What Are You Reading?

[Quirel]

Just got back to my apartment and browsed through my bookshelf. Jogged my memory.

Hard Magic by Larry Correia.
Um... wow.
Cross X-Men with gangster noir and a slight touch of H.P. Lovecraft, and this is what you get. Double props for including John Moses Browning (!) as a character.

Monster Hunter Vendetta by the same guy.
It's an interesting dichotomy between the first book and this one.
In the original, the villain seemed more dangerous, but the protagonists were in less danger for most of the book because Lord Muchado didn't really see them as a threat.
In this one, the villain was weaker and definitely small potatoes compared to Lord Muchado, but he was arguably smarter and better prepared. Also, being a former Monster Hunter, he barely did anything but attack the protagonists until the end of the book.

Overall, it was definitely good. No scenes that really stick out as the most awesome like in the first book, but fun to read.

Honor of the Queen, by David Weber.
Got halfway through, threw the book across the room.
I liked the previous books because I liked the side characters, and loved the battles. The Honor of the Queen is just about Honor, dry politics, and Honor doing political maneuvers to get the respect of people that can't see how special she is. Too much time is being spent on a chemistry-free romance between Honor Harrington and some daft bastard who we KNOW is going to die because the station is slated to be destroyed during the invasion that's going to happen but first here's more people talking about political maneuvers and the invasion that they're going to get around to.

Also, the above should not be required to keep track of all the characters.

Out of the Darkness, by David Weber.
I really wanted to like this one, because it's like Harry Turtledove's Worldwar series done better.

In the Worldwar series, lizard aliens with technology that's an almost exact replica of our modern day technology invaded during World War II and lose because they're creatively sterile and horribly outnumbered.

In Out of the Darkness, coyote aliens with advanced technology invade during the modern day, and get their butts handed to them because they were expecting to fight knights armed with bows and polearms. Their technology is better realized, because it's more realistic for an alien species that has only ever had to fight primitives. For example, they have hovertanks with lasers that can explode a house, but those tanks are underarmored and have zero underbelly armor. Mines? IEDs? What are those? Also, their aircraft aren't stealthy because they've never fought anybody with radar, and they don't have anything that can detect stealth aircraft.

But they're quite good at precisely dropping meteorites onto cities, airfields, ambush sites, etc.

Another comparison is that in the Worldwar series, the aliens were terrible at fighting because they had not fought each other in thousands of generations. Something about how their planet had no major oceans allowed one empire to rise up and last long enough that the lizards revere the very idea of the Emperor. Hell, they don't have standards or flags, because those arise as a way for nations to distinguish themselves from other nations.

In Out of the Darkness, almost all intelligent aliens have a herd instinct and defer to the group in order to protect themselves and the herd. The Coyotes are one of the few that simply have a pack mentality. The strongest rule or are challenged, but they are much more willing to fight and take risks. Overall, though, there's not much difference between the herd and the pack. Show enough force, and they back down.

By the galaxy's standards, Humans are insane. We have a family mentality. We fight to protect our family units, and once those families are killed (By, say, an opening salvo of meteorites onto our largest cities) we aren't going to stop fighting. The escalating feeling of "Oh, crap, what did we get ourselves into" on the part of the Coyotes is delicious.

This book was David Weber at his finest. The characters and the fight were foremost, while the dry politicking hardly reared its head.
Up until the last chapter.

No, I'm not afraid about spoilering it. You deserve to know.
The Coyotes pull back their forces, their ships are ready to bomb Earth back into the Precambrian era, and they're stopped by vampires. Vampires.
"Hello, my name is Vlad the Impaler, and I can transmute my body into fog and ride spaceships into orbit" vampires. I don't care if it WAS foreshadowed here and there, this is ostensibly a science fiction novel, and I wasn't looking for vampires any more than I was looking for foreshadowing about Pegusi that fart rainbows.

The second part of the last chapter has all the surviving main characters at a barbeque talking about how unlikely the whole thing was.

That's it. I'm done with Weber.

Teach Us! Professor Mordin!

Three beers later, I've finally managed to finish it.
I've got a question about manga in general. Do y'all think that something is being lost in the translation from Japanese to English?
Yeah, I know that this thing wasn't intended to be taken seriously, but there's something about the dialog that seems common in the scanlated mangas that I've read.

*Fun fact: You can actually set your hand on fire and it not hurt at all. With a little bit of alcohol and windy day, you can put on quite the Magic Fireball Hands of Power routine if you desired.

Yeah, I've heard that alcohol fires burn cooler.

The mixture I used was diesel-acetone-gasoline. Perfect for degreasing engine parts, but holy hell is the flash point low.

I hear those started awful and got progressively worse.

Eh. I read something that Brian Herbert wrote himself (And claimed to have got the idea from his dear old dad) and wasn't impressed.

To quote Mahatma Ghandi, "Men may be great, but not necessarily their sons."

I think I've mentioned this before, but honestly, while Halo 4 has been touted as the start of a trilogy/saga, it feels more like a bridging chapter or book-end to the original trilogy.

I don't really get that feeling. Of course, it depends on what Halo 5 One feels like, but Halo 4 feels too dissimilar to Bungie's Halo to be book-end. After the Flood/Ark/Halo 04-2 were destroyed in the same explosion, the Chief was lost in space, perhaps whisked off by an ancient Forerunner AI. That's ending enough for me.

The story ends without any indication as to where things will go next (bar the Didact speech maybe), it ends with the death of Cortana (leaving John the only character from the previous games present in H4)

I be you dollars to donuts that it won't stick.

and given how the fiction has progressed since then Spartan Ops, Escalation, etc., the universe feels more like John is of the old guard and it's time for a new generation for a new era (cue TNG music here). I know it won't be the case given the trailer for the Xbone, but in all honesty I'd be happy to retire John post-H4. It feels to me like his story is done, and...well, in theory I think Palmer could have a made a good protagonist in the "similar but different" vein, but...well, we all know how that went.

Maybe this is just because of how the Spartan IVs were portrayed, but I don't think that a Spartan supersoldier would be a good protagonist to continue the Halo series. John 117 was then, this is now. After the war. During the rebuilding.

Ah yes...the speech.

"The load of hot air allegedly blathered by a senile Forerunner who just crawled out of his Cryptum. We have dismissed this claim."

Wouldn't you want to kinda stagger out your plans of genocide? Build an army of Prometheans from lesser defended worlds first before flying a single ship into a human fleet? Wouldn't you want to consider that if it takes, say, a few hours to compose a single city, how long would it take to compose every other city on Earth?

I worked this out, once. Pardon me if I've already brought it up.

Assume that it takes five minutes to target a city and compose it. That means that he can compose 12x24 or 288 cities in a day. Assuming an average population of 500,000, that's a total of 144,000,000 people composed.
I remember some question about whether the 300 million figure applies to Earth, Humanity as a whole, or was just retconned by 343i. That said, I think it would take more than a day to compose Earth. Much longer if he insisted on getting every human being. Imagine, if you will, cars fleeing along the highway as the Composer beam slowly tracks after them.

In short,


CREW: The Scimitar is spreading its "targeting wings".
PICARD: Targeting wings? It needs fancy targeting wings to hit something bigger than an aircraft carrier from only 1 km away, dead ahead?
CREW: Yup. And it needs to charge up for 7 minutes too.
PICARD: Excellent. Just enough time for another contrived action scene. Hey, if it takes 7 minutes to charge up to kill 1000 people, how long would it take to kill 6 billion?
CREW: I'd calculate about 80 years. Who the hell wrote this?
PICARD: Thank God I signed up for X-Men.

Hence my conclusion that the Didact lost his marbles to a greater extent than what I believe 343 intended.

Or they just didn't think it through. It's a surprisingly common problem with science fiction.

Found it missing myself. I got no sense of granduer or scale on Requiem. And Installation 03 was just brushed aside. That's what the rings are now - set pieces.

Ayup.

Another thing I disagree on. The weapons were unbalanced (sole campaign tactic of just getting a Promethean weapon ASAP and you're set), often I felt I was being forced down corridors rather than going through open spaces, the Prometheans were uninteresting, and the Mantis and Broadsword sequences I just found tedious. In all honesty, the gameplay killed the enjoyment for me as much as, if not more so than the plot.

Only thing I disagree with is that the Promethean weapons weren't powerful to the point of being unbalanced. They were only slightly better than their counterparts, sometimes.

The problem is that the Covenant, UNSC, and the Forerunner all had identical weapon sandboxes, with the UNSC being the only ones with unique weapons.

Bearing in mind that this is a setting where dwarves can fashion mithril into armour (high density, little weight), not sure if I'd call it outlandish per se in the context's setting.

Yeah, I did wonder out loud what the K value of Mithril is.
I am a terrible person to go to the theater with.

