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Apr. 15th, 2024 12:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anghraineMy best friend and I watched the second season of Halo last night. It's been very watchable, more than S1 IMO, but I have enough reservations that it had started to feel like a bit of a chore. It's both more ambitious and less cohesive than S1, with major characters disappearing for significant stretches of time (I was worried about Miranda!) and a split between so many arcs and subplots that it's weird and tiring. I like most of the characters in themselves, even the ones who are dreadful human beings (Halsey is my terrible fave!).
However, it's ... interesting that so many dudebro-type Halo fans had tantrums over the show being anything other than a direct recreation of the game (the protagonist of a TV show having emotions???) and particularly over it being "woke." I can't speak to the matter of fidelity, given that I've never played the games and my brief experience of watching them seemed pretty underwhelming after Mass Effect, but it is anything but woke. In particular, the critique of the UNSC undercuts itself in this season more than in the first and this season is far more racist.
The casual offscreen disposal of Madrigal felt like a direct and awkwardly executed concession to just those kinds of fans, and the amount of narrative scaffolding and breathing room overwhelmingly favored white characters, especially in S2. We get a little more sense of Riz and Vannak as people, but they don't benefit from the sort of structure around them that John and Kai have; Vannak's development as a distinct character had only just started when he was killed off. Riz was (also very awkwardly) written out shortly thereafter.
Parangosky's one-dimensional, unilateral ruthlessness is contrasted with the gradual and increasingly nuanced development of Ackerson as someone deeply human. It also contrasts with the space afforded Halsey (which, similarly to the glassing of Madrigal, involved awkwardly retconning the events of the previous season's finale, in which she had successfully deployed a flash clone to outwit the UNSC; this season begins with her captured without any sense of how or why it happened). The Halsey scenes of early S2 are particularly good, but the show had to swerve way off-course to find a pretext for giving her large amounts of focused screen time in a frequently very rushed season. The vibrancy of Halsey's characterization (with even little signs of something like normal feeling!) + the careful, slow humanization of Ackerson vs the conspicuous absence of Miranda until she appears late in the season to make an utterly disastrous decision + flatness of Parangosky's characterization + the handling of John and Kai as opposed to the underwriting of Vannak and Riz. The other super special one in a zillion figure, Makee, also being white (and heavily made up in a baffling way considering her circumstances) alongside Laera's increasing prominence where Soren's writing becomes shaky ... I mean. It's a lot.
The show doesn't seem to quite know what to do with Perez after the fall of Reach and afterwards it seems like they mainly focused on her eyes darting around in panic, contrasted first with John and then with Kai. I really liked her but the close-ups of her scared face over and over by the finale started to feel tedious, like they didn't know what else to do with her character. The tragedy of Reach being principally felt through the deaths of the Perez family, the deaths of an interracial gay couple, the death of Captain Keyes, and the death of Vannak while the completely unarmed Halsey wanders around the warzone in her Plot Armor ... :\
I did appreciate that they didn't completely eject Kwan Ha; she gets less focus, but she's still a major character and the things that made her important in the Madrigal arc from S1 are actually preserved in this season despite the ham-handed excision of Madrigal itself from the story. Her writing is more consistent than Soren's, too, and I like her a lot.
But wow is there a marked difference in the amount of care, nuance, and screentime afforded the major white characters and nearly everyone else in the show. My best friend largely agrees and think it shows the perils of "color blind casting" etc—how doing it thoughtlessly without any consideration of what it means for the individual characters or overall narrative can lead to re-inscribing racist tropes rather than undercutting them. To me it feels worse than that because it's so incredibly pervasive—maybe not deliberately racist but actively so.
I don't know, I've certainly liked more overtly racist things (LOTR, SW), but it bothers me so much here that it makes it hard to fully engage with the show.
However, it's ... interesting that so many dudebro-type Halo fans had tantrums over the show being anything other than a direct recreation of the game (the protagonist of a TV show having emotions???) and particularly over it being "woke." I can't speak to the matter of fidelity, given that I've never played the games and my brief experience of watching them seemed pretty underwhelming after Mass Effect, but it is anything but woke. In particular, the critique of the UNSC undercuts itself in this season more than in the first and this season is far more racist.
The casual offscreen disposal of Madrigal felt like a direct and awkwardly executed concession to just those kinds of fans, and the amount of narrative scaffolding and breathing room overwhelmingly favored white characters, especially in S2. We get a little more sense of Riz and Vannak as people, but they don't benefit from the sort of structure around them that John and Kai have; Vannak's development as a distinct character had only just started when he was killed off. Riz was (also very awkwardly) written out shortly thereafter.
Parangosky's one-dimensional, unilateral ruthlessness is contrasted with the gradual and increasingly nuanced development of Ackerson as someone deeply human. It also contrasts with the space afforded Halsey (which, similarly to the glassing of Madrigal, involved awkwardly retconning the events of the previous season's finale, in which she had successfully deployed a flash clone to outwit the UNSC; this season begins with her captured without any sense of how or why it happened). The Halsey scenes of early S2 are particularly good, but the show had to swerve way off-course to find a pretext for giving her large amounts of focused screen time in a frequently very rushed season. The vibrancy of Halsey's characterization (with even little signs of something like normal feeling!) + the careful, slow humanization of Ackerson vs the conspicuous absence of Miranda until she appears late in the season to make an utterly disastrous decision + flatness of Parangosky's characterization + the handling of John and Kai as opposed to the underwriting of Vannak and Riz. The other super special one in a zillion figure, Makee, also being white (and heavily made up in a baffling way considering her circumstances) alongside Laera's increasing prominence where Soren's writing becomes shaky ... I mean. It's a lot.
The show doesn't seem to quite know what to do with Perez after the fall of Reach and afterwards it seems like they mainly focused on her eyes darting around in panic, contrasted first with John and then with Kai. I really liked her but the close-ups of her scared face over and over by the finale started to feel tedious, like they didn't know what else to do with her character. The tragedy of Reach being principally felt through the deaths of the Perez family, the deaths of an interracial gay couple, the death of Captain Keyes, and the death of Vannak while the completely unarmed Halsey wanders around the warzone in her Plot Armor ... :\
I did appreciate that they didn't completely eject Kwan Ha; she gets less focus, but she's still a major character and the things that made her important in the Madrigal arc from S1 are actually preserved in this season despite the ham-handed excision of Madrigal itself from the story. Her writing is more consistent than Soren's, too, and I like her a lot.
But wow is there a marked difference in the amount of care, nuance, and screentime afforded the major white characters and nearly everyone else in the show. My best friend largely agrees and think it shows the perils of "color blind casting" etc—how doing it thoughtlessly without any consideration of what it means for the individual characters or overall narrative can lead to re-inscribing racist tropes rather than undercutting them. To me it feels worse than that because it's so incredibly pervasive—maybe not deliberately racist but actively so.
I don't know, I've certainly liked more overtly racist things (LOTR, SW), but it bothers me so much here that it makes it hard to fully engage with the show.