User:Matt-256/Matt's Lurker Cave

In light of real life commitments, fluctuating interests and increasingly more perfectionistic/revisionist tendencies, I am unlikely to ever become really active here again. That said, sometimes I get in a really "Halo" mood, and want to do something. Therefore, I'm using this page just to air some of the Halo Fanon-y thoughts swirling in my head during my nostalgic moods.

Supersoldiers
If there's one thing I've often written over the years, it's Spartans and other supersoldiers. Is, IIs, IIIs, IVs (Ajax's version, before Halo 4 put the kibosh on that), JAVELINs, you name it. In fact, I used to make lame new Spartan programs (gah, why did I have to remind myself about the SPARTAN-V5 Program!) to have more Spartan characters. For good or ill, this has always been followed by my tendency to purge and revise these articles after a while in an attempt to streamline things (and, at least as I tend to try justifying to myself, fix mistakes I had previously failed to catch) - naturally followed by later creating more, and so the cycle continues...

Predictably, most of my current thoughts on this are similar - ideas to revise and alter my stuff to fit with my current tastes (as well as the trends in the Canon Haloverse), while at the same time likely leaving the gates open for creating many more characters later.

SPARTAN-II
With every new Spartan-II in canon (or expansion on previously vague canon ones), our work here becomes ever more difficult. Less potential slots available, tags that can no longer be used, events contradicting what we have written, etc. While this has not affected any of my SPARTAN-IIs yet (thanks to the whole "Leonidan" thing that I, Lomi, Spartan 501 and Spartan-091 put together, luck with the number tags, and that Cassandra has not been expanded on since her first mention and short entry in the encyclopedia), upon discovering the expansion of Randall-037's (who played a minor role in my Laszlo-108 and Lomi's Riker-012 articles) character in Nightfall, I realised that that could change at any time. As such, I started thinking on some ways that potential future problems with Spartan-IIs can be avoided (although, when it comes to the "Leonidan thing", I am actually pretty content with how it turned out, and by its nature, it can probably continue to fit in with established canon facts unless 343 at some point decides to release complete lists of all participants in the program, including those killed or crippled in the augmentations - plus it would not be up to me to decide anyway).

So far, I have two potential scenarios, both of them involving a form of project running in parallel with Halsey's, drawing from the pool of 75 candidates that Halsey had to cut. Fanon Spartans could be slotted into this parallel program, and thereby avoid any future canon hiccups (as it is highly unlikely 343 would come up with such an idea, what with them still having a large pool to choose from, along with Spartan-IIIs and now Spartan-IVs). Cassandra and other expanded-upon canon Spartans would be an exception to this, as they are mentioned in canon as being from John-117's class. The differences in the scenarios center around how many candidates they should involve, and in turn exactly how similar the parallel program should be with the canon one.

A - Identical/Nigh-identical
The first possibility is a nearly identical parallell project - with 75 (or probably 74, as Caled-095 was explicitly able to evade the attempts to abduct him) candidates, trained by a grizzled drill instructor and an overarching authority figure in the background. To be perfectly clear, I am not the first to think of something like this - Morhek alludes to it with his Andrew-306 and Indigo Team articles, implying that there was a parallel unit of Spartan-IIs seemingly also trained by Mendez, but without Halsey's knowledge, and producing incredibly similar results to Halsey's efforts.

The benefit of this kind of approach would be that it would require minimal changes to existing articles (simply excising mentions of Halsey and canon Spartans). One downside is that Halsey was cut down to 75 candidates because of funding - using all of the others in a parallel program would contradict this motivation, as there would be no reduction in costs as a result (though it could be easily countered by explaining that "funding" was a lie told specifically to be able to make a parallel program outside of Halsey's jurisdiction, or that the brass changed their minds after that instruction to Halsey). Another is that involvement from Mendez would raise numerous questions - such as: how did he have time to also train another group? Why wouldn't Halsey notice his absence and try to figure out what he was up to? Etc. Of course, with a little more editing, this could be fixed by simply using someone other than Mendez as the chief DI of the parallel group.

