Haruspis

I don't know if this is the right way to describe this quality I feel this collection has, but the phrasing that comes into my head is "post-343."

Like, yes, of course Halo Studios is not really a separate entity from what 343i was but also the thing about the writing side of Halo is even though you could argue about exactly how many ships of Theseus we are deep at this point, it is undebatable there have been multiple changes of the guard.

Waypoint Chronicles at its best very much feels like it approaches mid 2010s Halo with a fresh perspective that is keenly interested, but also doesn't have personal skin tied up in its original making. What if we kick the foundations. What if we cared about this Halo. What if we liked ideas from this Halo and wanted to explore them. What if this is beloved and a bit nostalgic and interesting to flesh out. What if we treat it with seriousness and care but it's not precious or sacred.

And, as someone who spent the 2010s bitching rancorously about Halo and talking shit about everything... yeah. What if we cared about that Halo. What if it was fun sometimes. What if we grab the action figures that were already in the box and smack them around and get dirt on them and chip the paint. It doesn't belong in a museum, and it also doesn't belong in the Eternal Shame Hole. Sometimes it wasn't that good, but people engaged with those stories and they were what they were and their purpose is to be played with.

The error I made at the time was, candidly, believing that it was all part of a unified vision that was ultimately going to take us somewhere. That obviously didn't really end up being the case. Creative teams changed, priorities shifted, and the result ended up being that there's just a lot of narrative flotsam and jetsam from that era.

Maybe some of it can't or shouldn't be salvaged, I don't know. I always hated the way the Created were introduced in Halo 5. To me, they were the extreme end of "This is a creative singularity that completely fucking breaks the universe." But I think we've been able to give them a favorable second wind with some of these short stories, which means I had to go and tell my 20 year old self to eat crow on that front.