I've been following your channel since 2010, back when I was "BoBsPfhorever77" & I gotta say, this video impressed me & I've rewatched it three times now. Hope to see more of these type of videos, man. Cheers.
Very nice video. I liked where you were taking this and agreed with what you had. I appreciate that you respect Halo enough to recognise and give credit to the human intentions behind it. It's a very deliberately constructed work rich in fine detail, all of which was considered to work towards a complete vision. You *are* right that Halo is very concerned with the heroic. Only I would go further. The science fiction setting is more than a contrivance to sell a more believable knightly hero. It's all a necessary setup for a more heroic existence for the entire human race. They clearly wanted to take the heroic out of legend, history, and the imagination and make us consider what it would take to *make it real*. The names and imagery invoked from a variety of historic moments and movements suggest a continuity, in which all greatness of the past is collected, remembered, and refined into the state that exists in Halo. A warrior in "Spartan" armour, wielding and taking orders from "Cortana". Cortana who, in addition to being named after a medieval weapon of legend, shares a role with and bears a deliberate resemblance to Athena. She physically sprang from the mind of her progenitor fully formed (she was created by cloning and destroying a copy of Dr Halsey's Brain) and she is a Goddess of wisdom and armed resistance. Cortana as an "FPS" character is to you what the idea of Athena was to Greece. She channels your vital impulses towards strategy and vision. Beyond this all prominent UNSC warships have names taken from English poetry, a finer and more advanced civilisation which could also succeed in war and the pursuit of high and grand visions. The constant progression and evolution over time suggests continuity. I'm not disagreeing with you here. I'm agreeing with you harder than you dare take your own premise. They don't just want you to see heroism as more plausible, grounded, or "realistic". Halo is a picture of heroism as a living force running through history, which can take on different forms across cultures but it's all manifestations and evolutions of that same force. The Master Chief isn't just meant to remind you of heroic figures of the past, he's their (perhaps indirect) heir. The Heroic Tradition is severed in our own time. But Halo is a vision of it coming back. Halo is Bungie asking us "What would a heroically oriented humanity look like? What would its champion look like? What would a heroic humanity do? What would a champion of a heroic humanity do? What creates heroism and what does heroism demand?" The heroic is severed, and for humanity the age of Halo is, ironically enough, an AGE OF RECLAMATION. If you aren't a loreguy, that's what THE COVENANT call this period of time, from their own perspective. Humanity's darkest hour is also that in which it finds itself again. This is not a coincidence. "What creates heroism?" The Master Chief is a hero and he was born of NECESSITY. Taken and CULTIVATED (not tortured or abused) to be what humanity needed. His existence was not a tragedy. The tv show said that because it was made by distinctly out of touch (due to a lack of NECESSITY in their lives) people who don't and can't get it. The Master Chief did not become a hero by repressing his humanity. He becaming a hero by growing into it. He was able to become MORE human than everyone else. He is SUPERHUMAN. The training of Spartans was all about GAMES. Indulging in the joy of fully throwing oneself into challenge and overcoming which is denied to all of us now. A point which is repeated over and over again in the novels is that the Spartans are probably the most fulfilled humans alive. Their lives are full of purpose and they are able to leverage every perfected part of themselves against organic problems which are all part of a greater life defining struggle they care about. That is self-actualisation. That is completion of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. The Master Chief does not need therapy. He has a perfect life. He is a perfected man. He has rediscovered the highest form of human existence, the heroic. Halo is Bungie saying that your desire to play games is a trace of the heroic in you. The "power fantasy" is more than superficial. The open endedness of Halo's "combat" is an open problem which invites you to take stock of all you have and all that you can think of and do, and get the thing done. This drawing upon resources to overcome IS what power is about. It is why we love games, they allow us to exercise some power and agency when circumstances otherwise deny us the chance to apply ourselves and win.
