: 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.

: 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.

Even then, I think getting to think what you did and went through can really fuck you up. You don't just return to a normal society after living in a brutal one. SPARTAN-II's are not in Laconia - they're in a world where the rights of human beings and children should by all rights be obeyed.

From what I read, soldiers react automatically when getting to kill someone, but only later when they're alone do they process they just ended the life of another human being. Spartans themselves never really have the chance to think of all the sentients they had killed, they barely had any downtime during the Human-Covenant war, and even then John still feels guilty over the lives of the Helljumpers he killed when he was young, and of the Op at Eridanus Secundus.

My theory of what's happening to him so far as of Escalation is that he refuses to simply "chill out". Otherwise, he's going to be alone with his thoughts, and that shit can be terrifying for some people. It's also been mentioned John would slowly start questioning things.

If anything, while I don't approve of the way Traviss shoved rhetoric down peoples' throats, I still appreciate that they make Spartans distinct, that some would hate Halsey for what she did as 'independent thinkers' that Cortana mentioned they were. Whenever if you're a Spartan or a washout, you'd still be unhappy: By either getting the downtime to think of what you're doing ("Wake up, John"), or by being cheated out of your childhood and only getting a broken body for your failed service. Soren did.