Game play wise, it was a much more streamlined focus. There's none of the sweeping vistas of H1 and, in some instances, the environments are much smaller than H3 (IIRC) but

That's actually a point against it, in my book.

there's something to be said about riding a big ass mammoth tank and

There would be something to say about riding a Mammoth 'tank' if we'd done anything interesting with it.

Luke Skywalkering a large alien ship.

No, not Luke Skywalker. You were Baron Manfred von Richthofen. Buzzing his little triplane through the Death Star, past weapons technology millions of years beyond his own.

The rings are no longer interesting and have been done to death. Halo 2 and maybe 3 would've been the place for that. Not Halo 6.

I agree. That should have been a point against their inclusion at all.

[TheEconomist]

That's actually a point against it, in my book.

I can see how it would be. For me though, it's neither. If it had been like Halo 3, fine, I like that formula, but it's been done to death. I liked the small change, because it was a bit different, and Halo's been basically the same game just more fined since the beginning. ODST being the exception of course.

- - - Updated - - -

That's actually a point against it, in my book.

I can see how it would be. For me though, it's neither. If it had been like Halo 3, fine, I like that formula, but it's been done to death. I liked the small change, because it was a bit different, and Halo's been basically the same game just more fined since the beginning. ODST being the exception of course.

[Hawki]

It wouldn't be a Hawki discussion if there weren't tons to disagree with.

Eh, look on the bright side. Stimulates discussion at least.

Halo

I wasn't talking about the environments, I was talking about the galactic scale of the plot and where that plot takes you.

I can't really call H4 "galactic scale." In an ideal world, that would be a good thing - using the bell curve analogy, H1-H3 went up in scope (Alpha Halo-Delta Halo/Earth/High Charity-Earth/High Charity/Ark/Installation 04B) with the stakes getting higher and higher. However, I feel H4 fumbles the ball here. The Didact's motivations are too vague to make me feel invested in them, so while I feel it's trying to be 'epic,' it doesn't quite pull it off. I'd have much rather have it toned down plot-wise.

Game play wise, it was a much more streamlined focus. There's none of the sweeping vistas of H1 and, in some instances, the environments are much smaller than H3 (IIRC)

That's a negative in my book.

but there's something to be said about riding a big ass mammoth tank and Luke Skywalkering a large alien ship.

Eh, not really. The Mammoth sections I found more enjoyable when I could get off the damn thing, whereas otherwise on it, it felt like a poor man's Rig from Gears of War 2. As for Luke Skywalkering...maybe. I was kinda put off by how easily John is able to tear through the Prometheans, but I can't really hold it against the game as a) he's done so against the Flood in H3 on High Charity, and b) it's a videogame, and beating the odds is kinda part of the territory. But...well, at least Luke had friends when on the Death Star. And the Stormtroopers were fun to watch him fight.

Halo's never had the set pieces of its competitors, it's nice that it's starting to get those.

Setpieces like when control is taken out of the player's hands to see scripted events, interrupting gameplay in an attempt to mimic Call of Duty?

Yeah, that put me off too.

He made it clear that humanity was a future threat, not a current one. He mentions the ascendancy beginning, not having completed,

Which could also apply to the pre-Human-Forerunner War of ages past.

It's a stretch, I know, but the prospect of encountering the Didact again and living Forerunners for that matter makes my stomach turn. I know it's 343's mandate to continue the series, and continuance of said series would dictate the need for an adversary, but there were plenty of other options for them to take. I'd personally have gone with the Assembly, but, well, beggars can't be choosers.

The rings are no longer interesting and have been done to death.

And shield worlds haven't?

It's never a natural progression for a person to care so much for a machine or to go through so much trouble to save a piece of code.

When that code is sapient and has been with you through thick and thin, I'd say it would come off as natural.

Where was this conviction when he needed to ensure the aftermath of H3. It's like, "Oh fuck, I'm stuck out here, time to sleep, nothing else can be done about that huge conflict I've invested so many time to solve ... zzzzzzzzzz...

Said conflict was over at the time, and there was no way back at said time either. Safer to go with the beacon. On Requiem, getting Cortana home would be just part of the package.

Worse, this minuscule "problem" was still a concern of his as humanity is facing complete annihiliation.

When? Not in H2, when he goes to Earth. Not in H3, where by rescuing Cortana he gains an index. And certainly not in H4, where there's no sense of humanity facing annihilation at all.

Master Chief is supposed to be an efficient militarized "psychopath". He's supposed to be hard enough to focus on the mission, nothing else. If he's gone soft, that should be shown in other areas, not just this irrational, sentimentality for the sake of an emotional anchor for the player.

I disagree, but it's been shown in other areas too, such as increasing independence and dialogue from one game to the next.

But when stories require emotional connections, all logic goes out the window.

And when does a work of fiction not require emotional connection? If there's characters involved, you need emotion. And if there aren't, and it's entirely narrative-based, then a great deal of investment goes out the window.

I mean, we're supposed to worry about saving the lives of real people, not AIs, and Chief is more upset with the "death" of an AI than the billions of human lives.

None of the characters are "real" in the strictest sense of the word, just players in a story. Shock of all shocks, I'm going to care more about saving an actual character than faceless humans that I've never seen that are under threat from an ill-defined foe.

The game was almost insulting in the way that it kept suggesting that I should give two fucks about a machine, how fucking stupid do they think I am?

And that it expects us to care about Earth (again) because the plot says so isn't insulting?

How you can say things like LW has bland characters but then tolerate this, I don't know.

Because unlike Leviathan Wakes, whatever the flaws of H4 are, bland characters aren't one of them (except Palmer I guess - jury's still out whether I prefer "bland Palmer" or "shut the hell up Palmer).

It's no wonder mankind is so stupid when emotions are this easily manipulated. You don't even have to be particularly skilled about it. Subconsciences are so easily impressionable.

Well, there's a potential borg/cyberman recruit.

Something tells me you played on Easy or Normal

Normal. But I played on normal for all the other games in the series, so while I'm arguably ignorant, it's ignorance that's spread out equally.

I don't really get that feeling. Of course, it depends on what Halo 5 One feels like, but Halo 4 feels too dissimilar to Bungie's Halo to be book-end. After the Flood/Ark/Halo 04-2 were destroyed in the same explosion, the Chief was lost in space, perhaps whisked off by an ancient Forerunner AI. That's ending enough for me.

I agree, but I don't define the book-end feeling by...well, feeling.

Rather, more by plot. H3, IMO, had no need of a sequel despite the Legendary ending teaser. H4 raises a no. of plot points (Didact, Prometheans, Cortana's condition, and the Covenant remnant), and in the context of the game itself, concludes all but the Covenant plot point. It feels like an extension of a pre-existing ending, if that makes sense.

I be you dollars to donuts that it won't stick.

I'm going to assume you meant "bet." And I also won't take that bet because I'm betting a revival is in store also.

(In ref to the above post, key word being "within the context of the game itself." In a wider context, is where the feeling of inevitable resurrection comes from.)

Maybe this is just because of how the Spartan IVs were portrayed, but I don't think that a Spartan supersoldier would be a good protagonist to continue the Halo series. John 117 was then, this is now. After the war. During the rebuilding.

Problem is, there isn't really any rebuilding going on. The UEG has done its rebuilding, and is kicking arse and taking names. Not that I really appreciate that, but if the series isn't going to be low-key, it makes sense for the protagonist not to be low-key either.

and Halo's been basically the same game just more fined since the beginning. ODST being the exception of course.

Don't forget Halo Wars.

Honorverse

Y'know, I saw a few books in the library in this series. For some reason I always thought the titular character was male.

Anyway, I'm trying to have a post more than just debating H4, but unfortunately, don't have much to say. Looking at the series on Wikipedia, it sounds reminiscent of The Lost Fleet in terms of protagonist, so that's a potential downer for me.

Lord of the Rings

Yeah, I did wonder out loud what the K value of Mithril is.

Well, Bilbo's mithril shirt was worth more than the shire and everything in it. I figure there's some way to extrapolate worth from that.

Maybe there needs to be a Middle-earth mathamatics course. After all, there's already Elvish ones...

Other

The Coyotes pull back their forces, their ships are ready to bomb Earth back into the Precambrian era, and they're stopped by vampires. Vampires.
"Hello, my name is Vlad the Impaler, and I can transmute my body into fog and ride spaceships into orbit" vampires. I don't care if it WAS foreshadowed here and there, this is ostensibly a science fiction novel, and I wasn't looking for vampires any more than I was looking for foreshadowing about Pegusi that fart rainbows.

Playing devil's advocate, but if we have coyotes attacking Earth, are vampires that far fetched?

...probably, I guess. Still, maybe it's better to consider it science fantasy rather than science fiction?

Do y'all think that something is being lost in the translation from Japanese to English?

Maybe. I've read a few scanlated mangas for various series (e.g. Legend of Zelda, Metroid, Pokemon) and...well, I do find the language style a bit different at times. Hard to explain. But I've never really been put off by them for that reason.

