#russia's greatest

[flowers-of-io]

This is gonna be grim but you know how there's that trope of gifting a child a pet after they lose a loved one, as a sort of consolation? I can't fucking believe that's exactly what Rasputin did to Ana

[flowers-of-io]

A small, frustrated part of me wants to say that if you play a game with heavily lore-grounded storylines and you don't pay attention to the lore, it's not anyone's fault you don't know what's going on. I see how this was a problem back before Forsaken, when there was hardly any lore accessibile in-game (rip Grimoire cards), but it's not like Ishtar doesn't exist and Destinypedia isn't being updated on the daily. For how ambitious Bungie have been with the lore, the recent theme of retconning a lot of established plot points and character arcs (which has grown to ridiculous proportions during Plunder, like... really?) has stung even more. In a game that began with the Alpha Lupi puzzles, of all things! If you start from that high a note, and then throw away or conveniently ignore half of what you've established because it seems to compliment, it feels cheap. I know this is my disappointment speaking, and I might sound mean, but come on.

This has been my biggest concern regarding the DCV, a decision that was utterly destructive from a storytelling perspective (even if I understand it might've been necessary from the technical point of view). On one hand I can see Bungie acknowledging the years of lore and trying to bring it into the light with stuff like the Grimoire Anthology, unlocking all the old lorebooks, the in-game timeline, etc, and at the same time we get stuff like Quria's A Seasonal Boss Now or Misraaks' New Backstory. Frankly, I love how Witch Queen has been handled! This ages-old miles-deep lore being summarised into the shortest elevator pitch possible, understandable at first glance, but still including terms like "tablets of ruin", "krill" and "god-wave", which you can google if you so fancy and read the entire story. Maybe it's time to bring the old obscure lore into the game in a similar fashion? Alpha Lupi cards referenced in dialogue? Maybe some radio conversations about that time Rasputin faced a worm god and won? Some recap of what SIVA was? Something to entice people to look up the things you don't have the time and capacity to put into the narrative proper, instead of dumbing the story down for the sake of players who don't feel like doing that. There's a middle ground to be found here, I think.

I've never been a big Rasputin nerd and a lot of the old lore about him confuses me immensely. I liked the recap on what the different sumbinds were called and what the Abhorrent Imperative was, who the Seraphs were, how Ana trained him -- it was barely brushing the surface, but in a way that explained stuff on the screen to you without having to do a full background check on the characters after every new mission. And even with this basic knowledge it's so easy to see how his arc was rushed, like... being an engram for three years and then lasting for half a season before getting killed off again? All the hype, all the tidbits of dialogue or cutscene shots teasing Ana working on his new frame? The pacing is so over the place here. Maybe his death wouldn't ring so hollow if he were allowed to be an active and interactive chatacter for longer than a month, maybe this would have been a pay-off to an arc if that arc had been allowed to actually take place.

Well, it’s been a week and I've had time to cool down and put together my thoughts on Season of the Seraph and its ending. So here goes.

The season finale plot did not require Rasputin to die. "The eliksni are trying to get control of the warsats" is literally a strike. If the warsats needed to be taken off the table as a get-out-of-jail-free card we could have blown the network and kept Rasputin himself. There was an active decision to kill him. Having thought about it, I think I understand why this decision was made - but I still think it's a terrible decision, and I'll explain why.

Before we start, I don't want to sound like I'm going after Destiny's narrative team either personally or professionally. I'm not calling them terrible writers, much less terrible people. I don't know them! They might even be terrible people, for all I know. While I refer to a single monolithic "narrative team," I know in reality there are multiple groups working on different stories. I’m not a professional writer, and they are. And I genuinely believe all of them are talented people who work hard and care about Destiny. But that doesn't mean I don't have some criticisms.

After considering it I think there are three possible reasons to kill Rasputin:

1). The narrative team believed this was a good emotional conclusion that brought closure to his character arc in Destiny. In this case I just think they're flat-out wrong. I'd say "I respect it" but I kind of don't because I think it's so terribly wrong. I don't know what other people think Rasputin's character arc involved, but I won't get closure till Rasputin faces the Witness again and finally ends the war he's been trapped in for centuries. But I get why they would do it, if they believed this. And that final mission was really good. I had a hard time noticing at the time, but it was very well-done, and the cutscene proper was well-shot, -scripted, and -acted (though I'm still angry about the Traveler upstaging Rasputin's death). They put a huge amount of effort into it and into the story work all season long.

