zavalas-bignaturals-lore - Tumblr blog

zavalas-bignaturals-lore · 9 months

Text

I think a question worth asking is: Are they really saying that the inability to eat is what causes the problem, or are they using that as shorthand to say that never feeling hunger is the problem and eating is a solution? I'll admit, it's been a while since I've actually read the entries about the creation of Exos, but given how Bungie writers have tied Exos to both the Vex and the Darkness artifact of Clarity Control, I think their intent was less about "look at what not being in a human body does to the mind" and more about "look what happens when a megalomaniacal person like Clovis Bray uses people's lives to conduct literal mad science with barely any understanding of what they're doing."

As Bungie is broadening their concept of the Darkness into this realm of memory and experiences and the things in the spaces between, it recontextualizes what Clarity Control does to transfer the consciousness to the Exo body. While it effectively preserves the memories, it cuts it off from essentially all external and internal sensory information. It's kind of like asking, "What if there was an opposite to brain death where the body fully dies but the mind lives on?" Less, "they can't eat and that makes them crazy" and more "what if a brain could no longer feel anything at all but continued to experience life?"

There's probably someone better than me who could write about this, but it's been bothering me how Exos are depicted as body horror due to the "They Can't Do Human Things So They Go Craaaaaaazy!!" thing. Some of the points for that could be valid, like how impending doom is a sign of a heart attack because your body is telling your brain something is off so how would it feel for your mind to get zero feedback from major organs? Probably bad.

However, not physically eating food is something that many real life humans deal with and it does not make people lose their minds. I'm sure adults who get feeding tubes later in life miss tasting certain things, but not participating in the physical act of eating food does not make people "go crazy". Not being able to eat making Exos "go crazy" is the like one big thing people explaining Exos to me emphasized. I want people to understand that, despite it being depicted this way, not being able to physically eat does not work like that in real life.

Not being able to physically eat is the norm for more people in real life than people realize. Destiny using it like this feels very similar to how some body horror depends on differences in physical appearances being "scary" but they'll use real conditions people have as "inspiration" even if it was not intentional. I'm sure this is the result of people not being exposed to things in real life, but they are things people should be aware of.

Science fiction uses horror to ask questions about the world and the answer to 'If You Can't Do "Typical Human" Things Can You Stay Sane??' is usually yes.

#destiny the game #destiny 2 #exos #destiny lore #i hope this makes sense #i really just kinda rambled

95 notes · View notes

zavalas-bignaturals-lore · 10 months

Text

I'd like to add that with the Hive, they actually, truly, are ontologically evil. The Krill, the species they were before their pact with the worms, could have become anything. Unfortunately, through the pyramid scheme of influence that was the Witness > Rhulk > the Worm Gods > the Three Sisters, they made a pact to become permanently evil. They gave up true free will when they took the worms into their bodies in favor of feeding their worms with the sword logic. If there is any race in Destiny that maybe shouldn't go through a redemption arc, it's them. And the Witness too, but that's beside the point.

We see it in the Lucent Tales book that on the whole, even when gifted the light, Hive physiology doesn't take to it quite right. Whether it's the acolyte that refuses to stay alive when it's rezzed or the Thrall that are punished just for accidentally receiving a bit of light through the negative pressure it creates in the tithing system. All of this is met with the wrongness. Fynch claims that to rez his knight, to make him better with the light, Fynch has to give up the empty spaces in himself to something cold and wrong. Fynch has to become part monster, and "you can't just be part monster."

Destiny has had this interesting development narratively where in D1, everything felt really black and white, good and evil. Destiny 2 has explored a lot of grey areas, revealed more stories that do warrant sympathy, understanding, and forgiveness, Misraaks chief among them. But now D2 is pulling back the curtain one more time to show that it actually is black and white at the highest level. Some things really are just evil and it's best to fight back against them. I, for one, hope that Savathûn never becomes a true ally to humanity and the coalition.

P.S. I do love her characterization as a completely evil being though, I love evil mastermind types.

There are two approaches to the issue that the Hive murdered billions across their eons-long crusade across the cosmos: the Forgiveness Stance ("Yeah they killed lots but we should still forgive and welcome them if they choose to change") and the Endorsement Position ("Yeah they killed lots, good for them"), and both are valid and good and I support them. Traveler forbid shrimps do anything. I can't believe we're still having this conversation a year and a half after TWQ.

