On Critical Dissonance

Hallo! Holy Week is ending! Easter Sunday is tomorrow! Hooray! He will be Risen!

I had a fantastic weekend last week; if you’re on Facebook, look for those pictures. Hopefully they won’t get posted (too) late. I do also feel a bit like I’m crashing after having such a wonderful weekend, though, so pray that I make it through that.

Presently, along with Delicious in Dungeon, I’ve started watching Shogun, as well as doing Brooklyn 99 again now that it’s on Netflix. Great fun!

I know I’ve talked about this before; however! I cannot find any sign of it on the blog right now, which means it’s been over four years since I’ve written this type of Note. So I’m in the clear!

On Critical Dissonance

The Paramount+ Halo adaptation has not been polarizing for Halo fans as much as almost universally reviled. Across the board, fans took issue with creative choices such as Master Chief spending so much time outside of his armor (you never see his face in the game series), the amount of screentime dedicated to human military drama and politics instead of action and the war against the alien Covenant, and generally not following the Plot of the games. The Fall of Reach, one of the biggest events in the canon, the subject of a novel and a video game (which contradict each other but that’s a topic for another time). Chief doesn’t get to the Halo ring, the whole start of the first video game, until the finale of the second season.

Despite this, it’s gotten fairly good reviews from critics. Reactor Magazine has an article saying Halo has a “stellar” first season. Kotaku’s review of the second season finale declared that the episode “proves” that the show is good and always has been, despite what that haters have been saying.

[Weirdly enough, this corresponds to the time when Kotaku’s management decided to no longer host comments on their articles.]

For the record, I haven’t seen the Halo adaptation, aside from a few scenes. I cannot pass judgment on it. I have Forward Unto Dawn to satisfy the longings for a live-action Halo adaptation. However, I’m using the adaptation to highlight an idea I’ve talked about before regarding reviews and critic culture: critics are usually looking for something entirely different than fans are when it comes to movies, shows, and games, especially when it comes to adaptations and sequels. This is why you often get sequels or adaptations that are critically approved or adored, even though hardcore fans absolutely despise them.

I feel like the big-name example here is The Last Jedi, but let’s not wade into that one.

What fans really want from a sequel or adaptation is continuity, consistency, and familiarity. That’s not to say that fans will always revolt when it’s not exactly like the fiction they’ve come to know and love already; though sometimes, they will, hence people getting worked up over things like characters’ hair color changing in adaptation. More often, though, it’s that they want something that feels like the fiction they liked in the first place. An adaptation or sequel that doesn’t feel like the story they enjoyed, or that removes the things they liked… well, they don’t have much reason to be invested.

Critics, on the other hand, are much more interested in commentary and innovation. If it doesn’t quite fit with the continuity of what came before, that’s fine, as long as it’s telling a compelling story, or says something meaningful. They’re not invested in deep lore; most TV critics probably haven’t played Halo, or weren’t interested in the story of it if they did. Having a science-fiction military drama is much more intriguing to them than a show about guys blasting aliens, and they don’t get why people would want the latter in the first place. Video game adaptations are probably hit with this issue the hardest–to people who aren’t in games, it feels like a very inaccessible medium for storytelling.

In both critic and fan cases, the result should be handled well for it to be liked by either group. I think in an ideal world, Halo would have both good human drama AND tons of alien-blasting; however, budget probably constrains how much you can show the aliens in the story and the makers of the show had to make a choice.

There is a false dichotomy, I think; many people expect that fans just want more of the same things over and over again. And no, that’s not true; at least, it’s not always true. What fans want is for the things they love to be expanded in a way that respects the source material. Having a sequel that follows the main rules established in the original shouldn’t be that difficult, but you see that broken all the time. Likewise, critics don’t always hate something that fans love; it’s not as if it’s a binary about two completely different directions. They can get onboard with adaptations or sequels that follow the same rules as the original, as long as they do it in a good way that innovates, telling a unique and interesting story.

There’s this weird idea I see sometimes that critics have this weird, blue-and-orange morality thing going on, that they don’t understand quality at all, and I don’t think that’s the case. It’s just that they’re using a different measuring stick on some key features. Fans forget that it’s not a useless viewpoint. Critics, however, are also likely to overlook and forget that fans do have a point, too.

“Look at what this movie says about the past of the film series, and how it deals with difficult topics!” Well, okay, but if it breaks all the characterization and worldbuilding rules of the series that it’s a part of, then that’s not actually good storytelling. Being unable to maintain consistency between installments isn’t a good thing; breaking that consistency proves that you maybe should have made an original story to begin with. I don’t think the fans are entirely wrong with that one, especially in regards to Halo–if the budget makes depicting the actual conflict of the show too difficult to do in live-action, why are you trying to do this at all?

[Also, an animated Halo series that took the storyline seriously would be amazing. Just look at Halo: Legends.]

At the same time, yeah, a lot of times the source material can be stale. If it’s a long-running series, you can only run through the same character and Plot beats before they grow old. And again, things like video games are sometimes seen as inaccessible to television audiences unfamiliar with that medium. You’re going to have to change things around for it to work for studios and TV audiences. In the case of Halo, it’s also worth noting that the studio originally in charge of it, Bungie, absolutely hated the idea of an ongoing story or deep personality for Master Chief, and tried to pull the plug on the novel tie-ins multiple times, even after the first one was already written and about to be published.

I see both sides here, is my point, but I also see their disadvantages. Either way, I think these conflicting points of view are worth considering when looking at reviews or fan reactions, instead of just asking, “Hey, what is this reviewer smoking?” or “Are these fans crazy?”, which are admittedly sometimes my first responses to seeing reactions I don’t quite expect in cases like that.

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