History Characters / HalfLifeTheCombine

* ALighterShadeOfBlack: Downplayed. No doubt Breen deserves to be the most hated man in the world and should be condemned as the traitor he is for cooperating with the Combine. However, the Combine are the ones who invaded Earth in the first place and he's just their delusional figurehead. Considering he allowed the Combine to rule over '''the entirety of Earth''' by letting people be slowly tortued by them and is still an incredibly bad person regardless of who he aligns with, he still isn't that much better than the alien invaders themselves.

* VillainHasAPoint: He tells Gordon that through his actions, he has sparked "death and finality". A lot of people end up paying the price for Gordon being a DoomMagnet throughout the game and the following Episodes.

* WellIntentionedExtremist: It's hard to deny that due to him negotiating humanity's surrender at the end of the Seven Hour War, he's the only reason there's anything left for Gordon to save. He's also insistent that everything he does is for the sake of mankind's continued survival, even if that means an eternity of subservience and assimilation into the Combine empire.

* ImmortalProcreationClause: Breen claims that the Combine sets up the reproductive suppression field because they plan to give immortality to humanity at some point and need to keep their population in check. That is all but certain to be a [[SubvertedTrope bold-faced lie]] to mask the [[ChildlessDystopia quiet genocide of humanity]], however.

* LesCollaborateurs: The Civil Protection members are humans who willingly decided to work with the Combine. It is implied that while at least some of the volunteers have somewhat sympathetic motives for joining up, such as better food and housing, many of them have done it simply for the power and brutality they are allowed to exercise.
** Doctor Breen is a more direct example, as is the collaborating scientist seen in ''Alyx''.

* PuppetKing: Over all of humanity due to the Combine installing him as their puppet.

* VillainHasAPoint:
** While his actions afterwards smack of a power-hungry man who only cares about himself, it's hard to deny that due to him negotiating humanity's surrender at the end of the Seven Hour War, he's the only reason there's anything left for Gordon to save.
** He tells Gordon that through his actions, he has sparked "death and finality". A lot of people end up paying the price for Gordon being a DoomMagnet in the following episodes.
* VillainousBreakdown: He becomes increasingly impatient and childish as Gordon Freeman kills off his soldiers and starts a rebellion. When Gordon invades the Citadel, Breen goes from first trying browbeating him into surrendering, to frantically, but still condescendingly trying to reason with him, and finally he starts outright begging for him to stop. Later, while trying to escape via teleport, he resorts to juvenile taunting and mockery, then goes back to begging when it becomes clear that Gordon's not gonna quit anytime soon.
* WickedCultured: He shows a mild example of SesquipedalianLoquaciousness, and makes reference to advanced physics notions several times, but we're not sure exactly what his MorallyAmbiguousDoctorate is actually ''in''. In any case, everything about him, from his way of speaking to his bearing and his dress, screams "scholarly and cultured".
** If Dr. Rosenberg's dialogue in ''[[VideoGame/HalfLifeDecay Decay]]'' are still canon, however (though the game was made long before Breen's character was ever properly formed), they indicate that he considers Breen "a bureaucrat, not a scientist", indicating that he doesn't think highly of the man's intelligence, which would imply that while Breen isn't neccessarily an ''idiot'' (far from it), [[FeigningIntelligence he's actively trying to come off as smarter than he actually is.]]

* DystopiaJustifiesTheMeans: Unlike [[AliensAreBastard the Combine]], Dr. Breen is a human being who knows what the world was like before they invaded Earth and turned it into their plaything because he's an inhabitant, while they just see it as another place to extract resources from. This means he is enforcing the dystopia ''aware'' that it's a dystopia but doesn't really care.

* ScrewThisImOuttAHere: A squad of CP officers attack Gordon, Barney and the citizens Gordon's escorting in ''Exit 17''. Barney implies that they are trying to use the train for themselves to get the hell out of City 17, having second thoughts about still serving the Combine in such a dire situation.

* NominalImportance: She's pretty much ''never'' referred to or acknowledged by any characters aside from Combine units reporting things into their radio to her and rarely characters reacting to her voice as a sign of incoming Combine, but she's still heard throughout the game relaying tactical info and helps provide context to how the Combine military operates and what's it like living under Combine rule.

* PreMortemOneLiner: While Gordon is still being chased by the Civil Protection, she may make it a point to directly refer to him via the officer's radio when he's critically injured.
--> Attention: Freeman. Prepare for final sentencing.
--> Attention: Freeman, you are charged with terminal violations 143, 243, 245. All protection team units: [[DeadlyEuphemism complete sentencing at will.]]

* NormalFishInATinyPond: With a side of OutsideContextProblem; as described under FascistButInefficient, the Combine are quite capable of staging interdimensional invasions, but seem to be quite poor at moving troops and resources around within a dimension itself. While the exact mechanics of determining and controlling the relationship between interdimensional teleportation locations with relevance to physical dimension locations[[labelnote:Note]] i.e. How easy is it for the Combine to open portals to other parts of the same universe? Could they open a portal on Mars for example? Could they open a portal on the other side of our universe?[[/labelnote]] goes intentionally unexplained, it's possible that the Combine have only amassed their overwhelming resource and technological dominance by invading individual resource-rich planets across multiple realities. For all the player knows, given the Combine's difficulty moving resources and troops over long distances within dimensions they may not even truly dominate their ''home'' universe.