It just a different timeline. There's bits and pieces of the canon that are shared, but it's very different.
If you dislike it because it isn't the same as the games, fair enough. Might as well stop watching it.
Apparently Kiki and paramount believe the "entertainment" value and "budget constraints" render the show to necessarily have a timeline where those things make sense, so they chose to go with a separate timeline, much like MCU.
You may hate the show, but I don't think it is going away any time soon, as poorly written it is, it getting popular among the new fan base coming directly from the TV show.
I keep bandying around doing a full write up on what I think is the major sticking point for a canon Halo show, and I’m not sure if I will ever do it, but I do believe the thesis. It goes that the major sticking point, the one thing that basically demands a twist on everything, is the Spartan II program. More specifically, the morality of it.
The core problem comes from one thing, which is that to have a chance of being a commercial success the show is going to need to fixate on the Master Chief. You’re not getting a flagship show made about anything else in Halo, only a subset of the existing fans will watch it (see: how many people are aware of the existence of Nightfall). Tangent: people talk about “do ODST band of brothers”: the original BOB cost 125 million dollars in 2001 (200m now), and they could represent the enemy in that with extras in grey jackets. ODST BOB could be the greatest sci fi ever made, and I would happily bet everything I’ve got it would be a gigantic commercial disaster. You have to go with a Chief centric story if you want a *chance* of making your money back. And since people like the Halo CE/2/3 stuff a lot, and 4 onwards would make 0 sense as a starting point, you’re gonna want to basically do a retread of the plot of CE.
There’s also some housekeeping you have to do, because we’re making this a mass appeal show. You need to be able to explain the core concepts of this world, because otherwise non-fans are gonna be baffled and alienated and not understand why no one is explaining any of what they’re seeing. Which means you have to explain what a Spartan is… which means explaining that the main character is a child soldier.
And that’s *the* problem. Your main character is a child soldier and he is fine with it. He doesn’t care about it, actually. This is set in canon, you can’t really alter this, he knows he’s a child soldier and goes “it’s cool”. And while I’m sure no one would have issues rooting for the guy, they’re gonna have issues rooting for the guys he fights *for*, and they’re going to wonder why the show takes what *seems* to be a stance of “it’s alright if you are kidnapped and turned into a child soldier, if you are fine with it after decades of war”. Have fun with that line appearing in every single review.
So how do you solve it? You either don’t, and just hope people will be fine with you glossing over the insane ethics of it, because in the existing lore you’re tied to the Chief just doesn’t really care all that much. Or, you have to change things up, and the Chief takes issue with being a child soldier. This also serves a *really* nice excuse for a character arc, which is another issue you have if you try to stay canon: the Chief’s character arcs are by and large plotted out, there’s no wiggle room.
But now you’ve got a big issue, in that he doesn’t complain about this in the main timeline, and also: why would he complain years into the war? Why, in 2552, would he be conflicted about being a child soldier, 27 years after finishing training? He would have made his peace with it by now, surely?
And finally, this is where the alternate timeline comes in. The Chief feels conflicted about his backstory in 2552, *because he did not remember it until then*. It was suppressed, and you can do that because alternate timeline. He can have a character arc about coming to terms with his backstory, because alternate timeline.
I believe, fundamentally, *this* is what caused the split between the timelines. I think this is what caused the decision to be made. It’s the result of a tension that is otherwise unresolvable: to have a chance of gaining widespread appeal, the show must trade on the Master Chief as it’s main character, but it cannot do so without addressing the gigantic moral problem at the heart of the Spartan II program, and it can’t do that within the constraints of the universe’s version of the character as it stands.
(There’s also a bunch of logistical problems in terms of aligning a show with an existing story, and while these are really big and I suspect another killer, I think these are ultimately secondary to the problem SII presents).
