History Characters / HaloTheCovenant

--> '''Brute Captain:''' "Don't play with your food"
--> '''Brute Chieftain: "Pack brothers, don't embarrass me".

* DeadpanSnarker: For a mostly DumbMuscle race, the Jiralhanae can often display a dark, sarcastic sense of humour when engaging the Master Chief in game play delivering gems such as, "No thanks to you, I found him!", or "Don't play with your food", there are moments when the Brute Chieftain will say, "Pack brothers, don't embarrass me".

%%* DeadpanSnarker: Brute Chieftain, "Pack brothers, don't embarrass me".

* BashBrothers: Always come in pairs.

* ActionSurvivor: Survives the opening salvos of the Great Schism and subsequent Flood infection of High Charity, albeit only thanks to his Elite comrades. He also oversaw Elite combat units on Installation 04, and got his troops off the ring before it exploded.

* TheCracker: He has some skill, having begun his career as a communications officer, and used it to plant a bug in Truth's throne so he could potentially glean incriminating evidence to advance his own position. [[spoiler:He ends up learning about Truth's plan for the extermination of the Elites and nearly gets killed for it after he goes out his way to tell his Sangheili allies.]]

* TokenGoodTeammate: He's the only one of Truth's aides to have concerns about the Brutes beginning to replace the Elites, Truth's own scheming, and even the wisdom of trying to annihilate the humans rather than accept them into the Covenant. [[spoiler:He also refuses to partake in the ColdBloodedTorture that the Prophet of Exquisite Devotion inflicts on the captured Elite Councillors.]]

[[folder: The Minster of Discovery]]

* DoesNotLikeShoes: Played straight in most cases, apart from certain higher-ranking Brutes.

* DoesNotLikeShoes: Thanks to their tough exoskeletons (and low position within the Covenant hierarchy), the majority of Unggoy go barefoot.

* BladeOnAStick: Energy Staves, though only in cutscenes. In-game, they use Plasma Rifles, Carbines, Energy Swords, and Brute Shots.

* BadassBaritone: Has a very deep voice, took out his formidable uncle in his youth, and is badass enough to be Thel Vadamee's primary rival.

* YouCantGoHomeAgain: [[spoiler:It's revealed that Cortana [[EarthShatteringKaboom destroyed Doisac]] in the interim between ''Videogame/Halo5'' and ''Videogame/HaloInfinite'', due to Atriox—the current figurehead of the Brute people—refusing to join her cause; killing tens of billions in the process and leaving the Brutes an endangered species as a whole. [[SarcasmMode They all took this sudden development]]... [[RoaringRampageOfRevenge rather well]].]]

->'''Voiced by: Michael Wincott (''{{VideoGame/Halo 2}}''), Creator/TerenceStamp (''{{VideoGame/Halo 3}}'')'''

* ApocalypseHow: When the Covenant discovered them, they were still recovering from a nuclear holocaust they waged on each other.
** [[spoiler:Suffered one yet again in ''Infinite'' with Cortana destroying Doisac altogether due to their refusal to join her cause, which understandably '''''pissed''''' them all off.]]

* ArmorIsUseless: Completely averted. You are not punching through that armor.
** The sole exception is in the original first Halo: Combat Evolved where it doesn't matter where you shoot (except for the shield obviously) as every area of the Hunter is vulnerable.

* AlienInvasion: Their second favorite thing to do after uncovering Forerunner artifacts is to invade planets and wipe out as many combatants as they need or want to, usually in the name of finding the aforementioned artifacts.

* AsskickingEqualsAuthority: See KlingonPromotion.

* AsskickingEqualsAuthority: Comes with being a Brute Chieftain.

* AsskickingEqualsAuthority: As per usual for a high-ranking Brute, he earned his position by kicking lots of ass.

* AsskickingEqualsAuthority: Not by real fighting skill, though, merely through brute force. And he's pretty bad at asserting his authority anyway.

