User:Quirel

And I'm Quirel, the guy who writes Not All Who Wander.

But not just Not All Who Wander. I've got a pretty active slate, with a dozen oneshots and multi-chapter stories in some level of production. Most are just notes scribbled down in a notebook, some are proper outlines, some are mostly written, and one or two desperately need me to get off my lazy butt and write a final chapter.

Halo, 343i, And The Origins of Daybreak
At this point, with Halo Infinite looming on the horizon, it's pretty clear that Halo has had a rocky journey since 2010, and the fanbase is possibly at its lowest ebb since ever. There's not the gathering excitement inspired by Halo 3 or Halo 4, nor is there the oceans of fanrage that Reach and Halo 5 left in their wake. As far as I can tell, most longtime fans consider Infinite to be a thing that's just going to happen, and they have even less enthusiasm for the upcoming books. Now that we're approaching the milestone where Halo has been under the direction of 343i longer than it was ever under the direction of Bungie, it's worth looking back and asking what happened. How did we get to this point.

Of course, much digital ink has been spilled on this topic over the past decade, so I'm going to do my best to not waste your time.

Some say that 343i can't stick to a plan. That they overreact to fan criticism, and the Reclaimer Saga could have had a consistent storyline if only they'd ignored the whiners. I genuinely don't think this is the case, because deleted material from Halo 4 and behind-the-scenes rumors show that there was a lot of continuity between Halo 4 and Halo 5.


 * Cortana replaced the Didact when the Didact's nebulous motivations confused the fans? Dummied-out dialog from Halo 4 shows that Cortana's rage against the UNSC and possible betrayal were originally supposed to be planted in Halo 4.
 * The Chief's character was dialed down in Halo 5 to appease the whiners who just wanted cool Master Chief action? That same dummied-out dialog shows that 343i was already having second thoughts about the Chief being so talkative, before the whiners ever played Halo 4.
 * The Janus Key was thrown away in a comic? Yeah, like that plotline was going anywhere.

There's a great deal of continuity across the first half of 343i's tenure, and possibly beyond that. Rumors I've heard of Infinite's development indicate that there would have been a role for Blue Team and Osiris going forward, though you should be damned careful with that Monkey's Paw. And Tacitus has an interesting theory that much of 343i's big plot points (AI rebellion, Cortana going rogue, return of the Forerunner) were recycled from the original franchise development team.

Naturally, the fact that the Didact got put on ice in a freakin' comic proves that some plans did indeed change, but I don't think this was any more significant than the changes we saw under Bungie, certainly not when you account for the number of writers who have come and gone. 343i's problem isn't that they're too wishy-washy. It's that they're more corporate than Bungie ever was.

This is not me ragging on corporations or capitalism. Capitalism is great, but corporations are tools. Like any tool, they have strengths and weaknesses, and when you use them for a job they were never intended to do, you get shoddy results. A corporation is a splendid tool for taking an existing business model, copying it into every ecosystem that can support it, and iterating on that same plan to get maximum profits out of minimal inputs. As a rule, innovation is very hard for companies that don't have R&D as the core part of their business model. Intel and AMD will always make better chips, but KFC isn't going to expand its menu to Pho Saigon. Frankly, this model works very well for fast food and insurance companies and other business models.

(You do see innovation in business fads, but this is an example of many companies copying successful business models from other companies. In the world of video games, this is the fad of MMOs and hero shooters and Battle Royales. These fads rarely work, and I could rant for pages about Just In Time Manufacturing in particular, but that would be a tangent)

Writing is different. Writing is a creative process. Most publishers can't stay in business selling the same story over and over again, but a corporation will try to do that because it's operating on a business model that worked in the past.

So when 343i came to Halo, they continued telling the same stories that worked in the past. Spartans fight the Covenant over a Forerunner relic, and have to destroy the relic to keep it from falling into the Covenant's hands, or to stop a third party that was accidentally released in the fighting. This is the basic plot outline of the first three Bungie Halo games, Halo Wars, Helljumper, Spartan Ops, Helljumper, and some other stories that I can't think of at the moment. Under 343i's tenure, threats to activate the Halo rings or some other Forerunner doomsday device were turned into a meme, as that plotline was recycled for Halo 4, TN72H, Halo Wars 2, Hunters In The Dark, Halo 5, Envoy, and the upcoming Troy Denning novel.

