#they did not intend for that shit to be read

[abbadabbas-world]

WHY YOU AREN'T SHIFTING.

Bruh. If you read that and thought, "yes this is for me, I'm not shifting" or anything like that, get your shit together. You ARE shifting. Every single one of us is in a constant state of shifting. We are moving our consciousness to different versions of the reality we inhabit infinite times every. single. second. I know that that can be hard to conceive but you are shifting constantly without even realizing it or intending to because that is how life works. That is how shifting works. That is how the world works. That is how consciousness works.

BUT, on a real note, if you want to know why you aren't shifting to the reality you want to shift to, keep reading.

Well actually, I don't have the answer to that, but I can maybe help you shift where you want.

The best thing that helped me reframe my view on reality and consciousness, etc. was the realization that my dr is not special. My dr is no different than my cr in any way. It is just a reality. Thousands of people have drs just like mine. Thousands of people already exist consciously in that dr. Because my dr is just like my cr. I was born into my cr just as you were born into yours and just as our comfort characters or dr selves were born into theirs. THEY WERE BORN THERE. You did not make this reality up in your head. REAL PEOPLE were born in that REAL REALITY.

On another less puzzling note, stop putting your dr on a pedestal. If you're a shifter, you've heard that phrase probably three hundred times. But I want you to truly believe it. You were born in your dr. Your consciousness does not inhabit that body right now, but, nonetheless, a version of you was born there. That reality is just as real to the people that live there as this reality is to you.

When you go there (provided you haven't scripted these out) you will experience real things

Bad hair days

Stomach aches

Hunger/thirst/tiredness

Loss

Love

Pain

Sadness

Happiness (why the hell would you script this out??)

Boredom

Jealousy

Betrayal

Sickness

And literally a thousand more things that come with being a real person. There isn't any magic in reality shifting. It is something that we as humans just do, just can, and just are. I hope this helped.

[indigosabyss]

Uhhh comics Kamala pet-sitting Chewy. And you can really see how much of the Marvels movie shaped this scene.

[antlerlad]

"Will you come back from this?"

"Does it matter if I do?"

[screenshot redraw from the absolutely fabulous transformation cutscene]

[qiu-yan]

in MDZS the novel, the innkeeper in Yunping mentions that people are too scared to go petition Yunmeng Jiang for help because someone once walked in on Sect Leader Jiang whipping a guy in the main hall, supposedly because the guy was a demonic cultivator.

[utilitycaster]

I don't begrudge anyone their campaign preferences, and I think there's plenty of valid reasons to like Campaign 3 the best and this is not directed at people who are genuinely having a great time with it, but it feels like virtually all the nostalgia and wishful thinking I see surrounding Campaign 3 is screaming "you guys want Campaign 2." You want more slow travel and downtime and interparty conversations and slow-burn romance? You wish their main focus was fighting governmental corruption? You want a party that only semi-settles down at the end and keeps adventuring and remains very close? You're frustrated by how everpresent and overarching the moon plot is? You miss when they were just fucking around in a city? I genuinely believe you want Campaign 2, or at best you love a specific ship or a character from Campaign 3 but aren't happy about basically anything else, and would vastly prefer the tone and events and plot of Campaign 2. And I don't really care if you watch Campaign 2, or if you think I'm being annoying here; I simply genuinely believe you'd be happier watching Campaign 2 than Campaign 3 and are so deep in a sunk cost fallacy well you can't see it.

[thefirstknife]

The Witness and the Unveiling

I've been processing the new cutscene for days now and had a lot of good conversations with other people. A lot of people are interested in figuring out what this cutscene means for the lore book Unveiling, which is also my big interest. I'll talk about the lore book itself and how it related to the cutscene and what that possibly means for our understanding of the setting.

A LOT of the text will be super speculative, very long, often abstract and ultimately not conclusive. I'll drop absolutely everything I can think of to discuss about this to try and gather every possible question and possible answers in one place. But the truth is that we don't know the answers to these questions and maybe we never will.

What is the Unveiling lore book?

First things first. The Unveiling is a lore book that we started uncovering at the end of Shadowkeep. Shadowkeep campaign ends with us acquiring a strange artifact: an orb that we recover from the Lunar Pyramid, in front of the statue of a veiled figure. As soon as we touch it, we are transported into the Black Garden and the cutscene with our clone plays.

After this cutscene, we return to the Moon and we give the orb we collected to Eris. At the time of Shadowkeep's original release, Eris worked on the orb for weeks to come, revealing 1 lore tab per week. Every page of this lore book is narrated by an unknown entity who told us about the time before the universe existed and then about the creation of the universe. It also told us about the Gardener and the Winnower, their struggle, their philosophies, what we (Guardians) mean to them and ultimately what might be coming in the future. It's one of the fundamental texts for Destiny.

Is the Unveiling now retconned with the new cutscene?

This is a question that gets both asked and claimed a lot. The answer is no. First and foremost, if we're talking about a hard retcon (Bungie saying that this lore book is no longer considered canon or Bungie simply ignoring to mention it ever again), that is literally impossible. Unveiling is the culmination of a non-vaulted campaign that's considered a big part of the Light and Darkness saga and it will never be removed from canon. This text is not only the ending of a campaign, it is referenced in-game; characters have canonically read it and commented on it, most notably in Witch Queen Collector's Edition and it's directly referenced in the lore book Inspiral from the newest raid which I'll touch on later. But the point is, if they wanted to quickly push Unveiling under the rug, they wouldn't have told us "hey remember Unveiling?" with the Lightfall's raid lore.