(Tbf, I would LOVE to have an in-depth discussion with someone who believes the Hive are irredeemable! It's hard to even find any good arguments in favour of this stance other than "but they killed many people and Savathun is a dirty liar :(", which is very odd for a species that committed numerous genocides. I believe in Forgiveness Supremacy, but I'd love to have this belief challenged! Please dispute it! Throw arguments at me! Let's have a debate! It's so weird that for how inarguably evil the Hive's entire history has been, it almost feels like people who believe them to be irredeemable haven't really... thought about why?)

#destiny 2 #destiny the game #destiny lore #lucent hive #savathun

123 notes · View notes

zavalas-bignaturals-lore · 10 months

Text

Okay, so, THE cutscene is officially here and released. The Witness' origin story, why it does what it does, its relation to the Traveler, the Light, the Darkness, etc. Spoilers ahead.

I know that the Unveiling lore book has been a source of speculation and a bit of mystery for quite some time, but I'd very much like to engage with it in the context of the new cutscene. Namely that, if we take Unveiling as a story that the Witness told us, the story was predicated on capital B bullshit. Unveiling suggests that there is a specific cosmic struggle that has been going on between the Gardener and the Winnower since time immemorial, but according to the cutscene, that is blatantly false. The Witness invented the very concept of the Winnower as an opposite to the Traveler/Gardener's "unfettered chaos." I want to make clear that my reading of the cutscene does not hold that the Veil and the Winnower are the same thing. Instead, the Witness is attempting to be the Winnower. The race that would become the Witness "merged themselves into the salvation that they craved." They sought a Winnower, and thus became so. All of its preaching about the necessity of its Final Shape have been the megalomaniacal musings of a race that was hurt when they attempted to kill god and take its place. The Witness has been lying and manipulating its way across the universe in pursuit of its god, destroying race after race in the name of nihilism. There is not and never has been any kind of universal truth in the Witness's words. Instead we can see it for what it is, a conman peddling death as salvation.

Honestly, given this knowledge of the Witness? I can't wait to commit a one-shot genocide when we kill it. Gestalt consciousness head ass

#destiny the game #destiny 2 #destiny lore #destiny 2 lightfall #season of the deep

134 notes · View notes

zavalas-bignaturals-lore · 11 months

Text

So, I'm finally ready to talk about Lightfall. I've been really holding off on this, because I didn't want to post my fresh-off-the-campaign hot take, I needed it to simmer and thicken up a bit. I know it's been months since release, but heavy Lightfall spoilers ahead.

Let me talk about what works for me: the vibe is exceptional. A pretty modern take on the 80's action movie, just like Bungie themselves stated they intended. The campaign runs at a breakneck pace, only slowing down for a few moments here and there. Rohan and Nimbus have a perfect master-student trope dynamic. Calus is an entertaining villain, his hypocritical subservience making him an interesting lieutenant to the Witness. Honestly, Calus really got Starscream-ed in this expansion. Strand came out just the right amount of hot, nothing too crazy, except suspend maybe, but at least that hasn't broken pvp in the way Stasis did. And last up, the raid? A visual feast, with better narrative integration than Vow of the Disciple making it a real treat. I know it has taken some flak for being "easy," but honestly not every raid needs to be incredibly mechanically dense and absolutely full of high difficulty enemies. There really is plenty to like in the expansion, but narratively it kinda creates more questions than it answers, and not in a good way.