The problem wasn't just that these plotlines were done to death after Halo 3. The problem was that they had no narrative imperative after Halo 3. They had no purpose, they were just echoes of stories that had worked before.

What the writers at 343i didn't understand, or the business suits calling the shots didn't understand, was that those plotlines weren't the heart of Halo. The Master Chief isn't the heart of Halo either for that matter, he and Cortana are decent characters who happened to be at the heart of the stories that captured the imagination of the Halo fanbase. But even the Chief and Cortana can take the stage so many times before they get stale. What made Halo compelling was that it had an overarching narrative. There was a story to be told about the Master Chief and Cortana and Halsey and Blue Team and Thel 'Vadam, and the books and the games and even the comics were building that narrative together. And Halo 3 was the grand finale of that narrative.

But the Chief stepped into a cryopod, and we saw him drift toward Requiem. Wasn't that a promise of things to come?

Yes, but that's a new story. Look, stories are all about conflict, right? They're about meaningful conflict, not about a big guy in green armor shooting purple aliens in endless grey hallways. The Bungie-era Halo games had three big conflicts, three themes, that tied everything together:


 * Why did the Covenant attack us in the first place? How do we win an unwinnable war?
 * Who are the Forerunner? What is our connection to them?
 * What is the Master Chief's relationship with Cortana? Is she loyal?

Halo 3 ended all three conflicts. Cortana was a friend who the Master Chief would descend into the bowels of Hell to rescue, and she was worth it because she was indeed loyal to him, if not to Humanity. The Covenant was split and broken at the battle of the Ark, and we ended the war with a respectful truce with the Elites. The origins of the war were explained in Contact Harvest, which ties into the final theme.

The connection between Humans and Forerunner is that Humans are Forerunner. Yes, Humans are distinct from Forerunner, but Mendicant Bias, 343i Guilty Spark, and the Librarian separately confirm that we are Forerunner, and the Beastarium hints that the Forerunner were uplifted from an unknown planet. You have to jump through so many mental hoops to conclude that Humans aren't Forerunner, I'm mystified at how 343i thought that burying the connection was a good idea.

343i tried to tell the same stories even though the themes that gave them life were resolved. Sure, Bungie made Reach, but Reach was at least set chronologically before Halo 3, and it kept the Forerunner nonsense to a minimum. Same reason explains why Forward Unto Dawn was so good. But when it came to Halo 4 and Spartan Ops and Spartan Assault and many of the spinoff books, the chemistry simply wasn't there.

In fairness, 343i at least tried to reconstruct the themes, though I'm not sure if this was intentional. To their credit, they did an outstanding job with Cortana. They found one last theme that hadn't been resolved, the fact that she had an abbreviated lifespan, and would likely perish not long after John woke up. That was the B-plot to Halo 4, but it might as well have been the A-plot for how hard it struck the fans. And to think that one of the writers had to fight to keep it in, when he wasn't sure if he could do it justice and the rest of the writing team was ambivalent about it.

The Forerunner theme was renewed by changing the answer from "Humans are Forerunner" to "Humans are not quite Forerunner... and also, they have this grudge against us, except the Librarian really likes us and is handing out genetic gifts so we can defeat her husband and reclaim the mantle, except she was against the mantle back then, and her husband was against using the Halo array but now he's for it except there's two Didacts..."

Frankly? It's incoherent. There's no plan, just a muddle of contradictory and half-baked ideas that needs an agency-wrecking plot device like the geas to make it work. That's the reason why the Didact was put on ice. He's just an angry old man who wants to digitize Humanity, and once you take away his Composers, there's no story to be told about him.

