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thetreestumptherapist · 3 months ago

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Halo 2's 20th Anniversary

I know I am a couple days late, but I've been really busy and should actually be in bed rn, but I am going to tell some Halo stories before I forget or don't have time again. I am also going to try to summarize because I want this to be fairly quick.

I used to watch my grandfather play Halo CE on his computer when I would go visit my grandparents. Then later, my aunt got an xbox 360 and brought it to our house when she would visit for the holidays and my parents let me play Halo Reach with her. And then she and I would play when we would go visit her. We slowly made our way through the entirety of halo Reach, 1, 3, and 4 this way, playing during holidays and vacation visits. I think we did some of it online, but I don't remember very much. I do remember freaking out about needing Halo 5 after finishing Halo 4 online with her, so I know we did that one online at least a little bit.

You may have noticed, but Halo 2 wasn't listed with the others. That's because neither me nor my aunt had a copy of H2 for a while. We skipped H2 and went straight from CEA to H3. Thinking back on it, it kind of was extra immersive that way, because I was just as confused as Chief was, as to why the heck the sangheili were on our side. And I also didn't know where Cortana was, like Johnson and Thel didn't.

At some point my aunt got us both H2 but they were for the original xbox (I am genuinely wondering if H2 for the 360 exists) so we couldn't play online together.

Now it's been a couple of years since I've played Halo with my aunt. I need to ask her to play Halo this Christmas. I've been missing that connection for awhile now. Unfortunately, the vibes from those first playthroughs can never be recreated, but I can enjoy the nostalgia I guess. I play with my sibling now, and we just completed an H2 playthrough a couple of months ago. Maybe we should do another one for H2's anniversary instead of moving on to H3.

Now that we have the story of how I got H2, let's talk about the game itself.

Anemoia. I literally found that word because of games like Halo (and destiny 2. Forsaken specifically) and how I never got to experience their golden days. But, when I tell you, the first time I saw it, I felt the nostalgia of that original xbox H2 screen even though I had never seen it before. I envy all of you who grew up playing in those online lobbies. I get they probably had their downsides, and yeah I have special memories of playing halo with family, but would have loved to have friends to play halo with.

The music is immaculate. I love how throughout the halo games the music matches the vibe of the game. CEA has a futuristic, yet ancient feel. Like the forerunner buildings and ring itself. H2 uses electric guitar and feels very fast paced and epic at the height of the war. H3 has a really bitter-sweet feel to it. Sacrifices are being made left and right, every decision has consequences, and we need every inch of progress we can get. It very much is "One Final Effort".

The terrible lighting in H2 adds so much horror to the flood. The flood is scary in CEA, but the clean and crisp lighting takes away from the horror of it being an ancient and forgotten terror. Original graphics H2 does not. It has all the horror of not being able to see clearly in the darkness, seeing something move out of the corner of your eye and having things on your motion sensor that you can't see in front of you. Seeing things shoot at you, but not seeing well enough to shoot back. It's a struggle and it's terrifying.

Where's my assault rifle?

I like the Gondola level, where we're chasing down Regret. That was fun. Except for the flying enemies. That was annoying.

Frick it, I liked the whole game. I can't pick a favorite level.

The dialogue is supreme. I don't know who wrote the script for this game, but they did not miss with this one. From "If they came to hear me beg..." to "Sir, finishing this fight" every line was nothing but sheer bad*ssery. I feel it is worth mentioning that, as far as I am aware, this is the only game Chief swears in and the word he said was "piss" and it's such a mild swear word there is confusion as to whether it's actually considered a swear. And it was when facing the gravemind, the flood. When he was dealing with the only thing that that ever truly struck fear in his heart. The man just doesn't swear and I love him for that. Even when halo was rated mature, he didn't swear. And that's another thing that annoys me about the tv show. It's like they thought "what if this Master Chief ditched his entire personality?" But, that's a discussion for a different time.

I would also like to say, I have seen the cutscenes in the anniversary graphics and I like Rtas' "Hmm" after Thel's "That makes two of us" in the old graphics better. I am pretty sure they knew each other before Thel's disgracing, and Rtas claims to not care about Thel in that moment, but then proceeded to care about him throughout the whole game. Like, all that helping him, wasn't just out of interest for the prophet's will. Rtas cared for Thel, you can tell by the way he speaks to and about him. My headcanon is he has to pretend to not care about Thel, but really he does care about him. In the anniversary graphics he's very standoffish and and kind of aggressive, in the older graphics he's acts more like he still has some respect for Thel, even if only because of how graciously Thel accepted his fate. I feel like that little bit of respect is more accurate to their species' morals etc. Yes, honor is very important to them and if someone disgraces them that is the highest offense, but Thel was a strong warrior who took responsibility for his mistakes, (even though the situation was out of his control), and accepted his punishment with grace and no complaints. Only the brutes would not find this respectable. So, yeah, I like the older graphics for that scene on the ship.

