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| Re: My Comprehensive-ish Argument With Narcogen | |
| Posted By: Narcogen <narcogen@rampancy.net> | Date: 5/30/11 12:23 a.m. |
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: Mind if I go off on a tangent? : I'm from the Halo Wars Forums. Spent two or three years there, had fun. And : towards the end, when it became clear that ES had lied about working with : Bungie, there were all sorts of threads asking why the Cyclops, the Flood, : Brutes, whatever, had to make it in. : And inevitably, there was going to be someone who would reply with "Who
I don't agree with that at all. : And that's how I see you. You're an exclusionist. You're someone who doesn't
I'll partially agree with that. I have not only played the games. I don't have every piece of additional material, but I have all the novels and have read them all at least once, the older ones more than that. I don't have the short story collection but I'll be getting it. I have the anime. No interest in the graphic novel. A few figurines. Do those count? What I have reverence for is a primary work. Something that an individual or group of individuals put out. That's Halo, the game, made by Bungie. Everything else is derivative; even Bungie's own sequels. But the further you diverge, the less relation there is between the original work and the new ones and that, to me, makes them less interesting. I am an exclusionist not because I think maintaining continuity is unimportant but rather because I do think it is important. If additional material does not illuminate the original work, and is not executed at the same level of quality than the original work, then it represents more of a risk of damage to continuity than it provides benefit, and deserves to be treated with some healthy skepticism. The further removed it is from Bungie's own influence and supervision, and the further afield it is from Halo's major settings, characters, and themes, the greater the skepticism. : But you're smart. I know that. You offer thoughtful arguments. You
Thanks, I guess? : You're a smart person, yet you hold an opinion that is not only the polar
I think original works deserve respect. I think that while an author's intent is not the only way to interpret a work, nor always the best, there is something to be said for placing the progenitors of a franchise in a special position. I am not against continuity; far from it. My objections are based only on the idea that Bungie should not retcon continuity added to the Haloverse by third parties-- that Microsoft's need to expand Halo into other markets and media should handcuff them to continuity they did not originate, and despite all the friendly language about cooperation and approval, probably had not nearly as much say in as the fans would have liked them to, simply because there aren't enough hours in a day. Fictional universes benefit greatly from a sense of mystery that is evoked by feeling that the world has history beyond that which is visible. This effect is ruined by revealing that history completely, unless one then goes on to create further mystery (as Bear's novel has done). : Not a good metric, I'd say.
: Star Wars? Lucas. That's the beginning and end of the argument.
: Not to say that multiple creators is foolproof. I mean, look at the Ewoks. : The EU is... well, a mess. The best items come from the authors who actually
I think you've proven my point. On what basis does one allege that Bungie's retconning of third-party contributions to Halo canon are particularly egregious in a market where two older, more popular, and more successful science fiction franchises have arguably done a much, much worse job of maintaining continuity? What examples would be better? What absolute standard, rather than a relative one, would one apply, and who would be its arbiter? : Fairly low, I'd say.
I think you misapprehend a lot. I think you overestimate Bungie's "clout" prior to Halo's release. I think you misapprehend the release of a tie-in novel (which took a lot less time to create than the game) as an intent by Bungie (rather than MS) to make a "multi-media franchise" instead of a "video game with a tie-in novel" because tie-ins make extra revenue and promote your primary products-- in this case, the Xbox and Halo. I'm honestly not sure I see the value in such a thing, to be brutally honest. Perhaps this is a nascent form I'm simply not giving enough credit to, but it's been my experience that many works that are good in their original form are rarely as good when adapted to another, and very few, if any at all, actually survive the process of being adapted to many different formats-- to say nothing of having many parallel "creators" of different contributions working quasi-independently. Merely adapting from book to film or the reverse is often a minefield. They got some of the best
My opinion was that the Dietz novel was not only awful, but completely unnecessary. A naked cash grab, nothing more, and I own it only for purposes of completeness. : For your reading pleasure,
: As per a Bungie employee, one of the original writers , Bungie participated