Let me start with the beginning and end of the campaign. There's tons of speculation about this campaign kinda being filler, and the cutscenes of the Witness definitely feel the most evidential of that. In what feels like a single scene split down the middle, the Witness reaches the Traveler, attempts to cut(?) into it, and has a revelation on where the Veil is. After the campaign, in which the Witness apparently manipulates the Guardian into getting their Ghost close enough to create a link between the Veil and the Traveler, the Witness creates some sort of portal or doorway just above the Travelers surface and kills(?) it, and then the Witness and part of the Black Fleet just kinda go into the portal and leave. The story frames this as a defeat, but that doesn't exactly land emotionally. It feels like this was meant to be an "Empire Strikes Back" moment, but delivered the defeat at the Witness' hands just after we were victorious over Calus. With the benefit of hindsight, I can see the shape of intent here, this possibly being meant as a rug-pull, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. This would have been more impactful if the status quo was actually fundamentally changed. In reality though, what did change as a result of this event? The Traveler is "dead" (again), but we still have the Light. The Witness "won," but is not present in the world (again). The Veil was revealed to exist, but we don't actually know what it really is (yet, admittedly, but that's the crux of its problem). The Light was defined as the realm of the physical and the Darkness defined as the realm of consciousness. At best this is redefinition, but we've known that the Light and Dark were amoral fundamental forces since Beyond Light. Neomuna exists in the narrative now, but its influence is entirely contained to the Lightfall campaign. Really everything is still kinda the same, just with some looming sense of "now we need to find and stop the Witness." Even that is the same motivator that we were left with at the end of Witch Queen. To be totally honest, this is a little less than compelling as a motivator, especially the second time around. I'm not saying that a story needs to fundamentally change aspects of the game, but ultimately Lightfall feels like treading water when it had the opportunity to blow players away with our first contact with the Witness. To reiterate from earlier, at the end of Lightfall, the Witness is just gone again. I'm not entirely sure if Bungie intends for the Witness to be a ghost in the narrative or not. One would think not given that they put a name and face to its existence, but to introduce it and immediately remove it gives the sense that it should be less directly visible. In either case, it feels rather on the fence, preventing it from really giving weight to either side. A lot of the Witness' on screen action serves more as a jumping off point for introducing the Veil above all else. That's all well and good, except...

What the heck even is the Veil? To keep with my usual "Bungie tells a story with their names" rhetoric, it's very easy to point to the Veil as just that, a separation between the Light and the Darkness, the physical and the psychic, etc. We know that the Veil "feels like the Traveler" and that it can be linked through Light energy (the Radial Mast, the Ghost) to the Traveler. We know that Neomuna's Cloud Ark runs off of it in some way, connecting it to the "psychic web" vibe of Strand and the Darkness. Lastly, we know that the Vex attempted to create their own version of the Veil, which would become the Black Heart from Destiny 1. (I should make a note here, Season of the Deep is currently happening and providing additional info on the Veil, but I'm just talking about what was in the main Lightfall campaign.) So what's the deal, did Bungie really just make a McGuffin for the Lightfall campaign and call it a day? In the context of Lightfall alone, yes. The Veil serves no purpose beyond "it makes Strand easy to see" and "the Witness cannot be allowed to use it." Okay, so am I saying that having a McGuffin is a bad thing? Well, maybe. The framing presented by Osiris for our desperate fight to protect the Veil is too simple. "The Witness wants it, so stop Calus from getting it" is thin, even by McGuffin standards. What are we as players really to do with that motivation? Especially once the resolution becomes "well, the Witness succeeded but is now gone and we still have our powers." As a whole, Lightfall lacked impact, at nearly every level.

Okay, I don't want to leave off on that kind of negative note though, I still enjoyed a lot of Lightfall. One of my favorite parts was Calus. Every part of his presentation was incredible. Ever the sycophant, Calus' ostentatious presentation of himself is an effort to impose what he believes he should be on reality, when in truth, he was given that form by a higher power. Calus sought to become the voice in the Darkness, that which remained at the end of the universe, only to find an insurmountable being there instead. Fighting the Guardian at the end of the campaign offers an interestingly poetic end. Finishing his first phase tears off his helmet and switches his weapon to more traditional Cabal gladiatorial fare. For what might have possibly been the first time in his life, Calus fought with his own power. No army, no cosmic power, just himself. The way Caiatl put it, "You gave him a Cabal's end?" underscores this perfectly. What a way to end his story.

#destiny the game #destiny 2 #destiny 2 lightfall #destiny lore #lightfall

9 notes · View notes

zavalas-bignaturals-lore · 1 year

Text

Destiny is a story about shapes and grief.

I think I may have figured out Destiny. I don't think the primary conflict between the Light and the Darkness is the philosophical issue we thought it was.

I got thinking about it after all this talking, with many others but especially @jazzhandsmcleg, about the way all of The Witch Queen DLC and its 4 seasons have had overarching narratives surrounding trauma and cycles of violence and grief, and the way the Darkness and the Light are characterized by their different approaches to it.

