Why all the hate for the TV series when no ones watched it?

Community Halo Universe
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All of reality fits onto one coherent continuity, and it has countless compelling, true stories in that coherent continuity.

The Halo universe is mostly wide open for stories to be told, spanning hundreds of worlds and hundreds of thousands of years.

In my opinion, if a writer isn’t able to write a compelling story that fits into the established continuity, then that’s not a very good writer. And if a writer could write stories that fit the established continuity, but chooses not to, then my opinion on the writer is even lower.

The Covenant established a “kill all humans” rule as soon as the Hierarchs learned of their existence, so it makes absolutely no sense to have a human character raised in the Covenant.

There’s also nothing wrong with Commander Keyes being a military commander of her own ship. The decision to change her entire backstory to make her a scientist is change for the sake of change. And in my opinion, that’s not acceptable when you’re building off of someone else’s work.

And for full transparency, I didn’t like when 343 changed the looks of the aliens (particularly the Elites) to make them their own… but fortunately, Halo Infinite was a return to form, and the Elites actually look elite (particularly Chak 'Lok’s entrance).

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Sure but to write it off and the amount of negativity on this forum is way over the top. Also, a lot of canon doesnt work in live action.

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You’re not going to convince me to not write it off - it’s been written off in my eyes, and I have zero interest in it due to the decisions they’ve made not aligning with my wants. As for the reactions of others, is it not their prerogative to like or not like things as they see fit, even if you disagree with their assessment?

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How is it not peoples perogitive to see things as they see fit? Right, so its about you not be able to stomp on people?

PC players QQing is so funny in the scheme of crossplay. First for everything I guess.

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Pretty sure you meant to reply to another thread, this is about the TV show :wink:

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They had the whole of Halo lore to pick from, so if something didn’t translate to TV well, they should pick something else. They could have done almost anything they wanted if they focused on the spartan 3s or 4s, and set the story between Halo 3 & 4. But they didn’t, they decided to change timelines and significantly re-write long-established characters.

I’d say the amount of negative response is appropriate for what’s been revealed so far.

The aliens look better than they did in Nightfall, but CG can’t fix the writing.

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You havent seen the show yet. Its a trailer. The negative responses is WAY over the top. Im a Halo fan since day 1 BTW, read the books, and can still get excited for the show regardless of changes.

People are just being way to negative.

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There has already been a lot of information about the show revealed outside of the trailer. Casting, character descriptions, etc. The fact that it deviates from established lore so heavily that they had to declare it non-canon (which is what “silver timeline” ultimately means), says a lot.

I’ve too have been a Halo fan for ages, particularly of the coherent narrative that all fits more tightly into a single continuity than the lore of many other franchises. The writing of stories that aren’t compatible with the canonical timeline undermines that cohesion.

It’s part of the reason I’ve never really been interested in super-hero comics. They’re rebooted so frequently, and even within runs the characters power levels fluctuate so extensively that there’s no continuity. It got so bad that the only way they could try to fix it was to re-brand it as a multiverse. I don’t want that for Halo.

You can like the show if you want, but the nature of its existence is contrary to what I personally love about the franchise.

I don’t hold anything against the actors, or the special effects people. I’m sure they’ll all do their jobs admirably. The available evidence suggests that the writers of the show do not respect the established canon, and are changing things for the sake of change, or worse, to push socio-political agendas that I don’t want infesting this franchise (entertainment should bring people together, not push agendas on them) That is preventing me from having any level of expectations for this show.

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I know it goes against all established lore but I’m gonna try to make sense of it… what if the woman in the Covenant is just a pawn. And the Prophets raised an infant they had abducted to use her to activate Forerunner objects, then dispose of her once they were done. Maybe in the Silver Timeline the Covenant figures out they need them to activate the sacred artifacts. Or maybe, a human similar to Atriox, got sick and tired of watching her friends and family die around her, so she betrayed the UNSC. Maybe she was mind wiped or experimented on? Who knows what they are going to do.

I don’t have much faith in the TV show being a success, but I’m still gonna check it out and see how the writing, acting and direction is. There have been decent adaptations coming out here lately, some are still going strong with their own spin-offs that have nothing to do with the original source.

In the end, it’s all about the love of what the art is representing, Halo in general, and I think people are forgetting this. This show will be good publicity for Halo as a franchise, and people are shooting it down without even giving it a proper watch. This happened to Cowboy Bebop and I actually enjoyed that Netflix adaptation, but because it wasn’t directly copied from the anime-scene by scene the public cried and now it’s canceled.

