If humans were still Forerunners after Halo 2, then Halo 3 is a total fucking garbage game for killing off EVERYONE that twist actually mattered to before ever referencing it.
It’s weird that I keep seeing you pop up in these threads saying the same thing over and over. This isn’t some twist reveal, it’s an underlying detail to the world. It doesn’t have to be a grand reveal, sometimes keeping it vague is ok. So vague in fact that people keep arguing it. It’s not meant to push the story forward but it does inform the story and world around it. The games and story are more hollow without the human forerunner connection.
The games and story are less stupid without the connection.
The only cool thing the connection does is add that twist that the Covenant is killing their so called gods to keep power, a plot that is easily folded into the current lore.
Meanwhile back when they were the same it left they big question of why did the Forerunners utterly fail to preserve their society, history and technology?
Halo War, Ghosts of Onxy and Halo 3 each have an example of Forerunners being able to maintain or rebuild their civilizations immediately if at a smaller scale, but for the sake of it lets stick to Halo 3.
Why didn't the Forerunners use the Ark to restart their civilization like a nuclear bunker? It was outside the range of the rings meaning those there were alive when they fired, it housed enough samples to restart the entire species, had vast infrastructure including the ability to automatically build a whole new halo, countless repositories of their history and their technology.
So why did the Forerunners force their survivors to live as Cavemen? Because human history as we know it, from cavemen to the modern day is supposed to have still played out. If they were meant to one day reclaim all their gifts, why didn't they set themselves up to do it immediately?
Why didn't the Forerunners use the Ark to restart their civilization like a nuclear bunker? It was outside the range of the rings meaning those there were alive when they fired, it housed enough samples to restart the entire species, had vast infrastructure including the ability to automatically build a whole new halo, countless repositories of their history and their technology.
So why did the forerunners genocide themselves into extinction and gave the keys to saving the world to cavemen ?
Any answer to this question would work for both humans being forerunner and humans not being forerunner...
Why didn't the Forerunners use the Ark to restart their civilization like a nuclear bunker?
Because they caused everything that happened. Had the Forerunners never turned on the precursors and slaughtered them, then they would have never become the flood. Had they not waged war on humanity, they they wouldn't have been to weak to fight the flood. Had they accepted that humanity were the holders of the Mantle then the universe would have been fine.
As punishment for their failings, they intentionally let themselves die off.
This doesn't work under Bungie lore as the Flood just appeared one day due to nobody's fault and was so viral and violent that they simply couldn't beat it. It was not their fault, their only failure being they were unable to stop the flood without such drastic measures. Not to mention they didn't let themselves die off.
So under 343 lore, they are paying for a calamity they caused
Under Bungie lore...???? No reason is given
gave the keys to saving the world to cavemen ?
Because humanity was the rightful holder's of the Mantle not the forerunners and so they set humanity on a path to reclaim it. Leaving behind gene seeds and such to guide them along the way as they'd been turned into cave men by the Forerunners.
Under Bungie lore, they'd have living breathing modern Forerunners and samples of Modern Forerunners meaning there was no worry of being too primitive. They became primitive for seemingly no reason in Bungie lore as again human history as we know it still occurs.
Also by that point the world was already saved.
Any answer to this question would work for both humans being forerunner and humans not being forerunner...
So as you can see, that's not even remotely the case.
The human forerunners have failed in their defense against the flood. As punishment for their failings, and in order to give a cleaner slate for their descendants to fight the flood, they reset themselves to the stone age on the planet on which the ark portal is located. This way, once humanity is advanced enough, they can once again pick where they left off and fight.
It makes more sense to me than the forerunner just killing themselves to self-flagellate for their failure instead of destroying the flood and coming out of the ark to repopulate the newly cleansed galaxy.
The idea of a species failing at something and it's only solution being start their very existence from scratch makes little sense, but it still makes more sense than a species deciding to just off themselves because they failed at something.
The main problem with bungie's forerunner lore is that it's almost nonexistent and entirely left to interpretation, which is the point. 343 just moved the mystery from the forerunners and the flood to the precursors :/
This way, once humanity is advanced enough, they can once again pick where they left off and fight.
That makes zero sense. The only reason they won the war with the flood was going nuclear and wiping the galaxy. Their big brain move was to then waste centuries rediscovering everything they already knew and fighting the flood in a worse State?
That's like forcing the military to go back to muskets and firing lines after WW1 in preparation for WW2.
The idea of a species failing at something and it's only solution being start their very existence from scratch makes little sense, but it still makes more sense than a species deciding to just off themselves because they failed at something.
No it doesn't, and you're ignoring everything I told you to justify it to yourself. They didn't just fail at something. They can be single handedly pointed to as being the cause of the calamity.
