Those of you who have read Primordium will know what I’m talking about. With all the information given in the end of Primordium it is obvious that the Precusors are coming back. It can be assumed that the Precusors are going to come back because humans are finaly mature enough now. Because the Precusors are coming that means so are the flood. It is not certain how we will encounter them in Halo 4 yet. It may be through fighting or terminal or some other form but they will be there. If it is the Infinity in the teaser means that WARNING! Primordium Spoiler! Guilty Spark has found the Librarian and possibly the Didact as well if he’s still alive. It would also mean that Master Chief would meet up with the Spartan IVs. It could also mean that the Librarian and/or the Didact or the new Guilty Spark would tell Master Chief all about where the flood comes from and about the Precusors and that the Timeless One wasn’t a real Precusor but a flood gravemind pretending to be a Precusor. Don’t open the spoilers if you don’t want some parts of the end of Primordium spoiled.
Humanity is no way in Hell ready to fight the Precursors and what I’ve dubbed the “True Flood”. A single Forerunner-ladden tech ship and at max a few hundred super-soliders are some of the UNSC’s best assets.
I haven’t read these new books, so I would be grateful if someone could answer the following question for me:
Why–in the name of Thor, WHY–would the Librarian still be alive in 2553? It totally, completely, and utterly undermines the single most poignant aspect of the Halo mythology so far: namely, the conversations she had with the Didact in the terminals in Halo 3. Those conversations were so heart-wrenching precisely because the Librarian was on the wrong side of the Maginot Line, she had destroyed her only chance to return home, and to top it all off, her lover was the one who had to pull the trigger that would obliterate her existence. That isn’t the kind of poetic narrative that you just go and wipe out in a single, poorly executed swipe. I will be very, very disappointed if the Librarian survived.
Additionally, if 343 Industries were to publicly announce that the Precursors were no longer part of the Halo canon, I would immediately send them a $10 donation–more, if I weren’t subsisting on a student’s budget.
> Additionally, if 343 Industries were to publicly announce that the Precursors were no longer part of the Halo canon, I would immediately send them a $10 donation–more, if I weren’t subsisting on a student’s budget.
They’ve been part of the franchise since First Strike when Halsey called the crystal under CASTLE Base, “precursor”. If not then, then with Halo 3.
> I haven’t read these new books, so I would be grateful if someone could answer the following question for me:
>
> Why–in the name of Thor, WHY–would the Librarian still be alive in 2553? It totally, completely, and utterly undermines the single most poignant aspect of the Halo mythology so far: namely, the conversations she had with the Didact in the terminals in Halo 3. Those conversations were so heart-wrenching precisely because the Librarian was on the wrong side of the Maginot Line, she had destroyed her only chance to return home, and to top it all off, her lover was the one who had to pull the trigger that would obliterate her existence. That isn’t the kind of poetic narrative that you just go and wipe out in a single, poorly executed swipe. I will be very, very disappointed if the Librarian survived.
>
> Additionally, if 343 Industries were to publicly announce that the Precursors were no longer part of the Halo canon, I would immediately send them a $10 donation–more, if I weren’t subsisting on a student’s budget.
I have to spoil censor it so that it isn’t edited by a moderator but the anwser to your question about the Librarian is in Primordium Chakas gives a code to the science team that is talking to him and they put it into thier ship which is guessed to be the Infinity and from that code a new updated Guilty Spark is produced. He takes control of the ship and goes through a speech and tells the crew that after over 100,000 years of searching he has finally found the Librarian. This is what is probably a hint toward with Halo 4 that they will all be in it.
> They’ve been part of the franchise since First Strike when Halsey called the crystal under CASTLE Base, “precursor”. If not then, then with Halo 3.
Precursor with a lowercase “p”, used as an adjective rather than a proper noun. I have a strong suspicion that she was simply describing the Forerunners. However, I don’t know the actual quote that you’re referring to, so if you’ll provide that, I can make a more accurate claim.
