#for past few days ive been. not very functional!! progressively getting worse but aside from that im good

[growling]

taking sick leave from being funny on the internets cause not only do my legs straight up not work but also my brain😔😔😔 im just writing items in a list now and its just static noise and a distant tumbleweed

[aces-to-apples]

halo, spartans, and rvb deep lore

so

you wanna incorporate spartan lore into your rvb fic

okay then, first thing’s first: what you have to know, first and foremost, about the spartans (beyond a genuinely stupid amount of backstory) is that everything about the SPARTAN-II Program (not to be confused with the original ORION Project, or the subsequent SPARTAN-III or SPARTAN-IV Programs) from start to finish is fucking buckwild

tw: child abuse, kidnapping, mental abuse, emotional abuse, physical abuse, human experimentation, human rights violations, medical experimentation, child soldiers, slavery, murder, torture, ptsd, war, genocide, psychosis, non-consensual body modification, suicide (i missed that one, sorry), let me know if i missed anything

ORION Project (retroactively termed “SPARTAN-I Program”)

okay so picture this, it’s 2494. humans have been out there, colonizing space for a good couple hundred years. there’s a Unified Earth Government. there’s a United Nations Space Command. everything still runs on capitalism, and the military is basically the government. now up until now, because Capitalism, earth and its closest neighbors (the Inner Colonies) have been demanding more and more from the poorer and sparser working class Outer Colonies with diminishing returns for the Outer Colonies because space capitalism, and it’s been getting progressively worse and worse for decades. it’s very star wars, slow decay of the republic, because CAPITALISM IN SPACE, folks! so, 2494, after decades of trying to negotiate better conditions and compromises with a government that doesn’t listen and doesn’t care, finally the demands for independence start pouring in in earnest. these demands are, of course, denied, with prejudice. fighting breaks out; it’s unofficial war. the Insurrection. unbeknownst to you, humble average joe trying to live your life without GODDAMN SPACE CAPITALISM, the unsc (specifically ONI, the office of naval intelligence, which is basically the space CIA, who does all the really shady shit) saw the writing on the wall a few years before and put restarted the efforts to biochemically augment regular soldiers for more effective use. super soldiers, ya dig?

(full disclosure: they’ve been trying this for years, decades, like a century and a half or some shit but it never really worked out and last time they tried it, in like 2321 or some shit, they scrapped it and shove the initial volunteers back into regular duty and they all ended up mysteriously dying.)

so, super soldiers. stronger, faster, enhanced sight and hearing, enhanced brain function, the works. and work it does, sort of. the first 65 test subjects are a success, and deployed in 2496 because the Insurrection is picking up steam and actually winning battles and taking control of new territory and using spies and just basically freaking the shit out of the military. another batch goes into the works. things get worse. bombings continue, insurrectionists grow bolder, spies become harder to root out, civilians get caught in the crossfire, hatred for the unsc continues to grow. at its height, there are 300 active duty ORIONs, and they’re good at what they do, but it’s not enough. because of War and also Science, the ORIONs also become a game of diminishing returns, most of them growing too traumatized, too jaded, too sympathetic to the insurrection, or too sick (physically, mentally, and even genetically) to continue. 2502: the leader of the Secessionist Union is assassinated by the ORIONs, the Union falls apart but the Insurrection only gains strength from a martyr, and honestly when does any military actually stay smart and efficient? the ORION Project is quietly retired in 2506 and the remaining 165 active duty ORIONs reintegrated back into regular unsc.

(another quick aside here: the Insurrection refers less to any specific group of insurgents and more of the overall cause of independence from earth imperialism. the Secessionist Union was the most visible, organized, and effective of the bunch, having gather about a dozen world initially to all petition for sovereignty from the Unified Earth Government.)

(fun fact: ODSTs (Orbital Drop Shock Troopers) were modeled off of the ORIONs and became the most badass and effective soldiers in the UNSC, barring SPARTANs themselves.)

