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magellanicclouds · 3 years

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Halo: Divine Wind - The Fate of The Ferrets

Under the cut is some heavily focused thoughts about the events of Halo: Divine Wind. It is all itself spoiler content and examines a lot of that content in detail. If you plan to read this novel and don’t want to be spoiled definitely do not continue beneath the cut, and I'd suggest avoiding of the notes section too. In a post based entirely on spoiler material, I think it's fair to assume that any conversation in the notes would also be as revealing, especially since I am encouraging it here.

For those of you who are ready for this: Essay under the cut.

There is so much I have to say about my disappointment with this novel, and I do feel that @ladywolvesbayne did an excellent job of putting to words a lot of my own complaints, criticisms, and hurt feelings on the matter. But, this isn't going to be about my general review on the book as a whole, but rather a very focused subject: The fate of the Ferrets.

Now, I don't just mean their fate story wise, but also their fate as characters of the Halo EU.

Veta and the Ferrets, like Owen-B096, and Rion Forge with Spark and the Ace of Spades, became established as a new hardline for storytelling, and it seemed to me anyway that they'd be hanging around for a long while, offering the EU plenty of content to keep it healthy and interesting. And save for Spark, none of these characters have ever been in the games or hinted they may ever, so their stories and experiences are left wide open to the freedom of exploration. Games can eventually come to an end, but a well cared for EU can keep a franchise going for years afterward. The Gammas themselves were already introduced to us by Nylund back in Ghosts of Onyx, and while Ash receives a fair bit of character building and introduction in that novel, it's not until Troy Denning's Last Light that we really get to know Mark and Olivia as well.

All the Spartan-IIIs are tragic figures. Children orphaned by war, rescued by the UNSC from zones of conflict only to be ferried into another under the premise that they'd "volunteered" to become vengeful warriors; some as young as four. I think that it's probably not up for argument that as a result of their inception, creation, and continued pattern of loss, that the SIIIs carry a lot of unresolved trauma. And while they seemingly manage to function with extreme discipline and effectiveness despite it, it's been shown too that they are not immune to the potential of it all coming crashing down at any given moment. They're human - there is only so much anyone can take before the last line is crossed, and I think the horrid and wasteful end event of Divine Wind has done just that.

It is my opinion that allowing for the death of Mark is signaling the death of the Ferret Team entirely.

There are people who probably feel differently on that, and that's fine - we're all able to have and share our opinions on this media, and doing so often enriches the conversations we can have. Some have compared Mark's death to Sam or Kurt - a noble sacrifice. But Mark's death wasn't a noble sacrifice, it was murder, and it doesn't hit any of the same notes otherwise. Sam and Kurt chose their end, and the specific conflict they were involved in was still raging when they made their choices. Their actions directly ended that conflict, and most importantly, both of them had the personal agency to decide how they went out, and were able to first say goodbye to the ones they loved. Mark's death meanwhile, felt like a cheap "shock" device. Meaningless and wasteful to the narrative of the novel, and it is my opinion that in it's wake, has essentially ended the thread of any future Ferret stories. A hollow lack of closure and respect for both Mark himself, and Veta and the Ferrets as a whole.

While I absolutely will discuss what I mean by that, indulge me a moment about why I feel Mark's final scene was so terribly mishandled.

There's no argument to be made that Mark wasn't in trouble. He was in trouble. He'd fallen a few hundred meters down the side of a mountain, was alone and freezing and bleeding for the better part of an hour. Multiple ribs and one leg was badly broken, an ever-opening abdominal wound exposing his organs to air, every inch of him bruised and battered, and fourteen hours off his Smoothers. In spite of it all, he was able to push down the screaming voices of rage in his building paranoia, and stop and think and formulate a plan. He was even able to stand momentarily, and likely could have kept moving, had it not been for the structural failure of his leg alone - the pain certainly wouldn't have stopped him, we know that much. So yes, he was in trouble. But Red Team's Pelican was close enough to hear (and in fact, he probably could have even seen it had he been able to stand and survey the newly carved river basin, since they were already nearby collecting Olivia), and had it not been for the absolutely ridiculous decision to just happen to place Dhas Bhasvod right there next to him, I do think that his plan to flag Red Team down would have been a success.