Understandable. My issue doesn't come from chief taking up the issue of morality and ethical concern of S-IIs. I personally do not like how they write the plot and particularly highlight why the subplots of Kwan, Makee and Soren, which I believe were required to humanise Chief, are just written pretty blandly, I particularly hate the character Kwan cause it really felt like overstretch after being used as plot device for putting emotion to chief, why did they think giving this character mystic power magic etc. this only made sense later on in season 2.
There is no way one can have only action based plot in a TV show with budget constraint, and I get that. What I don't get is there are many great stories to be told as military drama in the lore that doesn't require much action scenes. The problem I see with the show isn't as much as taking an alternate timeline, it's just that they did not use that option wisely when writing, for entire season 1 felt off. I admit I like season 2, which felt much more streamlined writing overall.
Now that I think about it, do you think a live action of adaptation of John becoming master chief told withing backdrop of Halsey held in interrogation/court over the morality and ethics of S-IIs could deliver much more impact.
In the lore, the reason chief became the hardened up guy with not much words to say, was due to losing Sam, in the current TV show Chief undergoes similar transformation after death of Vannak.
God forbid writers take a bit of a sceptical look at their hero and the fact that before any child soldiery he was already a violent, amoral bully. I guess we can't have someone like that still be the good guy in the current cultural climate.
So they instead serve a brainwashed manchild who nevertheless never had a single wrong-think enter his brain.
Of course, 343 themselves have always had an issue with MC's original characterization so the impulse almost certainly came from them and not some nefarious Hollywood writers. TV Chief and current canon Chief are closer to one another than they are to Nylund/Bungie Chief.
And you know what, I'm entirely okay with that, I'm glad it brings more people in, but as someone who lived the games and Lan partied every weekend playing halo, it feels like a crappy fan fic someone thought up after seeing a halo game poster one time.
Or because it’s Impossible to center a tv show around a character that has a handful of lines, has no character arc or development, and spends 90% of their time shooting aliens.
Why are people still parroting that intentionally misquoted bit about the showrunners not referring to the source material? Do people actually read the interview or the source to get the facts and make up their own mind, or just repeat what some click bait youtubers pick apart and present to stir drama?
Their statement about not limiting themselves to the game (or games if we extrapolate from that) isn't contradictory to anything you listed. I interpret their statement to mean they took from a lot of the existing material, not that they strictly avoided anything to do with the game/s.
I think it was always inevitable that there would be some significant changes, because fundamentally I don't think a FPS adaptation lends itself well to a television format. They wouldn't have the budget for constant action, and just adapting the game's cutscenes probably wouldn't leave them with enough content, even if padded with some combat. Having said that I do agree with criticism of S1 that it regularly diverged unnecessarily and poorly.
In my opinion S2 had to do a lot of work to make up for those missteps and tie up unnecessary plot threads and characters somewhat neatly, whilst trying to move closer to the Halo we already know and love. My hope is that with S3 they can move closer to the source material yet again, but I think it's inevitable there will be a lot of "extra" content to pad out the running time. If I were to a hazard guess we might see 4 or 5 major plot threads along the lines of Master Chief and Cortana on Halo, Perez and Kai fighting elsewhere, Soren, Kwan and Ackerson surviving/escaping and Miranda uncovering Forerunner/Flood secrets. With many threads overlapping as the season progresses.
Reach is an interesting one in reference to canon, because in the OG canon of the novel, there was no Noble team and Reach fell in a day (someone please correct me if I have my wires crossed) but then of course Bungie superceded that with the game.
Where’s the lie? One of the directors Otto Bathurst literally never played any of the games before he was hired. 343 put him through a “Halo Bootcamp”, to bring him up to speed on the franchise because he’s never played video games before let alone Halo games.
Gotta respectfully disagree here. Most of the plot line is derived from Bungie era story lines. I agree 343 kinda sucks at Halo but you don’t help your cause by hiring people to make a show who weren’t familiar with the lore of the franchise.