[TheEconomist]

Eh, look on the bright side. Stimulates discussion at least.

I'm not really sure what we do is discussion on my end. You're like an irrational, unsolveable puzzle and I'm a puzzle solver that must understand everything. Yet, everything I make a movie, you get more irrational.

Said conflict was over at the time, and there was no way back at said time either. Safer to go with the beacon.

A real person in Chief's position wouldn't have made that assumption. When every few minutes something else goes wrong unexpectedly Hollywood-style, no one assumes the end to anything. And what do you know, something did go wrong. Massively. If Chief weren't smart enough to allow even a small chance for that, he would have never made it off the Pillar of Autumn in Halo CE.

I know there wasn't a way back at the time which is my point. When he was cut off without reasonable hope of being found, but then is, his first thought shouldn't be on such trivial matters. It's like if someone were shipwrecked at sea. For a time, they have no hope of getting back. But, then they are found. What do they do? Go home and get back to normal life? Go back to sea and hope it doesn't happen again? Or do they go looking for all the trivial bullshit items that were lost at sea. That's about how much value Cortana has, even if she weren't demonstrating through-out the entire game that she was basically going mad, making her even more useless.

On Requiem, getting Cortana home would be just part of the package.

I assure you, no soldier ever was worried about such bullshit in the heat of battle, and I have several soldiers in my family. But, more than that, it never happens because if it did, they would be quickly killed, before they had time to think.

Imagine, a soldier being awoken from his bunk, in the middle of the night, to a gun in his face. He has a split second to react. What does he do? "I wonder if I left the stove on when I left for training."

*dead*

You don't know it, but from a purely logical perspective, that's how stupid Chief's worrying about Cortana is since she's proven that she is quickly going to lose her usefulness and is quickly becoming a dangerous reliability.

And certainly not in H4, where there's no sense of humanity facing annihilation at all.

You've got to be kidding me. Even the talking heads of Halo 4 say humanity is facing annihilation, verbatim. All of that talk about the Didact of enslaving them or destroying them (depending on the time) was.. what exactly, to you? An empty promise? Doesn't matter. Master Chief is obligated to take it seriously.

But, let's say they weren't. A lot of people, real people, are dying regardless around the Chief. Dying by the thousands and thousands, hundreds of which being right in front him. He has no time to worry about a damned AI.

Your argument is an emotional one, not a logical or realistic one. I hope you realize that.

I disagree, but it's been shown in other areas too, such as increasing independence and dialogue from one game to the next.

You disagree with what? That's he's a psychopath? No one but a psychopath performs that well and that calmy in combat. No one. Consult any military study if you don't believe me. All FPS and action heroes are psychopaths, regardless of the amount of emotion they show outside of combat. Or do you disagree that his relationship with Cortana would require him to be going soft ... Either way, I just don't see your point.

*I'm using the general understanding of the term Psycopath, not the actual one. In case you know enough to know the difference.

And when does a work of fiction not require emotional connection?

In the parts where 90% of my enjoyment comes from.

[/quote] Shock of all shocks, I'm going to care more about saving an actual character than faceless humans that I've never seen that are under threat from an ill-defined foe.[/quote]

Exactly. There's very little intelligence behind the emotional connections that most people have with their stories. If you're going to care about a character more than all of humanity, then make it a better one, at least human character.

This is why we almost always disagree about the merits of everything. I need order and logic in everything I take the time to think about, all you seem to need is some lame attempt by the creators to awkward fumble at a heart string, any heart string to a tune, any tune. And you're hooked. That's why you praise WOL, My Little Pony, and who knows what else while I'm over here contemplating the true complexities of the human condition.

[/quote]And that it expects us to care about Earth (again) because the plot says so isn't insulting?[/quote]

Quite possibly the absolute dumbest argument I've ever heard outside of real-life problems. Holy fuck, wow. Wow. WOOOOOOOW. I mean seriously, I am flabbergasted. I understand that you personally have no real dog in the fight so your connection is diminished. But, how can you care about Cortana, but not all of mankind? What in the fucking fuck? Seriously. Explain this to me. I've been trying to figure you out for ever but you keep throwing me for loops.

.... *sigh*

Back on topic. You shouldn't care about either, but, out of the two, yeah, the billions of humans lives at the brink of destruction with nothing but your efforts to save them should be more of a concern to you than the feelings of ONE SINGLE NON-LIVING ENTITY. Especially given that, you know, if your head isn't in the game you doom your entire species and thousands of years of hard work by billions of people, to nothing, all because of that piece of holographic ass in your view screen that is already going through what is basically irreversible dementia. In real life, would you sacrifice your country for some scenile old woman who doesn't know who or what she is? Damned close to what Halo 4 is trying to make you do.

Because unlike Leviathan Wakes, whatever the flaws of H4 are, bland characters aren't one of them

Amazing. Absolutely amazing. I'm not even sure this falls under the realm of subjectivity. It is almost entirely inarguable that there is some kind of depth or complexity to any of the characters in Halo 4. Any kind of interest is of the bullshit kind, like I've been talking about in the past post, and has no logic or reason behind its purpose or existence other than the face-value of its furthering of the next action scene. Fine, you found the characters in LW uninteresting and they never grabbed, I can somewhat see your point. But, again, praising Halo 4's characters like you do every other steaming pile of shit? I don't see how any intelligent person can think this way. Honestly. And, if you're going to be a writer, or at least very least a fan fic writer, you need to understand this. Just because you say something should be cared about, doesn't mean the reader is going to. And that's at the core of why most people here disagree with your assessments of everything.

For the sake of your own mind, please, read some real fiction. Video game tie-ins are the lowest of the low. I know the appeal, I read them for years. But, seriously, its time you graduated to more intelligent reading. A couple of real reads and you'll be just as embarassed as I was about how seriously we took these lame ass video game stories. It's like watching Saturday morning cartoons when you could be watching the greats of television drama.

Well, there's a potential borg/cyberman recruit.

Why? Because I laugh at the people who care more about an AI than billions of human lives? Yep. True psychopath. But, I'd much rather be that than so unfathomably stupid with my feelings. I don't lack them. I suppress stupid ass baseless emotions. And you present a terrific argument for why everyone else should too.

it's ignorance that's spread out equally.

Sounds more like you got better at the game than anything changed.

Don't forget Halo Wars.

It is blasphemy to even mention that trash in the presence of a PC RTS gamer.

As for the rest of your comments on my statements about the game play. You misunderstood, again, about everything. You are arguing something entirely different than what I said. But, I've already typed enough and I've lost interest for now. So I'll just say go re-read, if you really even care.

[Hawki]

I'm not really sure what we do is discussion on my end. You're like an irrational, unsolveable puzzle and I'm a puzzle solver that must understand everything.

Y'know, maybe if you didn't keep losing your cool and smashing the puzzle, things would be easier for you.

Yet, everything I make a movie, you get more irrational.

You're making movies now?

But again, I present my thoughts and arguments rationally, while you continue to react with expletives in a most irrational manner.

A real person in Chief's position wouldn't have made that assumption.

So, the Ark's destroyed (and Installation 04B), Truth is dead, and his followers defeated. I'd call that pretty conclusive.

And what do you know, something did go wrong. Massively.

Four years later from events out of his control, and events that the UNSC brought on itself.

But, then they are found. What do they do? Go home and get back to normal life? Go back to sea and hope it doesn't happen again? Or do they go looking for all the trivial bullshit items that were lost at sea. That's about how much value Cortana has, even if she weren't demonstrating through-out the entire game that she was basically going mad, making her even more useless.

I'm really not getting your argument here. You're equating Cortana to trivial items lost at sea...except she isn't lost, she's right by him. Saving her means getting back to Earth. Getting back to Earth means saving himself too. Getting back to Earth also has the promise of reinforcements, intelligence, etc. in the face of Covenant forces.

I assure you, no soldier ever was worried about such bullshit in the heat of battle, and I have several soldiers in my family. But, more than that, it never happens because if it did, they would be quickly killed, before they had time to think.

Imagine, a soldier being awoken from his bunk, in the middle of the night, to a gun in his face. He has a split second to react. What does he do? "I wonder if I left the stove on when I left for training."

1) Cortana isn't a stove, she's sapient, an ally/friend to John, and useful to him in battle.

2) The 'stove' (Cortana) isn't back home, it's right next to him.

3) Getting back to the 'stove' (Earth) is part of his mission statement anyway.

You don't know it, but from a purely logical perspective, that's how stupid Chief's worrying about Cortana is since she's proven that she is quickly going to lose her usefulness and is quickly becoming a dangerous reliability.

"Going to." She's still useful in the here and now, and repairing her on Earth can make her useful again.

But that's the logical perspective, as you say. But John is a human being, and has become more human over the series. Humans are illogical. Humans are emotive. There's nothing wrong with that in a narrative sense.

