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[coolbeans]

Ryuu96 said:

coolbeans said:

But we're talking about said rogue AI rendering him unconscious and torturing him via dreams/nightmares.  They can highlight the neural link and its importance, but it's just pure fantasy shit to me.  I doubt the average Halo fan would guess this was the logical extent of an AI's abilities.  

I don't really see anything at all which is unbelievable about an AI being able to put someone to sleep if it has direct access to their brain (which it does), it just needs to manipulate the hypothalamus. AI's which aren't crazy already manipulate parts of the brain to enable Spartans to have extreme reflexes and have done since the OG trilogy.

Torturing him via his nightmares? I think the only far fetched part there is the AI being in with the nightmare with him and seeing it as well. These are actual events that happened to him so I don't think it's that crazy that the AI could trigger a bad memory in him while he's asleep, the only fantasy part is the AI seeing what that memory was without Dinh telling him, Imo.

But this is Halo, Lol. I'd say Halo is in the middle ground of Sci-Fi/Fantasy and an AI fucking with someone's mind is no more fantasy than The Flood, Halo Rings, Shield Worlds, etc. Almost everything about the Forerunners is fantasy. FTL is not possible under our current understanding of Science and those tiny UNSC ships won't produce the energy needed and Wormholes are just an unproven theory. Slipspace in Halo is Space Magic.

Weapons are mostly realistic. Shields that cover an entire person and protect against all types of attacks, physical, plasma, kinetic, etc, aren't really Scientific. Even something as simple as the Needler in Halo's own lore has no explanation (Halsey couldn't explain how it works, Lol). The Weapon aspect of a Halo Ring is literally made up Science, Neural Physics (which is how Halo Rings work) is literally Space Magic.

Ancient Aliens...Prehistoric Humans...Artificial Gravity in the way that Halo does it...Etc. Are all Soft Sci-Fi. - The way in which Halo does Artificial Gravity is more magic than Sci-Fi. UNSC used to use rotating hull sections or acceleration but Covenant straight up "create" gravity with machines which can be turned on/off and UNSC reverse engineered it, point is, that isn't backed by science either.

So like, if we compare Halo to our current real life understanding, a lot of it is straight up fantasy, unproven science or made up science, if we compare it to Star Wars, it's more grounded, but Halo has never been a hard Sci-Fi IP like something like Starfield looks to be so I'd just say don't look too much into these things, Lol. I've not really seen any complaints about an AI emotionally screwing a Spartan.

Halo is a Militaristic Sci-Fi but that doesn't mean "realistic"

I guess the unconscious issue is more of how that's developed here.  Like The Banished developed their own unique AI software that's able to successfully attack his head.  But let's just say that's not as a big of a deal, I don't think haunting dreams is on the same spectrum as The Flood, Halo Rings, etc.  In those cases, I'd appeal to genre expectations there.  However unlikely it is, we can easily suspend our disbelief of an alien race "zombifying" our bodies.  Many of those other elements can at least tap into something that works in the abstract.  But there's something about the highly technical like AI becoming The Ghost of Christmas is a bad route to take imo.

It feels like you're creatively running on fumes when you're adding new 'flexible' abilities for AI.  Something that's haunted Halo since 5's Cortana reveal.