> > Where are you getting that from Roberto?
> >
> > I want more novels to readddd!
>
> If you mean about Escalation, I would say it is a continuation of Spartan Ops given how its advertising says the events of Halo 4 have impacted the Chief, Infinity and the galaxy, it seems to be after.
I thought he talked about the TV series… whoops.
I asked on twitter and they said yes. WooHoo!!!
> > I’ve been very busy so I must have missed something - but they’re continuing with another comic series next month?
>
> Halo: Escalation
I’m not sure how I feel about this. Initiations was a huge disappointment for me. I will be tentatively hopeful it wont be as bad as Initiations.
At least the cover art isn’t as horrific as Initiations was.
> I asked on twitter and they said yes. WooHoo!!!
Source?
if i can figure out how to link ill link it.
> > if i can figure out how to link ill link it.
>
> No worried, here it is.
Awesome, thanks.
And thanks OP for asking.
> > > I’ve been very busy so I must have missed something - but they’re continuing with another comic series next month?
> >
> > Halo: Escalation
>
> I’m not sure how I feel about this. Initiations was a huge disappointment for me. I will be tentatively hopeful it wont be as bad as Initiations.
>
> At least the cover art isn’t as horrific as Initiations was.
Oh dear god, please, please don’t let them turn the Arbiter into a damsel in distress that that bloody pathetic excuse for a Mary Sue has to go rescue… please… don’t do that to him…
> > > > I’ve been very busy so I must have missed something - but they’re continuing with another comic series next month?
> > >
> > > Halo: Escalation
> >
> > I’m not sure how I feel about this. Initiations was a huge disappointment for me. I will be tentatively hopeful it wont be as bad as Initiations.
> >
> > At least the cover art isn’t as horrific as Initiations was.
>
> Oh dear god, please, please don’t let them turn the Arbiter into a damsel in distress that that bloody pathetic excuse for a Mary Sue has to go rescue… please… don’t do that to him…
Hopefully they also present Thel as being a bit more assertive in terms of what he intends to do about the current situation with the Covenant, how he intends to rebuild, how he intends to foster peace, etc. The way he was presented in Kilo 5 was kind of pathetic. He didn’t even appear to have any plans at all, let alone get a chance to voice them before Jul dominated him in front of all the Elders.
> > > > > I’ve been very busy so I must have missed something - but they’re continuing with another comic series next month?
> > > >
> > > > Halo: Escalation
> > >
> > > I’m not sure how I feel about this. Initiations was a huge disappointment for me. I will be tentatively hopeful it wont be as bad as Initiations.
> > >
> > > At least the cover art isn’t as horrific as Initiations was.
> >
> > Oh dear god, please, please don’t let them turn the Arbiter into a damsel in distress that that bloody pathetic excuse for a Mary Sue has to go rescue… please… don’t do that to him…
>
> Hopefully they also present Thel as being a bit more assertive in terms of what he intends to do about the current situation with the Covenant, how he intends to rebuild, how he intends to foster peace, etc. The way he was presented in Kilo 5 was kind of pathetic. He didn’t even appear to have any plans at all, let alone get a chance to voice them before Jul dominated him in front of all the Elders.
Well, that’s what can happen when you hire an author to write your book series who openly boasts about not doing her research before writing for a franchise (as seen when Traviss turned Parangorsky into her soapbox avatar, soundly condemning Halsey for the S-II project, when said admiral was directly responsible for the S-III project, something with every single ethical issue of the S-II, plus a legion of others, and when Mendez also tried to condemn Halsey (when he was every bit as culpable) and tried to claim that the S-III project had no genetic selection criteria (something that is not only false, but that he would very much know was false, due to the fact that he was present at the meeting where said genetic criteria was decided upon)).
