: Sometimes I think that people get the idea that Spartan training was just
: Hogwarts with guns. These are child soldiers and that's actually a very
: serious problem today in many parts of the world. It doesn't look good
: when you have little American kids idolize and envy these children. Today,
: they're taken from the clutches of their families, abused and
: indoctrinated, and trained to kill. In the context of Halo it's all of
: that plus spearheading an empire's oppression of its populace.

: Star Wars: The Clone Wars, at least when you consider the Grand Army of the
: Republic, is quite tame when you compare it to Halo and its United Nations
: Space Command. Imperialism is merely a product of the clones' actions and
: not the ongoing reason for their existence like the Spartans were.
: Furthermore, every little thing about the clones wasn't whittled down into
: a broken husk as Chief Mendez did to John and his companions. They were
: encouraged to be individuals as a part of a whole. Spartans were abused,
: mentally and physically, into becoming what they were ultimately charged
: to do.

: Such a story should be marketed to young adults who need an insight into our
: own fucked up world with science fiction, not children who need lessons in
: right and wrong in a seemingly tame and entertaining setting. I just don't
: think seeing grown adults abusing children is the right thing to do.

Of course SPARTAN-II training wasn't Hogwarts; it was much safer. There weren't eldritch monstrosities and malevolent forces lurking around every corner and the only people being killed or seriously maimed were the instructors (until you get to the augmentations, that is). But in all seriousness you make some good points and like I said before, the setting is not without its problems. I certainly don't believe 343i would actually try to pull it off even if they entertained the idea.

That said, it's obvious a series like this wouldn't be targeted at little kids. I admit the phrasing "kids" was vague - I was mainly thinking about early teens and older who can already grasp more serious or "mature" themes and understand morality on a basic level; the same age group that's the expected target audience for shows like the Clone Wars*.

But since my original idea had less to do with selling Halo to kids and more with a cartoon about SPARTAN-IIs, you could as well market it at older teens/young adults too; the substance of the show would actually benefit from this as you show more of the brutality and delve deeper into the moral facets of the story. It's just that the setup lends itself very well for a cartoon, as a live-action production with child actors tackling the same subject matter would be much less appealing, both because very few people like to watch a story driven by child actors and even fewer want to watch actual kids getting beat up. Live action would simply make the whole thing too visceral.

However, if we went with the preteen/early teen audience for the sake of argument (or in this case, 343i wanting to win over new consumers), it would be a given they wouldn't be showing the worst parts and would cherry-pick more "tolerable" scenarios, though I'm not sure how much they'd have to cut or alter to get away with it. If it meant completely sanitizing the setting then it wouldn't be worth it, but you could get far by simply skipping the explicitly brutal parts and mostly focusing on the era after the boot camp, once the status quo had been fully established. If they showed the abductions and boot camp at all, it would be extremely selective - I doubt the beatings with electric batons would make the cut.

We wouldn't be seeing 99% of the training anyway since a large portion of it would consist of drills with endless rote repetition of simple actions, waiting around for things to happen, etc. Instead, while there'd definitely be creative training scenarios, the focus should be on the characters and their interactions and the few moments of fun or random mischief that are suggested to have happened. And that's my other point: you don't need to glorify the overarching circumstances to root for the characters. The vignettes from the novels to which I refer always struck me as that: how this extended and close-knit family acts and copes with this grim setting and make the most of it. Other than the iffy part where you have kids/teens with guns in a military setting, you can leave the whole big picture vague and general. And again, as pointed out in above posts, the whole training thing could just be one scenario with the other being the Covenant war, which is much less morally problematic (apart from the whole genocide thing going on).

It also depends on what kind of light the agency behind the Spartans is cast in. The Clones in SW are an indoctrinated slave army sent to die by the millions with no individual rights whatsoever. If you look at that from Travissian angle you couldn't have a show like TCW either. Are the Spartans really instruments of state terror or are they a last resort to prevent Space Armageddon from happening? Neither side was truly innocent there, unless "I don't like taxes" qualifies as a valid excuse for nuking an arcology. People tend to romanticize resistance movements but a lot of what we've seen in Halo points at the Spartans' prime targets being less noble freedom fighters and more like power-hungry African/South American warlords in space running their own little military juntas, or fanatics that rival al-Qaeda or ISIS (and surpass them many times over in kill counts). It goes without saying that the UNSC is far from innocent either, it's just that "an empire's oppression of its populace" is a very dramatic and simplistic way to describe a complex situation. As for any real-world parallels, I doubt seeing a futuristic, highly organized sci-fi military training transhuman cyborg commandoes would make teens line up to sign up with a Liberian warlord.

I just don't think a Halo property should be entirely divorced from Halo's moral muddiness and uncomfortable parts. If you make it about something completely different and new there's a good chance it'll just be a generic kids' show with a Halo coat of paint haphazardly slapped on it. Meanwhile, Spartans are Halo's principal actors and fundamentally interwoven with the fiction. As tragic as their inception was I'm confident it could be done in a presentable manner, though nothing short of major retcons could ever make it Disney material. And if you want to shelter kids from everything someone might take offense at you're stuck with fluffy super happy fun land shows like My Little Pony, the likes of which I can't really see working in a Halo setting.

Then again, this is all hypothetical since a show like this will never happen. 343i likes to play things safe and inoffensive which is why they've swept the verse's more troublesome aspects under the rug in favor of morally unchallenging run-of-the-mill GI Joe heroics (they basically disowned the Nylund-era EU with Karen Traviss' books: "Hey, everyone! Halo's not really morally gray at all! We fixed all the bad things that happened and made all the evil meanies get their comeuppance! And everyone who wants can be a Spartan now!")

* I'm basing most of this on what I've heard people say about the show. I've only seen a couple of episodes and a few clips (like a montage of all the violent/dark stuff that happens in it) - the series never really hooked me as I'm wholly averse to the SW Prequel era and the characters didn't interest me all that much. But it tends to come up in discussions as an exemplar of a kids' show handling mature topics.