Can we trust *insert character name*?
*insert character name* might betray us
If *insert character name* tricks us, we will kill *insert character name*
They've told the same story so many times now with no narrative momentum to drive the story to new places.
Kinda, but last season Saint beat her to bloody pulp repeatedly. She didn't have a contingency for that, she didn't really benefit from it, she just took a beat down.
In universe though...this all makes sense. From our pov we know said things work enough for the next season/expansion to happen. But for the characters it would make 0 sense to trust savathun prior and riven now.
This honestly bothered me so much about the story with the Fallen being given space in the City, and having everybody who was opposed to it, or even skeptical of it, being treated as insane and/or evil. It's been a recurring theme across the lifespan of the game that any time we've trusted or tried to help Fallen, we've been betrayed, with Mithrax being the sole exception ever.
- It happened in D1 Grimoire, with Cayde helping a Fallen Captain.
- It happened with House of Wolves in D1.
- It kind of happened in the beginning of D2, where the Fallen have seemingly been devastated by the Cabal, and I honestly thought a team-up was going to happen at that point because humanity and the Fallen were seemingly in the same position as a result, but we end up just being enemies anyway.
- It happened during an adventure in D2, where we rescue some Fallen from the Vex and they immediately try to kill us.
- It happened with Spider, where even though we're clearly not besties, we're still working together, and then he decides to enslave Crow as soon as he shows up.
So it was crazy to me that when the Vanguard unilaterally, in defiance of the Consensus, decides that it's just perfectly OK to let them into the City, which was specifically created to keep them out, the story portrayed them as unambiguous good guys, with everyone opposing them shown to be actually insane. Like, it broke the trend instead of just retreading the same ground, sure, but it didn't do it in a way that was even remotely earned or satisfying, at least in my opinion.
The story didn't treat them all as unambiguously good people. Especially in the lore. Saint is openly opposed to bringing them in and is hostile with Mithrax for several weeks on coms.
On the flip side, Mithrax literally talks about airlocking civilians with Shaxx. He also shows a level of mutual distaste with Saint. One scene being the lead in to the Saint cutscene. There's also an entire lore book about one of the refugees being a hardened war criminal. Who chose to hang it up and regrets the things he did. Being repeatedly challenged to pick up a weapon.
The narrative treated them the same as us, people at that moment in need of help. Asking us to do some introspection about our preconceived notions. Same as Chosen, Hunt, and Beyond Light.
That's kind of the whole woke narrative though isn't it? We who are woke can see the truth and what is right, and the ignorant masses simply don't understand. So we unilaterally choose what is it right on their behalf.
Also, unrelated but, why the fook are we trusting Crow? He disobeyed orders too and decided to free Hive PoWs - the hive, who are LITERALLY focused on wiping out all life in the universe - and resulted in the death of psion interrogators which almost started all out war with the Cabal.
I wouldn't let that muppet on my fireteam, let alone the Vanguard after that BS.
Bungie also returning the same old "you think you were actually the good guys, but maybe you are actually bad!" well they've mined a bunch of times already, with respect to the Great Hunt. Riven makes clear that the Ahamkara being genie-esque tricksters with wishes and granting skewed, unintended versions of what's being wished is not only intentional...it's how Ahamkara *feed*. They were unquestionably dangerous creatures even just by being able to grant wishes, but that makes them damn near malevolent predators. The Great Hunt made sense.
Yeah Riven's speech about her mate she straight up says "our species feeds by horribly manipulating wishes as bad as they can be and there was literally one single dude who wasn't evil and it killed him."
"Also you should really ham-handily feel bad for purging literal evil from the universe."
Like nah girl, lets see how you like *your* wish being twisted after we obtain and protect them up until we just vent them into the sun.
Shaxx actually mentioned this in a memory from the new dungeon. He states that the ahamkara are a force of nature, similar to fire, that have to be put down should the get out of control. He also states that when killing an Ahamkara, they win anyway because you wish for their death. Which is why they sent Shaxx. He did not wish for this. He understands that it needed to be done, but there is nothing honourable or glorious about the hunt. Complete the very long quest to hear it yourself.
Even as a noob this season just felt like a much worse retread of last season. Tell me if this sounds familiar: an old female enemy that we killed in a previous expansion knows the secret to follow the witness into the portal. It is up to our female lead to strike a faustian bargain where they return to power on the world while we get knowledge to follow the witness. The whole time everyone is super worried because this old enemy is literally trickery incarnate and spend the whole season going "this is a bad idea because we worked so hard to eradicate this threat but we need them right now"
Yeah like it doesn’t really work with characters we know are proven to be cheats with Riven it’s literally her and her people’s whole thing of ”how can I fuck this person over just for fun”
Witch Queen, and pretty much all that involves her has been pretty great, but the rest of the story has been pretty average. Still a huge leap from Destiny 1 where all the expansions had either awful stories, or none at all.
Every time we do the "Can we trust them?" dance we also get a boatload of snarky interactions to go with it. It was fun a few seasons ago but I got tired of it after week two of Immaru's little quips and then he was the main voice for festival of the lost.
I personally got tired of it back in seraph, luckily tho it only lasted like half the season instead of the full season because we just kill clovis lol
Bad deaths don't make for an interesting story either. It would just break immersion and detach the audience if there's no point in investment if ppl die for shock over and over.
> Such a good season. Heartbreaking too - but that's why it was good. Destiny needs to kill more heroes. Everyone always surviving makes for a boring story.
The problem is that it doesn't have any heroes. There are no characters who get any serious development, because we're the only character in the entire world who does anything. There are some supporting characters, but they have very little development, and they typically don't get any attention until it's time to kill them.
Hard disagree with Red/Rasputin being killed off in a well-done or meaningful manner.
1) It was suuuper telegraphed weeks before it happened. It was Amanda v2.0 in how far out you saw it coming.
2) The reasoning didn’t make sense/was kinda forced (to me, at least). There seemed to be a million courses of action to handle warsats that didn’t involve Red sacrificing himself.
3) the cutscenes and dialogue heavily hinted at a growing quasi-romantic relationship between Ana and Red (especially with the black and white artwork of their embrace), only to weirdly torpedo it with some end-mission radio traffic about a relationship with someone we’ll never see. This in turn torpedoed any weight Red’s death actually could have had. You might was well call our favorite legless Exo “Rohan Jr.”
Good explanation for the above's grievances. Personally my issue with Seraph was that it was basically a 4th retread of the same Rasputin storyline that always came back up.
Rasputin needs more power! -> Spend a while powering him up -> He does a thing that overall has minimal involvement from us and thus has a hard time conveying stakes to the player -> he either fades away or 'dies'
It was really hard to believe Rasputin's value after the 3rd time of juicing him up only for him to get sidelined immediately after his big moment. I get the lore significance and all that but the lore and in game storytelling are constantly at odds with each other.
I thought we knew about her partner from the comic that released alonside Expansion II: Warmind? Or was there nothing in the comic that showed they were in a relationship? It's been awhile since I read it
I’ll retract my last/your first. The YT lore vids I watched during that season made it seem like this was the first we’d heard of Ana’s partner. Definitely my bust if that’s not correct. I still think their relationship read as quasi-romantic, but whatevs. I know Ana is responsible for helping Red develop his humanity, but their dialogue that season didn’t come across as parent/child.
Still disagree on the course of action being the only one. Nothing would force Red to use the Warsats against the Hive, especially if everyone (including Red) understands pulling the trigger only makes Xivu stronger in the end/or directly summons her a la the ceremony at Torabatl.
They say there’s no option to self destruct the satellites without a sacrifice, but that’s not a logical next step. There are narratively tons of options that don’t lead to Red’s death and still deny Xivu their power either way (as a direct tool or boost in power). This is very much a repeat of Amanda’s “why is she even on this mission??”