In TWQ, Savathûn is given a true second chance for her species in the Light. But as Ikora points out, she struggles to break free of the learned patterns of the Darkness, continuing the pattern of deception and violence.

Same with Season of the Risen - it’s the Warlords and Dark Ages all over again, but this time it’s the Hive. It forces once again to ask: what does it mean to be given a second chance if this is what you do with it? Temper this with Saladin’s story about the girl from the Dark Ages who he protected, but who became a cruel mortal Warlord in her own right. Crow objects to the mental torture of the Hive Lightbearers and he tries to break from the cycle of interspecies violence, but unintentionally ends up continuing it by killing the Psion and heightening tensions between humans and the Uluran.

Season of the Haunted!!! Literally, the entire thing is about confronting your traumas and greatest fears and the worst parts about yourself and beginning to heal them, making something better from them. Completely changing the game by turning Nightmares that torment into Memories that guide you. Crow with the memory of Uldren, Zavala with that of Safiyah, Caiatl that of Ghaul - and most importantly, resolution focuses on how they, specifically have been held back from healing by their self-incriminating Nightmares. It challenges the cycle of continuing violence on a very personal level. Eris even has patrol dialogue describing the a Nightmare as a thing of pain craving only more pain: "Such is the cycle."

Season of Plunder brings up the very same questions on a much higher organizational level. It gives us Eido and Eramis taking very different jaded vs. new-hope approaches to the legacy of the Whirlwind, asking: can we change? Are we defined by generational trauma forever? Can we continue to grow and change for the better even though it can never be undone? Though Eido is clearly young and naïve, we're clearly given the opportunity and narrative nudge to sympathize with her desire and hope for growth and redemption, both for the Eliksni overall, and for Eramis in particular.

And we're not even done with Season of the Seraph, but it already goes incredibly hard asking the same questions, again from a more personal angle. How far, and through how many generations is trauma transmitted? From the Bray family to Rasputin, to Felwinter to Osiris to Ikora – how do we fix this? How do we fix this? How do you defeat an enemy who IS war itself? What can you do to end an endless cosmic cycle of violence?

Go back and back and back in Destiny's lore even back to D1, and the majority of conflicts seem driven by this cycle of grief and revenge and violence. The entire line of humanity's war with the Hive goes back through Oryx's grief for Crota and the First Crota Fireteam and Eriana-3's grief for her wife Wei Ning. Even the Hive siblings' pact with the Worm Gods, though manipulated by Rhulk, was driven by the pain and grief they endured for themselves and their people, and wanting to escape that cruel pattern. The entire predicament of the Eliksni and their conflict with humans is driven by the trauma and grief and loss of the Whirlwind. Even Caiatl's empire, a conquering force that would be highly regarded by the sword logic, now must reckon with the same kind of loss in the Fall of Torobatl.

How do you escape this cycle and stay free of it?

I think, this year, we are finally seeing the beginnings of an answer.

I can't highly enough recommend the TWQ Collector's Edition lorebook (page scans & transcript) and The Hidden Dossier (page scans & transcript) that immediately follows it. What I've been calling Ikora's theory of "memory and grace" that she develops through the course of these two lore books is a balanced philosophy of memory/Darkness and grace/Light (which honestly deserves an entire post of its own). I think it clearly points toward the final resolution the story of the conflict between the Darkness and the Light.

In light of this, something in the Calus part of the new Lightfall CE lorebook (images, transcript) really jumped out at me.

“The doomed and the damned left the record of their downfall in the OXA. Your star got its name from the oldest myths in that archive. And when your mother told your father that story…the star became your name. A prayer that all will go as it must…and the way it must go is struggle.” “Aiat.” Not a word in Ulurant or any other Cabal tongue. “But Caiatl means something else..” “Yes. ‘It may not always go as it needs to go.’ A good name for a soldier." "A strange name for a daughter," I say. "Your father chose it for your mother's sake. Out of love."

And because the parallel is so overwhelmingly striking, I am once again going to reference philosophy/worldbuilding from the Young Wizards universe, which has great resonance with Destiny lore and which Bungie has been long aware of and has even been referenced in Forsaken-era canon lore.

