Do you ever feel like too much was revealed?

Community Halo Universe
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I usually write in blue, but this is going to be a long post with a lot of spoilers if you haven’t read the books (and they’ve been out for a while, so I suspect everyone that’s reading this knows all about them)

This will be a long, long, long post, you’ve been warned.

And here we go.

I’ve read Cryptum, Primordium, and Silentium over and over. I love them. I do. They’re amazing, and the only Halo books I’ve actually READ without just going right to a summary online (and I mean no offense to any other Halo books, don’t misread this, I was just incredibly interested in what happened to the Forerunners.

But with THAT said you might be thinking “Well dude, if you didn’t want too much revealed, why did you read the books?”

I’ll admit, I knew that a lot was going to be revealed, but I feel like there was TOO much revealed.

For instance, the Primordial. In Cryptum, I found him the scariest, and he wasn’t even in the book. He made the Didact’s face turn pale from fear, and then later on when he meets up with a Promethean friend that was there with him when they discovered the Primordial on Charrum Hakkor, HIS face went white with fear.

Two Prometheans, the greatest of the Forerunner Warrior Servants, and they’re scared to freaking death of this thing. It was described as having four large arms, three fingers, two large legs, 15 meters tall, and it was never confirmed what the heck it was…until the end when he said he was the last Precursor.

Then in Primordium, the Primordial’s physical appearance changes, which led us to an even CRAZIER picture of him. He loses his two legs for tons of spider-like legs, then he became grossly fat, and could re-arrange his limbs. Well maybe he IS the last Precursor, but now he’s turning into a Flood form, considering that he even said the Flood and Precursor’s are the same.

Then came Silentium. It’s straight up confirmed that he was an early Gravemind by Forthentcho A.K.A. the Lord of Admirals. Oh…okay :confused:

But whatever, the Flood themselves ar-wait, there’s this quote “Some broke themselves down into powder, this powder became defective over the years and suffered on even the cellular level. We saw this suffering, and it was good.”

Nevermind then…

Well at least the Precursors THEMSELVES are mysterious! Right?!

No…wait, it’s said that they themselves don’t actually have a form or society…they’ve just changed form constantly, at certain times were very feral and cave-man like, sometimes they had the greatest technology ever…oh…COME ON.

There’s nothing left when it comes to the human imagination. We now know what the Forerunners look like: Female Forerunner (not Librarian)

(which I don’t actually have a problem with, we’ve been waiting to know what Forerunners looked since 2001)

We know exactly how the Flood were made.

We know what the Precursor’s looked like: the answer is everything.

We know about the Precursor’s technology.

There’s no more mystery left…the human imagination is it’s greatest ally when it comes to fiction…and also it’s greatest enemy.

Remember that feeling at the end of the Halo 3 Legendary ending, that you WANTED to know what planet that was, but at the same time you DIDN’T want to know?

It’s the same reason we weren’t shown the whole Xenomorph in the first Alien film until the end.

It’s the same reason we didn’t see the whole shark in Jaws until about half-way through the film, and it worked beautifully, which is odd because we already knew what sharks looked like, but our imagination took over…

It’s what made the story of Darth Vader so great before the Prequels came out.

But now that we know, it isn’t as exciting…I don’t get that feeling of wonder with a hint of fear anymore from Halo that was there at the beginning.

If it were up to me (if I had a nickel…) then I would have saved what the Precursors looked like, they’re plan, where the Flood came from, and all of that sort of thing until the END of the franchise.

Now, the only thing left NOT revealed is the Master Chief’s face. And I hope, I HOPE to Hell and back that they do NOT reveal it entirely.

Mystery is what made a lot of Halo great. We WANT things to be revealed, but at the same time, we secretly don’t…

But now, the Precursors, the Flood, all of that is now known entirely. Yup. That’s it.

Now we just wait for the Flood’s return if it will come at all…and until they show the Master Chief’s face.

:confused: some of the Halo magic is gone, and I sometimes wonder if it’s because I’m in my twenties now.

But in my opinion:
Being denied the answer to the mystery is its own guilty pleasure.

Just a little rant of mine. If you were happy with all of what we now know, then I’m glad at least someone is happy.

Perhaps I AM too old. Perhaps the next generation will be given a new mystery the size of the ancients.