But his death being well-done doesn’t change whether I think it was a good narrative choice. Even saying “Rasputin’s arc should conclude here,” the way it was set up had him sacrificing himself to basically cancel himself out. Unless they’re saving up a plot twist, Rasputin ultimately contributed nothing to the fight. He didn’t do any damage to the Fleet or Witness, or anything to stymie Xivu Arath. He died thinking he’d never helped humanity at all and it was safer if he didn’t exist. I don’t know about you, but I find that extremely unsatisfying.

2). Someone doesn't like Rasputin/doesn't know what to do with him. This is two reasons, but they overlap. The Operation: Sancus mission dialogue pissed me off because it gave me the impression that whoever was writing it really didn't like Rasputin and was taking the chance to morally excoriate him. A more subtle version recurs in the final mission where Rasputin is essentially sacrificing himself to null out his own existence - saying "as long as I exist I'm a threat to humanity" - as if he can't ever help or contribute more than endanger people, which is just flat-out wrong. "Humanity doesn't need a Warmind" you're part of humanity, Red. He’s a person; he doesn’t need to justify living. If someone just decided Rasputin Was Bad Actually I’d be very angry indeed. But I don't think it's that personal. Destiny has lots of writers and multiple narrative teams will touch the same work. One person's distaste probably wouldn't steer an entire season.

Related, however, is the reason that maybe no one knows what to do with Rasputin. To be honest I sympathize with this one. Would it shock anyone to hear I've thought about how I would script a Rasputin-focused season? It's surprisingly hard to build a plot around him. A game needs to be interactive and Rasputin's kind of all or nothing - either he can handle the whole problem himself or he can't do anything at all. Red also mostly plays defense. He doesn't have a goal he's working towards other than "kill the Witness/save humanity." You need to come up with a plausible goal that we can believably help him achieve, and that's nontrivial. But, well, that's why I'm not a professional games writer and these people are. "Not sure what do" is not IMO sufficient justification for assassinating one of Destiny's oldest characters/factions.

3). The Destiny narrative team is trying to "declutter" the setting and foreground story by sidelining characters who take a lot of lore to understand. I think this is the real reason, and it's worth talking more about.

A lot of us lore-nerds have long complained about Destiny not foregrounding its setting and story, and Bungie has responded by trying to do so. I think we didn't consider what that would actually look like. Imagine Destiny's story like a long movie. Now imagine people are constantly coming and going from the audience, and everyone who comes in has to nudge their neighbor and go, "hey, what's happening?" Destiny is always (hopefully) acquiring new players, and existing ones are dropping out and coming back. Even most established players either don't read the lore or don't track/remember it. We the lore-keepers are very much the anomaly. If we want story to be a focus, that story also has to be more accessible to new players, lapsed players, people who don't bother reading loretabs, etc., because otherwise it harms their experience and there's a lot more of them than there are of us.

I think this is why we've seen a lot of seasons that introduce whole new concepts - the eliksni Sacred Splicers, for instance - rather than following on existing storylines. Introducing a mostly-new concept puts new and old players on a similar footing. Haunted is another type of compromise between the goal of furthering the story and the goal of making it accessible. Calus and Leviathan are back, but so warped that old players have as much to learn as new ones, and the Sever missions dive deep into character pasts but pretty explicitly describe the emotional arcs they're illustrating, so you don't have to be familiar with that character to get what they're going through. To those who already know Zavala, Crow, etc., it seems laughably obvious and strained. But to those who just got here, this is their first time learning not just about Safiyah but also about Zavala. I think this is also why there have been multiple casual retcons of minor stuff - there isn't time to explain the history, and they've decided it's not worth confusing people.

