: The Spartan II's, for better or worse, we're able to say a lot by essentially
: not saying much of anything at all. It was through their actions that they
: were defined, and THAT, is why for fans such as myself, made them special.

I think the problem lies in how most writers other than Nylund see the SPARTAN-IIs and also IIIs to an extent. See, Nylund didn't think the Spartan II project was the right thing to do, morality-wise. But he put all that aside and embraced, even celebrated, the SPARTANs as the people they are, not what they ought to be by the fairly narrow social standards of ordinary people. On the other hand, most other writers just can't get over how absolutely and completely terrible and condemnable the Spartan program was and how broken the Spartans are.

Unlike Nylund, other writers constantly emphasize the contrast between Spartans and normal people not to highlight how the Spartans are something above and beyond what any human could hope to be, but to pity and lament how humanity has been robbed from them. Often they'll just make their Spartan characters rebellious against the whole system (see: The Cole Protocol, Halo Legends, the Traviss books, some of the comics, etc.), despite this kind of behavior never being shown in Nylund's work. Or they simply write the SPARTAN-IIs as if they were normal people, which is completely missing the point of why people like them.

Nylund was able to recognize that despite all the horrible things they had to go through, emotional brokenness wasn't the defining trait of a SPARTAN. They were still people and socialized with each other, despite being detached from mainstream humanity. They were different, not broken, and their interactions among themselves show this. Nylund's SPARTANs weren't uncomfortable being what they were; they enjoyed the ability to live up to their fullest potential, a chance they never would have gotten in an ordinary life.

As an example to illustrate this attitude, in Glasslands, Karen Traviss thinks naming the Onyx shield world in honor of Kurt's pre-SPARTAN surname is the right thing to do. I'm fairly certain Nylund would've gone with "Ambrose", since that's what the few people close to him would remember -- and honor -- him as. Using an identity that had been long forgotten and buried in some archive, the name of a person that hadn't existed for a long time, as he had become something greater than he ever could've under that name, would actually be doing a disservice to Kurt's memory.

I guess you could describe the S-IIs as the ultimate nerd heroes, which goes back to the topic of the gulf between them and the Fours. Why is that? They socialize well only within their own, very narrow peer group and feel detached from most people. They're smart and educated and can do things like casually calculate the velocity of a pin dropping. The gym scene in The Fall of Reach is like classic nerd wish fulfillment: John, who's still a kid, is harassed by a bunch of grown-up schoolyard bullies and then proceeds to absolutely wreck them. Can you see where this is going when most of the SPARTAN-IVs are apparently modeled after your average high school jock?

The SPARTANs are special because they aren't your average war movie special forces operators. Writers should understand this and get over their (admittedly understandable) discomfort about how they were made, because SPARTANs (inter)acting like SPARTANs in and out of the battlefield not just with "normal people" but with each other is fertile ground for good science fiction.