I just can't wrap my head around it. An entire glacial peak, a whole actual mountain, is violently erupted to a core by the Spirit of Fire's supraorbital MAC strike, and somehow every single character who was in, on, or around this massive glacial facility all end up within a stone's throw of each other at the base. What absurdity. I can almost forgive Veta, Ash, and Olivia managing to tumble into the same relative space, since they'd all jumped together at the same spot and descended through the same icefall. It could be believed that they were basically funneled by the crevasse down a similar path, but Mark was very distant from the place they'd jumped when he'd gone down the side grappling with the Aggressor Sentinel. Mark had been back toward the entrance of the Citadel protecting their exit, in case the hardlight bridge didn't fail, and based on the scenes of Ash and Olivia pursuing Castor, Gadogai and Dhas, the route from the entrance to the first Clairion AI's vestibule was at least a ten to fifteen minute run - at their landspeed. That puts Mark at a significant distance from them on the mountain.

Personal anecdote - I love mountain climbing, and used to be a very active Alpinist for several years. It's frighteningly possible to lose track of people very quickly around single crests and faces, and I can't say that I'd ever describe the environment of a entire vertical landmass to be comparable to a supermarket parking lot - especially after some catastrophic event like it suddenly exploding and fracturing. Why was everyone deposited so laughably close to one another?

In my heart of hearts, the story we should have gotten was of Red Team completing the Ferret's recovery and finding Mark alive, though in very critical condition. OR, if we just had to have Dhas there for the hell of it because 343i is so desperate to get us to believe he's the most dangerous threat in the galaxy, then sure, Mark's deflection of Dhas's attack on an unaware and vulnerable Ash and Veta could have served as his last act in this novel, but only in the sense of showing us that even now he is still a warrior worth his foe's pause; it didn't need to include his death to be meaningful. It could have been such an intimate close-up experience for us, to truly have a front row seat to the horrible extremity of an SIII Gamma's ultimate fortitude, and I think Mark is the perfect choice for this.

Absolutely kills me that the scene is just so easy to change with only the tiniest of variation, and could have offered so much more emotional value - Mark acts to protect Veta and Ash: his family. That is his drive. We got that part, but I was immediately able to imagine instead that Mark is surrounded by countless pieces of the shattered Sentinel, not just the beam emitter he finds - where did the rest of it go? When the Prelate pounces him, he could have used all that exposed debris as weapons at his disposal. Scrap metal, even of Forerunner design, would never have been enough to actually hurt Dhas, but it could have been enough to stagger his hold on Mark, who could then have used that single moment to get out of his grasp and escape over the cliff edge to avoid being grabbed again. Mark is still in trouble. He hits the freezing water from 50 meters and loses consciousness. He still faces drowning, but those single seconds would have changed everything and given us a dramatic hook, while keeping Dhas's apparent supremacy intact.

As the canon goes, Red Team's rescue Pelican was in fact so close during Mark and Dhas's encounter that Dhas winds up fleeing only seconds later. It's fair to say they could have actually seen the end of the confrontation take place, which is how they managed to recover Mark prior to Ash and Veta clinging to the ice floe nearby. So, if Mark had been able to turn to face the river basin, he could have visualized the Pelican's line of site, quickly realizing that the best plan forward would be dragging himself off the edge to avoid Dhas's reach, while also clearing a potential firing line for the Pelican. But I don't write for 343i and this isn't what happened. Only what I would have done, and I feel like it still more or less offers the essence of the 'pound of flesh' 343i seems out for in every story these days, except it's in a purely emotional capacity while still offering the misery they crave for their franchise now - Mark doesn't die here, but we still have to sit and watch and read as he suffers endlessly for the whole back half of the novel. Wouldn't that have been enough?

But - back to the Ferrets fate as a whole.

I honestly I feel like their story could have only satisfyingly wrapped up in one of two ways - and please, know that I use the word "satisfying" here in terms of 'it handled the job appropriately and with closure', not as something I'd necessarily be emotionally happy with.