Until sometimes replies, I shall wait, but for now? Silentium

P.S. Anyone else annoyed with how Halsey has been treated? I feel like she deserves a little payback in the form of the Chief vs. Parangosky. The results would be a new kind of delicious for me.

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I don’t think they really told us that much to be honest. What we saw was a small window in a large, expansive history we may never know fully. The fact we still hypothesize on Forerunner origins, human origins, just what the Precursors are, the purpose of the Flood, whether a cure for the Flood exists and so on is a testament to that.

As for the Halsey question, odd as it is to tack on, I am. I understand the purpose and why it happened, it was just poorly done. To save time though, let me just say that after seeing Halsey’s Journal compared to Mein Kampf by Adolf -Yoink!-, I decided to read the book in question and I’m fairly convinced Traviss read neither. Seems like it was just done to make an emotional hit to make the fanbase hate Halsey without any effort and I’m disappointed that Traviss and 343 decided to aim that low.

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Yes Lt Lambert USCM. All my yes. So very nice to see someone else that hates the direction they’ve taken the Forerunners and Halo lore.

Too much was revealed, and frankly it turned the Forerunners into a joke. Before, Halo was military science fiction with that dash of the unknown that kept you wanting to know more, and allowed you to use your imagination to fill in the blanks.

Now? It’s all high science fantasy nonsense with what basically amounts to space magic. There never should have been a star-faring Ancient Humanity, we should have been picked by the Librarian not based upon her Forthencho (that’s a winner name for sure) fangirl crush, but because of our potential as a species, what we represented in our infancy.

Reclaimers not by birthright, but by privilege. A title, without all the Space Magic 343i and Greg Bear decided to associate it with. No stupid nonsense about being altered by the Librarian, no implanted generational knowledge, no grand manipulation by the Librarian.

All of that WEAKENS what Humanity is now. We didn’t get this way or beat the Covenant because of our own merits and abilities, this was just part of some Fangirl’s plan.

And instead of Guilty Spark being his own character built specifically for the job of maintaining Installation 04, he’s now an Ancient Human that was unlucky enough to be turned into an AI. Instead of him standing, as he did for years as an interesting character, on his own merits and actions that we see in the games, he’s now got all these unneeded backstory attached to him in an attempt to make him ‘special’.

The only backstory he needed was most of what was presented in the glimpses we were given in the Halo CEA Terminals. That’s how ALL of this should have been done, with these tiny little tidbits of information that gave us just enough to keep imagining to what was.

And the Precursors, or should I say Flood, they’re another level of joke. Instead of an enemy that we knew nothing about and could only begin to perceive what it was based on the observations of a mad AI and the Gravemind’s own ramblings, now it’s just ancient aliens who turned themselves into space magic dust that went reached the expiration date. And now it’s being heavily hinted that an enemy that wasn’t all that much fun to fight in the first place is coming back.

Way to pull the generic plot device card on ALL of that, 343i. It reeks of writers that are unable to push the narrative forward on it’s own strength and has to instead Macguffin in some Big Bad from the distant past to make trouble.

And THANK YOU OP for bringing up the Alien comparison. It fits so perfectly and has long been my opinion on how they should have continued handling the Forerunners and all the backstory.

But instead they turned the lights on, and now we see that it’s just a guy in a suit. Or rather a bunch of guys with really stupid names in suits. The was MYSTERY to what the backstory was, what the Forerunners were, and now it’s just filled with this…garbage nonsense that just doesn’t fit with the Halo universe.

And honestly? I just have to ignore the Didact and the /entire/ Forerunner storyline in Halo 4. The campaign in Halo 4, for me, is the Chief getting back to Earth to fix Cortana. All the rest of the troubles I just do my best to write off as the Ugly Covenant pressing the wrong buttons and causing problems. It is the only way I can tolerate the game. Click the spoiler button if you want to know what I have to say about how they could have revealed things differently yet radically would have made the Forerunner plot better.

Didact? Forerunner AI that thinks it’s the Didact, with his belief in the Mantle twisted. Now there’s a way to explain why we have the heroic Didact on the Ark firing the Array, the one that we fight in Halo 4 is just a Promethean (horribly unfun enemies to fight with uninspired designs, by the way) version of mad Mendicant Bias who either thinks it is the Didact, or wants to ‘finish the fight’ as the way it felt the Didact should have allowed to do without firing the Array.

