First of all, Hunt the Truth has been pretty good so far. The voice acting and dialogue writing is excellent–easily the best quality of anything that’s come from 343 Industries previously. The problem I have with it so far is actually the premise: why did ONI ask someone to dig into John’s past and not expect that person to find out anything about John’s past? I know, I know, “he was only supposed to report the ONI-approved stuff,” you say. But they had to have known that Giraud would encounter inconsistencies, not just in “bad records,” but in eyewitness testimony. And not only did they allow Giraud to discover these inconsistencies, but they also told him to. Did they just think he’d just shrug them off? Whoever it was at ONI that made that decision must’ve been either naive or stupid. If you’re in charge of keeping one of the biggest scandals in government history covered up, you’re going to be a little more careful than that. If you don’t want people to find skeletons in your closet, then don’t ask them to go into your closet!
Let me reiterate that this post is not a Hunt the Truth bash-fest post. Most of everything else that makes up the series is pretty good. But it’s really hard for me to enjoy the series when I know that the entire basis of the storyline hinges on something so implausible. It’s kinda like how after you find out that Indiana Jones is mostly irrelevant to the plot of Raiders of the Lost Ark, the movie is more difficult to enjoy. Or once you find out the explanation for The Happening, the entire movie is ruined, because you realize how ridiculous and unreasonable the explanation is.
ONI didn’t ask Benjamin to dig into Johns past, one of the reasons why he was told to only interview sources that sully had, but he wanted to make the best “hero” story that he possibly could, which led him to finding his own sources outside of ONI. And it was pure LUCK that he found that one record, that one piece of evidence, that would make ONI’s cover-up come to an earth shattering stop. ONI wasn’t expecting him to find that one record, hell they probably didn’t even know the record existed. Remember, that record was a list of deaths from the hospital that John “died” at this hospital which was located on the planet that John was born on and was eventually glassed, and remember “Glassed planets have bad records”
They wanted a fluff piece on “The history of our hero” and gave him a list of people to talk to who would all regurgitate the official story. This guy was never a “real” reporter, he was a propaganda mouthpiece; they expected him to interview people on the official list and then write the story they wanted, just like he had done for them in the past. That he decided to be diligent and look for his own sources caught them completely by surprise; it was the sort of thing he had never done before.
EDIT: augh, ninja’d
I’ve thought about this too and it’s the like the didact escalation thing. It’s like a good looking house built upon a bad fundament. But what I think/hope is, that there’s still a missing puzzle in both these scenarios explaining why everything happened in such a seemingly nonsensical way, saving us from major lore falseness.
of course you could say they underestimated giraud, but…I mean it’s ONI
> 2533274815175401;3:
> They wanted a fluff piece on “The history of our hero” and gave him a list of people to talk to who would all regurgitate the official story. This guy was never a “real” reporter, he was a propaganda mouthpiece; they expected him to interview people on the official list and then write the story they wanted, just like he had done for them in the past. That he decided to be diligent and look for his own sources caught them completely by surprise; it was the sort of thing he had never done before.
>
> EDIT: augh, ninja’d
This ^
I guess after 30 years of war he got use to slapping out the same content but when he came across a living legend, he got curious and now it seems like he might go join the cat.
BTW why edit in the “ninja”?
As emphasised by Black Box;
“Is ONI one happy family? Oh, please. We’ve got four divisions, officially, and only one of them knows that we’ve actually got more than that. There’s Section Two—made up of psyops and PR, who each kid themselves they’re not like the other at all—which tells the lies; Section Zero, which thinks it spies on everyone else, tells lies to Section Two, and thinks it tells lies to Sections One and Three; Section One does stuff we can almost talk about, the interface with other branches; and Section Three does the stuff we can’t talk about or else it would have to kill everyone in fascinating and groundbreaking new ways. Technically, you’re not a numbered section at all. You’re the praetorian guard for CINCONI, in a way, and we just call CINCONI’s staff Core Four, although it’s actually in Core Five of Bravo-6, and DCS reports directly to it. You’ll note I didn’t mention HIGHCOM, and that’s because all ONI sections lie to HIGHCOM and tell it that it’s the most powerful body on Earth, which generally works well at keeping the old buffers convinced that they make the decisions. Now, are you confused? I certainly hope so, because that’s my mission.”
—Black-Box, explaining the perceived structure of ONI to the rest of Kilo-Five, and only partly joking