I haven't explored a lot of the multiplayer maps yet. I was working on that with my sibling, but we found blood gulch (Coagulation or whatever it was called for H2, I don't remember rn) and freaked out and forgot about all the other maps for a bit, so I will have to go look at those later.

I am sure I could think of more to say, but, it's late (technically early from a certain pov...) and I need to get to bed. If I think of anything else to say, I'll edit this post to include it all, rather than reblogging.

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slasherflicks999 · 19 days ago

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BEN MY BELOVED 😍😍😍😍 ……BENloved? yes……

FIIIIINALLY made an actual proper design for him after eons of not being able to get his outfit right guys are we proud….. i always had a vague idea of it i just could never execute it properly LMAO

I LOVE HIIIIIIIIMMMMM did you guys know

i also almost forgot his freckles as i do literally every single time i draw him despite the fact ive been drawing him covered in freckles since i was like 14 ummmm its fine i remembered eventually 😍

more rambles and yapping about him in my au after the break :3 again… I YAP A LOT. like seriously. i really could talk about him all day tbh

but first surprise doodle HEHEHEH

moving on… lets talk about his design a little to start off bcccc look at it it’s the first thing you’ve seen obvi (and bc im doing this in a similar format to my oc slasher’s post where i ramble about the design then character and personality stuff then whatever else yay!)

now. you may be looking at him and going “woah he is COLORFUL!” yes he is! i think having him be colorful is fun but beyond that like… ok u need some context first: in my au he’s not stuck in the cartridge anymore which i will elaborate on later, but likeee i still had to give him some nods to his LoZ origins other than just making him blonde and giving him elf ears and green clothes without literally making him the world’s most dedicated link cosplayer. love his cosplay era you go queen but i just feel like MY version wouldn’t be in it after he gets out of the cartridge (again will explain more later) bc he figured maybe he should be his own person a little bit. and idk if yall knew this but… zelda games get pretty colorful!

that being said i still wanted to have an itty bitty nod to it thrown in there so if you look on his jacket those fun little doohickeys on one of the sides are the colors of the spikes on the side of majora’s mask in game :3 i also gave him his little hoop earrings like adult link has because cmon. he’s gotta have em. and beyond just that he also has the green hair and like… idk what to call em, those fun little ball jointed doll looking joints i see people draw canon arg BEN with because i like them and since he’s sort of a merging of canon behavioral event network BEN and a more “fanon” version of him i wanted to nod back to it a little

beyond that he’s just a lot more generally technology inspired, like he’s literally wearing wires as accessories and those semi-transparent bits are supposed to look like the inner membrane of a keyboard! (saw some guy make shoes out of those once and said “oh i gotta use that idea” so i did :3) idk i just wanted him to look fun and like he eats circuit boards. he doesn’t but like… he’s definitely thought about it once

anyway MOVING PAST ME YAPPING ABOUT MY DESIGN THOUGHT PROCESS let’s talk about what he’s actually like!

i feel like it’s pretty often i see people make him either totally spooky or totally silly but you see…. i enjoy both…. so….. :3 let’s see if i can merge the two

generally when writing any of the pastas i try my best to write them ALL to be more or less morally gray largely bc i think it makes them more interesting than just making them all automatically evil just because they’re meant to be horror characters/murderers. idk i feel like it adds more complexity not only to them as individuals but also dynamics and makes them feel more like actual characters than static entities that jump out at you and go BOO! or on the other side of the spectrum anime twinks. staring directly at the 2010s fandom LMAOOO /lh

WITH THAT BEING SAID! he is definitely not a saint in any sense of the word like whatsoever but he also is not super evil. like he’s not always gonna have good intentions but at the same time he’s not entirely heartless and does genuinely care about some people yk?? he’s not walking around punching old ladies or anything but is he gonna go out of his way to be particularly nice to you? hell no he’s not! not unless he REEEEEALLY cares about you/likes you but even then you might not be able to tell LMAO it depends it depends

even then at the end of the day he is more or less a demonic entity and LITERALLY feeds off of negative emotions/energy, like he will become genuinely exhausted if he doesn’t torment tf out of someone for a while, he doesn’t just do that shit for funsies, he needs to or else he will feel like total shit. just so bad. not to say he doesn’t gain ANY enjoyment out of it at all but like that’s not his main motivation.