Realistically, Thel should be kept away from the fights by his bodyguards. He’s an important leader and Humanity’s greatest shield against the hostile covenant remnants (rather ironically) due to the fact that the Storm, Brutes, and the like, are also at war with him, and he’s got a much greater number of war assets at his disposal than the UNSC does (which makes ONI’s most recent attempts to more or less ensure that they reignite a war that the UNSC has no chance in hell of winning all the more baffling and makes one wonder if the inmates aren’t running the asylum at this point). However, while he should have a heavy guard and the first response upon attack should realistically be an attempt to get him out of the line of fire, in the event that is not possible, and the fight makes its way to him, what we should then see is a return of the Thel from Halo 2 and 3. That is to say, him hacking, blasting and slaughtering his way through his would-be assassins with some eloquent, warrior-philosopher variation of “You think you can take me down? I stared down the #%@%$ Gravemind kicked him in his metaphorical rear, and lived to boast about it! You are nothing but a warm up exercise to me!” and demonstrating why he was considered one of the few individuals in Halo that might have been able to make the Chief sweat in a one on one fight. Bonus points if an S-IV makes a remark about “being very glad he is on our side” or something to that effect.
I would like to see one leading up to the events of the next Halo game.
> > > > > > Well, that’s what can happen when you hire an author to write your book series who openly boasts about not doing her research before writing for a franchise
> > > > >
> > > > > For the 3,078,875,976,401st time, she does do research, extensive deep research upon being signed on for a project, but she doesn’t allow herself to be familiar with a universe before hand to avoid any preconceived notions about that universe. Like this community.
> > > > >
> > > > > She approaches it as a journalist, as impartially as possible. Her opinions are irrelevant, only those of the characters. Obviously this community can’t see that, but that isn’t her problem.
> For the 3,078,875,976,401st time, she does do research, extensive deep research upon being signed on for a project,
What does this extensive, deep research involve exactly? If it involves the methodology of treating every fictional universe as being the same through some fallacious analogy to treating every car as being the same due to the common parts with similar functions, then that isn’t research. That’s called being ignorantly presumptuous, before making a fool of yourself because you thought that Doctor Who was like WH40k in its thematic and tonal qualities, and that you could wing it with a factsheet and nothing more.
> but she doesn’t allow herself to be familiar with a universe before hand to avoid any preconceived notions about that universe. Like this community.
Reading the books and other source material cannot give you a preconceived notion about the fiction. If it were to be preconceived, then you would arrive at the conclusion having not read any of the source material first. If one’s research involved reading Halopedia or forum posts then that would be arriving at preconceived notions.
Did the author read the source material? No? So the preconceived notions would seem to be on the author’s part.
> She approaches it as a journalist, as impartially as possible. Her opinions are irrelevant, only those of the characters. Obviously this community can’t see that, but that isn’t her problem.
I think what the author does is less like a journalist interviewing multiple people for a more complete picture of the story and more like getting someone else to interview those people for them and then assembling a hodgepodge of third-hand information with all sorts of important pieces of info missing that they would have otherwise had because they didn’t conduct the interviews themsselves, and so couldn’t investigate the right issues and answers and so have no unique insight into anything.
Thus explaining the lack of sufficient details picked up from prior canon and the GAPING plotholes that one could fire a planet through.
> > I’ve been very busy so I must have missed something - but they’re continuing with another comic series next month?
>
> Halo: Escalation
Forgive me but… Is it just me or does that image is just lacking a unicorn in the background??
> > For the 3,078,875,976,401st time, she does do research, extensive deep research upon being signed on for a project,
>
> What does this extensive, deep research involve exactly? If it involves the methodology of treating every fictional universe as being the same through some fallacious analogy to treating every car as being the same due to the common parts with similar functions, then that isn’t research. That’s called being ignorantly presumptuous, before making a fool of yourself because you thought that Doctor Who was like WH40k in its thematic and tonal qualities, and that you could wing it with a factsheet and nothing more.
>
>
>
> > but she doesn’t allow herself to be familiar with a universe before hand to avoid any preconceived notions about that universe. Like this community.
>
> Reading the books and other source material cannot give you a preconceived notion about the fiction. If it were to be preconceived, then you would arrive at the conclusion having not read any of the source material first. If one’s research involved reading Halopedia or forum posts then that would be arriving at preconceived notions.
