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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   22608 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 6, 2026

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Halo 1 (don't remember the sequels as much) is also a fundamentally fascist story. A white-coded "Spartan" single-handedly fights off the aliens intent on destroying the universe at the behest of their superstitious foreign cult. The Flood actually infect the humans like a disease. The xenophobia is celebrated and written into the script, with the Oorah US military as the good guys mercilessly slaughtering thousands of aliens.

I understand the sequels try to add more nuance into the politics of the aliens, but a lot of the sincerity of Halo 1 is the unapologetic roleplaying of a xenophobic warrior-ethos that you won't find in modern games. Wolfenstein of course is an anti-fascist story.

Interestingly the main enemy of Halo 1 is the "Covenant", so it is indeed subversive but subversive in a totally different vector than you see in modern games. Destroy the Covenant to save Civilization from the Aliens looking to destroy it!

Edit: Went a little more into the meaning of the Covenant:

  • Formed around 852 BC by the Prophet (San'Shyuum) and Elite (Sangheili) species, they united to worship the Forerunners.
  • "Holy" War against Humanity: They call themselves a covenant because they consider themselves chosen, while viewing humanity as a blight upon their religion.
  • Perception of Humans: The Covenant calls humanity "Demon" or "reclaimers" and tries to destroy them because humans are in fact the true inheritors of Forerunner technology, a truth that would destroy the Covenant's religious foundations.

Inb4 "Joo obsessed":

From Wikipedia:

The Covenant serve as one of a number of religious allusions in Halo. Their name refers to sacred agreements between the people of Israel and their God in Jewish and Christian tradition, and could be used to indicate the attitude of superiority complex the aliens have to the inferior and sacrilegious humans. The Covenant's ships bear names referring to elements of Judeo-Christian religion.[14] A review of religions and religious material in video games noted that the Covenant's invented religion had many similarities to those in similar games, and would likely be called a cult in the real world.[15] The thematic parallels of religious zealots fighting an American military metaphor was not lost on Microsoft's content review team, who forced a name change of the holy warrior "Dervish" to Arbiter before the release of Halo 2

So my revisiting of the symbols in Halo 1 with a more mature perspective was on-point before finding verification of that interpretation.

But yeah, one of the biggest set pieces of Halo 1 is the Covenant ship Truth and Reconciliation in which you infiltrate and kill them all! It was subversive but from the opposite angle of Wolfenstein.

Halo 1 (don't remember the sequels as much) is also a fundamentally fascist story.

I would argue that Halo (the first game) is only "Fascist" and "White-coded" insofar as those who have succumbed to the woke mind-virus will label anyone to the right of Bernie Sanders "a Fascist" and anything resembling traditional western virtues as "Whiteness". The Master Chief may not be a silent protagonist, but he is very explicitly a faceless one. Fact is that we don't know anything about his race beyond that he is human, and I feel like that is intentional. I also do not believe that historical Fascists would have been very comfortable with the positions that Halo seems to take on questions of agency and free-will. Their whole thing was about the state being the ultimate sovereign and Halo basically says "Fuck That. We don't follow orders we do what is right!". It would seem to me that Halo is more "Stoic" or "Early-Christian" coded than anything else.

As I have argued before, if your model of "Fascism" ends up lumping men like Truman and Churchill in with Hitler and Mussolini your model is not fit for purpose and if you think that Clarence Thomas is "white" I think we need to take a step back and discuss WTF we are even talking about.

Furthermore I do not believe that xenophobia factors into the game's appeal as much as you seem to think it does. The Humans in Halo are not at war with The Covenant because they wanted to "Purge The Xenos!" they are at war because the The Covenant attacked them first. Now if you were talking about the Helldivers or Space Marine franchises you might have a point but the original Halo trilogy is a different beast.

A true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, he fights because he loves what is behind.

It's common across all scifi-mediums for symbolic representation of racial struggle to be depicted as relations between alien species rather than tension among the actual human races of the actors within-species. This was true for Star Trek as well.

Halo is fascist because it depicts racial struggle, an actual race war, and celebrates the heroism of the warrior who saves the world. It pits the pagan-coded Spartan against the Abrahamic-coded Covenant.

The Humans in Halo are not at war with The Covenant because they wanted to "Purge The Xenos!" they are at war because the The Covenant attacked them first.

They are at war because the Covenant is a coalition of aliens fighting a Holy Race War against humans! And they apparently name their capital ships after racial justice courts!

A true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, he fights because he loves what is behind.

Well one thing is fascists tend to love their race, which would be represented by Master Chief: racial self-defense against alien hostility. Halo pulls off the "fight for your race" vibe which people just love naturally as much as they will deny it.

Inbred socioreligious elites using ethnic replacement to displace their former warrior caste is a funny thing to dwell upon now, but back then, it was just another thing that made you sympathize with the Arbiter more. This is the kind of 4chan joke that gives you a sensible chuckle.

Truth and Reconciliation being the name of the Covenant ship you attack in Halo 1 is pretty on the nose though looking back and actually making a criticism of socio-religious cults destroying social fabric. The Truth and Reconciliation was present at the fall of the Reach! That would have been written just a few years after the real TRC even though as kids that certainly didn't come to the mind of me or any of my friends.

the unapologetic roleplaying of a xenophobic warrior-ethos that you won't find in modern games.

I think the novelty of this was part of why Helldivers II did so well. It's unapologetic, but rides the line on being tongue-in-cheek about it.

Yeah I thought about calling out Helldivers II even though I've never played it. My understanding is it's more of a Starship Troopers phenomenon where the writers were trying to subvert the "xenophobic warrior-ethos" but they accidentally made it too cool so that players unironically like it. So I would call that more of a subversion that backfired, in contrast with the sincerity of Halo 1.

Or maybe, most likely of all, they were trying to cash-in on that pulse while having plausible deniability!

The interesting thing about Halo and the TV show 24 is how they were both thematically and tonally a perfect fit for the aftermath of 9/11 and the beginning of the war on terror, even though they were both written before it happened.

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