(another one: due to all the biochemical and genetic fuckery, the ORIONs who didn’t develop ridiculous scary physical/genetic health problems, or completely understand mental health problems, really did kind of end up like captain america-y super soldiers and continued serving well past when a baseline human would have retired or just gotten Too Old For This Shit. Avery Johnson, a notable and dare i say Iconic character from the Halo franchise, was an ORION and that led him to surviving: all of the ORION Project fuckery missions, the Harvest incident AKA: When Humans Met Covenant And It Went Poorly, the Fall of Reach AKA: When The Covenant After 20 Years Of War Found And Glassed Earth’s Next-Door Neighbor Signalling The Beginning Of The End Cuz When They Found Earth It Was All Gonna Be Fucking Over, the Battle of Installation 04 AKA: Halo 1, and the first Battle of Earth and the Battle of Installation 05 AKA: Halo 2. he was a key leader in the Human-Covenant Alliance following the Great Schism and participated in the Battles for the Ark and Installation 08 AKA: When The Elites Realized Their Religious Leaders Were Full Of Shit And Started Their Own Rebellion And Teamed Up With Humanity To Stop The Flood From Spreading Or The Halo Installations From Firing And Wiping Out All Sentient Life In The Galaxy AKA: Halo 3. also, the biochemical fuckery kept the flood, aka: space zombies via spores, from infecting him. the monitor, also known as epsilon’s ball-form, shot and killed johnson with his lazer face at the end of halo 3. i cried. this badass motherfucker survived like legit 55 years of war to be taken out by an a.i. who can’t wear pants having an existential crisis.)

SPARTAN-II Program (spiritual successor to ORION Project)

2510. shit’s been fucked for awhile. the Unified Earth Government and the United Nations Space Command have been fighting an unofficial civil war for like 15 years. people are Tired, they want the war to end, but they don’t want to admit that they’re in the wrong, so they decide to throw more firepower at the problem. enter Dr. Catherine Halsey, a motherfucking 18 year old civilian child prodigy scientist, I DIDN’T EVEN FUCKING KNOW THAT SHE WAS THAT FUCKING YOUNG WHAT THE F U C K, walks up to the Vice Admiral of ONI (remember, Space CIA, alllll the shady shit) and says “hey i got an idea let’s try super soldiers again but this time it’s Worse” and ONI fucking agree because ONI is Fucked Up and i fucking Hate them, fuck ONI. anyway, it’s “spartan episode 2: attack of the clones” up in here. oh, you think i’m kidding? you think i jest?

“the first problem is,” says arrogant petulant 18 year old catherine halsey who’s never been told no a day in her life because she’s just So Smart, she’s Emily Grey up in this bitch but without the perky attitude or respect for people’s wishes when they say they don’t want a robot arm, “the problem with the orions was that the genetic fuckery y’all did was done all willy-nilly, y’all didn’t even make sure the soldiers would be compatible. now you’re got avery johnson, real like Captain America, running around but also orions who retired and had children need to give their kids special injections on the regular to keep their genes where and doing what they’re supposed to be. so you gotta genetically test all your subjects before you fuck with their dna.”

“okay, that makes sense,” says oni, “go on.”

“right so the second problem is,” says halsey, who will eventually become pretty much the worst that Humanity has to offer to the Universe, in my opinion, “that some of your knock-off super soldiers developed a little touch of the ol’ ptsd, or caught some Feelings about the insurrection maybe being Not Wrong, so we gotta make sure to brainwash—i’m sorry, did i say brainwash, i meant indoctrinate—all your slaves—i mean subjects!—in Military Values and Warfare because who wants super soldiers with empathy. so they’ve gotta be pretty young, which ties in nicely with the genetic component which requires they be prepubescent. neat, right?”

“brainwash children,” oni replies, nodding and making notes, “got it. anything else?”

“ah ha!” says halsey, whom i hate possibly more than any other fictional character across the board. “so! after we find these really genetically specific children who are all in the single digits, all possessing not only genetic but superior physical and mental capabilities, and after we kidnap them and replace them with flash clones—which, i’ll remind you, are illegal to create because flash-cloning speeds up the development of the cloned fetus to such degrees that they almost unfailingly develop compounding biological and congenital defects that cannot be corrected us thus almost all of them end up dying awful painful deaths—so we abduct the children and replace them with clones almost guaranteed to die quickly, ruining untold hundreds of lives in the process, we’ll physically, mentally, and emotionally abuse them into compliance and ruin any chance of them functioning in society by turning them into child soldiers. and then! and this is the really fun part, and then when they’re fourteen we’ll subject them to the most despicable violations of their body that i can possibly concoct using chemical, biological, and physical let’s call them ‘augmentations’ to make them grow obscenely large and strong without their consent because they’re slaves—soldiers!—and really who needs consent or ethics or basic human rights, amirite?”

