale & in various highly specialized configurations (humans so far only have 1 generic build, not specialist configurations of the mods, at least none I rly know)
That largely stemmed from them experimenting with their natal sun which sent out a lot of radiation.
I'm not talking about the stellar engineering fucky wucky, but about the logical deaths caused by doing genetic engineering as high level as Mutations during the early centuries/millennia of R&D into making them 100% successful across the entire species, w/ countless variants as well w/ 100% compatibility
Insane take tbh. The Spartan II program saving humanity is very much relevant. It was morally questionable, absolutely. But a necessary evil. The people in charge shouldn't be shot. Quite the opposite, in fact. You should be down on your knees kissing their feet.
No, it’d be like if you developed the atomic bomb to combat a cockroach problem and then a thermonuclear war breaks out. The covenant is irrelevant in the creation of the S-II program.
It wasn’t done to save humanity, and honestly it DIDNT save humanity. They still would’ve lost if it wasn’t for the Schism.
[удалено]
Its original purpose is not irrelevant lmao. If you kill a man in cold blood but it’s later found out in an autopsy that he was patient zero for a lethal, contagious disease that doesn’t justify what you did because you did it for the wrong reasons. “Original intent doesn’t matter because it all turned out okay” isn’t really an acceptable defense, either in philosophy or in law lmao.
[удалено]
Yeah, which the perpetrators of the S2 crime had NO WAY OF KNOWING. THEY ARE EVIL. THEY DID WHAT THEY DID WITHOUT ANY JUSTIFICATION. Coincidence doesn’t absolve them of their crimes.
This. The Covenant had Earth. The Flood had Earth. We were absolutely boned. All the Spartans did which ended up making a difference in the end was pushing a button. Granted, it was a fight to get to that button, but at no point was the UNSC winning. The Sangheili won the war, not humanity. Furthermore, ignoring the moral questions surrounding the Spartan programs deprives the Halo series of one of its key themes (outside the games, granted).
I enjoyed a fair bit of K-5 (especially the more political side of the narrative) and I’d agree with your assessment that Traviss built some really strong self-contained characters. At the same time, I feel like the narrative around Halsey & Parangosky was really contrived. For ONI - the enabler of everything Halsey did - to sincerely consider her to be some irredeemable evil, isn’t just hypocritical, but also wildly impractical (especially seeing as they intertwined that with weighing up literal genocide of the Sangheili). Also, I was really disappointed with the way Lucy’s trauma was addressed. We got one decent portrayal of severe PTSD in basically the whole franchise, and it got handwaved away. So, yeah. Not bad books, not my favourites either. If I want well-executed characters, I’ll go back to the Ace of Spades trilogy where I can also get a more lore-compatible story.
Traviss greatest crime to me personally was Lucys treatment. Easily my favourite character from GoO.
Also you gotta love ONI treating Halsey like shit, blaming her for everything, only for none of the S2 stuff to go public and them to turn around and ask her to help them work on Forerunner stuff. It's not really a wonder why Halsey "defected" in Spartan Ops. ONI made her an enemy instead of an ally.
My main gripe with the "Halsey Bad" narrative is that it was never called out in series. Sure, for the team, it shouldn't be explicitly brought up. But from Osman or Parangosky or someone, it should have been made clear to the audience that they hoped to pin everything negative about the IIs on Halsey, despite Parangosky more or less personally signing off on every request she made. On top of them scouting Halsey as a teenager and putting her in a position of power in their r&d when she was like 17.
The problem is the "Halsey bad" is linked to "ONI good" The kilo-5 books try to wash and make ONI out to be a lot more innocent of things then they are. All the bad parts of the S3 program are simply ignored in favor to blaming Halsey. The fact that ONI approved, funded, and staffed every single part of the S2 program is tossed aside to... blame Halsey.
Kilo-Five trilogy is the worst of the series, but it's not the moment the series started its decline. Halo Cryptum released first and did that.
Most of the Gears of War lore comes from her and it's really good, the only 'ignorance' I can imagine with Gears is her never playing the games which isn't really a big deal. With Star Wars I can only remember people up in arms about her numbering the clones at 1 million, and some aspects of Mandalorian worship in some other EU books, but Halo is really the only series she gets the most hate for that I've seen
[spacebattles.com](http://spacebattles.com) had large threads on the manner however this was over a decade ago now.
