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The Traveller and the Tyrant

This is my honest review and critique of the Witness's characterisation. I would ask you to "enjoy", but, considering its themes and the fact that it is over 3,700 words long, perhaps a better phrase would be: "you have been warned."

When I loaded into Excision last week, I was immediately struck by the opening cutscene’s resemblance to the final, climactic battle of The Lord of the Rings, where the steadfast commander of humanity gave a rousing speech to his allied troops before bravely charging forward into the shambling mass of deformed, mutated enemy foot-soldiers, all under the shadow of a monolithic tower, the abode of the ultimate villain of the story. This was nearly enough to make me tune out, and, alas, what followed was not much better.

I have myriad complaints about the Witness’s portrayal in Destiny, and this cinematic is as good a place as any to begin. I do not think the introduction to Excision was fitting for the end of the Light and Darkness saga. Throughout the series, we have fought off a number of escalating threats, beginning with opportunistic Eliksni scavengers, and ending with a being that can end the universe itself. I do not think that a horde of Scorn ought to be the best this being can come up with for its final stand. I would have preferred to see it bend reality, drag us into the arm-tunnel shown in the trailer, shatter an allied warship on the spot, do anything, anything other than tread the worn war-paths of Sauron and his hundreds of imitators in various works of fantasy. First, because this is science fantasy after all, and second, because many of those themes are deeply rooted in xenophobia, unfitting for our current day and age.

The visual designs of the Witness itself and its precursors draw heavily from the historical and present cultures of southwest Asia and north Africa. Their monumental structures of stone evoke the architecture of the region. Their tetrahedral ships remind one of the Egyptian pyramids, and their murals, of the intricate paintings in buried tombs. They are said to hail from the sandy desert. The precursor aliens covered their heads and sometimes entire bodies in cloth; the concept art clearly contains sketches based on humans who dress this way, in burqas; and even the Witness is clad in a long, black robe that hides its lower face, showing only its dark, single brow and dark eyes. I could go on, but I believe I have said enough to back up my next statement: It was not a wise decision to base this particular sci-fi faction on the peoples of the Levant.

The Witness’s army of Scorn is portrayed as a savage horde, in stark contrast to humanity and our allies. The Scorn don’t even have guns. They have crossbows and torches, yet they are a deadly threat to our shining ships. We are told that our enemy is magnitudes more powerful than us, but we are shown that its troops hail from the Bronze Age. Why is the Witness not allowed to demonstrate its technological or paracausal superiority? We are told that it is made of many people, but it is single-minded, ruthless, and its cruelty is unmatched. In fact, its constituent minds are not even slaves; they literally do not have individuality until they dissent, and any dissent is, of course, summarily suppressed. These characteristics – the savagery or “backwardness”, the collectivism and despotism – are common Orientalist stereotypes. And to top it all off, the Witness is driven purely by religious fanaticism. Its robed, veiled selves are ontologically evil and irredeemable, except in death, naturally. I note that Savathûn gets a pass, decked out as she and her throne world are in Gothic imagery and ball gowns, and roll my eyes. And in the game, our characters speak of the Witness as a poison, a disease. A corrupter of all that is good. A foreign snake in our Traveller’s garden. There is concept art of that. Appalling.

I have always known that Destiny is a game made by and for Americans, or the West in general. I was even recently reminded of this by the way that Bungie hiked up the price of The Final Shape expansion for many non-USD currencies, but I still held hope for a satisfactory conclusion. I was too optimistic. It appears that even in this modern tale, the tired tropes that have plagued genre fiction since genre fiction existed are inescapable. I saw the Witness’s multi-armed form (reminding me immediately of Guanyin and perhaps others of Shiva) coming from a long way off, and I still laughed when I first finished Iconoclasm. It was like finding myself situated in that old drawing depicting the Christian nations of Europe as a group of humans, arming themselves against the distant, threatening silhouette of... the Buddha. An image published in 1895. Maybe a being with a thousand arms is threatening, who knows, but I’ve seen too many sticks of incense burnt before her altar to be afraid or awed. Buddhist villains are rare in fiction, and there was some potential in contrasting the Witness’s concept of the world as made of suffering with similar ideas in Buddhism, but the resemblance, in the end, was used for superficial, visual shock value. Sigh.