The first option is my preferred one: The entire team survives, using a variation of Mark's survival like detailed above. The Ferrets are successful in their mission and are recovered alive by Red Team. Without a doubt, Veta and the Gammas are all very critically injured and require urgent medical intervention with the promise of lengthy rehab time. But, on top of it all, they're now also perfectly marooned along with Red Team and the Spirit of Fire in 343i's junk drawer. It's bittersweet and carries the awful reality of never returning to the occupied galaxy - of never seeing Fred or Blue Team or anything familiar ever again. But, they have each other, the only thing that's carried them this far to date and will carry them through the struggle of healing their wounds and the trauma of two years of living in fear. This option strengthens their connections as family and empowers their resolve to keep going. Importantly, it leaves their narrative thread open to new stories and plots.

In universe, this conclusion also offers the very necessary proof that the Ferret Team is an extremely reliable asset. It feels silly from the outside looking in, to even have to consider that. After all, we know what these characters are capable of, but this is an issue that plagued the Ferrets in previous novels, whether mentioned through Veta's perspective, recalling the very candid way that other ONI agents regard them, or by words delivered directly from Serin Osman's own mouth: near unanimous agreement among other higher seated members of ONI that Veta's Ferrets are a mistake, disparaging the worth of maintaining them. Osman is clear about how she's been 'sticking her neck out for them’ to have this chance, but it's really no secret - the obvious distrust of Veta's insular experience, and her vocal seditionist rhetoric, combined with the risk and cost involvement of concealing and maintaining three SIII Gammas, especially in the event of long-term deployment, sounded like expensive failures to ONI.

Which, forgive me for yet another segway here - the Second Option I mentioned is just below, but that last paragraph brings about an important and relevant point about the Gamma's medicinal needs and continuity issues that rose from Divine Wind.

Throughout the book, Veta reminds us about the ticking clock on the Gamma's mental stability once their final doses of Smoothers have been exhausted, but she also gives us a bit of background on how they've been maintaining up till now. Not one of the kids were fitted with sub-dermal patches to auto-release more advanced compounds of the drugs over a scheduled period, even though such medical tech has had mention of use in other Halo resources. Instead, they are required to inject three doses of their Smoothers each day to stay balanced. Three doses a day, for two years. Sounds like planning for this mission fell horribly to the wayside, yet they had enough time prior to joining the Keepers to establish alter-egos and prepare for their insertion. But...the recommendation of sub-dermal patches just never came up? Seems like a critical oversight, and it brings up an enormous contradiction - In Shadows of Reach, Veta's urgency to hand the message to Fred, combined with Dare's later comments about ONI's fragmentation and lack of contact with field assets, just doesn't gel with Veta now telling us that ONI has apparently been perfectly in contact with them the entire time. Not direct contact mind you, but they've been at least aware of her and her team's conditions well enough to continually deliver supply drops at locations close enough for it not to be unreasonable that the Ferrets could retrieve them without exposing themselves. So...this was just happening constantly on Reach then, because Veta and the kids were under endless scrutiny and couldn't have just been stockpiling supplies without Castor's people finding out. When we're talking about navigating the surface of an entire planet, ONI must have had pretty pinpoint knowledge of their locations and it just doesn't seem believable to think that they could routinely get that close, undetected, for over two years without once being able to retrieve mission critical information from the Ferrets in exchange. Learning this made the severity of their isolation that was implied by Shadows of Reach feel totally handwaved.

All in all though - back on track - Option One gives us the best possible outcome: We get to keep the people we are invested in, the Halo EU remains healthy as a result of keeping fan's interests with characters they care to keep up with, the door stays open for new potential story threads to be woven and books to be written, and we get a sort of narrative 'full-circle' closure on ONI's doubts regarding the creation of such a unique and paradigm breaking team. (You were wrong, ONI. Eat it.)

Option two is the cold water: That the Ferret's mission was successful (because of course it has to be, the halo array can’t fire), but none of them survive it. Whether they fall protecting one another, ensuring that the array is not activated, or in stoic realization that they cannot outrun the devastation of the MAC strike and instead choose to spend their final moments in a kind of peace with one another, comforted in knowing they'd accomplished the impossible, and that they'd done it together. As a family. Obviously this option shatters my heart to pieces, but it STILL feels more narratively satisfying than what we got, and offers a very clear closure.