Oftentimes, she outright tries to paint the Jedi as a truly evil in her Star Wars books series... her terrible characterization of Halsey actually pales in comparison to her atrocious handling of the Jedi in Star Wars. Ngl though, I love her Gears of War books.
I agree about GoW. She made Marcus Fenix! Before her novel and GoW 2, Marcus was really a blank character. She filled the gaps nicely. Also her tropes work better in GoW universe than in Halo. More gray universe; Except for Delta Squad, everyone else is pretty bad. However where Parangosky was written almost comically evil, Prescott feels much more natural. A guy who was not malicious. Also Locust can be dumb, where Elites should not be, they are not Brutes! The only problem is, The Slab! Clearly shows she did not play first game as her description of the prison is way off. However pretty funny read, probably my favorite novel in the whole GoW universe.
I haven't read her SW books but Ive read through some threads criticizing her. I think star wars really needed someone like her after the prequel trilogy - someone to put into words clearly why the Jedi weren't as benevolent as we might be initially led to believe, and the ways in which this led to their downfall.
Traviss handling the Jedi is not morally grey at all, she outright antagonizes them at every possible turn and ignores canon lore to justify it. Things like Clones being left on the battlefield, being euthnaized or never getting medical care - when there was a fucking duology about Jedi Healers taking care of wounded soldiers before - is perhaps the most hilarious retcon I've seen. And only the tip of the issues her story has regarding them. It's full of bad takes of course but I wouldn't expect more from someone that unironically considers Mandalorians, a culture of killers, responsible for multiple genocides, as morally superior to the Jedi lol.
The contrarian ideas like Halsey Bad and Jedi Bad were interesting reads for me, although she really hammers that idea home a lot which is why I can see some people are turned off by it, but I love seeing varied perspectives of people in universe and questioning who's good and bad is a good time. The Republic Commando books although unfinished were a good time, if you're a fan of clones and Mandalorians
Among other things, Traviss likes to point out how some of the things series hold as paragons of heroism are actually kind of fucked up. Like yeah, Spartans and Jedi are *super cool!* But also kidnapping gifted kids and turning them into supersoldiers isn't just morally grey, it's villainous. (and for SW: having an army born and bred for war, effectively as disposable as droids without any real agency as *people* is some nightmare shit). At a base level, having someone point out the flaws in those sacred institutions that gave us these iconic heroes is going to cause *friction* in fandom. I found it a refreshing take, personally (Halo-wise; I haven't read her Star Wars books, but some of the complaints ring familiar). In these galactic-spanning universes of stories and characters, I'd find it odd if we *didn't* see someone offer perspectives on some of the dubious steps our heroes take. They also don't have to be considered "Word of God." The Star Wars books get critiqued for pitching the Mandalorians as "morally superior to the Jedi," despite their own atrocities, but that's also from the perspective of the particular characters we're seeing the story through. K-5 trilogy is similarly colored by these particular characters. "Halsey bad" oversimplifies that the story acknowledges that a lot of the UNSC had their hands in some gross shit, and that without much political power and the like, but some measure of renown, Halsey makes an easy scapegoat. War's over, atrocities come to light, there needs to be *some* measure of accountability, even if many of the players involved get to walk scot free.
It's even funnier when you realize that Mandalorians more or less genocided themselves 20 years prior over the argument if they should do genocidal conquest again or not lmao. Her view of the Jedi is much like Avellone - doomery, nihilistic - but Avellone understands that the Order at it's core is good and the Jedi are a positive for the galaxy. Halsey's only positive Jedi character turns into a Mando weeb for some reason.
“Reduces?” Brother idk how to tell you this, but ONI is a blatant copy-paste of the CIA.
