#john halo please go to therapy challenge

[bloodgulchblog]

Going through Fall of Reach again at 3x listening speed on my way to and from work this week because I guess this is how my life is now.

Say what you will about how it's just okay-tier gamer fiction because it is, but. But. It 100% establishes the duality of John's capability as a soldier and his vulnerability as a human person.

The earnestness of the character is lain out here, in our earliest non-game source, and I think that's so important to why I ended up caring so much about him. It's always been there. John's a weird dude because the UNSC brutally shaped him, cultivating that sincerity and feeding it with belief that everything being asked of him is necessary, he's the only one that can do it, and if he doesn't then the consequences for everyone he's trying to protect will be terrible.

No ego. No malice. All sacrifice for other people, because other people are what matters to him. John's loyal to the UNSC because it's what he knows, and the UNSC is his only source for information about how this is his purpose and the correct way to perform it. He is carefully and deliberately isolated in order to preserve this.

This is why it's possible to view him as a decent person, despite loyalty to the UNSC and our understanding of how fucked up the UNSC can be. Because of the lengths Halo goes to in order to establish John's sincerity and this fucked up violent kind of innocence, it's possible to want better for him and hope that somehow, someday he'll finally get to understand it all and maybe be okay. We can believe that if he ever did have and accept all the pieces, John would be able to adjust his view of the world and come to a place where he'd make choices that prove he's worth liking.

...Even if we know the odds of that are very, very against him getting that chance, and it's horribly sad.

#my room mate's cat woke me up by knocking over half my bookshelf at 3 am and this is what happens when that happens #also this goes for other spartan-iis a lot too it's just like #john is probably the most perfectly isolated one because he's trying incredibly hard at all times #john ate every bit of what they fed him about how this was all his responsibility now and his fault if it goes to hell #the man never met a responsibility he wasn't gonna worry about forever #grey team for example is more cynical because they never believed as hard as john believed they saw more of the brutal edge earlier #john halo please go to therapy challenge #master chief #halo: the fall of reach

[bloodgulchblog]

john halo please go to therapy challenge

#halo #master chief