#it’s been a grip since I engaged a lore post in the Destiny community on Tumblr!

[saltineofswing]

I was talking about this with my boyfriend last night and one of the things that we agree on, is that in my opinion a lot of the problems that Destiny’s narrative currently has connecting to its audience can be traced back, in part, to a decay of its genre influences.

Destiny 1 had an incredible clarity of genre. I think everybody who plays the game can easily identify that it is many parts Fantasy AND Sci-Fi. But it’s not 50% sea, 50% weed — there’s a third genre in the mix, and it’s extremely important to counterbalance and equalize the other two, and that’s Pulp.

When Destiny is at its best, it has a healthy slice of pulp weirdness in the mix, balancing against the Fantasy and Sci-Fi. I’m talking about stuff like ‘So… think you can kill a god?’ Or the original characterization of the Exo Stranger. Or the fact that Rise of Iron deals with green/brown/gold Viking samurai knights fighting uhhh [checks notes] evil red nanobots. Or, like, It’s also very present in the entire design ethos behind Venus as a garden world — early sci-fi/pulp stories featured Venus as a jungle or swamp or some mixture of the two, and often used a color scheme that is dead on for in-game Venus. The retro ‘golden age’ design of the colony also lends itself to this, and then you have the main enemy groups on Venus being ‘endless automaton scourge vs. space pirates’.

The Books of Sorrow have a lovely pulp veneer over them that would skew them almost towards, like, sword and sorcery if it weren’t for the sheer scope of them. They feel like Conan the Barbarian or Elric of Melniboné. I mean, goddamn, Bungie just straight up calls the Awoken home the DREAMING CITY. Forsaken was DRIPPING with pulp. Destiny managed to pull this really cool trick where they stayed true to the pulp genre tenet of exoticism and exploration, while also sidestepping the biggest problem with the pulp genre (and IMO one of the reasons it's fallen by the wayside so much), which is the. Uh. Xenophobia and racism that is often endemic to narratives about exploring ~weird foreign lands~.

The Hive have a really well-built and stable foundation of pulp weirdness, thanks to all of the work put into their lore early in the game’s lifespan, that allows newer writers to iterate on them without losing that pulp feeling. The other races Do Not, to various degrees of loosely established canon. The Fallen/Eliksni had the second-most present pulp influence in early canon, but I would consider them a casualty of modern-era Destiny retcons. The Cabal have weirdly wrapped back around now that we mostly have Caiatl and her crew, who are mostly decked out like space gladiators to match all their name theming. The Vex are barely more than a concept, and I think there’s another whole post about why the Vex haven’t been important to the narrative since, arguably, the first game (the real enemy of Curse of Osiris was the weak narrative).

So, sorry, how does this relate to all of the above, the post to which I am responding/adding on? An important part of the pulp genre, is that it naturally works very well with other genres — it’s a very effective amplifier (so is one of its descendent genres, the superhero genre). Fantasy, especially sword and sorcery which Destiny mostly seems to draw from most heavily, oftentimes has a very direct clarity of ethos. The good guys are good and the bad guys are bad, and the good guys save the world from the bad guys. Symbolically, these good guys and bad guys can be portrayed in a very strict visual dichotomy. Bright spheres and dark pyramids. This is where we find the baseline Destiny moral ethos of the first game — Light good, Darkness bad. Bungie did a good job of leaving themselves plenty of wiggle room, and there were grey factions that didn’t fit the moral dichotomy, but every time somebody looked at the camera, they said ‘The Light is good and the Darkness is evil.’ But the narrative of the original game was no God of War, it probably wasn’t anybody’s absolute favorite thing about the game. So, the foundational lore wasn’t so sacrosanct that it couldn’t be adjusted.

The early rumbles of this were in Forsaken, but the real shockwaves didn’t hit until probably around Beyond Light. The drastic way in which Exo lore was retrofitted to the modern era Destiny narrative is the canary in the coal mine, IMO, for writers beginning to carve away the pulp genre from the game’s base ethos — or squirreling it away in ever-deeper layers of content. As Fantasy and Pulp genre took a backseat to the Science Fiction of it all, narratively-speaking, it feels like the people steering the ship decided that we needed to explain everything in very concrete and grounded terms. Modern sci-fi has a lot less room for ‘this is just the way it is because we sez so’. I looooove me some nitty-gritty sci-fi explanations (I was invested in Exo mouthlights to the point that I wrote a big post about em), but I do feel like the casualty of throwing off the foundational genre balance of Destiny is that the writers felt like they suddenly needed to kill the mystique that had allowed the unsubtle ethics of the world to remain so straightforward. Bright spheres and dark pyramids was too ethically black and white, ironically.

