: The majority of S4's are former ODSTs.

: ODST's in TFoR were described exactly as you mentioned.

: So, as I said before in my previous post, 343 did indeed portray them
: correctly, canon wise. It's just that many of us don't like that, which is
: ironic given how many of us criticize their handling of previous canon.

: The S2's went through painful augmentation and indoctrination.

: The S4's did not. They essentially undergo a painless and fail proof
: augmentation that the 2's did not, so when they come out of it they are
: like children showing off their new super powers, to where the 2's were
: not like that, because they grew up with them.

To add my voice to this, and both your other posts and Archillen's are a hard act to follow, I hate the Spartan IVs because nothing interesting is being done with them precisely because they're former ODSTs who went through a painless augmentation process. They feel like some fanfic author tried to upstage the earlier Spartan programs by combining all of Humanity's cool supersoldier projects and omitting all their drawbacks.

This is spelled out in their introduction in The Thursday War. Adult volunteers are being turned into Spartans because the augmentation process no longer requires puberty. Karen Traviss was clueless as usual and presented it as a moral choice, as ONI repenting of its earlier sins and casting out the evil influence of Dr. Halsey. But if you can apply the augments to adults in the post-war world, there is zero reason to use children. It's not a moral choice because the UNSC is sacrificing nothing by using adults.

The Spartan IIs were made to face a dire threat, but the project director took every step to protect the Spartans. She refused to have them neurologically brainwashed. She tested the augmentation procedure to the best of her clinical and budgetary ability. Every technology she could integrate into MJOLNIR to keep her adoptive children alive was deployed at the earliest opportunity.

The Spartan III program was a dark mirror of the previous generation, a look at what the S-IIs would have been if the project had been run with little regard for the subject's well-being. The need was great, but the S-IIIs were suicide troops. It's likely that little regard was given to their long-term health when the augmentation procedures were applied.

The Spartan IVs have none of this. They don't reflect on the needs and compromises that drove the previous programs, they're just here to kick ass and chew bubblegum.

The fact that the genetic markers are apparently no longer required feels like a cop-out. To me, the genes Halsey looked for never made the Spartans some kind of master race. Didn't even mean that they'd look alike. I just thought that the markers indicated "I am going to have exceptional cognitive abilities and a physiology robust enough to survive radical alterations to my muscular, skeletal, and nervous system." The absence of those markers and puberty should have consequences, because Spartan augmentations are extreme changes to the human body.

Meh. Maybe all the Fours were bit by radioactive spiders.

Getting back to the unprofessionalism of the Spartan IVs, it goes way beyond the casual nature of the ODSTs. We've gone over this again and again and again, but the Spartan IVs are incompetent. Palmer is singularly unfit for command and is a danger to other soldiers when she takes to the battlefield. Miranda Keyes was bad enough, but now they've cloned her and made an entire branch of supersoldiers from her DNA. Watching them in action, it feels like their success is owed more to the ineptitude of their enemies than any tactical ability.

Take care of that and tone down the dudebroity until they resemble Buck's squad, and I'll tolerate the Spartan IVs.