Every story has ret-cons that occur on occasion. Some are minor and meant to solve a small contradiction of lore whereas others entirely reshape the reality of a series. Which one is the one you dislike in Halo? There are quite a few to choose from.
Mine is the ret-con of the fact that Humanity ARE the Forerunners.
Bungie’s story of Halo had been established that Humans were the Forerunners and they just didn’t know it at the time.
The term “Reclaimer” is used because Humanity is slowly reclaiming the legacy that they had lost when the Flood had ravaged the galaxy ~100,000+ years ago. The Forerunners is a term that the Covenant uses to describe those who made the ancient technology and “ascended to the Divine Beyond”. The whole reason for the Human-Covenant war was the fact that the Prophets learned that their ancient texts were a mistranslation and that their religion was a lie. Their gods weren’t divine, they were the newest mortal species that they had come across in space. And rather than have Humanity join the Covenant and unseat them from their throne eventually, the Hierarchs condemned mankind to death and began the genocide.
The story of Halo was one that was a tragedy, where a hyper-advanced Humanity had faced against a cosmic-horror entity that came from the unknown and brought us to the brink of destruction. After exhausting all options, our ancient ancestors deployed and fired the rings then sent out ships to reseed the galaxy with life. Humanity and all other races were knocked back to the stone age. For some reason or another, the San’Shyuum Keyship hadn’t left their homeworld which lead to the butterfly effect of the creation of the Covenant Religion and allowed the species to become space-faring after reverse engineering parts of the vessel to create other spacecraft.
What made Humanity special in regards to the other races was the fact that we had discovered space travel of our own will and had created everything from the ground up. Shaw and Fujikawa unraveled the secrets of Slip-Space WITHOUT having to reverse engineer something that was already capable of doing so. Sure they were capable of inventing, but it was either hindered by their minds or their culture. Brutes for example had been space faring before the Covenant found them, but they nuked themselves back to the stone age. By the time they were inducted into the Covenant, they were going through another Industrial Age of sorts.
And then the Halos were discovered. Unlike the Covenant, Humanity had no problem interacting with the tech that surrounded them while the Covenant had to either hotwire everything or send in the Huragok to try to do what they were built for. We see John have no problem activating the Light Bridge, interacting with the Silent Cartographer in an instant while the Covies had to occupy the area for a while before being able to even access the door controls. John is able to put Cortana directly into the Core of the Control Room because of the fact that Human Tech is recognized by Forerunner tech solely because it is designed by the same mentality… the same species mindset parameters.
And need we forget 343 Guilty Spark’s iconic lines of dialogue?
“You are the child of my makers, inheritor of all they left behind. You ARE Forerunner… but this ring is mine!”
The original story of Halo was one of a tragedy where Humanity was slowly but surely climbing back up to the point that they had been at from before the firing of the Halo installations. But they were denied by the Covenant, and nearly brought to extinction despite being their “gods”. And to make matters worse, the firing of the installations was almost in vain because the very threat that you had hoped to smother was back. The Flood never fully died and now a ghost from your past was haunting you. Cosmic Horrors prove very difficult to defeat, even with a MacGuffin tool.
But then came Halo 4 and the start of 343 Industries’ narrative ret-con that I kinda hate. Sure, what they did with it initially was craft a compelling narrative out of the main campaign of Halo 4… but it does seem to sully the entire series as a whole.
Now the Humans and Forerunners were two separate species, the Cosmic Horror elements of The Flood were gone as they decided to explain away the origins of the intergalactic parasite by creating the race of Precursors. Humans were made to originally inherit The Mantle of Responsibility, a new concept added to the series; but that title was taken from them by the Forerunners with their hubris and pride. The Librarian regretted such a decision made eons ago and recognized Humanity as being much more worthy than them, and thus made them the Inheritors of the Forerunner’s Legacy.
So no longer were Humans the Forerunners… we were just the ones made to inherit their tools after the rings fired. Instead of Forerunner tech recognizing Human DNA and going “ah our masters are trying to gain access after so long! access granted!” they now are meant to go “Your Genesong/Gaeii is developed enough for you to access this technology.” It has entirely changed the narrative of the Halo story in the background and has created the problem we now face for Halo 5 Guardians and potentially Halo Infinite.
“Who is worthy of this ‘Mantle of Responsibility’? The Humans? The Created? Anyone else?”
This ret-con was basically done to reinvent the Forerunners so that the enemy you faced in Halo 4 was not anything close to Human… even though The Ur-Didact had mutated himself to be barely recognizable as Forerunner in the first place. Had they kept with that idea of his mutations, 343 could’ve had him still remain an antagonist by making it so The Didact disagreed with his wife, The Librarian, as to how Humanity was supposed to develop after the Halo rings fired. His forced mutation experiments on himself would’ve likely shifted his mental physiology and made him unable to comprehend certain notions outside of his war-like tendencies. Humanity could’ve remained to be the remains of the Forerunners and have to deal with an ancient Human that went into the mad-science department INSTEAD of ret-conning much of the lore and then having to explain it away in three books as to how and why it happened.
TL;DR - Bungie had it so that the Humans were the Forerunners and Halo was a story of reclaiming a legacy that was lost due to the Flood. 343 Industries’ writers decided to make it so Humanity were simply inheriting something from another alien race that was once their rivals.