And the Covenant... well, not a damn thing was done with the Covenant. 343i ignored the Great Schism. The truce with the Elites was written off with a simple "A lot can happen in four years." Look, I realize that Jul 'Mdama's fleet being hostile to the UNSC is a perfectly reasonable outcome, but it was brought about by lazy writing. Bungie put more thought into who the Covenant were and why they were on Halo in the first game than 343i put into Jul's Covenant. Jul's Covenant was present solely for gameplay purposes, because you can't design a whole Halo game around fighting Forerunner warbots. There was nothing creative, nothing distinct about Jul's Covenant that separated it from the Covenant of old, or showed how they had been forced to change by the Great Schism. Yes, Jul's Covenant had weird-ass armor and new weapons and a different look overall, and some thought that was to make them look like scavengers, but Halo 5 showed that all the Covenant looked like that.

So. Along came Halo 5, where 343i finally paid lip service to the Great Schism. It was hollow because the two sides were fighting over... something. Basically whether Jul 'Mdama was right, but Jul 'Mdama had already been unceremoniously killed off and it's never clear what he stood for aside from manipulating his followers and getting revenge for his dead wife.

But Halo 5 really screwed the pooch. Cortana's theme was resolved, and the Forerunner theme was resolved when the Didact was composed. For a while, it seemed as if 343i was going to open up a new theme and a new plotline by making ONI go rogue, a plot that was sure to disappoint because ONI was no longer ruthless but pragmatic. Under 343i's tenure, all of the nuance had been sucked out of ONI, turning them into an off-brand Cerberus. Instead, 343i resurrected Cortana, flipped her established characterization so that she would choose betrayal, and doubled down on the Mantle plotline. It's not clear why anyone in the modern era would care about the Mantle, but 343i thinks its really important.

I hope I'm not being dramatic when I say this was the death knell of Halo. Bungie crafted a story with some durable themes, and many stories were able to be told by riffing on those themes. 343i built their media on incoherent themes, and these themes lasted only so long as they were able to plausibly say "Trust us, this is all building up to something bigger." And for a while, they captured the old magic. It seemed as if the narrative had a purpose, and the big transmedia experience was building toward that payoff. Halo 5 ripped the cover off that illusion and parked the story in a narrative cul-de-sac from which it couldn't escape.

Certainly, I've repeated many of the same things you've heard over the years. My one new contribution is the focus on themes. Again, the themes of the original games and novels were simple and durable, but the themes in the 343i era were incoherent or nonexistant. This problem is not limited to Halo. It's the reason why everything is falling apart. All of these corporate entities are pushing for big transmedia experiences because Halo and Star Wars and the MCU showed that they can be incredibly profitable, but the writers behind them can't craft good stories, and that's because the basic ideas underlying these stories are nonexistant or incoherent. Your 10th grade English class lied to you. A theme isn't a single word or a description. That's a buzzword. A theme is an open question that is resolved or at least addressed by a story.

And that's the mistake we are trying to correct with Daybreak.

It's not easy. It's pretty damned difficult. We're going under the hood and rebuilding the Halo universe to support a Great Game narrative, one about the struggle of empires and the decline and fall of civilizations. This is not easy, and it's taken some retcons to get going, but better some things be changed than that we sit in constant fear of writing something that we'll have to contradict later. It will allow us to write new stories, and expand the different species out of the narrow archetypes that they've been pigeonholed into.

One of these days, I hope to write the Anti-Kilo 5 Trilogy. Every time I think back to those books, I think of what a waste they were. These were the first books to be set after Halo 3. Damn near 1400 pages that could have been devoted to setting up the post-War world, exploring the surviving colonies, anticipating the next stage of the Great Schism. Instead, 343i handed Karen Traviss a list of plot points she needed to foreshadow, and she proceeded to do so in the most blasé way possible. Spartan IVs were mentioned offhand and Jul found the Didact's name scratched on a convenient set of ruins. The Infinity got shilled pretty hard, and Glasslands at least served to explain how Halsey and Blue Team got out of Onyx, but the rest of the books were mediocre. There's not much redeeming value in there.

An anti-Kilo 5 Trilogy would take place right after the end of Halo 3, if it doesn't start in the last stages of the Africa campaign. It would be a grand tour of the major surviving colonies, witnessing the major battles as the Separatists and the UNSC establish a secure perimeter around Earth. I just need the time, the inspiration, and the dedication to put it to paper.