“entirely,” oni says, nodding in agreement. “so what’s the survival rate on that, by the by?”

“hmm?” asks halsey, distracted by her own fucking evil brilliance, “oh right yeah well you originally okayed that i steal 150 kids from their parents but then i added in that whole flash-clone bullshit to soothe my own almost non-existent conscience so you bumped it down to 75 and then, like, 30 of them won’t survive the augmentation process at all, and then like a dozen of them will become so painfully and tortuously disabled that we’ll just kick them out of the project—you guys can find a use for those wash-outs, right?—and like a couple of them will probably kill themselves so like…” halsey trails off, counting her fingers silently. “33, maybe? did i count that right? yeah so like between thirty and thirty-five i’d say. less than half, to be sure! that’s cool right?”

“…….sounds good to me!” oni agrees enthusiastically, because they’re irredeemable pieces of shit. “what happens next?”

what happens next, dear readers, is that after all the children are kidnapped when they’re six years old in 2517, they’re treated like *waves hand in above direction* THAT, until 2525, when the planet of Harvest was discovered by the Covenant. you know, that alien coalition that decides to wipe humanity out of existence for Religious Reasons. i won’t get into the politics of the covenant because even after all of this i think that’s Too Much, but suffice it to say that the leaders of the Covenant were Full of Shit and They Knew It Too. so, harvest happens, and Covies go on a decades long rampage, and the insurrection doesn’t so much die as it gets sort of pushed to the side because Genocidal Aliens. so the Covies are glassing planets left and right—despite the Cole Protocol which states that any UNSC or civilian ship must not make any direct slipspace jumps from Covie engagements to any human populated planet because they can track slipspace vectors and calculate where you’ll come out, and also if you have to evacuate then you damn well wipe all your data and activate the ship’s self-destruct so they can’t find more humans to mercilessly murder—and with the addition of Genocidal Aliens to the mix, the SPARTAN-II Program speeds the fuck up and introduces Project MJOLNIR.

MJOLNIR Power Assault Armor, a high-powered 1000 lb. combat exoskeleton system designed not just to protect, but to enhance the already substantial physical capabilities of the spartans (all now somewhere in the upper six-foot range, to my memory) and to house fully-formed smart a.i.

(a.i… are a whole ‘nother deal. quick an dirty version: a ‘dumb’ a.i. is programmed like any other and can continue on as it is pretty much as long as its physical contain can. a ‘smart’ a.i., on the other hand, is based on an actual human brain but due to the limited nature of its processing matrix, the longer it operates, the less ‘space’ it has in its ‘brain’. a smart a.i. times out around seven years, sometimes before, because it literally thinks itself to death. once it times out, they call it rampancy. remember that term? yeah, it’s cuz season 10 talked about the four stages of rampancy, which can be compared to human psychosis, at which point the a.i., having been gathering incomprehensible amounts of data for seven years, begins to break down and dip into, kind of, debilitating amounts of emotion. sigma wanted to achieve the meta phase because it was the closest he could find to being human again, but he needed all of the fragments collected again because merging together might make them a full a.i. and thus closer to achieving, or i suppose, regaining full personhood.)

right anyway mjolnir armor, the distinctive halo armor, makes spartans absurdly strong and difficult to kill. not invincible, but damn fucking good. the spartans, along with the ODSTs, run of the mill marines, the cole protocol, and human refusal to just lay down and die pretty much holds the line against total annihilation by the Covenant for *checks watch* twenty-seven goddamn years. for twenty-seven years the Covenant sprinted around the galaxy squashing every human colony and settlement they could find but couldn’t find earth or much of the inner colonies. two, three generations of people who never knew anything but war in some form or another is pretty fucked up, guys.

