: If you've made it this far, thank you for reading.

I mean this honestly and sincerely: this is the best post I've read here in a long time. Fabulous.

People often give Bungie a free pass on the muddle the story was through H1-H3, including the novels. Contradictory, tangential, ephemeral, and sometimes nonsensical. Also, entertaining.

The Covenant as a whole is a myth. A non-starter. An impossibility. It is a hegemony that should have split along stratifications as soon as H3 ended. The Covenant "loyalists" or whatever they were in H4 need to be cast aside completely...they are an anachronism that needs to be left behind (haha!) in order to present a more nuanced (and realistic) depiction of what the Covenant is (or was): a loosely bound collection of 6+ species with entirely different values and goals.

This mean complexity. Real, hard complex interactions and messy motivations. Tough to do, requiring a huge amount of exposition AND consumer patience/commitment. The obvious model would be Martin's Game of Thrones universe.

I ask you, would the Halo universe, post-Convenent collapse, be any less Machiavellian?

OK, ok. Acknowledged. This is a video game we are talking about. Alright. But what about the novels? About the general narratives of the game?

I believe 343 can do better than H4. We'll see.