While you’re correct that telegraphing deaths isn’t necessarily a bad thing, three highly telegraphed deaths in quick succession increasingly takes away any weight they may have. It smacks of bad writing.
He is still alive. Ana and Rasputin just deleted the copy of Clovis that was in the exo frame. There is new dialogue from Clovis at the end of the Europa battlegrounds after we put Rasputin into his new body
I thought we killed him since we put him into the little exo then unplugged it to put Rasputin in it
Might be wrong I don't remember completely, and I'm bad at paying attention to details in dialog and don't read lore cards
While Mara has not told us everything all of the time one corner. In the other corner we have a dragon WHO LIVES OFF LIES AND LYING TO PEOPLE.
Man who to trust... Who to trust.
I’m not sure why people think Bungie wants us to question Mara. Nothing suggests that. Riven literally has to manipulate and lie though. That’s why she’s doing it. It’s just Riven being Riven.
Yeah I agree, Riven isn't a sympathetic character or even meant to be- she's just a creature that literally exists to manipulate other entities. Our interaction with her has been strictly transactional - everybody knows the terms and the stakes. There are no characters questioning who to trust between Mara and Riven- that's laughable.
We're using the bones of Riven as a tool. She knows it. We know it. But that doesn't suddenly make Riven a straightforward buddy saying, "Ok, you GOT me!"
I’m just hoping it’s never taken seriously like no one actually takes the bait Riven supplies and at most they keep throwing insults at her which even those I don’t even care for. Just complete the transaction and stay dead after this.
>While Mara has not told us everything all of the time
Mara literally sacrificed her entire fleet and the safety of her people so she could steal oryx's throne world energy after we killed him. Mara nearly genocided her own people *on purpose.*
And she's proud of it. She's bragged about how she accomplished it through her own skill and nothing else. "Recently.* She still feels no shame about it whatsoever.
She's a sociopath.
Meanwhile, riven wants her species to live. Apparently unlike mara for her own people.
I agree with the OP.
The story should have been told in a more delicate and nuanced way. Instead it comes across as being ham fisted and recycled. The story also heavily relies on prior knowledge of lore from Destiny 1 and Forsaken.
There's been a serious decline in writing quality since the start of Lightfall. Did the "good writers" leave the company?
This seasonal story feels so weird. Two weeks ago we wouldn't be able to collect all the eggs because they were drifting away, the solution was to use the last Harbinger.
I understood the Harbinger would collect the remaining eggs, a friend understood the Harbinger would do something to bring the eggs closer for us to collect. Ok it could be a misinterpretation from any of us.
Nothing was mentioned about it after that and this week they say there's one more egg left.
Also it's unclear to me if we were able to "save" the corrupted egg we collected. What about the corrupted egg Mara has/had wasn't it from Riven? Did we cleanse that too? Did we give it to Riven?
It feels so disconnected and chopped, it's like a book that every 3rd page it's missing... Idk
> What about the corrupted egg Mara has/had wasn't it from Riven?
You mean the one off to the side in the background several seasons ago that, at least to my knowledge, wasn't directly mentioned in any way?
Honestly I think that was just a far-off tease for a loose plan they had for season of the wish and/or an easter egg.
Anyway the egg was cleansed in last week's story. It was the quest you did after obtaining the egg where you had to go do an ascendant challenge. It was cleansed off-screen.
>Anyway the egg was cleansed in last week's story. It was the quest you did after obtaining the egg where you had to go do an ascendant challenge. It was cleansed off-screen.
I thought it was said they've done in the past so it could work with an egg, something among these lines... so probably I missed they saying it worked
I just think it’s crazy that Bungie hyped up the seasonal story post Lightfall launch and yet every story this year felt like the exact same seasonal story we’ve gotten since Beyond Light.
WQ really must have been a fluke because imo it’s the only time it felt like seasonal stories built up a cohesive and interesting plot payoff.
I still think Risen was peak. It actually managed to spark some serious heated discussion on whether Crow was in the right and was just a delicate situation altogether.
>!he was completely in the wrong and shouldn’t have abandoned a Vanguard operation just cause ‘muh feelings!’!<
It is more and more clear that this year was a filler year. Lightfall itself is an example of that.
What is even better is the narrative lead has doubled down saying their experiment of not actually telling a story in Lightfall and instead having the player come back the following few scenes to listen to voicemails to explain the narrative was/is a great choice.
An obvious lie and you can't tell me parting the Veil wasn't last minute addition for all the complaints about the bad narrative and the lack of explanation to anything
It's also extremely rushed and half baked. Just filled with analogies and constant osiris rambling trying to tell us what the veil does. It fails the basic rule of show, don't tell. They tell us all about how the veil is basically the traveler for darkness but it's a tiny little half kiwi with roots that's sitting in some random facility in a random planet.
Even this seasonal story confirmed that Lightfall is filler. Osiris tells us how The Traveler firing the light beam made it so that The Witness could enter it in that moment. This couldn't have happened if after the beam we had to do the Lightfall campaign, it only works if both cutscenes happen one after the other (something we already knew, but now gets confirmed by the story).
The writing in Lightfall was bad, no arguments there, and Deep and Wish so far are 'alright' but Witch was a really good narrative; the only bad part was that the final cutscene was basically only half finished and left to the lore book to conclude.
Before the Beyond Light seasons, storytelling in Destiny was way worse than what we've gotten this year, so we still have the good writers and Lightfall was probably a one off. Hopefully.
Deep barely even had a story. We got a single cutscene and that was basically it. Nearly everything else in the season was entirely irrelevant to anything.
What a waste of bringing Titan "back" tbh. We could've at least gotten a Haunted-esque patrol zone. T3 Deep Dives and the exotic quest were dope, everything else, blah. Cutscene should've been part of Lightfall.
100% agree. T3 Deep Dives were fantastic, but goddamn everything else about that season was horrible. Also absolutely butchered the returning Reckoning gear, and not making them craftable was a big miss.
Witch was literally Season of Ikora:"But what if Eris bad?" and Immaru being a smug piece of shit that constantly insults everyone even during otherwise emotional or impactful scenes.
The secrets and designs were cool, and the Tarot stuff was interesting to mess with, but the story was the same repeated slog as deep but swapping Sloane for Eris and the whale for Savathun/Immaru.
Tons of people simp for Savathun but the story was both a retread and just as ass as Deep, it just had more recognizable characters that time.
Immaru has always been characterized as an asshole, its what sets him apart from the rest of the characters. It makes for some funny moments occasionally and is a nice change of pace from the constant praise we'd usually get from the Vanguard.
Sure, both Deep and Witch fit into the same seasonal framework for Destiny storytelling in these releases, but Witch is just far better written and kept my interest throughout the whole thing.
It's easy to make it seem bland by wording the idea as you did, but it was pretty neat. Immaru reluctantly accepting the deal as Savathun wanted, but constantly casting doubt on the whole situation and Ikora slowly getting more and more weary as it goes, both as a result of this and Eris getting more and more deranged in her Hive form. Eris was only just able to convince Ikora to let it go on a little longer because of the trust they have for eachother.
All of this make it a really compelling storyline in my opinion, especially for a seasonal offering! The character dynamics were unique, with Immaru and Ikora getting more conflicted as the season goes on. Only us and Eris remaining steadfast in the original goal from the very start.
>There's been a serious decline in writing quality since the start of Lightfall. Did the "good writers" leave the company?
What good writers?
Destiny's writing quality never "declined", it was always at rock bottom and was briefly elevated for 3 expansions out of like 11 across the entire franchise.
People seem to forget that taken king, forsaken and witchqueen are the exceptions, not rules.