If people are talking about a retcon in the sense of "we believed that certain things from this text are true, but now new information is challenging that, does that mean that the original text is being retroactively changed or rendered pointless?" The answer is also no, though with a big caveat. (super long post under)

The thing is that the Unveiling was never 100% proven true. We have always known this. We've received this text from a Darkness artifact and the narrator of it is very clearly both biased and unreliable. The Unveiling is not telling us objective truth, it's telling us a biased interpretation of something that may or may not be truth. There is probably some truth to the Unveiling, which I'll get into a bit later, but it is largely a propaganda piece, meant to sway us to the side of the Darkness and reject the Traveler (Gardener). It uses a familiar and casual language to make it more relatable while it talks about how the Gardener made a fundamental mistake by wanting to introduce complexity and unpredictability to life.

So if new information comes out and says "Unveiling was all a lie or wrong or simply a myth with little connection to reality" it would be perfectly in line with what we know about Unveiling right now. I expected that at some point we should learn directly if Unveiling was just a biased tale filled about something incomprehensible that may never be fully true. The new cutscene does nothing to Unveiling outside of simply giving it a new context and a new way to interpret it. This is not new for the Destiny setting which is actually filled with unreliable narrators, characters who lie and characters who are wrong. As a matter of fact, that's what any setting should be like if it strives for realistic storytelling.

The fact that the Unveiling is directly referenced in the newest lore from the newest raid means that Bungie didn't magically forget about this lore book. They literally basically added two extra pages of it with Root of Nightmares. But we never knew the true meaning of the Unveiling so any new information that confirms or denies certain parts of it makes full sense in the story.

Unveiling and the Witness cutscene

So, what are the issues and contention between these two things? Well, there's a lot. A lot of little details from the Witness cutscene are now putting a lot of original interpretations of Unveiling into question. Did we blindly believe in this origin of the universe myth that the Unveiling told? Is it a complete fabrication? Is there at least a kernel of truth to it? Who wrote the Unveiling?

The biggest divergence comes from the fact that Unveiling claims there are incomprehensible entities that created the universe called Gardener and Winnower; the Gardener becoming the Traveler and the Winnower being completely unknown. The cutscene explicitly calls the Traveler "Gardener" but it's revealed that was a name given to it by the Witness' species when they stumbled upon it on their planet, covered in dirt. How can this be the entity that created the universe?

When the Witness was officially introduced at the end of the Witch Queen, the immediate assumption of many was that the Witness was the Winnower. This is now categorically untrue, at least on some level (will get to it eventually later); the Witness is not an entity that fought the Gardener in the allegorical garden that predates the existence of the universe. So does the Winnower still exist as that entity that fought in the garden?

Let's summarise the Unveiling piece by piece first. First page is an introduction with a lot of grand claims about the nature of existence. It immediately makes it clear that the narrator is selling us a worldview:

But imagine the abomination of a world where nothing can end and no choice can be preferred to any other. Imagine the things that would suffer and never die. Imagine the lies that would flourish without context or corrective. Imagine a world without me.

Pages two, three, four and five claim to detail a time from before the universe existed presented in an allegorical tale about a Gardener and Winnower that live in a garden and play a game. The allegorical language is not subtextual, it's very much explicitly told that this is an allegory.

Once upon a time,* a gardener and a winnower lived** together in a garden.*** * It was once before a time, because time had not yet begun. ** We did not live. We existed as principles of ontological dynamics that emerged from mathematical structures, as bodiless and inevitable as the primes. *** It was the field of possibility that prefigured existence.

The story goes: before the universe existed, Gardener and Winnower played a game of life. They were able to configure the game board with starting set pieces and then let it play out and see what comes out of it. The end of the game was always the same; the same pattern would always win and the game's ending would always be predictable. This bothered the Gardener who wanted complexity and freedom. It didn't bother the Winnower; the Winnower prefered the clean and clear cut outcome that always follows the same principles and always leads to the same conclusion.

Page six is an interjection with a philosophical question about the nature of a specific protein. The page explains it to us and asks if this protein is an agent of Darkness or the Light. This is not entirely relevant to the topic at hand, but it's important for the understanding of how Unveiling is trying to exert its bias onto the reader by presenting some sort of a gotcha. It wants us to come to the conclusions that benefits the narrator.

After that, page seven resumes the origin story of the universe. They fought together in the garden about their differences and about the Gardener's decision to make a new rule for the game. Their fight was so fundamental that it led to the creation of the universe. The chapter title is "T=0" which means "time equals zero" and is a part of understanding how the universe was made out of nothing.

The garden had given birth to creation, the rules were in place, and there would never be a second chance. We played in the cosmos now. We played for everything.

Page eight returns to trying to sway us to its side by telling us that the concept of predation is what made all of life possible and that it is the narrator who is responsible for our existence.

It was the first defector—the first predator. It changed everything. Now the oozeballs needed sensors to watch for danger, and brains to integrate those senses and generate plans of survival, and swift neurons and muscles to enact that plan. This was the Cambrian Explosion, the great birth of complex life on your world. I caused it. I, the defector, the destroyer, the one who takes.

It's selling us a worldview again. It wants us to believe that the reason we have everything we do is because of the sword logic; everyone fighting for the right to exist. When everyone fights, everyone has to evolve to defend and survive, therefore the reason we've evolved is because we had to fight. This is a huge contrast with how the Gardener works. The Gardener jumpstarts and uplifts species by gardening, terraforming, evolving them without the need to struggle. The Gardener also doesn't pick and choose when it comes to terraforming; everyone is equally important and you don't have to justify or prove your right to exist. An ant's value is the same as a human's. To the narrator, that simply cannot be. If the ant can't prove the right to exist by being stronger, then it should not exist. This always showed bias and the way this ideology works on the misinterpretation of the "survival of the fittest" phrase; survival of the fittest isn't "survival of the strong" it's "survival of those who are best adapted to their environment."

Page nine is very important and is one of the things that makes Unveiling possibly true in some aspects. Namely, this page called Patternfall, is about the Vex. The narrator describes the Vex and how they existed in the allegorical garden from which they escaped into the universe with the Big Bang. Before the battle between Gardener and Winnower, the Vex, this pattern, always won the game. The Vex were the winning outcome of every game played, the source of Gardener's frustration and Winnower's elation.

