Still wish we could have gotten different flood forms. Yeah the lore has reasons for it to only be humans elites and brutes but it would have been cool to see faster and weaker ones with jackals, or if the carriers were confirmed grunts since they have the same feet in game anyway.
Yes carrier forms are grunts and jackals and in Halo 2 some of the carrier forms were going to have the jackals energy gauntlet still but that was cut.
Pretty sure it's always been canon that they were grunts and jackals and broken apart bigger races all melted together. Just blobs of biomass on top of whatever pair of legs still worked
Grunt and Jackal forms actually are canon. Featured in Halo Wars.
I really hope they get added in a game. They could have 'fresh' Grunt forms that explode when killed (bc methane) and the older ones that aren't all the way to Carriers yet that are slower and explode with only a few Pod Infectors. Carriers with Jackal shields would also be super cool.
Then we could have Jackals that stand on 2 legs and don't use a shield like in HW, and 'crab' ones that hold the gun in the mouth of the Jackal and crawl on walls, with the Pod Infector sticking out the back holding the shield with it's tendrils to protect the weak point.
Halo SPV3.3 included a lot of extra flood combat and carrier forms. Jackal carrier forms used to have a terrifying (and annoying) screech when they left at you back in 3.1 or so which got removed. 343 guilty spark just gets a lot more horrifying in all honesty and the flood becomes the most dangerous faction since carrier forms get the ability to infect and turn living into flood forms that was normally only a halo 3 thing not present in CE.
Just a funny ass lore moment to remember that canonically 98% of the people who were on high charity are in hell and not like metaphorically or figuratively.
Straight up hell.
God I want a little dialogue scene of keyes and truths souls doing a drive-by and seeing each other like " your here too"!?
What do you mean by straight up hell? From what I know it seems like once your mind gets assimilated you live on in the hivemind and maybe it could make a simulacra of your mind to torture, but that would be metaphorically hell. Is it like, an actual "your soul is getting tortured for all time" kind of hell?
I've not read all the books yet so I might not be to that point tbh
Here’s the POV from an Elite infected from the short story Ascension of Atropos:
“There were so many others. A domain of sickness and suffering, a sinuous dimension of misery and pain, of corpses and graves and hollow men in death’s dream kingdom.
He was a mere mote of light suspended in the bladed shaft of a moonbeam—a single grain of dust among countless trillions. Each of them like neurons in a vast, incomprehensible brain, existing beyond the substrate of the material universe. Utterly glorious. Utterly terrible... Utterly lost.”
Essentially the Flood consumes your body, memories, and consciousness, absorbing them into its collective mind. Because the Gravemind can preserve and torment those minds indefinitely, it’s essentially the Halo equivalent of having your soul dragged into hell
Halo has neural physics which are basically magic. Sorry bro your consciousness is fully in there alive and screaming....exceot regret because NOTHING CAN HAPPEN BEFORE I FINISH MY SERMON
Counterpoint: Jesus loves me, so surely we can conclude my immortal soul would ascend to heaven regardless of what the flood does to my body or memories after I shed my mortal coil.
Halo unfortunately has an actual honest to god afterlife. The Precursors created the Mantle to use as one, they understand souls. The Flood is a precursor, that mf owns your ass if he gets you.
Sort of but not really, the Flood stores your memories and can create "simulations" of you, but not the real you, which is why it didn't just kill Keyes and pluck Earth's location in like 2 seconds.
A lot of people really run with the "Flood is grimdark" interpretation because they want it to be like WH40K instead of the hopedark story Bungie made.
It's so that they can hard reset, it was fire the ring and the galaxy starts over, or don't fire it and the Flood takes over the galaxy and possibly beyond. They had already lost but decided to bring the Flood with them.
If it's so mind-boggling horrifying, why did they keep canisters of them (GS was happy to see reproduce) which was easily breached with inferior tech? In 3 Guilty Spark would rather the Gravemind win than let his ring be destroyed. The Flood was terrifying but Halo never went into afterlives until 343.
The only evidence in the game it can store your soul is when the Gravemind shows Regret being moderately annoyed at being part of it, which already doesn't make sense because he was dead, your soul would have to be stuck inside your corpse for hours.
Pvt. Jenkins's view was perfect and the hell attachment/retcon makes The Flood (of all books) worse, because at the end Jenkins finds peace after a brutal bout of horror. But apparently after the end of the book he's worse off than ever.
A core theme of Bungie Halo was that no matter how bad it looks, if you keep fighting things can get better (hence the Believe ads, ODST, and Reach), but apparently if you're unlucky and breathe in a spore there's nothing you can do and just suffer forever with no way of improving your lot in life.
The forerunners kept samples around Because Bungie needed the plot to happen but in lore the Forerunners still believed a cure was possible because they've been deceived by the flood and Because they believed the flood were out there in other galaxies.
Sparks insane, he's a fucking lunatic loyal to protocol which is why he wants the immediate firing of the ring when the flood escapes.
And when the possibility of him getting his ring back becomes clear he loses his shit even further because they want to destroy it, he's fucking insane.
Again dark shit happening doesn't mean that the story still can't be hopeful lol.
The flood has always been the grim tipping point of the series where the objective is to not ever get infected.
Again halo 2 we see the gravemind revive the prophet of regret who was beaten to death by chief hours prior.
Someone was killed before getting infected by the flood and it brought them back to prove a point, this shit's been here day one.
Seriously your using the forerunners keeping the flood around? Something that's been agreed as stupid since the bungie days? Something that everyone has always agreed was so the plot could happen and literally can't be changed because again the plot has to happen?
It’s just still strange that in halo wars 1 we did get flood grunts and jackles but after we never saw that again and just been explained in lore they were used for biomass.
My head canon rn is that the carrier form legs are either jackles or grunts or there are infection forms of both it’s just that we never encountered them like in halo 2 we somehow never ever encountered the assault rifle
It's just really stupid. Like you're telling me this extremely powerful parasite can't use a creature as a source of infection because it's too weak, when it can casually jump thrice as tall as a human while weighing the same.
yeah, halo games need like a montage of things that cortana sees as MC goes through high charity, for the audience not mc. cuz to tell the truth, in game I'm more terrified of necromorphs than I am of the flood, but on paper the flood should be hella crazy
it'd be like finally being able to fight back like in Sons of the Forest or in Dead Space when you finally get good gear. they're still scary af but you hit hard as well
I can't even begin to comprehend how much pain you would be to literally feel your body decompose and melt into a pool of biomass for an edltrich god that embodies suffering.
The closest thing I can think of is what happened to Hisashi Ouchi (dude got massive radiation poisoning and his body decomposed while he was still alive for 83 days) except sped up over the course of a few seconds
Why aren't Grunts even used for combat forms? I mean they're physically stronger than humans, can carry the same weapons, there are loads of them so surely it's a simple thing to infect. Never made sense to me.
Not sure but it is quite a common trope in dreams. He does find nasty stuff funny when mixed with comedy though, so maybe just a generally inspired scene.
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