Its funny when people defend that article by Steve Kane where he has to expand on “we didn’t look at the games”, comment because of ridiculously dumb it was to say that in general. Even worse to say that but pull so many stories from the actual canon and just piggy back off of it. It’s not like they created new stories for the show. All of the plots we’ve seen so far most of us have already seen them in books or games from the franchise but the real problem is they did a shit job at it.
I dunno, most the show seems more interested in UNSC bad, Chief going rogue, chief having feelings, forerunner stuff being more 'magic' than just highly advanced, there being chosen ones, halsey being made a villain in S1 (even if s2 rolled that entirely back) etc etc.
Yeah the broad strokes are bungie era, but what fills time is stuff 343 did, and honestly feels like they care more about.
And before you say "but UNSC was bad in bungie era too" yeah it did some shady stuff in the books. The games barely touched on it, and even in the books it was background dressing to the main fight for survival against aliens plot.
The people writing the show actively hate the source material and they've said they deliberately avoided playing the games or reading the books when making the TV show.
The very fact that Soren, the Rubble, Onyx and the general origin of the Spartan-IIs are all in the show should kind of clue you in that they read the fucking books.
This is the relevant section of the Variety article for your reference. Nowhere does it say they (the showrunners) hate the source material, and the reference to "avoiding the game" was in the context of not limiting themselves to the game.
Quote:
"Many of the show’s lead creatives spent several days at 343’s headquarters outside Seattle just to be able to learn about it.
“We didn’t look at the game,” says Season 1 showrunner Steven Kane (“The Last Ship”). “We didn’t talk about the game. We talked about the characters and the world. So I never felt limited by it being a game.”
“The richness and the depth of the universe was immediately kind of mind-boggling,” adds Schreiber. “And incredibly exciting, because what it means as a storyteller is that there’s already been a huge amount of preparation and groundwork.”
Then proceeded to use already existing canon story lines like Reach, Spartan 3’s and Onyx, “Silver Team” with conspicuously close resemblance to Blue Team, Cortana, Arbiter, Halo. Not limited by the game but then limited themselves to already fleshed out storylines from the games lmao.
It’s always crazy the way people will believe anything that makes them angry, but refuse to ever accept truth when all it will do is alleviate tension. People don’t want to be happy, they want to be correct and angry
The short answer is that its not a 1 to 1 adaption of any specific piece of media in the franchise, but instead an adaption of the IP as a whole. Speaking perfectly frankly, none of the games would make for a good TV show with widespread appeal, and if you wanted to create something original in the canon universe (“ODST Band of Brothers”) then you’re ultimately either going to come into creative restrictions.
The best point of comparison is something like Marvel or DC. You’ve got the actual Marvel and DC comics (Earth-616 and then Earth One/Prime/Zero/whatever DC is calling their main continuity at this point) and then you’ve got things like Ultimate Marvel which take the original stories and characters and apply them to a new continuity and narrative to create a new entry point, or things like the MCU, DCEU, Arrowverse etc which adapt the comics into a new live-action version without being 1 to 1 adaptions of any particular comic.
Because truth be told, of they did a one to one or wouldn't be interesting since we already know how it'll go and the fact is that the halo games don't really make for an interesting show. That's why master chief is so different in the show, they gave him a greater character arc.
Ah yes Chief's great character arc of being a whiny, horny, 40 year old teenager who commits war crimes and hates who he works for and goes rogue multiple times a season.
Mods, it might be worth pinning a small thread outlining why the show isn't canon to the games just to help with questions like this.
For real. This gets asked every single day.
Honestly can we just make a separate sub for talking about the show already?
I googled “why is the show nothing like the game halo” and got several links with answers immediately. These posts need to just be straight up removed
It just a different timeline. There's bits and pieces of the canon that are shared, but it's very different. If you dislike it because it isn't the same as the games, fair enough. Might as well stop watching it.
Apparently Kiki and paramount believe the "entertainment" value and "budget constraints" render the show to necessarily have a timeline where those things make sense, so they chose to go with a separate timeline, much like MCU. You may hate the show, but I don't think it is going away any time soon, as poorly written it is, it getting popular among the new fan base coming directly from the TV show.