Given that we know that the Vex are real and that they have a... tenuous relationship with time, this part of the story feels correct. It would make sense that the Vex predate time itself, which would explain why they are able to navigate it and manipulate it as easily as we manipulate any other force; the Vex already existed when all of time was a singularity before the Big Bang, this is known to them. Not only that, but the Vex can't understand paracausality, which was added to the game as a new rule, a rule they've never seen before. The description of the Vex in this chapter is also on point so it's has to be correct or close to correct.

They propagated in the saline meltwater of comets orbiting the first stars. That broth of chemicals became their substrate, and they learned to catalyze impossible chemistry with quantum tricks. Then, they rained from the sky into the steaming seas of fallow worlds, and there they built their first housings from geometry and silica.

We know that they are linked to first stars because of Clovis Bray's expedition to 2082 Volantis, an impossibly old star dating back to the beginning of the universe that the Vex have kept artificially alive ever since by refuelling it.

In all their transformations, they retained that kernel of ultimate self-sufficiency that had made them victors in the flower game. But they are not incontrovertibly destined to rule this cosmos. They were made before Light and Darkness, but the rules are different now, and even this pattern must adapt.

Patternfall also makes a note about the Vex that are alligned with Darkness: Sol Divisive of the Black Garden.

They are not all mine, not in the way that admirers such as my man Oryx are mine: utterly devoted to the practice of my principle. But some of them have, nonetheless, found their way home.

This specific page tells us that at least in some way, some sections of the Unveiling must be telling an objective truth, or at least be as close to the truth as possible. Barring any new reveals about the Vex, this seems to fit with what we know about them so it must be correct. The Vex are the way they are because they predate the universe and their existence in the universe right now is the only remnant of a time before time. They used to be the final shape, always, until paracausality was introduced and now they must fight with the rest of us to reclaim their position. This means that the allegorical garden where the Gardener and Winnower lived and fought must be in some way real. Remember, we are talking about a time from before the universe. The word "real" is a very loose description of that place, but the Vex must've come from there and possibly have a memory of being there so it there must be a "there" before the Big Bang. Mind boggling stuff going on. (As an aside, the Vex HAVE to be the core of The Final Shape expansion. They gotta. Also note that there is a weird metaphysical space on the other side of the portal)

Speaking of aspects that have to be true or at least reflect truth; there is the Tree of Silver Wings. This is mentioned throughout Unveiling as a tree that existed in the garden that was toppled when the Gardener and Winnower fought. The Tree is clearly real because we've seen iterations of it several times now. A completely new Tree was grown in the cradle on Io and now we can also see the Tree in Root of Nightmares, growing at the cradle on the Witness' Pyramid. The seeds of the Tree are also real; Osiris had one and so did Calus and we've seen both. How does the allegorical Tree from an allegorical garden from before the universe existed relate to the real Trees in a very real universe is completely unknown.

Page ten is a lot more attempts to convince us that the narrator is the correct choice to follow and that its philosophy is the winning one and that we should abandon the Gardener and join them. The narrator also tells us that we don't have rush with our answer because it is coming over to meet us anyway. This was the end of Shadowkeep so it was quite an ominous message. The Shadowkeep year ended with the arrival of the Black Fleet to our system and then was further expanded in Beyond Light where we gained a more direct contact with them and their gifts of stasis.

The final page, eleven, is Eris' message to us about hope and resistance to the allure of Darkness. Mind you that she's not talking about using aspects of Darkness as tools, but more about the philosophy of it as it's presented in Unveiling; you can use the Darkness without entertaining the Darkness and the philosophy of the extreme version of the sword logic.

Okay, so what's the issue between this and the Witness cutscene? Well, before the reveal of the Witness in general, we believed that the narrator of the Unveiling, the Winnower, is the big bad. The entity that is the origin of Darkness, the entity that made the Black Fleet, the entity that controls our enemies. This was never confirmed, but it was a reasonable conclusion to Unveiling, until further notice. Now we know that some parts of this aren't true. The Witness is the big bad and the Pyramids are just the remains of its species' technology. And while the Witness does fulfil some of the roles of the Winnower, we now know that the Witness is not the origin of Darkness so it cannot be the Winnower that's spoken of in Unveiling, not the Winnower that existed before the universe.

The Witch Queen and some hints here and there before that (mostly in the Presage mission where Savathun more or less explicitly told us that the Darkness is not the same as the entity that we're fighting against) introduced the Witness directly without any metaphors or vague language. We finally saw this being, in full glory, as it emerged, moved and spoke. From then until now, we've tried to understand the Witness but we really knew nothing substantial.

A lot of conversations were about the nature of the Witness and the Winnower, the narrator of Unveiling. Were they the same thing? Or are they separate entities? Is the Winnower even real or is it literally just a metaphor for a philosophy, an idea, that the Witness represents? There's always people who will immediately clamor about "retcons" but once again, the Unveiling was never an objective truth. We made assumptions about the Unveiling and its narrator, but none of those assumptions were ever confirmed in any way. This is also reflected in-game with characters discussing the meaning of the Unveiling in many different ways. Unveiling being unreliable and unclear was intended. The Witness existing does not contradict or remove Unveiling's significance. It just recontextualises and already unreliable text that was never objective to begin with.

And it continues to do so. The Witness cutscene first and foremost shows us the Traveler, curiously covered in dirt and depicted almost as if it's rising from the ground. The Witness' people are described as discovering it and naming it "Gardener." It then uplifted them, terraformed their world and gave them a golden age which is familiar to us.

