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> As someone that (mostly) loves Halo and its general aesthetic, I’ve been very wary of delving into the EU after learning of the far-reaching retcons that befell Halo’s narrative. Most notably, making Humans and Forerunners a separate species even though Halo 1-3 extensively foreshadowed (and then revealed) that they were one in the same.
Yea, other than IRIS/Halo 3 showing Forerunners and Humans were separate,but okay. This is just another example of how inconsistent Bungie is with their own lore
> Unlike Candland, I simply can’t bring myself to shrug my shoulders and embrace such a significant recton
You got plenty in Halo:Reach that I don’t see being mentioned
- The Covenant being allowed to invade Reach- The Covenant going against their dogma extensively innovating their tech and tactics Ex: Randomly using a CSO late into the war instead of from the start and just one of those ships,a cloak that can’t be detected whatsoever, actually preforming a legitimate siege,Teleportation Spires,etc- The UNSC being portrayed as grossly incompetent- Halsey implying/foreshadowing that something massively important must be at the Sigma coordinates- The PoA having a mission to investigate those coordinates instead of Cortana randomly doing so- which shatters the entire theme of Humanity surviving by luck- The PoA magically being fully repaired (despite being inscribed as a skeleton at that point) and passing through Covenant controlled naval space twice without incident- The PoA operating in-atmosphere when it wasn’t rated and too heavy for such an actionWe also have the retconned species encounter dates which I won’t rant about here and several other things Bungie themselves did.
> it blatantly disservices the original writers
They did it themselves and since majority of your post keeps bashing this fact I can’t respond without re-posting the same thing. It has been well known since IRIS that the Forerunners found Humanity near the Maginot Sphere’s edge and indexed them. You literally have a comic with an Ancient Man in Africa watching Forerunner machines build the Portal.
IRIS also tells us that Forerunners are alive,watching us, and hoping the Flood is stopped for all our sakes.
> So now I’m here, asking for your help. Are the novels - particularly the Forerunner Saga - and the stories they bring to the table worth the glaring retcons? Do they provide an interesting, solid experience that makes up for the original canon being tampered with? If I’m going to dedicate myself to buying and reading the books, I want to be assured that their takes on the story are better than Bungie’s. Not just different.
Uh yeah, The attention 343I paid to the original canon is uncanny and they took it to an entirely different level. Your entire post here is a subplot within the saga that gets a slight explanation in Silentium. It is crazy to read the Flood being described (a "first) as “aberrations” and dig back through “The Flood” and see that exact term being used.
Majority of the Saga is based off IRIS and the Halo 3 terminals. So if anyone is rusty on those they need to be re-read.
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> > > As someone that (mostly) loves Halo and its general aesthetic, I’ve been very wary of delving into the EU after learning of the far-reaching retcons that befell Halo’s narrative. Most notably, making Humans and Forerunners a separate species even though Halo 1-3 extensively foreshadowed (and then revealed) that they were one in the same.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > Yea, other than IRIS/Halo 3 showing Forerunners and Humans were separate,but okay. This is just another example of how inconsistent Bungie is with their own lore
>
>
>
> Can you direct me to where IRIS and Halo 3 itself showed Forerunners & Humans were separate? Or, more accurately, that Humanity wasn’t a direct descendant? I will admit, again, to a lot of ignorance in regards to the EU, and also to IRIS considering I wasn’t around for it. But Guilty Spark outright says 'YOU ARE FORERUNNER.’ to Chief in Halo 3. Stacked with the many instances where that twist was foreshadowed, and the link I posted where a Bungie employee regards the Forerunner-Human change as a retcon, I don’t have much else to believe.
Sparkie also spoke to John as if the two had met and conversed prior to 2552. The distinction between Bungie and 343 Industries’ canon aside, 343 Guilty Spark often speaks in a manner befitting his rampant state after a thousand centuries of isolation. He’s strange, uttering the most obscure things that would surely bewilder everyone but himself. Furthermore, much of what Guilty Spark has said in the Bungie games can be applied seamlessly with what 343i has introduced. John may be Forerunner, but that’s not all that he is.
“Last time, you asked me, if it was my choice, would I do it? Having had considerable time to ponder your query, my answer has not changed. There is no choice. We must activate the ring.” Merely confusing an ancestor or is this something else?
“You are the child of my Makers. Inheritor of all they left behind. You are Forerunner! But this ring… is mine!” If humans are Forerunner, then John would not be noted as the “child” of his Makers. He would simply be one of those Makers. 343 Guilty Spark serves the Forerunners, and if John, and indeed humanity as a whole, were Forerunner as well, I doubt he would denote them as the children of anything.
