: Fair point. Wearing the armor until you die is kind of what the Arbiter is
: all about- suicidal mission and all. However, I can also see shedding the
: armor as a symbol of breaking free of tradition and ushering in a new era
: for all of the Covenant races. Thel's just progressive that way.

Hmm... From talking to a few folks about this now, that seems to be the key difference in perspective: I never saw him as progressive. I saw him as REgressive - returning to the old ways before the Prophets, pushing back to the old code of honor. So having Thel leave the Arbiter mantle behind to me is 343 overlooking the core character. :)

: For the record, I love the original Arbiter armor as well. Thel is my
: favorite Halo character and I don't feel like the post-war Halo material
: has done his character any justice.

Aye, it's one of the reasons that the Halo that is broadcast to me no longer registers as the actual Halo. Although it was always a franchise owned by a big corporation, I felt like Bungie wrestled within that structure to maintain the authenticity of Halo's core, at least in their own outputs. With them gone, I feel like it's going to be more akin to a popular comic franchise, where editors force unnatural arcs on the stories and the writers change every few issues, half of them unfamiliar with the characters and styles, and new artists come in trying to 'modernize' the costumes with a bunch of details. You have to wait years sometimes, but eventually a writer who loves and knows the characters come along and returns the characters to their natural behavior, and the costumes reset to the tested and true versions. I'm waiting for that to happen with Halo, I guess.