post-colonialist view of unreliable narrators in "Halo"

My favorite Halo games are probably a tie between Halo 3 and Halo: Reach. Both of which don't really have any overt colonialist themes, but it always struck me as odd that humanity needed to genetically engineer super soldiers to go into space. Like sure, there's a war between us and the covenant now, but how did that war start in the first place? When humanity first made it to space, what was their first instinct?

https://www.pcworld.com/article/398477/halo-reach-pc-review-impressions.html, Halo: Reach.

This probably comes as a surprise to absolutely no one, but it was, in fact, colonization! The invention of slip-space travel (basically they can travel faster than light) allowed humanity to colonize other planets. The planet Reach (as in Halo: Reach) even acted as a sort of scientific and military hub before it inevitably fell--a fact I wasn't fully aware of whenever I played the game for the first time. Humanity creates the Spartans (AKA Master Chief, the aforementioned genetically engineered super soldier) for something until the Covenant attacks the Reach colony; their reasoning is based on the fact that they view humanity as an affront to their gods, basically declaring a religious war on them. Which is a whole separate issue that I'm not going to get to much into...

But, as far as I know, humanity never colonized a species or race of living beings (including the covenant), only planets. Which, when I put it like that, doesn't sound very good either way. Colonizing a planet is still not great, but post-colonialism typically focuses on individuals or groups that have been the victim of colonization. It draws from the impact of human control and exploitation of colonized people and their lands. The lands, in a sense, could be applicable; but in that same sense, it could be more reasonable to apply a theory like ecocriticism instead. But I already named this post so I'm just gonna try my best to squint my eyes (or reach, if you will) here.

Is a planet a living thing? My gut instinct is probably, but I'm not a scientist. In reality, scientists actually say that planets are not living at all, they just have life on them (so I guess my gut instinct was wrong, but that makes sense). And yet, the planet is the one being colonized--it's flora and fauna are being colonized, and humanity is still the colonizers. Under post-structuralism, colonist narrators are viewed as unreliable, which creates an interesting tension between who we're playing as and how our story is being told. It's kind of what caused me to question the motivations of Halo in the first place. It's undeniable that the covenant began to commit genocide against humanity, and not because humanity was colonizing planets. But before humanity begins fighting for survival, why were they fighting to stay in the first place? In fact, all of these space missions continuously jeopardize all of Earth, eventually leading the covenant to discover Earth's location--instead of just retreating. Why stay when there's so much at stake?

Was it the greed of resources that caused the UNSC (United Nations Space Command) to want to stay in space? Did they want somewhere to conduct their little superhuman experiments in secret? The perspective of the game series doesn't offer a clear answer, especially considering you play as a character fighting for Earth, Humanity, and the UNSC. At some points, we can even see Master Chief go rogue, and disobey orders. It's possible that he knows something we don't. And his actions might be what causes players to question the UNSC's actions specifically, since they are certainly not all good apples.

Either way you spin it, humanity was never welcome in space--especially not at the rate the characters in Halo accomplish. The covenant may not have waged war on us for claiming distant planets as our own, but perhaps some cosmic karma threw them our way. The reasoning behind humanities fight to stay in space is questionable at best, and potentially sinister at worst.