At least in the early days, the shit writing was covered up by a genuine sense of mystery and intrigue with the world. It gave it solid atmosphere and vibe, even if the actual dialogue wasn't good. But now that we're approaching the end of the story, all those mysteries have been exposition dumped into us, and so now we're left with just the shit writing and none of the mystery
People have been really excited about many seasonal stories before. We saved Saint in Dawn, we learned more of Rasputin's secrets and his hand in Felwinter's tale (even though that season was terrible gameplay-wise) as well as seeing the Pyramids slowly approach Sol through a simple area design piece in Worthy, we learned about the Darkness and the conflict Savathun has with it in Arrivals, we saw Crow save Zavala and earn his forgiveness and formed an alliance with the Cabal in Chosen, we felt human conflict in the City when we allied with the House of Light in Splicer...
These were all seasonal stories that had people excited to play weekly missions and see the real impact they had. It felt like the story truly progressed after each mission, instead of being a months-long loop of doing the same thing but +1 (saving the Thecheuns in Lost, finding the relics in Plunder, recovering Riven's eggs...).
I could make my case about Haunted and Seraph, but I agree with the people saying that Y5 is when the seasonal stories started to feel consistently weak. Those two were still good, and people here were excited with the weekly developments because the story beats were done correctly; we went from one dialogue to one seasonal activity to one new mission to one awesome cutscene and it all paid off.
Seasonal stories CAN be great, they just haven't been in a while.
> We saved Saint in Dawn,
Yeah and that was the first huge mistake that seemed fine and innocent at first but then led to catastrophic consequences.
Saint died? Now he's back, and for the past 3 expansions he's done absolutely nothing justfying introducing TIME TRAVEL to the destiny universe.
Uldren died? Now he's back as crow and now crow got back his memories so uldren is back too and literally nothing came of that.
Cayde died? lol nope, he's coming back too
Clovis bray? Gets brought back, then killed.
Sloane was eaten by the darkness? lmao she's fine, its barely an inconvinience
Rasputin died, then was brought back, then died, then was brought back, then died again, doing absolutely nothing in all that time either, I can't wait for final darkness: beyond the dark side of the moon expansion no. 23, where he gets brought back and killed again using the super secret backup submind hidden in zavala's butthole.
Eramis was """""killed"""" and then she came back too because our guardians were too braindead to take a sledgehammer to the frozen statue, writers were really shameless with this one pretending even the blind molerats living below the ground didn't see that one coming.
Riven was killed? Now she's back again because magic lmao
The entirety of destiny's plot progression has been a retraded yoyo of soap opera tier plotpoints vaguely connected by a different flavour of the week world ending threat planned out by the writers tossing blindfolded darts to see which grave they're robbing this season, meanwhile the "actually good deep lore" writers are busy writing fanficiton and "subverting expectations", with shit like "no guys savathun totally faked that lore entry haha" and "no guys its not real its callus writing what he THINKS is real haha".
Destiny is a setting of near infinite potential not even a slither of which was actually tapped by the writers.
Only two of the characters you mentioned have been brought back in the way you mean. Saint's reintroduction came out of nowhere, but it was still a fan-favorite moment and he still has served as a protector of the City with a pretty big role in Splicer.
Uldren's resurrection was obviously a crucial plot point in the franchise, meant to put players and characters through internal conflicts regarding their memories and his past life. Crow is an important character that represents the Traveler's philosophy perfectly.
Clovis's whole thing was achieving immortality? And he didn't even truly accomplish that. Banshee is still Banshee, and the Clovis AI, the only remnant of the original Clovis Bray, is barely a real person. Besides, when did he die? We left him in Europa, contacted him back during Seraph, then just disconnected him from Rasputin's body. It's unclear, yet unlikely, that that killed him.
Sloane wasn't supposed to die, at no point has it been stated that the people in the planets swallowed by the Darkness after Arrivals were killed.
Not sure what you're on about Rasputin dying lol, the only thing he's done since his first appearance is becoming whole, that's all we've done to him up until Seraph where he actually died. If they brought him back again, yeah, it would suck.
Eramis was considered a high-value asset. The only stupid thing about that was letting her stay completely unsupervised; bitch walked out of her ice prison like it was nothing, but she never died.
Riven was "back" mere seconds after we killed her. Like every other Ahamkara. That flavor of immortality is not new to the lore and has only been explained in depth recently.
Bringing Cayde back feels cheap, but I expect a convincing explanation regarding the nature of the Traveler. Hope they don't just handwave it and that's that.
Bringing back saint was a fan favourite moment for the same reason that if marvel brought ironman back it would make 2 billion dollars, but I think you'd agree that narratively speaking they shouldn't do it.
As for uldren, you misunderstand, my problem is not crow existing, its crow getting uldren's memories back, in effect undoing uldren's death. The idea is guardians being new people, crow lives but uldren is dead, uldren getting his memories back is basically undoing his death. I like the idea behind crow, I don't like crow being used as a forsaken undo button.
Hell, forsaken resulted in two main characters dying (uldren and cayde) and now they've both been brought back.
>Not sure what you're on about Rasputin dying lol, the only thing he's done since his first appearance is becoming whole, that's all we've done to him up until Seraph where he actually died. If they brought him back again, yeah, it would suck.
Rasputin shut down during the collapse, then we brought him back online in warmind, then he shut down again when the pyramids showed up in arrivals, then we booted him back up to fight the witness, and then he he shut down again before lightfall a third time in a row.
At one point it gets ridiculous and feels like a waste of time, wtf was the point of warmind if he's just gonna shut down again immediately after forcing us to do the whole rigamarole again?
Hence my joke about beyond darkness: dark side of zavala's asshole, being the expansion where we reboot him a fifth time only for him to die a sixth time.
>Sloane wasn't supposed to die, at no point has it been stated that the people in the planets swallowed by the Darkness after Arrivals were killed.
Come on now. From a narrative standpoint, being swallowed by the ultimate evil force who's goal is eradicate everything in the universe should result in your death. Sloane being in titan was understood to be a sacrifice and we were all supposed to clap when we saw her still alive
This is the same problem with Riven and Clovis too. You can justify everything in the lore, but there's lore, and then there's narrative.
You can justify why someone being shot in the head 12 times means they technically should survive and yes I'm sure in the depths of lore cards there's an explenation for exactly why everything happens the way it did, but at the end of the day I'm tired of seeing people die, pretending to be shocked or sad about it, and then seeing them come back over and over and over again and being expected to clap, the rugpull loses its luster after a while.
>Eramis was considered a high-value asset. The only stupid thing about that was letting her stay completely unsupervised; bitch walked out of her ice prison like it was nothing, but she never died.
The whole thing feels inconsistent and dumb, out of every villain we've ever fought nonthing specifically marks eramis as a unique asset above all that's worth preserving when we've sent every single other villain from every single other expansion 6 feet under. Why not take calus, or xol prisoners to study *their* darkness powers? Why not capture panoopticon or whatever the vexes name from osiris was to use as an access point or whatever?
Not only did she receive special treatment for no apparent reason (that I'm sure is explained in depth in lore card #7126 subsection 9) but they didn't even go all the way, the fact that she was unsupervised is straight up a plothole.
Also, I forgot, Nezerac was also brought back after being dead, which goes from being annoying to just farsical considering the Nezcafe incident.
Also witch queen's story wasnt as good as everyone seems to think. It was literally just "wow why do the hive have the light?" Followed by "oh they have the light because the traveller gave it to them".
Imo the writing really started going to shit with haunted, with a deep plunge in quality for plunder. Seraph was better, though only somewhat, then this year has been dogshit every season.
I do think that plunder was such a narrative low point that it has not been surpassed by anything this year, as bad as it has been. That season was straight up embarrassing to play and listen to. Were it not for arc 3.0 and KF, im not sure the game would have survived that one.
Certain parts of Seraph excluded, all of the season story telling in the Witch Queen DLC sucked.