Instead, what we got was in fact the very worst option available: A single piece gets carved out of the Ferrets, tearing down the entire dynamic they've been built on and crushing their morale to the point of detriment.

It was all a slow running train wreck. The main plot had already been resolved, our heroes had won, and for all intents and purposes the book was over. The manner and placement and timing of Mark's death felt meaningless in the scope of it all, but it kept getting worse with every page. The drawn out manner of using Mark's body as a kind of gross focal set-piece after his death was unnecessarily ghoulish and felt like borderline desecration. To make matters worse, what should have been a brutal spotlight on Ash's hapless and heartbreaking fear and denial, Mark laying hardly a foot away from him, was tarnished by Alice's character being written so bizarrely cruel and tone-deaf - needlessly interrupting Ash's mournful realization by infantalizing him and threatening to kill him. I couldn't even believe what I was reading. It was like we were being told that the scene simply wasn't allowed to be powerful or reverent - that like Ash, we all just had to 'shut up and take it'. The only bit of it at all that felt authentic to true human feeling was Olivia's devastated screaming.

Removing Mark from the team's equation doesn't just unbalance their combat and mission capability - although this is huge seeing as how they've each developed into pretty niche specialties to form a functional gestalt - but it unbalances them as a family unit. It feels unnecessarily cruel, and a loss they will not be able to reconcile. I simply can not imagine any reality where this doesn't squander and decay their personal fortitude into invalidating their usefulness entirely.

Cracks in the armor were already there - without any context or reason given, we have to accept that sometime before this novel, Ash suffered a loss of faith in himself as a leader, since he just...isn't anymore. There's no background given on that. We never find out why. All we know is that Ash is no longer their 'Sabre Leader' and that's the end of it. In the past, we've seen how badly and deeply the loss of team and family has harmed him. It feels likely that beside being an extremely competent soldier, and brilliant tactician, somewhere during the years that we've never gotten to see in writing, Ash faces the reality that he can no longer handle the pressures of leadership. Now, after a lifetime of having his brother safe at his side, and a decade since they'd escaped almost certain death on Onyx, Mark is gone, and he doesn't even know why. The focus placed on his worn and sunken eyes, and the shaking weakness of the smile he forces for Veta's sake in her infirmary room spoke loudly of a man dissolving.

I do wish I could offer better on how Olivia feels at the end of all this, but sadly she was rather used more as filler throughout most of the Ferret's scenes in the novel. Both she and Ash felt dulled and often out of character, with Ash only echoing any of his established personality during his very scarce POVs; in those at least, we got to see that he still carries a lot of fear. But Olivia, we don't get to see inside her mind, or see any more to her than when she is directly interacting with others. It's not so much that she was...poorly written, I guess, but more that there was just nothing stand-out or special about her. She filled a space in this book, and that feels like a real waste of her personality, when she absolutely could have been the perfect foil for introducing more emotional exploration - back in Last Light, we learned that Olivia is far more apt to openly discussing more intimate thoughts and feelings. With the way the pressure and desperation was mounting in the middle to back of this book (especially with the lack of Smoothers ebbing away their inhibitions), it could have been a great opportunity to give us a lot more depth on the Ferrets overall. Without her having been explored better here, it's unsure to say how well she'd be at maintaining herself in the long term after the loss of Mark, but based on the history we do know of her, and her very visceral pain in the rescue Pelican, I can't imagine her being able to compartmentalize this level of grief with any quickness, if at all.

Veta's brutally darkened change in general outlook was grim with every single time she reminded us how willing and ready she is to die. When she couldn't quite understand Ash and Olivia's reluctance to watch a clutch of people die on camera during the trap set by Dhas...their empathy just didn't make sense to her. She constantly felt one more loss away from reducing what's left of herself to living only for the sake of it, and what could be worse than the loss of a child? The two short times that her thoughts wander back to Fred are highlighted almost only in the fact that she's understood she'll never see him again, and she takes the only bittersweet comfort she can in knowing that at least her message was able to allow her to say goodbye, and she hopes that it helps him to navigate the loss. 'Hopeless' is the one word I'd used to describe her now.

