User:Tacitus

Greetings! I'm Tacitus. Some of you may also know me as Eternarch on SpaceBattles, or Tacit Axiom in various places, or The-Chronothaur in the art sphere. If you have any questions or would like to get in touch regarding Daybreak, you can contact me on my talk page.

I've been a Halo fan since 2004, when I got an Xbox for the first time; I made it just in time to get in on the hype for Halo 2. I got into the novels shortly afterward, and it were those novels that properly got me into Halo as a universe. My initial role in the greater fandom was mostly as a lurker, though I did call some corners of the fandom home; Halopedia being the most prominent example. Over the years, I accrued numerous headcanons, ideas and fanon concepts, as well as a fairly solid internal conception of how the Halo universe was and should be. Starting around 2010, that internal idea and the official Halo universe began to drift apart. The first big chink in the armor was Halo: Reach, which overturned a lot of the basic assumptions about Halo for me, as it did for many others, and not always for the better. "Canon" was no longer something fixed and reliable, but rather could easily be changed on a whim. Of course, I knew what Bungie's stance was, and creatively speaking, I understand that it was their right to establish what was definitive in their creation. But that doesn't mean I personally preferred their take to the original version of the fall of Reach; particularly as many of the deviations could have been easily avoided with just a bit of script doctoring.

Then came 343 Industries, and while I don't envy the task they took upon themselves, most of their worldbuilding and stories, particularly in the early days, never grabbed me. It didn't feel like the Halo I knew anymore, and not in a new and fresh way either. It just felt alien to the tone and style that had drawn me into the universe in the first place, and much of the worldbuilding for what was supposed to be the new and exciting post-war era came out half-baked. The narrative about humanity's ascendance, the sidelining of the Great Schism, and the reemergence of the Forerunners as a macabre horror show, among other things, just didn't feel like an organic continuity of what I had come to like about Halo. The final nail in the coffin was the story of Halo 5: Guardians. This was the first time I actively refused to accept something as part of my internal headcanon, which had by then already been stretched to the breaking point by trying to reconcile all the new material with the picture classic Halo had built up.

Even then, not all of 343i's output was bad. Troy Denning emerged as a new light in Halo's novel scene, and 343i's initially lukewarm lore and worldbuilding gradually improved with solid entries like Warfleet. And there was still a lot to like about the core ideas in Halo. The universe does a lot of things, while individually derivative, in a very particular way that's fairly unique. Halo was also quite formative to getting me interested in sci-fi literature in general, so it holds a special place in my heart. So, for the sake of my sanity, I settled for a less canon-centric approach to Halo fiction; I would have my internal headcanon where I'd include quality material like Denning's novels, and I would let 343i and most of the fandom have theirs, which included the likes of Spartan Ops and Halo 5.

So, anyway, this is the stage against which the genesis of Project Daybreak is set. I originally launched the project as a way of giving structure to the numerous headcanons and fanon concepts I'd come up with over the years. This was around the time I was relaunching my earlier digital art habit, and I would start incorporating little bits of fanon lore (which I'd previously kept largely to myself) into my art submissions. As that took off I also started posting my stuff elsewhere, and eventually ended up collaborating with Quirel, who I'd already been long acquainted with on the HBO forums and the Halo Archive. As he was writing his fanfic, Not All Who Wander, based largely on a similar premise as my own, we ended up merging our efforts. This is also where Project Daybreak really started to take off as more than just a scattered collection of tidbits, becoming a real and serious attempt at comprehensive universe-building and storycrafting. Now, as both the project's audience and contributor pool grow, I try to maintain some level of creative consistency and unified vision across the board. But my main passion in regards to the project is still getting my metaphorical hands dirty with fan lore, art and cartography.