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| Re: Back with a touch more, but not much. | |
| Posted By: Narcogen <narcogen@rampancy.net> | Date: 3/7/06 10:46 a.m. |
In Response To: Re: Back with a touch more, but not much. (Anton P. Nym (aka Steve)) : I agree that the well-nigh-invulnerable force shield is primarily a game
That's pretty much all I'm saying. : Heck, if Mr. T had just been really tough as a Brute, immune to headshots
Yes, but that's a result of how Bungie constructed the environment; nobody put a gun to their head and made them integrate a jumping puzzle into the final boss battle-- which they essentially did, as the single best place to fight him from is the rotating platform where Keyes hides. : However, let's not write the whole thing off to auctoral fiat. Bungie's
Sure, they're good at masking authorial fiat with window dressing. That's part of the craft, too. But there's still a difference from when the initial assumptions you've made seem to point you in the right direction almost without effort, and where you need to shoehorn story details into place to cover where you wanted to go anyway :) In almost any story, there's always at least one question you can find to ask where the only logically consistent answer is, "because if they didn't, you wouldn't have a story." :-) : Or it may not, in which case it'll be fruitless... but we won't know until we
: -- Steve's looking for these lines of speculation to create their own
Well, depending on how you look at it, they already do. Tartarus is ambitious, conniving, and perhaps a bit self-righteous. He's not stupid. Open hostilities with the Elites would almost have to be something he'd be preparing and planning for quite awhile. To suggest that his adherence to the caste system, and his desire or need to assert his position atop it within the Brute hierarchy-- since that's what we're talking about, not what distinguishes him from other Covenant individuals or groups, but what distinguishes him from his support troops-- is so great as to deprive them of a weapon that would make his troops at least the defensive equal, if not an outright superior, to a foe he plans on throwing them into battle against, to me is a gross exaggeration of that element of the story in a vain attempt to explain away a clear inconsistency. That there is no other single unique weapon of similar importance (elsewhere in the thread I accounted for the Prophets' chairs and the Heretic's holograms) I think just goes to emphasize that his use of this weapon did not emerge naturally from the narrative, but imposes itself on the narrative in order to justify the unique opponent Bungie wanted to conclude Halo 2 with. Just as the absurdity of dual-wielding double-barrelled shotguns must have been overridden by the pure coolness of the idea, I can imagine a discussion about how to make Taraturus might have gone along similar lines-- let's give him a weapon nobody else has, that the player never sees anywhere else, and make Tartarus a different kind of foe to fight than any of the others. To do that, let's make him like a Brute-- strong and fast-- but with a shield (since no Brute has one) and a powerful melee weapon (since other Brutes use brute shots or plasma rifles). In a way, it's the offensive equivalent of the plasma sword-- a one-hit-kill weapon at close range.
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