User:Tacitus

Hi, 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 or Discord (Tacit Axiom #4090)

Origins
My journey with Halo is the story of how I learned to stop worrying about canon and make my own.

The first generation of Halo fans were the people who migrated over from the old-school Bungie fandom - Pathways Into Darkness, Marathon, Myth, et al. These were the people who theorized on marathon.bungie.org and later HBO before and after HCE's release, and most of whom have now moved on to bigger and better things. I'm from what could be called the second generation of Halo fans, for whom Halo CE and Halo 2 were the most formative parts of the Halo experience. While I was loosely familiar with Halo CE beforehand, I got properly into the series when I spent my meager savings on an Xbox in 2004. I got my hands on the early novels shortly afterward, and it were those novels that properly got me into Halo as a universe (and, in time, served as a gateway drug for more serious science fiction). As someone with a love of complex systems, shared universes overflowing with detail and texture tickle a particular fancy. Over the years, I accrued numerous headcanons, ideas and fanon concepts but never was brave or motivated enough to do anything substantial with them.

So that's the background against which my part of Project Daybreak is set, and it's very much a story of how me and the Halo franchise began to drift apart.

Officially, we treat 2009 as the cut-off point for the Daybreak Continuum's "canon", but 2007-2008 is probably where I'd draw the line on what I consider "old" and "new" Halo. In some ways, even Halo 3 is part of that transitional phase that began as early as Halo 2, when Bungie broke big (yeah, it's the old "it's popular, now it sucks" story). But Bungie were rockstars back then, and Halo 2 was in many ways a watershed moment. It retained some of the character of the old Bungie, but there was no going back afterward. I was a bit lukewarm on Halo 3; I didn't like some of the choices they made, but the presentation and setpieces were excellent and it did wrap up the story in a somewhat satisfactory way. Especially with solid novel companions in Ghosts of Onyx and Contact Harvest. Halo 3 was the Return of the Jedi to 2's The Empire Strikes Back; a shallower and decidedly inferior story that had some weird holes, but it still brought the trilogy to a nice finish and, along with what had been established in the concurrent novels and its own terminals, left some threads hanging for future expansion.

For me, 2007-2010 is Halo's Middle Period. Most of the media released during this era of the franchise is okay, some of it's questionable, and only some works stick out. Halo 3: ODST was a solid, moody spin-off game with an always-enjoyable Joe Staten script, while Halo Wars was merely okay; I didn't like some things in it, like why the Forerunners needed to be involved at this point in the timeline, but it was what it was - a decently enjoyable console RTS built on the most archetypal template of a Halo narrative possible. On the novel front, only Nylund's grand finale in The Impossible Life and the Possible Death of Preston J. Cole shines through from this era, as does his final outing in Dr. Halsey's journal. (And do not think I worship Nylund - I do think his work is fundamental to Halo, and he is above the Halo standard of writers, but he is not infallible.) The fledgling 343i's initial output was mostly forgettable; some of it goofy, like most of Halo Legends, or edgy comic-book schlock like Blood Line and Headhunters. (Some of the other curiosities from this era are also the things that could've been - like Peter Jackson's Halo movie that died out, or the game project Halo: Chronicles - that sounded like quite the trip.)

Even Bungie's Halo swansong in Reach didn't really grab me despite the initially promising premise. At the time I was still obsessed with canon, so I was one of those people who endlessly complained about the changes. With hindsight and knowledge as to some of the stuff that went on behind the scenes, I can understand what Bungie's stance was, and creatively speaking, 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 (shameless plug for Daybreak's version). At least Reach looked good and had a strong atmosphere, and Marcus Lehto's creative vision shone through. Bungie always excelled at presentation, even if they didn't always stick the landing with their stories.

With Reach shipped, the Age of Bungie came to an end, ushering in the Age of 343 Industries. At this point you might be thinking I'm here to convince you why Number Company Bad, as the kids say nowadays. And I will discuss what I see as 343i's failings, but I will try to be as fair and balanced in my critique as possible. 343i's output hasn't been all bad, but it also led to me running an alternate canon project, so clearly there was something that happened.

First off, I don't envy the task 343i took upon themselves. The act of consolidating what lore and story exists for Halo and then moving on from there is a huge endeavor, as we've come to learn with Daybreak. Unlike us, 343i were working full-time on this stuff, but they also had other priorities - like going through all the stuff Bungie had left. I get it, it was a massive undertaking. You had a couple of people coming in from Bungie, but mostly it was Frankie. In fact, one could argue that we can see the very early seeds of some of the ideas that would flower in the 343i era in what are supposedly Frankie's contributions to the Halo 3 terminals and the Bestiarum. But anything beyond that is speculation.