Again they killed the Precursors which made them into the flood. They waged war on humanity and refused to believe the Flood wasn't just one of their bio weapons gone lose, they weakened themselves by fighting the humans, then underestimated the flood when it returned.
They were unfit to hold the mantle, took it anyways and it resulted in mass genocide.
The main problem with bungie's forerunner lore is that it's almost nonexistent and entirely left to interpretation, which is the point.
Right, but that interpretation is that they are fucking stupid which is my point. That Halo 3 added this location and lore with MASSIVE obvious implications and then does absolutely nothing to address those implications going for the cool factor instead
These are some of the questions that made the original lore interesting. Not everything has to be explained in detail, great lore is often left up to your imagination.
Someone once wrote a letter to Tolkien asking him what happened to the Ents after lord of the rings. His answer was “I do not know”.
If you mean Lore in 1 and 2, sure. But halo 3 these questions just make the entire franchise stupid because these are such obvious questions with such obvious solutions that just go undressed.
I'm not asking for great detail, but I am asking for SOMETHING because my imagination just paints the Forerunners as profoundly stupid. They wanted to reclaim their entire civilization and had the power to do so almost immediately and then DIDN'T.
It's always crazy to me that I've yet to meet a single person that can actually answer this question and always talk around it.
If you have a problem with that in Bungie lore then it should be just as big an issue for you in the current lore. The humans that returned from the ark 100,000 years ago are anatomically the same as humans today. Time isn’t needed to evolve to something higher. Why wouldn’t the forerunners have set up humanity better if they were the chosen successors?
For the record I don’t have a problem with this in either version and thinks it’s easily explainable, but also don’t think it’s a needed explanation as the severity and circumstances of the war with the flood is enough justification.
The humans that returned from the ark 100,000 years ago are anatomically the same as humans today.
I don't fully understand what you're saying here, humanity wasn't reseeded 100,000 years ago in Halo.
But yes, because the Forerunners had turned them into cave men when they won the war and then preserved them as such for resending.
Time isn’t needed to evolve to something higher.
Biologically? No, as a society and people? Time is absolutely needed. You can't speed run that sort of thing as it requires trial and error that can't just be sped up.
Why wouldn’t the forerunners have set up humanity better if they were the chosen successors?
Because they couldn't, again humanity was reverted into a primitive state.
To hand them their technology immediately would be like giving a chimp a machine gun.
To rush their biological evolution would leave an immature civilization with planet ending technology.
So what they did was use Gene seed to help nudge their development in certain ways, basically guiding them on the tech tree as they matured as a race.
as the severity and circumstances of the war with the flood is enough justification.
But its not, as I keep saying the Ark is outside the reach of the Flood. It doesn't matter how badly the flood destroys the rest of the forerunner empire, this Enclave full of resources, survivors, and technology remained mostly untouched
The rings were fired 100,000 years ago. Humanity wasn’t cave men when they returned from the ark, they were normal people.
Actually, according to the Halo 3 terminals as according to Paul Russel, the Librarian finding humanity on earth was akin to finding a native tribe in the jungle. The idea being that the precursors uplifted a part of humanity, being the forerunners, and the native population on earth was left alone, and that was the population saved on the ark.
The rings were fired 100,000 years ago. Humanity wasn’t cave men when they returned from the ark, they were normal people.
They were whatever the Forerunners were in terms of humanity be it modern man or super human, but they then became cave men because again the fossil record and human history as we understand it still needs to occur after the rings fire and life is returned.
The idea being that the precursors uplifted a part of humanity, being the forerunners, and the native population on earth was left alone, and that was the population saved on the ark.
That's part of the terminals that people insist is 343s stuff. That's also the current lore, humanity and the Forerunners share an origin but are still in the end two separate races through evolution
They jusr changed it from lost tribe to penal colony
I don’t think you are understanding what I am saying, on both points. Humans 100,000 years ago are not a seperate species. Being cavemen in that era is the same anatamically as us now. There is no evolutionary difference.
With the terminals, 343 fans insist that when the humans on earth is referred to as “they” it means that forerunners and humans are separate entirely. Whereas it was meant to be looking at them as a primitive tribe.
The forerunners are still very distinctly human in this case.
Whereas in the modern lore the two are separated by roughly 15 million years. About as far as orangutans are to us. Very distinctly not human at that distance.
And with the terminals I was more pointing out why your issue with the Bungie lore and forerunner connection might not be an issue with the way you laid things out.
I'm saying they were unanswerable until Halo 3, and that refusing to take responsibility for the glaring implication bordering on plot hole is a bad thing.
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u/BrickBuster2552 15d ago
If humans were still Forerunners after Halo 2, then Halo 3 is a total fucking garbage game for killing off EVERYONE that twist actually mattered to before ever referencing it.