“all the fair things skewed, all the beauty twisted by the dark Lone Power watching on his steed. If only there were some way he could be otherwise if he wanted to! For here was his name, a long splendid flow of syllables in the Speech, wild and courageous in its own way—and it said that he had not always been so hostile; that he got tired sometimes of being wicked, but his pride and his fear of being ridiculed would never let him stop. Never, forever, said the symbol at the very end of his name, the closed circle that binds spells into an unbreakable cycle and indicates lives bound the same way.” [...] “Nita bent quickly over the Book and, with the pen, in lines of light, drew from that final circle an arrow pointing upward, the way out, the symbol that said change could happen—if, only if—and together they finished the Starsnuffer’s name in the Speech, said the new last syllable, made it real.” Excerpt From: Diane Duane. “So You Want to Be a Wizard, New Millennium Edition.”

CAIATL’S NAME IS LITERALLY THE UP-AND-OUT SYMBOL.

I know I'm probably only talking to the handful of Destiny players from the (very small) Young Wizards fandom, but what you need to know is that this moment is pivotal and sets up the series-long theme of hope for an eventual exit from the cycle. It's the incredibly small, overwhelmingly improbable possibility of a second chance, a new start for the Lone Power, the source of all strife and suffering, who itself is driven by loss and pain. A concept of extended grace that is inherently tied to the philosophy of the Light.

“Billions of years, it took. All the redemptions there have ever been went toward this; from the greatest to the least. And finally in the fullness of time you came along, and took my role, of your own will, and woke up a race powerful enough to change the whole Universe, and gave them the fire.” She glanced up at the mobiles and smiled. “How could he resist such a bait? He took the gamble: he always does. And losing, he won.” [...] “The Defender reached down and put a hand into the shadow. “And we are going where such matters are transcended… where all his old pains will shift. Not forgotten, but transformed. Life in this universe will never have such a friend. And as for His inventions… look closely at Death, and see what it can become.” The long, prone darkness began to burn, from inside, the way a mountain seems to do with sunset. “Brother,” the Defender said. “Come on. They’re waiting.” Excerpt From: Diane Duane. “High Wizardry New Millennium Edition.”

This is the devil’s second chance, its homecoming. Grace among the memory. How do we heal this? By fixing it. By making and TAKING that opportunity of grace.

Likewise, Destiny is shaping up into its own universe’s story of this Reconfiguration, the remaking of everything that exists through the act of a second chance, both offered and taken, with full awareness of the irreversibility of harm already caused.

Destiny isn’t the story of the light and the darkness fighting each other. That happens, but that’s not what it’s ABOUT.

It’s “And I know exactly what we are. We’re best frenemies with a history of intense mutual hurt and messy reconciliation, leaving a deep tenderness as well as an almost impenetrable knot of scars. What could be simpler?” (Chalco)

It's “For so long, I believed peace was beyond my reach. No more. I have found it in guiding others down the same path that saved me. But… I might allow myself to want more than peace. What, I am not certain. Is joy the word? Might I find that again?” (Eris)

It's “Second chances… hm. Turns out I've been using mine wrong. I thought being a Guardian was my destiny. That wielding the Light for good was the most I had to offer. But it's clear now. This is what the Traveler chose me for. I was reforged in the Light for a purpose. To remake something dead and gone… into something beautiful. To learn how to forge something new from what we were. Everything Uldren did to the Reef, the Scorn… Fikrul. I have a responsibility — no — a calling to make them whole. And… I can't replace Cayde. But I can cover his old patrols — maybe organize the Hunters a bit, if they'll let me. Clean up some of my mess. I don't know if I can fix everything Uldren left broken… but I can try.” (Crow)

We aren’t defeating the Darkness. That’s never what it’s been about. It’s about breaking the cycle of trauma and grief with memory and grace. We're transcending the Final Shape, but we're not here to destroy it or become it. We’re harmonizing the Darkness and the Light into a sustainable balance to create something new from the wounded remains.

We're here to heal the broken relationship between the Winnower and the Gardener.

That's all that it is, in the end. They had a falling out, and now they hurt, and they hurt each other, and everything else, forever. Breaking free from that cycle begins and ends with them.

Is that fair? No, it's not.