But wait. If the Gardener is from a time before the universe, how is it now suddenly a dirt covered orb on a random planet? This is where the Unveiling being interpreted literally becomes a problem. If the Gardener (and Winnower) aren't from a time before the Big Bang and that whole allegory of a garden that existed before the universe is a lie, then what is the Unveiling and who wrote it and for what purpose?

I've seen a lot of good discussions on it that I'd like to highlight here. This post discusses things in a similar way to what I'm writing here, for example. Just a little while ago, I reblogged this interpretation of it which I really like which differs from this. There's been a lot of various similar theories in which the Witness has simply created this idea of the Winnower and the associated philosophy after it went through an existential crisis of catastrophic proportions; the Unveiling is simply entirely a lie, an attempt to make people believe the winnowing philosophy.

It's a good question to ask what of the story of the Vex and the Gardener if Unveiling is fully a lie. A really important note here is that we've known from other sources that the Traveler is the Gardener. Both from other characters, most notably in Lightfall from Osiris, but also from the Traveler itself and the Unveiling. So if Unveiling is bullshit, what about the Vex and the Gardener? Why did the Gardener even appear on the random planet from the dirt?

My theory is that Unveiling is partially correct. Something incomprehensible WAS happening before the universe existed; it involved forces that would end up becoming the Light and Darkness, the Gardener, the Vex and probably the Veil. This period of time is so abstract and unfathomable that we cannot physically understand it through anything but allegory. Some believe that the Veil now fulfils the role of the Winnower which is possible, but I'm not sure how likely; we will need even more information on the Veil to make that judgement call. Either way, Unveiling's myth about the origins of everything could still hold true in some regard. If that's true, we know that the Gardener made the new rule for the game (paracausality), caused the Big Bang and inserted itself into the new game (aka into the universe). The Gardener thus became the Traveler which it has refered to as being its body.

It feels like lead and neutronium and electroweak matter fashioned into a moon-sized ball that you must carry as you move.

The time before the universe wasn't physical, but the universe is. This body, the Traveler, had to have been made and it's possible that it was made on the Witness' planet. Perhaps that was one of the first planets in existence, a place where the Gardener forged its body and emerged into the existence as a physical being capable of terraforming. The Light is the domain of the physical so it makes sense that the Gardener has to utilise this physicality to be able to do its thing.

The Darkness is psychic; it's emotion, consciousness, the mind. It doesn't have to be physical. Perhaps the Winnower IS real, but it's simply a metaphysical idea that exists in the universe, but cannot be seen. It can influence others; everyone who ponders on the nature of existence runs the risk of being exposed to the idea of winnowing. It's inevitable. Every conscious being can be influenced by Darkness and it's many possibilities; some perfectly neutral or even good and some bad.

And the Witness' people went highly in-depth in their research of the Gardener and then later the Veil. If they were looking for answers to meaning and purpose, they would've likely come close to understanding the origin of the universe. Perhaps from the Gardener (who was there, before the Big Bang) or perhaps by exploring the Veil (which is, as of now, still fairly unknown as an entity) or maybe even the combination of their investigation into both of those. There's some credence to this in particular, given the memory from Ahsa in week 3, mainly this part:

Two halves of a whole... long divided. A... schism between them. Reunited. [exhales in joy] A glimpse beyond... to the beginning...

This most certainly refers to the Traveler and the Veil being reunited and connected as the Witness' people attempted the connection for the first time. And it offered them "a glimpse beyond to the beginning." Beginning of what if not the universe? The connection was never fully realised and the two were never fully reunited. But they were in Lightfall and in Lightfall, this created a portal to an incomprehensible realm into which nobody but the Witness can enter (for now). This realm acts as if it exists somewhere outside of normal spacetime, somewhere beyond, and it resembles... well, a garden world, like a garden from the allegory of existence before the universe.

If the Witness' people saw how the universe began as explored in the Unveiling, they would've absolutely come to the conclusion that everything is meaningless and that the Gardener did something that led to untold suffering, basically on a whim to seek more complex, but ultimately pointless life. Instead of this perfectly ordered garden world where every outcome is known and there is no deviation from the rules, we received a universe that is seemingly random, chaotic and meaningless. At least that would be the interpretation of it in their mind.

The Gardener could've just let things play out infinitely in the game with the same outcome, with the same pattern, but it didn't. It made the universe instead, filled with infinite mysteries and infinite possibilities and you will never know which one of those possibilities are "correct" and which choices are better than others. You will never know where to go and who to follow and what to do and there is no inherent value to any specific choice you make. Countless species will live and die "without meaning and purpose."

This was terrfying to the Witness' people, possibly exactly because they've seen how things were before. Before the Gardener's actions, everyone would have a specific purpose to fulfil in service of reaching the final shape which is always the same. Now, there is no goal, nothing to work towards, nothing to specific to strive for. So they decided to follow the philosophy of an entity that fought the Gardener and take up its job; to winnow in search for the final shape. To reshape reality, reset existence, "free" the Gardener from its own creation.

In that way, Unveiling is still very much true and it's the same as ever; it's a subjective interpretation of the origins of the universe told in a biased nature by a being that learned to despise the chaos of existence and would want to return to the way things were before.

So who wrote the Unveiling then? Again, many theories. Since the Witness' reveal in WQ, a lot of people speculated that the Witness wrote it and that the Witness is same as the Winnower. That could be true now, in a way; the Witness took up the mantle of the Winnower so it might as well be it. The Unveiling is written with a tone and voice that differs from how we know the Witness, but now we also know that the Witness is a being of billions; perhaps there is a voice in there who writes text and who speaks that way. It could also be just a ruse; the Witness is a manipulator who lies constantly. It could've written this text in this way to deliberately confuse, manipulate and coerce us; the Unveiling "tone" is fake and it was also fake when it spoke to Oryx.