>
> Did the author read the source material? No? So the preconceived notions would seem to be on the author’s part.
>
>
>
> > She approaches it as a journalist, as impartially as possible. Her opinions are irrelevant, only those of the characters. Obviously this community can’t see that, but that isn’t her problem.
>
> I think what the author does is less like a journalist interviewing multiple people for a more complete picture of the story and more like getting someone else to interview those people for them and then assembling a hodgepodge of third-hand information with all sorts of important pieces of info missing that they would have otherwise had because they didn’t conduct the interviews themsselves, and so couldn’t investigate the right issues and answers and so have no unique insight into anything.
>
> <mark>Thus explaining the lack of sufficient details picked up from prior canon and the GAPING plotholes that one could fire a planet through</mark>.
Not to be rude or anything, but if a subject has been beaten to death in a previous book, surely future novels shouldn’t be required to go in to as much detail. At least I think that’s what your getting at.
For example, we know who the Arbiter is, we’ve played him in 2 games and know him and his story pretty well. So when Traviss introduces him in Glasslands, she doesn’t need to spend 5 pages talking about his back story.
I am currently rereading The Thursday War, and came across something specific.
[Spoilers]
When BB is getting ready to reintegrate his fragment, he mentions that Dr Halsey once wiped a part of Cortana’s memory with Cortana never realising something was missing.
And I was like “Hey that’s a call back to First Strike”, and realising that she must have read the novel in order to know that.
Also if you could please fill me in on the plot holes, that would be grand.
Anyway, at the end of the day 343 are the ones with the final say in the products they produce. If they thought that the books were as terrible and canon-breaking as some of the community say they are, they wouldn’t have sent the book to print.
> .
>
> I am currently rereading The Thursday War, and came across something specific.
> [Spoilers]
> When BB is getting ready to reintegrate his fragment, he mentions that Dr Halsey once wiped a part of Cortana’s memory with Cortana never realising something was missing.
>
> And I was like “Hey that’s a call back to First Strike”, and realising that she must have read the novel in order to know that.
>
> Also if you could please fill me in on the plot holes, that would be grand.
It could also very well be she looked for some things to make Halsey look bad without really going in-depth as to why she did what she did. After all, BB holds Halsey in contempt for wiping Cortana’s mind and for being an “AI Killer”. Yet, as an ONI AI, he should know what Halsey did was ONI/UNSC protocol, at least for what she did to Ariquel and Kalmiya. Never bothers to tell us this, so I have to wonder, am I supposed to feel mad at Halsey for this?
So maybe she did read First Strike, but was she paying attention? Given how she forgot about Jerrod, Halsey’s little AI in Ghosts of Onyx, or apparently how the punch from an enraged supersolider to the skull of an old woman doesn’t really do that much damage, I doubt it.
> So maybe she did read First Strike, but was she paying attention? Given how she forgot about Jerrod, Halsey’s little AI in Ghosts of Onyx, or apparently how the punch from an enraged supersolider to the skull of an old woman doesn’t really do that much damage, I doubt it.
Don’t forget what she did to Mendez and Parangorsky, and the implications that Lucy never learned to battlesign (something that every Spartan ever trained would have known and that Lucy demonstrated repeatedly in GoO).
Honestly, her treatment of Lucy… that an individual so mentally scarred as she was (and indeed, given all she’d been through, it’s not surprising that Lucy came down with an epic case of PTSD, and it might actually have been far more worrying if she didn’t), that despite all the treatment that Kurt (for all his faults) tried to give to her, all the therapy and the like, would be so insufficent to combat what she’d been through, that even as he stood ready to sacrifice himself, this man who had been her father figure, friend, trainer, and mentor, who meant the world to her and more, that she couldn’t manage to force words past her lips, would finally “get over it” just because she got irked with a character that the author just happened to not like (how wonderfully convinient) wasn’t just in very poor taste and cheap from a literary standpoint, it was a god-blam- slap in the face to anyone who has ever suffered from severe post traumatic stress disorder.