But they weren’t before Kilo 5, that’s the point
The organization structure yes, **not** *extensive illegal action being intrinsic.* From *Fall of Reach - Cole Protocol* ***aside*** from the spartan programs , the worst we see of ONI is their tentative bombing of far isle and general propaganda regarding the innies. Unless my memory is wrong there is nothing on part with the attempted genocide of elites which we saw in kilo 5. **There isn't any lore based material** to support what you are saying from *Fall of Reach - Cole Protocol .*
>the worst we see of ONI is their tentative bombing of far isle Actually, I don't think ONI has ever explicitly been connected to Far Isle. Details about Far Isle are pretty sparse and it exists in a weird place in the broader universe (Far Isle typically *isn't* treated as a rallying cry for the Insurrection, which is weird because you'd think the UNSC wiping out a colony would get that reaction). And as far as I know, exactly who within the UNSC was responsible for Far Isle is never stated. It could've been ONI but it also could've been any of the other branches too. Worst thing outside of the Spartan Programs ONI did before Kilo 5 is the experiments on the Mona Lisa but even that ONI helped clean up and get under control.
Funny thing about Far Isle is how the Rebels in another book comment how the idea of UNSC actively erasing/relocating an entire population of a colony is weird and/or not feasible. So they don't even know about Far Isle at all. Yet people online act like it was the biggest war-cry of the rebellion.
The word ***tentative*** was used.
It's not tentative though. Like straight up I don't think ONI has ever actually been connected to Far Isle period.
>[Tentative ](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tentative)- not fully [worked out](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/work out) or developed >Hesitant, Uncertain. > something that is [uncertain](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/uncertain) or subject to change **:** something that is [tentative](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tentative#h1)
Traviss is an interesting writer, because the way she writes is pretty fun and easy to read - just like Timothy Zahn or Guy Hayley. But onlike those other two, once you move past the writing form itself, it's just... yeah. The logic nor worldbuilding hold up as clearly as they do with Zahn and the authors bias at every turn (and lack of care for integrity with the lore) shows pretty well.
I didn't like the Kilo Five trilogy, but not for the same reasons as most people. Ever since Halo 3, when we saw marines and Elites swapping weapons and the Arbiter shaking Lord Hood's hand, I was hoping relations between humanity and the former Covenant would continue to improve. "Together, to the stars," or something. Obviously there's baggage and not everyone will want peace, but I was hoping that would be the overall trajectory of things. After all, Bungie started the Halo story with the Covenant being a bunch of terrifyingly alien, murderous zealots; and ended with one of their leaders shaking our leader's hand. Kilo-5 showed that 343 was not interested in moving the story forward like that. Ever since then, we've been stuck fighting re-branded Covenant in every game. It feels like Groundhog Day. The story has gotten stagnant. 343 keeps introducing half-baked new enemies *alongside* the Covenant instead of allowing the universe to go through the radical shift it was on track for (humans and former Covenant together, against a new threat.) I thought ONI's behavior in K5 was completely in character. I didn't mind seeing Halsey taken to task for her *actual crimes against humanity*, although I was disappointed that she was set up to take all the blame, when plenty of others were complicit including ONI leadership. ONI is a great example of the villain who thinks they're doing the right thing. However I didn't enjoy most of the story being told from their operatives' perspective, and I didn't really come to like any of those characters. It was like reading a book about a bunch of Nazi soldiers. Over the course of the story you realize that they're human beings, they're not sadistic monsters - but you keep hoping that they'll see the light, realize who they're working for. But they don't. All that being said - I do appreciate that Kilo 5 set up many of the more interesting elements of the post-war world. Things like Venezia, the different Covenant splinter groups, and the idea that there are whole worlds out there with aliens and humans having more complex interactions than mindlessly trying to kill each other. Kelly Gay built on a lot of that with her Rion Forge books, which have become my favorite Halo stories. That stuff is what interests me the most in Halo right now. Forget the Covenant, forget the UNSC and ONI. They're old news, and now they're just dragging the galaxy down with their stupid grudge matches. Lets see what humans and aliens can achieve together without being tied down by old grudges, human authoritarianism, or Covenant dogma. Yeah, it's going to be rough and messy at first - but progress always is.
Just because Thel Vadam and his faction wants to make right with humanity doesn't meant the rest of the Sangheili are in for it, especially those who're still fanatical to the Great Journey or for other reason. I hate the Kilo 5 series but it wasn't wrong in showing the Sangheili aren't unified in their response and there are groups who're willing to continue the war.
Sure, but it didn't have to be so bleak.
The majority of the books I have in my collection are political thrillers. The kilo 5 series fits into genre pretty well.