Another option is that Unveiling was still written by the entity we know as the Winnower. If the Winnower is the origin of Darkness, coming from the garden from before the universe, then it is metaphysical; it's in the mind and consciousness. It doesn't need a body or to be fully physical. It can influence and talk and BE simply by being the origin of consciousness. Every conscious being can access the Winnower. The Winnower is every idea that leads to predation and killing and death. It's every thought and dream and memory and pain. It could've touched the Witness' people and pushed them to adopt its philosophy when they went too far with their research and especially when they connected to the Veil. It could've tried doing the same to us, when we connected to the Darkness artifact in a Pyramid at the end of Shadowkeep.

There is also the angle that the tale from Unveiling is literally entirely untrue. There was nothing before the universe existed. The description of the Vex was the Witness' attempt to understand how they function, or a piece of truth added to make the rest of the text seem correct to those that read it. The myth of the garden and the two entities fighting could be an attempt to give meaning to how everything started, giving a reason to pursue the Traveler and feel justified doing it.

The main point here is that we don't know and we might never know given the incredibly allegorical and mythologised way that Unveiling is talking about something that is incredibly hard to conceptualise in the first place. An interesting bit to add here is the concept of egregore:

Egregore (also spelled egregor; from French égrégore, from Ancient Greek ἐγρήγορος, egrēgoros 'wakeful') is an esoteric concept representing a non-physical entity that arises from the collective thoughts of a distinct group of people.

It's not an accident that egregore in Destiny is a physical manifestation of psychic connections that links points of Darkness together. It comes from this originally; basically if enough people think about the same thing or believe in the same thing, they will create an "egregore" = their thought or belief will spawn a non-physical entity associated with that thought or belief. In that sense, the Witness' people may have created the Winnower when they all united in thinking about how the universe is meaningless without a Winnower. The Winnower is an egregore created by the Witness' people and the belief in this egregore manifests physically as the egregore fungus which infests and links everyone who believes in the Winnower. Perhaps, even, if the Winnower is that egregore, something created by the first beings that ventured that far into metaphysics and then it retroactively became tied to the universe. Once the Winnower was created, the Witness' people tried explaining where it fits into the universe, constructing an origin myth around it. Perhaps they weren't aware that they manifested the Winnower, and believed that they simply discovered it and that the origin myth they constructed was them learning some bigger truth.

There are issues and questions with any of these explanations and they all go into super abstract possibilities and options. If the garden before the universe is entirely a myth, then what of the Gardener and the Vex and the Tree of Silver Wings? If there's truth to how the universe began, what about the Witness being simply a species that got uplifted and went mad with horrors of knowledge? Was the Winnower real in the garden before time or is it merely something conjured from the minds of a people who wanted purpose and meaning?

Furthermore, what about Inspiral, the raid lore book whose last two pages are very reminiscent of the Unveiling, reference it and function almost like extra two pages for it? Inspiral is particularly strange because each page starts with a description of a being that left its memories in the book. First of the final two pages, Meaning, describes its narrator as:

A dream of a metaphor made starkly, an allegory discussed in study of ontology, in Darkness not unkind. It leaves behind a warped, barely-real data fragment to mark its passing.

And the second, Winnowing:

A dream of a friendly conversation with someone impossible to see, cloaked in shadows. It leaves behind an impossible data fragment to mark its passing.

Neither of these descriptions fit the Witness. The Witness is not a metaphor or an allegory, nor is it "barely-real." It is also not "impossible to see" nor does it leave behind "impossible data." The Witness is very much real, though clearly ascended into a state of being beyond our comprehension, but we can very much hear it and see it. The cutscene very clearly explains that the Witness began as just another species and achieved a higher existence; it's not some weird mystical energy that originated before the universe began. Most of all, the Witness is neither kind nor friendly.

The only metaphor and allegory is the garden from before the universe and the Gardener and the Winnower that fought in it. The Gardener manifested as the Traveler, but the Winnower is unknown to us. These two pages read, again, almost exactly the same as Unveiling and they bear no resemblance to the Witness, neither in tone nor in the description of their narrator(s). Obviously, it could be lies and manipulations on purpose which is something to keep in mind in general.

But the page Meaning very clearly makes a distinction between two entities:

There is a voice that echoes across the Darkness, and it asks this question: what is the purpose of it all? And there is another voice that calls back and says: listen, I will tell you a purpose. I will tell you of a Final Shape.

After seeing the cutscene, the first sentence could obviously refer to the Witness' people. They sought purpose and meaning. The second specifies that something answered, something else, when they dug deep into the Veil. Did that something exist on its own, predating the Witness, or did the Witness create it, like an egregore? Either way, the Witness inquired and something returned the call OR the text is referring to a generalised idea of anyone exploring the Darkness, asking that question and then getting a reply from the Winnower, which is a creation of the Witness.

On the other hand, there's the issue of the Darkness being a much more complex phenomenon than we've previously believed. If the Winnower is the origin of Darkness, then would it not represent ALL of Darkness? As of right now, both Unveiling and Inspiral pages that we might be able to attribute to the Winnower are distinctly focused only on the sword logic aspect which fits more with the Witness. The Witness and its pawns have extermined species that also used the Darkness, in different ways. Would the Winnower not acknowledge the entirety of Darkness? This issue can be better solved if we insist that the Witness is what invented or manifested the Winnower and its ideology. Darkness is more than winnowing, that's for sure, but the Witness and its manifestation of the Winnower are focused only on winnowing.

Some more concrete answers may lay in our understanding of the Veil. We're beginning to gather more information about this entity and the cutscene itself shed some light on it as well. The Veil was connected to the Traveler, always, even before the Witness' people found it. It was not near the Traveler, but instead somewhere far away where the Witness' people had to fly to in order to bring it back. Some already believe that the Veil is the Winnower or a product of it; that the Winnower and the Gardener were these abstract entities in the garden before the universe and then became the Veil and the Traveler post-Big Bang, but still connected.