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Arguments that Support Ben’s comments…
1 → Not Part of the Game, Books, or previous Media… no different levels of expectation.
2 → Lumu or Fret is not Blue in your Halo Infinite multiplayer experience are they? I made mine Orange.
Just cause it’s not regular, does not mean it’s wrong.
3 → Master Chief has been around for 20+ years, let the poor man rest his voice, Chief barley says anything anyways.

I too am excited to watch the Series, anything more Halo is a +1 in my book.

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I agree with you about most of what you have to say, except this thing about “socio-political agendas.”

Representation is important, so personally I don’t mind things like the casting of Captain Keyes, and frankly it seems to me like a bunch of dudes are complaining about things like the leaked script idea that a female Spartan beats up chief. That totally matches canon, Chief has never been the strongest or fastest Spartan, the idea that another spartan could beat him is totally within reason.

Huge agree about super hero comics… I feel like a lot of 343s stuff and now this show are just way too much hero obsession

That said, it seems super performative to me, like those values aren’t necessarily important to the people making the show, they’re just doing certain things to be popular… the one thing I’m actually annoyed about is Spartans having long, dyed hair… that just isn’t with the military science fiction of the world.

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Captain Keyes is a devoted, dutiful, likable, and competent leader… who happens to be a straight white man. Do you honestly think that if Captain Del Rio (an antagonist, who’s openly hostile to Master Chief and Cortana, and isn’t willing to take the action needed to save humanity, and who hapens to be a straight white man) appeared in this show that they’d swap his race the way they did Captain Keyes?

My point is that a positive representation of a white, male, authority figure is being removed by changing the character’s race, but they wouldn’t change the race of a white character who’s portrayed in a negative light. To use the language of the demographic that typically likes race-swapping white characters… this is “problematic”. It perpetuates a false narrative about white, male leaders being predominantly bad, and it expects minorities to be grateful for being pandered to with hand-me-down characters. Minorities deserve their own heroes, written from scratch, standing on their own, and not resting on the legacy of heroes that have always been another race.

Master Chief is canonically the best spartan. He’s not the #1 fastest or strongest, but he’s the best balance of all of the valued traits. If the leak is accurate that they want a Mary Sue character to beat him as a “female empowerment” moment, that’s still bad writing, because it’s showing that they can’t build up a new character without tearing down an established character. It’s a toxic shortcut used by hack writers (not just in this franchise… there’s plenty of examples of this in other franchises such as Doctor Who and Star Wars).

My point about Marvel and DC comics was that the unending stream of reboots and countless continuities are too convoluted for me personally care. Having a well written heroic character in the lead isn’t a problem. I don’t know what you mean by “too much hero obsession”.

It doesn’t really matter if the people making the show believe in what they’re doing… what matters is what they’re doing. If they’re doing it to appease a particular demographic for beliefs they don’t have, that’s no better than sharing the beliefs of the demographic they’re catering to.

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I agree with this sentence: “Minorities deserve their own heroes, written from scratch, standing on their own, and not resting on the legacy of heroes that have always been another race.”

As for the idea that the removal of a positive representation of a white male is problematic, I’d just ask if you feel that there aren’t enough examples of that representation in media? When there’s a case like this, I don’t really worry about it all that much because I don’t feel that straight white men (like myself) are lacking in representation. I would certainly agree though, that in a better version of writing this TV show, they would simply add another interesting and unique character who is a badass Captain of a destroyer or cruiser, and is meant to be a black character from the beginning, I agree with you there. I’m really not a fan of the whole silver timeline in general.

Also big agree about “It doesn’t really matter if the people making the show believe in what they’re doing… what matters is what they’re doing. If they’re doing it to appease a particular demographic for beliefs they don’t have, that’s no better than sharing the beliefs of the demographic they’re catering to.”

What I meant about hero obsession was that I find the obsession with Chief as this monolithic hero to be a bit shallow and boring, it’s the same reason that I’ve never liked Captain America, and most of the MCU. That is, of course, just my opinion.

Lastly, as to the leaks about the script, they are of course unsubstantiated rumors from click-bait articles. To address the idea that Master Chief is canonically the “best spartan,” where are you drawing that from? They have always said that he was the best leader, and lucky, and unique, but never that he was the best. There are certainly other Spartan-IIs in the lore who we think could beat him in hand to hand combat (I think Sam, maybe Fred, maybe Jorge) … obviously at a range with Snipers, Linda would totally demolish him. The idea that someone “beats” master chief isn’t crazy at all, and I’ll reiterate that from my perspective, the pushback against that idea is based almost entirely on the fact that the person (allegedly) defeating him is a woman. I’m seeing now that it is allegedly “Makee” who beats him, not another Spartan (is that what you read as well?)