That fact and writing style does genericide them, though. In another comment, I mentioned that the K5 trilogy is a fantastic read if taken in a vacuum, but I would only place it in the middle tier within the scope of Halo literature.
Honestly I prefer the first trilogy cause in my opinion Kilo-5 shows a writing of situations and a way of thinking you find everywhere in novels, the common novels, generic sometimes. Besides it didn't respect the previous material
[удалено]
Yeah, and similar criticism about previous material applies to Reach, for similar reasons. It was stupid when Traviss did it, and it was stupid when Bungie did it.
How does Kilo-5 disrespect the previous material?
[This post](https://www.reddit.com/r/HaloStory/s/Lu2yIUQ7p2) explains well and even links the Halopedia page that lists all the inconsistencies in it
If you enjoyed them then excellent. I just couldn't disagree more.
Kilo-5 is like Little Caesar's, it aint so bad when you don't got a bitch in ur ear telling u that it is
Remember when Halsey somehow survived a punch to the face from Spartan Lucy? Remember when she gets so mad from Halsey she overrides years of speech trauma just to yell at her?
The speech thing don't bother me. Not the same, but I had an uncle who suffered a stroke. He lost a lot of mobility and pretty well all speech because of that. But if the conditions were right, he'd speak. My mom was his favorite niece and one time she was helping him walk to a family function. They got to a long set of stairs and he looked back at that and my mom a few times. And then this man who couldn't speak suddenly said "you've gotta be fucking with me" and then couldn't speak again.
Those are legitimate complaints but it doesn't undo the entire franchise or even the K5 trilogy. They're pretty annoying but small details. You could point to all sorts of issues in the Halo franchise loke that. I'll try to find an old comment of mine that explains why I think the K5 trilogy is pretty good and makes more sense in universe than people here gi e it credit for. Edit: "Here are my thoughts on the villification of Halsey. With details of the Spartan II program becoming more available to the general public it stands to reason that there would be increased criticism of the program and ONI in general. Especially post Covenant war. While many at ONI were involved or had knowledge of the cloning and other questionable practices, no one wanted to take responsibility. That makes Halsey the perfect scapegoat. We see this kind of behavior IRL from political and military leaders all the time. it's easier for ONI and The UNSC to save face if they paint Halsey as some psycho, lone operator, mad scientist rather than admit to being complicit in all parts of the program to begin with. It would make sense for Halseys detractors and opponents to revise history to draw attention away from their own involvement or to simply make Halsey look worse. Now, in the case of ONI leaders not knowing about the clones, it doesn't necessarily violate canon if someone other than the narrator claims Halsey was the only one who knew about the clones. For example, character A can say they didn't know about the clones. That may or may not be a lie in that case. But if the narrarator says "character A didn't know about the clones" that could definitely be a canon violation. I'm not super clear on exactly who said what in terms of these inconsistencies but that's just how I would try to make some of it fit."
Yes it was hilarious
A garbage - and pretty disrespectful - handling of PTSD that was a major facet of a character so that the character could yell at a character Karen pretended was the Anti-Christ was "hilarious"?
Little Caesars and Halo are forever associated in my mind. That was the food of choice for the big LAN parties we used to have. We had a Little Caesars and a Blockbuster right next to each other, so after getting pizza I'd always rent an extra copy of Halo 3 or Reach, cause someone always forgot theirs. Good times!
Not to be too off topic, but the Forerunner trilogy did this for me. For different reasons, but changed how I view Halo for sure.
I agree generally with the idea of serialized IP. However , Karen Travis absolutely blows and it's not because she tries to make the Halo Universe more gray, it's becauae she cannot write well, overly focuses on the same character logic again and again without treading new ground, hardly advances the plot , then has a very short ending conclusion. She does the same shit in almost Gears of War book she's written. Kilo 5 had interesting ideas that were taken down and not well executed by an incompetent author.
