#I BLAME THAT CURSED GAME FOR STARTING THE DOMINO CHAIN

[tedisipi]

thats not even a yandere by literal definition what the fuck are you talking about

[flowers-of-io]

(I'm putting my response under a read more bc this post is reaching some truly dreadful lengths.)

It's fine!! <3 I also preemptively apologise if I come off as cagey or Too Much because I'm still learning to separate my emotions and my rationale and sometimes I don't even notice when I've started yelling in caps and people are like "woah chill" and. U know. I just have many thoughts and all of them are in neon colours man.

First off about the shit Sav has caused thoroughout history:

I don't think blaming her for Crota's actions makes much sense? Don't get me wrong, she totally was the catalyst for why Crota got kicked out of the High War into the great Vex unknown, but I find it hard to believe it had been that long of a con to specifically get him to fuck up by opening a Vex portal, get kicked out of the court after a century of open war, spend untold millennia more building up his and Oryx's power, to eventually end up in Earth's orbit and kill a thousand Guardians who, mind you, went out to assault the Hellmouth first, and lead to everything that came down afterwards. I'm way more inclined to believe this was a butterfly effect where she just wanted to mess with her brother and inadvertently created a ripple on history that eventually became a wave. Dust is a very fun loretab talking about Crota's death and all that followed in similar terms, of how one innocuous decision can have massive consequences that are entirely unforeseen and only align into a cause-and-effect as you look back at it.

If you're talking about Taeko's fireteam, you're absolutely correct! She Fucked With Them Hard and that strike was absolutely dreadful.

Forsaken is a tricky one, because I genuinely can't tell how far down the chain of events she's planned all of this and how much it was again a domino of cause and effect that got out of hand. For what we know, the curse was meant to be a self-sustaining power battery for her worm and possibly also a way to access the Distributary and get out of the Light-and-Dark game entirely (as per TWQ Collector's Edition). She's definitely guilty of messing up Uldren's mind and leading to many Awoken deaths as result of opening the Dreaming City to enemies. But can she be blamed for Cayde's death, for example? Or the creation of Scorn (who would then grow to be a plague upon her own domain)? How far had she planned all this, and from which point had it been the snowball getting out of hand and rolling down the hill by itself? Can she be blamed for this destruction, even if she hadn't planned it? These are all interesting questions and I don't have an answer for them!

Osiris is another tricky one because while what she did was obviously rancid, she does have some good points when she argues in favour of her actions in that one cutscene from Lost. Yes, she snatched his body and traumatised him immensely, and fucked around with all of our minds for nearly a year. But she also saved his life from a stupid death at Xivu's hands. She extended a hand to Crow before anyone else did and led to him getting out of the Spider's Shithole. She was the driving force that led to the alliance with Caiatl. There were things that turned out to be undoubtedly good as a result of her actions.

There's also something to be said about her potential responsibility for the Vex attack on the City in Splicer and the lives lost that day. How much was this Savsiris' coercion and how much was it Lakshmi's own choice?

Plus, to keep the tally straight, she was the one directly responsible for letting Xivu Arath to Torobatl, so. There's that.

TWQ campaign is such a perfect storm because while a lot of it was her own set up to trick us into acting according to her plans (her ship is literally called The Lure...), no one made us fucking. swing by and start killing everything in sight, no questions asked, INCLUDING THE CABAL ALLIED WITH US??????? No one made us kill the Ghosts. We brought this upon ourselves folks. I'm really not surprised that she says "I'm so glad you're here to see this" when she's about to twist the knife in that last mission, considering the utter rampage we've just gone on completely unprompted.

And ah, the Traveler.

To be totally clear - I do think she fucked up royally and did the absolutely opposite thing of what the Traveler would want anyone to do, even if she argued otherwise. Even if she did not take it directly -- there are implications that it came to the throne world voluntarily -- she still tried to hold it there by force. I'm not gonna tackle the weird jump in logic on Ikora's part that without the Traveler the City would be defenceless (WHY??? So far the Traveler has been but a huge target mark painted on us for the Darkness to shoot at???) because we'd be here for a week, but that aside. Savathûn actually had reasonable intentions. She'd said to the Witness she was ready to die to keep it away from her throne world, and the whole point of keeping the Traveler there was to keep it protected from the Witness. Again, I'm not saying this was RIGHT -- because it directly contradicts the Light's entire philosophy and the Traveler's wishes, and was in fact Sav retreating to the old Hive ways of control and dominance -- but I argue it would've spared us the shitshow at the end of Lightfall. Like. The entire point of what she was trying to do was to keep the end-of-Lightfall events from happening.

(I would also like to point out one VERY important detail, which is that Savathun saved humanity during the Collapse. The info on what she actually did then is very vague, but from what I can gather she either saved the Traveler from the Witness or legit held it in place and kept it from leaving as the Darkness was closing in. She had also killed Nezarec and taken the Veil from him to then hide in on Neptune either during the Collapse or beforehand (I still can't figure out the timeline here) to prevent the Witness from doing exactly what it did at the end of Lightfall.)

On the topic of the Hive's sympathetic villain tragic backstory thing -- it's true that this is getting a bit tiring after Yet Another enemy race coming across as sympathetic because they are just really really sad, but to be completely fair the Hive have had this going on about them since The Taken King. The difference here is that back then all of that tragic backstory was hidden in lore you could read on an external site, and now we have Ikora actually turn to look straight at the camera and say it aloud. "The Hive were tricked by the Darkness" is far from a new realisation, but this is the first time it has really been said out loud in the game besides some very cryptic writings in quest texts.

Finally, about the alliance -- honestly to me the idea of "a fringe faction splits off from the main enemy group and allies with us" is becoming old, but this is purely my subjective opinion. To me it would make far more sense if we joined forces with the Hive purely out of necessity: Savathun is the only person in the universe who has any idea of how Xivu Arath thinks and operates, and we won't hold out against both her and the Witness without this knowledge. We have common enemies and are desperately underpowered to face them. I'm under no illusion that we will ever be friendly with the Hive the way we are with House Light or Caiatl, Sav herself doesn't want that lol, but we do have the same goals and need one another to withstand the long night--whether we like it or not.

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?)