Hello everyone! Welcome back to the blog! I’ve decided to shift my focus to something more personal to me compared to my last post: the Halo franchise. Originally developed by Bungie under the supervision of Microsoft, the debut of Halo: Combat Evolved unexpectedly stood as a flagship for the upcoming original Xbox console. With the title’s success after its release due to its creativity and innovation within the first person shooter genre, its main character “Master Chief” or “John-117” became a staple of video game iconography. In this entry, I’ll be discussing the evolution of John-117 and how the video game medium warped a character initially seen as a self-insert archetype into something a bit more complicated. This character analysis will spoil the ending of Halo Combat Evolved, as well as some parts of Halo 2, Halo 3, and Halo 4.
To understand John-117’s narrative function, we should probably understand his practical function first. As someone who assumes control of the “Master Chief”, you are set into a world where humanity has been continually fighting a collection of united alien species under the title of “The Covenant” that battles humanity in a religious fervor. After crashing landing on one of their religious artifacts (an ancient ring-world, aptly named Halo), you spend the game shooting and destroying whatever aliens stand in your way in the fight to understand what Halo is. Video games are able to push the boundaries on what it means to be a self-inserted character by having the fate of its characters solely depend on the audience (within limitations of technology at this time, considering we have come a long way since the release of this game back in 2001.) The Master Chief remains silent whenever the player is actively in control and playing the game, leaving us with his companion Cortana to interpret this alien and ultimately foreign conflict. In moments when the game pulls away control from the player in the form of cutscenes, John-117 has a chance to speak his mind about things. He is portrayed as a stoic soldier, fit with all the one-liners that would make an action movie star blush, and his actions (when the player is not in control) reflect that. When trying to uncover the mystery behind the Halo ring’s purpose, his understanding never relies on information that the player doesn’t have, which leaves most of the exposition to Cortana, a hyper-intelligent A.I. that lives inside his helmet. Throughout this game, he is incredibly vocal when talking to Cortana (which never occurs when the player is in control), which makes us base his personality off those interactions. Unfortunately for us, his character doesn’t obviously grow or evolve in his next two appearances.
In Halo 2, The Master Chief has to share his time on screen with The Arbiter, an alien who betrays the Covenant that he was once a part of. Because the player spends less time with John-117 overall, the narrative makes up for it by cutting down the dialogue between him and Cortana, fraying the only way the audience had a way of knowing how these two characters behaved. This would become even more detrimental in Halo 3 where Cortana is absent for almost the entirety of the story until she is reintroduced at the very end. John-117, at this point, saves the galaxy from new threats one game at a time, and is essentially reduced to a main character that always saves the day for humanity. The Arbiter (who works with the Master Chief in Halo 3) fills the role of Cortana but isn’t as snarky or fun to work with considering that they are still fighting a war that the Arbiter was once a part of. The shift from using Cortana as a ironically human character to understand the Master Chief (with him being the actual human but emotionally void) to using the Arbiter represents a different dynamic that only accentuates Chief’s knowledge on how deadly the Covenant, frequently displaying his distrust towards the Arbiter in his actions and not his words.
In Halo 4, however, we are presented with the most emotionally dynamic version of John-117 that we’ve seen up until this point. We can mostly attribute this to the fact that Bungie, the original company behind the series, left to work on another project while leaving Halo to 343 Industries, a company created by Microsoft to keep the Halo franchise going. In this iteration, Chief is on a mission to try and find a solution to save Cortana from rampancy, a condition akin to old age in computers that destroys them over time. Cortana understands that she’s dying, and for the first time in the series, John-117 blatantly rejects the idea that could be a thing that could happen. He is a character that is defined by how successfully he accomplishes his goals, whether it be stopping aliens or saving humanity multiple times in a row. From all of his cosmically impressive feats, his inability to do anything about his closest friend dying is seemingly the only thing that brings out his emotions.
Strangely enough, the only thing that changes between the first and the fourth game regarding John-117’s character is his willingness to show these emotions. John-117 has won every one of his battles but at the cost of something larger than himself. In Combat Evolved, he lost an entire space ship’s crew along with its captain. In Halo 2, Earth was attacked and he had to leave Cortana behind, and in Halo 3 he loses two of his commanding officers in the same couple of minutes without the chance of saving them. In a sense, Master Chief is a tragic hero that hasn’t had a chance to process his grief because he sees his primary goal as saving humanity no matter the cost. This interpretation becomes more complicated depending on whether you still see Master Chief as a self-inserted character. Video games inherently have a different structure of storytelling in the way that it gives you direct control of the character. Is he his own being because he has a definable voice, tragic backstory, and harrowing adventures? Or does none of that matter because those definable aspects of his character are rarely shown to matter?
As a direct comparison, we can look to the rebooted Doom Series for an example of a character that matches Halo’s Master Chief (which is probably the other way around, since Doom remains as the basis of most modern first person shooters considering that the original Doom came out nearly 10 years before Halo released.) Doom’s protagonist is also a guy in green armor whose only motivation is to protect humanity from an invading force (which happens to be demons from Mars instead of aliens from space.) Affectionately named ‘Doom Slayer’ by the community, his only defining characteristic as a character is anger and rage as he takes down his foes in an exclusively brutal fashion and is also considered a self-inserted character for the player to project themselves upon. Doom Slayer has even less characteristics and personality than Master Chief, but still falls under the same type of character as him. While not a direct comparison, it does ask questions about the borders of the self-inserted character archetype and how it translates into a format that gives the audience more agency than it has ever had before.
While I considered covering the events of Halo 5 and Halo Infinite and how they further shape 343 Industries’ vision of Master Chief, I haven’t had enough time to dissect them compared to previous entries (and it would also extend this post at least another thousand or so words, with most of them complaining about the inconsistent and nonsensical writing of Halo 5 with the incredible narrative backpedaling of Halo Infinite.) I think there is plenty of room for interpretation of Master Chief’s character that works with and without the self-inserted assumption that many people make, which might further our understanding of what this character archetype can mean and become in a space where we actively control the character’s fate. I’ll be back next time with another character analysis!
-Harper Saglier, Blogger.
Harper Saglier – Asst. Prose Editor: Harper is a junior at Lewis University majoring in English with a concentration in Writing. They are currently employed at the Howard and Lois Adelmann Regional History Collection. When they aren’t reading academic material, they enjoy watching movies and reading books from their endless growing backlog of recommendations. They hope to use the analysis and writing skills gained from Lewis to further drive their interest in literature beyond graduation. Some of their favorite authors include Neil Gaiman and Oscar Wilde.