So then I went ahead anyway, defending the City upon the Hill (ringed with spears) against Satan, via feats of marksmanship and acrobatics through five exciting encounters, riffling through a diary that I picked up in the Monolith to try and learn more about my enemy. If I knew my enemy, and knew myself, then I could potentially complete Salvation’s Edge in a reasonable time-frame! Or not. The raid took my team and me a month and a half. Probably because the lore left me more confused about my enemy than I was at the start.

We are told that the Witness comprised a multitude when it first entered the Traveller, since people were still actively being cut out of it shortly thereafter. And then, by the end of Excision, the game implies that the multitude is gone, and only a single consciousness remains, which we kill with little fanfare (when we could’ve used a 2-minute cutscene. In my completely unbiased opinion).

Where did the many go? Did they all become dissenters? How? Why?

It is possible that, like the lower-case gardener described in page 2 of the raid's lorebook, all of the constituent minds grew frustrated with being unable to achieve perfection even with the Traveller’s Light, abandoned their original goal of imposing the Final Shape upon the universe, and were sealed off into statues one by one until only the last remained. But this would imply that we, the player, had little to do with the Witness’s downfall, that it imploded from its own loss of faith. Hardly a triumphant victory for us to brag about when we go home, and it comes with the “bonus” moral that mortals should not aspire to godhood because such attempts are doomed to failure. This explanation is too dull for me to accept.

The alternative, then, is that we did do something to cause the constituent minds to defect en masse. But I cannot, for the life of me, figure out what. Remember, we killed the dissenters to weaken the Witness. Why would committing murder make other people dissent, people that are one hundred percent committed to the Witness’s goal? I imagine myself as a sailor on a warship in the heat of battle, or a member of a raid-race team that has been awake for 47 hours straight. I see the enemy ship fire at me. I see the 48-hour deadline drawing closer and closer. What could possibly make me turn against my own crew, sabotage my own team? Yes, it could be because my captain has been yelling at me and I am completely fed up with them and I would rather die than suffer them for another minute, but that is also either a preexisting weakness that we merely exploit, or a stress fracture within the Witness that is caused by destroying everything and everyone it throws in our way, not by convincing these constituent minds that our philosophy and goals are better than theirs. Yes, this is the genre of game where shooting and slashing solves all problems, but come on. It could’ve been different.

On page 4 of The Rubicon, the raid’s lorebook, we learn of a previous occasion upon which the Witness was nearly defeated. Its adversary offered it peace, but the Witness struck it down. The dissenter narrating this story was not shocked into individuality by the betrayal, but by the fact that the thing they created to be literally single-minded in its pursuit of the Final Shape... is single-minded in its pursuit of the Final Shape? And then, more pertinently, the dissenter dismisses any notion that the Witness could be changed, and begs us little lights to not hesitate when we are the ones holding the knife to its throat.

This dissenter, while earnest, is wrong. The death of the adversary did change the Witness. It dislodged one mind from the collective, did it not?

So imagine, if you will.

We encounter the dissenters. We listen to their story. They beg us to destroy them to weaken the Witness. They desired to be exonerated in death, to be redeemed, to be saved by us and the paracausal entity behind us.

And we refuse.

We are given a blade, but we strike the statues with the hilt instead, cracking the stone. We pull their living flesh – made of what, we do not know, but it is living – from the rubble and we spirit them away to the camps we’ve made. We sit them by the fire and we protect them from retribution and, though these nocturnal beings do not see very well in the Light, the Witness sees, and it knows. It may seethe at how we escape its clutches time after time, it may sneer that we are making everything harder for ourselves, that we forget the ultimate goal is survival, but, through our selflessness and our seemingly endless capacity to forgive, we stir up hope within the multitude that what awaits them could be better than death, than even finality. They begin to remember the ancient enemies that once offered them mercy, and they are confronted by a new enemy who, for the first time, uniting Light and Darkness, has the power to defend such a truce. Slowly, they realise that they do not want to be our enemy. They are cast off. We save every person we can. And in the end, together with all our allies, we confront those vicious minds that remain.

But page number 4 shut that down, and all I’m left with is my fireteam member’s gripe that wow, this is just like how the United States deals with uppity foreign countries. It doesn’t really attempt to show that it is better, but prefers to fund dissident groups within the enemy state until it collapses, and everyone there is worse off. Which is harsh, but I can understand my friend’s position, since I have related gripes of my own. You see, the campaign forced me to protect the Traveller, the very model of a foreign interventionist, and I cannot overstate how much I resent that.

