I've been thinking about something similar to this recently.
Like, I kind of wish our fictional heroes could be real and come do something about this shituation the US is in. Heroes like Sam and Dean Winchester, Leia Organa and the rest of the rebels, spiderman. People like them.
I caught myself one day wishing Master Chief would come save us.
Then I remembered.
I remembered why he was kidnapped and what he was trained for and I realized, he very likely wouldn't be on our side. At least not at first. Not until it was too late.
I am still grappling with this realization.
We always view him as a hero on the good side. But that's not how he started. He started as a government pawn squashing rebellion against the oligarchy and the unethical science institutions. In many ways he still is a government pawn, but now he's just fighting a common-to-all-humanity enemy rather than fighting fellow humans.
This is why he is such a fascinating character to philosophically entertain.
At what point does the patriotic hero become the villainous oppressor?
The short answer is, he always was. We just don't have to judge fiction as if it's reality. Fictional characters are not real people, fictional worlds are made up, even "realistic" stories are at the mercy of whatever the person telling the story thinks is realistic, and we can have perfect 100% true for-certain knowledge about fictional characters/worlds in ways we never can with real people and real situations.
The longer answer is self-indulgent and long-winded and under the readmore.
The thing of it is: Halo is military science fiction (which is a specific sub-genre with a specific history) with its lore foundations lain down in the USA in the 2000s. It is pretty much impossible for someone to write milsf without engaging with what they think about war and the military. The degree of earnestness and seriousness varies, but there's no such thing as a totally "apolitical" piece of art and that's especially true about war.
When you consider it as a whole, Halo is less specifically pointed/intentional in its themes than a lot of milsf, because Halo is not the product of a single author with one set of ideas. Halo, as first and foremost an entertainment IP that belongs to a giant corporation, is more of a ouija board experience with many stakeholders with hands on the planchette. With many people contributing to the goal of "make up a science fiction shootgame story that will entertain a lot of people, earn money, and not piss anyone off too much" you end up with a general consensus of what that meant when Halo's lore was being born.
Thus: Halo is scifi-flavored mythology about war and the military, as written to appeal to the imagination of the United States general public (and especially teenaged boys and young men) in the years immediately after 9/11 and during the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
If that seems like a weird comparison because Halo 2 and Halo 3 are very much about the human US-modeled military on the backfoot holding the last line of defense against a scary zealously religious enemy that wanted to wipe out every last man woman and child... you were fortunate not to know many of the teenaged boys and young men I did in the 2000s.
The Master Chief, as the main character, had to fill the needs of the story: Good at shooting aliens, cool armor, someone the audience can root for without having to think about it much, relatively quiet, and also definitely not young. Chief's backstory feels like an exercise in asking "but if video game character with dialogue, why not loud and obnoxious?" because the modes of popular video game protagonist at the time were pretty much "does not talk at all" or """"funny"""" with little in between, and so the answer was: trauma.
Chief's construction as a character is interesting because it manages to build him up as both an experienced, loyal soldier on the payroll of an oppressive imperial government... and (at least to some degree) an innocent because of the abuse and indoctrination that made him.
The Master Chief is the trope of the "innocent" soldier, a good boy who follows his orders because he believes 100% that it is the right thing to do to save everyone and that any sacrifices made are necessary and justified. A character that we believe would reconsider those orders if they were to do anything they know is "bad", but who is also given the benefit of the doubt by the lack of knowledge we are told they have and the purity of their intentions that we are promised.
(Sidebar: I recommend reading up on the basics of the myth of the clean Wehrmacht, which commonly surfaced in military adventure fiction in the 20th century and still does sometimes to this day.)
Because this is fiction, the scenarios where he does things that are bad can be tailored to be not so bad (depending on how you read them, and generally the audience is encouraged to read them favorably to him) because we can know oh, that character in that scene was a bad guy because a writer can declare it. We can also know for certain that if a narrator's voice declares from on high that he regrets anything he has done (for example, in one of the early novels when he experiences regret about killing other human beings in his youth) that it is true, his remorse is real and there is no chance it is a lie or an attempt to save face.