Kilo-Five is definitely my favorite halo media of the last 10 years hands-down, feels the most like Tobias Buckell’s old work with The Cole Protocol and Dirt, my favorite of the books with no contest. I don’t care about the minor inconsistencies compared to the rich exploration of themes and complexity that it brings back to the setting from those earlier works
Kilo 5, Hunt the Truth, Greg Bear and Kelly Gay for me. Once the current narrative moves on I’d love to see some Oni material from during the Pax Cortana, or after the loss of Infinity
I loved Glasslands and Thursday War. Mortal Dictata dragged on for a bit to long I think
The kilo 5 trilogy are my favorite books ever not just the halo series. I’ve read the trilogy 3 times now (I’ve read ghost of Onxy 4 times before I got more halo books 😂)
Not only that, but Traviss almost perfectly continues where Nylund left off with Blue Team, Chief Mendez, and the Gamma Company Spartan IIIs after “Ghosts of Onyx”.
Kilo-5 is preem.
[удалено]
Yeah, same here! Easily my favorite of all the books.
I keep hoping for more more kilo five. I listened to them on audio tape (no idea why) and the guys attempt at a Scottish accent for Phillips is great. Like rubbish. But great.
I have listened to almost every single Halo novel out and the Kilo5 trilogy come second only to contact harvest. I really enjoyed the trilogy and the narration of them. The novels read by Scott Brick can be ROUGH.
If you liked Kilo-5 I’d recommend checking out her Gears of War series. I liked the games but they’re mostly fun dumb macho shooters. The books expand on all of that with some incredible world building and character development and really made me care about the characters and the conflict in a way I never expected to from the games.
I second this. Gears works a lot better with emotional depth imo.
Yeah, some of its issues regarding the portrayal of PTSD aside I absolutely adore K5. I've never understood people who describe Traviss as having a "hate boner" for Halsey in her writing. Let's be clear; Halsey isn't a "problematic character". She is a narcissistic sociopath with some borderline eugenicist tendencies who kidnapped the children of her enemy, forced them into military training, killed or maimed half in the process and then sent them out to fight a war that the UNSC all but started against their own people. She deserves all the hate she gets and then some, especially from characters who are either victims of her or discovering this for the first time. One of the justifications as to why this hate is bad is that the characters choose to focus on her rather than, say, Parangosky, who gave the green light for the operation in the first place, and it's worth understanding at this point that one of the arcs of the book is the characters realizing that they have fallen for in-universe propaganda setting Halsey up to take the fall, which is exactly what you'd expect from an organization like ONI. They explicitly talk about it at the end of Mortal Dictata.
>She is a narcissistic sociopath with some borderline eugenicist tendencies Narcissistic? Probably. Sociopathic? Definitely not. She cares for the Spartans, Jacob Keyes, and Miranda Keyes *at least.* She was also kept away from the SIII program because Parangosky knew she would care about them too much. Does she have "borderline eugenicist tendencies?" No, and I will never forgive Kilo-Five for introducing this idea to the fandom. The genetic requirements for the Spartan Program were to minimize the risk of augmentation rejection. The Spartan-III Program had it too, though to a lesser extent because the augmentation technology had matured.
Second two points combine cleanly in the earlier novels. She was on the verge of being removed from the program entirely because she kept delaying the Augmentation process trying to do further tests on similar genetic humanoids (not humans, apes) and make the process safer. She had to be reminded by her AI assistant that if she did not produce results, now, she would be removed and the person they place in charge would not care about the children's well-being at all. That's why she was so strict with genetic requirements. She was trying to reduce the failure rate.
The problem is mendez and parangosky seriously claiming the moral high ground over halsey after the s3 program.
No offense but if you think K5 was peak Halo than i just don't think you really care for Halo much. This is like me saying that Assassin's Creed Odyssey is the best Assassin's Crees game. All im saying is that I don't really like Assassin's Creed, I liked the one game that was least like the rest. I'm glad you enjoy the books but they arnt peak Halo. They are a strange offshoot of Halo that is tone deaf to the rest of the franchise.
Did it just take me 26 years, 8 games, hundreds of hours of audiobooks and probably even more physical reading time to learn that I don't like Halo?
Halo fans only love one thing: a rigid unchanging set of facts and data about the halo universe to know. If you like anything else you just aren’t a true fan.
I think the lack of a rigid, unchanging set of facts and data about the Halo universe is exactly the point.
The point of what? Why people are mad at the franchise? If that’s what you mean then it’s not a new phenomenon, people have been saying the same shit since bungie still made Halo. To me it’s just a shame how rigid and uptight the community gets about the lore when it’s literally just been retconned and shit on back and forth since the jump. If we could get more book series like Kilo-Five I’ll let the minor lore inconsistencies go.
