Cortana

Cortana Spoilers through Halo 4. Cortana is probably my favorite character in almost any series ever. I love this character. I love her personality, and I absolutely love the relationship between her and Master Chief. There’s so much there that I don’t even know where to start. She can be funny, sarcastic, impatient, and completely confident that she knows more than everybody else in the room. Usually she does. She’ll be helping Chief through something that could get him killed and still find time to give him a hard time about it. That back and forth between them is so good. And Chief lets her. He doesn’t suddenly become a completely different person when she’s around. He’s still Chief. He still keeps most of his answers short. But they understand each other. She knows how to talk to him, and you can hear how familiar they’ve become with each other without the game stopping to explain it to you. That’s a huge part of why I love them together. You spend all this time with these two, going through one disaster after another, and their conversations become something familiar in the middle of all of it. Even when Cortana’s telling you where to go, there’s personality in it. She has something to say about what’s happening. She gets frustrated. She makes a joke. She has an opinion about the terrible situation they’ve ended up in this time. Then the games put distance between them, and getting back to her actually matters. There are plenty of objectives in Halo. Plenty of things Chief needs to retrieve, destroy, activate, or escape from. Going back for Cortana carries something else with it because of everything that’s already happened between them. By the time you get to Halo 4, they’ve been through so much together. Now she’s dealing with rampancy, and Chief wants to get her help. He wants there to be an answer. Of course he does. Look at everything else they’ve managed to survive. But she knows what’s happening to her. She’s trying to tell him, and he keeps looking for a way to fix it. That’s such a difficult situation for the two of them. He can fight his way through all these impossible situations, but he can’t just fight this for her. And being able to understand what’s happening doesn’t make it any easier for her to face. I love that the game lets her be afraid. She’s still Cortana. She still has all that intelligence and personality, but there’s something happening to her that she can’t just work her way around. It gives those conversations with Chief so much more weight. And then she saves him. After all his efforts to find a way to save her, she’s the one who gets him through it. Their final conversation in Halo 4 deserves time of its own. After everything going on around them, the game gives them that moment together. There’s so much they haven’t been able to say, and so little time left to say it. I could go on about that relationship for a very long time. I don’t think you have to agree on exactly what to call it to understand why it means something. They trust each other. They care about each other. They’ve been there for each other through things almost nobody else could understand. The possibility of losing that is awful. And Cortana has so much going for her outside of Chief as well. She makes decisions. She takes risks. She can be wrong. She has her own wants and fears. I don’t want to talk about her as though her entire purpose is to make somebody else’s story more interesting. She’s a huge part of why the story is interesting to begin with. There’s more to say about where the series takes her after that, and I’ll get into those games separately. But this is where I’m coming from with Cortana. I love the character, and I love what she and Chief have together. There are very few characters in anything that I’d put above her.