When you are the lone survivor of your squad every time, coming back bruised and beaten, and treated like shit by your Elite leaders. Would you not start to waiver in your faith?
If I had never known a life outside of the Covenant and had been indoctrinated to fight from birth, even at the cost of my own life, for the promise of the Great Journey, no, probably not. Just like every other member of the Covenant we've seen, save for the ones who were told by their gods their religion was a hollow lie.
I certainly have no intention of defending the choreography. But neither will I let that tint the unavoidable implications of the scene anymore than I'm going to let Halo 5 make me believe Chief and Locke actually fight like a clumsy middle schoolers. As I virtually never do in such cases, since "But the choreography sucks." invalidates like, 90% of fictional badasses in one way or another.
Regardless of its quality of execution, "Atriox beats the shit out of Red Team." is a decision the writers clearly sat down and put into motion. And in-universe, that unavoidably means he's a tremendously skilled and powerful warrior. If you disagree because of the actual details of the fight painting different picture, fine, but that's not a standard I ever apply here.
You can pretend what happened on screen happened differently all you like, but the fact of the matter remains that Chief and Locke fought like drunken sailors, and Atriox laughed off every hit Red Team threw at him. That is what we have to analyze and deal with, regardless of how things should have played out, so I suggest you engage with the text as it is if you're going to debate about it.
I don't see much point in distinguishing between the two scenes when the latter was shown, like, a single short walkthrough mission after the first one, but alright.
When first impressions are made in seconds, a monologue given minutes later is minutes too late.
Do you have any info on the timespan HW2 takes place over? I'm not aware of anything official, and my impression was that the whole thing was close to two days, with the Banshee attack being a handful of hours after first contact, at most.
More estimation on my part trying to account for how long force deployments from the
Spirit would take vs. navigating potential Banished AA, moving troops across ground, etc. At the very least, since Red Team encountered Atriox and the first deployment of a UNSC base on ground, it had passed from midnight/dawn into the hours of the morning/afternoon, which would have been plenty of time for
Conviction to take the
Spirit down.
On the longer end, Halopedia lists the
Conviction's date of destruction between March-April, with the conflict starting March 28. So if it was destroyed in April, that's at least four days, and thus even more egregious.
I'm sure the Banshees were trying something akin to that when they did attack, and it obviously wasn't that easy.
You're missing the crux of my argument being
it should have been that easy. The
Spirit of Fire was fifty years out of date thirty years ago, and the
Enduring Conviction should have the ability to put out hundreds of small craft (to be fair, it did not, but I'm already pointing out how incompetent the Banished are, so point in my favor). We've seen before how long it takes for a Covenant naval force properly pressing its advantages against a UNSC ship to board/down it. It is not long, but for some reason it was here. In the absence of a technological advantage on the
Spirit's part, and her complete lack of single fighter response to the Banshee harassment, the only reason it could have lasted as long it did was, once again, incompetence.
And I think that having the EC chase the SoF around to literally push it into the atmosphere just to capture it is a bit much when its fighter swarms were clearly on the verge of overwhelming it themselves.
My point is that it would have been successful, and in a much shorter timeframe
and with fewer losses because none of the
Spirit of Fire's armaments could have penetrated its shields, and there wouldn't have been any Banshees to be shot down by her point defense. Done and done.
But if you want less of a setpiece example, the
Enduring Conviction could have fired a plasma torpedo or one of its ten separate energy projectors through the exposed bridge of the
Spirit of Fire, killing the bridge crew and rendering the ship dead in the water. Now the ship is his, no harm no foul.
I'm not even pointing at particularly incompetent subordinates here*, I'm saying that it's not reasonable to hold Atriox responsible for various lieutenants of his failing at tasks that would be far removed from the attention of the entire faction's leader
Of course it's reasonable, he's the one who put them in charge. A fool who trusts a fool to do a good job is also a fool.
and would themselves generally be capable of handling such situations anyway (as was the case here, if not for the tremendous X factors of Red Team
I already said I'm not holding Spartans against Atriox, you can stop repeating that point.
and the SoF being far more experienced and substantial a force
Substantial?
The
Spirit of Fire's original compliment was 11,350 personnel. 3500 sailors running the ship, 6000 marines, and 2000 army grunts. After the events of Halo Wars 1, they had just over 5500 total crew members. If I'm being charitable and assuming that the majority of those 5500 aren't all shipboard management, and instead saying every compliment was cut in half, that leaves 3000 marines and 1000 army. The
Enduring Conviction would be capable of holding 40,000 troops, a not insignificant number of which would be Brutes and Elites, and would thus severely outgun and outclass any force Cutter could possibly field. The only thing saving Cutter now is that Atriox's troops are spread across the Ark and cut off without the portals, but that just means this isn't actually a stalemate. It's a war of attrition that Cutter will lose, but also one that he shouldn't have been able to force in the first place.
And if we're doing that anyway, Thel is "guilty" of the exact same thing. He almost certainly
could have slapped
Cutter Keyes and company down on
the Ark I04 had he personally taken charge of the efforts to squash them... but didn't, because
- he's the
Warmaster Supreme Commander of his entire faction the fleet, and such a task would be better left to subordinates most of the time.