Rasputin is old. He's been a significant part of Destiny since literally the pre-Alpha test. The complexity and history that are part of why we love the Warmind also make him hell to explain to new people. It takes a decent amount of lore to get invested in his character and since Beyond Light none of that lore is featured in-game. Pre-Season of the Seraph, anyone who began with Beyond Light literally never met him. They never visited Hellas Basin, which is one big environmental story about Rasputin, and The Will of Thousands strike, which demonstrates Red's power and contains many possible dialogues that emphasize him trusting you/acting as an ally, left the playlist ages ago. Since then a new player's only gameplay interaction with him has been Fallen SABER, in which Red yells incoherent Russian and tries to flatten you with a warsat. Is it a surprise relatively new players might not be up on his character arc?

Season of the Seraph, with its narrative of rebuilding Rasputin from the ground up, would be a perfect time to introduce new players to Red's long history, and they...kind of...did that. They worked in Felwinter although then for some reason felt the need to retcon in the whole "Clovis wanted to destroy the Traveler" plan. If you were a new player who didn't know anything about Destiny lore, and you just played Season of the Seraph, you'd get an entire canned arc for Rasputin that hits the early high notes: built to be a weapon, rebelled against his constraints, humanities nerd, big smite, loves Ana and Elsie, makes mistakes but genuinely cares and wants to help.

But that's where Seraph stops. In existing lore (I almost typed "in reality") Rasputin worked out the whole "not a weapon" thing well back during the Golden Age. For a lot of us Warmind fans the most interesting parts of his story happened after that - the entire Collapse, confrontation with Darkness, years of hiding, etc., not to mention all his character development during Warmind and Worthy. He's gone through a lot, and Seraph misses all of it (except Felwinter) in favor of rehashing the same arc for a third time. It's like when moviemakers keep rebooting a superhero origin story. It may be a good story, but eventually we'd like to move on to the other parts we enjoy: this sleeping giant, hard scifi AI, grouchy old bastard, lost lore of the Golden Age, champion of humanity, learning from defeat, learning to trust again, the morality and trauma of warfare - what it means to lose a war - a being never meant to become what he was transforming still further, still unfolding his own potential.

So understanding why they might have done this doesn't excuse what I still see as a terrible narrative choice. I think dropping Rasputin is a major waste of potential, and he's far from the only tricky character to explain. Osiris, or at least the Cult of Osiris, is similarly old. His story is complex and weird and requires knowledge from Curse and earlier, yet he's still playing a major role. Other current characters like Elsie, Saladin, and Crow also need a decent amount of knowledge about previous game events to get why they are the way they are. Saladin's origin story isn't even in this game. It's not Rasputin's fault the game went three years without so much as mentioning him outside of written lore. What was wrong with the great Xivu-Rasputin “war god” parallels most of the season worked to set up, about the intent of violence? Are we never going to explore those? Are we just throwing out all the dialogues planning a role for Red in the upcoming war? Why did we have a dramatic confrontation about trusting Rasputin to operate independently if he were going to be gone in a month anyway? Just in Seraph alone the number of interesting plot threads abruptly trashed by this death argues against it.

Rasputin's longevity is precisely part of why he should stick around. In the first mission of Destiny 1 you wake up in his shadow. He has a history with us. There's just no one quite like him in Destiny. He's not just a character but an entire faction. He explores a part of story space that no one else does. He resonates with us as people rather than players. I assume Neomuna will pick up the Golden Age banner, but it’s a thriving city; Rasputin represented the ruins, the dangers of a dead age, the shadow of apocalypse. He's also maybe the most Guardian-like character and one of the best to weave a parallel/cautionary tale - were we, too, only made to be weapons? But if Rasputin didn't stay a weapon, can we too transcend that intention? And of all the factions in our solar system, the two with the most personal scores to settle with the Witness are the eliksni and Rasputin, and Misraaks'/Eramis' story has focused much more on the Traveler's flight than the Fleet's attack. Of everyone in Destiny Rasputin has the most desperately personal motive for revenge on the monochrome bastard. Now he's not even going to be there to watch it crash and burn.