Halo is a story about individuals and humanity as a whole finding themselves again through brutal necessity and the holistic experience of violent overcoming. And this "finding" consists of a reconnection to a forgotten glory. Our lost inheritence. On the surface level this is the legacy of the forerunners. Humanity's ancient ancestors who built an empire in the stars. And the part which isn't said out loud and directly at any point, humanity is reconnecting with the heroic. The humanity of the UNSC sees itself as the heir to Sparta, Chivalry, the British Empire, the entire ongoing tradition of heroic struggle to live and go higher. And it's not ALL spooky Indo European war cult. The Master Chief's name is an allusion to the *other* great spiritual strain of our culture, which for a long time was fused quite comfortably with the heroic. The Master Chief's name can be taken as a bible reference. Type it in and you'll get something. John 1 17. " For the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ. " What does that mean? The protagonist's name refers to sacred inheritance. In this one line I believe the key idea we are meant to perceive is that it is possible to have the law but not be complete or whole. Which leads to the other side of the game's engagement with human tradition. Humanity have discovered themselves and are becoming excellent and complete *despite* not really understanding their place in the world. They are in the process of correcting themselves the natural way with incomplete knowledge. By walking the path of truth that they were made for they are proceeding towards their destiny even as they don't know it. A deliberate detail visible throughout the games is that humanity's architecture and design tendencies look distinctly forerunner. Utilitarian grey shapes with hard, straight edges, in contrast to the rounded natural shapes and ornamentation of the covenant. Given enough time humanity would just recreate forerunner civilisation if not interrupted. THE COVENANT, by contrast, know far more about the history of the Galaxy. At least some of them do. They have the law, but not grace or truth. They know where it all leads, they know that humanity are the natural custodians and heirs of the greatest achievements in the history of sentience, but they don't like the truth, they don't like the way things are supposed to be within frames which they have already accepted as sacred. The most obvious and controversial point to make from here is that the prophets are playing the role of the hebrews in the new testament. They are vicious hypocrites who want to destroy the truth because it dis-privileges them. But it's more complex than that. The covenant contains many castes and peoples of varying dispositions and beliefs. Some of whom we are meant to see as *better* than others. The elites are humanity's more lost or deluded mirror. Like the humanity of the UNSC they maintain a rich and dignified existence by remaining on a purposeful war-footing at all times. They profess allegiance to the covenant, but what lends them their nobility is the deeper trend which runs beneath and is manifested through their surface faith. They are another warrior tradition. If the Master Chief is both a Spartan and a Knight (warrior tradition manifesting in a christian influenced garb), The Elites are Islamic holy warriors (The Arbiter was originally named "The Dervish"), and like Islam, beneath the relatively new history of their beliefs and practices, older notions of the sacred were manifesting themselves. The Jihad is older than Islam. Persian cultures sharing a common root with the European tradition introduced this to the arabs. These branching traditions of sacred warfare, despite the fact they could find themselves aligned against each other, were spiritual kin. The elites were the members of the covenant most well primed to receive the truth of the world because they were already living so much of it. They were the *elites* of that society. The best. The ones living the most fully and in accordance with the nature of living beings of sentience, will, and intelligence. The Covenant are a collective which represents the entirety of Abrahamic tradition, gone more or less astray. And Halo does not say that it is all wrong. But what it does posit is the eternal truth of the heroic. One does not have to directly profess the heroic, but one cannot ignore its unending pull upon the human soul. The Spartans, the Romans, the Knight of Chivalry, the Colonial officer, the space warship captain and spartan of our potential future, they do not all profess the same specific things. None of them actually hold to rationalised and explicit professions of the heroic purely and explicitly as the heroic. But it manifested in each of them. They were compatible, they let it in and lived it, and so they were great. Halo is a great invitation, for those clever, informed, and open minded enough to see. It's asking you to see the heroic. To see it behind us in our past and beneath us as buried potential. When you play Halo you indulge in some basic truths. The world we live in now is boring. Conflict can be fun and satisfying. Great works and great tasks are enthralling. You can't really understand those who came before us, OUR forerunners who built OUR civilisation which we see all around us, until you really appreciate these ideas. And if you learn to appreciate them, then that's where the invitation comes in. What comes next, Reclaimer?