that’s the thing that makes him different from a lot of other pastas too, his method of killing isn’t anything physical, he just literally torments the living shit out of people until they kick the bucket themselves. at this point he’s rather numb to and detached from it, but i imagine it definitely disturbed him quite a bit when he was figuring out that he had to do it to keep himself satiated essentially. he definitely freaked himself out quite a lot when he was freshly dead like yeah he was angry and vengeful but like… he was also kinda just a scared little kid who got stuck in a video game and saw himself as a monster for a few years guys 💔💔 probably still kinda does view himself like that in many ways. my shaylaaa…

speaking of let’s talk about his LORE :3

first of all present day he is 19. but he’s dead! you shout. yes he is! kinda! lemme explain:

well first and foremost for all intents and purposes he IS dead. but he’s also not JUST a ghost. remember how i mentioned him being demonic? yeah i wasn’t exaggerating about that LOL, plus if he WAS just a ghost he wouldn’t need anything to keep himself satiated like he does with energy

when he died he ended up being the moon children’s first successful instance of actual digitization… key word being SUCCESSFUL. they had tried the same thing before with others, but their actual souls ended up not being able to entirely make it through the process, with some not getting through at all and others being sort of fragmented with only the scraps of what they used to be remaining. even so, all of their heartbreak and pain and anguish and rage they felt in response to their deaths (and probably even whatever they had experienced in life) ended up forming its own makeshift demonic entity. it was all sorts of unstable and constantly seemed to be searching for more and more energy to even keep itself together, but it didn’t have anything to truly attach itself to that make it much more than just a mass of jumbled up energies desperately trying to survive. until ben died. then it had something it could keep itself alive with. it had a body, more or less. something more tangible and stable than just… fragments.

this ended up being what turned ben lowercase into BEN uppercase! it also… came with lots of side effects.

we already talked about how he needs to keep getting negative energy to keep his literal energy up, but this sort of fusion also made him a LOT more powerful than he was supposed to be. he’s essentially fueled on spite LOL but besides that he also was able to literally warp a lot of the game to his will (not entirely, but he wasn’t supposed to be able to change anything at all), the soul fragments gave him the ability to control his aging and parts of his appearance more or less (he can appear as practically any age he wants but mentally ages normally, though he really doesn’t do much with that and just lets himself age normally because he kind of doesn’t wanna stay a weird little middle schooler forever LMAO. his ability to control his appearance is also pretty much entirely out of his control until he escapes the cartridge though, before that he can only really change how his eyes look and his general spookiness though even that was and still is mostly connected to his emotional/mental state.)

he also suddenly gets VERY good at just… understanding how people work in general. he gets really good at the whole manipulation and torment thing really quickly to the point where it even starts to freak himself out a bit (sort of like i mentioned before.) he tries not to dwell on that for too long though. he does his best to get used to himself now even if he really did not like how he turned out at first.

but anyway shortly after all this happens and BEN figures out he needs to really fuck with people to feel at least kind of okay, the cartridge began having so many horrible mental effects on anyone who was even AROUND it that eventually they just had to throw the thing out as a sort of “failed experiment” which explains how it eventually got into the hands of jadusable who posted about it and that in turn essentially opened a door for BEN to get out.

this was great for him in many ways! freedom yippee yippee freedom! he was much, MUCH less limited in his abilities now and had a lot easier access to new people to torment which generally had him feeling a lot better energy-wise and eventually made him a lot less aggressive since he wasn’t essentially hangry and exhausted 24/7. that being said… he was still trapped in the cartridge for about 3 years. that does things to a person. especially since he was so young.

he has a LOT of trauma from it, which is another reason i didn’t go with the link cosplay route for his design beyond just i wanted to give him a personality outside of just loving zelda games (although let’s be honest it probably is still a special interest of his (YES HES AUTISTIC because i am autistic and me and him are like this 🤞🏻)) he was literally STUCK looking like that which is the main reason he gave himself his own wardrobe basically the second he could, because he still loves link and the LoZ games and all but he didn’t wanna feel stuck like that anymore. it made him feel trapped and lose his sense of self a little bit so he was like “yeah i gotta get a different outfit.”

it also definitely made him a control freak. if he doesn’t have at least a good amount of control over a situation it sort of freaks him out and gives him that same sort of trapped, helpless feeling. he gets a little better with it as he grows but that never really goes away, he hates feeling powerless in any situation which i think also helped him come to terms with the whole tormenting people thing, because it made him feel like he had power over something and it still does even if there’s a lot more he has control of now. this is also why he’s not technically a proxy, because he doesn’t want slender to have that control over him, it makes him feel weird. he still hangs around and is civil with him, he just doesn’t wanna actually work for him. he’s his own boss 🙂‍↕️🙂‍↕️

he doesn’t really like to talk about his life before his death all that much though. all that anyone seems to know is he didn’t have a great childhood after a certain age and he just doesn’t wanna talk about it, which of course nobody questioned because almost all the pastas had at least somewhat traumatic childhoods LMAO

anyway! now that a lot of the more serious lore shit is out of the way time for me to just mindlessly throw shit out there about him because!! i love him!!!! fun facts fun facts!!!