Naturally, in an earlier phase of a shared universe, the vision will be clearer and there will be fewer canonical conflicts than later, when more and more authors have left their mark on the universe. The Halo universe had two teams working on it at the start -- Bungie, the primary, and the Microsoft Game Studios Franchise Development Group as the secondary. These teams had some friction between one another but they did work together and produce an outcome that -- while far from perfect -- still somewhat coherent in design, style and tone. 343i taking over was a critical shift, because it meant the vast majority of the original creators and visionaries behind the canon were now gone. On the high level of things, Frankie was the only constant, and even he had come on board only in the lead-up to Halo 2. Eric Nylund worked on a couple of entries in 2009 and 2010 and signed off shortly afterward.

And I don't have any illusions that pre-343i Halo was some timeless masterpiece of science fiction. Halo was a very good game series with a relatively standard but well-presented story that had some surprisingly solid tie-in books to go with it (along with one merely average tie-in book in The Flood). But what Halo had, aside from good games, was a particularly interesting mix of sci-fi ideas, archetypes and tropes wrapped in a nice package. It had a lot of different species and cultures with their own quirks and internal dynamics, it had a classic sci-fi inspired humanity that was dealing with its own growing pains, it had mystery, wonder and scale and thousands of years of timeline to play with. Not all video game settings have that. Those ideas and the themes acting behind them weren't very well fleshed-out yet, but the universe had a lot of potential to both expand and move forward. All Halo needed to do after Bungie was really look into what are the universe's core elements and then start giving them more definition and context, along with further refining parts of the world that weren't yet well realized. Circa 2009, Halo needed to both establish the big picture, and go more in-depth in places where it counted.

Creatively speaking, this was an extremely delicate time. But one thing was certain: without the original creators, the new Halo wasn't going to be like the old anyway. So, there were various ways 343i could've gone about evolving Halo. They could've approached it like natural evolution, gradually and organically building on what's already there. Or they could've done it like geas-directed pop culture evolution, metaphorically throwing the original canon to its metaphorical homeworld, devolving it, and then reshaping the Brave New Narrative in their own image by meddling with its DNA until it was barely recognizable. Guess which option 343i went with?

Anyway, what do I mean by building on what's already there? I'm not talking about an empty, fanservice-filled nostalgia bait like JJ Abrams' The Force Awakens. It can make you feel warm and fuzzy in the moment but it'll leave you wanting more. But there's a balance to be struck between empty nostalgia and changing something so much overnight it becomes unrecognizable. The Old Halo-NuHalo shift is like if you took the metaphor about the Ship of Theseus but replaced all the planks in one go, and on top of that the planks are a different type of wood and instead of the old-fashioned tar and oil finish, rudimentary but time-tested, the ship is now painted in all sorts of garish patterns. Some bits of the ship are still solid and it does float, but it has very little if anything to do with the ship you had.

I'm not really talking about retcons per se or this or that detail being changed. I'm saying that post-2009 Halo felt fundamentally alien to the very tone and style that had drawn me into the universe in the first place, and the worldbuilding for what was supposed to be the new and exciting post-war era came out both half-baked and presented a glaring mismatch to the story threads that were actually left hanging at the end of Halo 3. The narrative about humanity's ascendance, the Mantle being thrust to the limelight as the new central conflict, the sidelining of the Great Schism, and the reemergence of the Forerunners as a macabre horror show, among other things, were in no way an organic continuity of where Halo left off last time. Nor do I think it was a direction that served Halo's future well. I know some lore fans love this period of Halo, but to me, this was only when the seeds of later failures were sown. It wasn't the worst that was to come, but it wasn't also a solid and lasting foundation to build on, so it's no surprise things started going increasingly sideways. From then on, Halo was an increasingly convoluted house of cards waiting for a light breeze to blow it over. The final nail in the coffin as far as I was concerned was the story of Halo 5: Guardians, which was around the time I started seriously looking into making my fan stuff an alternate universe. Halo 5 was my break-up moment with Halo, and the U-turn 343i did with Infinity hasn't wooed me back so far.

With all that said, not all of 343i's output was bad. I maintain that The Forerunner Saga was a way better of a piece of literature than 343i's vision of the Forerunners deserved, and Greg Bear is still the author with most literary sci-fi cred they've worked with. However, they are still the backstory to 343i's version of Halo, and that meant Greg Bear was working within certain predefined limits (especially with Silentium, large parts of which were rewritten many times over to better match what we see in Halo 4). And as good as those novels are and as engaged as I was in them for some time, I cannot honestly say they present an organic continuation of the Forerunner story we got between 2001 and 2008. They're great novels, but not necessarily great Halo novels. Anyway, around the same time the Guardians fiasco happened, Troy Denning emerged as a new light in Halo's novel scene; Last Light scratched a particular itch I had back then, and likely sustained whatever little interest I had in Halo after Halo 5. Eventually, 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. 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 launched the first iteration of 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.

Shortcuts

 * /Sandbox
 * /Eras
 * /Arcana
 * /The Dawn's Heralds