This just moves the story forward without having to heavily lean on or further warp and retcon the background lore.

The Space Magic done to Master Chief to make him immune? Easily written off as his augmentations (or further augmentations by the Librarian) to make him more than just the baseline Human the Composer was calibrated for. There was once again no need to bring up the Space Magic and grand manipulation plans of the Fangirl, no need to further weaken what Humanity is and take us further away from ‘still within the realm of realism’ into full on Space Fantasy with Space Magic.

As for Halsey, I again completely agree. The way that she has been treated is just beyond ridiculous and reeks of the people doing the writing taking personal offense at what she did. ONI approved stealing and replacing the children and creating the Spartan-II, and they continually approved of the Spartan-IIs throughout the entirety of their training and eventual deployment. All of this ‘Halsey is now a war criminal’ is -Yoink-, and I really, really, really hope that she’s just playing Ugly Covenant Leader Elite instead of siding with him at the end of Spartan Ops.

Her character is fascinating and she deserves more than to just be the whipping girl of inexperienced (and quite frankly bad) writers.

When Joseph Staten left Bungie, I was so excited and hoped that he would get hired by 343i, and how disappointed I was when wasn’t. He is the reason Halo was what is was, and he desperately needs to get back to it. And then 343i needs to just contract Eric Nylund to write any future Halo books, and together Staten and Nylund could possibly undo all the damage that has been done to the lore by lesser writers.

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I’m glad, ManiacalSpark, that you get my Aliens reference. Perhaps I was wrong about the community after all (I was under the assumption that only a few could see past their own desire)

> I don’t think they really told us that much to be honest. What we saw was a small window in a large, expansive history we may never know fully. The fact we still hypothesize on Forerunner origins, human origins, just what the Precursors are, the purpose of the Flood, whether a cure for the Flood exists and so on is a testament to that.

I must, in the utmost respect, disagree.

It feels like we DO know fully. The Precursors and Forerunners got into a war 10 millions years ago. Precursors lost…revenge in the form of the Flood, etc.

The Forerunners are from the Precursors when they made them on the planet Gibahlb (spelling?)

Well humans were made by the Precursors too…

And the cure isn’t really that big a deal…I don’t fee like any of these things, even if we DIDN’T know, can compare to things like:

Where the Flood came from.

Who the Precursors were.

What the Precursors looked like…

Why they’re all gone.

All of which have been answered.

I feel like the awe-inspiring mystery has been shattered.

And as for you, ManiacalSpark, I’m glad someone else doesn’t just want everything revealed immediately.

I will quote Mr Plinkett: “The past was better before we saw it.”

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I remember playing the older games when it was still a mystery and looking forward to it being revealed. I thought, like most people, that the Forerunners were ancient humans, but they weren’t.

And yes, it was a science fiction military shooter steeped in mystery, but that’s something that had to be expanded upon, they can’t just keep that up forever.

I like the expanded lore and the story. Being kept in the dark was great for the sense of mystery, but it’s time to open this story up. I kind of had a similar feeling to what you guys are describing here during the final seasons of Lost … “I liked this better when I didn’t know what was going on.”

I’ve read the books, and I don’t find the portrayal of the Didact in Halo 4 to be off. He looks fine to me. Maybe we just pictured him differently when we read the books. But a lot of people have this “if it’s attached to Halo 4 in any way, it’s terrible, no matter what it is” mentality.

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> I’m glad, ManiacalSpark, that you get my Aliens reference. Perhaps I was wrong about the community after all (I was under the assumption that only a few could see past their own desire)
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> > I don’t think they really told us that much to be honest. What we saw was a small window in a large, expansive history we may never know fully. The fact we still hypothesize on Forerunner origins, human origins, just what the Precursors are, the purpose of the Flood, whether a cure for the Flood exists and so on is a testament to that.
>
> I must, in the utmost respect, disagree.
>
> It feels like we DO know fully. The Precursors and Forerunners got into a war 10 millions years ago. Precursors lost…revenge in the form of the Flood, etc.
>
> The Forerunners are from the Precursors when they made them on the planet Gibahlb (spelling?)
>
> Well humans were made by the Precursors too…
>
> And the cure isn’t really that big a deal…I don’t fee like any of these things, even if we DIDN’T know, can compare to things like:
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> Where the Flood came from.
>
> Who the Precursors were.
>
> What the Precursors looked like…
>
> Why they’re all gone.
>
> All of which have been answered.
>
> I feel like the awe-inspiring mystery has been shattered.
>
> And as for you, ManiacalSpark, I’m glad someone else doesn’t just want everything revealed immediately.
>
> I will quote Mr Plinkett: “The past was better before we saw it.”