I don’t know. Even giving my own opinion for that last one confused me. I never got the impression that Bungie really knew what they were doing with it either.
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> I always assumed that Spark was grouping Chief (and by extension, the whole of humanity) in with the Forerunners. One quote, for example: “Last time, you asked me, if it was my choice, would I do it?”
>
> I was under the impression that the word ‘you’ was referring to the collective, not to Chief specifically. Thereby foreshadowing that the Forunners and Humanity are/were the same.
That’s an interesting theory, but something else he said soon after shines light on who exactly 343 Guilty Spark thinks John-117 is.
“More or less. Technically, this installation’s pulse has a maximum effective radius of twenty-five thousand light years. But, once the others follow suit, this galaxy will be quite devoid of life, or at least any life with sufficient biomass to sustain the Flood. But you already knew that… I mean, how couldn’t you?”
The ordinary Forerunner and surely no Human would be aware of any of Halo’s strategic capabilities before this very moment. This was a personal reference and I don’t think we can blame 343’s rampancy for this one.
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> When this line was written, Forerunners were still distant ancestors to modern-day Humanity. We fired the Halo array to kill the Flood, and we slaughtered most of the galaxy in doing so. And yet, the Gravemind still remains. We sacrificed everything to slay him, but our genocide was in vain.
I’m changing the subject here but I thought I’d bring it up since I was literally just talking about it a few mins ago. That part I just quoted from you is directly from the book warhammer.
> One billion years prior to the events of the first novel a parasitic race called Vang Oormlikoowl (best translated as High Intelligence Omniparasitic lifeform) by a race known as the Batrachians is infecting the galaxy; literally. Everywhere the Batrachians look to in the sky they see planets infected by The Vang. It is stated that The Vang only see other lifeforms as food or means of living (a vector for infection). I’ll spare the details but the Batrachians end up destroying The Vang by activating a Super-weapon. The Star Hammer. The Batrachians make the ultimate sacrifice in vain as The Vang lived on…
I loved the Halo universe Bungie created and I still do but once I discovered the similarities it has with books such as Warhammer and Ringworld I lost respect for them and Halo. I think Bungie created a universe filled with mystery yet being dark, cryptic and errie but at times I feel let down of how uncreative it really it.
I do however still favor bungie over 343 (nothing against 343) I find their storytelling to be more clear, more straight forward (apart from how confusing and awkward they where about humans being/not being forerunners). That was a big blunder. Maybe it’s because the universe has expanded a lot and more rapidly since 343 took over, there seem to be a lot more to take and it feels really obscure.
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> Can you direct me to where IRIS and Halo 3 itself showed Forerunners & Humans were separate? Or, more accurately, that Humanity wasn’t a direct descendant?
All we knew is that Humanity somehow had a connection to this race, Bungie failed to give clarify this plotpoint and later on expected the fans to create their own headcanon in lieu of nonexistent writing. Nobody in the Halo Universe section of Bungie was pushing the descendant theory nor do I remember it being brought up with any sort of frequency.
IRIS Server 5 With the Librarian finding Earth
IRIS Bounce Control Path-Showing that the Forerunners are alive and watching
Ancient Man watching the portal being built.
If Bungie wanted the two races to be the same they should have directly stated so at one point and started to expand on that aspect. Instead a few of them seem upset that a plotpoint which was never written didn’t turn out how they wanted. Should have done that in Halo 3 with a myriad of other things.
> YOU ARE FORERUNNER
Even during those days we knew that to be a term and Cryptum confirmed that. If you recall in CE,Spark tells you himself that the Forerunners were killed by the rings and again in Halo 2.
> Stacked with the many instances where that twist was foreshadowed,
That plot was obscure from the start with even the heaviest “Humans are Forerunners” proponents knowing such. There just wasn’t any hard support for it.
> Bungie employee regards the Forerunner-Human change as a retcon
Kiki wofkill (If not Bonnie Ross) stated that when 343I took over the universe Bungie’s fabled “Halo Bible”-*something they had been smugly bringing up for years and said contained so many key points -*was nothing more than scraps of scattered paper with writing on them. That being said, Bungie itself had extremely poor organization as a studio with man devs contradicting themselves. One will say Halo was never planned past CE and the universe primarily written around Halo 2 (which it was) while another states everything was planned from the get go. I talked to a dev on twitter (Paul Russel) and he stated the Sangheili never had tails or were planned to have them. That shocked me because I knew there was a dev interview about that, so I linked him. He was surprised and stated “They must have had that meeting without me”, He never even knew about that concept!