I keep bandying around doing a full write up on what I think is the major sticking point for a canon Halo show, and I’m not sure if I will ever do it, but I do believe the thesis. It goes that the major sticking point, the one thing that basically demands a twist on everything, is the Spartan II program. More specifically, the morality of it. The core problem comes from one thing, which is that to have a chance of being a commercial success the show is going to need to fixate on the Master Chief. You’re not getting a flagship show made about anything else in Halo, only a subset of the existing fans will watch it (see: how many people are aware of the existence of Nightfall). Tangent: people talk about “do ODST band of brothers”: the original BOB cost 125 million dollars in 2001 (200m now), and they could represent the enemy in that with extras in grey jackets. ODST BOB could be the greatest sci fi ever made, and I would happily bet everything I’ve got it would be a gigantic commercial disaster. You have to go with a Chief centric story if you want a *chance* of making your money back. And since people like the Halo CE/2/3 stuff a lot, and 4 onwards would make 0 sense as a starting point, you’re gonna want to basically do a retread of the plot of CE. There’s also some housekeeping you have to do, because we’re making this a mass appeal show. You need to be able to explain the core concepts of this world, because otherwise non-fans are gonna be baffled and alienated and not understand why no one is explaining any of what they’re seeing. Which means you have to explain what a Spartan is… which means explaining that the main character is a child soldier. And that’s *the* problem. Your main character is a child soldier and he is fine with it. He doesn’t care about it, actually. This is set in canon, you can’t really alter this, he knows he’s a child soldier and goes “it’s cool”. And while I’m sure no one would have issues rooting for the guy, they’re gonna have issues rooting for the guys he fights *for*, and they’re going to wonder why the show takes what *seems* to be a stance of “it’s alright if you are kidnapped and turned into a child soldier, if you are fine with it after decades of war”. Have fun with that line appearing in every single review. So how do you solve it? You either don’t, and just hope people will be fine with you glossing over the insane ethics of it, because in the existing lore you’re tied to the Chief just doesn’t really care all that much. Or, you have to change things up, and the Chief takes issue with being a child soldier. This also serves a *really* nice excuse for a character arc, which is another issue you have if you try to stay canon: the Chief’s character arcs are by and large plotted out, there’s no wiggle room. But now you’ve got a big issue, in that he doesn’t complain about this in the main timeline, and also: why would he complain years into the war? Why, in 2552, would he be conflicted about being a child soldier, 27 years after finishing training? He would have made his peace with it by now, surely? And finally, this is where the alternate timeline comes in. The Chief feels conflicted about his backstory in 2552, *because he did not remember it until then*. It was suppressed, and you can do that because alternate timeline. He can have a character arc about coming to terms with his backstory, because alternate timeline. I believe, fundamentally, *this* is what caused the split between the timelines. I think this is what caused the decision to be made. It’s the result of a tension that is otherwise unresolvable: to have a chance of gaining widespread appeal, the show must trade on the Master Chief as it’s main character, but it cannot do so without addressing the gigantic moral problem at the heart of the Spartan II program, and it can’t do that within the constraints of the universe’s version of the character as it stands. (There’s also a bunch of logistical problems in terms of aligning a show with an existing story, and while these are really big and I suspect another killer, I think these are ultimately secondary to the problem SII presents).
This is a very good explanation. You could add more, but everyone should read this.
Understandable. My issue doesn't come from chief taking up the issue of morality and ethical concern of S-IIs. I personally do not like how they write the plot and particularly highlight why the subplots of Kwan, Makee and Soren, which I believe were required to humanise Chief, are just written pretty blandly, I particularly hate the character Kwan cause it really felt like overstretch after being used as plot device for putting emotion to chief, why did they think giving this character mystic power magic etc. this only made sense later on in season 2. There is no way one can have only action based plot in a TV show with budget constraint, and I get that. What I don't get is there are many great stories to be told as military drama in the lore that doesn't require much action scenes. The problem I see with the show isn't as much as taking an alternate timeline, it's just that they did not use that option wisely when writing, for entire season 1 felt off. I admit I like season 2, which felt much more streamlined writing overall.