You've got to be kidding me. Even the talking heads of Halo 4 say humanity is facing annihilation, verbatim. All of that talk about the Didact of enslaving them or destroying them (depending on the time) was.. what exactly, to you? An empty promise?

Um, where? Where does anyone say that humanity is facing extinction? Del Rio doesn't believe it, Palmer says nothing, and while Lasky helps John, I don't recall him saying anything about extinction. And whatever threats the Didact makes are so vague and so without any sense of threat that it's impossible to take him seriously.

Doesn't matter. Master Chief is obligated to take it seriously.

Which he does. To the extent that he puts off going back to Earth to engage the Didact directly.

But, let's say they weren't. A lot of people, real people, are dying regardless around the Chief. Dying by the thousands and thousands, hundreds of which being right in front him. He has no time to worry about a damned AI.

Um, where? Unless you mean New Phoenix, in that case, no, they're not dying all around him, they're dying off-screen, and we're only informed of that in the end sequence. And in which case, no, he has no time to worry about Cortana. That's why he doesn't in the last level until the Didact is defeated.

Your argument is an emotional one, not a logical or realistic one. I hope you realize that.

I hope you realize that all this talk of humanity facing annihilation isn't based on logic at all, but what the game wants you to believe. If it wants a logical threat, then it needs to define the threat rather than provide vague notions of what will happen if it isn't dealt with.

You disagree with what?

The assertion that him "going soft" wasn't shown in other areas prior to H4.

This is why we almost always disagree about the merits of everything. I need order and logic in everything I take the time to think about,

And yet you're still able to enjoy H4 for some reason.

Quite possibly the absolute dumbest argument I've ever heard outside of real-life problems. Holy fuck, wow. Wow. WOOOOOOOW. I mean seriously, I am flabbergasted. I understand that you personally have no real dog in the fight so your connection is diminished. But, how can you care about Cortana, but not all of mankind? What in the fucking fuck? Seriously. Explain this to me. I've been trying to figure you out for ever but you keep throwing me for loops.

I know the feeling - you've been doing it to me throughout this entire thread.

Back on topic. You shouldn't care about either, but, out of the two, yeah, the billions of humans lives at the brink of destruction with nothing but your efforts to save them should be more of a concern to you than the feelings of ONE SINGLE NON-LIVING ENTITY. Especially given that, you know, if your head isn't in the game you doom your entire species and thousands of years of hard work by billions of people, to nothing, all because of that piece of holographic ass in your view screen that is already going through what is basically irreversible dementia. In real life, would you sacrifice your country for some scenile old woman who doesn't know who or what she is? Damned close to what Halo 4 is trying to make you do.

If there was ever a facepalm moment, this is it. Alright, let's try and spell this out:

1) You make a claim that billions of human lives are at risk. Alright. Let's assume that Earth currently houses billions in the setting (which is unlikely if the old 300 million figure corresponds to the world), but let's assume that billions of humans live on Earth. Let's say they're all at risk.

2) How are they at risk? Why is the Didact's ship so invulnrable to UNSC weapons, to the extent that an entire fleet can't take it down when Forerunner technology was incorporated into them? Why is UNSC weaponry fluctuating in power in accordance with the plot?

3) And on that note, where are all the space platforms? Were they destroyed? Maybe, but that was never specified before. And am I supposed to believe that the UEG is able to manufacture the most powerful fleet in the known galaxy in 4 years, but didn't spend any of that expense on MAC platforms?

4) Ignoring all this, two of the most fundamental points of storytelling. The first is "show, don't tell." There's no explanation of what the beam actually does while it's being used. It's a fair assumption that it's being used to compose humans, fine. But it doesn't show us this. Its effects aren't seen. I cared about the characters on the Ivanoff because I'd spent time alongside them, and we got to see what the Composer did to them. But I don't have that luxury with New Phoenix.

5) The second rule it breaks is that of plot/worldbuilding - in a story, a writer has to ask, "is this relevant?" If it's relevant to the story, it can be included, provided its relevance is explained. If it isn't relevant, then its inclusion should at least be reconsidered. I bring this up because Earth is being used as a crutch. We're expected to care about it because it's humanity's homeworld, not out of any relevance to the actual story. You could have replaced Earth with any world and had the same effect, and it would have been more logical to do so for reasons I've previously stated. In the previous games, Earth was always relevant to the plot, and built up naturally with it. Here, it's just thrown in.

6) And to top it off, it's a repeat of past games. Earth being attacked from above...been there, done that. It's retreading old territory, so I can't help but feel apathic about it. And unlike the previous games, where the consequences of losing Earth were made clear (last bastion of any significant human power), the consequences aren't clear here. We don't know what the world situation is during the game, so losing Earth doesn't necessarily have the same impact that losing it 4 years ago would.

So, in short, the game gives me little reason to care about Earth or the people on it. In contrast, Cortana's been with me throughout the series, and has had a constant presence. As such, in the context of the game, her fate means more to me than some nameless, faceless people that are never seen. True, while I was fighting through the Didact's ship I was primarily motivated to defeat him in itself (if only to just end the damn thing). But in the long run, Cortana gets greater priority.

Amazing. Absolutely amazing. I'm not even sure this falls under the realm of subjectivity. It is almost entirely inarguable that there is some kind of depth or complexity to any of the characters in Halo 4.

I said they were colourful characters, not deep or complex ones. Learn the difference.

Honestly. And, if you're going to be a writer, or at least very least a fan fic writer, you need to understand this. Just because you say something should be cared about, doesn't mean the reader is going to.

Which is the same mistake H4 makes about telling us we should care about Earth without giving us a reason to.

For the sake of your own mind, please, read some real fiction.

Which is what I do anyway. Have you even been reading the posts I've made? Wheel of Time? Dune? A Song of Ice and Fire? Ender's Game? The Name of the Wind? Heck, even Leviathan Wakes.

Whatever. I'm done. It seems your interpretation of fiction and characters goes by a set of rules only you understand, and you expect everyone else to jump through hula hoops to understand what those rules are.

Sounds more like you got better at the game than anything changed.

No, something distinctly changed, and that was that we got a third set of weapons to play with. The effect of that may vary from player to player, but one can't deny that the event occurred.

It is blasphemy to even mention that trash in the presence of a PC RTS gamer.

Well, it's good to know that the elitism of the "PC master race" hasn't diminished.

As for the rest of your comments on my statements about the game play. You misunderstood, again, about everything.

What comments? That I play on normal? If you're referring to the game having the same formula bar ODST then yes, I agree. I was pointing out that at the least, HW provided some variance within the overall canon in terms of gameplay, owing nothing to said previous formula. That's something I can get behind - it's a dumbed down RTS, but still one I found enjoyable at times.

Then again, I'm used to you misunderstanding my comments. So if we can't understand each other, why even bother?

[Quirel]

Anyway, I'm trying to have a post more than just debating H4,

Greatly appreciated. = /

but unfortunately, don't have much to say. Looking at the series on Wikipedia, it sounds reminiscent of The Lost Fleet in terms of protagonist, so that's a potential downer for me.

...Bloody hell, that series is built around a Mary Sue too?

And the bookstore doesn't take returns. Darnit.

I'm not sure if Honor Harrington is a Mary Sue per se, but the series is definitely based around HER relationships and HER problems and anybody who disagrees with her is either mistaken, bigoted, or the boot-scum of humanity. Her scenes can get obnoxious, but the series doesn't have a protagonist of any sort without her. The exception is the couple of chapters in the second book where she was shipped out of the system because a female captain offended the delicate sensibilities of a backwater planet that the Royal Manticorian Kingdom was cozying up to.
Oh, and she has the obnoxiously cute ultra-special empathic animal companion too, so there's that.

Well, Bilbo's mithril shirt was worth more than the shire and everything in it. I figure there's some way to extrapolate worth from that.

Maybe there needs to be a Middle-earth mathamatics course. After all, there's already Elvish ones...

If it's worth that much, then perhaps Mithril is a thermal superconductor?
Which would make it useless against dragon-fire. Bad idea.

Playing devil's advocate, but if we have coyotes attacking Earth, are vampires that far fetched?

...probably, I guess. Still, maybe it's better to consider it science fantasy rather than science fiction?

Well, "Coyotes" and "Coyote-aliens" is just a convenient way for me to describe them, same as I might call Kzinti "Cat-aliens".
Right up to that last chapter, the book had a definite science fiction feel to it. The last chapter loops that around and flat-out tells the reader "Well, if aliens are possible, vampires can't be that far out." It feels less like an organic development and more like David Weber trying to prove a literary point.

Maybe. I've read a few scanlated mangas for various series (e.g. Legend of Zelda, Metroid, Pokemon) and...well, I do find the language style a bit different at times. Hard to explain. But I've never really been put off by them for that reason.

It seems like the Japanese language often omits the subject of a sentence. So, if a mother is complementing her kid, she might say "Such a cute child" instead of "You're so cute" or "You're such a cute child."