I started to become interested in Destiny’s lore after seeing some amazing fanart. Through copious amounts of research, I came to the conclusion that the Traveller is a downright bastard. If you haven’t read Shattered Suns, Rhulk’s backstory, you should. But below is a summary of what Rhulk said about his society as he sat on the Witness’s therapy couch, looking directly into the camera:

“Long ago, my planet, Lubrae, was inhabited by clans of hunter-gatherers. One day, the Traveller came and provided us with resources that helped us survive the dangerous flora and fauna of the forest where we lived. (It may have also genetically modified his people, if his ‘we evolved’ phrasing is to be taken at face value.) People were of two minds about how to continue after that. Some wanted to take advantage of these resources and settle down in a well-protected City. Others preferred to stay in the forest, and live like how they did before. As a result, they fought, and they were still fighting by the time I was born. I grew up watching the better-fed, better-armed City people murder members of my forest-dwelling clan on sight.”

His clan, Rhulk explained, was egalitarian, and relied on one another for safety. The Traveller’s uplifting of his species changed all of that. Lubraeans were able to manufacture Glaives and other tools to better protect themselves against the wildlife. The newly-introduced technology shifted their very conception of safety from the clan to the Glaive, from their fellow Lubraeans to objects that could be gathered into one City, be cordoned off, monopolised, hoarded, controlled. In that City, they invented oligarchy, soldiering as a profession, and the death penalty. They started to march troops into the forest, trying to rid it of its original inhabitants.

I have read books and reports on modern hunter-gatherer societies, and all of them conclude that first contact, if unavoidable, should be made with extreme caution. To quote the 2013 IWGIA report on indigenous peoples in voluntary isolation and initial contact:

“[When we make initial contact,] what we are actually doing is forming the spearhead of a complex, cold and determined society that does not excuse adversaries with inferior technology. We are invading the lands they live on without being invited, without their agreement. We are introducing needs they have never had. We are destroying extremely rich social organisations. We are taking their peace and tranquillity away from them. We are launching them into a different, cruel and hard world. Often, we are leading them to their death.”

I do not like how the narrative of Destiny persistently exonerates the Traveller. At times, a character will rail vaguely against the “chaos” it causes, and the most frequent complaint we hear about it is that it left their species too soon. Rhulk was, to my knowledge, the only one to see the Traveller come to his world, distribute its technology among his people, dump a pile of societal problems into their laps as a result, saunter off without so much as a word, and subsequently come to the conclusion that Lubrae never needed the Traveller in the first place. And he was correct; it never did. I hope it is abundantly clear that if humans were to ever encounter an alien planet inhabited by hunter-gatherers who are themselves hunted by predators, our first course of action should not be to hand out shotguns left and right.

But what if we granted them different technology, such as high-yield crops? If human history is anything to go by, they would go on to invent chattel slavery. Agriculture increased the efficiency of food production, but humans, instead of distributing the labour evenly, have universally chosen to create an artificial underclass, and then force them to perform the majority of the labour. This was true in 2000 BC, and it remains true today. The fact of the matter is, societal issues can be much, much more difficult to solve than technological ones. The Traveller tripled human lifespan? So what? Humanity has already doubled it on our own, but we’re still struggling with concepts like “women deserve rights.”

Some might say that it does not matter, because those aliens would have invented all these things sooner or later, both the good and the bad; that the Traveller merely eased their transition into a prosperous future. To which I would respond: it does matter. They must be allowed to choose their fate. At the very least, they deserve an answer for why their prayers for safety and sustenance were answered in this ham-fisted manner. We are told that the Traveller wants to grant us freedom, but all it does is run roughshod over peoples’ right to self-determination. Look at what it did to the Witness’s homeworld. It terraformed an environment that sapient beings were already living in. Were the precursors not already adapted to the dry environment, physically and culturally? What is the purpose of making a forest sprout from the sand? Is it for the benefit of the nomads of the desert, or is it to reinforce the audience’s preconception of how utopia should look? Why does the game’s narrative re-iterate that the precursors ceaselessly sought answers from the Traveller, framing them as greedy, entitled, and unsatisfied with the “blessings” bestowed upon them? If I were a precursor, I would have questions too: what was wrong with the way I lived before? Why do you get to decide how I ought to live? Is walking away even an option at this point? Paradise is a prison when you cannot leave. Lubrae’s Wanderers tried, but they could not escape the new material conditions that the Light had imposed upon them.