* AsskickingEqualsAuthority: What kind of credentials does a [[ButtMonkey Unggoy]] need to be considered not just an equal, but a superior to a [[ProudWarriorRaceGuy Sangheili]], one might ask? Try being able to defeat Sangheili in single combat, outpowering Jiralhanae in hand-to-hand combat, and wounding a ''[[SuperSoldier Spartan]]'' bad enough to make them retreat. Even the most [[TheFundamentalist traditional]] Sangheili aren't going to deny his prowess.

* HeelFaceMole: He's just using his alliance with the Rubble to help Truth [[spoiler:track down human populations through the black market and gain the stellar coordinates for Earth, and to gain both the Rubble and its slipspace drives for the Kig-Yar under his command]]. Regret, [[LockedOutOfTheLoop not knowing this]], [[RightHandVsLeftHand sends Thel and his Zealots out to eliminate Reth and his allies for apparent blasphemy]] and they don't realize what Reth's really up to until they've already captured and interrogated him.

* GoMadFromTheRevelation: Learning [[spoiler: Humanity's status as the true Reclaimers, and later the [[KillEmAll true goal of the Halo Rings]] from which the entire Covenant religion was established]] unhinged the already-villainous Truth to new depths.

* BeliefMakesYouStupid: Their blind adherence to their religion holds them back in many ways, such as preventing them from innovating or improving on their technology. Most notably, however, the central tenet of their religion is that the Forerunners are gods who [[AscendToAHigherPlaneOfExistence ascended to a higher plane of existence]] by activating the Halo Array, when in fact the Halos were weapons of last resort created to starve the Flood by killing all sentient life in the galaxy. Many Covenant, even when presented with indisputable evidence, will still stubbornly cling to these beliefs.

* NonActionBigBad: A ''Grunt'' could probably beat him in a straight fight.

* WhatHappenedToTheMouse: His final fate has yet to be revealed; it's only known that he was not present at ''Halo Wars''[='s=] final battle, having been sent away by Ripa beforehand.

** ''Halo: The Thursday War'' fully confirms it and takes it UpToEleven. The Covenant ''had absolutely no idea how any of their technology worked.'' Or at least, the high-end stuff. The Elites, the second highest race in the whole empire, find themselves unable to maintain their ships and space stations with the Engineers missing in action, and the other races are if anything worse-off. Human characters make note of how the Covenants' remnants can produce essentially none of what the Covenant itself could. Apparently the Engineers handled absolutely everything. The Covenant are basically the equivalent of a Stone Age tribe that stumbled upon an old cache of modern small arms, gave said small arms pseudo-religious nicknames, and then started shooting other tribes with them.

* TheEmpire: One spanning a good chunk of the Orion Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy. However...
** VestigialEmpire: Even at the height of their power, the Covenant was extremely fragile, fractured, and unstable. Civil war was a daily occurrence, as was political murder, some planets were never fully integrated even after centuries (''Warfleet'' gives the Jackal homeworld and most of their colonies as examples), and factions seldom actually coordinated their efforts in wars. In the end, the strain of fighting even a comparatively small power taxed the empire to its limits and led to a political coup that itself led to the collapse of the whole rotten structure. The Covenant were more like hundreds of feuding fiefdoms that could be aimed vaguely in the same direction than they were a true empire. ''Warfleet'' also mentions that, though the Covenant nominally consisted of a thousand worlds, entire worlds or even sub-domains could simply vanish from High Charity's records and not be contacted again for decades.

* VestigialEmpire: The events of ''VideoGame/{{Halo 2}}'' and ''[[VideoGame/{{Halo 3}} 3]]'' have caused the Covenant to split apart into multiple warring factions. Easily the most powerful and noteworthy Covenant successor states are the (relatively) peaceable Elite-dominated Swords of Sanghelios, the hostile Brute-dominated Banished, and the hostile Elite-dominated Covenant remnants under the command of Jul 'Mdama. Note that because of how huge the Covenant was in their prime, even these successor states (and possibly others) easily qualify as galactic great powers.

* AliensAreBastards: To over simplify it, the Covenants standard introduction to a new species often involves forcibly occupying their planet and orbit, giving the inhabitants the offer of [[JoinOrDie joining their ranks or being destroyed]] (or in the case of the Unggoy, outright enslaved on the spot), and then begin excavating the planet dry for any Forerunner technology they originally came to recover. If a species refuses to join the Covenant, a war will commence until the uninitiated species either surrenders or are rendered extinct, often ravaging the planet through 'glassing' their surface from orbit to render it inhospitable.

