Halo: Humans and Forerunners

A recent video by Halo Followers dives into the question: What if… Early Humans Allied with Forerunners? Here is their video:

For some background on the question….

The Halo story line mostly (certainly the video games to date) takes place in the mid-26th century, where humans are fighting for their very existence against a religious empire known as The Covenant, which is comprised of 6 races, or possibly 8 or more depending on how you count them. As it turns out, The Covenant is based around worshiping an ancient alien race that disappeared long ago, but left what appears to be holy relics plus some nifty technology behind. The leaders of the covenant )(the San’shyuum, also known as the prophets) decide that eradicating humans is apparently central to their religion, so we essentially have a holy war.

Now, step back about 250,000 years (and pretend you don’t know that archaic Homo sapiens are already roaming Earth, lighting fires and spearchucking their way across the evolutionary apex predator finish line) and Forerunners and Humans engage in a war which essentially wipes the humans out (The Librarian preserves their genetic code for reseeding later, and this is where modern/future humans come from). Shortly after defeating the humans, The Forerunners fight (and eventually ‘lose’) to The Flood. As a last resort, the Forerunner fire the rings they’ve created, which wipe out all life in the galaxy (which starve the flood of their food, and allow life to eventually flourish once more once the reseeding begins, and ostensibly without the flood around to infect/wipe them out).

The Halo Followers video suggests that had the Forerunners simply teamed up with the humans, together they could have likely defeated the flood and shared the mantle of responsibility. That may be true but a few caveats:

The Flood doesn’t defeat the forerunners through conventional means. Rather, they infect their AI and in a surprise attack, cripple Forerunner forces at the outset, and from there it’s all downhill for the Forries. So it stands to reason that such an attack could have been planned against the ancient humans as well.

In reality, the Halo canon’s reasoning on the Forerunner-Human war is full of holes. The general explanation is that the human’s continued bombardment of planets in Forerunner territory was perceived as an invasion, and it’s not discovered until afterwards that the humans were in fact containing The Flood by decimating planets they’d begun to infect. It’s also said that the Forerunner-Human war lasts a millennia. So apparently, what we have here is a failure to communicate….for about 1,000 years. We’re left to believe that Forerunners and humans fought a battle for a millenia without communicating their reasons for fighting each other.

Plot holes aside, the Halo saga is still amazing.