But Destiny is – unhingedly, brilliantly, paradoxically – a FPS game about how to stop killing each other, growing ever more into a framework of restorative and reparative justice.

The story says, we are all culpable, we have all done awful shit and have endless potential to do more awful shit – AND, most critically, we all have the potential to do better (grace). AND, the act of making the conscious choice to do so and letting that happen is the only way for things to get better (memory).

The Collapse happened and it was horrible, the Red War happened and it was horrible, the Great Disaster happened and it was horrible, Twilight Gap happened and it was horrible...AND?? HOW ARE YOU GOING TO RESPOND? The Whirlwind happened and it was horrible! The Fall of Torobatl happened and it was horrible! Your species' Choice was stolen and you became the most prolifically violent killers in the universe and it was and is horrible! WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT IT?

Are you going to make it more horrible? Or are you going to make it BETTER????

Are you going to fight for the Final Shape, or for the gentle kingdom ringed in spears?

#i absolutely adore this #cabal culture was groomed by a hive war god #caiatl was brought together with zavala for a reason #and that reason was to heal them #the traveler playing matchmaker to inspire a war empire into goodness

454 notes · View notes

zavalas-bignaturals-lore · 1 year

Text

"Aren't you tired, Eramis? I am"

The Awoken Queen of the Reef has long been an enigmatic character in Destiny, one that captured the obsessions of my best friend for quite some time. I've enjoyed her character as well, especially so the more we learn of her. Something about the Queen and her machinations behind the scenes really just works. Season of the Seraph has seen her occasional involvement, mostly through mission dialogue or in the weekly audio transmissions, and it's there that I was struck by Mara's admission to Eramis. There's something very moving about her character, one that comes off as aloof at best or totally unknowable at worst, showing this deep vulnerability, even more so to an enemy Kell.

I want to ask, even though I know the answer, how did we get here? What did Mara experience that shaped the character she is now?

To put it very simply, loss. Known, expected, predestined loss. Destiny 2 Year 2 brought with it the lore books Awoken of the Reef and Marasenna. Mara's story, from her voyage as a human aboard the Yang Liwei through the events of Forsaken. Within the pages of Marasenna, Mara knows every Awoken life that will need to be spent to save humanity. That cost came to weigh heavier upon her than even she could have predicted. She would lose her closest confidante (read: lover, partner), Sjur Eido, then her brother, Uldren. Season of the Lost saw her grappling most closely with her losses as the Witch Queen restored Uldren's memories to Crow.

Not to get too far off topic, but it's generally frowned upon for guardians to remember their life before being risen. Bungie used this narrative to make it clear that the Traveler does not rewrite someone's personality when choosing them to be risen (which was important to Savathûn in the Witch Queen expansion).

To get back on topic, Mara is faced not only with her brother's resurrection, but now with helping Crow reconcile who he is as a guardian with who he was as Uldren. Above all else, Uldren was "a man who would always express his love through loss and ordeal" (Imponent III). In this way, he and Mara are the same, though only us as players have this insight through lore books. All of her losses have added up over time. The weight is catching up to her. The weight has caught up to her. Now, with nowhere to go she extends a hand to Eramis, an enemy, to caution her from going any farther down a similar path.

I'd like to compare this to the subjugation of the House of Wolves. Mara fought alongside Sjur and Uldren with pistol and dagger to bring the Wolves to heel, but here she is trying a different tactic. It's clear that she learned a lot about herself after watching Crow grapple with who he is. Watching Crow become successful away from her, watching him make mistakes and lose just to show how much he cares and wants to help. It must have reminded Mara again of why she returned to Sol from the Distributary. It's easy to forget that the Awoken could have ascended to godhood out there at the edge of Light and Dark. It's easy to forget that Mara wrote the rules that made the Awoken mortal again. It's easy to forget that Mara did not want to become Queen. It’s easy to forget that Mara is a sister and a daughter and a partner. It’s easy to forget that Mara has suffered loss after loss after loss. Mara is ready to turn things over to those like Crow, Misraaks, and Eido. She’s ready to follow those who have learned from their mistakes. She's had enough of her imperial remove.