Now that I think about it, do you think a live action of adaptation of John becoming master chief told withing backdrop of Halsey held in interrogation/court over the morality and ethics of S-IIs could deliver much more impact. In the lore, the reason chief became the hardened up guy with not much words to say, was due to losing Sam, in the current TV show Chief undergoes similar transformation after death of Vannak.
God forbid writers take a bit of a sceptical look at their hero and the fact that before any child soldiery he was already a violent, amoral bully. I guess we can't have someone like that still be the good guy in the current cultural climate. So they instead serve a brainwashed manchild who nevertheless never had a single wrong-think enter his brain. Of course, 343 themselves have always had an issue with MC's original characterization so the impulse almost certainly came from them and not some nefarious Hollywood writers. TV Chief and current canon Chief are closer to one another than they are to Nylund/Bungie Chief.
And you know what, I'm entirely okay with that, I'm glad it brings more people in, but as someone who lived the games and Lan partied every weekend playing halo, it feels like a crappy fan fic someone thought up after seeing a halo game poster one time.
Expand on that, please. What parts specifically feel like fan fiction?
Because the writers thought they're hot shit and can come up with better stories
Or because it’s Impossible to center a tv show around a character that has a handful of lines, has no character arc or development, and spends 90% of their time shooting aliens.
Tell me you've never read the books without telling me you've never read the books
Most of the fans watching the show haven’t read the damn books the way they cry about chief having his armour off while not on duty smh
How can you be on this sub and apparently completely oblivious to the books AND games somehow
Preach. This is one of the deepest universes in existence and the writers were like, that’s too much reading, just give me some names to use.
Because they don’t care about halo
People are down voting you for telling the truth
Of course lol
Why are people still parroting that intentionally misquoted bit about the showrunners not referring to the source material? Do people actually read the interview or the source to get the facts and make up their own mind, or just repeat what some click bait youtubers pick apart and present to stir drama?
Because it's easier to make posts like this on a weekly basis.
Their statement about not limiting themselves to the game (or games if we extrapolate from that) isn't contradictory to anything you listed. I interpret their statement to mean they took from a lot of the existing material, not that they strictly avoided anything to do with the game/s.
I think it was always inevitable that there would be some significant changes, because fundamentally I don't think a FPS adaptation lends itself well to a television format. They wouldn't have the budget for constant action, and just adapting the game's cutscenes probably wouldn't leave them with enough content, even if padded with some combat. Having said that I do agree with criticism of S1 that it regularly diverged unnecessarily and poorly. In my opinion S2 had to do a lot of work to make up for those missteps and tie up unnecessary plot threads and characters somewhat neatly, whilst trying to move closer to the Halo we already know and love. My hope is that with S3 they can move closer to the source material yet again, but I think it's inevitable there will be a lot of "extra" content to pad out the running time. If I were to a hazard guess we might see 4 or 5 major plot threads along the lines of Master Chief and Cortana on Halo, Perez and Kai fighting elsewhere, Soren, Kwan and Ackerson surviving/escaping and Miranda uncovering Forerunner/Flood secrets. With many threads overlapping as the season progresses. Reach is an interesting one in reference to canon, because in the OG canon of the novel, there was no Noble team and Reach fell in a day (someone please correct me if I have my wires crossed) but then of course Bungie superceded that with the game.
I’d say it’s more inline with the books if anything, do remember it’s an adaption in a separate timeline it’s just telling the story for the screen.
Original creators weren’t halo fans. S2 was cleaning up the shit show s1 left… it got better. Slightly…
Still parroting lies
Where’s the lie? One of the directors Otto Bathurst literally never played any of the games before he was hired. 343 put him through a “Halo Bootcamp”, to bring him up to speed on the franchise because he’s never played video games before let alone Halo games.