The Precursors sat there as the Forerunners killed them. They were interested in this rampage of violence and just watched it, they didn’t fight. It wasn’t a war. The Flood was a mistake that corrupted the Precursors into a motive of destroying all creation.

There is a difference between knowing “Oh, they made them.” and knowing exactly when, why, how, etc. All we know is that the Precursors created life. No specifics.

The single thing that could save the galaxy from imminent destruction, theoretically found by Ancient Humanity hundreds of thousands of years ago and then lost isn’t important?
That’s one of the biggest new mysteries of the Halo Universe. Ancient Humanity found something that they believed could destroy the Flood supercell at its core, but the Flood retreated at the same time so we don’t know if it worked. The Forerunners never got ahold of the “cure”, and the Primordial ends up saying that the cure doesn’t exist. Yet he and Mendicant Bias spent years on Installation 07 testing Humans for immunity. Why test when there isn’t an immunity?
We still don’t know what’s going on, and it could be critical.

Who the Precursors were? We know as much about them as we knew about the Forerunners in CE. The Forerunners were ancient creatures that created things. The Precursors are ancient beings that created things. All we know more is that their methods are advanced beyond comprehension.

We know, possibily, what one Precursor looked like. And he was in the middle of a Flood transition. Other than that, we have no idea. The Precursors existed in many shapes and forms.

Yes, a lot was revealed. And a lot had to be revealed to push the story forward in an engaging way.
But in the breaking down of old mysteries and terrors, new mysteries and terrors were created.
We have the biggest and most terrifying thing in the Halo Universe now. The Primordial’s Prophecy. He said that in 100,000 years, when Humanity is ripe and arrogant, the Flood will return. Combining that with the Gravemind’s speech, things aren’t going to be good… at all. That 100,000 year mark is here, and Humanity is “thriving” with new Forerunner technologies, certainly becoming arrogant in their actions.

Then we have the Librarian’s plan, influencing us for millenia. Driving us towards a certain point.

A lot was revealed, but the story is so much richer and expansive now, and has so much more room to expand. As we continue, new mysteries will arise, and ancient secrets will unfold.

The Forerunner Trilogy transitioned us from the Original Trilogy to the Reclaimer Saga. With that, the mystery was taken off of the Forerunners, and placed on the Precursors.
We may know a bit about what happened, but other than that all we know is that there are beings who wield the power to meld life itself into structures out there, and something happened to them. Some are sheparding the Flood to eliminate all creation. Some went dormant, never to be seen again?

Also, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
Halo didn’t turn into some magical, fantasy universe. The beings at its core are just advanced beyond comprehension. We just don’t understand them or their technology.

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> I’m glad, ManiacalSpark, that you get my Aliens reference. Perhaps I was wrong about the community after all (I was under the assumption that only a few could see past their own desire)
>
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> > I don’t think they really told us that much to be honest. What we saw was a small window in a large, expansive history we may never know fully. The fact we still hypothesize on Forerunner origins, human origins, just what the Precursors are, the purpose of the Flood, whether a cure for the Flood exists and so on is a testament to that.
>
> I must, in the utmost respect, disagree.
>
> It feels like we DO know fully. The Precursors and Forerunners got into a war 10 millions years ago. Precursors lost…revenge in the form of the Flood, etc.
>
> The Forerunners are from the Precursors when they made them on the planet Gibahlb (spelling?)
>
> Well humans were made by the Precursors too…
>
> And the cure isn’t really that big a deal…I don’t fee like any of these things, even if we DIDN’T know, can compare to things like:
>
> Where the Flood came from.
>
> Who the Precursors were.
>
> What the Precursors looked like…
>
> Why they’re all gone.
>
> All of which have been answered.
>
> I feel like the awe-inspiring mystery has been shattered.
>
> And as for you, ManiacalSpark, I’m glad someone else doesn’t just want everything revealed immediately.
>
> I will quote Mr Plinkett: “The past was better before we saw it.”

