#or perhaps some lore on a infinite mp armor kneecap or something

[holyshonks]

I just finished the Halo YA series. @bloodgulchblog already warned that the ending is bad (in an ethically dubious way, not in quality--the series is good as far as Halo novels go) but it was even more unsettling than I thought. Some snippets that stood out to me:

Dorian is one of the kids who joins up with the UNSC. A bunch of his friends died during the initial attack on their town. Here, he finds out that the attack on the planet started six months prior and the UNSC didn't sound the alarm to "prevent panic". This triggers his distrust for towards UNSC, ONI, and Owen because he believes his friends could have survived if they had been warned.

Dorian's distrust also spreads to Evie, who starts to question ONI's motives. One of the details that I feel like we weren't supposed to read into is that ONI promised the kids a scholarship to college if they agreed to join the militia, which, considering how the books ends is just.......so disturbing.

"They're clearly okay with lying when it suits them." "Evie stop."

LET HER SPEAK!!!

(As an aside, I did like that one of Saskia's primary motives is she's trying to get on the UNSC's good side because her parents sold illegal arms and she doesn't want to be held accountable.)

And then of course, the most horrifying detail:

Victor has completely bought into the UNSC and is the most excited to have joined up. He gets injured and the kids are brought into a room and told that he's not recovering because of an ONI artifact they were all exposed to.

After """"""""getting his parent's permission"""""" they begin the still-experimental Spartan-IV augmentations on him and tell the kids that they will also die if they don't undergo the process. It is a doozy.

"You really think we're boogeymen, don't you?" Yes. Yes, I do.

Dorian is one of those characters that gets written off by the others as being paranoid while saying the exactly correct thing the entire time.

"I was a child soldier like my father before me and it was no big deal, god."

I feel like Dorian is supposed to be a stand-in for the reader because my immediate first thought when I read that Victor was sick is that ONI not only didn't get his parent's permission, but that they made up the disease whole-cloth. Like, with the context of everything ONI has ever done, this is elementary.

I truly can't tell if the intent was for this to be as sinister as it comes off? Because by the end they all "agree" to undergo the augmentations together because found family, greater good, ect ect and I'm left alone in the room like um......they're in high school??

Ultimately, I am interested to see how four teenagers with wildly different motives would make out as Spartans, but I would be pretty sad to see Dorian as a Spartan because it means they beat the healthy (and very accurate!!!!) suspicion out of him. But Dorian the insurrectionist? Yes please.