So with that in mind,we don’t know who could have been involved with the Forerunner/Human “plot” or how much involvement they had. Their organization was so sloppy and some points were even outsourced! Not to mention the lack of that plot being fully established in the first place.
Greg Bear leaves no doubt in the readers mind that both Humanity and Forerunners both came to the conclusion of some disparity happening long ago. Cryptum uses that as one of it’s sub-plotpoints with Primordium following up but leaving you with a haunting thought. While the plotpoint wasn’t concluded there isn’t any debate of it’s clarity or presence.
As for the “Humans are Forerunners” plot, you just have the most vague seeds spread out across the fiction. It’s as if Bungie wanted the plotline to be there but didn’t have the creativity or depth to legitimately establish the idea.
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> > > I always assumed that Spark was grouping Chief (and by extension, the whole of humanity) in with the Forerunners. One quote, for example: “Last time, you asked me, if it was my choice, would I do it?”
> > >
> > > I was under the impression that the word ‘you’ was referring to the collective, not to Chief specifically. Thereby foreshadowing that the Forunners and Humanity are/were the same.
> >
> >
> >
> > That’s an interesting theory, but something else he said soon after shines light on who exactly 343 Guilty Spark thinks John-117 is.
> >
> > “More or less. Technically, this installation’s pulse has a maximum effective radius of twenty-five thousand light years. But, once the others follow suit, this galaxy will be quite devoid of life, or at least any life with sufficient biomass to sustain the Flood. But you already knew that… I mean, how couldn’t you?”
> >
> > The ordinary Forerunner and surely no Human would be aware of any of Halo’s strategic capabilities before this very moment. This was a personal reference and I don’t think we can blame 343’s rampancy for this one.
>
>
> Does that really imply that Spark was making a personal reference? Couldn’t it be realistically interpreted that Spark assumes Chief knows what’s up because he identifies him as a Forerunner on the ring? From the point of view, what reason would Spark have to doubt Chief’s knowledge until he explicitly admitted to not knowing what Halo does?
Because the entire novel has Chief asking questions and visibly confused as to what is going on.
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> > I always assumed that Spark was grouping Chief (and by extension, the whole of humanity) in with the Forerunners. One quote, for example: “Last time, you asked me, if it was my choice, would I do it?”
> >
> > I was under the impression that the word ‘you’ was referring to the collective, not to Chief specifically. Thereby foreshadowing that the Forunners and Humanity are/were the same.
>
>
>
> That’s an interesting theory, but something else he said soon after shines light on who exactly 343 Guilty Spark thinks John-117 is.
>
> “More or less. Technically, this installation’s pulse has a maximum effective radius of twenty-five thousand light years. But, once the others follow suit, this galaxy will be quite devoid of life, or at least any life with sufficient biomass to sustain the Flood. But you already knew that… I mean, how couldn’t you?”
>
> The ordinary Forerunner and surely no Human would be aware of any of Halo’s strategic capabilities before this very moment. This was a personal reference and I don’t think we can blame 343’s rampancy for this one.
Bungie stated in an interview that 343 wasn’t crazy (in regards to this line) you just don’t get what he is talking about.
Literally all we had on that.
adamj004 OMG, I always feel so weird seeing my work being brought up. I’ll be doing a far more in-depth explanation later on with a friend.
Oh, and it’s Starhammer guys 
> 2533274809475040;8:
> Does that really imply that Spark was making a personal reference? Couldn’t it be realistically interpreted that Spark assumes Chief knows what’s up because he identifies him as a Forerunner on the ring? From the point of view, what reason would Spark have to doubt Chief’s knowledge until he explicitly admitted to not knowing what Halo does?
343 personally refers to John and other humans throughout the Covenant Trilogy as Reclaimers, as in, not the very Forerunners who created him a thousand centuries prior, but rather the Forerunners who would carry on their legacy from then on. There was nothing to suggest to him that anyone in the UNSC who he came across had any knowledge of their species’ past affairs or, at the very least, Halo’s strategic and tactical capabilities, and its inner-workings.
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> > 2533274791742477;6:
> > > 2533274809475040;5:
> > > I always assumed that Spark was grouping Chief (and by extension, the whole of humanity) in with the Forerunners. One quote, for example: “Last time, you asked me, if it was my choice, would I do it?”
> > >
> > > I was under the impression that the word ‘you’ was referring to the collective, not to Chief specifically. Thereby foreshadowing that the Forunners and Humanity are/were the same.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > That’s an interesting theory, but something else he said soon after shines light on who exactly 343 Guilty Spark thinks John-117 is.
