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To Frankie, from me: *Das Spoilerz, Ja*
Posted By: AngelicLionheart <angeliclionheart@gmail.com>	Date: 11/21/09 3:18 a.m.
Dear Frankie: I love you, man. I really do. You rock the whole Sock Drawer. And this episode, "The Duel," and what it reveals about Sangheili culture, doesn't change any of that. So... That said... Well, let me put it this way: I like science fiction a lot. I like cool shows like Stargate and Star Trek (the new ones) and Star Wars and all these things... you know, they're cool... I like them... but one thing that has _ALWAYS_ bothered me about these shows is how annoying their imagining of alien life is. It's almost ALWAYS an alien who "happens" to be able to be portrayed by a human actor with some forehead wrinkles or some minor alterations to the human form. It is rarely actually "alien." It's almost always just a human being with some makeup. Bipedal, binocular vision, eyes, ears, etc. Annoys me to the max. It's so .... I think of 50's Sci-Fi when I think about it. (Which is one of the reasons I love The Flood -- it seems so authentically alien, and the fact that they "see" and "hear" and communicate without eyes ears or mouths is awesome. Those little antennae/cilia looking things jutting out of the chests are so radically different than what we humans use.) Even H.R. Geiger's Xenomorphs were basically warped human beings or some kind of warped representation of them, mixed with all kinds of other things. But at least his LOOKED alien. Farcscape did a lot of aliens well... not all of them, not by a long shot, but some of them. So all I'm saying here is that I am the kind of guy that is bothered by what I know to be a shortcoming in alien design in Sci Fi, and if _THAT_ would bother me, then of course my favorite sci-fi series of stories having something on that level revealed to me would bother me. Except with the Sangheili, it's not their appearance that bothers me... it's their cultural similarity to human beings. The similarity in histories and such. Visually and otherwise. Is this a shortcut to a cultural history? Just clone a human culture and alter it? ...or is it something more? :) So, at the end of the day, what am I saying? I'm saying that the fact that one of my buddies or coworkers might come up to me and give me a hard time about what this episode revealed bothers me. That they could come up and say to me "Hur hur, those Bungie guys are real creative. Why create a whole new culture when you can just rip off feudal Japan? Hur hur." I know that you and Bungie are above that. SO! I'm not going to jump to any such conclusions. What I will do, however, is let you know where my mind is and what direction it's walking towards by asking you this, O Frankie my Frankie: Exactly what stages in societal development were the humans and the sangheili at during the point at which the Forerunners took them from their homeworlds and temporarily stored them on the Ark Installation along with all of the other sentient species while the Halo Array was fired? And, in addition to that, exactly how much time did they get to spend together while this event happened? Which leads to this question: to what degree were these two races able to influence each other while co-inhabiting The Ark? On edge, ~AngelicLionheart

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