'Hopeless', didn't have to be all we got out of this. There could have been more expressions of love and care - enough to revitalize Veta's waning hope at least. There were quiet moments - safe moments - where this could have happened. The time on Commander Barre’s Recon Pelican could have been expanded; hell, plenty more could have been expanded simply by better editing and narrative focus. I mean, could we not have edited out two or three of the seven paragraphs describing ad nauseam how Veta had become Gadogai's purse? We probably could have cut down several sentences from the overly wordy and ultimately useless quantum timespace lesson we got in the first few chapters. We especially could have done with less of the many endless sentences describing to us the various colours of sand in the desert biome. All of that space could have been used for actual character exposition on those who wound up snubbed - for memories or flashbacks, for meaningful introspection, or for even just a few more moments of Veta and the Gammas comfortably sharing space with one another. Don't just tell us how much they've grown and changed and learned - show us. Instead, countless pages we're dedicated to the fifty various Jiralhanae 'main characters' arguing about all the same things they always do, and a literal cartoon villain, who will probably wind up tying some damsel to a space traintrack the next time we see him.

Veta's eventual words to Cutter, about pledging her and her's team's service to the Spirit of Fire felt like little more than going through the motions - saying what she said purely for the sake of Ash and Olivia alone - but worse than that, it read like a standard cinematic wrap-up at the end of a film, where the hero looks out over the horizon and promises to keep fighting, where ever that may take them. There's no sequel or follow up, but the audience is supposed to assume that the hero is doing just that, somewhere in the background of their reality. That's how those lines read to me, and it became only reinforced by her eulogy to Mark. Granted, this was hauntingly beautiful and actually broke the shellshock I'd been in the last several pages. It was devastating and emotional, but it also crushed whatever sort of lingering hope I'd had for a future with her, Ash, and Olivia. Veta wasn't just saying goodbye to Mark - she was saying goodbye to us all.

If this is going to be the Ferret's last entry in the Halo EU - which to me it absolutely feels like and if I wind up wrong on this I'll be more than happy to eat my words - then it's extra sad to think of how much time and potential is being wasted, and the broken state in which we're leaving them. All the learning and growth along the way that we never got to see - that we won't get to see. Beside Veta, Mark had the lion's share of spotlight between his siblings in this novel, and seeing the proof of his personal growth was fantastic! He's blossomed into a strong leader and opened up his personality to become a much more varied and multifaceted individual, all while still retaining all the good old furious and violent Mark nature that we love. Hell, the kid at some point learned to speak a dialect of Ibie'shan, the Kig-Yar language! I'd pay good money for an entire short story about Mark learning how to squawk, click, and screech in coherent sentences with a straight face!

But sadly, beside A Necessary Truth, we never got to see a single thing about their team working cases or missions on their own. Never got to watch the Gammas train and learn to fit in amongst society, and never got to see them teach Veta how to fight alongside them if and when things went sideways. We never got to see the moments that connected them as a family, as their love and dedication to each other matured. All the little rituals and habits and memories they'd built. We never got to see the way that Veta's relationship with Fred evolved, and at to what point they'd come - at what level the Gammas regarded him, and where he fit into their family.

Veta and the Ferrets genuinely could have spun off their own side series! They were such a unique and interesting and emotionally charged aspect of the EU. Halo has rarely offered us content revolving around SIIIs as is, but also the entire genre the Ferrets occupied - the subterfuge and undercover missions and detective style stories they could have given us. But, I guess these were just my hopes for them, and maybe some of you agree with me on that too, but 343i just didn't see the same potential I guess. They didn't see Veta as a road to exploring the depth and purity of humanity in the Spartans.

I worry that this downturn in the EU has something to do with the Halo games getting locked into a Teen rating, sending 343i hell bent on taking the EU down the darkest direction they can manage since it's now their only outlet for explicit horror. As though they just want to fill the universe with as much misery and pain as they possibly can, and are willing to burn down everything beyond the scope of the Master Chief's current campaign in order to prop up some eventual miracle. Some outrageous singular event that they'll feel gives them the right to turn back to us and smugly say, "See now, wasn't it all worth it?"

No. The answer is no. It's never a victory if you had to lose everyone you love along the way.

#halo #halo eu #halo divine wind #halo divine wind spoilers #long post

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