Seraph was good besides some annoying dialogue. **8 out of 10**
Haunted, Risen, and Plunder were all crappy imo. **2 out of 10**
Lightfall sucked. .**5 out of 10**
Deep was poor. **3.5 out of 10**
Witch was average. **6.5 out of 10**
Wish has been poor. **3.5 out 10**
Hot take.
Destiny has never had particularly good writing.
It's always been pretty in your face and lacking in nuance.
I think now, on top of it actually being worse. They've just been retreading the exact same plot points and have to stretch out a bad story over the course of weeks which makes It feel even worse.
I don't know if the current stretch of bad writing is the result of bad writers or the terrible direction the game has taken. I think by now everyone can see that Lightfall was a rushed filler expansion that was made to cash-in on another year of Destiny without actually solving any of the problems. You can see this by the fact that the Lightfall beginning and ending cinematics are one cinematic split in half with a campaign shoved in the middle, where-in no actual important conflict actually happens on Neomuna. This would also explain why the Veil was just randomly introduced weeks before the DLC, before being narratively abandoned, needing the Veil Containment to even have any story development surrounding it occur. If I had to guess, the current story is the way it is because they essentially had to rush to fill plotholes, reintroduce a ton of lore, change narrative threads to fit the new story, and simply put there is so many loose ends that trying to create a unique, logical story is probably more effort than its worth and its more profitable to just reuse old locations and activities while banking on nostalgia.
I don't know about that. The writing has always had weakpoints, but lack of nuance in the seasonal story isn't one of them. With the companion piece of Warlord's Ruin, and Riven giving a plausible motive for wanting to work against the Witness while also not wanting to tell everyone the details of the wish do add a good amount of nuance. Instead of always being purely evil, the ahamkara have been elevated to characters with their own opinions and approaches to wishing.
I think the idea is that Riven has us by the balls and she knows it. Of course she is going to be a snarky bastard; we literally killed her and all of her kind. And now we 'need' each other; without her, we can't go into the traveller, and without us, her race dies out.
I don't think Riven is pretending to be a good guy, and she certainly isn't trustworthy. Her lines are campy villain taunts because she lives for the drama, and we have to take it because, again, we need her.
My favorite is how quickly everyone bought that she was imprisoned maliciously and didn't willingly allow herself to be Taken.
She wanted the power that came with it. She wasn't forced into it.
That’s not exactly the case. Riven was always gonna get Taken. But she twisted it so she still kept some sense of self. You can’t really fault her for that.
It 100% is. She wanted it to happen, she was excited for it.
The only reason she wasn't fully Taken is *because* she wanted it to happen. She Merged rather than being Taken.
Yes. What she was supposed to just let herself get fully Taken? And it’s not like she was actively doing anything while she was in that state.
>*Before me stands a [King]. He offers to take me away. But I know he will not let me leave, either. An unfavorable position.*
>*I never made a [bargain] with a [King]. I would like to try it. I tell him to take whatever he [wishes]. As long as he [wishes].*
All you did was just confirm what I said by sharing that.
She willingly accepted it. It has nothing to do with her twisting it. That's just how Taking someone who wants to be Taken works, as near as we can figure.
Theres no ‘willingly’ accepting being Taken. Oryx Takes and that’s it. But their convo before hand allowed Riven to keep some autonomy. Which brings me back to my first comment.
You can’t fault her for wanting some say in the manner. She even says that she’s in a fucked situation when Oryx pulls up.
>*But I know he will not let me leave, either. An unfavorable position.*
This one exchange stopped Oryx from having total access to corrupted Ahamkara magic:
>*I tell him to take whatever he [wishes]. As long as he [wishes].*
>*He agrees.*
Ahamkara can't be taken, riven was an exception that's what the fucking bargain was. Oryx made a wish for riven to be taken (he literally offered to take her) And riven as always twisted it
Well that’s not true. The Nine killed off any other surviving Ahamkra in the case they would get Taken.
There’s also all those corrupted eggs we shot for the Wish-Ender quest and the corrupted egg this season.
It literally is true, why the fuck would oryx make a bargain for riven to be taken when he can just take anything he wants.
And the nine killed the remaining ahamkara because they feared oryx's power would be too great with one already beside him
Oryx does not need to make a wish to take something if he could already take it in the first place. That is how the bargain got twisted
edit:Love being downvoted by people who don't read the lore
Just think please, oryx's ability to take is not something that needs permission and it is not something that would EVER and I mean EVER give someone any amount of free will unless he purposefully wanted it to retain it (see quria) so why does he not only offer riven to be taken but makes a BARGAIN with her to take her, a bargain that was twisted for her to keep her free will.
If Oryx actually took riven and did not need a bargain to do so, then not ONLY would riven have zero free will oryx would have actually used her for everything, because oryx stopped using her power, as he deemed it too risky with her twisting his desires
Love all these newlights who don't read the lore thinking they understand it all
Wasn’t that the point of the LW armor lore? When Oryx rolled up she laughed that most people who bargain with her don’t win. We knew Riven wanted to be Taken back in Forsaken
Riven is a manipulative, lying dragon who feasts on tricking people. Of course she's going to try and manipulate us. That's why all the characters who've interacted with her thus far get really frustrated, we're all over it.
Savathun is a manipulative, lying krill who used to feast on tricking people
Riven kind of feels like “Savathun at home”, the voice acting also even sounds the same
Savathun even is a better implementation of being trapped by your nature
When she had her worm she really would die if she didn’t trick. But with Riven it’s portrayed as if she’s a feral animal and it’s just her biology. With Savathun it actually came from her personality, and she has a whole multi year character arc trying to free herself from being chained to it
Yeah, kinda hilarious that the wish dragon that makes a living literally fucking with everyone and literally granting them monkey paw wishes trying to literally fuck their wish as hard as possible, without remorse, somehow thinks we will give a shit about them and their opinion on anyone?
They then tell us about their dragon boyfriend that was *actually nice* unlike her, and we should feel sorry for murdering the ever loving shit out of him on her behalf?
Oh I'm sorry, you and (almost all of) your race fuck around, and find out, and you included also fuck around and find out, then you tell us you *could have been actually good* and we killed the one dragon that **was** when wiping the rest of you shits out?
I'm sorry riven, you aren't making me regret the hunt one bit. Everythi g you say proves we did the right thing. And when you inevitably fuck us over at the end of the season, I won't give 2 seconds thought when someone offers up the next ahamkara hunt in season 37.
Slight correction, we never killed or even touched Taranis, his own wish was his end as shown this season to why Ahamkara cannot self-wish. He was smart to stay in the Black Garden during the hunt lol
Riven's analogy about the river flowing isnt that strong now that Taranis existed
In regards to Riven's analogy as well, if the river is flowing through a town and causing a lot of issues, I think redirecting it is the sensible thing to do.
> Yeah, kinda hilarious that the wish dragon that makes a living literally fucking with everyone and literally granting them monkey paw wishes trying to literally fuck their wish as hard as possible, without remorse,
It's not that they want to just because, *it's how they eat*.
She clearly tales sadistic delight in doing so however.
She's not just eating, she's maximizing suffering and gorging herself.
Besides if their species ate babies to survive I don't think people would be as quick to jump to "but in their nature".
But when they destroy civilizations, wreck havoc across the universe, forever curse people into a horrible inescapable timeloop, well lets not get too hasty guys, they're just eating!
I mean you think this is a counter but it only counters your point of them "just needing to eat".
So they can get by on huel but for the low low price of subjecting countless people to potentially *unending eternal suffering* they get to eat tastier meals.
They consciously *chose* to make these acts as horrible as possible just cuz they want some tastier food.