anyway so, fast forward through, Yikes, All Of That to 2552. 2552 was a big year yall. ngl, like twelve huge battles all happened pretty much concurrently right now, but wrt the spartans: the Covenant found Reach, which was pretty much Earth’s next-door neighbor (and, incidentally, where all the spartan ii’s were “trained”) and they found it right when all of the spartans had been recalled back to it for a super secret mission. most of them died. john-117, master chief, and his buddy (i……wanna say linda?) made it off the planet with cortana the a.i., kickstarting the first halo game, while a little group got up to their own crazy space-magic shenanigans that i……i honestly can’t even get into right now, i just can’t, it’s all so fuckin weird and spans like seven books and i honestly don’t remember most of it. so, master chief and cortana the a.i. who is based on halsey’s brain because jen taylor is a hell of a voice actress, go to halo and meet the space zombies and stop halo from firing and killing everyone by blowing it up and that’s basically halo 1 for you. same thing happens in halo 2, except now there’s alien politics and you also get to play as a sangheili soldier who comes to the startling realization that his religious leaders are Full of Shit and starts a civil war. halo 3 is all the crazy shit happening on earth and also more alien politics and honestly i enjoyed that game least so i don’t remember much of it tbh. like i said, most of the spartans die on reach, but john and his buddy who might be linda live, as well as a little handful, one of whom is definitely named fred.

SPARTAN-III Program (AKA: "Make the units better with new technology. Make more of them. And make them cheaper.“) (god everything about this universe is so fucking buckwild)

the spartan ii’s were a resounding success but there literally being less than three-dozen kinda cut down on their usefulness, and also halsey refused to train a second batch of spartans because of her goddamn “age requirement” and like i’m not complaining that more children weren’t abducted and experimented on but halsey really was a fucking moron really just out here to stroke her own damn ego, jesus fucking christ. not, of course, that the spartan iii’s were MUCH better, mind you. so, 2531, six years into the war with the covenant and an equal amount of time without a second batch of spartan ii’s, this asshole called ackerson goes, “pfft, i can make more of these fuckers and i can make them cheaper and i won’t have to kidnap kids, who’s with me?”

and ONI said, “wait we’re not kidnapping anymore?” and it looks kinda put out cuz it likes that shady shit.

“nah,” says ackerson, waving a hand, “we’ll just recruit orphans from glassed planets who have a grudge against the covenant. like, ya know, eight and nine years olds and shit. it’ll be fine.”

so the first batch of spartan iii’s was produced in 2531: alpha company, 300 strong, all of whom survived the augmentation process at the age of twelve because it, like, got refined and dulled down a little or something, it’s been awhile. so alpha company is doing good, real good, trained by a the guy who trained the spartan ii’s and even one of the spartan ii’s themself.

(kurt-051, also known as kurt ambrose, real name kurt trevelyan because the spartan program literally fucked him up so bad he couldn’t remember his family name so ackerson just fucking gave him one, oh my gooood. anyway, so kurt was the leader of green team and they were sent on a mission but ONI fucking, they fuckin sabotaged his jetpack so that it malfunctions while in space so that he’s presumed dead but actually ONI just abducted him so he could train the spartan iii’s without halsey knowing about it because MILITARY POLITICS I GUESS?)

right anyway so alpha company, they do good, they do good, and then nine months after deployment in 2537 all of them (with a few exceptions who got pulled out to do other shit in other branches) get wiped out in Operation: PROMETHEUS, a mission to destroy a Covie shipyard or whatever. ONE-HUNDRED PERCENT CASUALTY RATE. okay, so, this is fine, we’ll try again. 2539, beta company, 300 strong, we’ll train them even harsher than the spartan ii’s were, drill them even more on unit cohesion. what happens, can you fucking guess? 2545, DING DONG, YOU ARE WRONG, same thing fucking happens in Operation: TORPEDO. only two survivors of that massacre, and the handfuls who weren’t sent on the suicide mission en masse.

in halo: reach, the game that bridge halos 3 and 4, carter, emile, jun, and thom (who was the original noble six, whom you, the player, replace in-game after he dies) are spartan iii’s from alpha company. kat and the player’s character, spartan-b312, are from beta company. jorge is an og spartan ii. there were also rumors of a couple different teams of iii’s helping evacuate civilians from reach at the same time. the LONEWOLF Headhunters were also spartan iii’s: basically two-person assassin teams.

