Talk:Believe

Exclusion from official canon
So. I'm guessing everyone can agree at this point, that everything related to this marketing campaign can be marked as non-canon, and excluded from articles depicting events that actually occurred in the official story. Obviously, the events in the Believe campaign never happened. Even the creators stated that they didn't know anything about the Halo 3 story when they made this, therefore making all of the stuff related to Believe - not canon.

Also, i have no idea why this page was redirected to the talk page of Believe (Event). --Jugus 10:03, October 7, 2009 (UTC)

New Canon Development
I fully understand the original classification of the Believe campaign materials as non-canon. Unfortunately a new development in the form of the Halo Encyclopedia (2009 edition) has complicated things. The Halo Encyclopedia: The Definitive Guide to the Halo Universe includes elements of some of the Believe materials, though none in their entirety. This once again opens up the canon question. I'm not saying that this makes all or even any of the Believe materials canon. I'm not saying we need to reclassify it. I'm saying we need to have a conversation to determine where we stand. Hopefully we can keep this conversation a little more civil than the one I initiated on the Encyclopedia itself.--Rusty - UserWiki:Rusty-112|112 ]] 04:35, October 31, 2009 (UTC)

About the inconsistencies...
I have just re-examined everything I could find on the Believe campaign. Without speculation about any secret ONI distortion (I think that indeed it doesn't make sense to speculate on ONI-illuminati-conspiracies), there seems to be a lot of misconceptions regarding the inconsistencies. Among the dozens and dozens of perfectly normal information, there is barely one or two things that are fundamentally irreconcilable—actually it is even framed in a way that is similar to errors in the novels, one wrong word here or there, which overall has little significance in the whole work.

First of all, the "Second Battle of Mombasa" seems to be a term coined by Halopedia. While I have no specific proof, it is very likely that it came with Halopedia's choice of separating the Battle of Earth into two different events. So the conclusion was that it should apply to the Battle of Mombasa too. From what I have uncovered of the Believe campaign, the only official term used is "the Battle for New Momasa", with a few other instances of "the New Mombasa clash" for example. Overall let me begin with elements that perfectly fit into the canon. Believe (event): This ceremony happens in 2556, there is nothing really problematic about it. Museum: Here is an interesting one. It's the only time that the "battle" gets a timeframe. The Halopedia article for the Second Battle of Mombasa emphasizes quite a lot its duration by mentioning many times that it was a seven-day battle—which is a misconception. It only comes from this video, in which the soldier mentions that on the seventh day they ran out of ammo and scavenged the weapons they could find. The narrator then asks if he can remember where he was, and the soldier explains that at the time of the Master Chief detonating a grenade, he was in a Warthog. Since the two situations (scavenging ammo and using a Warthog) are completely different, there is nothing that proves it happened on the same day. There are two different times during which the narrator asks "Do you remember", the first one is a general question about what the soldier can remember from his battle (on the seventh day, he searched for ammo), but then to the second question he shifts to where he was on the diorama (in the Warthog). So that leaves us with no said timeframe for the overall conflict, and talking about "a seven-day long Second Battle of Mombasa" is an error from Halopedia. Hunted: To me it fits perfectly with the story of Halo 3 even if the creators had no idea of what they were doing. Assuming I had never heard of anything about Believe being not canon, I would simply see this as a Marine who participated in the mission of recovering Master Chief at night during the level Arrival. Enemy Weapon: No problem at all. Gravesite: That's the kind of error that I think is similar to what you could find in the novels (or other similar media). The problem is the year: basically "Five years ago" (in the early 2600s) there was a ceremony for Master Chief's disappearance. Basically the "five" should be something like "fifty" or so and there would be no conflict. It's a very standard error that you can find everwhere (for dates, measurements, etc). For the rest, the soldier is quite good at correcting the narrator: there has never been any grave created for Master Chief, contrary to what the narrator naively asks. This leaves the thing completely open to the events of the Master Chief's return in Halo 4. Master Chief was acknowledged as MIA after the war and there was a ceremony (but never ever a burial) some fifty years ago, period. What happens later is not said. If the video was released for Halo 4, that's the way we would talk about it: just a single word issue (since they got a number wrong, just like with Infinity's length in its Halo 4 trailer, hhhhhhhh 343suckssomuch), the rest would be completely normal, actually we would even see some hints from this 27th-century guy that Master Chief was indeed not dead. So just re-read the transcript by correcting "five" with "fifty" and then have a good laugh reading the Trivia section talking about speculation of the video hinting at the Master Chief being killed. You're absolutely right if you're accusing this to be retrospective correction, because yes, the creators were just dead wrong doing their thing in 2007, but as I said, if the thing was happening today we'd just say oh look at this ridiculously tiny mistake which doesn't discredit the whole video. Same with a book that gets a year wrong for whatever reason.