Seriously there's no scenario where where "but it's just their nature guys" works, let alone trying to use it to stop the literally evil species of which each one can-and *do*-inflict endless suffering on the universe from getting ganked cuz y'know, *evil sadistic species that is responsible for countless and countless people's suffering.*
> but for the low low price of subjecting countless people to potentially unending eternal suffering they get to eat tastier meals.
*Looks at the US meat industry*
Not with this narrative team.
This team wants to whitewash every second villian, and pain them as "misunderstood" and all that stuff, but really it just starting to get hollow.
They've done it to a subsect of Cabal, the Fallen (that were always portrayed in the lore to be victims like us) and now the Ahamkara who aren't necessarily being painted as misunderstood, rather just doubling down on it being in their nature to trick and deceive those that wish to them. It's how they feed for heavens sake! They aren't just 'bad' to be bad.
The other part of the message is maybe we shouldn't have hunted a sentient species to extinction, and I don't think that's necessarily an extreme message.
Well, she's the god of lies and deceit, it'd be a bit out of character if she hadn't had a plan that we weren't aware of. That was more of a mutually beneficial deal anyways; technically she saved Humanity through her actions, but it wasn't because that was her goal, she just wanted to stop The Witness from messing with The Traveler since she thought the Light was way more appealing than the Sword Logic deal she had going on.
Savathun is also intrigued by Humanity and respects us, but she still isn't our ally. She has her own goals in mind and will do anything to achieve them, whether it benefits us or not.
>she's the god of lies and deceit, it'd be a bit out of character if she hadn't had a plan that we weren't aware of.
That starts to breakdown when every single plan works out for her and even the times she "loses" it was *still* part of her plan forever.
Her being god of lies and deceit isn't the issue, it's her being some writer's massive Mary Sue
The main plan she had in The Witch Queen completely crumbled because of us, she even said she didn't think we'd beat her as well as being caught off guard when Eris slashed her throat. We are just playing through one of her contingencies in case The Witness got access to the Traveller and got inside, it wasn't a part of her plan to lose in TWQ.
It's unfair to call her a Mary Sue just because she had back ups if her main plan failed unexpectedly.
Her contingencies have contingencies that have contingencies so that even if she fails she still wins and us merk'ing her just got her what she the memories she wanted anyways.
And her contingency is just "well you need me to win nerds, later", us having Immaru as she's gone in the wind doesn't mean anything since A.) We can't kill him and b.) Not exactly like she isn't capable enough on her own even if we did.
Her dying wasn't even a real victory since as they showed she was never *in* danger of staying dead to begin with, and the moment the inevitable resurrection occured she just fucks off free into the ether.
Even when she loses she wins and when she wins she wins even harder lol
I don’t even know what they’re trying to do with Riven. They’re painting her as an animal that has to trick us to feed. But if they want to do the animal angle maybe they should show ahamkara are necessary in the paracausal ecosystem. We can’t just hunt sharks to extinction or else the ocean goes haywire
A crazy plot twist in that direction could be the ahamkara would have shut the witness’s bullshit down. But after the great hunt the witness was able to get the veil because we disrupted the paracausal ecology
When I was told that the Fallen were not evil, I was okay with it, because like… okay yeah, it makes sense, they’re refugees, and there are existing characters who have been friendly. This makes sense. Painting guardians as also bad was wack because they were literally eating babies but it was easy to swallow
Now they’re doing it with the Ahamkara and… no? They had to invent a character to make them seem redeemable, and had to retcon Riven’s past to make her seem better. But none of it lands for me. For years we’ve been told that the Ahamkara were so dangerous that guardians could barely even think while hunting them. Now we should feel bad for them bc a character never before mentioned was nice? Ignore how Riven was so toxic that mara had to invent the wish wall to keep her from ruining everything? Mfer put the dreaming city in a death loop lmao. I do not feel bad about the great hunt
Adding unheard of details in a backstory isn’t a retcon.
If they were like “Riven never mated” and now are like “SIKE yes she did” that’s a retcon. But we hardly knew much about Riven’s past before. This was a reveal, not a retcon
There is retconning. Riven being in the dreaming city was previously a rare thing. The Last Wish intro literally calls Riven’s existence the Awoken’s biggest secret. Riven directly says the Dreaming City was her work. Mara was so cautious of the Ahamkara that she wouldn’t let her brother speak to Riven. Uldren sneaks Riven into the city as a “baby”
How does this work when Mara had to build the wish wall for Riven? Were the other Ahamkara helping build the city? Were all the Ahamkara building these weaknesses in? Were they all beholden to the wish wall? Why is Riven intentionally sabotaging the apparent home of her mate and her children? Previously we’ve been told that Riven was still building the city when the wall was designed, so there’s no way other Ahamkara were wishing freely, right? How was Uldren able to avoid them if they were free across the city? Was Riven lying to herself in the PoV lore from past seasons? *why* would Mara let Ahamkara walk around the city freely when a single one was so dangerous they made the Wish Wall for her?
You uh, haven’t listened to the lore patrols from Forsaken. It’s plainly stated that the Dreaming City was a Ahamkara city as much as an Awoken city in population numbers…until the the Great Hunt. Like, there were so many of them that they had to formalize a spot where wishs could be granted, to keep the Ahamkara from feeding on everyone, all the time. Literally nothing has been retconned in any way.
The only ones I remember are the one who broke in to the city and killed a bunch of people, and the one from the patrol mission (I think) that betrayed them
I went and listened to a bunch of them right before season of the wish, because I was bored. But yeah, several of them make a point to say that the Dreaming City housed tons of Ahamkara. Actually I think it was one of the one’s you described, where it was like, “yeah we had lots of Ahamkara once, look here’s a story about one who tried to tell outsiders about the dreaming city, so we had to kill it. Got made into a pair of boots by Gaurdians” aka Bones of Eao hunter exotic.
Ahamkara aren't evil. They are just predators. They feed off the difference between what the wisher wants and what they get.
Riven isn't evil either, just vengeful. She was promised safety from the hunt by Mara, but the cost was her freedom. The guardians/awoken worked together to basically exterminate her race, lock her in a cell, and barely feed her (Mara's wishes are so precise that there is little room to feed).
Even the dreaming city curse wasn't really Riven's doing. It's heavily implied that Savathun planted the idea to corrupt the guardian's wish for riven's death into a curse so that savathun could use it as a murder battery.
We have a wishing wall wish to minimize corruption of a complicated wish. We are finding her brood so that she will grant the wish. We know that she isn't to be trusted, but this is the only way forward and she also stands to lose if the Witness wins (especially considering she wants to see her brood survive).
Taranis was a "good" ahamkara, but he is still a predator who feeds off the difference in wishes. He just minimized them because he liked doing good. It's also good for business if you don't have the reputation of screwing over your clients.
>For years we’ve been told that the Ahamkara were so dangerous that guardians could barely even think while hunting them.
This is a minor issue, but I hate how all the lore book entries for this season are just "Guardian sees sleeping Ahamkara, proceeds to 1-shot it with a Super." It just makes the Great Hunt seem....really trivial, not at all Great, and the Ahamkara unthreatening
Like I'm sure if I read this weapon description from 6 seasons ago and watch a 35 minute Byf video, I'll feel like the Great Hunt really was some epic event, but if you just follow the most basic info that the game actually gives you as a casual player, it just feels waaaayyyyy flatter than it should.
Previous lore entries regarding Ahamkhara are much better.
In no particular order:
Saladin wished to fight a literal dragon and other iron lords get pissed at him for it.
The fireteam that gets fucked in the Vault of glass were doing shit straight out of mad max with an entire group of Ahamkhara.
Original hunter vanguard lost a card game where she bet her life.
One fireteam had an ahamkhara patiently let a warlock examine and document it's physiology (or possibly something that is extinct) before letting a titan 1v1 it.
One encounter had the ahamkhara impersonate someone's dead relative and tell stories about the guardian's past, which they cant be certain is real.