> > They’ve been part of the franchise since First Strike when Halsey called the crystal under CASTLE Base, “precursor”. If not then, then with Halo 3.
>
> Precursor with a lowercase “p”, used as an adjective rather than a proper noun. I have a strong suspicion that she was simply describing the Forerunners. However, I don’t know the actual quote that you’re referring to, so if you’ll provide that, I can make a more accurate claim.
Liek I said, at the latest in Halo 3. I don’t have FS on me at the moment. That said, you can’t just remove them from the canon.
> I have to spoil censor it so that it isn’t edited by a moderator but the anwser to your question about the Librarian is…etc
This may be 343 Industries’ sloppy justification for her survival, but it still doesn’t explain why any self-respecting writer would allow her character to survive.
And as for “copies” of certain characters being produced: cloning and time travel have always been two surefire ways for an intellectual property to “jump the shark”, and Halo has now experimented with both. No character should ever be “copied”, because it undermines the importance of death; when death no longer carries the price of non-existence, the stakes can never be as high and the fiction loses potency. (See Warcraft’s mythology for an example of this.)
> That said, you can’t just remove them from the canon.
Unfortunately, it seems as though you can just add them to the canon, despite them serving, at best, no purpose, and at worst, the purpose that was initially reserved for the Forerunners.
Additionally, I’m curious to know what references there were to the Precursors in Halo 3, since I don’t remember any. Can you refresh my memory?
> And as for “copies” of certain characters being produced: cloning and time travel have always been two surefire ways for an intellectual property to “jump the shark”, and Halo has now experimented with both. No character should ever be “copied”, because it undermines the importance of death; when death no longer carries the price of non-existence, the stakes can never be as high and the fiction loses potency. (See Warcraft’s mythology for an example of this.)
Cloning has been around since the beginning, SPartan-II flash clones and the general cloing of body parts for making AIs and medical purposes. And truthfully, no charcater has really been “copied”. The closest thing I can think of is what some of us speculate is the deal with Chakas.
Fragments of his personality were used to make the Monitors of the Halo Array.So don’t expect to see a Johnson clone or anything anytime soon. But as for time travel, yeah, Frankie said ilovebees is canon and that involved a time-travelling AI. That and the time anomoly in First Strike, it’s hard to explain.
> Fragments of his personality were used to make the Monitors of the Halo Array.
See, I don’t like this either (and, yes, I realise I’m being consistently negative in this thread). The monitors were far more compelling when they were little more than Forerunner AIs built simply to govern the Halo array in the absence of their creators. Am I now to understand that they are all just slightly different copies of one another?Oh, and I wasn’t referring to the sort of cloning that has previously been referenced in the Halo universe; that never altered the narrative, and it came with consequences (e.g. the child clones that acted as stand-ins for the abducted Spartan II candidates died shortly after they were created, which implies scientific limitations, and limitations are always important in any narrative).
the auther runs everything by 343…
> > That said, you can’t just remove them from the canon.
>
> Unfortunately, it seems as though you can just add them to the canon, despite them serving, at best, no purpose, and at worst, the purpose that was initially reserved for the Forerunners.
>
> Additionally, I’m curious to know what references there were to the Precursors in Halo 3, since I don’t remember any. Can you refresh my memory?
The Besterium said they were a race that preceded the Forerunners and was Tier 0 on the technological advancement scale, is the best. The Forerunners had to come from somewhere and the concept of the Mantle had to come from somewhere as well. As far as this concept goes, it isn’t as bad as you make it claim.
> See, I don’t like this either (and, yes, I realise I’m being consistently negative in this thread). The monitors were far more compelling when they were little more than Forerunner AIs built simply to govern the Halo array in the absence of their creators. Am I now to understand that they are all just slightly different copies of one another?
We didn’t really know WHERE the Monitors even came from. As for what you put in the spoiler tag, that is the speculation. Doesn’t make someone like Spark any less special, he is still vastly different than Chakas ever was.
