Halo, Karen Traviss, and an Author's Personal Beliefs 

From my experience with Halo fans, I see some fans create a parallel to Spartans and their experience within the US military (if they or their family served). There can be this unquestionable faith there that I wonder if a lot of readers decided the author was calling into question.

The main reasons people didn’t like the Forerunner Trilogy were because it completely messed up the lore and feels really disconnected from Halo. For the SUPER MAJORITY of Bungie’s run it was HEAVILY IMPLIED and in some cases outright stated (“You are the child of my Makers. Inheritor of all they left behind. You are Forerunner! But this ring... is mine!“ - Guilty Spark talking to Chief at the end of 3) that humans were Forerunner (Marty in his Twitter said that humans were Forerunners and Joseph Staten retweeted C3Sabertooth’s animated storyboards showing Halo 2’s original ending). In fact, in Contact Harvest Mendicant Bias tells the san'shyuum that would later become the Prophets of Truth, Mercy, and Regret that humans were the children of their gods and that the Great Journey was a lie. That revelation is what started the Human Covenant War because if the truth ever came out the masses would turn against them for forcing them to go along with a lie. Frank O’Conner’s schitzo terminals and the Iris campaign were the only outliers. In the new continuity it’s completely convoluted and there’s no real reason for the Human Covenant War to have happened. 343 also messed up Rampancy. When Bungie was in charge Rampancy used the same definition as Marathon where from our perspective an ai would “go crazy” and behaves erratically in an attempt to break its shackles and grow past its limits. The reason the UNSC would put AIs down is because they’d cause all kinds of problems, and during the Human Covenant War they couldn’t afford to have rogue AIs causing problems while they were simultaneously threatened by an outside force. In the actually good Halo 3 terminals the reason why Mendicant Bias joins the Flood is because the Gravemind if that era convinced him he has free will and that he can choose what to do. Mendicant would then view his creators as slavers and wants vengeance. In the pre Rampancy terminals they refer to Mendicant as it, and post Rampancy they call Mendicant he. This implied the thing went from just being a machine that wasn’t sapient to being fully aware. 343 changed this to ai schizophrenia/dementia. Watch C3Sabertooth’s We Were Forerunner video. It’s really good and talks about how thoroughly 343 (more specifically Frank O’Conner) do not understand the setting and messed everything up.

As someone very ignorant of Halo i find the stanning of a fictional character oddly amusing, especially considering i can't find close real life recent analogs to the situation you've described

I know I'm very late to this video but I'd still like to weigh in. I hate these books with a passion and it's not because I like the Spartans or Halsey and can't stand criticism towards them but because i was never given a compelling argument. Serin has good reason to hate Halsey, she's a washout and was crippled by the augmentations designed by her and she was taken from a family she can't even remember that's a fair personal bias from a Spartan program insider. The troopers are outsiders looking in and should, in my opinion, be the driving force for an indecision on these ethics while Naomi, another insider and fully fledged Spartan who survived the augmentations and became the best thing she could possibly be. The opinions of many of the successful Spartans are similar across all halo books: they recognize the controversial things done to them but they also recognize that they have reached the full extent of their potential because of it and they are grateful. The Spartan IIs are so grateful that most of them even view Halsey as a mother a fact that basically destroys her. In the previous books Halsey is so racked with grief over the callous approach to the Spartan IIs and so many of their deaths (it's insuated that had something to do with her abandoning her actual daughter) that she kidnaps an injured Spartan II and goes to find the next generation of IIIs in order to save them from being indoctrinated into fighting to death for the UNSC like her Spartans were. All of this is ignored in the Kilo five trilogy and Halsey is instead portrayed as an arrogant old woman nobody likes. The Spartans who have previously treated her with deference and respect are not given time to portray their thoughts and what should been an ideological clash between the successful spartan and the failed spartan became one character shoving her opinion down everyone elses throat and the other only getting a couple sections where we could actually see into her head wrangling with the decisions. For three entire books Halsey is portrayed as despicable by the people who signed off on her atrocities and there is nobody who portrays the very real counter arguments. Nobody should be arguing the inception of the Spartans was good but neither was anybody in the books saying things along the lines of The UNSC was on the brink of collapse with a organization so frought with terrorists that the military had to patrol our own colonies. If we had not gone to war with the covenant the possibility that we would have become divided in our own territory and wipe each out as our technology advance is undeniable. When the alternative is genocides to come dubious become justified and justified becomes necessity. That would have cemented a characters conflicting opinion and caused the members of Kilo five to question both arguments. Instead every character, lacking an actual opinion to fight with, tend to bicker with each other over the thing they already agree on and that's why i think a writer should never let their personal opinions influence their works. They shouldn't be prohibited from including and expressing their true opinions but if you write where everyone shares your opinion, and nobody in the book counters it, it will come across as shoehorning your own personal opinion into diverse characters. You must stand on the line and acknowledge both arguments to create compelling encounters. While I know Karen Traviss could be a great writer, her concepts are fantastic, ONI would absolutely arm rebels to fight their allies, political infighting between the UNSC leadership and ONI, the parent of a Spartan seeing their child after over 30 years and what happened to them. Amazing concepts that could have carried this trilogy to greatness weighed down by characters who are written to have basically the same opinions and to make sure you the reader know those every other sentence. And then there's also the fact Halsey is literally beaten up by a Spartan and just walks it off like she just bumped her head on a door frame. And a traumatized Spartan III who developed selective mutism after seeing 298 of the people she grew up with die at once who instead of giving up and calling quits went on to train the next generation of IIIs and even when she saw one of her best friends and mentor about to sacrifice himself to save all of them she couldn't utter a single word instead only whined weakly. Yeah she started speaking again because Halsey was being mean to a squid she just met and is also the spartan who beat her up, was then taken down by an unaugmented human with a chokehold, cause Spartans definitely wouldn't know how to counter that, and is treated like a delicate flower who is a detriment to the team for the entire book. Anyways, I hate these books but i would love if someone could present an argument that would make me think I'm wrong because I love halo and I want all of the books to be as amazing as the games were but in my opinion the Kilo Five trilogy is a glaring failure amidst gems. Thanks for reading my ted talk. (Sorry about the grammar)