(also, just to clarify, because the appeal of spartan iii was that it was cheaper, not all, and not even many, of the spartan iii’s were issued mjolnir armor, because making a single suit cost as much as making a full battleship. because space capitalism.)

alright, so, gamma company, third time’s the charm. 330, average age of six years old, all of them survived augmentation in 2551 and were shipped out only a few weeks after the fall of reach, so around december of 2552/january of 2553, maybe. NOW LET’S TALK ABOUT PROJECT CHRYSANTHEMUM! Project CHRYSANTHEMUM was the name given to the NEW AND IMPROVED biological augmentations given to gamma company. you wanna know what makes them new and improved? why, fucking up your brain to make it wayyyyyy more aggressive, resistant to shock, and more able to access the “animal part of the brain in times of shock”! i mean, when you hear “depresses higher reason centers of the brain over time; requires regular doses of [special meds] to be taken to avoid uncontrollable aggression” doesn’t that just fill you with confidence and positivity and something that isn’t homicidal rage?? so yeah in addition to having the body of an adult olympic athlete at fucking twelve years old and stupid fast and three times as strong as a normal soldier, now your brain can’t regulate itself! isn’t that fucking dandy! take your smoothers kids or you might just murder everyone in sight!

delta company was scheduled to be a thing but was likely never put into practice. why they went out of order on the naming i’m not sure.

the spartan-iii program was disbanded after the end of the human-covenant war in 2553 and the remaining spartan ii’s and iii’s were folded into Spartan Operations, which was a brand-spanking new military branch designed specifically for oversight of spartans because…

SPARTAN-IV PROGRAM (AKA: And Look At That, We’re Back To Consenting Adults)

2550. listen yall. shit. shit’s fucked aight? has been for awhile. and like maybe, maybe super soldiers in walking tanks is too much to ask for? maybe just regular super soldiers, but ones that are already full-grown? yeah let’s go back to the drawing board on that one. yeah let’s just do some unauthorized testing—whoops! 10% survival rate, that bites. let’s just, uh, not tell anyone about that—

“hey there,” says lieutenant commander musa, former spartan ii candidate who was tortuously disabled by the augmentation process and carries a grudge the size of pluto against catherine halsey.

“we weren’t doing anything!” shouts oni, because fuck you, oni.

“i wanna help make more spartans,” says musa. “i hate halsey with every fiber of my being but spartans are doing good work, important work, and i wanna help them do it but only if they’re consenting adults.”

oni looks at that latest batch of spartan iii’s who, due to circumstances, had to go off their smoothers during a planetary battle and freaked out everyone and their mother. “yeah good call.”

so with ackerson dead and halsey fucking finally arrested for war crimes, musa and jun (spartan iii and only survivor of noble team from halo: reach) take the lead on the spartan iv’s, the candidates of which are pooled from fully-grown human adults in a variety of military branches, from grizzled veterans to promising young soldiers with experience under their belts.

2553, the first batch of 145 iv’s is live, include My Girl Commander Sarah Palmer who kicks ass and takes names. 2554, second class is initiated. SPARTAN-IV Program is headquartered in a dedicated facility on Mars; spartan iv’s are trained in a top-secret facility orbiting an unnamed dwarf planet.

as previously mentioned, spartans gain their own military branch, Spartan Operations, and remaining ii’s and iii’s are offered to be folded into the new branch. many accept, but some decline in favor of non-combat roles. hundreds of spartans are assigned to the UNSC Infinity, literally the biggest fucking ship in human history, i love it so much it’s great. in halo: 4, a big part of the plot is that john was missing for like four years and when he’s found again there’s this fuck-off big ship filled with people calling themselves spartans who are also fuck-off big but also Strangers. anyway i love the spartan iv’s and anyone who didn’t like spartan ops or halo: infinity are cordially invited to me in the fucking pit.

SO! i’ve been at this for literal hours and am going to bed now! hope you learned something helpful, i’m sure i forgot a lot of shit, not even including all the shit that i left out on purpose because it’s two in the goddamn morning.