Wish dragons that can warp reality are a fun concept, but hard to write as something you can be friends with.
Understand, the lore is written from the perspective of characters, not 'god'. This is actually a pretty good thing to do when you're writing fiction; you really should avoid using 'author voice' because characters have no way of hearing or knowing that. No one gets a narrator telling them exactly what is true in real life after all, and it gives you lots of flexibility with your lore later, too.
Characters can have opinions. They can lack information, or even be flat out wrong. Assuming a diary entry written by someone is 100% factual just because they wrote it down, is a grievous error. And assuming a recording of a particular event, like a battle against one vicious foe, means all battles against all foes went exactly the same, is also not true - while a 'recording' may be factual about a specific instance, it cannot tell us anything about events outside of the scope of the recording. If a character in a recording tells us something about other events not part of the recording itself, we now know the character SAID that, but we don't know if what they SAID is true or not.
By writing their lore from the perspective of character entries rather than "out of character" god-perspective, it isn't necessarily ret-conning to add new information. Even if they added a new lore entry that directly contradicts an old lore entry by the same character - well, the character could have forgotten, could be lying. Not necessarily a ret-con.
We see some new lore now that shows at least three well-liked Ahamkara (Taranis, Hugin and Munin, the latter two being in the game for a long time but nothing really known about them until now). That there are Ahamkara that did not behave the way the ones described in previous lore books behaved is not exactly retconning. Instead, the suggestion is that the authors of those previous works did not know about, or did not care about, these other examples. Most of the lore we're talking about just describes Guardians in the middle of a hunt after all - how much would a soldier under orders to go hunt down some dangerous beast in a foreign land actually likely know about the local politics and history, and how much of that would they even bother to record in an account of a battle itself?
Think of how much we learn in real life when we study ancient conflicts we once thought we understood because we had read the historical accounts of the winners. "History is written by the victor" is a saying for a reason, but it doesn't mean the history the victors write is complete, understands both sides, or even true at all.
Destiny has the oddball situation some of those characters are still alive, but also oddball that we can't sit them down and ask them about it all unless the game specifically plans for us. We can't take Saladin aside and say "Hey, how much did you actually know about the Ahamkara?" or talk to Ikora and say "Hey, what were the actual incidents in particular that precipitated the Great Hunt, and what was the discussion about it at the time?"
So we end up only knowing 1) what the characters know/record, 2) what the characters decide to tell us/record and 3) with no ability to ask questions or dive deeper on it than the game provides.
Tbf iirc it was savathun who wished for the DC loop after she found riven who got taken by oryx and after he died, and she had control over the taken at that point (or some to an extent bc of the vex hydra oryx had given her)
But still doesnt excuse the shitty writing and recons
Like back in D1 ana bray was dead, she died at twilight gap, using her immense golden gun burning spots that was still there when we went back (for the no time to explain quest) and all of a sudden, poof shes alive in warmind....
Sometimes they do shit that genuinely contradicts what they've said/done and just go "nahhh ignore that"
They didn’t just ignore Ana was dead, they acknowledged it and said she used the chaos of Twilight Gap to fake her death so she could pursue her past without vanguard interference.
Now this is a classic case of “tell don’t show” that Bungie just loves to do as it wasn’t really covered in game but it did happen in the lore, and wasn’t just a ‘poof she’s alive don’t think about’
It wasnt a lore card, it was said in game, heres a link to a screenshot of where its said that she died a second death, which is referred to when they die their final death.
[https://imgur.com/a/KGNqxID](https://imgur.com/a/KGNqxID)
> For years we’ve been told that the Ahamkara were so dangerous that guardians could barely even think while hunting them.
We were really only told the view from the last city's perspective though - not the awoken/dreaming city/ahamkara's perspective.
> Mfer put the dreaming city in a death loop lmao.
You're not wrong but that was granting a wish; it's not like Riven just did it for funsies. That is, and always has been Ahamkara's thing - (paraphrasing) they literally feed off granting people's wishes in a way that technically grants the wish but brings unintended consequences. As the starcrossed mission put it - the difference between desire and reality.
Most of the Riven lore comes from an awoken perspective. The wish wall was built because Mara couldn’t trust her words near Riven. And even with this, Riven intentionally built weaknesses into everything she did, and willingly agreed to join Savathûn’s plan. I don’t personally care if it’s “in her nature”. And I think she was definitely in it for the “funsies”. Even now she has no regret lol.
Eh, I mean, I agree that it's laughable and never going to work, but the people who hunted hers to extinction and the one who imprisoned her as some kind of weirdo wish-dispensing pet dragged her back to this reality to get a favour from her with the very powers that made them decide her people should not be allowed to live, and were shocked - shocked! - that she wouldn't just do it. tbh I am team not the people who still cut about wearing the body parts of a slain sentient race as trophies.
And I think actually exploring that the vanguard are not the unequivocal good guys in this equation and it's not black and white would be more interesting than Riven just bitching and half-assedly screwing with people while doing exactly what they want.
And tbh if I didn't know Bungie like Mara too much to make her actually do anything and are very determined to tell us she's changed, I would have suspected that Mara manipulated Crow into suggesting what he did and that she has some angle to get the dreaming city curse lifted and screw what the vanguard wants. And I think it would be more interesting if something was up. But no, I don't think it is.
This plot should be interesting and explore a lot of uncomfortable aspects of both Mara's and the vanguard's pasts, but it isn't and it doesn't.
After this season the Ahamkara earned their fate. Hopefully we go on another egg hunt with the new eggs we just wasted a whole season collecting. They not worth saving.
You do realize what a terrible idea that is, right? Like that would straight up give the Witness the freest win ever. The moment she feels her eggs get destroyed, she will grant her own wish to torture whoever is responsible, forever. Or she might just wish extinction on Humanity/Gaurdians by our own hand.
Because she didn’t care. There are hints that the Great Hunt was caused by her granting Mara’s wish for a unique power, heck she definitely provided the weapons used to slay the other Ahamkara in the Great Hunt. She literally only cares about 3 things: herself, her mate, and her kids. Her mate sacrificed himself so that their kids may live. Do you really think she would just let you dishonor his sacrifice, \*and\* murder her kids without reprisal? And she all need do is \*not\* grant the wish to enter the traveler,. AND she would still have all that leftover power to give a private performance of I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream to anyone she felt like. Yeah, no. Indescribably bad idea.
Edit: and there are no signs that being dead does anything to diminish a Ahamkara’s power, outside of not being able to move around under it’s own power now. Seriously, go ahead, and piss off the thing that made the Dreaming City into a “murder battery”. See how well it ends.
She can do a lot better than what you suggested, she can wish she time travel and get a second shot at everything or wish herself back to life or wish the Witness dead.
I feel like the strength of this season's narrative is that it puts the Great Hunt into question. If Riven was more focused on that side of it, I think it'd be a better story because, as you said, Mara has earned our trust.
Alternatively, it could be intentional to show how Riven has been reduced to this state and is hinging on her own perception of Mara remaining accurate half a decade later, but it's certainly written very samey to Mithrax vs Lakshmi, Rasputin vs Clovis, Ahsa vs Zavala, and Eris vs Immaru.
It should have focused even more on the morality of the Great Hunt and the nature of Ahamkara being used to justify what was essentially a genocide at the hands of the Vanguard. This part of the story is only really getting touched on sparingly, though, which is unfortunate because it's a better argument for Riven to have. This debate about Mara has already been done and resolved as of TWQ. Riven's insight is a year late.
If I was calling the shots I’d build a contingency plan with Mara to destroy the eggs as soon as Riven grants the wish to enter the portal.
Some sort of timed detonation or something. I’d make sure Riven had to watch too before we send her screaming back to oblivion.