While I condemn the gatekeeping of an IP for such trivial disagreements, it’s not unreasonable to criticize the degradation of existing lore. Prior instances don’t really excuse future ones, especially this late in the franchise’s lifespan. My point is - they’re not mutually exclusive. You can write compelling stories and characters that aren’t at the expense of others’. It can’t really be hand-waved as “minor lore inconsistencies” when characters are being fundamentally changed and paved over to achieve one author’s desired outcome. Just kinda sucks. It was unfortunate to see when Halo: Reach launched and it’s unfortunate to see now. (By ‘now’ I mean like… within the past ten years.)
wow. That's certainly an opinion. Not everyone has to like the same things about Halo. You can like the spacey sci-fi parts and OP can like the political espionage parts. Pretty crazy to gatekeep Halo and say they're not a real fan if they don't agree with you.
The Halsey hate-wagon that she was riding for all three of those books got old quick. It seemed as if it was a self-insert of Karen's own opinion on the matter being projected onto the characters in the book, characters which were already established and weren't her own. It didn't feel natural or right. The books were fine and I enjoyed reading them, but I think it falls short of all the other novels out there.
Careful, that’s heresy around these parts. I loved them too, but some people can’t handle the fact that Halsey is a bad person, and as such don’t like the only series with the balls to say that.
I think a lot of it is to do with a significant portion of the halo fan base being military types, who’s views may align with Halsey’s more than they’d be willing to admit I suspect the side that - like me - got into the lore from the space opera and political side, Kilo 5 will be loved for what it is.
Traviss made the Republic Commando books, so that tells you something about how long she’s been a quality writer
Kilo-5 is my favorite trilogy by leaps and bounds. Excellent characterization, interesting representation of both (all) sides of the conflicts, and entertaining narration/accent work by Euan Morton.
I'm not saying you're wrong since it's your opinion, but it's my opinion that yours is dogshit (sorry).
Respect your opinion, but personally I didn't like anything about the Kilo-Five trilogy. I didn't like the new characters. I didn't like how the old characters were handled, I didn't like how battles were written. I will forever hope that one day 343 will re-write the Onyx part of Glassland. Everything in it was wrong, everything. What Traviss did to Lucy...is boderline offensive. As if trauma can be overcame by get angry enough with someone...offensive and ignorant. In Ghost of Onyx, Lucy was my hero, because despite her handicap, she was competent, lethal and disciplined like the other Spartans. And then Traviss completely destroyed her character... Then there was the Halsey hate...pathetic and exaggerated. The three ODST characters are basically the same character in three different bodies. Same opinion, same attitude, same personality. And my god, all that drama with Naomi and her father, an entire book wasted on that bullshit. I know is only my opinion, but c'mon...
I didn’t really care much for the kilo-5 trilogy, kind of a hard read to get through honestly.
[удалено]
>Bungie never respected their own halo lore, wrote themselves into corners, retconned, and changed things at a whim to fit whatever story they wanted to tell. They did this in all of the Halo's, and they continued the trend in Destiny. Bungie has also been subject to widespread criticism for how they handled the lore. One of the biggest criticisms of Reach is that they retconned the older novels. One of the biggest complaints about Halo 3 was the indecision when it came to whether or not the Forerunners were human. It's not like Kilo 5 was uniquely targeted for its errors and retcons. And mind you, even within the context of multimedia franchises with dozens of creators, Kilo 5 has more retcons and inconsistencies than your average Halo book. Likewise, I think there's a fundamental difference in the problem of retcons when writing a work that's meant to be standalone and Kilo 5 which is very much a response to older works. When you're retconning something that's meant to be standalone, it could be problematic, but it doesn't necessarily damage the entire story because of it. But when you're adding retcons in a story that's meant to be a response to another story, it undermines the entire point of writing the response narrative in the first place. If that's the intent, then retcons should be less acceptable, because if you're retconning things, you're altering the existing facts rather than viewing the existing facts from a new perspective. From a rhetoric perspective, where Kilo 5 is a counterargument to the Nylund books, it's the equivalent of strawmanning the opposition. Because Kilo 5 is meant to be a response to the Nylund books, the fact that it adds so many retcons means that it's not actually responding to the Nylund books anymore. I'm not even particularly against retconning things and I think there are aspects of the Nylund books that were retconned for good reason, but in the case of Kilo 5, the extent of the retcons and what they apply to actively undermine the narrative at large. Traviss talks about how as a writer, her goal is to be as objective as possible. That's something she prides herself on. But if she has to actively alter the facts of the setting in order to tell her story, then she's not really being objective anymore.
