The voice direction in this game is abysmal. You can tell 343 told Cortana's voice actress to do her Weapon voice to tie it more to Halo Infinite instead of letting her act like Cortana
Re-writing (retconning) the OG Cortana into this abomination of a character archetype is probably one of 343's worser decisions.
The "Weapon"--who was meant to be a "younger" version of Cortana--acted
nothing like the one we knew, and so now they have to retcon her behaviour. It's like they're afraid of writing professional sounding women because in their mind women aren't capable of acting like that. They have a bipolar attitude when it comes to writing women--and I'm not bothering to demarcate 343 from any other studio because they're all the exact same--where they're either:
1) The least-stressed in any given situation (inferring superior emotional control to men) which gets portrayed as a lackadaisal/whimsical regard of everything.
2) The most-professional in any given situation (more logical/emotionally mature) which gets portrayed as the girlbossy archetype we're all more or less familiar with.
Modern writers aren't writing women like human beings, they're writing an abstraction of one that is simultaneously "safe" yet offensive due to how horrifically bad they are.
Women can't even write women either because the objective isn't to write a character, it's to write
representation, which means writing an idealised version of a woman who, despite not even being a self-insert, is meant to be a flawless ideal. The worst part is they're not a
universal ideal, they're an ideal to a very
specific and
politicised subset of people who are in contention with the rest of the world.
The Cortana we had was already an idealised representation because for a decade or two we had this beautiful window where the perfect representative was someone who could be depended upon. Confident, not arrogant. It's like 343 are trying to make up for making Cortana emotionally unstable in Halo 4 all those years ago.