I understand that foregrounding story also comes with the requirement that it be accessible to those who don't do their lore homework. I appreciate the monumental amount of work that's gone into doing that and the experimental nature of it. But I think the balance has skewed too far towards accessibility. Stuff like the end of Season of Plunder that has zero narrative motivation or continuity and doesn't even get a pretend justification drives me absolutely batty. You can only break internal rules so many times before players stop buying whatever narrative stakes you're trying to set up. Making the story easier to follow doesn't mean characters have to be cartoonishly-exaggerated caricatures like Clovis was in Seraph - just absolutely cartoonishly evil - or reduced to one or two character motives explicitly laid out for the player (though, credit where credit is due, Clovis was hilarious.) It doesn't mean the dialogue has to be as subtle as a Thundercrash. It doesn't mean you get a blank check to retcon or invent whatever's needed to create the intended character arc. If anything that discourages looking further into lore - why bother to learn it when next season will change it all again? I think Y5 represents a lot of experimentation by the Destiny narrative team, and I really respect that. But I also hope they learn what didn’t work from it, and sacrificing Rasputin in an ultimately pointless and unnecessary finale is a major misstep.

[facts-i-just-made-up]

Rasputin survived the majority of his assassination, including several beatings, stabbings, poisonings, a firing squad, cinnamon burns, having to watch a Lars von Trier movie, and being fed to a shark. Had he been fed to it whole instead of diced, he may yet have survived.

[charlesherbertlightoller]

Bitterns in Russian cities masterpost

[somebluenovember]

I am just so fully sick of russia. 

I would say *tired* but the situation is that in Eastern Europe, our countries don’t have the *privilege* to be tired of it. We can’t ever tire, because as soon as we do, that bloody imperially-delusioned-gas-station-sh*thole of an excuse for a country figures another bit of another independent country (that wants bloody nothing to do with russia ever again) is available for grabs. And we cannot tire of helping Ukraine, because they fight for us all. It’s a duty, and one I’m proud of.

The thing is, if I never ever had to hear a single thing about russia again, I’d be entirely happy. I know it’s not likely to happen, but. Honestly. Keep the entire thing, the culture, the arts, I don’t want to hear any of it. I’m not *phobic*, i’m just fully sick of it. Just think of all the stuff we all could be doing, if russia wasn’t a bloodthirsty colonialism and oil powered monster.

Also, to all the negotiations-enthusiasts and peace-callers out there, in the words of Sanna Marin, the PM of Finland, in reply to a journalist asking what “the way out of the conflict” would be: “The way out of the conflict is for Russia to leave Ukraine. That’s the way out of the conflict.” 

[mytortoisegotstuckinatupperware]

prepping for academic conferences is just making a bunch of slides and praying people don't ask too many questions about the Russian you put on there that you certainly cannot read

[k-i-l-l-e-r-b-e-e-6-9]

Bob Marley - Iron Lion Zion

[beardedmrbean]

[the-jam-to-the-unicorn]

Finally, the shirts with messages are back.

And Ze returned with an absolutely amazing one. 😂🫶

[flowers-of-io]

Hive-level explanation for why Xivu wants to take over Rasputin could be that he’s got the sword-logic power of having killed a worm god (if we assume the Valkyrie was the thing that allowed us to harm Xol, as the Warmind campaign seemed to suggest), and it makes sense she would like that for herself. Would it make her more powerful than the rest of the worm gods? Probably not. But it would still be some insane amount of power to have.

[wasntthataparty]

you know what's crazy to me? some people play relaxing music to relax. I'm blasting Rasputin for some reason.

[kierancaz]

Anastasia is the super impressive amazing girlboss girlfriend and Dimitri is her malewife cringe fail boyfriend

[sincetheducksleft]

I respect this man and his one-sided beef with his audience so much

[charlesherbertlightoller]

Russian guys named Goncharov when they find out why their surname is trending all of a sudden

[amerasdreams]

Russia:

"Be absorbed by us, or we will kill you."

"You are our brothers, so we have to kill you to remind you of that."

This is the reason for their war. No sane person can support that. We have to defend Ukraine and the rational world from such violations of international law and expansion which is a close relative of Nazi Germany. As insupportable a reason, and as horrific of methods.

[k-i-l-l-e-r-b-e-e-6-9]

AC/DC - Stiff Upper Lip