: Er, Steffan brings it up, repeatedly. And Black Box's donor expressly says
: it's not Halsey's sole responsibility. You might want to try rereading. As
: for the "narrative", you're right. It's a narrative Parangosky
: expressly said she was going to cook up in Glasslands. Why are people
: acting surprised two books later still?

Yes Steffan brings it up, but it's pretty clear he feeds it into his pre-existing resentment towards the UNSC, that that isn't too surprising. And sure, BB's donor mentions it on the last page of the book, but aside from him Naomi is the only member of the UNSC who really raises the point. Does that seem appropriate to you? That every UNSC character, bar two, has this frankly unreasonable vendetta against Halsey that defies common sense and alienates a fan-favourite character?

: Okay, now you're just using words incorrectly. They didn't "retcon"
: anything. Do you honestly think that everything you write, if given to
: another person and read, would be taken the exact way you meant and
: intended? They don't like Halsey, so they see her comments in the journal
: as trying to absolve a guilty conscience. They're bringing their own
: baggage, yes, but that's not rewriting events in the universe.

I'll admit retconing wasn't the most elegant way to describe what Travis did with Halsey's diary. However the approach she took to characterising Halsey, namely beating the reader over the head shouting "HALSEY IS EVIL, YOU SHOULD DESPISE HER", doesn't so much make it seem like she's trying to convey and opinion but to assert a fact. If we were to play along with this characterisation and accept it as fact, this would affect the sincerity of Halsey's Diary, in a manner very much akin to retconning.

: It's a smaller story. To take your logic to its stupid extreme, "I don't
: watch films like The King's Speech, because the main character's flaw took
: the whole movie to get through. I want things to explode and it's a bad
: story if things don't."

Small stories are fine if they manage to get the audience to care about the characters and invest in the stakes, in my opinion MD didn't. Frankly, the core story line of Steffan finding out what happened to his daughter seems like an artificially constructed melodrama, a Traviss thought bubble "wow what if a Spartan II met their parents". Again, I'm not saying this is a story unworthy of being told, I just don't think it's substantial enough to carry the weight of an entry in a main line Halo series. The same goes for Pious Inquisitor arc; there's a clear disconnect between the importance and stakes the book places on it, vs what any consumer of the previous extended Halo Universe would expect.

: Why does 'pushing the series forward' require returning to the same stories
: repeatedly? The Halo universe is vast—if your definition of "pushing
: things forward" is it has to involve Chief or progress story elements
: from the games, I guess the entire Forerunner trilogy, Halo Wars, and ODST
: have been massive wastes for you. Sorry, I guess.

I don't have an issue with smaller scale stories when they're presented in the right format. My disappointment comes from the fact that we only really get a new Halo novel once a year, and so I was hoping for something that had it's sights set a little higher than telling a glorified Evolutions story.

PS belittling people and their opinions never helps your argument, and no I thought the Forerunner Trilogy, Halo Wars etc were great.