The truth is that this is a highly complicated concept to think about, explore and explain. The Unveiling could be one being's attempt to explain how the universe began and it could be true or it could be false. Nothing in the cutscene explicitly tells us either way, nor does it render the Unveiling useless (and it also doesn't render it a word of god).

The science and philosophy about the origin of the universe are unknown in real life and will probably remain unknown in Destiny. To expect a fictional story to accurately and unambiguously tell us how the universe began is to expect A LOT. The only ones that could truly maybe tell us are the Traveler (Gardener) and the Veil. The question is, would we be able to withstand knowing something like that. Many who peered into the Veil have lost their minds and the Traveler does not speak of things like that because divulging such information would inevitably put someone on a set path. To know everything is to lose choice. You know exactly where to go, how, when and why, as well as what will happen when you get there. The Gardener wants us to make our own fate and it wants the universe to not lead into any specific outcome.

This is some of the most bizarre and wild high concept scifi stuff we've ever had in Destiny. I don't expect us to solve it so quickly after major new information has been revealed and there's still a lot more to find out. This is a really exceptionally long dive into some of the theories and options. A lot of people don't like this type of unreliable philosophical conundrums and would much rather just prefer to be told the facts. And I don't think we'll ever know facts about these topics in a way that would make them easy to digest. Unveiling might one day be fully explained in a way that will allow us to construct the true history of the universe and its origins, but it might also not be. Perhaps it will remain a perpetual mystery to force to wonder about these concepts.

I'd personally prefer a little bit of mystery to remain; for both us and the Witness to forever wonder what was the meaning of it all, what was our purpose, have we chosen it "correctly" and what our choices could've led to if we've done things differently.

[sanctus-ingenium]

After purchasing Said the Black Horse, may I have it printed and bound? Just one personal copy, not for sale. There's something about the tactile feeling of books that makes me happy.

I actually have a book-formatted pdf with a full new cover ready to go and I've already ordered a single copy for myself (it will take some time to get here but you'll know when it does because I'll post about it). If it looks good I can make it more widely available.

In the meantime I'm 100% cool with you using the book pdf you get on kofi to print a personal copy using like your own printer or local in-person service but I would rather you didn't upload it to any online self-printing services. Also be aware that there are images at the back of the pdf so you might want to cut those out before printing.

[rollercoasterwords]

I have, a genuine question for you. Do you acknowledge the racism in the original AYTD or at least know about it? Like how MsKingBean uses slurs and racist stereotypes?

hey, so, i'm a bit apprehensive about answering this because...it doesn't feel like a very geniune question to me, if i'm being honest. "do you acknowledge x thing" is a question that is inherently set up so that i'm meant to answer "yes, i acknowledge that x thing is true," because the alternative is saying "no, i don't acknowledge that x thing is true," which is already framing this interaction as if to disagree with you would be a kind of failure on my part to do some due diligence of engaging critically with a text. and the fact that you say mskingbean89 used slurs in atyd shows me that you haven't even engaged with the text, because that simply...isn't true.

if what you're referring to when you say "slurs" is the anti-romani stereotypes--this is coming from an extra chapter in the bootleg tapes focusing on greyback, where there is a slur used to describe his living situation + he + his family were portrayed as nomadic irish people in a way that was insensitive. people who read that chapter and then went back to the canon story with that characterization in mind rightfully pointed out that it was fucked-up. mskingbean89 addressed those criticisms by adding this note to the beginning of that bootleg chapter:

personally, i think this was a good way to take accountability + acknowledge the mistakes she made with that portrayal. she was a human being who made an ignorant mistake, which then just happened to get absolutely blasted to millions of people--she did not have sensitivity readers or editors looking over her fanfiction, because she did not write it expecting it to reach the level of popularity that it has. to be honest, i am not really sure how she could have better acknowledged her mistake, aside from just....not having made it in the first place. she explains her intentions without acting as though that intent cancels out harm, owns up to the fact that the stereotyping was harmful regardless of intention, and provides resources to learn while also committing to be more mindful + educate herself moving forward. honestly, that's exactly the response i would hope to see from someone who makes a mistake like this one.

i agree with you that people reading atyd should acknowledge + understand the racism regarding romani stereotypes stemming from that bootleg chapter, which is why i think it's great that there is a note literally built into the beginning of that chapter acknowledging it! but i feel as though there's been this like...game of telephone happening online when it comes to atyd, where there are now people who have never even read the story talking about things that quite literally do not appear in the base text itself. i've also seen people acting as though mkb herself did not address these issues when they were raised to her, which is just...patently false.

and so what i'm wondering here is what you're looking for from me when you ask a question like "do you acknowledge the racism in atyd." anyone who actually reads the texts has to acknowledge the racism in that bootleg chapter, because mkb puts that acknowledgment front and center at the beginning. and also like...in the part of the fandom i'm in, in the conversations i've listened to or taken part of regarding atyd, people have acknowledged the issues with that bootleg chapter and the ways it reflects back on the main story. so what do you mean by "acknowledge" when so many people, including mkb herself, have already... acknowledged it? what action are you calling for, and who are you calling for it from?

because like. if what u actually want to say here is that atyd is Irredeemably Problematic and we should all like....shun it? universally agree that it's Bad? then it's just like. it is up to each individual reading the story to decide whether that specific portrayal of greyback in the bootleg chapters is something that ruins the story completely for them or whether they still think the story as a whole holds worth. personally, i feel like i can acknowledge that there are issues with mkb's portrayal of greyback and i need to be mindful of that when reading the story so as not to internalize harmful stereotypes while still finding atyd to be a masterpiece that really beautifully deals with a lot of nuanced issues regarding class and disability and systems of power. this is just part of thinking critically when you read; many famous and beloved works of fiction contain the biases of their authors or have mistakes or issues in the way they portray things that are a product of ignorance. and i know everyone reading marauders fanfiction should understand this, because if u genuinely think that a character being negatively stereotyped means u should throw the entire work in the trash, then none of u would be touching harry potter fanfiction with a five foot pole in the first place.