> The Forerunners had to come from somewhere and the concept of the Mantle had to come from somewhere as well.
This stance is little more than a reductio ad infinitum; there has to be a beginning, but since nothing Bungie could have conceived would have been sufficiently compelling, they (wisely) chose to shroud that beginning (the Forerunners) in mystery. What 343 Industries has done is turn the Forerunners into the humans and the Precursors into the Forerunners; it hasn’t added anything, merely shifted everything sideways.
One of the Cryptum reviewers on Amazon sums this point up quite nicely:
"It is very common in Sifi to say someone discovered ancient alien tech and that propelled a civilization into space travel. In the Halo universe that ancient group was the ‘forerunners’. But when they start talking about the forerunners getting technology from the precursors I just wanted to throw up. What a copout. I felt so ripped off. […] So how many times is it acceptable to say this culture got its technology from a previous one? Are you okay with the next book saying the Precursors getting their start from the Predecesors, and the Predecesors from the Pioneers, and the Pioneers from the Groundworkes? At some point there has to be a story that maintains itself and doesn’t always play the chicken and the egg game."
One of the comments made in response to this review is also right on the mark:
“J. Farrey is right to criticise the inclusion of the Precursors; they are an atrocious plot device. Their existence is Bear’s/Bungie’s/343 Industries’ attempt to preserve the mystery surrounding them whilst also permitting them to be scrutinised in detail. As the Forerunners moved into the spotlight of the Halo mythology, their enigmatic appeal was inevitably beginning to wane, and so the Precursors were hastily invented to make up for this.”
> > The Forerunners had to come from somewhere and the concept of the Mantle had to come from somewhere as well.
>
> This stance is little more than a reductio ad infinitum; there has to be a beginning, but since nothing Bungie could have conceived would have been sufficiently compelling, they (wisely) chose to shroud that beginning (the Forerunners) in mystery. What 343 Industries has done is turn the Forerunners into the humans and the Precursors into the Forerunners; it hasn’t added anything, merely shifted everything sideways.
That implies that the humans are like the Forerunners, and the Precursors are like the Forerunners. Has it happens, they are not.
Furthermore, the Precursors background is being unveiled much quicker than the Forerunners background. It’s taken two novels in the space of two years to learn a bit about them, compared with the Forerunners, with whom it took about six.
> That implies that the humans are like the Forerunners, and the Precursors are like the Forerunners. Has it happens, they are not.
My remark in no way implies that humans are like the Forerunners, and Precursors like the Forerunners. It wasn’t their technology or their weapons or their intentions that I was referring to; it was the purposes that each species served in the Halo fiction. Humans served as the relatable protagonists: known, sympathetic underdogs. Meanwhile, the Forerunners acted as a plot device that allowed certain things to exist without a strict origin story (e.g. the Halo array); they were enigmatic absentees whose immense legacy was continuing to shape the galaxy. Bungie used them in the same way that myriad science-fiction properties have used mysterious alien races in the past: to negate the need for a long and ponderous technological revolution on the part of humanity, and to propel the story towards a far more interesting point.
What I’m implying is that the Forerunners now serve the same narrative purpose that humanity once did, and the place of the Forerunners has now been taken by the Precursors–a wholly pointless alteration.
I like finding out about the forerunners, while the review says their enigmatic sense was inevitably waning, it is also inevitable that people want to find out about them, and the precursor still keeping some sense of enigma was probably the best way to keep an astute sense of mystery
I wouldn’t have minded finding out more about them, but this full reveal is not something I can stomach. And I know of other people who think that the new books have destroyed the Forerunners’ mystique, so I know I’m not alone.
That said I think that people would find it annoying that the forerunners would remain a mystery forever in the game, and they still have quite a bit of mystique in terms of weaponry and their own ascendance that far up in technology.
I will be in halo four. Thanks for noticing 