Believe: The John 117 Monument: This one I think is the most interesting, because it gives an insight into the making of the monument. And I'm very surprised to see how we have utterly discarded this insight so far. Basically what it says is that the environment was created with data collected after the battle, I'd say under the glassed surface in deeply buried stuff that got damaged (As the Assembly pointed it out, it's impossible for the Covenant to literally glass a place to 100%). They relied as much as they could on "real" data: scans of the human soldiers (that dated back to their enlistment), blueprints of Mombasa's architecture found in the debris, and... Covenant corpses and equipment—found after the battle (which I would like to repeat, wasn't a "second" new battle, nor did it last for seven days, nor was any specific date given for it). So the narrator says that they tried to create everything correctly, they wanted to represent Mombasa, the Chief fighting there, the Marines, etc. And the Covenant. But if you just think about them, you're going to understand how the Brutes can canonically appear in the monument but not in the original opening of the battle (Master Chief fighting during Halo 2). There were very few Elites, most died very rapidly. The bulk of the forces in Mombasa ended up being Brutes. The first day is compatible with the Master Chief, the Marines, the Grunts, the Jackals, the Hunters, etc.—all of that being a loose representation of the Battle of Mombasa. But in people's mind, don't forget that the Brutes were there instead of the Elites. If the makers of the monument really based their work on what had been found in the debris after the war, then it's very likely they found tons of Brutes and either no or very few Elites. So they scanned what they found and bragged about being so accurate, and you freaking fall for it and don't think about how an in-universe documentary about an event that happened 60 years prior can be very slightly inaccurate about mixing up the events of October 20th with those of October 21st.

So basically, the battle was never supposed to be the "Second" Battle of Mombasa, it's just supposed to represent the Battle of Mombasa, period. There's literally no indication of the date it's supposed to happen on (So quit thinking it was in November). We just know that on the seventh day of the Battle for Mombasa, a guy went to search for ammo. While the Battle was never represented as a lenghty one (I see that on Halopedia, we just count the events of Halo 2 and Halo 3: ODST and then assumes the city was abandoned), nothing really says it couldn't last for many more days—especially since the UNSC maintained many forces in the region (In Crow's Nest, in Voi, all around the savannah...) so among the thousands of soldiers who fought, there very well could have been soldiers still in Mombasa for some time (in The Storm, we can still see Mombasa across the Portal, and although it's mostly destroyed there is still a part of it standing with buildings and so on, so the Covenant didn't entirely glass the city when they uncovered the Portal). So no specific date, and Brutes are here because their corpses were found there. And for Marines not saying this is inaccurate to represent the Chief and the Brutes simultaneously, well they probably saw the Chief once playing with plasma grenades and saving their Warthog or whatnot, and fought for days against the Brutes, so they probably think there's no problem. Note also how it's not said in the documentary that the Chief died during this particular scene, nor that the scene itself is supposed to represent a particular moment of the Battle of Mombasa. They just say that they got the environment and the faces as realistic as they could, for the rest God only knows what happens there (well, and the soldiers). Now that's the moment when you rant: "But the creators wanted to represent that as a particular scene during Halo 3 when Master Chief dies and it's not in the game so it's not canon". Well, I'm not here to disagree with you. That's indeed the case. But we should also take into account the in-universe explanation. And I'm not talking about a crazy secret ONI plot to hide the existence of the Portal and so on. There's a documentary explaning the creation of the monument directly from our dearly canonical Museum of Humanity. No date, no name, just a very confuse location with everyone killing each other and Brutes being present in the first hours of the battle (Basically the only time when the Chief set foot in Mombasa), and the in-universe makers bragging about their historical reconstitution using historical whatnot, but hey I bet they never played Metropolis so that's why they don't know Brutes arrived just hours later; I blame them for not having knowledge of the most historical account in existence, Halo 2. But, well, I suppose they can't check it.