Addendum: a part of it, I feel, based off her Star Wars books that I’ve read (if you decide to venture into these things, stop with Triple Zero, any further and you’re at risk of brain damage when her stories have the Jedi in cahoots with Palpatine and one of her Jedi characters more or less throws her life away trying to protect Clone Troopers from Jedi Padawans… while said troopers are in the middle of Order 66 and actively butchering said Padawans), is that Traviss seems fundamentally incapable of writing anything other than “Romantic” black and white morality. This is is a very bad hamstring to have in the Halo universe, which has never had black and white mentality (with the UNSC/UEG having its flaws, and the Rebels being the type of people who nuke civilian population centers to show that they mean business, and of course, the Covenant… well… the less said about them, the better. Even the vaunted Forerunners, long held in the first part of the trilogy as these valiant, upstanding individuals who fought for the galaxy against the relentless tide of the Flood, turn out to have been colossal jerks in many ways). For heaven’s sake, our protagonist (117) is an individual who has willingly murdered unarmed civilian noncombatants on multiple occassions not because his hand was forced or he had no other choice, but because it was the easiest thing to do. He nearly sacrified Johnson in First Strike, not to battle, but to ONI, knowing that he’d be killed and disected on the extreme off chance that his Flood immunity might be replicated, and also made it clear that (at that time) if he felt a still “twitchy” Cortana became a liability, he’d remove her from the equation. While this last bit is obviously not the case anymore, and stands out as terrific character growth for him, he is the embodiment of the grey morality of the UNSC in the Halo franchise (to say nothing of ONI).
> Addendum: a part of it, I feel, based off her Star Wars books that I’ve read (if you decide to venture into these things, stop with Triple Zero, any further and you’re at risk of brain damage when her stories have the Jedi in cahoots with Palpatine and one of her Jedi characters more or less throws her life away trying to protect Clone Troopers from Jedi Padawans… while said troopers are in the middle of Order 66 and actively butchering said Padawans), <mark>is that Traviss seems fundamentally incapable of writing anything other than “Romantic” black and white morality.</mark>
We are talking about the woman who said Order 66 was a good thing after all.
> > Addendum: a part of it, I feel, based off her Star Wars books that I’ve read (if you decide to venture into these things, stop with Triple Zero, any further and you’re at risk of brain damage when her stories have the Jedi in cahoots with Palpatine and one of her Jedi characters more or less throws her life away trying to protect Clone Troopers from Jedi Padawans… while said troopers are in the middle of Order 66 and actively butchering said Padawans), <mark>is that Traviss seems fundamentally incapable of writing anything other than “Romantic” black and white morality.</mark>
>
> We are talking about the woman who said Order 66 was a good thing after all.
Oh, god, do not remind me…
I am still at a loss as to how Traviss got hired for this job, given her reptutation. I would love to see the minutes and/or transcript from that meeting…
> Not to be rude or anything, but if a subject has been beaten to death in a previous book, surely future novels shouldn’t be required to go in to as much detail. <mark>At least I think that’s what your getting at.</mark>
>
> For example, we know who the Arbiter is, we’ve played him in 2 games and know him and his story pretty well. So when Traviss introduces him in Glasslands, she doesn’t need to spend 5 pages talking about his back story.
That is not what I am referring to. It’s not that I expect a full run-down of the prior canon of each recurring object in a new book. I expect that when recurring objects do come up in a new book, that those objects are accurately depicted in accordance with that prior canon. That’s what I mean when I say there is a lack of sufficient detail being paid attention to.
I don’t want the novel to give a full chapter summary of Thel’s prior actions, but I do want to see the book written in light of those incidents. In other words, I want him written as the -Yoink!- who won in a staring contest with the Gravemind and who, along with John, is the only reason why there is any Sangheili still breathing, not some skulking coward with no prowess; militarily, politically or otherwise.
> I am currently rereading The Thursday War, and came across something specific.
> [Spoilers]
> When BB is getting ready to reintegrate his fragment, he mentions that Dr Halsey once wiped a part of Cortana’s memory with Cortana never realising something was missing.