B - Different
The other scenario is a smaller group, possibly with slightly different objectives to Halsey's project. Again, I can't take credit for this - Brodie-001's Project SIGMA came first.

Anyway, the main benefit of this approach is that the aforementioned "funding" thing does not have to be contradicted, as some number of candidates were still disqualified from being trained. In this scenario, my ideal number of parallel candidates would probably be around 14-25, meaning at least 50 candidates' worth of investments are saved. Furthermore, in this scenario, the resulting article might be more interesting, as it becomes a distinct entity rather than a copy of the canon SPARTAN-II Program. In my case, I would probably have liked to name it LEONIDAS, and made it about training the candidates to be individual ONI operatives rather than team-based spec ops like the main group - meaning the "Leonidan" operatives would not be abducted main unit members, but rather part of a parallel program to serve explicitly different roles.

On the downside, it would require far more revisions than Scenario A. In my case, it would require Lomi's and 501's consent, as I did not create the original Leonidan concept myself.

SPARTAN-II Class II
An article I put together with Lomi, and then did almost nothing with. If I were to come back, I would probably try to do more with it. One idea that has been floating around in my head lately is to revise it to be a blend of the Class I SPARTAN-II Program and Ajax's Necros SPARTAN-IV Program. Specifically, to have (let's say) 3 units of 75 candidates each, each unit trained like the original SPARTAN-IIs, with supersoldier instructors (whether Class I S-IIs, S-Is, JAVELINs or whatever). This could potentially be tied in with Class III/Project ARES (see below). Regardless, I would probably want to explain why there were still candidates failing the augmentation procedures despite the fact that SPARTAN-III appears to have made them safe (for those fitting within some set of parameters, at least - we don't get confirmation that they were made safe for "normal" humans until SPARTAN-IV) - namely by adding additional, dangerous enhancements not yet made safe like the others.

Project ARES
Another series of articles I have been involved in that I am actually pretty proud about how they turned out after the most recent revisions, and thus would not mind if they stayed unchanged. Much (if not most of it) is probably due to 501's input (well, he originally created the project and the personnel involved himself - I just jumped onboard later and helped out), and the Ares Logs we put together to further flesh out the articles. That said, in hindsight I think we could have made things less intricate and easier if we had handled it a bit differently. Two scenarios have sprung to mind.

1 - Part of Class II
In line with the potential revision of the Class II project mentioned above, ARES could conceivably be integrated as one of the individual units, saddled with more problematic candidates than the others for whatever reason (bad luck, taking them because the other unit instructors/commanders did not want them, etc.).

2 - Parallel with S-III
In the end, in many ways, Project ARES and the supersoldiers it produced actually kind of resembles SPARTAN-III more than SPARTAN-II. AS such, one potential revision would be to make it a project running in parallel with Alpha or Beta Company, as sort of a spiritual predecessor to the later Headhunters Initiative (it's not specified whether the Headhunters began with Alpha or Beta Company) or alongside it (should canon later reveal that the Headhunters indeed started with Alpha Company, or if ARES is made to run parallel with Beta instead). A benefit of this approach would be that there are sizeable pools of candidates to pick from (many candidates were rejected from becoming recruited into Alpha and Beta, after all), possibly complemented by some S-II style abductions (for candidates like Connor-338, Roger-341 and Rachel-343). It might also involve less revisions than the first scenario.

JAVELIN
In hindsight, I made Project JAVELIN basically just a Spartan-II Program with a different name. Should I ever return, I would probably revise it a bit, either as a smaller-scale SPARTAN-II based parallel program (like Scenario B above/Project SIGMA), or as a project following more along the lines of ORION/SPARTAN-I or SPARTAN-IV - using military volunteers rather than children.