--> '''(Defense order)''' Stay here, huddle close! ''No inappropriate touching.''
--> '''(Fellow Brute is killed)''' ''He was my lover!''
--> '''(Player killed)''' He's dead, now we cuddle!

* IronicNickname: Seems to be a trait. Truth is a complete liar and psychopath, Mercy is a merciless bastard, and Regret didn't regret anything he did [[spoiler:even after he was dead]]. With Truth at least it was intentional, as he chose the name to remind of himself of his own lies and hypocrisy.

* IronicNickname: For the most part, Mercy is a merciless bastard, outright telling The Arbiter that his tasks will eventually kill him and vowing that none of humanity would be left behind after Truth was done. He did stick his neck out for Regret during ''VideoGame/{{Halo 2}}'', [[spoiler:not that it did much good for Regret]]. While all of the Hierarchs' names are ironic, Mercy's name is doubly ironic, as not only was he merciless, he was shown no mercy when he was left to die by Truth.

* OddNameOut: While Truth is an explicit liar and Regret hot-headed and impulsive, Mercy is never shown to be particularly merciless; indeed, he seems far less punitive than the other two.

* IronicNickname: For the most part, Mercy is a merciless bastard, outright telling The Arbiter that his tasks will eventually kill him and vowing that none of humanity would be left behind after Truth was done. He did stick his neck out for Regret during ''VideoGame/{{Halo 2}}'', [[spoiler:not that it did much good for Regret]].

* TheStoic: In ''Halo 2'', he never showed any form of emotion, even with the facts of Halo 04's destruction and the discovery of Halo 05 but...
** NotSoStoic: ...in ''Halo 3'', it's revealed that his stoic personality was just a façade to hide his psychopathic, sadistic personality and ''extremely'' high temper. Prior to that, he had a small moment in ''Halo 2'' where he practically seethes at his guards to kill the Master Chief after he showed up.

** NotSoWellIntentionedExtremist: This would later veer into this kind of territory when it's revealed that he was also doing it to keep the San'Shyuum in power over the Covenant, not to mention that he was still willing to activate the Halo rings just to see if he ''would'' become a god as a result. In this regard, a civil war would be far less costly than destruction of all life in the galaxy.

** NotSoStoic: He's more emotive in private with his wife, or when he needs to get someone to do something ''fast''.

* DeathEqualsRedemption[=/=]DrivenToSuicide: Atones for his crimes by [[spoiler:opening the doors of his room and letting the Flood pour in and kill him.]]
* ForScience: He led an expedition on one of the rings to study Flood specimens. [[GoneHorriblyWrong This did not go well]].

* KillerSpaceMonkey[=/=]UrsineAliens: Described as an unholy blend of gorillas and bears, with a bit of rhino thrown in for good measure.

* UnstoppableRage[=/=]RoaringRampageOfRevenge: Once one of them dies, the other one will get ''pissed'', and if playing on a level higher than Easy, you're in big trouble. ''[[Literature/HaloTheFlood The Flood]]'' implies that this is an attempt at SuicideByCop so that the Hunter can "rejoin" its brother in death.

* LivingMacGuffin[=/=]MementoMacGuffin: Due to it downloading Vergil, Sadie treasures it as being the only thing left of her father's work (which is why she later becomes its handler after the war). Meanwhile, Alpha-Nine's true mission in ''ODST'' is to retrieve it for its intel, while [[DirtyCop Kinsler]] also tries to capture it in an effort to brand himself a war hero.

* UnwittingInstigatorOfDoom[=/=]UnwittingPawn: [[spoiler:When it is assigned to guard Jul 'Mdama, he convinces it to divulge various bits of information about the Forerunners and their technology while it shows him around Shield World 006, including the portal system and the existence of the Didact on Requiem, which allows Jul to escape to Hesduros and form his own faction with the intent of awakening the Didact, thus jumpstarting the plot of ''VideoGame/{{Halo 4}}'']].