so, anon - if you have actually read atyd, and there are issues with racism that you have found that i am unaware of, and not just telephone-game twitter posts of people taking shit out of context that you're accepting as truth without bothering to engage with the work yourself--if you want to have a real conversation about it, i would invite you to come to me as an actual person and not an anonymous ghost in my inbox. my dms are open, but when it comes to talking about serious issues, i tend to find it more genuine if the person coming to me actually cares enough and believes in what they're saying enough to say it as themself. and if you haven't read atyd and are just parroting things you've heard other people say online then i would invite you to actually sit down and read the work and form your own opinions on it before getting back to me. i know that might sound harsh, but honestly i'm just completely fed-up at this point with all the bad-faith takes and misinformation that i've seen people spreading about atyd just because they think it's cool to dislike a popular thing.

[loppiopio]

live izaya reaction to chapter 29 (honey python) of a cheap imitation.

[seventh-district]

so uh. that 2.2 Special Program, huh

[knightelf]

i could turn jacob seed. i could make him forgo his brothers orders and see through him for what he was evennn if he was maybe right about montana getting nuked whateverrr like what everrrr okay

[elderly-worm]

Oh wait. Take Me To Church on Crowley's playlist is like, a lot, huh? I have made the mistake of listening to it while so so sleep deprived and................................................................ damn.

[owlf45]

Sorry for being shippy but… does dabi like, like-like hawks in imaginary? Or is it a “i pity you moderately good looking bird” situation?

ill be fr, i've never gotten to the part in the anime/manga where dabi and hawks interact. i might joke around with them and if i ever catch up on the series, we'll see how it goes from there

[ioannemos]

every now and then i glance at fanfic that i know is gonna be really weird just to like. reset my brain a little. there are people out there who not only thought of this, they actually wrote it and then they posted it online for anyone to read. i mean they put their name on it and everything. they allowed comments. God bless em

[87dvhnk]

"i read the wiki and i saw the pages/panels already, why do i need to read the comics?"

because a) some those comics fuck with awing dexterity and stamina b) there's a good chance shit is out of context or simply misrepresented (innocently, humorously, ignorantly or maliciously) and c) you know the beats/endings of tons of shit, but it doesn't impede your enjoyment of it, now does it? sure it's nice to go in spoiler free, but if the gimmick of spoiling material is all a piece of media has, then that piece of media is meritless. you knew who luke skywalker's father was before you saw the movie. is it still worth watching? you knew romeo and juliet died before you read the play. is it still worth reading? do you not want to go on a journey? do you not want to feel something? do you not want to commiserate about the human experience through art? a wiki will never be comprehensive enough to cover everything you would have read or seen yourself--it can't be, not without being the thing itself. even then, you still miss the things not on the page/screen, the things that are only implied, the things that go unstated, or else conspicuously omitted. don't talk to me about shit haunting the narrative if the only haunting you've ever been apart of was your passing despite your dogshit analysis skills haunting the conscience of your eng 101 adjunct professor in perpetual fear of losing their contract and being relocated from their car to under a bridge by demanding college students demonstrate basic reading comprehension, critical thinking, and coherent argumentative skills. boast about killing the author? my friend, you are cain advancing in the fields, skulking, stepping in abel's footprints, filled with murderous intent, with nothing but the chinese telephone-equivalent of a description of a weapon cutting into your soft palms.

[o-wild-west-wind]

A Biracial Reading of OFMD, ft. Iggy’s Revenge Izcourse

a.k.a. I typed out a sentence that turned into an accidental essay of meta, whoops!

Y’all…I love this fandom to pieces, but I don’t think some of you realize why not all of us love Izzy/may be critiquing him. And major disclaimer—I am in NO WAY telling anyone to stop enjoying him as a character. This is NOT an anti-Izzy post (I will go into more detail on why I in fact encourage you to keep doing so later, and to the people who are sending unsolicited hate mail to Izzy fans & haters alike: please don’t!)—I’m just tired of seeing vitriolic hate against the people writing about him as an antagonist, or critiquing his actions based on canon, or post after post of “why don’t people love Izzy like I do!!” and then aggression when people explain their honest opinions. Look: we all have our skrungly little bad guys. I get it!! I’ve got my own collection!! I too have become a consumer and enjoyer of the Izzy fanon!!! PLEASE don’t take this as an attack—I just want to provide some personal, potentially fresh context from at least one (obviously non-exhaustive) perspective for those who want to know why Izzy isn’t universally adored, and also to make a plea for a safer fandom space where we can talk about our perspectives on these fictional characters without escalating to unnecessary vitriol, especially as s2 be upon ye (bc holy shit fandom is supposed to be fun, we’re having fun and that’s an order 😤)

(Oh, and I know I’m potentially stirring the pot with this post, but this should go without saying: don’t send each other death threats. What the fuck. Nobody do this?!)

So now that the legalize is out of the way: I want to share that the reason I initially imprinted on this show—and on Ed specifically—was because I’d never seen an explicitly biracial character treated with such complexity, nuance, and grace. While our ethnic makeups are vastly different, I too am half-white & half-brown—which means we’re absolutely nothing culturally alike, but our worlds view and treat us as pretty much the same regardless. And like Ed, my dad resents my mom and my racial makeup, and is prone to what I like to call “white violence.” Not going to overshare on the internet, but let’s just say that all this compounded makes Ed feel highly relatable to me (although for legal purposes I promise I have not krakened my dad 🙃).

