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> > The Forerunners are supposed to be gone, extinct.
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> No they aren’t. The original Halo games, and some novels, had attempted to establish that humans were the Forerunner. Since humans and Forerunner were one and the same, they were never extinct. The terminals in Halo 3 would end up changing this narrative and establish that humans and Forerunner were a separate species, but it would also acknowledge that Forerunner on the Ark survived because it was out of the Halo’s range. Those Forerunner would leave, carrying a record of what had happened to the galaxy.
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> Where the Forerunner have gone has been left open for nearly a decade and I don’t understand why some people would complain when we’re finally going somewhere with them.
Yeah, I considered addressing the humans-being-Forerunner point in my post, but it was already getting a bit lengthy. I see that as different because in that relationship the humans of the present are still different from the Forerunners of the past, although they are physically descended. The new humans, born anew after the end of the pre-Flood galaxy, is its own new civilization. It’s not simply Forerunners picking up where they left off, it’s a new people coming who would have eventually inherited the old power the Forerunner left for them to reclaim in their stead. Present humanity was more a child of the Forerunners than they were Forerunner themselves. They were outside the legacy of guilt and failure which the Forerunners had left behind when they fired the Halos. Forerunners returning from outside the galaxy would simply be Forerunners picking up where they left off, and I feel that would detract in a serious way the role the Forerunners have played in the story up to this point, like a character whose story arc revolved around a dead parent suddenly finding out in the end the parent was alive all this time and had returned to them. Personally, I find that cheap.
As far as the Halo 3 Terminals news that Forerunners could still be out there goes, I do think was it not good for the story even back then. The dead parent of the previous example hasn’t come back… but we learn they’re not dead. That’s just a kind of an odd narrative (thankfully the separation of Forerunners and humans alleviates this somewhat) given the circumstances of Halo 3.
In regard to the topic of this thread, I just think that them returning would make this problem (which is simply how I view things personally) worse. Learning about the Forerunners has been fun. Reading the books and seeing the Didact and the Librarian has been interesting. I think it’s been worth it in the long run for us to “go somewhere” with the Forerunners, for sure. But I do think those outside the galaxy should stay there. As Filial Devotion said, in even those same Terminals:
I do not look to trade my life in order to preserve our past, but to secure the future—and if not ours, then the future of some [culture] yet to come.
*Isn’t sacrifice in the interest of others what you spoke of as being so noble? Should I have allowed another to bloody his hands while I remained safe behind a [shield of privilege]?*Isn’t this sentiment made much less poignant when it turns out the past of the Forerunners is in fact preserved (albeit outside the galaxy), and their people are in fact now allowing the current galaxy to bloody their hands, and against the very same threat, while these other Forerunners to this day remain safe? Not behind a shield of privilege, perhaps, but a shield of apathy as they skulk outside the galaxy? I’m not saying this damage is new or recent to the Halo universe, I just think it’s unfortunate and wouldn’t like to see it cascade even further with a true Forerunner resurgence.