I recently read "Surely You're Joking, Mister Feynman", and I laughed out loud at his observations about learning Japanese. He found that not only is the language incessantly polite, but incredibly dependent on context and hierarchy. So, ask someone if you can look at his garden. If he's a peer, you ask him "May I gaze upon your (Fancy word for a garden)". If he's more important than you, you ask something like "May my eyes drift across your (Fancier word for a garden)."

He pretty much ragequitted his Japanese lessons. I would have LOVED to hear what he thought of Japanese honorifics.

I know there wasn't a way back at the time which is my point. When he was cut off without reasonable hope of being found, but then is, his first thought shouldn't be on such trivial matters. It's like if someone were shipwrecked at sea. For a time, they have no hope of getting back. But, then they are found. What do they do? Go home and get back to normal life? Go back to sea and hope it doesn't happen again? Or do they go looking for all the trivial bullshit items that were lost at sea. That's about how much value Cortana has, even if she weren't demonstrating through-out the entire game that she was basically going mad, making her even more useless.

Imagine, a soldier being awoken from his bunk, in the middle of the night, to a gun in his face. He has a split second to react. What does he do? "I wonder if I left the stove on when I left for training."

*dead*

You don't know it, but from a purely logical perspective, that's how stupid Chief's worrying about Cortana is since she's proven that she is quickly going to lose her usefulness and is quickly becoming a dangerous reliability.

Back on topic. You shouldn't care about either, but, out of the two, yeah, the billions of humans lives at the brink of destruction with nothing but your efforts to save them should be more of a concern to you than the feelings of ONE SINGLE NON-LIVING ENTITY.

OK.
The problem is, you're assuming that Cortana is supposed to be a piece of equipment, just like the Warthogs we drive. The thing is that she (Like every other artificial intelligence in a Bungie game) is very much a sapient individual.

I need order and logic in everything I take the time to think about, all you seem to need is some lame attempt by the creators to awkward fumble at a heart string, any heart string to a tune, any tune.

Hold on, now. If that was true, then Hawki would have been hooked by the momentary scene of New Pheonix getting beam'd. He would have swallowed the whole "Save the innocents being savaged by the big bad evil guy!" plot, hook line and sinker.

News flash: Wanting to save the people you know and have fought alongside with is human. Not giving a crap about sacrificing your close friends for the faceless masses is sociopathic utilitarianism.

Quite possibly the absolute dumbest argument I've ever heard outside of real-life problems. Holy fuck, wow. Wow. WOOOOOOOW. I mean seriously, I am flabbergasted. I understand that you personally have no real dog in the fight so your connection is diminished. But, how can you care about Cortana, but not all of mankind? What in the fucking fuck? Seriously. Explain this to me.

Explanation: because "All of mankind" doesn't exist. Neither does Cortana. It's a frickin' story.
We have no emotional investment in "All of mankind", because they're just an overused MacGuffin. And because that investment isn't built up by the writers, we don't view the Didact's plan in 'in-universe' terms. We just sit back and think "Oh, really, the authors couldn't have come up with anything more original than this?"

Cortana is infinitely more real to us, because we've built up an emotional investment over the past three games. She's been there, she's an actual character like Johnson or the Arbiter, so we're going to worry about her.

Honestly. And, if you're going to be a writer, or at least very least a fan fic writer, you need to understand this. Just because you say something should be cared about, doesn't mean the reader is going to. And that's at the core of why most people here disagree with your assessments of everything.

Holy Hell, that's exactly what Hawki's been saying.
You and the writers at 343i both are saying that we have to care about the faceless masses because they're human. We, the readers/players/watchers, don't feel any connection to them because they're a bare-bones MacGuffin.

I mean, Hell, if our reason for going after the Didact was because he slaughtered Sandra Tilson and the rest of the scientists on Ivanoff Research Station, that would have been more compelling to me because I met them, interacted with them, and had an investment in their continued survival. But the rest of Humanity? It reeks of a sophomoric attempt by the writers to Go Big, Be Epic.

In the parts where 90% of my enjoyment comes from.

Exactly. There's very little intelligence behind the emotional connections that most people have with their stories. If you're going to care about a character more than all of humanity, then make it a better one, at least human character.

And you're hooked. That's why you praise WOL, My Little Pony, and who knows what else while I'm over here contemplating the true complexities of the human condition.

Why? Because I laugh at the people who care more about an AI than billions of human lives? Yep. True psychopath. But, I'd much rather be that than so unfathomably stupid with my feelings. I don't lack them. I suppress stupid ass baseless emotions. And you present a terrific argument for why everyone else should too.

Yeah, yeah, we get it, you're the ubermensch, whatever.

This was a whole lot better when we were discussing books.

[TheEconomist]

I'd call that pretty conclusive.

Then you haven't been paying attention.

I'm really not getting your argument here.

I'm making an incredibly desperate attempt to reason with you on your own terms. Logical, fact based arguments don't work, I have to use metaphors to get you to think on your own. No matter what metaphor I use, it's going to be inadequate. It is the nature of metaphors, especially when I refuse to spend much time coming up with them, but my point is still there. Master Chief's decisions and motvations are irrational and HIGHLY out of character as shown in past games and is logically expected of a super solder. He's going do otherwise because the hamfisted attempts by the writers demanded it.

1) Cortana isn't a stove, she's sapient, an ally/friend to John, and useful to him in battle.

I am amazed that you think I was comparing Cortana to a stove.. Wow ... Wondering if a person left the stove on is an an (American only, maybe) saying for being absent-mindedly worried about whether or not you did something unconsciously. My point was that you don't have time to worry about stupid shit in battle. When everyone but you on a station is annihiliated by a super advanced alien heading towards Earth, you don't spend time consoling the feelings of a non-living thing that that oh so awful replacement won't happen. No, a person should immediately get the fuck out of there. If not to save mankind then at least to get away from danger. To differently is irrational, especially of a soldier, who is expected to do that, has done that, and has always done that, except at that moment when the writers wanted him to be temporarily retarded for the sake of the heart strings.

no, they're not dying all around him, they're dying off-screen

Off-screen to us is still right in the face of the Chief. Regardless, the events on that asteroid station was very much on screen.

If it wants a logical threat, then it needs to define the threat rather than provide vague notions of what will happen if it isn't dealt with.

Right, because the Forerunners haven't shown themselves to be a logical threat. Haha. They're a threat even if they aren't even their. Just their hand me downs are a threat to the galaxy.
And, I don't know what you mean about the Didact being vague. Even if he didn't make verbal threats, which he did, his actions did everythign to convey that he was a very real threat to mankind.

The assertion that him "going soft" wasn't shown in other areas prior to H4.

Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't. I can't remember and I didn't care even when I did. But, that's not the point. Like, at all. WTF.

And yet you're still able to enjoy H4 for some reason.

Because the story is a very, very, very, very, very small portion of the game to me. I played the first two Halo games about a dozen times before I even knew anything about the story other than the very basics.

So, in short, the game gives me little reason to care about Earth or the people on it.

This argues my point wonderfully. You need to be TOLD what to care about. Where as myself, when I'm putting myself in the Chief's shoes, trying to role play him and get into his head, I instinctively care about Earth, because that's what I would care about if I actually were Chief. You seem to treat it like you're a blank shell that needs to be told what matters or else you care about nothing. That's more indicative of a passive observer whether then some one playing a game, much less some who cares so much for this story and actually tries to write story in this setting.

Learn the difference.

You didn't say they were colorful, you said they weren't bland. Learn the difference. One implies that they are better than bland characters (LW characters) but you give no reasonn why. I assume you meant some kind of depth to their being, otherwise, why would you care? I care about complexity when I get into characters. You don't. That's fine. But, what exactly was in anyway colorful about the H4 characters? They're even more bland than Matt Horner than the rest of the crew on the Hyperion (other than the obvious of course) and they were some of the dullest I've ever seen.

It seems your interpretation of fiction and characters goes by a set of rules only you understand, and you expect everyone else to jump through hula hoops to understand what those rules are.

Yeah ..... ummmmmm ... What? I'm not even debating the interpretations of anything. I'm debating the legitimacy of, say, getting upset over the death of a single AI instead of numerous human lives. I just don't understand how its okay to write a story where the main character is so much more worried about the feelings and well being of a machine than real human lives.

If that's somehow expecting people to jump through hoops, then, fine, whatever. I call it being a logical, rational, discerning, free thinking person, but that's just me. You make it sound like I'm saying there's only one interpretation of the storyline. None of us are disagreeing about the interpretations, only the merit of various plot lines. And, as expected, I gave logical arguments, and you gave emotional (IT'S JUST HUMAN!!!) arguments that I just don't agree with ... and I'm hardly the only one.

The thing is that she (Like every other artificial intelligence in a Bungie game) is very much a sapient individual.