> >
> > “More or less. Technically, this installation’s pulse has a maximum effective radius of twenty-five thousand light years. But, once the others follow suit, this galaxy will be quite devoid of life, or at least any life with sufficient biomass to sustain the Flood. But you already knew that… I mean, how couldn’t you?”
> >
> > The ordinary Forerunner and surely no Human would be aware of any of Halo’s strategic capabilities before this very moment. This was a personal reference and I don’t think we can blame 343’s rampancy for this one.
>
>
> Bungie stated in an interview that 343 wasn’t crazy (in regards to this line) you just don’t get what he is talking about.
>
> Literally all we had on that.
>
> adamj004 OMG, I always feel so weird seeing my work being brought up. I’ll be doing a far more in-depth explanation later on with a friend.
>
> Oh, and it’s Starhammer guys
Haha. After talking about it earlier I thought I’d read into it again and you’re article just popped up.
Oh and I don’t know why keep calling it Warhammer lol
I think you’re talking by your own point of view. You are disappointed that things aren’t as you imagined. But actually there are pointers through Halo 1, 2 and 3 that indicate that Forerunners and Humans are different species. And it’s better like that anyways. To make it all humans would be boring and easy to overcome as it cuts out what the Halo cannon is today, and it’s great as it is today. The Gravemind says that the sins of the father pass on to the son.
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Jumping on the wagon a bit late here but…
The whole “You are forerunner”. I looked at it as a more literal definition, as in:
> fore·run·ner
> ˈfôrˌrənər/
> noun
> noun: forerunner; plural noun: forerunners
>
> - a person or thing that precedes the coming or development of someone or something else.
Now granted the Forerunner trilogy introduces humans as a race that literally preceded the creation (and detonation) of the halo rings. We would still be ‘forerunners’ in the literal sense.
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> > > 2533274835488730;2:
> > > > As someone that (mostly) loves Halo and its general aesthetic, I’ve been very wary of delving into the EU after learning of the far-reaching retcons that befell Halo’s narrative. Most notably, making Humans and Forerunners a separate species even though Halo 1-3 extensively foreshadowed (and then revealed) that they were one in the same.
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > Yea, other than IRIS/Halo 3 showing Forerunners and Humans were separate,but okay. This is just another example of how inconsistent Bungie is with their own lore
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > Can you direct me to where IRIS and Halo 3 itself showed Forerunners & Humans were separate? Or, more accurately, that Humanity wasn’t a direct descendant? I will admit, again, to a lot of ignorance in regards to the EU, and also to IRIS considering I wasn’t around for it. But Guilty Spark outright says ‘YOU ARE FORERUNNER.’ to Chief in Halo 3. Stacked with the many instances where that twist was foreshadowed, and the link I posted where a Bungie employee regards the Forerunner-Human change as a retcon, I don’t have much else to believe.
>
>
> Sparkie also spoke to John as if the two had met and conversed prior to 2552. The distinction between Bungie and 343 Industries’ canon aside, 343 Guilty Spark often speaks in a manner befitting his rampant state after a thousand centuries of isolation. He’s strange, uttering the most obscure things that would surely bewilder everyone but himself. Furthermore, much of what Guilty Spark has said in the Bungie games can be applied seamlessly with what 343i has introduced. John may be Forerunner, but that’s not all that he is.
>
> “Last time, you asked me, if it was my choice, would I do it? Having had considerable time to ponder your query, my answer has not changed. There is no choice. We must activate the ring.” Merely confusing an ancestor or is this something else?
>
> “You are the child of my Makers. Inheritor of all they left behind. You are Forerunner! But this ring… is mine!” If humans are Forerunner, then John would not be noted as the “child” of his Makers. He would simply be one of those Makers. 343 Guilty Spark serves the Forerunners, and if John, and indeed humanity as a whole, were Forerunner as well, I doubt he would denote them as the children of anything.
>
> I don’t know. Even giving my own opinion for that last one confused me. I never got the impression that Bungie really knew what they were doing with it either.
There have been some interesting theories regarding Spark’s words, mainly focusing on the the librarian imprinting geas in the genes of humanity. As master chief is the culmination of these geas, it could be speculated that he is genetically similar to the Didact and is therefore the iso-didact. Halo follower gives a much better explanation than I can at 2 AM
SOURCE http://halofollower.com/master-chief/
I think spark thinks humans are forerunner because he thinks he is forerunner. Bare in mind sparks memory got wiped from when he was chakas. So he dousnt know he was human, he even refers to humans as “our ancent enemy” its posible his logic got a bit scrambled and because he used to be human but thinks hes forerunner he has asumed that all humans are forerunner.