[quote]at the beginning, the Didact wants to save the Humans. I don't see how this could lead to his hatred of them. Furthermore, the Librarian seems to want to destroy the humans, yet in the next terminal, she wants to save them (it seems like her and her husband are in opposite opinion.[/quote] This is the Didact when he was the noble, heroic teacher and general in Forerunner society. It was early days in the war, so we can surmise that his children are still alive at this point, he has yet to reach a point where he hates humanity. Librarian favours more rash decisions, she knows little to nothing about humanity at this point outside of the tensions that are running between their species. It's only when she spends over a thousand years studying them following their devolution that she comes to love them. [quote]in the second one, the humans hav found a planet they think might be flood-free. how hard could it be to send a message to the forerunners "hey, there's this alien parasite attacking us, it'd be great if you guys could help out. also, this is why we've been eradicating your planets. you would have done it, too."[/quote] The Forerunners did not believe that the Flood was a credible threat to the Ecumene, in fact many thought that it was simply a human bio-weapon developed to give humanity an incentive to push into Forerunner territory and expand. The Forerunner Ecumene spanned 3 million worlds, humanity had something like 10,000 because they were pushing away from the Orion Complex (away from Forerunner dominance). All the Forerunners saw were their worlds bombarded to a cinder and the human ships that had done the deed. Likewise, when the Forerunner [i]did[/i] discover the Flood, they treated it like a disease to be cured. They would've totally impeded humanity's efforts against the Flood because they spent so many years looking for a way to cure it, during which time the Flood was assimilating whole systems. Humanity knew what had to be done and their scorched earth policy ultimately paid off, the Forerunners would have impeded that at first (but then, after some hundreds of years, they ended up resorting to the same tactics humanity had used). [quote]how could the halos be a better plan than the didact's prometheans (which were decently effective. option 1: killl everything in the galaxy. option 2: let stuff live, get more soldiers in the composer, and defeat the flood. then return life to the galaxy. it seems like the halos are ridiculously unreasonable when the prometheans (in enough numbers) could at least put up a good fight.[/quote] The Forerunners don't understand ho to use the Composer properly, it only subimates one way. Once you become a Promethean, you cannot go back to being an organic being - when the Forerunner attempted this, the organic bodies they had created for the composed minds to be put in began decaying extremely fast and resulted in abominations. Librarian describes it as "manifest holocaust". It was not a viable solution, it was a crime against the Mantle, and the Ur-Didact's plan was to have the Prometheans become his own personal army who would wipe out any species that might one day contend the Forerunners for power. Likewise, the Prometheans only came about at the very end of the Forerunner-Flood war. There were very few Forerunners left and hardly enough in the way of other species to supply an army of Prometheans to take on the Flood - [b]let alone the immortal Star Roads[/b]. [quote]why didn't they just leave the galaxy? it's not like they couldn't make it to another near by galaxy. i know that they touch on the galaxy topic a bit in cryptum, but that doesn't explain why they'd rather completely irradicate life in that galaxy instead of just moving to another one.[/quote] What? The Flood came from outside the galaxy when humanity pushed them back, it's highly implied that the Flood spent those ten thousand years infecting local satellite galaxies to build up some of their strength for their return to the Milky Way. Likewise, slipspace access was almost completely closed off by the Star Roads. The Halos being constantly moved across the galaxy during the war essentially used up the 'bandwidth' of slipspace, and the Forerunners did not have the capability to travel across galaxies. Librarian's trip to Path Kethona, the local spiral galaxy just outside the Milky Way, in a single ship almost completely bankrupted the Ecumene.