: It does seem like a lot of them focus on that. I don't know much about it
: from a personal standpoint, but almost every interview and conversation
: I've seen with a writer or actor where they talk about a character of
: theirs that's seen as bad includes them sympathizing with the character or
: saying it's a matter of perspective or being misunderstood, or at least
: saying that they don't pass judgment on the character in a hard-and-fast
: way, and I've seen many say that you have to be on a character's side when
: you portray them, or at least not be against them, or else the portrayal
: will become a caricature and not work properly. This would apply directly
: to Halsey and a few others, and I think the basic principle applies to the
: Spartan II's, if you want to show them and show them right you have to get
: in their heads and not be overly concerned with anything they're not
: overly concerned with. Nylund is at a distinct advantage there because he
: seems to be the one that wrote at least half and probably a large majority
: of the characterization of the S-II's in the first place (we'll never know
: what ideas came from who until we get the Halo Bible, specifically the
: version of it that was current as of a few months before the first game
: was released).

It's clear most of the now-iconic SPARTAN-II characters and Halsey were pretty much Nylund's babies and that he liked to write about them. That doesn't mean he didn't acknowledge Halsey's more controversial actions as wrong (he has actually done that rather unambiguously). It's just that most people are smart enough to know this without someone like Karen Traviss shoving it down their throats.

: I think this post shows a part of why some authors and fans reject the older
: view of the S-IIs: it's been romanticized. We can argue semantics and
: psychology over whether they're "broken", and we can throw
: around figures about how much they can lift, but I think the majority of
: the human population would call what happened to them wrong, but a lot of
: people see it or want to see it as justified in one way or another, or
: even as a good thing overall. This is just as repellent or even more
: repellent than the thing itself in a lot of cases, it's like burning down
: someone's house and then lying to them about it. To portray characters
: accurately and celebrate their strengths and lament their flaws, or simply
: show their strengths and flaws, is one thing, but you take into account
: past portrayals and different people's views of those portrayals and it
: gets messier.

It's not about justifying anything either way, it's about portrayal. It is completely out of character for the SPARTANs to be crying about the fate imposed on them. Whether it was right or wrong from an outside standpoint is irrelevant since they grew up that way and that's the only life they know. And they like it, more or less. Just like the Ancient Greek Spartans or really any other brutal warrior culture obviously didn't judge themselves by today's moral standards.