Quote Originally Posted by Warsaw View Post
@ejburke: The Gravemind you encounter in the Halo games is not the same one that attacked the Forerunner 100,000 years ago. The Flood have a trait that lets a Gravemind recall all the events of its predecessor. However, we don't know if this precludes the simultaneous existence of multiple Graveminds. This is all coming from the Halo Encyclopedia, by the way.
If he's not the same Gravemind, then it begs the question where he came from. Where did the Flood find enough food on Delta Halo, post Halopocalypse, to generate a new one? The humans and Covenant had only just arrived during the events of Halo 2.

Bungie pretty clearly led the player to believe that he was a remnant of the war with the Forerunner. Given Cortana's line in Halo 1, "Halo doesn't kill the Flood, it kills their food." -- it made perfect sense that he would have survived. Then Halo 3 has to come in and confuse everyone by demonstrating that Halo does indeed kill the Flood.

Now it's a convoluted mess, with retcon on top of retcon being used to explain things that didn't need to be explained if only they had their shit straight all along.

All I'm really getting at is that the story could have made much more sense than it does, but for sheer carelessness. You can patch a boat with duck tape, but it's a better idea to avoid punching holes in it in the first place.