"We’ve set up a universe now that’s actually quite complex. We have gray areas where at the start of the Halo universe, everything was pretty black and white. We had a known bad guy that couldn’t be reasoned with. We had an opaque mystery in the Forerunners that couldn’t be penetrated. We had simple, almost binary motivations and everything was either good or evil. Now we have a galaxy in chaos and a lot of nuance in motivations and politics. We have Covenant with their own agenda, we have the beginning of an Elite civil war. We have a religion in tatters but perhaps in the beginning of a revival. We have Halsey whose past crimes have been exposed, but then so has the victory and good those crimes were in service of. And of course, we have the Master Chief dealing with the loss of a vital part of his own identity, and questioning his past. All of that stuff is feeding into the novels and comics and it’s all grist for the mill."

I'm sorry, Frankie, I just don't see it. I mean, sure, in the past the Covenant-UNSC conflict was pretty black and white but everything else, particularly in the novels, has always been gray.

Nylund's portrayal of Halsey was sympathetic, yes, but it's not like the moral ambiguities of her work were never acknowledged or explored. Or what about Ackerson, Parangosky and the Spartan-IIIs? How was that black and white? Or the UNSC and the Insurrection? Etc.

I just feel that the extreme continued emphasis on Halsey and "her" crimes ignores the bigger picture of this universe which has always been a very bleak place where extreme ends were used to justify extreme means all around. Not to mention the way more recent writers have apparently abandoned Halsey's characteristic guilt over her actions - something that drove her character over two entire novels. It doesn't feel like moral complexity is being introduced, it feels like this previously ambiguous character is being pushed into the villain mold for the sake of extra conflict.

And how about the way the Covenant (and Prometheans!) were robbed of their dignity and turned into mindless-looking and -sounding monsters just so there's no ambiguity that these are the bad guys? Would it not have helped sell the moral complexity angle if the enemies you were gunning down were actually believable as a diverse assortment of sentient beings with their own cultures and backgrounds, rather than a homogeneous mass of monstrosities?