I thought about this one for a long time, I really did. However, it's been 7 years since I released this story to FFN and I've yet to make one update to it. Because of this and a few other reasons, I will be canceling this story. I know that some will close out of whatever window they're reading this in after reading that, but I'd appreciate it if you understand my reasoning as to why I'm canceling this.

First: No plan for the plot. The main thing that I've learned in my time writing on this site is that you need a game plan when writing a non-one-shot story. Continuities internal to the story must be maintained and they have to make sense. And with this story, I had no game plan, no roadmap to tell me what I should be doing per chapter or what major events need to be established/hit. That's the main reason why this story had been on pretty much indefinite hiatus for years.

Second: Universes of a different genre affecting one another. As mentioned in another story I canceled, this is probably one of the toughest things to pull off in a crossover story. You have to blend the universes together in such a way that it makes internal sense. The main thing in this story is: how does Harry's upbringing in a military household inside the UNSC affect his Hogwarts schooling? How will each year be affected? Then, the most important ones. How do the events of Halo 5 and Halo Infinite affect Harry? After all, the last thing I truly want is a tagalong fic where not much else changes, where you can pretty much wholesale copy and paste the entire story from the sources and tweak them just a bit to fit what you're trying to accomplish. While there is nothing inherently wrong with this from new writers, you may as well watch/read the source material at that point. What I came to discover in some long insight sessions is that this story brought nothing new to the table in either Halo or in Harry Potter as a whole. Me telling the same story as in Harry Potter but "my dad is a space marine" didn't really fit the bill or justify the reason to create a new story for this in hindsight.

Third: Disinterest in Halo as a whole since Halo 5. As some of you may know if you follow me on other stories or I may have even mentioned it in the preface of this story, I grew up on Halo. It was my shit after it was introduced to me by my cousin many, many years ago. I loved the universe as a whole. I wanted to read all the books in it, especially after Halo 3 when Bungie decided to retire Master Chief from the story and move on to other projects after Halo 3: ODST. And then Halo 4 came. It was a fine game and an ok story, but it changed Halo forever and not for the better, to be honest. Then Halo 5 happened. This game killed any interest in Halo I did still have, especially with the marketing strategy of "read the books to understand what happened before this game" rather than making a coherent game that made sense. Also, the "power ranger" shit they did was just bad. It wasn't Halo. It was some corpse being piloted by some corpo entity wanting more cash. I tried to get back into Halo when Infinite dropped thinking that it would be a return to form, but it wasn't really. And, to stay relevant to this story itself, they killed off Rookie for what honestly felt like it was done for shock value since that was the player character for ODST for a majority of the game. This was the nail in the coffin for this story since it hinged so heavily on the Rookie being alive and the reason Buck joined Locke's Spartan team was his death.

Fourth: One property is "complete," and the other is still "ongoing." The one that many people have to take into consideration when writing is the two properties themselves. When they are both completed it makes it easier to see how the characters grow and mature over time to understand how they got there. You see all of the story beats and understand how we got there. The same can't be said for ongoing stories. This makes it extremely difficult to plan around changes when they're performed in the writing room which is counterintuitive to what you want to happen that involves your story. For me, this is what happened with Halo as mentioned above near the end of that paragraph. Because of how 343i and Microsoft took Halo in comparison to Bungie when it concerns the story, it made it so much more difficult to even strategize how to write anything for it. There are some people who have mastered this skill and I am legit jealous of them as this is a difficult thing to master. My hat always goes off to these individuals.

So, with that being said, these are the four primary reasons outside of it being a borderline decade since I last updated this story. I am certain that to some this will upset you and I'm sorry, but I can't see myself writing this story any further. If you're a follower of me rather than of my stories, I do have a repository of stories I've been writing for the last few years here on FFN that are all over the place in terms of properties explored. The main purpose of it is to explore new ideas before going full hog into a new story which results in a situation like this. It allows me to do a bunch of different things. If you're so inclined and want to see more of my work outside of this story, I'm always updating it every so often with new pilots and one-shots. However, if all you followed me for is for this story, I'm sorry to see you go and I hope we see each other somewhere else on this site.

Until next time.