Good idea for a thread. Here’s my rant about one particular discrepancy affecting Halo lore:
Parangosky deeming the Spartan-II program unethical makes no practical sense, considering she co-signed the Spartan-III program, which not only is a lot like the S-II program, but also had the very intended goal of sending augmented kids to their deaths. At least the Spartan-IIs were not thought of a canon fodder.
Karen Traviss would probably say that Parangosky took issue with the flash clones, but I’d reply part of the idea behind it was to try and give the families some closure. Didn’t work out very well, granted, but I don’t think the Spartan-III program fared much better in that regard.
Also, Parangosky runs -Yoink!-ing ONI, not Amnesty International. She probably spends her time doing much worse stuff than that (e.g. as I pointed out, the S-III program), and she knows that just like in any secret service, some of her own people are doing things behind her back. So if she gets upset with Halsey using clones over thirty years ago, I don’t see how she managed to be CINCONI for all those years with such thin skin.
Yet in the Kilo-Five trilogy, here she is basically spending all her time saying “won’t somebody think of the children??”.
Some will say it has more to do with character development than lore, but the fact that she never even thinks of the S-III program or that no one - not even Halsey, who’s read about the program in Ackerson’s files - reminds her of that particular fact leads me to think that Traviss simply did not know that Parangosky co-signed it.
That’s what makes it, to me, the most infuriating discrepancy in the whole universe; it serves as pretty much the basis for all the Halsey hate during a whole trilogy of books, and yet it makes no sense to those who know of the origins of the Spartan-IIIs. And short of saying Parangosky has amnesia, there’s no way to fix it.
And on a completely unrelated topic : why on Earth are there still animals roaming the Ark in Hunters in the Dark as early as 2553? The Master Chief did activate Installation 04B in the very orbit of the Ark, did he not? Having a nervous system should qualify those animals for complete annihilation. There’s no way Solitude bred them and had them grow to full maturity in a short few months. And if they’re still around despite that, what reasons does the UNSC have to believe the Flood was destroyed as well? Nothing in the novel made much sense, but this was probably my biggest issue with it.