When I first watched the show (and honestly also until my 3rd or 4th rewatch), Izzy IMMEDIATELY made me think of my dad. He also immediately made me think of Ed’s dad. Their mannerisms, word choices, and tones of voice; the obsessive need for control; the default of violence; the gradual dehumanization until an ultimate kraken-ifying breaking point—it all read to me like an intentional parallel. A shadow of white violence following Ed around that he hasn’t been able to shake, and mirroring to him the things he fears the most, including the things he fears within himself and feels forced to become (he is half-white after all, and this is a whole other post, but tl;dr there can be a lot of baggage that comes with being half-white/half-poc in regards to grappling with your toxic relationship to that white side of yourself, and especially if your white parent was racist and/or violent). And you can claim a different reading of all of this if you want (I genuinely mean that, like I’m in favor of meta & I think it’s great to analyze these things) BUT. that does not change the fact that I felt what I felt as a result of what was portrayed on screen and combined with my lived experience. Because fictional characters are just that—fictional—and are vessels by which you can process the world; we will always bring our personal lived experiences to anything we consume, and that’s okay—that can be the point, even. Art imitates life imitates art. Interpretation is the name of the game!

(more under the cut)

So when I watch this show, it’s a helpful tool for me to process my own feelings of being victimized by the white violence that’s followed me around my whole life, as well as the ways in which I’ve rebelled against it/tried to make peace with a non-toxic version of whiteness (in parallel to the more overt theme of masculinity, which is—ding ding—inexplicably tied to whiteness and western colonialism) via chaos, love, hurt, and sometimes giving up and giving in—and in this process, Izzy is a safe target. And you know why that is? Because he’s FICTIONAL. I can feel rage towards him because he’s NOT REAL. I can better understand and process the pain I’ve felt and rarely seen societally acknowledged by watching it paralleled on screen via actors and writers who have likely also grappled with similar feelings (I mean, I genuinely have made more progress with my personal biracial trauma via this show vs. years of therapy), and if I want to assume the worst of Izzy based on my interpretation of canon to help me through this? That’s fine! Because I can’t hurt his feelings and he can’t hurt mine!! Because he’s not real!!!

And here’s why I still support the Izzy-enjoyment: I am sure that many of the people who love Izzy and defend him to the ends of the earth probably feel a similar way that I do about Ed. It’s why we get all riled up and protective of these characters, why we might take attacks on them as attacks on ourselves; recognition of the self in the form of the other, and all that. Izzy is a vessel by which to safely work through the dark feelings and the pain you’ve bottled up—and he’s a safe way to do that because he’s FICTIONAL. And that’s a beautiful thing imo!! That’s truly the beauty of art—it is what we make of it, and what we make of it helps make ourselves better. It’s good to be open to interpretation.

HOWEVER: that does not give you permission to discount my relationship to this show (as I will not discount yours), and more importantly: that does NOT give you permission to reject the notion that canonically in s1, Izzy is literally and thematically (emphasis on thematically) an antagonist who is purposefully written to cause harm that can be interpreted as a hate crime, especially to those with lived experience of homophobia/racism/ableism/bullying/etc.—and you cannot harass people about this when conversing about theories of canon. If someone sees Izzy’s dialogue as cutting, degrading, and even triggering, that’s extremely fair of them to do so—clearly Ed was written to feel it that way! Con himself has paralleled Izzy with Judas! And can interpret it all differently? Sure! But you CANNOT assume that everyone else will, and then get upset when people don’t. I can’t believe I need to spell this out about an angry white guy in a show about toxic masculinity, but if someone does not like Izzy, it is likely due to a personal history of harassment (or worse) that he is reminiscent of; by making a point to defend him to someone—even if you are well-intentioned—you are very much putting salt in a wound.

I want to take this opportunity to further emphasize some tenets of fandom in general:

you can like characters who do horrible things without needing to jump hoops to argue their morals as pure 👏

conversely, you can critique their actions and still like them (encouraged, even) 👏

you can like characters who do horrible things simply because they’re cool and hot and interesting—don’t worry, we know it’s not the same as liking people like them irl 👏

your liking a villain archetype says nothing about your own moral virtue 👏

you can like horrible characters and see reasons for why they are the way they are/view them as tragic/note sympathetic dimensions of their personality/root for them to have redemption arcs while acknowledging that said redemption arc may not have happened in canon yet and that these are implicit, not explicit, readings of canon 👏

and you can also reimagine canon and change their contexts in fan works so that they ARE morally virtuous 👏 but PLEASE just be mindful and accountable when you do this in a context where not everyone will see a character the same way as you, and where multiple of people of marginalized identities have spoken out about the harm not doing so can cause. Just be honest, sincere, and kind, listen and learn, and don’t harass people for understandably needing space from a character that symbolizes something different to them than it does to you.

Also: blocking tags or people just because they have character opinions different than yours is totally okay and does not mean anything other than “I am curating my online space to have a better time,” it’s NOT personal

And most importantly: FANDOM IS FOR FUN! This isn’t our day job! We come to fandom to decompress. Don’t ruin people’s safe spaces!!!

Like I said, I’ve grown to enjoy Izzy over time thanks to fandom and fanon, and I think it’s fantastic that fandom can have such diversity in the way it interprets canon. I can’t wait for his probable redemption arc (it will likely be a healing thing to witness for many of us) and I’m truly glad that we can all have different relationships to the same characters. But please—when some of us need Izzy to be a punching bag, just let him be a punching bag. No, it’s not homophobic and DEFINTELY not misogynistic to view him as an obstacle in Ed and Stede’s relationship (baffled by the amount of times I’ve seen this take—it’s a funny joke but if you actually think Izzy is treated the way female characters related to other mlm ships have been treated, the point is very much going whoosh). You don’t have to engage; it’s not personal. It’s not about YOUR relationship with him—it’s about MINE. Please let me feel and even discuss rage towards him when I think about episode 10. Please let me throw as many sandwiches at his head as I need to. Because I PROMISE, it won’t hurt him—because he, and none of these characters, are real; and yet we, the fans, very much are.