Now with that being said, I can tackle the few remaining inconsistencies that I really consider to be inconsistencies. That is, a few mentions in the Diorama. Note how I say "few"; because actually almost everything said in it could have happened at some point during the battle, is very vague, and doesn't have anything to do with Master Chief anyway. Basically there are only four things that wouldn't fit very well into the canon (you can read all the rest and see by yourself how it's pretty much about standard encounters between human and Covenant soldiers). 1) Emmanuel Lomax says that he spent the night in a building and then the Chief arrived. As I said earlier, yes, you're correct when thinking that the creators of Believe simply made something without paying attention to the canon. So after everything I wrote and how I explained that mostly everything can be right, this is one of the irreconcilable thing that still lingers around—although you could consider it a random mistake like in the novels if Master Chief arrived and found Marines sleeping in broad daylight; it'd just be the author messing around for two sentences which can in no way discredit the work as a whole (After everything I've explained, the creation of the Diorama actually seems more canon than Palace Hotel). 2) Talking about Palace Hotel, here's something new: looks like Master Chief got captured by a Brute. Two options. First option: At the very least, it could have been an event detailed in Believe, a secondary media, and that we hadn't seen in the game but that still happened anyway. Like the Chief doing stuff and finding dead Mobuto in The Flood although there's no such thing in the supreme source of canon that Halo: CE is ("supreme", they said...). But even this can't be possible because as I said the Brutes arrived later and the Master Chief couldn't have encountered them although their very presence in the diorama is okay because the makers only scanned the corpses that could be found in post-carnage Mombasa. So long story short, this just leaves the whole "OMG Master Chief sacrificed himself for us" as a romanticized event of the battle (Oh, so "his hand reached out and pulled us back from the brink, and gave us hope", lik dis if u cries evrytime). Seems like they love the Chief a lot. Just like they love Jun and his courageous sacrifice so much that they honnor his sacrifice along with the rest of Noble Team even though he didn't die and, well, they also didn't really care for Noble Six altough his sacrifice was the most important one (Yes yes, I know the real world reasons explaning why Six isn't on the Noble Team monument and why Jun is, but from an in-universe perspective that doesn't change anything of what I said, people working at the Museum of Humanity are terrible people who don't always produce historically accurate things). 3) So the third awkward thing is a certain Thomas Chang who participated in the Battle of Installation 04. Not possible if you only rely on the events narrated in First Strike. To the risk of repating it again and again, yes, I understand that the creators of Believe were just messing around when they wrote this kind of things. But in addition to this "crazy" mention, we still have people like Marcus P. Stacker and Chips Dubbo who survived Installation 04—God knows how. Not a new "inconsistency", so in fact it's still quite open. 4) Fourth and last thing, it seems that some Brute ranks are messed up (Stalkers are called Minors). So basically we don't care, if it happened in another media, it wouldn't be a huge problem.

