: While it's never established if it's in fact the truth, the Primordial's
: testimony in the Forerunner Trilogy suggests the Forerunners turned on the
: Precursors in the first place because ancient humanity became their
: favorites and the Forerunners feared (probably quite rightly) being wiped
: out first. If the Forerunner version of the Mantle is a sort of
: imperialistic condescension to the 'lesser' species, the Precursor's
: version feels like a chaotic evil 'the world is our sandbox and these
: people our action figures to break as we please'.

I think the thing to remember about Precursors is that they're capricious. They've devolved themselves, they've allowed themselves to go extinct, and they've generally taken many forms over the years. Halopedia describes them as having "Infinite forms, many voices, and a singular purpose." And if my memory serves me perfectly, they allowed themselves to go extinct so as to find out what death is like.

So, I think it's obvious that they chose to pass the mantle to Humanity because we are omnivores, and therefore better suited to running the galaxy than the herbivore Forerunner.

... What? You were expecting something rational? You were expecting something reasonable? You expected some nonsense about how all sapient species are suited to inherit the Mantle because *Mumblemumblemumble*? Hell no. Look at the description above. Look at how the Precursors have always been described. Powerful, yes. Knowledgeable, yes. Utterly alien and unfathomable? Yeah. Capricious? That above all else.

We're omnivores who may or may not have evolved on a different rock than the herbivore Forerunner. That gives us a different impetus than the Forerunner. Maybe there's no deep philosophical and egalitarian underpinning of the Mantle. Maybe the important part of the Mantle isn't that Living Time is preserved, but in how it is preserved, and how those who are supposed to protect it fail.

Maybe the Forerunner were never at fault. Maybe the Precursors decided that the Forerunner experiment had been run, and now it was time to see how a slightly different species would handle the Mantle. Maybe in a million years, they'd wipe away Humanity and give the Mantle to the Grunts. Again, not for any moral reason we'd recognize. Just to see what would happen.