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Re: Why retcons don't bother me anymore
Posted By: Narcogen <narcogen@rampancy.net>	Date: 5/17/11 12:13 a.m.
[snip] : In a manner of speaking, the battle of Reach was the transition from one : major act of the Human-Covenant War to a final act in the same sense in : which Halo 1 transitions in the form of 343GS; the main war strategy the : UNSC had decided to ride on got torn down and crushed, brutally. : It needs to be something special; it needs to be a turning point. [snip] I'd say that, at least before the release of Reach, it's a footnote compared to the transition that does occur explicitly within Halo 1: the transition from a war between humanity and the Covenant to a multifaceted conflict where elements of the Covenant and humanity are trying to simultaneously prevent an Array firing that would destroy all life in the galaxy and stop the re-emergence of the Flood as a galaxy-wide threat. The tension between the two objectives is that, unbeknownst to the orthodox Covenant, the Array is not the start of a Great Journey but actually a weapon of last resort against the Flood itself. That's the real transition. I actually don't see Reach being a significant transition point at all, except in that it leads to the Pillar of Autumn arriving at Installation 04. Reach is the last extant colony world, if I recall. The war has spanned decades and contains few, if any, significant human victories. By the events of Halo 3, humanity is alone on Earth. Reach is not a point of transition, it's just a last step. It doesn't alter the UNSC strategy, and its fall doesn't validate or invalidate the previous strategy because frankly it's never been more successful than it was on Reach. Where the Covenant want to seek out and find Forerunner artifacts, there are temporary ground actions that allow humanity to hold their own for awhile, especially when teams of Spartans are available. When engagements happen in space, or on worlds without such artifacts of interest, it's no contest. That's always been my impression. Reach is the last brick, but it has no more significance than the first. It was put up in the same way, and taken down in the same way. : The way Halo: Reach presents it, it was just another battle at another : colony, albeit a big battle at a very large colony. The UNSC lost the : planet, but it seemingly holds itself together and continues to : demonstrate itself as a meaningful intersteller fighting force. Aside from : being larger than most of the battles, it's seemingly not a well-defined : particular turning point, just another, perhaps large, defeat in a long : string of them. Really? I never got that sense. Halo 3 really doesn't give me that sense. Hood's speech about defending Earth doesn't give me that sense at all. Sure, some survivors escaped, but now humanity is left back cowering on the same planet it emerged from, and the planet's military won't even commit all the resources it has to the desperate journey to the Ark because Hood isn't convinced it will help. Only the Dawn goes. : I'm not arguing that Halo 1 doesn't make sense without a particularly brutal : turning point right beforehand, but IMO it adds symbolic context, : importance, from a storytelling stance. I think the importance of that symbolism, which I admit I don't see at all, but if you see it there's something there for you-- can be accurately measured by the creative decision to relegate all this material to the manuals and novels without a single in-game mention during the first installment-- and then the decision to retcon huge swathes of it before making Reach. The game, Reach, is the definitive story of the Fall of Reach by the creators of the Halo story. The novel was something a contracted author wrote based on Bungie's notes, materials, and their level of involvement at the time in events prior to Halo 1. I think if they'd ever thought they'd do five Halo games, the last of which would be Reach, the novel would not have been published. [snip] 343 is, of course, the pivotal moment of Halo 1 and is handled marvelously. It needs to be, because the reveal of the Flood is the real story of Halo. : Though from your comments I gather you probably disagree with me as to : whether or not it is, in this case, an actual wrench in the flow. Your : post seems to imply that you never considered the events at Reach a : special turning point that gives symbolic context to Halo 1 in the first : place (a sense I always felt was very strongly intended from the manual), : and as a result I doubt that our approaches in this regard to the Halo : story are entirely reconcileable (I have also stuck entirely with the : games, which renders me rather different from most people here, period). : As such, I doubt either of us is going to fully convince the other of the : correctness of their opinion. : Perhaps we can agree to disagree. Probably. For me, what Bungie makes does, of course, carry more weight than authorized materials from third parties. But if we have to split hairs to make distinctions between Bungie's own materials, then I think I put the game content itself against everything else. So when Reach's game content comes up against Halo 1's manual content, the manual hits the dustbin. I probably read it, way back when, but at the time I did not pay particular attention to Reach except that, as you say, it was the latest and biggest battle in a long war that humanity was losing anyway, and it's the last such battle before Master Chief and Cortana discover Halo and the Flood, and before the Covenant discover Earth. Those, I think, are the points required to absorb to understand the Halo series, and they are completely intact after the publication of Reach. I'd actually argue that to assign special significance to the fall of Reach-- above and beyond it being the last in a long list of fallen colonies, and the one that comes right before Earth is discovered-- is to elevate the human-Covenant war above its station in the context of the Halo series. Halo is, generally speaking, not the story of that war or even the end of that war. It's about the Flood, and the things the Forerunners made to fight them. If the story of the war between the Covenant and humanity were what Bungie wanted to tell, they would have started not at Installation 04, or even at Reach, but at Harvest. If Halo were the story of that war, then the story of the Arbiter and the eventual human-Elite alliance would be about the two sides realizing that they shouldn't be at war, instead of realizing that there's a more powerful enemy that endangers them both.

Death by intelligence

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