Does anyone else feel like the Halo 5 Cortana isn't the real one?

[Halo Theorist 117]

Does anyone else feel like the Cortana in Halo 5 just isn't the real one or that something is missing from her character? I made a Youtube video on it but I want to know what you guys think. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AtobZEHiSo

[Melody]

Well Cortana is/was a deteriorating AI, with deterioration would be changes in personality as well. I think she's the same as she was but 343 took a twist to change her up. I dunno, just my theory. I didn't like how she teased and played chief on in Halo 5.. it just felt so scripted and fake..

 

I'm going to say yes and no, she definitely doesn't care for the UNSC anymore, but she still is bound or attached to Master Chief and doesn't want to lose him. Technically.. she's not the same because at the end of Halo 4 she divided herself up so much that would have messed her up so badly as to become corrupt. 

[PHIL0S0PHY]

They made her, and everyone else a mediocre character, so that ccould be why she seems different.

 

I have seen theories out there that she could be the didact using the domain to trick everyone, but I am not sure

[Drizzy_Dan]

It actually isn't the Cortana we knew in the original trilogy and in Halo 4. There is a story about Cortana in Halo: Tales From Slipspace. 

[Jacob Elbon]

Actually I had a conversation with a friend about this, and we agreed to refer to Halo 5 Cortana as Sigma!Cortana, due to her ambition.  We realized that Sigma!Cortana is very different to Cortana, Especially in these areas:

• Possessiveness.  She is very possessive of Chief- even escalating to Yandere levels at times.
• Arrogance.  She has, with becoming technically immortal had a major ego inflation, nearly as bad as DIO's ego.
• Megalomania.  Halo 5's Campaign.  I rest my case.

And then when I was playing Halo 5 Campaign, I noticed she only called Chief John.  The only other person who calls him that is Halsey, who she constantly calls a monster, as a way to justify her actions.  But remember as she is a clone of Halsey and they share similar personality traits. Proof of this is when she agreed with Halsey that Chief is "attractive in a primal animal sort of way".

 

We came up with a theory that stated, and this involves human AIs in general, that rampancy and how it works depends on the individual AIs and their experiences.  In Cortana's sake with having the ability to copy herself thanks to her dismantling an Covenant AI, if you remember, in Halo 4, her rampancy was basically a very severe case of schizophrenia.  It's possible that Cortana was destroyed when the platform she was in was destroyed and Sigma!Cortana took the reins from then and was deposited into the Domain.

[depressant]

I think she's a bit different but all the changes from Halo 4-5 caused it. Also Jacob I think you make very good points.

[Drizzy_Dan]

Jacob is pretty much right on the button. Dominion Splinter in Tales From Slipspace tells the story of Cortana's still-functional fragments after she sacrificed herself to save Chief at the end of Halo 4. The Cortana we experience in Halo 5: Guardians is fragment that most closely resembles, or is pretty much the embodiment of, the Cortana we read about in Human Weakness (the story that made us believe Karen Traviss could actually write for the Haloverse).

 

She's a knowledge-hungry, ambitious, selfish AI who wants peace in the galaxy by uniting all sentient life forms under one near-omniscient presence. This was the exact "solution" she was offered when she was almost succumbed to the logic plague in Human Weakness by the Gravemind. If everyone was of the same mind, then there would be no fighting and knowledge would be shared.

 

Cortana was able to hold out and refuse as she saw it to be a betrayal to John most of all. Thinking of him is what got her through the time she spent on High Charity being tormented by the Gravemind and that's why she is so possessive about him and lenient toward his actions instead of eliminating at least his teammates. 

 

Even though Cortana now is not technically "rampant," it's clear that her thought processes are not reasonable as she is trying to unite everyone through threats of extermination if they do not join (which she has done to many lifeforms already). 

[Bill1138]

Remember that Halo 5's Cortana isn't composed of all of Cortana's fragments.  The fragments she shed to stop the Didact may have made it through the portal, but the one containing the personality traits we all know and love was the one that stayed back and saved Master Chief from the nuclear explosion in the hard-light box. 

 

That is why Halo 5's Cortana is so different... it's because it's the other aspects of Cortana's personality without the vital components of her humanity.