Personally I have issues with Makee’s character just because she doesn’t make sense within the canon as it is, but the idea that a foe could defeat Chief in battle is entirely reasonable IMO.

Thanks for being civil in our discussion of this!

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It’s not just positive representation of admirable white, male leaders being removed, it’s that it’s systematic, and that negative representations of white male leaders are explicitly not being race-swapped. And really take a moment to think about what you said… that because someone has a lot, that someone else has the right to take it… Applying discrimination to something in the present isn’t a solution to perceived discrimination elsewhere.

The characters need to be looked at as individuals, and not only as representatives of their race. The focus on race, and using that as the measure of which characters to race-swap is a problem.

In a novel, right where it says he’s not the strongest or the fastest, it says that he has the best balance of the traits. And it’s also mentioned that his tangible “luck” may actually be his ability to instinctual perceive and react in ways that others can’t understand. He is the best all-around Spartan. Keep in mind, the only melee fight he’s lost so far was against the legendary founder of the Banished, Atriox, a hulking monster whose weapon is as big as Chief is.

Everything I’ve seen about the character is exceedingly poorly written, a self-insert power-fantasy/Mary Sue. The idea of a non-augmented human female besting a super-soldier with decades more combat experience than she has is patently absurd.

For the consistency of the story, for Chief to be defeated in combat, the one that beats him has to have equally legendary combat abilities, which is what Atriox was, and what Makee is not.

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I think the biggest thing that bugs me regarding the points y’all are discussing, is the fact that Johnson got skipped over. If they had bothered to take a modicum of detail from the EU, they would see that Johnson is Chief’s mentor in how to exist in the military, especially since he’s a 7 ft tall teenager when they meet, which is something that would translate wonderfully to TV. The mentor/mentee relationship, and subsequent mentee surpassing of the mentor, and eventually mourning the mentor, is a classic story that is a classic because it works well. But, unfortunately, that whole arc was skipped over. It would have satisfied both the desire to have better representation, and the desire to explore underutilized bits of the universe, even in the non-canon Silver Timeline.

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There is only two spartans labeled as hyper lethal by doctor Halsey and the UNSC/ONI and thats Master Chief and Noble 6 from reach adding someone random female spartan that can beat chief would make no sense and as a girl i find that to be a disgusting amount of pandering to mess with a franchise i love just so others feel empowered from a series they have never played or read but just to watch a show like i hate the cringy lines to like omg halo like they bloody discovered it way earlier and find the halo stop the war so bad im sorta ok with keyes being a different race just make him look similiar at least but i totally get the point if your going to race swap the good white character it better be about their acting abilities not their race like i wouldnt dream of race swapping sgt major johnson just imagine the outrage and they better get someone good for that role to my sgt johnson deserves mad respect hes one of my favorite characters

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I have to point out that when they say defeat Chief in a battle, it doesn’t mean they were arm wrestling.

As to your first point, we’ll just have to agree to disagree, I personally believe in affirmative action, and I don’t imagine that debate belongs on the forums here.

I certainly can’t disagree with you about the character being poorly written, the whole show is pretty atrociously written it seems… I don’t have particularly high hopes.

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The ability of a non-augmented human female to best the best of humanity’s super-soldiers in battle is about comparable to a 10-year old child’s ability to best a professional soldier in battle. The difference in ability is astounding.

Keep in mind that every person is an individual, and it is a great disservice to make judgements about an individual based on their demographic, especially if they’re negative assumptions based on actions that individual played no part in. Injustice in the present doesn’t correct injustices of the past.

On this point we are in full agreement, even if we have to agree to disagree on others.

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Alien characters require a lot of money, which I think is the decisive factor in adopting parallel timelines.
Perhaps the lack of funds can also explain why TV dramas choose actors like this.
Is Sergeant Johnson not good enough?He is very popular and stands out in the Halo story.
They can hire one less actor by changing the race of Keys.
I’m not an American, and I don’t understand the needs of Americans in this regard.
From the perspective of fans, it’s strange that real actors don’t look like game characters at all.

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I think the first season will end with a battle at the Halo or them crashing on the Halo like in CE