I must, in the utmost respect, disagree with a lot of what you said here.
I completely understand why you’ve gotten upset at 343’s direction with the Forerunner saga; the imagination is often more fertile when left to itself. However, not knowing anything about the Forerunners annoyed me, and this storyline still holds a lot of mystery to me in the form of the Precursors. Yes, the Precursors are still mysterious, and here’s why.

Every detail you’ve mentioned about the Precursors came from one source: the Primordial, which is of course a Gravemind. How do we know that anything it claimed about the Precursors is true? Remember that multiple times, characters- including Catalog- recognized deliberate contradictions, inconsistencies, and lies in the Primordial’s words. For all we know, the Precursors are actually nonexistent, or- my own favorite wacky theory- what if the Precursors were humans even more ancient than the ones under Forthencho? This would explain the Flood’s preference for humans and hatred of the Forerunners, as it could actually be a sentient bioweapon created by humans that started thinking for itself and decided to test its makers’ descendants and destroy any rivals for the Mantle. Possibly ancient humanity is a sub-race of the Precursors. Just a crazy idea. After all, we don’t know anything for sure about them except that they built star roads and artifacts which the Flood can control and nothing except Halos can damage. Any other data about them is told by the Flood; possibly lies told to infect AIs with the logic plague and demoralize sentients in their path.
I think we don’t know a tenth of the Precursors’ story, much as the Forerunners were a mystery prior to Greg Bear’s work and Halo 4. Just my two cents’ worth.

I totally agree with you about Halsey’s story arc thus far, however. Karen Traviss’s work literally sickened me with how biased and irrational it really was. Frequently comparing Halsey to Mengele and -Yoink!- was just adding insult to injury. I’m personally hoping the Master Chief is hunted by Kilo-Five and ONI during H5 Guardians so he can beat the human team members- particularly Vaz- within an inch of their lives, and crush BB’s annoying chip into oblivion. It’s not like that’s going to happen, though… :frowning:

EDIT: Oops, I think I phrased the “utmost respect” bit wrong. Sorry if that seemed a little rude.

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> Every detail you’ve mentioned about the Precursors came from one source: the Primordial, which is of course a Gravemind. How do we know that anything it claimed about the Precursors is true?
>
> EDIT: Oops, I think I phrased the “utmost respect” bit wrong. Sorry if that seemed a little rude.

Actually most of what I had a problem with being revealed came from the Flood-recreated Forthencho when he spoke to the Librarian on Erde-Tyrene just before the Halos fired.

The Forerunner’s being revealed? Well, yeah, to be honest, I think it IS about time. I’ve always wanted to see a Forerunner, and in Halo 4 got just what I wanted. I’m incredibly happy I didn’t spoil it and avoided the internet for a time. Halo 4’s campaign blew me away. I loved it.

But when it came to the Precursors, I feel like it was WAY too rushed when it came to information on them.

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> But when it came to the Precursors, I feel like it was WAY too rushed when it came to information on them.

We probably only got a small idea of what the Precursors are, they are akin to Cthulhu. We know what he looks like, but that is about it.

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I have my problems with certain aspects of where 343i decided to take the Forerunners – one of the being that they’re now aliens completely unrelated to humans, or the retconning of the Halo 3 terminals. And the replacement of human agency and accomplishment with silly genetic predestination by a space goddess.

But I still think hiring Greg Bear was the best decision they’ve done for the sheer quality of his work alone. Nothing penned by 343’s in-house writers (or Karen Traviss) comes close to the mythic grandeur of the world Bear created with the Forerunner books.

The revelations about the Precursors don’t bother me that much. What do we really know about them? That their minds and motivations are beyond our comprehension; that they lived “in many shapes, flesh and spirit”. That they may predate our universe or perhaps come here from an older one. Forthencho’s statement to the Librarian alone is one of the most sweeping, imagination-provoking stuff in Halo in a long while and it opens whole new avenues for speculation.

Where did the Precursors come from? What is their exact nature – i.e. how do they experience endless cycles of evolution, death and rebirth and still retain their identity as “Precursors”? Are there still un-corrupted Precursors in different galaxies? How exactly does neural physics work and just what it can do (do the Precursors just will the star roads and such into existence via sheer thought or is there physical construction involved? Could Flood Keyminds reach a level where they could construct star roads?)