So this is it. Now you're eager to say that it's too complicated and doesn't make sense, or that I'm trying to justify the unjustifiable, or that even if it can be explained the creators of Believe messed around in the first place so we can't retroactively explain their things, and so on. But actually, I have very little interest in forcing our policy on Believe to change. My main goal was simply to outline how many things had been misinterpreted or forgotten or (worse of all) invented by us. This "novelty" take on the Believe campaign has pleased me a lot and I wanted to share my thoughts—I'm sure some of my points may allow people to rediscover Believe in a new light and not regard it as so detached from the canon as it has been portrayed. The only reason for which I think it should stay not canon as it is right now is because 343i didn't come forth and said that we should take it as canon—like they did with i love bees. Although that's still debatable, since elements of Believe have been canonized with the Halo Encyclopedia: The Definitive Guide to the Halo Universe, but that's an entirely separate issue. At the very least, I think that these elements may get rid of their "not canon" status, since after all the vast majority of descriptions in Believe can fit into the canon. So the validated things can get a pass. For the rest, I'll let that to you. Once again, my point was to show that you don't need to have a secret ONI cover-up operation full of speculation (that has been removed from Halopedia, recently), sometimes it's just sheer misconception of the Believe plot rather than real inconsistency. Still not canon, though. Sadface. Of course, that's "my" thing. If you think some of the things I said are just inherently wrong then I can't help for it. That's basically my point of view on Believe after re-watching/reading everything I could get my hand on.Imrane-117 (talk) 04:10, 13 December 2014 (EST)


 * Well, you've clearly put more thought into this than I ever did. Per your analysis, I'm thinking we should probably get rid of the Second Battle of Mombasa page and incorporate any relevant information here or to the John-117 Monument article. --Jugus (Talk  | Contribs ) 07:20, 19 December 2014 (EST)

Apparently canon
So CIA391 was informed, I'm assuming via Waypoint, by the 343i employee that runs the Catalog account that the Believe campaign is apparently canon. To quote from the original message from Catalog's owner and to CIA391 (who sent it to me via message on Halo Archive): "Stuff that Marketing makes is never canon, until we mention it somewhere else :) That said, most of the Believe ads are treated as canonical - even the future stuff like the Museum of Humanity (hence it being quoted in the 2011 Encyclopedia, p. 212) and the Bubble Shield grenade (which also showed up in Legends and we have an internal article about it though its not been used in-game yet). Is EVERYTHING canonical? Well, probably not without caveats! And stuff that hasn't been addressed like the Bubble Grenade are still subject to change or outright deletion :)" Sith-venator Wavingstrider  ( Commlink ) 06:36, 19 December 2014 (EST)


 * I wish we had a more solid confirmation so we could incorporate that background info in the article (why didn't Catalog post this publicly?). Then again, I don't think Believe has ever been explicitly decanonized either, and the exhaustive analysis above (as well as its inclusion in the otherwise-suspect Encyclopedia) suggests it could exist canonically. --Jugus (Talk  | Contribs ) 07:20, 19 December 2014 (EST)
 * CIA391 here. Well for one the Catalogs is currently in May 2558. Meaning it wouldnt make sense for it too in a in Universe way. Also the topic was brought up in PM chat between me and the the Catalog Account handler. I pulled out the part related to this. But can not show the whole conversation due to an agreement between me and the Catalog.CIA391 12:41, December 19, 2014 (GMT)

Based on this and Imrane's above post, I believe we could treat the material from Believe as canonical. It should, however, be kept mind this time that it's presented as an in-universe propaganda campaign to romanticize the Chief and not a 100% accurate historical account. I also reiterate my point about getting rid of the Second Battle of Mombasa page (as well as all mentions thereof) and treating it as a fan misinterpretation; the campaign material only refers to the battle as the "battle for New Mombasa" and similar terms. The Marines' testimonies can be understood as referring to incidents that happened during the Battle of Mombasa or possibly even blending in other engagements from that time period (most of the interview videos don't identify any specific battle, though the ones in Diorama are apparently tied to the same time and place). --Jugus (Talk  | Contribs ) 00:14, 24 February 2015 (EST)