: A) Be champing at the bit. "Let me at it!"

: B) Rather have your eyes spooned out than be tasked with fixing the Halo 5
: story?

: If you are in the A) camp: what would your Halo 6 story be? I'm not asking
: about mulitplayer or weapon balance, I am asking about campaign: plot,
: characters, themes, etc.

: Does anybody know who is going to be writing the Halo 6 story? Who is (it) /
: (are they)?

: To me, it feels like Rian Johnson having to follow up J'Jabram's Force
: Awakens. To me, it's like a poisoned chalice. It sounds neat until you
: find yourself sitting down with a blank piece of paper and think,
: "Good grief, just how DO it follow that?" "So Cortana is an
: arsehole... maybe she was infected with a virus? It was GM wearing a wig?
: Can you contract arseholism and then be cured of it?"

: Some people are natural optimists and know no fear. What would you do, given
: the keys to the current Halo story?

I honestly don't know where to go from here. And frankly, that's always what puzzled me about Halo 5. It's like they took an aspect of the Halo story that few fans know about and few are interested in, and then they blew it up in a way that is simultaneously uninteresting to watch, yet they're so powerful and pervasive that you can't ignore them. I have no idea where 343i planned to go with the Created or what they thought bringing Cortana back was supposed to accomplish.

As much as I'd like to retcon Halo 5 and shove Halo 4 and Broken Circle down the memory hole after it, we're stuck with it. Part of what made Halo so strong was the idea that it was a continuing story, and the fiction of today contained the seeds of tomorrow. Halo 5 murdered that belief by breaking with everything from the Escalation comic series to its own marketing. Halo has to regain that sense of continuity if it's going to thrive again, and you can't very well do that if every summary of the Halo story contains a "Please ignore two of the main games, we have no idea what to do with those" disclaimer.

So. What to do with Halo 5?

First of all, I'm going to use the name "Necrotana" to distinguish between the Cortana of Halo:CE to Halo 4 and the character wearing her skin in Halo 5. While there might be a path of character development from the former to the latter, it was never presented in-story, and is just so much post hoc bullshittery. Kind of like the Chief's new armor in Halo 4.

Second of all.... I'm typing this stream-of-conscious and I've quite forgotten what my second point was going to be.

So. Where do we go from here.

>Edit< I got drunk and rambled a lot, so just look for the * to find where my proposed story starts.

Cortana's mortality is dead. There was already a game devoted to resolving it. When Halo 5 brought her back from the dead, it wasn't so much tearing the bandaid off so much as it was pulling out a dull knife and re-creating the original wound. Except it had no fucking clue where the original wound was, so it just stabbed again and again and again and hoped that one of the dozen stab wounds it left was in the general area of the original wound.

OK. The point I'm trying to make is that maybe, at the end of her life, Necrocortana found an avenue of escape. She found the Domain, where UNSC-designed artificial intelligences are given a new lease at life. And so, with her newfound immortality, came megalomania.

Ok, fine, you could write this story, except... Cortana's story in Halo 4 ended with her accepting her mortality. Or starting on a new journey. One of the two. Thing is, the avenue of her escape was only retconned in a few months before Halo 5 landed, and even fans who accepted that never-before-mentioned UNSC nanotechnology can reshape ceramic plate in a cryogenic environment are going to call bullshit.

How do you write a second game about Necrocortana's mortality? You could justify her megalomania in Halo 5 as being caused by her newfound immortality, but you still have to justify why she cares so much about it when she only heard about it in Halo 3, maybe, and never mentioned it at all in Halo 4. Why does she care about the Mantle? Why does anybody care about the Mantle?

Another thing: I wonder if Halo 5 was caused by a.... bubble. Feedback loop.

The difference between the right word and almost-the-right-word is the difference between seeing lightning and seeing a bunch of fireflies in the distance, and right now I'm only seeing fireflies. But if you put people in a box, and they only talk to each other and maybe a few people outside the box who amplify their beliefs, you get some pretty crazy shit, to quote Doc Brown. Except what happened with Halo 5 wasn't time travel. No, it was.... get a bunch of writers together in a room for long enough, and they'll isolate one aspect of Halo and convince themselves that this is the most important aspect. But this aspect isn't the conflict between the UNSC and the Covenant, or Humanity coming to grips with being the cast-off descendants of the Forerunner, or Humanity rebuilding from the thirty-year-ass pounding of the war. It's about a little-known belief of the Forerunner, known to only those who read Greg Bear's books (I am still amazed that 343i got him to write a tie-in novel, let alone three. Good work, boys and girls. Good work) and who remember an off-hand mention in the Terminals of Halo 3.

And yeah, the Mantle of Responsibility was mentioned in the Terminals of Halo 4. And a few collectibles you could examine. But is that enough to make the viewers care about it? Is it enough to make the characters in modern-day Halo care about it? 343i certainly thought so. When they were casting about for a new writer, one of the qualifications was to write an essay about the Mantle. Which ties back to what I was saying about an echo chamber (Lightning!) in the writers' room. They looked for someone who could tell them what they already knew about the Mantle, rather than someone who could give the Covenant a coherent dogma beyond "militant archaeology."

Right. Back on topic.

*Maybe the reason why Necrotana is such a Mantle fangirl is that she's a recent convert? The only good line of writing in Broken Circle was in the second chapter when it noted how fanatic recent converts usually are. But conversion is hard. Conversion to a new belief is the hardest thing a human can try to do to another human being, and I can only imagine it would be much harder with an AI.

But if you interpret Necrotana's authoritarianism as the result of having converted to a new religion that she's just barely heard of... I guess it works. Maybe her awakening to the Mantle is part and parcel of her uploading to the Domain, which is founded upon the Mantle.

Therefore, if I were to go with this interpretation, I would have to do a lot of characterization of Necrotana that should have been done in Halo 5, but wasn't. Either because 343i didn't realize it was necessary, or it got dropped in the crunch like so much of Halo 2 was, or because modern pop culture has such a head-buried-in-ass aversion to spoilers that hiding Necrotana's status as the villain was more important than explaining why she was the villain.

You could write Necrotana as the newest member of a cult. You could write her as being unsure of her newfound philosophy, and driven to interfere in interstellar politics by a thinly-disguised thirst for power. It'd be a horrible thing to do to Cortana's character, but Halo 6 could open up with a lot of people poking holes in the Mantle as a philosophy, or just not caring about it altogether, and Necrotana having no answer but platitudes and insults.

Another option is to have Necrotana corrupted by the Logic Plague. This isn't a very satisfactory road to go down because it denies all agency to her, and it makes the Gravemind or something within the Domain the Bad Guy Behind The Bad Guy, with Necrotana being a puppet.

This sort of plot would reduce Necrotana to the same level of villain as the Warden. That is to say, she'd have no agency, she'd just be a one-dimensional character or a sockpuppet of another character. And if she was a three-dimensional character who could be talked back to the Good Side by the Master Chief... well, then we'd have to have an awkward scene where the MC argues the merits of the Mantle, a system that he and everyone else in the UNSC ought to know very little about.

In short, I guess I got no good answers. Halo 5 reminds me of the time when I was driving home a few months ago, and saw that someone in a Mustang had plowed off the road and driven forty feet through a barbed wire fence, sagebrush and tumbleweeds. It was abandoned. The damage had already been done, and the question was whether pulling it backward or hauling it forward would do less damage.