Why? Because once again the story tries to persuade us that she has emotions? Look outside of the narrative and at the facts. Her existence consists mostly of analysing tactical data for a few years until that magic eight-year point. The personality she has was given to further that goal, as shown in Reach. They didn't give her a personality for sentimental reasons, that would've been absurd and counterproductive. Whereas, on the other hand, Chief had to be conditioned to be non-human and still manages to be one after all of the games events. He has a human nature that cannot be denied. Cortana does not. Sure, she may be intelligent but she is not living. She is doing exactly what her programming dictates. Instead of the creators trying to arbitrarily argue that sufficient intelligence makes something automatically alive, maybe they should've put that effort towards making her actually live.

And, again, I say she has less value because she is easily replaced. The above points aren't even really my argument, just side statements for another benefit. I keep trying to tell you both this. If you remember, Cortana replicates/splits herself numerous times in H4 for various copoout reasons and then dies off for an even more stupid copout reason. Apparently, you can only split off data so many times until there's just not enough to be useful anymore. Ridiculous. Plus, given that Cortana pretty much solves her own problem, it renders the heart string pulling to get us to want to save her moot. Granted, she "dies" soon after but that's just more stupidity. Think I'm taking things the wrong way? Maybe. I have very little interest in shallow universes like Halo, but she even says multiple times through-out the main narrative that she is easily replaced. She keeps telling Chief that she may be fixed but it won't be "her". We're supposed to care about this thing because this particular "consciousness" is the one we've spent a lot of time with in past games. I don't. And I don't know why anyone else does other than nostalgia feelings completely unrelated to Cortana herself. Worse, Hawki even tries to argue that its right to care more for her than billions of real human lives. Kind of argues my point for me.

Both of you keep saying that I don't think she has value because she isn't living enough, which is partially true. But, no, you see, she has less value because she is easily replaced. Items which are easily replaced have less instrinsic value per unit. A data text file of book that can be easily copied has less value than a physical copy of that book, for example, even though the data text copy can be used to make an infinite number of physical copies. Why? Because it is easily replaced. You see, intelligent storytellers would take such a thing into consideration. I've read tons of books where, in the future, the human "spirit" is easily converted into data and copied. Some of the best examples of this are 'Pandora's Star' and 'Altered Carbon'. Because the human spirit is easily restored, individual life has very little value and the authors make huge amounts of changes to human society and how humans interact with each other to accommodate this paradigm shift. There's no one in 'Altered Carbon' mourning over the dead when they're just going to be "reskinned" soon enough anyways. Despite the fact that that person's death is just as painful and the new copy won't be that "particular individual", no one cares because all can easily be made right. I dunno, maybe I'm just spoiled by more intelligent storylines. Same with Cortana. Oh sure, the game gave plenty of reasons why she isn't entirely replaceable but those are just more stupid copout explanations and down right lies as the game goes on. "They might be replace me with another Cortana model, but it won't be me, you know that, right?" Yeah, right, who cares? Cortana is nothing but code that adepted to various data inputs. Another Cortana model will do the same. The game makes no argument otherwise. Statements saying differently are just hollow words that should be taken with the same seriousness of other inherent contradictions in fictional universes.

Not giving a crap about sacrificing your close friends for the faceless masses is sociopathic utilitarianism.

Well then props to the sociopathic utilitarians. Not sure what that's got to do with this since no one brought up sacrificing anyone. What we're talking about here is Master Chief being more upset about the "death" (if you can call it that) of an easily replaced, albeit intelligent piece of code than the deaths of billions and billions. If there's a sociopath/psychopath in there, it isn't the one that cares for the billions of humans. Sociopaths and psychopaths by their very definition are narcissistic. Caring so much more for a couple of close friends over the lives of billions in the definition of selfish.

Cortana is infinitely more real to us, because we've built up an emotional investment over the past three games.

Yeah, ummm, hate to break it to you, buddy, but I wrote at least a paragraph on this in my first post. You aren't telling me anything new. What I'm saying though is that someone with intelligence should see past the bullshit and be more discerning with their connections. Or, maybe, it's just me. The game just never convinced me I should care about Cortana's death other than she will no longer be there to talk at me in future games, which I really, really don't care about.

You and the writers at 343i both are saying that we have to care about the faceless masses because they're human.

Actually our arguments are very different. What you and Hawki are arguing that we should care about Cortana, basically, because she is there and gets all of the sad musical cues and introspective dialogue. That's far from a good enough reason for me. I'm not in the habit of being told how to feel or thing. When I turned on the game, I got into the shoes of a badass super soldier. I get into that mind frame and role play. One of the first things I think about are what my motivations are and how to achieve them. So, first, before anything else, I made my own decisions about how I should feel and my motivation damn sure wasn't saving an AI instead of my entire species and I damn sure am not going to travel across the galaxy for something that is so pointless. I simply lacked the capability to turn off the logical processes of my brain to be made to care about Cortana simply because the game told me to. Okay, fine, humans weren't a focal point for you. That's fine. Once again, I allowed for that in my argument and even wrote a paragraph on it (Did you read my past posts?). But, like I said, if you cared more for Cortana than the human species, you're one of the people with incredibly easily influenced psyches. I could elaborate further but I already have. Re-read and understand people.

This entire argument is just as ridiculous as if you were arguing that Jim Raynor's actions allowing Kerrigan to kill countless lives was justifiable because OMFGTHEHUMANFEELS. WTF Psychos. WTF.

Yeah, yeah, we get it, you're the ubermensch, whatever.

I appreciate the compliment but thinking for mysself even when a story wants me to go another way is hardly something speial. Just a sign of basic intelligence to me. Maybe my career as an economist, forced to constantly be bashing my head against the brick wall that is common human knowledge pathetically mired in baseless feelings, has made me an entirely different thinker than the average person (if you two can be said to even represent the average person) then fine. To each his own, I guess, but it's hard to deny that my way is logically and morally superior, if your arguments here are any indication. This ties in more to my comments I made in another topic about people's perpsectives. People like Hawki (and apparently you) are so easily manipulated inot thinking that a character can be good, bad, loveable, or despiseable simply by the wording of the author. As for myself, I have to decide for myself what a character is. A character is good to me by his actions, not the balance between the action and the amount of excuses the author gives, for example. A monster is a monster because he does monstrous things, not because the author told me that his actions were monstrous or didn't give me enough excuses for his actions.

I'm truly sorry that you can't. Like I said before, I hope you apply more free thought when voting, or you are really, really a part of the biggest problems of mankind.

[Hawki]

Halo

I'm making an incredibly desperate attempt to reason with you on your own terms. Logical, fact based arguments don't work, I have to use metaphors to get you to think on your own. No matter what metaphor I use, it's going to be inadequate. It is the nature of metaphors, especially when I refuse to spend much time coming up with them, but my point is still there. Master Chief's decisions and motvations are irrational and HIGHLY out of character as shown in past games and is logically expected of a super solder. He's going do otherwise because the hamfisted attempts by the writers demanded it.

Let's try and keep this simple:

1) His actions are not out of character in past games. H1, he was more an automaton, had some regretful/caring moments (e.g. Keyes), but mostly just did the job. H2, he's shown to care about Cortana even as he leaves High Charity, and has a bit of a buddy thing going on with Johnson (e.g. the verbal sparring and pod hammer scene). H3, that's developed even further, mourning Johnson's death, worrying about Cortana, etc. H4, that's much the same. He's still focussed on stopping the Didact, but has become more emotional/connected, and with Del Rio, independent as well. Call it irrational if you want, I call it natural character progression.

My point was that you don't have time to worry about stupid shit in battle. When everyone but you on a station is annihiliated by a super advanced alien heading towards Earth, you don't spend time consoling the feelings of a non-living thing that that oh so awful replacement won't happen. No, a person should immediately get the fuck out of there. If not to save mankind then at least to get away from danger. To differently is irrational, especially of a soldier, who is expected to do that, has done that, and has always done that, except at that moment when the writers wanted him to be temporarily retarded for the sake of the heart strings.

1) A soldier would automatically care about the comrade beside them. Getting a comrade in a good sense of mind is human nature.

2) Getting Cortana in a good sense of mind would help in a utilitarian sense as well.

Off-screen to us is still right in the face of the Chief.

No, he's not seeing any of it. From an in-universe sense, he knows what's going on (or has an inkling). From a narrative sense, it's a weak McGuffin that was used before.

Right, because the Forerunners haven't shown themselves to be a logical threat. Haha. They're a threat even if they aren't even their. Just their hand me downs are a threat to the galaxy.

Their devices haven't been used by any Forerunners in the games beforehand, only by fanatics who wanted to use them. The Forerunners created the threat, but their finger's never been on the trigger in the games.

And, I don't know what you mean about the Didact being vague. Even if he didn't make verbal threats, which he did, his actions did everythign to convey that he was a very real threat to mankind.

