I feel like I'm swimming upstream in polluted water when I read other works out there for purposes of trying to see how something I would want to write might fit in.
It's bad.
A lot of what I skimmed over were Mass Effect clones, but somehow further right wing than Mass Effect already was, with the names changed and the numbers filed off.
A lot of what's left involves "humanity fuck yeah" space imperialism, grizzled tough guys with cold piercing stares and powerlifter physiques well into old age and their adventures with brilliant and hot scientist women that are defined more about who their father is/was and less by their actual job, that try to prove they are Independent Strong Willed Women but of course swoon for the timeless grizzled ego insert's blandly stoic charms. Also, a space bureaucracy usually interferes with the grizzled tough guy's very important imperialistic mission and his only chance to save humanity is to go rogue with a ragtag bunch of renegades and kill those filthy aliens before they threaten colonial interests. Or something.
I got some pretty harsh negative feedback for my inclusion of ideas in my own work. The idea that billionaires wanting to colonize Mars aren't actually going to save humanity by doing that and it would be an insatiable resource sink that would further accelerate Earth's decay was especially incendiary. Maybe I should have already become a rich and influential writer first before trying something like that, but that seems like it might have involved writing one of the above reactionary works instead and hoping another off-brand Mass Effect got more traction instead.
I'm demoralized, but I'm also nearly done with the third book in my self-published trilogy. It's a weird place to be.
EDIT: I may as well post a link to the website my wife and my friend helped set up. It has the first five chapters available for free and some other stuff.
https://www.tulpatrilogy.com/
When I read those books as a kid, I knew the human society was very fascist but I didn't read it as like an endorsement, just kind of a background. I wouldn't be surprised if something in one of those books was like "And the fascism is awesome" but I was able to enjoy that universe without feeling like I was rooting for the hellish society.
I think some of the earlier books talk about how bad the junta was, but it gets kind of swept aside due to the whole external forces committing genocide thing. Which is honestly kind of realistic, like if literally Covenent showed up literally today and started glassing the planet, it would be a little weird to fixate on how bad this country is, even though that's no less true than it was yesterday.
Obviously we'd come out of an alien invasion even more fascistic, but fascism is I suppose better than being completely wiped out by other space fascists.
I don't translate this into "sometimes collaborating with fascists is good" because it's such an outlandish scenario it's stupid to even factor that into literally anything.
It would be so fucking cool if a Halo game decided to have a revolution against the UNSC, but that'll probably never happen. I can hope though.