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{{delete|Only tangentially related to /tg/.}} {{Fail}} [[File:KarenWard.jpg|300px|thumb|right|Behold my Comrades, the [[Chaos|Unholy Abomination]] that is, [[Fail|Karen]] [[Derp|Ward]].]] Karen Traviss is an author that has written books for [[Star Wars]], [[Halo]], and Gears of War. She is widely regarded as [[Matt Ward]] [[/d/|with tits]], [[Fail|so you know what is going to come next.]] Mentioning her name in the presence of die-hard fans of either SW or Halo tends to create much [[Rage]] and your chances of being shanked by a lightsaber or energy sword prop is quite high. <u>'''You have been warned'''.</u> ==Why is she so hated?== She doesn't do her research, retcons things just to fit her ideas on what's 'best' in the setting, openly denigrates beloved characters because she doesn't like their ideas, making respectable characters into blatant [[Mary Sue|Supermen]] and insults anyone who criticizes her, comparing them to the Taliban. She also has a tendency to grind her plots to a halt in order to shill her favored characters and in-universe ideologies and/or bash whatever parts of the universe she doesn't like. She's also a total hypocrite, the reason why she quit Star Wars? The writers of the Clone Wars show had Mandalorians that didn't match what she'd written. She is so bad that she makes the writing styles of Matt Ward and C.S.Goto look like Dan Abnett and Greg Bear; '''Yes. She. Is. That. Bad.''' Much like Matt Ward, her main problem is that she's exaggerating what's already present in the fluff to an absurd degree. They've both made their preferred faction into impossibly perfect badasses who are always right about everything and can do everything better than everyone else, to the point where any character who doesn't like them is treated as naive, stupid, or evil, even when no evidence exists for this in the story. ==Traviss-ty Era and Karen's writing 'Achievements'== ===Star Wars=== When Karen Traviss first started writing for the Star Wars expanded universe, most fans didn't see a problem with it. Her first book based on the well liked Republic Commando game was praised as being interesting and deep, with good character development and plotting. Things soon started to go off the rails, however, thanks to her clear bias towards all things Mandalorian/clone troopers and her raging hate-boner for the Jedi. Examples include... *Turning the Mandalorians into Ward-level [[Mary Sues]] by wanking their abilities into the stratosphere and reducing their entire culture ito a bland stew of proud warrior race guy tropes. [[Spiritual Liege| Mandalorian Liege anyone?]] Traviss-brand Mandalorians are also presented as being completely right and correct about everything all the time, and anyone who disagrees with them is naive at best and evil at worst, even when they're doing things like beating the shit out of their clone trainees or torturing Kaminoan scientists to death. *She also supports the lowest numerical estimate given for the clone army, a [[Skub|topic which caused much confusion and disagreement]] throughout the fandom and even in the EU author corps. To give you an example, the low-ball number for the clone army was less than the entire armed forces of the Soviet Union in World War II. [[What|The clone army, one that spans an entire galaxy, supposedly had fewer troops than one country on one planet that couldn't use cloning to keep up its numbers.]] And they were fighting a droid army that (at the time Traviss was writing) was said to be quintillions strong and had dozens or hundreds of factories dedicated to making replacements as quickly as they were destroyed. *In the Legacy of the Force series, Traviss retconned the entirety of the New Jedi Order, [[What|turning the Jedi into fucking idiots who couldn't find their ass with both hands and a holocron.]] Most notoriously, [[Rage|Jaina Solo was unable to operate the comm systems of a starfighter despite having been a member of Rogue Squadron, and was somehow unable to fight Mandalorians because they "can't be seen in the Force", despite the fact that she fought against the Yuuzhan Vong,]] [[Fail|an entire race of Force-invisible beings.]] She then had Jaina go off to train with the Mandalorians to defeat her Sith Lord brother, since they could apparently teach her how to beat a Sith better than her uncle Luke, who was like 5 for 5 on killing Sith Lords at that point. Hilariously enough, Traviss apparently pissed off the other writers in the series so much that when it came time for Jaina's epic showdown with Jacen, they just ignored all of her super-sekrit Mando training and had her kick his ass the Jedi way. *As mentioned previously, she has a massive raging hate-boner for the Jedi. Karen was not a fan of Star Wars when she was first contracted to write for the franchise, and did only minimal research into its background and lore. She therefore decided that the Jedi were ''obviously'' a bunch of corrupt, hypocritical, power-hungry slavemasters who just took this clone army they'd been handed and went merrily off to battle. This is in stark opposition to their usual portrayal: a bunch of hippie shaolin monks who were thrust into the middle of a galactic war they hadn't asked for and had tried to stop, and who had deep misgivings about the whole situation, ''especially'' with regards to the clones. As part of this, she turned [[What|Obi-Wan Kenobi into a bloodthirsty glory hound as opposed to the wise and patient mentor he's been in literally every other portrayal ever]], [[Derp|and had Mace Windu actively engaging in a conspiracy with Palpatine to prolong the Clone Wars for no reason other than the evulz.]] She then wrote some Jedi characters who agreed with the Mandalorians 100 percent about everything and shilled them as being the smartest Jedi in the Order because of this, to the point where they all managed to survive Order 66. ===Halo=== After looking at the clusterfuck that was her Star Wars writing, when rumors spread that Traviss was going to be writing for the Halo franchise, thousands of Haloites [[Meme|cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced]]. The rumors unfortunately proved true, and after getting hired, Karen sharpened her literary equivalent of a chainsaw and went to town on a decade's worth of consistent fluff. Within just a few years, this abomination of a [[Fail|writer]] birthed out three books called [[Herp|Glasslands]], [[Derp|The Thursday War]], and [[What|Mortal Dictata]]. As expected massive [[Fluff|fluff]] [[Rape|rape]] ensued and Halo fans cried out in [[Rage|rage]] over the amount of [[Fail|fail]]. Shining moments include... * Karen's ''gigantic'' throbbing hate-boner for Dr. Catherine Halsey. Halsey has always been portrayed as a conflicted person who feels deep guilt over her role in the Spartan-II program and is fully aware of the fact that she's a monster who has committed massive breaches of ethics and morality in her pursuit of the ultimate defender of humanity. As she did with the Jedi, Traviss apparently missed that memo and instead turned Halsey into a sociopathic Mengele expy who feels no remorse over her actions and doesn't see why anyone would have a problem with her. Traviss then wrote everyone else in the series to hate Dr. Halsey with a furious passion, despite the fact that without her work, humanity would have been extinct. The characters who now hated her included the admiral who signed off on the Spartan program, several of the people who helped her recruit and train them, and two of her own Spartans, who have always been portrayed as unshakably loyal to Halsey. She's also depicted as hating the newer generation Spartan-IIIs because they're "better" than her Spartans, as opposed to her actual objections to the program (which was that the IIIs were traumatized war orphans who were emotionally manipulated into signing up for the program and were then wasted on high-risk missions with low survival rates.) It got to the point where the Halo wiki effectively dismissed Traviss' writing as ONI propaganda meant to shunt all of the blame for their war crimes and other dickery onto Halsey's shoulders and make her their scapegoat. * Shilling Margaret Parangosky and Serin Osman as heroic characters despite the fact that Parangosky is even more ruthless and morally grey than Halsey. Indeed, Parangosky is generally considered by fans to be Halo's equivalent of [[Inquisition|Fyodor Karamazov]], so Traviss' attempt to make her the "good guy" earned her further notoriety within the Halo community. Admiral Parangosky is in many ways ''worse'' than Halsey, as she refuses to accept any blame for her role in ONI's many morally dubious projects and was actively attempting to [[Derp|destabilize the Arbiter's pro-Earth regime by arming and supplying anti-human Elite terrorists]]. Further, her hatred for the doctor is revealed to be caused by the fact that Halsey outsmarted her once, which makes Parangosky come off as an incredibly petty and vindictive asshole. It's also revealed that she's been grooming and emotionally manipulating Serin Osman to carry on her vendetta against Halsey after her retirement, to the point where Osman is now just as morally blinkered and hypocritical as her mentor. Traviss wrote all of this and still somehow made Parangosky out to be better than Halsey, [[Rage|who went from one of the most beloved and intellectually deep characters in the franchise into a cutout copy of Josef Mengele, only more incompetent.]] * Writing the Office of Naval Intelligence in such a way that they wind up looking like a bunch of short-sighted, incompetent buffoons rather than a ruthless and brilliant cabal of spymasters. The shining example of this is their provocation of a civil war on the Elite homeworld, after which they start supplying the sangheili terrorists known as the [[Heresy|Storm Covenant]] with weapons and tech, as opposed to supporting the human-friendly regime led by the Arbiter. This plot point was so stupid that it has been completely undone by the games' writers; the resurrected Covenant gets its shit thoroughly kicked in during the events of Halo 4 and 5 and has ceased to be a concern by the end of the latter. * Making Spartans even more of a [[Mary Sue]] than they were already, such as the case of a Spartan-II killing a Brute with a [[What|single punch]], despite the fact that in most other fluff, Spartans consider fighting a Brute in CQC something close to suicide. * The elimination of Lucy-B091's muteness due to PTSD, which was her defining trait, for...you guessed it. [[Rage|NO REASON!]] And it gets worse when she treats her like a [[Mary Sue|delicate little flower]], dumping all the blame on Halsey again, even though Halsey had nothing to do with the Spartan-III program and in fact opposed it. Related to this, Traviss also wrote Naomi-010, a Spartan-II, as being emotionally volatile and tempted by the idea of giving up her life as a Spartan to become a civilian, even though all other Halo media has portrayed the Spartan-IIs as cold, stoic, ultra-professional soldiers who would sooner die than retire, and for whom a quick touch on the arm is equivalent to an outburst of joyful laughter. ==Final Verdict== She is overall a bad writer and not much better as a person. She likes to compare people who disagree with her treatment of characters and races to the Taliban, and takes it poorly when her special snowflakes are touched by other people; she actually ragequit the Star Wars franchise after the ''Clone Wars'' animated series retconned the Mandalorians into not being unstoppable ultra-badass proud warrior race guys, some of whom were even (gasp!) ''villains''. She did manage to write a few good novels for Star Wars, and there haven't been many complaints about her Gears of War work, but those are generally overshadowed by her penchant for character assassination, plot derailment, and willful ignorance of lore, along with her willingness to insult and mock people who don't like her work. God-Emperor help us all if she somehow ever gets contracted to write for Black Library; it'll be the second coming of the Wardian Smurfs all over again. [[Category:RAGE]] [[Category:Writers]]
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