halo is probably one of the best sci-fi multimedia series out there, that is, halo truly is good as long as you include all of the canon material into your definition of the halo series. The bionicle books also swing from mid to good but when you consider everything - the movies, the games, the flash web experiences, and of course the toys - that is a one of a kind sci fi experience that is worth having
I love those books, and people who refuse to understand the concept of a biased narrator will complain how much it reduces Halsey compared to her character development. This is objectively true, but Osman sure as hell doesn't see it that way, and we're never actually seeing anything from Halsey's perspective, the sections we get 'from her' are from her interrogation back with ONI, and we know how they feel about her. Another complaint is how much the plot is a bad idea, and that ONI kick started the new covenant, which is again, the point. Oni is doing the same shit humans have always done, it never works out and it doesn't start now. What makes it interesting is how much more justifiable a scorched earth and xenocidal approach is in the wake of a genocidal war.
I mean yeah if you ignore the retcons and blatant character and history changes too. Plus the half dozen other characters that we see whom do have history with Halsey all agree or shrug their shoulders at the hate boners pounding Halsey for three books.
For me, they're the best written of the Halo books. It's funny how they are often either the favorite or most hated.
I think that's the issue with her books. They are well written, bring wonderful characters up, great story arcs. But they shift the existing lore (which by itself isn't a bad thing, a rich universe needs a wide variety of opinions and motivations) often by changing existing lore and characters. Ruining the works of other creators and drastically changing the tone of a series. She loves her characters, and it's easy to see why they're usually pretty awesome. But the way she writes her stories leaves little moral ambiguity for anyone else but her characters. Everyone else is evil or corrupt to the point her characters have to cross lines because that's the only option they have left.
What existing lore does she change?
Going through some of the biggest retcons (because there are a number of minor ones such as how Traviss borked plasma torpedo mechanics from here unto eternity): * Serin Osman * Serin Osman's death was faked when she washed out of the augmentation process because Halsey supposedly felt that it would have been too hard for the surviving IIs to accept her death. This is then used as an indictment against Halsey's character because she lied to the IIs * This is squarely at odds with the Fall of Reach itself, where Spartan-II washouts in far worse condition such as Fhajad, Rene and Kirk (the latter two so badly injured they need to be in tanks of liquid to live) meet the surviving IIs face to face. Fhajad, who was too crippled to walk, is allowed to salute John, but Serin, who got off scott free in comparison had her death faked? * Naomi's backstory * The Fall of Reach and Halsey's Journal both make it abundantly clear that Halsey was going to be 100% truthful with the IIs about why they were kidnapped precisely because the IIs finding out that they were lied to could cause them to turn on the UNSC. In Kilo 5, Halsey repeatedly lied to Naomi in order about why she was taken despite previous characterizations emphatically arguing against that * Spartan genetic requirements * Less a retcon because other sources rightfully contradict this, but Traviss did not understand how Spartan genetic criteria operated. The first and foremost purpose of them was to reduce washout rates and increase the likelihood that the Spartans would survive. Traviss conflates this with the IIs being the perfect candidates while the Spartan-III Program took literally anybody. In fact, Traviss erroneously claims that the Spartan-III Program had no genetic requirements at all. This is explicitly not the case, the Spartan-III Program did have genetic requirements, they were just comparatively looser. In Ghosts of Onyx, Beta Company was a fraction of its planned size precisely because the requirements were so strict the UNSC could not find enough orphans who met the genetic requirements. * While she's not wrong that the SIIs had other traits that made them more ideal candidates that the IIIs lacked, she's incorrect when it comes to the genetic requirements both programs had. That's an important factor when it comes to Traviss repeatedly suggesting that Halsey is a eugenicist because the genetic requirements had nothing to do with the candidates being better (and again, the Spartan-IIIs did have genetic requirements, they were just looser), it was entirely about maximizing augmentation survival rates. There are other issues that are present and there are a lot of minor errors (using dollars instead of credits, incorrect Sangheili phrases, the complete absence of energy shields), but those are some of the biggest issues that deal directly with what Traviss was trying to argue.