What actions? Certainly not on Requiem, where he's forced to retreat from the Infinity, where John and its crew beat him at every turn, and would likely have beaten him then and there instead of bugging out. All the while never specifying what his plans actually are. And yes, he does show what those plans are at Ivanoff, but again with the whole Earth thing, it feels more like the plot is making the UNSC forces there weak for the sake of plot then coming naturally for the plot (by virtue of the list made above).

This argues my point wonderfully. You need to be TOLD what to care about.

No, I don't. I don't like 343 telling me to care about Earth for the sole reason of "because it's Earth."

Where as myself, when I'm putting myself in the Chief's shoes, trying to role play him and get into his head, I instinctively care about Earth, because that's what I would care about if I actually were Chief.

That's your perogative, but Halo isn't the setting for it. John's always been a separate character from the player. There's some immersion, true, but not to the extent of, say, the Fallout or Mass Effect series where the player can make decisions and whatnot, or where we might play as a silent protagonist in a FPS (e.g. Gordon Freeman).

That's more indicative of a passive observer whether then some one playing a game, much less some who cares so much for this story and actually tries to write story in this setting.

And that's my perogative. I prefer to play "as" characters rather than "be" them generally. I've seen John develop as a character. Key word, seen. So it makes sense to me that while he's focussed on stopping the Didact, he's also worried about someone he considers to be a close friend.

You didn't say they were colorful, you said they weren't bland. Learn the difference. One implies that they are better than bland characters (LW characters) but you give no reasonn why. I assume you meant some kind of depth to their being, otherwise, why would you care?

I prefer colourful to bland. Colourful isn't the same as developed though.

*Colourful: The character has a distinct personality and/or appearence that makes them stand out, whether it be visually and/or narratively. The character is by definition at least two-dimensional under the paradigm of The Three Dimensions of Character. However, the character is not necessarily a 3-D or developed character, and is not necessarily complex either.

Halo 4 has this in that the Didact has a distinct presence/personality (evil madman with a nifty design), Del Rio (angry ship captain with distinct personality), and John and Cortana (visual design, outgoing personality in Cortana's case). Maybe Lasky too, but he's far too subdued really. He's the straightman/close friend, but doesn't really stand out in the same way.

*Developed Characters: A character that is three-dimensional. Under the mentioned paradigm, the character must have undergone a change/development in character and/or has multi-faceted aspects that may seem contradictory, but overall add to a unified character. John and Cortana count in that H4 is the next stage of development that's been going on since H1. Arguably the Didact and Lasky too based on previous appearences, but I wouldn't say so due to the amount of time that passes between seeing them in said previous experiences. I'd argue it's more a case of character change rather than development, and in the Didact's case, literally so (Flood/cryptum insanity and whatnot).

*Bland Characters: Characters that fail to stand out, whether it be visually, narratively and/or personality-wise. In H4, Palmer is an example because she barely says anything or does anything, or has any distinct presence, to the extent that if she wasn't named, she'd be a 1-D character under the paradigm. Leviathan Wakes falls into the same trap for me because while some characters have distinct presences at least (Holden and Miller by virtue of their POVs), the other characters don't (except maybe Frederick). Off the top of my head, I could name most of the H4 characters, even if they aren't necessarily developed. LW? Not so much. Apart from the mentioned characters, I can only recall the names Naomi, Amos, and Julie off the top of my head. I know there were other characters, but without looking them up, I wouldn't be able to name them.

Yeah ..... ummmmmm ... What? I'm not even debating the interpretations of anything. I'm debating the legitimacy of, say, getting upset over the death of a single AI instead of numerous human lives.

The same reason I've got more upset over the deaths of friends/family/pets then when as I speak, people all over the world are dying horribly in conditions I can't imagine. Are their deaths more tragic? Yes. I've at least never had a family member be murdered for instance. But you'll forgive me for caring more about those close to me than people I've never met and never will. Call it selfish if you want, I call it human nature. So John mourning Cortana rather than those in New Phoenix is a human reaction and as I've said, he's got more and more human in each installment.

The personality she has was given to further that goal, as shown in Reach. They didn't give her a personality for sentimental reasons, that would've been absurd and counterproductive.

Um, "smart" AIs don't get 'given' personalities per se, they're based on the mind of the brain they came from. While all smart AI's have cloned personalities, they're still bona fide ones.

Cortana does not. Sure, she may be intelligent but she is not living. She is doing exactly what her programming dictates.

Um, no. If she was a "dumb" AI, yes. But Cortana, like other "smart" AIs, are the personification of "I think, therefore I am." Cortana even points out to Solipsil that while loyalty was programmed into her, her empathy is her own.

And I don't know why anyone else does other than nostalgia feelings completely unrelated to Cortana herself. Worse, Hawki even tries to argue that its right to care more for her than billions of real human lives. Kind of argues my point for me.

Define "right." It certainly isn't "right" from a narrative sense, for reasons I've already explained. And while it would be more 'right' to mourn those that the Didact killed (certainly not billions, but whatever), that only applies to the real world, and even then, it's easier to mourn an individual than mourn a faceless mass.

"They might be replace me with another Cortana model, but it won't be me, you know that, right?" Yeah, right, who cares?

John does. I do. For the same reason that, say, if a pet got killed but family members said "don't worry, we'll buy you a new one." That's them missing the point entirely. It's even worse, if, say, a friend died but said friend could be cloned, only the clone would have no memories, a different personality, etc. Individuals are the sum of their experiences. And that's why we'd have every right to be pissed off if Cortana 2.0 showed up in H5 with the claim that "I'm just the same" and the writers expected us to swallow that. Not that I'm counting on that happening, but hopefully you see the point.

Cortana is nothing but code that adepted to various data inputs. Another Cortana model will do the same.

Those imputs would be different though. True, the code would be the same. But that new version wouldn't have any of the same experiences, and would therefore be a different individual.

Caring so much more for a couple of close friends over the lives of billions in the definition of selfish.

And pretty much the definition of human nature.

The game just never convinced me I should care about Cortana's death other than she will no longer be there to talk at me in future games, which I really, really don't care about.

The same way the game never really convinced me that I should care about faceless characters. From an emotional standpoint, I don't know how you could get invested in them, because they're not characters, they're not even redshirts, they're statistics. From a logical standpoint, I don't see how you could care about them because the consequences are irrelevant in the scope of the game, they're just to add to the 'epicness.' From a real-world standpoint, then yes, I'd care too if a city got composed, even more so if I'd lost friends/family in the process (like Thorne did in Spartan Ops). But Halo, like most sci-fi in its genre, isn't the real world. The real world has no bearing on it. You seem to be looking at it the same way you'd see the real world. And yes, you've explained how, that you like to put yourself in a character's shoes, but I don't, and I don't appreciate the lazy writing of using Earth as a crutch for emotional or narrative investment rather than giving me a bona fide reason to care.

But, like I said, if you cared more for Cortana than the human species, you're one of the people with incredibly easily influenced psyches.

No, I'm one of those people who appreciates good writing. Halo is fiction. Everything on this thread has been fiction. I do not read fiction in a non-fiction sense because that defeats the purpose of it. I do not approach fiction as I would the real-world or non-fiction. From your comments, it seems that you do. Fine. You're welcome to it. But stop telling me I should care about faceless individuals as if they're real, living people.

Just a sign of basic intelligence to me. Maybe my career as an economist, forced to constantly be bashing my head against the brick wall that is common human knowledge pathetically mired in baseless feelings, has made me an entirely different thinker than the average person (if you two can be said to even represent the average person) then fine. To each his own, I guess, but it's hard to deny that my way is logically and morally superior, if your arguments here are any indication.

Logically, maybe. Morally, under no circumstances. If your arguments are any indication, you're the type of person that prefers to see the forest rather than the trees. And I've seen that kind of 'morality' played out, and experienced it too often.

I hope you apply more free thought when voting, or you are really, really a part of the biggest problems of mankind.

Luckily I do apply free thought. And I also apply common decency, so as arrogant and moronic as that statement is, I'll employ my own morality and not stoop to such lows.

This was a whole lot better when we were discussing books.

Pretty much.

Honorverse

Oh, and she has the obnoxiously cute ultra-special empathic animal companion too, so there's that.

Is that a pro or a con? More thinking pro, but that's just me.

The Lost Fleet

..Bloody hell, that series is built around a Mary Sue too?

Eh, not really. More as in the "stand up good guy" who does the right thing, fights for the right side, etc. Overall, there's nothing really wrong with that I guess - I consider Dauntless (the first book in the series) a good book in that it sets out to do something (military sci-fi, good vs. evil with only a few shades of grey), but isn't really my thing as a result.

Other

Right up to that last chapter, the book had a definite science fiction feel to it. The last chapter loops that around and flat-out tells the reader "Well, if aliens are possible, vampires can't be that far out." It feels less like an organic development and more like David Weber trying to prove a literary point.

Fair enough. If it does indeed come out of left field like that, I'd probably be peeved too.

