: Forrest himself told me in an older post that Eternal was based on Halo's
: Alpha and for a while, featured actual things from Halo, namely
: Installation 04 before the Jjaro Dyson sphere and 343 Guilty Spark was
: originally the Sphere monitor.
Eternal's take on the Jjaro was based on a second-hand recounting (to me by a Bungie employee who heard it in a presentation by Jason Jones) of an unreleased development version of Halo (and ch5 was to take place on Halo itself, yeah) and then significantly modified both when it became clear that that was no longer canon in the Halo story (which was no longer related to Marathon), and just to patch up some holes that were unclear to me (I was told the Jjaro had been human at once point, but not how an ancient space empire could predate the evolution of humans on Earth, so I wrote time travel as the answer to that).
None of that should be used as a premise for arguments about the canon Marathon story, though.
But it't worth noting that in my take on the Jjaro, Yrro and Pthia weren't human. There are several stages of Jjaro civilization in the Eternal timeline. One is an ancient human spacefaring civilization employing technology based on future UESC and S'pht'Kr/Jjaro-stage-2 technology, eventually incorporating transhuman and wholly artificial intelligences by its end.
The second stage is the civilization of those disembodied transhhuman/artificial minds in machines left behind after the biological human Jjaro died off, and those are the kinds of entities Yrro and Pthia were; this civilization of AIs migtht well have included AIs of nonhuman origin as co-equals with the human-based ones, and Pthia may have been one of those.
The third stage is the godlike trans-physical, trans-temporal beings of pure mind and information with no need for a physical presence, which those stage-2 Jjaro became after inventing the Cybernetic Junction and fully realizing its potential. The W'rkncacnter are the same kind of being, just ideologically opposed, and there are many such beings of non-stage-2-Jjaro origins from all across space and time and alternate timelines, who are all now free to move effortlessly through the multiverse and have no physical identifiers, so ideology is really the only groupig factory, and any such beings on the same side as our Jjaro are 'Jjaro' too, inasmuch as that is the same we give to that group that's interested in preserving this timeline as it went in their history and fighting anyone else (who they call W'rkncacnter) who would try to use their godlike powers to meddle for personal benefit.