Why I Write
I have a problem where I can't stop writing stories. I'm often daydreaming. I come up with these characters, situations, and snippets of dialog, then I turn them over in my head for hours, like rocks rolling around in a tumbler until they emerge with a smooth polish or crumbled into dust. Writing these ideas down is the best way to short-circuit that process and get them out of my head, and if I'm going to write them down, I might as well do something with them.

Part of what draws me to writing fiction is that I'm interested in philosophy, ethics, history, and theories of mind. Fiction allows me to explore these ideas vicariously by putting characters through times of hardship and seeing how they react, or by pitting characters with opposite ideas against each other. And ultimately, I think that fiction is a much better medium to explore these ideas than boring academic treatises.

Stories are a way of accumulating knowledge and passing it on to others. This works because humans are capable of learning vicariously through others. No man is an island. We all have our own individual experiences, but we are not prisoners of these experiences. We can summarize these experiences and pass them along to other people, who can decode the stories and extract valuable information that will shape their own lives. It's quite amazing when you think about it.

Our experiences are subjective, not objective. But because we are not prisoners of our subjective experiences, we can examine each others' lives and slowly approximate the truth. Stories expand this capability by letting us learn from people who are removed from us by distance and time, and science fiction is a particularly interesting genre of fiction because it is speculative. Science fiction stories are the only ones that try to anticipate experiences that have not yet happened.

Of course, before fiction can be educational, it must first be entertaining. And if you've made it this far through the rant, you might see why I prefer writing fiction to writing philosophical tracts.

Halo, Fanon, Fanfiction
To start off... it's kind of funny that I ended up here. You see, there's two kinds of fanfiction. The first kind, the far more popular kind, is remixes. Peggy Sues, self-inserts, crossovers. That kind of fanfiction is all about taking elements from a story and giving them a good shakeup, adding new elements and seeing how that would change the course of events. This is a lot like how songs get remixed, or how videos get cut up for Youtube memes. The whole point is to shake things up and have fun along the way.

This kind of fanfiction is so common, in fact, that the best way to predict what stories will produce a lot of fanfiction is to look for a story that is amenable to this remixing. Look for an accessible story with likeable characters, especially a story with an audience surrogate. Look for a story with powers or magical systems that can be swapped out or rules-lawyered. Most of all, look for a story that leaves the audience less than satisfied. That's very specific. Look for a story that's flawed. A story that is good enough to gather an audience and keep them hooked, but has any number of mistakes that the audience wants to see fixed. The ideal generator of fanfiction would probably be serial fiction that gives the audience plenty of time to get invested, but has flaws because the writer is writing one chapter at a time and makes mistakes early on.

So the fact that three of the biggest generators of fanfiction, AFAIK, are Worm, Harry Potter, and Naruto shouldn't be too surprising.

I got into fanfiction for an entirely different reason. Back in 2006, there were a grand total of two Halo games and three novels, plus a graphic novel if you could find it in your local bookstore. That's it. There was a hunger for more fiction, and more fiction seemed to be coming down the pipeline. Halo 3 was getting close to release, Halo Wars was known to be in development, Eric Nylund was working on Ghosts of Onyx, and Microsoft was actively seeking to make a Halo movie. That was a fantastic time to be a Halo fan, but if you wanted more content, you had to wait or make it yourself. At the time, I wasn't exactly a patient person.

I tried to write more Halo fiction, staying true to the character of what had come before. I wasn't successful, but I did a much better job than one might expect from a first try. And it's strange, but Halo seems to have inspired more of this kind of fanfiction than the fix-it fics. Halo seems to generate more fiction about original characters, or the continued adventures of Master Chief, and there is a whole Halo fanon wiki with a strict canon-adherence policy. That wiki was founded, by the way, to give Halopedians an outlet so they wouldn't mess up Halopedia articles with their fanon.

So, now we've come to the Daybreak Continuum, a Halo fanon project that takes an alternate universe stance.