I think it was mostly handled well in Beyond Light because, in my opinion, a perfectly valid reading of Beyond Light was just that, like… you’re too cool and tough to succumb to the allure of using Darkness for nasty crimes. Stasis may be a neutral force, but it’s being given to you by the bad guy who has an ulterior motive. You were lured into a trap of using a corrupted weapon, and instead you take that weapon and you un-corrupt it by sheer force of will. Stasis in the background makes people violent and paranoid. Lore surrounding Beyond Light talked a LOT about other Guardians who were not as on the ball as you were succumbing to the temptation of using Stasis for bad and naughty things… that’s kinda gone away because it doesn’t fit the current narrative, where no, actually, the Witness just gave you a powerful weapon that allowed you to ass-blast one of its most powerful servants just for shits and giggles I guess?

If Stasis is a totally neutral force that you just Learned To Harness, it directly contradicts BL’s central narrative hook of ‘using the weapons of the enemy at high risk but with high reward’, and the Witness has no reason to give it to you. Well, no GOOD reason. “SEE… THE TRAVELER HAS BEEN LYING TO YOU ABOUT UHH… [flips through pages of background lore] ABOUT THE DARKNESS BEING EEEEVIL!!” Uh no dude, the Traveler hasn’t actually told me anything, you are projecting. If anything, I the player am more likely to go ‘well this is just inconsistent narrative building’.

Back before the lore around the Winnower and the Witness was less consistent and we were trying to determine if they were separate entities, we had a lot more uncertainty that the world narrative was able to use to its advantage more. The constant demystification and de-pulpification has actively harmed the narrative any time the writers have tried to go back to pulp or fantasy genre. I think you can see that Lightfall was an attempt to recapture the pulp influences of the early game — think of it as, like, D1 thru BL are kinda like early golden age pulp, and then Lightfall ages the game forward to 80s-era pulp. Shadowkeep and Witch Queen are sword and sorcery. But the foundational pulp influences in the game have been eroded to the point where, now, the writing is struggling to adapt not-so-sci-fi concepts into the modern state of the universe. I don’t… think I need to know in detail how Ahamkara work, as much as my brain loves the mechanics of feeding on the gulf between desire and reality. It’s a very fantasy-forward explanation, but it’s still a sci-fi style mechanical explanation. I was willing to accept at face value that they just grant wishes and don’t fuck and eat desire. Lightfall wanted to have it’s cake and eat it too, and the writers don’t know how to properly apportion the genre balance to make that happen, so the result is a collection of flavors that are so mixed up and varied that it just kind of tastes like nothing.

I think the game would have been fine if they had decided to keep the good vs. evil dichotomy more straightforward (Gardener good Winnower bad), and just focused more audibly on the fact that actions and their repercussions matter more than intentions or expectations. The Winnower would still be evil if it chose the Witness as its main agent in the universe, and then made no attempt to stop it when it started doing evil stuff. Or, god forbid, we not even be TOLD who is evil and who is good, and just be asked to decide on that fact for ourselves.

Look, I was willing to give the Veil a shot. I was. I was willing to let Bungie cook. But they made the Veil the Travelers opposite, and I couldn't figure out why I didn't like that. Until a random ass reddit comment and it clicked.

The visual storytelling between the Pyramids and The Traveler is such a beautiful way of portraying two opposing forces without explicitly saying what those forces represent. It's all in their design.

Angular/Spherical

Many/One

Black/White

They have "We are opposites" written on their forehead and the Veil kind of fucked it up.

While I'm on the subject, I've been revisiting my favorite lore book "Unveiling" and MAN, that shit was awesome.

I really really really liked when the overarching conflict was about two Gods giving themselves physical form in the universe to win a cosmic argument on whether the conplexity of life made it worth living. I also really liked its interpretation of the Vex: the manifestation of the perfect pattern. Microorganisms that always came out on top before a new rule were forced upon the game. And yeah, i get it, "Unveiling had no reason to be truthful. The Witness had every reason to lie to us to make us fight each other. Untrustworthy narrator." Blah blah blah.

But, I think it would've been way cooler and scarier if it wasn't lying. It would show that The Winnower truly believes what it's saying. It's simply acting in its nature. It doesn't even know if it's 100% correct, but chooses to follow its path anyway.

This part altered my brain chemistry fundamentally. I am NOT normal about this section and I never will be.

Ok. I'm done. You can tear me a new one or pick my apart. You can tell me the new story is better in every conceivable way. But the Unveiling lorebook was P E A K to me