>direction is shit in all regards
>fuck up the music
>hard miltary warrior woman
The warrior woman shit is what gets me everytime. It's the biggest red flag of anything modern.
You know like every historical woman who led men into battle was typically not a cunt. They are rare, but usually they tended to actually not be cunts.
There's a lack of humility in the bones of such characters. They don't command respect or the audience's appeal because there's no impression or even implication they were in any role other than the one we see—they left the womb a high-ranking soldier/general and that's that. In past media, high-ranking military officers who never saw combat had this depiction usually, and they were either extremely arrogant. or cowards, or both. That's why so many of them feel arrogant because the writers haven't even considered what they were like in a lesser role, so there's no humility to temper them, which is what usually happens. The way they dole out orders is as someone who has never received a direct order in their life.
Aliens, which Halo derives a lot of inspiration from, featured a semi-subversion of this given they have such a character and he does eventually lock-in (after being humbled). He dies with the warrior woman archetype that modern stories seem incapable of doing.
(Notice she still frowns and clasps onto the LT? It doesn't erase her past bravado and helps make her more likeable because it makes her more human. Stories are afraid to depict such characters having any vulnerable side out of fear it will overshadow the "badass girlboss" they've been depicting up to that point.)
Vasquez was a grunt like the other marines, and so was on their level not above them. It's rare to find such characters unless they're a subordinate to a hilariously incompetent leader who dies early in the story making them the defacto leader.
Halo 1 didn't have a Vasquez eqivalent but they had Foehammer, who was basically an expy of the pilot from Aliens.
She drops shit off for you, picks you up, says the odd bit of encouragement here and there.
Modern writers lack the
restraint to do a Foehammer (woman in military who does her job well and without condescension), and the humility to do a Vasquez (a soldier who is on the same level as the other soldiers).