- first of all agender he/it/they BEN is real in this house. and gay aroace BEN. and autistic BEN as previously mentioned. he doesn’t know if this is because of the soul fragments thing but he really could not care less about how he presents his gender for the most part, all he knows is he generally presents masculine bc it’s sort of his default :3

- he also still def loves video games! he’s even played through majora’s mask a couple times to try and help himself get over his trauma around it (though it takes him a long time to actually get through it now) he kinda hates that his trauma still prevents him from loving it as much as he used to :(( but at least he can play the other zelda games mostly fine which he’s glad about

- he purrs. that’s it that’s the whole thing he purrs. well he generally acts like a cat in a lot of ways for some reason like his ears moving and stuff but i think the best thing is that he purrs bc it’s just so funny to me. he definitely tries not to do it in front of anyone but has probably slipped up once or twice and promptly retreated into the nearest computer for a week or so because he was so mortified LMAO. very cat coded one of my own cats reminds me of him a little bc she’s sassy will act like she doesn’t care about you but then will purr up a storm if you scratch her in the right spot while she’s comfy. love her. they would get along great

- he is SO COLD. ALL THE TIME. he’s used to it by now but if you were to touch him it would be like touching a corpse laying outside on a late autumn evening or something like he does not know warmth. he does love blankets and warm things bc of that though. if he likes you enough to give you a hug he WILL be latched on like a leech just to take all ur body heat

- he can still eat and drink and sleep if he wants to but he doesn’t have to, like i said he runs off of negative emotions so all that other stuff is just a fun little bonus if he feels like it

-his colors will desaturate a good amount and he’ll start to glitch out quite a bit if he gets too low on energy, along with just being generally irritable and overstimulated

-he also just… glitches sometimes for no reason. any time he stutters or stumbles over his words he doesn’t actually stutter, just glitches. sneeze? glitch. got jumpscared by a bug? glitch. trying not to laugh? glitch. little things like that. along with just when he’s feeling really strong emotions (especially negative ones ofc)

- he actually does like nature a lot! it sort of helps him feel a lot more connected to reality outside of just the internet and technology and whatnot, plus he just finds it kind of peaceful in a way he can’t really get from hanging out in a digital void. maybe it’s the energy of the plants and animals or something

- he also enjoys music a lot :3 all sorts, though he does like electronica and hardcore stuff the most

-i cant lie…. he would definitely scream at people over COD. his temper isn’t AS short as it used to be but likeeee… he’s broken a few controllers 😔 he’s not really the yelling type at all otherwise though

-he’s like 5’7 ish by default. he can change that if he REALLY wanted to but he doesn’t see the point in wasting the energy if he can just float a couple inches above the ground anyway. plus he got his heels on so even if he does stand on the ground he gave himself a couple more inches of height :3 me too me too

-he does still cry blood! happens the most when he’s pissed off or trying to look scary but it will happen if he’s genuinely sad and like legit crying too

-he won’t let many people know it but he’s really claustrophobic (it means he’s afraid of santa claus 😯☝️ /ref) definitely scared of large bodies of water as well but that one’s more well known because…. he did DROWN. actually just realizing i didn’t mention his actual drowning much but anyway i feel like that would have less of a daily impact on him than the rest of his trauma anyway. stills definitely there but doesn’t directly impact him in as many ways

-my au probably takes place in like the mid-late 2000s but if it was in the modern day he would totally say shit like “chat am i cooked” or “that’s so sigma” in real situations on accident

i could talk about him literally for hours upon hours but im gonna stop here before i give myself an aneurysm LMAOOO thank you so much for reading all my nonsense rambles if you did!! :D very very much appreciated i WILL be posting more about him in the future hehe

i hope anyone who read this far enjoyed!! :D i definitely had fun writing hehe but im so tired and i now have to go to BED😭😭😭 thank you so much again tumblr for letting me yap🙂‍↕️🙂‍↕️🙂‍↕️🙂‍↕️

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