- the
Spirit of Fire Pillar of Autumn were scraping by on the skin of their teeth anyway, thanks in large part to a notably competent leader in Cutter Keyes and unkillable murderhobos in Red Team Master Chief, and presented no obvious threat to his greater plans...
- ... until they suddenly did, mainly through the aforementioned murderhobos, a meddlesome Smart AI in
Isabel Cortana, and surprise siccing Sentinels the Flood on him.
At every turn at the start of the conflict on the ring, Thel was making the right plays. He downed the
Autumn, captured her bridge crew, sent hunter-killer squads to massacre every human that landed in the drop pods he hadn't already shot down, and by the time the UNSC could even field a response, he had already got troops inside the map room and control room of the ring. Every single substantial loss he suffered was at the Chief's hands (which weren't that substantial, because there wasn't anything the UNSC could do to stop him taking the Cartographer and control room back after the Chief left), and even then, were it not for the appearance of the Flood, he would have eventually died too, whether by running out of resources or Thel getting sick of his shit and taking his head off himself. In every engagement where the UNSC regulars played offense against his forces when they weren't fighting a two front war against the Flood, Thel made a laughing stock of them.
In contrast, Atriox was suffering major losses from minute one, when, unlike Thel and the
Autumn, he had been on the Ark significantly longer than Cutter's forces, and thus should have had substantial fortifications to hold off an attacking force. Everything he had built crumbles and falls through his fingers the instant that a single ship with half a crew meets him in open combat. He presses no advantages, fields no big counter attacks, and continues to bleed troops and supplies until he's at a standstill with a force that had no right to be his equal.
The biggest distinctions being Atriox allowing Red Team to leave (clearly a mistake on his part), choosing to take the SoF intact rather than just destroy it (which nearly worked, and isn't at all unreasonable in the context),
What exactly does Atriox get out of the
Spirit of Fire that wouldn't pale in comparison to the literal treasure trove he's been standing on for four months? The answer is not a god damn thing.
and sticking around after the odds suddenly balanced out on him.
By my understanding, he only had the one ship at the Ark, so it's less a matter of him staying to fight and more that he has no other option but to do so.
In the broad stokes, there's really little difference between the two situations.
I've been talking about specifics this whole time, what is this about broad strokes?
Although that was certainly present too, with frequent communication on unsecured channels
Which, at least to my knowledge, had never been properly intercepted by the UNSC until that day, due to the presence of Cortana in the field. So there was no reason to secure the channels, if the Covenant as a whole even knew how since their relationship with computers was tenuous at best.
and the failed assault on Alpha Base (which included a literal Ghost cavalry charge) immediately coming to mind.
Frankly, this example only serves to work to your detriment. Alpha Base at the time of the attack was a hastily constructed set of trenches full of ODSTs against a hundred Ghosts, where they used the terrain advantage to compensate for their smaller force. And had it not been for the ODST snipers killing the Zealot leading the charge, they would have soon been overwhelmed regardless.
In every conflict between Cutter's armies and Atriox's, Cutter was the smaller force attacking Atriox's bases that he has had four months to fortify and fill with troops, and every time Cutter got through, despite the willingness of the Banished to use the
Conviction's energy projector on Cutter's bases and forces (which for some reason does negligible damage to them or the terrain, which makes no sense whatsoever).
I'd have to reexamine the details, but I'm pretty sure the Truth and Reconciliation being boarded by enemy forces three separate times doesn't help much either here.
Two of those times where the ship was infested by Flood, who have shown to be capable of flying Spirit dropships to avoid detection, two of those times involving the Chief, and all three times when the ship had been disabled by Cortana before abandoning the
Autumn. Hardly the hardest target to board.
and defeating isolated pockets of Covenant (or Banished, but small difference) forces has never been beyond the ability of comparably sized UNSC forces. Halo Wars 1 was based on the exact same premise, and again, Thel "failed at every turn" by the same standard if we're applying it equally.
Oh I'm sure if I looked over Halo Wars 1 again I'd find plenty of incompetence on the Covenant's part there.
Also, name one example of the UNSC winning an engagement with a Covenant force of the same size that didn't involve a Spartan.
And it's really not that much of a stretch to imagine there would be exceptions, which itself is probably part of the reason why this clan of Brutes was being used so callously even by the Covenant's standards.
That's a pretty big probably, considering Atriox is literally the only member of that clan we see question his position until his execution.
As for them praising the Covenant just before their rebellion, that's not that unreasonable either if they were still part of it at that point, and rebelling isn't a possibility any of them had ever seriously considered. That doesn't mean they'd feel the same when they all see a hero of theirs personally demonstrating, in some small sense, that it very much is possible.
Even if they never thought rebellion was possible, if they were discontented enough to actually try it when they saw their chance, they would have been expressing their disdain for the suicide mission they were being sent on in the privacy of their clansmen, not unironically praising their slavers.