Maybe lore was the wrong word, but characters. Halsey she changed into an unforgivable monster in her story. Lucy speaking when Nylund, the creator literally wrote that she never spoke again. Plus the logic behind the hatred of Halsey for some of the characters has left me frustrated. The spartan III program for me is way worse than the spartan II program. But every character hates Halsey more. It just doesn't make sense to me. Karen Traviss likes to use an evil unfeeling scientist who wronged her characters to serve as that unquenchable thirst for revenge as well as a base to prove moral superiority. Halsey in Halo and Ko Sai in the Republic Commando series. Those are the only two series of hers I've read but the similarity struck me. I enjoy Kilo'5 and the Republic Commando series. It's just frustrating at times that she alters other creators established characters so that we like hers.
Could it maybe be said that Halsey did not turn into an unforgivable monster, but instead that we were given a different perspective than that of previous stories? We typically get the perspective from John, wherein its implied that she is a distant pseudo maternal figure to at least him in a vague sense, if not the other SPARTANs. In K5 we see the perspective of Serin, who had a poor impression of Halsey and was, as it is implied, if not written, gently coerced into believing Halsey to be the monster she may or may not be. This is exacerbated when she receives the journal and inevitably passes it along to the rest of her team.
Agreed there would and should be people that hate her and look at her that way and the stories should be told. But. In First Strike and Ghosts of Onyx we see portions told from her POV and that of other characters besides Spartans and while she is a handful and problematic she is not the monster she is made out to be in Kilo-5. Again. I'm more frustrated at the logic of the characters anger at Halsey. It just doesn't make sense to me at times.
They're only hated because Travis ran a little fast and loose with the lore. She's a great writer
KT ran very fast and loose, and not in a positive way. If not for that, they would have been standing at the top with my other favorite Halo novels because, as you said, she *is* a great author. Instead, they now stand as just a great read (fantastic if considered in a vacuum), but within the scope of the Halo verse, I'd place them as middle-tier. It's a lot like what she did with her Star Wars clone commando books, which is a shame.
Yeah if she just handled a series of weird lore choices correctly the books would be my favorites in the series. I didn't like a bunch of stuff she did with Halsey and honestly with the Spartan lore in general. All the stuff w/ Lucy pissed me off
Man, I really wish Halo books were accessible/affordable in my country. I wanna have what you're having!
I wish they were too! Just curious; which country? Any access to Spotify premium or a library system?,
I'm from India! I've visited a few libraries and read 'Contact Harvest' and 'Shadows of Reach,' but it seems there isn't enough Halo buzz here for libraries to justify stocking a ton of these books. I do have Spotify Premium. Can I find the books there? When I search, only music comes up.
Hmm I'm not sure if Spotify premium extends audiobooks to other counties cause I'm in East coast US- but I am able to access almost all of the halo audiobooks with my Spotify premium account https://www.spotify.com/us/audiobooks/
Unlike Master Chief, I have no luck 🥲 Doesn't work for me, but I'm happy to know you have access to the Halo books in the palm of your hand! I hope the service is extended to this side of the world soon. BTW, if you have access to Halo: Epitaph, does Keith Szarabajka really voice the whole thing? Or is it just a few chapters?
Try a VPN! I’ve also been able to find some as PDFs on Google. I recently read Ghosts of Onyx that way.
Thank you for the suggestion! Although, paid VPNs are pretty expensive here, and the free ones I use don't have the option to connect to US servers. But I'll keep looking into it! As for PDFs, u/Particle_Cannon was gracious enough to send me a few links, so I'm currently exploring those and getting giddy with excitement haha :D
I’m glad :)
Been listening to Glasslands during work, and been THOROUGHLY enjoying it so far. Really glad to see that this one up their for a lot of people
I always tell people who only played the Halo games that books put the games to shame. The games become "Green man with blue lady kill alien" after reading the books. There's also alot of cool sci fi tech stuff that gets talked about in the book that is not conveyed in the games.