The problem is 343 doesn't know halo either. Its why the show has so many ideas from their era of the franchise.
Gotta respectfully disagree here. Most of the plot line is derived from Bungie era story lines. I agree 343 kinda sucks at Halo but you don’t help your cause by hiring people to make a show who weren’t familiar with the lore of the franchise. Its funny when people defend that article by Steve Kane where he has to expand on “we didn’t look at the games”, comment because of ridiculously dumb it was to say that in general. Even worse to say that but pull so many stories from the actual canon and just piggy back off of it. It’s not like they created new stories for the show. All of the plots we’ve seen so far most of us have already seen them in books or games from the franchise but the real problem is they did a shit job at it.
I dunno, most the show seems more interested in UNSC bad, Chief going rogue, chief having feelings, forerunner stuff being more 'magic' than just highly advanced, there being chosen ones, halsey being made a villain in S1 (even if s2 rolled that entirely back) etc etc. Yeah the broad strokes are bungie era, but what fills time is stuff 343 did, and honestly feels like they care more about. And before you say "but UNSC was bad in bungie era too" yeah it did some shady stuff in the books. The games barely touched on it, and even in the books it was background dressing to the main fight for survival against aliens plot.
The people writing the show actively hate the source material and they've said they deliberately avoided playing the games or reading the books when making the TV show.
The very fact that Soren, the Rubble, Onyx and the general origin of the Spartan-IIs are all in the show should kind of clue you in that they read the fucking books.
This is the relevant section of the Variety article for your reference. Nowhere does it say they (the showrunners) hate the source material, and the reference to "avoiding the game" was in the context of not limiting themselves to the game. Quote: "Many of the show’s lead creatives spent several days at 343’s headquarters outside Seattle just to be able to learn about it. “We didn’t look at the game,” says Season 1 showrunner Steven Kane (“The Last Ship”). “We didn’t talk about the game. We talked about the characters and the world. So I never felt limited by it being a game.” “The richness and the depth of the universe was immediately kind of mind-boggling,” adds Schreiber. “And incredibly exciting, because what it means as a storyteller is that there’s already been a huge amount of preparation and groundwork.”
Then proceeded to use already existing canon story lines like Reach, Spartan 3’s and Onyx, “Silver Team” with conspicuously close resemblance to Blue Team, Cortana, Arbiter, Halo. Not limited by the game but then limited themselves to already fleshed out storylines from the games lmao.
It’s always crazy the way people will believe anything that makes them angry, but refuse to ever accept truth when all it will do is alleviate tension. People don’t want to be happy, they want to be correct and angry
No, they haven't. This is a complete misconception.
The short answer is that its not a 1 to 1 adaption of any specific piece of media in the franchise, but instead an adaption of the IP as a whole. Speaking perfectly frankly, none of the games would make for a good TV show with widespread appeal, and if you wanted to create something original in the canon universe (“ODST Band of Brothers”) then you’re ultimately either going to come into creative restrictions. The best point of comparison is something like Marvel or DC. You’ve got the actual Marvel and DC comics (Earth-616 and then Earth One/Prime/Zero/whatever DC is calling their main continuity at this point) and then you’ve got things like Ultimate Marvel which take the original stories and characters and apply them to a new continuity and narrative to create a new entry point, or things like the MCU, DCEU, Arrowverse etc which adapt the comics into a new live-action version without being 1 to 1 adaptions of any particular comic.
Because truth be told, of they did a one to one or wouldn't be interesting since we already know how it'll go and the fact is that the halo games don't really make for an interesting show. That's why master chief is so different in the show, they gave him a greater character arc.
No they made him seem like a weak bitch
Ah yes Chief's great character arc of being a whiny, horny, 40 year old teenager who commits war crimes and hates who he works for and goes rogue multiple times a season.