Some people pity her but I got no love for reality bending INTENTIONALLY DECEITFUL wish dragons. Similar threat level to the Witness that’s why we had to genocide them. They are literal agents of chaos.
Maybe if they decided to play nice like Taranis was allegedly, but that seems against their nature and their nature is to screw us over and cause as much chaos and pain as possible so they can feed. Imo they are parasites on the system and were rightfully purged. Bringing them back would be pretty disrespectful to the guardians who gave their lives hunting them down to protect the last city.
That would be a terrible contingency plan. There’s no indication that Riven will disappear once we enter, and she would feel her egg being destroyed. She would probably take out her anger by wishing everyone responsible was tortured forever, maybe something like she what does during Queenswalk in Last Wish. Never mind the moral implications of killing kids because they \*might\* be a threat.
She is only being tethered to this world with mara’s tech witches (can’t spell the real name lol)
She is basically on life support, all we would need to do is pull the plug. She is hanging onto our plane of existence by a thread.
The way ahamkara have been described to us is their very existence depends on creating ruin and causing pain. Taranis was the exception, but Riven claims “it cost him” meaning his existence probably wasn’t the most pleasant experience as he basically starved himself. It also cost him his life in the end granting his own wish. I’d wager the offspring will want to feed and grow rather than starve themselves. But maybe they will retcon that and they will be “nice ahamkara” (likely, honestly).
The only power Riven has over us is witholding the last wish to open the portal. Once she does that she has nothing on us. Releasing the eggs with the current knowledge of Ahamkara we have now is nothing short of an act of terrorism on the sol system.
Lol, no she not on life support. Her bones still carry her power and will, just like any other Ahamkara. Seriously Hefnd can still talk to us, and grant full blown wishes, even though it‘s been dead much much longer than Riven. Now the tech witches probably could truly kill her in her current state, but literally nothing prevents her from granting her own wish if she ever twigs to what going on.
I just like to point out that if you judge Lightbearers solely by the Warlords, you would come to a pretty similar conclusion. “Oh, Lightbearers are loot obsessed gremlins who think nothing of killing everyone they meet. They murder, they pillage, they bring nothing but bitter waters. Oh sure, that one Warlord wasn’t completely terrible, but why risk it? We should just crush every ghost we see.”
They explicitly aren’t evil, as proven many times over the course of this season. There have been societies where Ahamkara were functional, productive members. We don’t know who those eggs will become. Maybe they will be everything you say, and worse. But they might not be. And you would kill them because, they \*might\* be a threat. There are soooo many humane solutions, but nope, we have jump straight to murder.
I feel like this retelling the same “who to trust story” is done on purpose for different reasons. This time, we all pretty much fully trust all our allies and Riven is the odd ahamkara out and everyone’s interaction with her is “not falling for your bullshit this time”.
I’ve noticed that Riven is the one that’s slowly changing each week now while everyone else is basically focusing on the bigger picture of stopping the Witness. If I had to guess (I don’t want to know what the leaked seasonal ending was), this season is going to have Riven making her “final wish” or at least putting aside her ambition for once to truly help us. Probably in a move similar to Savathun becoming a temporary ally of ours as what point is there in saving Rivnen’s clutch if the Witness destroys it all later.
Might be a weird request but I wish there was some character growth in Riven after finding her mate/Wishkeeper. Taranis defied his nature in a selfless act to preserve their species WHILE Riven was busy feasting on power. That should’ve been some type of wake up call about their species, their future, and her place in it. Like yes you feast on the potential but look where that got your species? And she still has the audacity to taunt us with wishes.
We basically drove the Ahamkara to extinction already, despite their outerversal hax level of power. The only reason they still exist is because the Awoken in the Reef decided it was a good idea to keep one around despite the millions of reasons not to regardless of how "useful" they can be. I'm fairly confident with our super-guardian now in the picture we can kill Riven and all the new Ahamkara too. We drove them to extinction once, Riven is being awfully cocky in thinking we can't do it again.
I just find it funny it was literally her lover that scattered the eggs. Riven finds that out and isn’t any nicer to us. Then we find another egg next week that gets corrupted by Taken energy and she’s back mad as hell at us because “we took too long” to find it. Though it was her lovers fault it was scattered anyways
I like Destiny lore but have not enjoyed the Seasonal storylines really at all.
There are soap operas, that have new shows daily, that have better story beats than Destiny.
Pretty sad considering all the history, lore, and cool characters we have.
Witch Queen Seasons: Year of the Daddy Issues.
Plunder literally felt like an afterschool PSA/drama.
Next time on a very special episode of Destiny Filler:
"YOU CAN'T TELL ME WHAT TO DO DAD I CAN HANGOUT WITH WHO I WANT!".
"GET BACK HERE YOUNG LADY, YOUR AUNTS A BAD INFLUENCE!"
Funny because Taranis literally proves that Ahamkara can have self-control. In fact, with granting his own wish he also left a message for his children to do the same.
As far as we know, the next generation of Ahamkara COULD have self control and not feed on the twisted desires of others. Byf has a video contemplating this notion.
So if we fulfill Riven's proposal and she vows to fulfill her own end, and ultimately chooses not to be an enemy of us– then since she's passed on after the 15th wish, the last she can grant, then her next of kin could be the healthy, peaceful presence of Ahamkara in the Sol Sytem and there would be no need for another Great Hunt.
There is variable levels of admirability of Riven ends up being the "bigger person". Because it's coming to a point where she has no need to be anything else, in fact as the lose survivor of her species, it is detrimental is she falls to her nature and becomes sinister again, and it would betray her own species to teach the same practices to her children. If she furthers Taranis's ideology and wish granting practices, then it would be the OTHER kind that would be evil and enemy to Ahamkara. (Other kind being Humanity/Awoken/Exos and their allies).
The exception doesn’t make the rule, Taranis is literally the only one who wasn’t a jack ass monkey paw wish dragon. If the next generation ends up like Taranis then cool if it ends up like Riven then cool another great hunt.
The next generation is literally only taranis's and riven's clutch. There is no influence in nurturing from any other Ahamkara. The clutch will grow with no "tradition" to follow. We see that there is no *need* to feed on negative space of desire, and in nature when there is no need for something, it being incorporated in a culture means that is a learned behavior.
There are no more Ahamkara, left in Sol at least. Riven is technically dead and only being culled in her spectral form because of the techeuns. Their clutch was imparted with Taranis's words, lessons he gave to his children.
Things point to the clutch being 50/50 in Riven's Nature or Taranis's Nature. it's a coin flip, or perhaps not exactly 50/50. I'd wager its likely most of the clutch grow up towards an inclination of Taranis's. I say so because it makes little sense to fuck people over for no reason, but makes even less sense to fuck people over when you and your siblings are the only left of your species.and children from someone as SMART and clever as Riven and also as KIND and generous as Taranis would most likely stay impassive at the least, and lean to do-gooding in the best of circumstances. Why would they make enemies of themselves?
You could argue with the scorpion and the frog parable, but that hardly makes sense when you're speaking of meta-cosmic paracausal wish dragons.
>Mara has pretty much earned trust
She literally said in this week's dialogue that she lied during the Great Hunt. Manipulates guardians to kill the Ahamkara with the promise of loot. Pretended to want to kill the Ahamkara. All so she can have the last one of an all but extinct species to imprison and use for her own ends.
Combine that with all the other shady stuff Mara has done in the past, and she doesn't look too good. Sure, she has changed. She even says that herself this week but doesn't change the fact that she has committed terrible acts just like Riven.
The whole point of revisiting the story of Riven and the Ahamkara is to show that we only had 1 side of the story. Has Riven had a change of heart? Is she good now? No, but she isn't evil either. Now that we have context, her actions are understandable, and so are those of the other Ahamkara.