To me the revelation of the Precursors as these incomprehensible, eldritch entities was much more interesting than something a lesser writer may have come up with – that is, another elder race of tall and luminous aliens in space togas.

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We pretty much don’t know anything about Precursors yet, only small parts.
And not so much about Forerunners that we could say that “we know them”.

At first the Covenant was the mystery. Then we got to know them more and more.
Then came Flood.
Then it was the Forerunners. Now we know somethings about them too, but not as much as about the Covenant.
Now it is the Precursors. And they seem to be so much like the ultimate freaks of the universe (or universes) that I don’t know if we even can get to know much more about them.

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A lot was revealed yes… But…
With more answers come more questions.

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> I have my problems with certain aspects of where 343i decided to take the Forerunners – one of the being that they’re now aliens completely unrelated to humans, or the retconning of the Halo 3 terminals. And the replacement of human agency and accomplishment with silly genetic predestination by a space goddess.
>
> But I still think hiring Greg Bear was the best decision they’ve done for the sheer quality of his work alone. Nothing penned by 343’s in-house writers (or Karen Traviss) comes close to the mythic grandeur of the world Bear created with the Forerunner books.
>
> The revelations about the Precursors don’t bother me that much. What do we really know about them? That their minds and motivations are beyond our comprehension; that they lived “in many shapes, flesh and spirit”. That they may predate our universe or perhaps come here from an older one. Forthencho’s statement to the Librarian alone is one of the most sweeping, imagination-provoking stuff in Halo in a long while and it opens whole new avenues for speculation.
>
> Where did the Precursors come from? What is their exact nature – i.e. how do they experience endless cycles of evolution, death and rebirth and still retain their identity as “Precursors”? Are there still un-corrupted Precursors in different galaxies? How exactly does neural physics work and just what it can do (do the Precursors just will the star roads and such into existence via sheer thought or is there physical construction involved? Could Flood Keyminds reach a level where they could construct star roads?)
>
> To me the revelation of the Precursors as these incomprehensible, eldritch entities was much more interesting than something a lesser writer may have come up with – that is, another elder race of tall and luminous aliens in space togas.

The Forerunners were separated from Humanity by Halo 3, and they didn’t retcon the terminals.

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> The Forerunners were separated from Humanity by Halo 3, and they didn’t retcon the terminals.

Depends on your interpretation. By Halo 3 I assumed the Forerunners were a subset of humanity plucked from Earth eons earlier by the Precursors and developed into their own independent civilization from then on. When they discover Earth again (in the last days of the Flood war) the Librarian talks about study of the humans offering answers to the Forerunners’ own mysteries – what would be a greater mystery than their own origins were this sort of background true?

The creation of a fully different human civilization and genetically-unrelated alien Forerunners just felt contrived to me. They could’ve had them as human relatives, just ones with a couple million years of evolution in a different direction and on top of that their mutations from the books. They didn’t need to be a race of Voldemort people.

As for not retconning the terminals, they didn’t directly retcon them (as in, outright saying they aren’t canon anymore) but they still contradicted them with the new information and handwaved that away with a decent enough in-universe explanation. This is, by definition, a retcon in the original meaning of the word (by now it’s come to mean basically “rewriting past canon”, but it can also mean inserting new meaning or context to previously established events, which was done with the terminals by revealing them as unreliable as opposed to factual accounts as people had previously assumed).

But like I said, I still think the good parts of the Forerunner saga outweigh my gripes with it and that it’s definitely up there on my list of best Halo fiction out there.

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> Depends on your interpretation. By Halo 3 I assumed the Forerunners were a subset of humanity plucked from Earth eons earlier by the Precursors and developed into their own independent civilization from then on. When they discover Earth again (in the last days of the Flood war) the Librarian talks about study of the humans offering answers to the Forerunners’ own mysteries – what would be a greater mystery than their own origins were this sort of background true?

And who is to say this isn’t true? We have literally no clue about what went on during the origins of the Forerunners and humanity.

> The creation of a fully different human civilization and genetically-unrelated alien Forerunners just felt contrived to me. They could’ve had them as human relatives, just ones with a couple million years of evolution in a different direction and on top of that their mutations from the books.