#destiny 2 #destiny the game #mara sov #queen mara sov #season of the seraph #destiny lore

18 notes · View notes

zavalas-bignaturals-lore · 1 year

Text

Neomuna thoughts

From my last post on the ECHO program and how that might tie in to Lightfall, I should add some info that I left out before I move on to my questions. Way back in Season of the Worthy, Bungie released a bit of web lore with Ana Bray encountering a derelict ECHO ship, now named Caelus Station. The ship housed ranks of Exos with cryogenically frozen human embryos ready to begin colonization efforts. We can only assume that Soteria's ECHO launch happened before the ill-fated Caelus Station, though we do not know how long before. The only confirmed timeline mentions that we have put Soteria's launch before the "imminent endangerment" of humanity, and the rest of the ECHO ships launching in response to Rasputin shutting down during the collapse.

So, on to my questions about the relationship between Soteria's launch, Nefele Stronghold, and Neomuna. Are these three all truly the same thing? That seems to be the consensus among Destiny lore junkies, but I'd like to explore some other options as well. The driving force behind this surrounds a critical missing piece of info. How in the world does Rasputin know anything about Nefele Stronghold?

Rasputin shut down during the collapse and is only brought back online during the events of Destiny. In this case, there are two windows of time for him to have learned of the ECHO ship as Nefele Stronghold, either during the indeterminate time between the launch and the collapse, or during the time since his reactivation in Destiny. While the former is indeterminate, I am led to believe that the time until the collapse was relatively short, given the "imminent endangerment" of humanity. It is possible that during this time the ECHO ship was able to get set up and transmit back to humanity and the warmind. If so, it is conceivable that Rasputin would have been able to set up protections for the now designated Nefele Stronghold that he could then bring offline when he activated his YUGA SUNDOWN protocol as described in the lore tab "TM-Moss Custom Duster."

The simplest answer for the lore is that it doesn’t matter how Rasputin found out about Nefele Stronghold, all that matters is that he did. That answer doesn’t satisfy me though, so let’s keep digging.

My next proposed theory shifts Nefele Stronghold to being a midway point, so to speak. In one of the ending dialogs to this season’s Heist Battlegrounds, it is noted that the Stronghold designation belongs to “colonization efforts... and anti-extinction vaults.” If Nefele Stronghold is an anti-extinction vault, it is conceivable then that it is related to the Koranthin network and then has information on every launched ECHO ship. This gives us something to do as pert of the season finale in a few weeks. A nice little bunker raid that locks in a new destination for Lightfall. This covers the hole of missing information on Rasputin as well. If Nefele Stronghold is an anti-extinction vault, then of course Rasputin knows of it, it would have been established prior to the colapse.This also gives all the more reason for him to have totally deleted record of it. That’s nice, neat lore, all tied up with a bow. I have one more theory however.

What if Nefele is a red herring? As part of the myth that a lot of this theory is predicated on (Nephele a Greek nymph/spirit of clouds > cloud city > Neomuna), Nephele was created by Zeus (or Oceanos) in the image of Hera to trick Ixion, a son of Ares. One of many titles that Zeus held was Soter, the male counterpart to Soteria. If you will indulge me with the ultimate spinfoil hat, in this metaphor, we sub in Rasputin for Zeus, and this becomes a plot for Rasputin to have faked deleted records for Nefele Stronghold to protect any chance of any of the ECHO ships having escaped. To be clear, I don’t really subscribe to this one, it’s just a wild and fun theory that I want written down for posterity. Just in case it turns out to have merit. Bungie does like to tell a story in their names, after all.

#destiny the game #destiny 2 #destiny lore #season of the seraph #destiny 2 lightfall

18 notes · View notes

zavalas-bignaturals-lore · 1 year

Text

Soteria’s ECHO

The lead up to Lightfall has come with a bevy of details as to how Neomuna could have been founded, most importantly in the story of Soteria, an AI run by the joint venture from Braytech and the Ishtar Collective.