I'm intimately familiar with the content of that thread. None of those posts are by a Bungie employee current or former. When Staten writes that "for better or worse, the novels are canon" that tells me that the descriptions of the interactions between Bungie-- then wholly owned by Microsoft-- and Microsoft and subcontractors were not entirely voluntary, nor entirely to Bungie's satisfaction. That nothing substantive was said of this (which would be commercially harmful to the franchise) is not particularly surprising. I do not call the novels fanfic, and never have. They are, however, of lesser canonical value, as well, generally speaking, of lesser aesthetic values when compared to examples of the form. To suggest otherwise is to suggest that "participation in brainstorming sessions, and approving outlines and drafts" is commensurate with authorship, which I don't accept. There is stuff made by Bungie, and there is everything else, and the chasm that stands between them yawns wide. Not all the extra stuff is bad, by any means, but it is simply that: extra. : -"Please direct all questions about time-traveling Forerunner crystals
Wow. No, I don't admit that. That entire novel was a train wreck, and the time crystal nonsense was there to deliberately try to create enough time between the end of Halo 1 and the start of Halo 2 to have a significant encounter that turns out to be of no significance. [snip] : -"Boren's Syndrome vs Spartan I"
No, they didn't, at least not when they made Halo 1, in which "sniper sergeant" did not even have a name. : Nylund had one idea for why he avoided infection, Bungie had another,
Not having assigned any particular significance to a footnote in a novel that Bungie didn't deem worthy of inclusion in the game-- Johnson specifically refuses to explain his own survival in Halo 2-- the existence of this retcon or its artfulness was of no particular signficance to me. If anything, this just makes the continuity messier-- better not to have addressed the question at all. : -"Halo Wars"
I'm sorry-- but that's nonsense. There was never any legal question regarding ES access to the Halo Bible, nor could there have been. Bungie Studios was not a separate legal entity-- it was a department within Microsoft. Microsoft could hardly have assigned the development of a Halo RTS to another internal studio, Ensemble Studios, and had any questions at all about access to the Halo Bible. If Bungie had no involvement it was likely because one or more of the following things were true: 1) Bungie had no interest in being involved
1) and 2) are largely self-explanatory, while 3) and 4) might be directly tied to the idea that you brought up-- that maintaining continuity might actually hurt the product as an independent work. It is difficult to assign significance to events that cannot touch your main plotline at any point; we've seen this as a difficulty in ODST, in Reach, and in Halo Wars. [snip] : Your entire view of fiction, unfortunately, is alien to me. Not just alien.
: From what I can understand of your approach to dates, appearances, and such,
: "John 117 fighting Covenant on a giant ringworld made by Forerunner. In
: And so on. You reduce the story down to the bare details, when those details
Please allow me to clarify. The details and their execution are indeed what raise Halo above the level of an elevator pitch, which is essentially what the summary above is. However, what is significant is that the details exist-- not the details themselves! What I mean is this. Look at some of the Halo manuals. They all have a lot of what would seem like extraneous details about the weapons, their history, and how they work, including specifications for ammunition. These are of no signficance. By that, what I mean is that if the rounds for a particular gun were 7.64mm instead of 7.62mm, this does not change the outcome of the war. The existence of the detail is to build verisimilitude. The enemy of verisimilitude is discontinuity, and the proliferation of additional details in spinoff materials is what leads, inevitably, to an increase in discontinuity. What the specs show me is that the world has been thought-out; by their very existence. A conflict between two sources on those values-- or calendar dates, or timestamps, or any other detail-- is, to me, an error in transcription and nothing more, not an error in the work itself, which is separate from its implementation in any particular form. : What makes this patently absurd is your insistence that a model of the PoA is
Until you can step inside that "representation" and travel faster than the speed of light, there is an important distinction to be made between representations and the things they represent-- even within the context of a fiction. The PoA exists to fulfill its function. It is not a real object. It is a symbolic object. As such, very few of the attributes it has are of significance to the story if they do not contribute directly to that function. As long as it is recognizable-- which it is in Reach-- and the changed details do not prevent it from being recognized, or prevent it from fulfilling its function, then it is still the PoA. Staten wrote that new takes precedence over old, and Bungie takes precedence over non-Bungie. I accept this, as I accept Bungie's general authority over their creation, and the events of Halo: Reach to be-- for better or worse-- the definitive version, overriding other versions where necessary. You know a fictional universe has gone wrong when its fanbase diverges from its creator, as it has done, to some extent, with Lucas. I see nothing that justifies that here, in Reach or anywhere.
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