I’m not a fan of the Halo franchise. I tried playing a demo of the PC port of the first game and I might be willing to play it in the future but I wasn’t able to get into it because I never had an X-Box. So I can’t really speak to the significance of the game’s hero, Master Chief, keeping his mask on, either for the narrative or on a meta level. The discussion around it, where fans are less than thrilled the new show from Paramount (I don’t know if it’s on their TV channel or the latest “plus”, which frankly is a discussion all it’s own) decided to have the main Spartan remove his helmet, revealing his face for the first time. I’m sure someone at the studio thought this was a big deal, not realizing that it was actually a bad deal.
This is another example of Hollywood types not connecting to stories the way other people do. We’ve seen actors defend their versions of character who bear little to no resemblance to the source material, and we’ve seen that comics and video games are on the low rungs of the media snob’s ladder and Hollywood is full of media snobs who fully support the pecking order that benefits them. This really isn’t anything new though. Why do you think so many superhero stories now have these helmets that collapse behind the hero? Why do they embrace the maskless hero as often as possible and some studios even fight for no mask altogether? It’s all marketing combined with their belief that the movie-going and TV-watching public are stupid. Movie makers have their own problem with masks because of how they were taught to movie make. As for the actors there’s a reason they go along with it: ego.
BW Media Spotlight 
BW’s Daily Article Link: In Defense Of Families In Stories
There seems to be a growing trend of stories in which the cast of friends think of themselves as a family, as if being close friends isn’t good enough or something. The traditional family unit gets treated as a joke or something broken that isn’t nearly as good as the surrogate family of unrelated characters. And yet you can still do a lot with stories about families, either as who the hero associates with outside of heroing, or a family of heroes. Author Caroline Furlong goes over families in fiction and how settling down may actually be the beginning of the adventure.
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Posted by ShadowWing Tronix on March 25, 2022 in Book Spotlight, Comic Spotlight, Movie Spotlight, Television Spotlight and tagged commentary, family.
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