>
> And I was like “Hey that’s a call back to First Strike”, and realising that she must have read the novel in order to know that.
By the author’s own admission they have not read First Strike, or any other piece of Halo source material.
> Also if you could please fill me in on the plot holes, that would be grand.
Well, I suppose we’ll start with ONI arming the Elite rebels. Who are they using as an intermediary to deliver these weapons? No one, but themselves. Whilst they undermine the Arbiter they decide to show off their pretty human faces to potential agents belonging to the Arbiter himself, or even any ultra-fanatical Human hating elements within Telcam’s faction that would seek to have Telcam overthrown for his treachery. I’m pretty sure that this is sloppy Black Ops work at best and not something ONI would do. Whilst I am sure that Telcam would say that he can vouch for his men, I find ONI even taking that chance to be kinda silly given what is at stake here.
So they are secretly betraying the Arbiter by arming someone who wants to destroy him, during a time when one of the Arbiter’s main and probably most challenging political goals is not only peace with Humanity, but common understanding, for both species to move past war and bitterness towards each other and perhaps to rebuild a new Covenant (If his statements in Halo 3 are anything to go by, as well as opening up the possibility for future cultural exchanges by welcoming Phillips to study their historical sites directly). In light of what the Arbiter thinks is possible and wishes to achieve publicly, does anyone else think that ONI has unknowingly given Telcam a weapon far more powerful than any of the weapons they gave to him through the fact that Telcam now has solid proof of Humanity being a bunch of treacherous -Yoinks!- who cannot be trusted? He can make the Arbiter look like a twit if he reveals this, and discredit him quite thoroughly. This would do far more damage to the Arbiter’s goals, faction and ideals than merely killing him ever would. Telcam has an ultimate trump card that he could (And probably should) reveal now. ONI is just lucky that Telcam and his inner circle are too stupid to realise that they could end the Arbiter without making him a martyr, by just speaking and showing off their weapons and secret meetings. I think that Telcam could avoid similar accusations by saying that he took the opportunity to demonstrate Thel’s foolishness and naivety about Humans by initially accepting ONI’s offer. And ONI blundered on in without taking this into consideration. No one even mentioned it at the briefing (Of course I wouldn’t expect Kilo-5 to; they’re all too stupid; hired for their sheep like attributes rather than their brains).
What next then. Most of the Sangheili are (Or through Thel will be) non-hostile but there are all those splinter factions out there, and then there are the Brute factions that formed the Loyalists. We’re talking about factions of a 3000 year old tier 2 space faring group of 7 civilizations here who regarded 500 ships lost with all hands as a minor inconvenience. Meanwhile the UNSC has what, exactly, to defend itself should one, or a few, decide to just remove humans from existence for being annoying little -Yoink-? They have the Arbiter to support them, with his presumably large military power (Conveniently absent when he most needed it, hurr) and most likely to get larger and stronger as time goes on and with co-operation from the UNSC. They have nothing else. Their only safeguard against hostile Covenant factions for the short term (which is probably going to be at least 30 years), and they are trying to destroy him. The Arbiter is not just a military power either, he is a force for change and the only way to get all those dissidents movements to die out peacefully and completely. So great job to ONI; they’ve helped to kill the Arbiter. Now what are they going to do about the Brutes if they come for humanity? Or the other potentially few hundred to thousands of Sangheili colonies if some of them (Like the Storm Covenant) should decide to kill us? Oh, what’s that, the Arbiter’s faction and military power is now being absorbed into Telcam’s faction because he blew their operation wide open to the public, and who has now declared war on humanity for being inherently deceitful, untrustworthy and demonstrably dangerous?
There are more, especially when you start taking into consideration prior canonical details which I have scarcely even begun to do here (Just scrutinizing the novel’s premise on its own merits), but I can’t be bothered typing anymore.
> Anyway, at the end of the day 343 are the ones with the final say in the products they produce. If they thought that the books were as terrible and canon-breaking as some of the community say they are, they wouldn’t have sent the book to print.
That is terribly naive and assumes that 343i are infallible. They are most certainly not.