You realize that it was never fully confirmed we were entirely separate species? Did you not pick up on the plot seeds of humanity’s and the Forerunner’s origins being more intertwined than the characters believe? Look at how similar the manipulars are described to humans. The Forerunners of Path Kethona even more so.

> They didn’t need to be a race of Voldemort people.

Flat nose = voldemort

Got it.

> As for not retconning the terminals, they didn’t directly retcon them (as in, outright saying they aren’t canon anymore) but they still contradicted them with the new information and handwaved that away with a decent enough in-universe explanation.

You do realize that not even the Halo 4 Terminals are entirely factual anymore…

> This is, by definition, a retcon in the original meaning of the word (by now it’s come to mean basically “rewriting past canon”, but it can also mean inserting new meaning or context to previously established events, which was done with the terminals by revealing them as unreliable as opposed to factual accounts as people had previously assumed).

Unreliable in what way? Did you even pay attention to the ONI sections of Primordium? Even they don’t know how much of them are true or not anymore. There’s a lot of stuff in there that can still be factual within the universe. I certainly treat large sections of it as being factual.

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> And who is to say this isn’t true? We have literally no clue about what went on during the origins of the Forerunners and humanity.
>
> You realize that it was never fully confirmed we were entirely separate species? Did you not pick up on the plot seeds of humanity’s and the Forerunner’s origins being more intertwined than the characters believe? Look at how similar the manipulars are described to humans. The Forerunners of Path Kethona even more so.

If they were genetically related the Forerunners would know about it (and apparently they don’t – the best they’ve got is “kind of similar, maybe”). DNA is like an open book to those who can read it and if you muck up common ancestry to the extent of unrecognizability you’re basically creating a different species and we’re back at square one as far as my gripe is concerned.

But I stress that this matter isn’t a dealbreaker for me, just something I’m a little miffed about.

> Flat nose = voldemort
>
>
> Got it.

Well, you can’t deny the resemblance.

> You do realize that not even the Halo 4 Terminals are entirely factual anymore…

Yes.

> Unreliable in what way? Did you even pay attention to the ONI sections of Primordium? Even they don’t know how much of them are true or not anymore. There’s a lot of stuff in there that can still be factual within the universe. I certainly treat large sections of it as being factual.

Yes, I did pay attention and there is no need to get all condescending. I agree that large segments of the terminals can still be considered true (wherever they don’t contradict with the newer stuff). But that doesn’t change the fact that certain things – like the notion that the Forerunners found Earth in the very last hours of the Flood war – have been altered or overridden and that 343 themselves have stated that the terminals aren’t entirely reliable because (and I paraphrase) they’ve been altered by an unstable AI for 100,000 years. That still undermines their narrative value and I’m not convinced it was wholly necessary. At least thankfully what they gave us in return for that loss was of good quality, but that’s solely due to Bear’s writing skill.

17

As for the “Voldemort Race” resemblance… Someone shared a picture detailing many different Forerunners - from the Builders to the Miners, and the Warriors… And they all looked radically different from each other. The Miners had four arms! The Ur-Didact for example failed his mutations (If I recall, I could be recounting this a bit inaccurately) and that resulted in his current appearance. They don’t all look the same, so one Forerunner != What they all look like. Chances are if we see the Iso-Didact in person he won’t look anything like the Ur-Didact. Unless we already have seen him and I’m not aware of this?

18

My thought process is that a mystery is meant to be solved. When someone gives me a mystery I love to imagine what it’s answer is. However, it doesn’t matter to me because I always classify it as fan fiction and fake within the universe.

I’d rather them give us all the answers by the end of the franchise. If Halo had ended at Halo 3 and never answered what the planet was and what happened to the surviving characters I would have dropped Halo altogether. There’d be no closure. Every theory on what it could have been was just fan fiction and to me everything would have just been a giant hole filled ending which gave no pay off.

So yeah I like imagination as mystery, but if I’m not given answers then its all a waste of time to me.

19

Agreed. There simply isn’t any real mystery left in Halo’s backstory. Nor does it help that in fleshing the Forerunners/Precursors out, 343 has moved Halo right up into WH40K territory, when it used to sit in a comfy niche between gritty realism and space opera. At this point, they might as well have Master Chief take his helmet off to reveal Jesus and be done with it.