Humans have had our share of prophets, many associated with millennia of internecine warfare. Now imagine if God, literal God, showed up in the desert one day, and stuck around until we achieved interstellar flight. The Traveller destroyed the precursors. We’re the unfortunate ones who have to deal with the consequences of its actions, if not its words. Destiny’s narrative insists that because the Traveller was silent, it is not responsible for what befell the precursors. That is untrue. Silent or not, the damage was done. The Traveller touched world after world, sending their peoples into crisis after crisis, and all the lore says on the subject is how much the Traveller cares about all of them. Truly. It can care all it likes, as long as it stops wielding the weapon of mass destruction strapped to its belly. Come here. Hand over the beam.

My opinion may sound extraordinary, but I assure you it is not. The following are some translated user comments, taken from the most-viewed version of the Witness origin cutscene from the Season of the Deep uploaded on Bilibili (video ID BV1Jm4y1t7cn):

“I feel that Traveller was messing around with the entire universe. In order to stop it, the Witness's people discovered the Veil and the Darkness, and tried to stop the Traveller from flooding everyone with its ‘kindness’. This caused the Traveller to embark on a foolish journey, drawing even more species into a cosmic war, just so it can continue to spread its so-called grace.”

“In summary: the Traveller tosses technology everywhere to all species, and then every species wants to expand their territory. It’s just setting fires everywhere.”

“I think the narrative may end up depicting the Traveller as a neutral power, or even close to a villain. After all, its existence has disrupted the fates of many species in the universe. No matter its original intentions, its unilateral interference is not a good thing. I don’t know how the plot will resolve; whether Light and Darkness will no longer continue to interfere in the universe, or whether the Darkness (Veil) will show its true face after the Witness is defeated…”

I am not cherry-picking. These are all highly-rated comments. You can go see for yourself. It’s fascinating that reactions like these are almost completely absent from the Anglophone fandom. I only reached my own opinion on the Traveller after extensive research, yet these fans on Bilibili took one look at that cutscene, and instinctively decided that our war is the Traveller’s fault. A vast Pacific lies between the writers of Destiny, and the messaging these players saw in its story. The game insists that the Traveller is innocent, that it always had good intentions; these fans say that intentions don’t matter when its actions have been the ruin of so many. Self-determination is more precious than any paradise a foreign saviour can grant.

On page 5 of The Rubicon, we see that the precursors learned well from their god. They began to journey among the stars, and render aid unto the other species they encountered. They did one better than the Traveller, in fact, as it appears that they actually bothered to ask those species beforehand why they may or may not desire aid, rather than park their ships in their skies and skip straight to the terraforming. Unfortunately, after too many refusals, the precursors decided to go to an even further extreme than their god. They would interfere in the life of every being in existence, all at once, forcing them to exist in an eternal, perfect moment. And unlike the Traveller, they would tell everyone exactly what was coming. The Final Shape.

Early on in the eponymous expansion, we discovered that the afterlife exists. Cayde-6 was perfectly aware and conscious after his death, suspended in a bright and comforting forever alongside his Ghost, Sundance. He enjoyed the experience, and disliked being resurrected yet again. This raises an incredible number of questions, but the thing that stood out to me the most was how familiar it sounded. How much it resembled what the Witness promised. For Zavala to be reunited with Hakim. For Crow to be reunited with Amanda. For Ikora to find peace in victory. And for us to…

I do not think the Witness was lying when it offered all of those things. It was not lying when it gave each of its disciples a different vision of its ultimate goal. Whether it was capable of carrying through is one thing, but whether it was honest is another, and I believe it was honest. Its Final Shape is a natural extension of what Guardians receive in death. Whereas Guardians are granted a peaceful eternity with their Ghost, the Witness would try to simultaneously grant every sapient creature an end in kind, tailored to their individual desires. That is not to say, I agree with its end. The Witness was a tyrant as much as the Traveller is a bastard, especially since it threatened to punish people for eternity, too, out of nothing but the pettiness in its bitter heart. Yes, I concur, I am a pawn of the light, but I will not suffer to be your pawn, either.

What I wanted to say after that, rebuking its offer to make me into a disciple, is: “I will join you, if you let me save you.”

#destiny 2 #destiny the witness #the final shape #rhulk #the witness #tldr: incredibly orientalist characteristion.

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