Detailed through the lore tabs of Terminus Horizon, Wilderflight, Long Arm, Into the Sunset, and Hierarchy of Needs, Soteria the Augurmind was a highly advanced AI capable of real-time flight simulations for the ECHO program. As noted in the lore tabs of the TM-Moss Custom Duster, Soteria was built with vex technology to give her the clairvoyance needed to simulate extrasolar colonization efforts. Soteria was first brought online by Dr. Sundaresh to run a simulation of worlds viable for colonization in the Andromeda Galaxy. Soteria's prediction of over 300 viable worlds was immediately reevaluated to just 27 in response to an indeterminable anomalous risk. Upon the end of her test, Soteria sent an urgent message to the warmind, Rasputin, for him to evaluate the simulation data (Terminus Horizon) In his reply, Rasputin invokes TWILIGHT, the arrival of the Darkness. In accordance with this, Soteria launches the ECHO fleet for departure, against the wishes of Clovis Bray I (Wilderflight). Soteria refuses Clovis's orders to return the fleet to suspension and for this he confines her to the Pillory Spire (Long Arm). As a last ditch effort to preserve something of herself she ejected a submind and planted it in a single ECHO craft which is then "caught in gravity at the edge of Sol, it fails, crashing through azure clouds," (Into the Sunset).

I'd like to take a moment to provide a quick background on Soteria's name here. In Greek myth, Soteria was a goddess or spirit of safety and salvation, certainly a fitting name for an AI meant to preserve humanity through deliverance to a new world. Where Rasputin failed to prevent the collapse, Soteria seems to have succeeded in safeguarding a portion of humanity, though not nearly as far away as she had intended. Bungie, as always, loves to tell a story entirely in a name. Some portion of humanity, or at least Exo’s, has been cast off to the edge of the solar system with nothing but a hopeful rogue AI to protect them.

A note about this, exploring these lore entries has produced a series of questions about the relationship between the aforementioned ECHO ship, Nefele Stronghold, and Neomuna. I’ll come back to this later.

#destiny the game #destiny 2 #destiny lore #spire of the watcher #destiny 2 lightfall

6 notes · View notes

zavalas-bignaturals-lore · 1 year

Text

The Dawn Chorus

Destiny is a game with only a few outlets for self expression, but buildcrafting with a side of fashion speaks deeply to me. In addition to that of course, the lore of the game is one of its strong suits, and somewhere at the nexus of those three things comes this post.

The Dawn Chorus is not an exceptionally pretty helmet, its wide berth and overly bug-eyed protrusions make it difficult to pair with armor to create a cohesive look, but the one above is what I've been using since the release of the Dawn Singer set. I'm quite proud of it, honestly.

Each exotic comes with its own lore entry, short stories or snippets of info that in some way inform its relationship with the game or players. For Dawn Chorus, it takes the form of a "Song from a hymnal discovered in the Scorched Chapel, believed to be an account of the Risen named Hungren-3." Bungie as a developer and writing team often draws from religious imagery for much of their worldbuilding, and that is especially true in their reverent depiction of the Traveler and the Light as part of their narrative.

In this case, the hymn is descriptive of a Warlock of purifying Solar Light, a perfect flame in and of himself. Bungie's writers do an exceptional job at bringing together the intersection of play design and lore. The Dawn Chorus helmet enhances a Guardian's ability to scorch and burn their enemies, and the lore written here is in harmony with that.

Guardians are often likened to gods, be they small, single entry characters like Hungren-3, or mainstays like Ikora Rey. It is therefore interesting to me when Bungie draws stronger parallels between the Guardians and gods. This case is of course about the source text being a hymnal. Bungie tells a very direct tale through the song of a Guardian who smites his enemies with "Flame's Sword," a bald reference to the Dawnblade super ability in game. Here they rely on every trope of fiery purification, framed through devotion to the Guardian that protects the people involved in writing the hymnal. The narrative device of devotion is deeply tied to the Guardians and the Light, with an oft-repeated phrase that claims to be the truth of how to become a Guardian in favor of the Traveler. "Devotion inspires bravery, bravery inspires sacrifice, and sacrifice leads to death." In this way, Guardians can become a sort of self-perpetuating myth. A Guardian has the ability to inspire all those around them into the same path that leads to the raising of a new Guardian, and so on as the cycle repeats itself. A never ending sea of hope and inspiration.

While I have started this blog to organize my thoughts and really start digging deeply into the lore and language of a universe that I've come to love, I did not want to go too hard in this, the inaugural post.

#destiny 2 #destiny the game #destiny warlock #destiny fashion

3 notes · View notes