I recently read "Surely You're Joking, Mister Feynman", and I laughed out loud at his observations about learning Japanese. He found that not only is the language incessantly polite, but incredibly dependent on context and hierarchy. So, ask someone if you can look at his garden. If he's a peer, you ask him "May I gaze upon your (Fancy word for a garden)". If he's more important than you, you ask something like "May my eyes drift across your (Fancier word for a garden)."

Nice point. It's quite interesting.

I mean that sincerely actually. I remember reading Planet Word by Stephen Fry, how the argument was made that languages are shaped by the needs of the society. E.g. the Inuit (or similar people) have over 10 words for different types of snow whereas English has to be more descriptive (e.g. we might say "wet snow," dry snow," "patchy snow," etc.), whereas they'd have a single word for each description.

So with the Japanese, I could see that making sense. With a heirarchal society at least as far back as the shogunate period, I could see the language mimicking the nature of the society it stems from.

I've read tons of books where, in the future, the human "spirit" is easily converted into data and copied. Some of the best examples of this are 'Pandora's Star' and 'Altered Carbon'. Because the human spirit is easily restored, individual life has very little value and the authors make huge amounts of changes to human society and how humans interact with each other to accommodate this paradigm shift.

Eh, I tend to be put off from books like that. If death is made irrelevant, then the reason to care about the characters tends to go the same way.

[TheEconomist]

His actions are not out of character in past games.

Like I said, that may be the case. I can't remember. Regardless of whether there was a progression, as each installment having a bit more of it, is irrelevant to my argument. I'm saying it doesn't make sense and isn't handled well once it gets to Halo 4, which is all I can comment on at the moment.

Getting a comrade in a good sense of mind is human nature.

Not at the expense of the mission. Soldiers are trained to let nothing interfere with the mission, especially if that mission is so important.

Getting Cortana in a good sense of mind would help in a utilitarian sense as well.

True, to an extent. She is quickly losing her usefulness. But, again, not my point. I'm not saying he isn't useful, I'm saying she isn't valuable, again, because she is easily replaced. She is a tool with an inbuilt replication mechanism. No good to get all sentimental about a single adaptation of her.

From a narrative sense, it's a weak McGuffin that was used before.

True. It is, but the entire Cortana story arch is weak. Cortana is a copy of a real personality, but focused on analytics and tactics. We're told that there can be plenty of new Cortana models, but it wouldn't be her, because the machine would have "grown up" under different circumstances, It's the old nature vs nurture debate. Fine. I can go with that, but then the game proceeds to unravel all of the already little importance of that by Cortana solving her problem on her own. The only reason there isn't some happy ending is because they come up with some bullshit reason for an AI to unwittingly weaken itself to such an extent through splitting and copying that is is basically suicide. No matter how you look at it, this is sloppy storytelling.

The Forerunners created the threat, but their finger's never been on the trigger in the games.

Irrelevant. Didact proved himself to be crazy and maniacal, Forerunner technology has been proven to be dangerous. In fact, that's the focal point of the game.

All the while never specifying what his plans actually are. And yes, he does show what those plans are at Ivanoff, but again with the whole Earth thing, it feels more like the plot is making the UNSC forces there weak for the sake of plot then coming naturally for the plot (by virtue of the list made above).

So, basically a video game plot twist? Oh the shockz. Didn't you defend the rebuilding of the Dominion in some previous topic, or was that someone else?

I don't like 343 telling me to care about Earth for the sole reason of "because it's Earth."

If you care about the story and the characters, you should care about Earth regardless. I'll grant you that the story is told shittily, but that means that you should care about nothing, not some AI plot line with more holes than I care to keep pointing out.

That's your perogative, but Halo isn't the setting for it.

Yes it is. Every video game setting is the place for it. Halo is told from a first person perspective, and 90% has to do with what you make this one person do. The place to not get involved in this way is a setting with shit tons of characters interacting with each other in complex relationships, but even then, you do, subsonsciously. Even if you have no choice and the character keeps going against your wishes. You're doing it as well or you wouldn't even care about anything in a game or a movie. I'm just being more proactive about it, I think.

So it makes sense to me that while he's focussed on stopping the Didact, he's also worried about someone he considers to be a close friend.

It makes sense from a narrative stand point, but not a realistic, logical standpoint. Just like Jim Raynor being so in love and faithful to Kerrigan as the Queen of Blades makes zero sense. You can stretch the truth enough for a narrative sense, but think about it even remotely, and the ficade crumbles away.


As for your definitions, I know all of them. What I'm saying is that

1) Halo 4's characters are not colorful. In fact, they're nothing, They serve no purpose. Other than the Didact, the only other characters I can remember have any kind of presence have been there since the beginning of H1.
2) When getting in-depth with a setting (i.e. not just passively playing through a FPS campaign) complex, developed characters with realistic intentions, motivations, and personalities is far more preferable to characters that are simply colorful. If they can't be both colorful and developed, then they're nothing but plot pieces for the video game story, which is undeserving of analysis post game play.

The same reason I've got more upset over the deaths of friends/family/pets then when as I speak, people all over the world are dying horribly in conditions I can't imagine.

No, that part I understand. This situation is completely different. As a solider, you are trained and, indeed, have to be something different. I would be fine with Chief regretting the death of Cortana more than the human lives. I said that in my first post. The problem is that this keeps getting in the way of his mission to save mankind, which is not okay. If the whole Cortana problem were introduced then left alone until the end where she died, I think that would be perfectly fine. Like I said, I can sympathize with MC getting a bit irrational about the death of the closest thing to a human companion he's ever had. What is out of character and makes no sense given what we know about what the character is is what I've been arguing.

The problem I keep seeing is that, like you said, you're an outside of observer to the characters, so you never try to really get in their head. You're only superficially (at least compared to my method) in the shoes of the character, so you worry a whole lot less about the realism or logic of that characters motivations and more about the narrative of the character's development. That's what I've been thinking was the difference and why I kept pushing to get to the truth. I feel like I understand you better than that's what I've trying to do.

And while it would be more 'right' to mourn those that the Didact killed (certainly not billions, but whatever)

I said the Didact had the potential the kill billions, not that he did. He actually killed very little.

For the same reason that, say, if a pet got killed but family members said "don't worry, we'll buy you a new one." That's them missing the point entirely.

Yes, again, I allowed for that in my original argument. However, Cortana's experiences are basically combat experiences which doesn't make her living. But, again, that's not my point. It's a personal preference and ideology, not an argument. I'm not going to give it anymore time because it seems to be confusing the both of you. For the somethingth time, I'm not arguing she has less value because she lacks the uniqueness or intelligene to be her own AI, I'm arguing she has less value because she is easily replaceable, as shown in the games events, regardless of the talking points. I did, however, make the point that a human personality made from experiences is more valuable than an AI personality made from experiences.

And pretty much the definition of human nature.

Well then apparently I have evolved into something entirely superior to humans. When I rule the world, I will remember this and take human nature complete hypocrisy into consideration as I annihilate all of you.

Translation: I have more faith in human nature, intelligence, and actions than that, even if it is an emotional impulse to be so selfish.

I don't know how you could get invested in them, because they're not characters, they're not even redshirts, they're statistics.

I was invested in them. I couldn't care less whether anything or anyone in the universe survived. I care very little about Halo other than the music and the game play.

But, again, I'm saying that if I were to care, I would care about the motivations of main character since I'm putting myself in his place. In his place, I would care more about human lives.

You're talking about the narrative from an outsider perspective, like I've always had a feeling you did and talked about in this post, so we're coming at this from entirely different directions, and reaching entirely different end points, as to be expected.

But stop telling me I should care about faceless individuals as if they're real, living people.

I'm not saying you should care. I'm saying you should care just as little about Cortana as you do these people.

Also, Halo is not good fiction. There's more contradictions and logical fallacies that if it weren't one of the best selling video games of all time with a somewhat coherent main story, then it would be universally panned by critics and readers alike.

----

This was a whole lot better when we were discussing books.

Well then someone PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE read some good sci fi like Revelation Space or Pandora's Star so we can talk about that. I guess we could all also agree to read a book and then talk about it, Book Club style.

Eh, I tend to be put off from books like that. If death is made irrelevant, then the reason to care about the characters tends to go the same way.

True, and I understand your point here, but the novels tend to focus on the suffering that such a situation cause in the individuals and the ways in which this makes those more wealthy, with more access to reincarnation more powerful. It also tends to have some overarching enemy that is a threat to all of mankind instead of just the individual, which I care more about anyways. Very, very rarely do I care about the internal whining of a character.

[Hellgrinder]

Long-overdue bump.

I'm currently starting Revelation Space again, and I've found it much easier to get into now then I did when I first started reading it when I was 15. Perhaps I needed to read "Pushing Ice" first, to get used to Reynolds' style.

I'm also reading Esrever Doom - one of the Xanth novels. Sweet googly moogly, I knew there would be puns, but never that many.