(This is also true of the Arbiter, but this post is already really long and I am not going to get into talking about him here. He has his own shit going on.)
Fictional characters are made up. They can be perfectly knowable, their intentions can be laid out for us with complete understanding, they often don't work quite like real people do, and their bad actions harm no one in reality. We cannot judge real people and real actions the same way we judge fictional characters, because other people are not perfectly knowable and real acts have real consequences.
It doesn't make anyone evil to love and sympathize with a fictional character who has, say, committed war crimes. I don't think writing about a fictional character can be evil, either. (Though it can certainly be unpalatable, and if you don't enjoy stories like these anymore after thinking about it, you owe them nothing.)
But it is important to think hard about what separates that imaginary character from a real person, and that we should not use the same excuses fictional characters have when thinking about what happens when real people do actual things in real life.
south dakota haters DNI !!
it is CRAZY to me how many people genuinely think she is evil.
south dakota was a freelancer. meaning PART OF PROJECT FREELANCER. you know, the evil fight like dogs torture program? the one that of course would utilize her anger and pit her against her brother for their own gain? south was already sick of being compared to her brother, and then she was put up on a leaderboard constantly taunting her with whether she was better or worse than him, as well as her peers. falling short would of Course lead to feeling resentment, feeling bitter and mean- and when the AIs are involved, and she is promised that one thing to make her stronger, to make her more valued, it's ripped away from her at the last moment!
and north was her brother, and yes i agree it was horrible that she let him die, but he was the source of so much of her internal torment! "everyone always finds a way to put you together. it's like you're not considered two people. even when we were kids, our parents dressed us alike, and when we joined up and got sent to the program, they stuck us together. people thought we were special somehow, i suppose. i used to hate that. all i ever wanted was to have my own life." north loved south too much to see the strain growing on their relationship. or maybe he did, and just chose to ignore it because she was his sister, and he'd always have her back, and she would have his in turn. also, in party crasher, north fought south!! he technically betrayed her! of course, he was in the right in that situation, and it was resolved between them, but she probably still felt the sting of that.
at the end of the day i do think south dakota was ,to some extent, justified. what she did wasn't right,, but neither were any of the things project freelancer did, and i still see fans of washington, wyoming, the mercs, and other such Killers and Betrayers so it just doesn't sit right with me
south dakota haters DNI !!
it is CRAZY to me how many people genuinely think she is evil.
south dakota was a freelancer. meaning PART OF PROJECT FREELANCER. you know, the evil fight like dogs torture program? the one that of course would utilize her anger and pit her against her brother for their own gain? south was already sick of being compared to her brother, and then she was put up on a leaderboard constantly taunting her with whether she was better or worse than him, as well as her peers. falling short would of Course lead to feeling resentment, feeling bitter and mean- and when the AIs are involved, and she is promised that one thing to make her stronger, to make her more valued, it's ripped away from her at the last moment!
and north was her brother, and yes i agree it was horrible that she let him die, but he was the source of so much of her internal torment! "everyone always finds a way to put you together. it's like you're not considered two people. even when we were kids, our parents dressed us alike, and when we joined up and got sent to the program, they stuck us together. people thought we were special somehow, i suppose. i used to hate that. all i ever wanted was to have my own life." north loved south too much to see the strain growing on their relationship. or maybe he did, and just chose to ignore it because she was his sister, and he'd always have her back, and she would have his in turn. also, in party crasher, north fought south!! he technically betrayed her! of course, he was in the right in that situation, and it was resolved between them, but she probably still felt the sting of that.
at the end of the day i do think south dakota was ,to some extent, justified. what she did wasn't right,, but neither were any of the things project freelancer did, and i still see fans of washington, wyoming, the mercs, and other such Killers and Betrayers so it just doesn't sit right with me
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