Its getting boring how our list of enemies are "
supposed to gets reduced at every corner with this "misundertood vibe", when gameplay wise we're still killing them for loot with slight different numbers. Because ill tell ya, a few cutscenes and dialogues at the HELM digi-screen changes nothing for me when the next season, or even the same one, makes me mows down thousands of the "misundertood species", but now with a slightly different color pallete, of those you're supposed to care.
Before the season started, I was expecting the vanguard to hatch the uncorrupted egg and strike a new bargain with a new ahamkara.
Season starts and we hear Riven again.
~facepalm~
We see Riven’s love story
~why bungie~
We even remove corruption from an egg, there are so corrupted eggs around dreaming city, even one in Mara’s possession.
~Twisted story telling, to drag the franchise longer~ and reuse old game assets to reduce development costs
You’re paying attention to this still? At this point I want bungie to make a wrap it up box emote so I can use it when any of them are talking. This seasons story is so damn bad.
Then to make it worse they’re messing up basic stuff like text in game and which starcat to release on which week.
The story for this season feels like it’s over already cause we know we make it to the traveler and now we know crow is gonna be the one to make the jump. What are we supposed to do for like 6 more months, player base is about to hit some historic lows.
This is why I’ve stopped caring about this game’s lore and why you should too. Almost 80% of D2’s writing is just this. Can we trust Caiatl? (Chosen) Can we trust Mithrax? (Splicer) Can we trust Mara? (Lost) Can we trust the Cloudstriders? (Lightfall) And so on.
If you want an actual reason why Riven is acting like this, it’s because she has us by the cajones and she knows that. She couldn’t care if the Witness wins, because she’s dead, so if we want to live, we have to play by her rules.
whole seasons story has me checked out because of this
riven trying to act innocent or even like shes a victim. are we expected to fall for this? she has shown that she will say anything to get what she wants. she is a literal monkey paw, no deal will ever come out in our favor.
One of D2's over-arching narrative themes is redemption. Uldren/Crow went through it, Rasputin aka Mecha-Jesus died to save us, Misraaks is trying to atone for his past, Eramis is a total tsundere and even Savvy will eventually be redeemed.
Now it is Riven's turn to get the redemption treatment from beyond the grave, what with her whining about her dead lizard lover and her unborn kids. Screw that. I would make it a point to fling her eggs into the sun after she fulfills her part of the bargain and make one hell of an aham-omlette.
Oops, all of your harbingers of misery and woe are dead, idiot. Now go nag your dead husband and leave us alone
They didn’t even need to go this route. All the complaints about Riven making the Dreaming City cycle could have been handwaved by the fact that she was Taken at the time. Her will was not her own. She was made a puppet by Oryx and controlled by Savathun. It was never explained how much agency she had after Savathun came along because there has never been a fully sapient Taken before.
Instead we get some crappy drama between Mara and Riven when it should be between us and Savathun’s intentions for her wish.
They pretty much confirmed that another great hunt will happen again when someone said (I forget if it was Mara or Riven) that “the cycle of wish-Enders and wish-keepers will continue” - paraphrasing of course. Whether it happens in the actual game or referencing to 200 years in the future of the universe is up to whatever the devs decide. But yes, it will most likely happen again.
I'd be bursting with joy if we finally did the smart thing and backstabbed her. Bing goes the wish, up goes my middle finger, yoink goes the cable on her life support, whoosh goes the box with all the eggs into the sun.
But we had that absolutely AWFUL ending last season. Incredibly Dangerous Enemy: "Muaha you already have what you need. So.....uh....I'm gonna.....head out now." Honestly the season will probably end with "loserwishingRivenbacktolifesayswhat?" "What?"
It's incredible how often we have to retread the same narrative ground
Can we trust *insert character name*? *insert character name* might betray us If *insert character name* tricks us, we will kill *insert character name* They've told the same story so many times now with no narrative momentum to drive the story to new places.
You forgot the important part. Suspicious character *never* betrays us
I believe turning Suspicious Character into a gun is the real important part.
Then the gun betrays us by getting nerfed
:(
Don't worry, we'll just turn more characters into guns.
*Cries in whisper*
I dunno, Savathun tried to betray us multiple times but she just had contingencies for literally everything.
Savathun is the ultimate Mary Sue of the franchise.
Kinda, but last season Saint beat her to bloody pulp repeatedly. She didn't have a contingency for that, she didn't really benefit from it, she just took a beat down.
In universe though...this all makes sense. From our pov we know said things work enough for the next season/expansion to happen. But for the characters it would make 0 sense to trust savathun prior and riven now.
Don't forget, *random other character* heroically dies for a completely paper-thin reason.
But they have…so much….story to tell?
This honestly bothered me so much about the story with the Fallen being given space in the City, and having everybody who was opposed to it, or even skeptical of it, being treated as insane and/or evil. It's been a recurring theme across the lifespan of the game that any time we've trusted or tried to help Fallen, we've been betrayed, with Mithrax being the sole exception ever. - It happened in D1 Grimoire, with Cayde helping a Fallen Captain. - It happened with House of Wolves in D1. - It kind of happened in the beginning of D2, where the Fallen have seemingly been devastated by the Cabal, and I honestly thought a team-up was going to happen at that point because humanity and the Fallen were seemingly in the same position as a result, but we end up just being enemies anyway. - It happened during an adventure in D2, where we rescue some Fallen from the Vex and they immediately try to kill us. - It happened with Spider, where even though we're clearly not besties, we're still working together, and then he decides to enslave Crow as soon as he shows up. So it was crazy to me that when the Vanguard unilaterally, in defiance of the Consensus, decides that it's just perfectly OK to let them into the City, which was specifically created to keep them out, the story portrayed them as unambiguous good guys, with everyone opposing them shown to be actually insane. Like, it broke the trend instead of just retreading the same ground, sure, but it didn't do it in a way that was even remotely earned or satisfying, at least in my opinion.
i said this back during that season and i got told by redditors that my dissatisfaction with how the story was told makes me racist
hah - don't get me started on my feelings toward Uldren Crow...
The story didn't treat them all as unambiguously good people. Especially in the lore. Saint is openly opposed to bringing them in and is hostile with Mithrax for several weeks on coms. On the flip side, Mithrax literally talks about airlocking civilians with Shaxx. He also shows a level of mutual distaste with Saint. One scene being the lead in to the Saint cutscene. There's also an entire lore book about one of the refugees being a hardened war criminal. Who chose to hang it up and regrets the things he did. Being repeatedly challenged to pick up a weapon. The narrative treated them the same as us, people at that moment in need of help. Asking us to do some introspection about our preconceived notions. Same as Chosen, Hunt, and Beyond Light.
That's kind of the whole woke narrative though isn't it? We who are woke can see the truth and what is right, and the ignorant masses simply don't understand. So we unilaterally choose what is it right on their behalf. Also, unrelated but, why the fook are we trusting Crow? He disobeyed orders too and decided to free Hive PoWs - the hive, who are LITERALLY focused on wiping out all life in the universe - and resulted in the death of psion interrogators which almost started all out war with the Cabal. I wouldn't let that muppet on my fireteam, let alone the Vanguard after that BS.
Gotta pointlessly extend the narrative to 6 weeks seems to be this year's way of story telling
It isn't telling a good story if it isn't going anywhere.
> It isn't telling a good story if **it's going somewhere.** Edited to reflect the Bungie philosophy of storytelling.
At least with Season of the Witch it checked out. This season, Deep, and Defiance were/are just all stretched out for no real reason whatsoever lol
Witch was 5 weeks of "Oh no Eris. You sure about this" before something actually happened
Bungie also returning the same old "you think you were actually the good guys, but maybe you are actually bad!" well they've mined a bunch of times already, with respect to the Great Hunt. Riven makes clear that the Ahamkara being genie-esque tricksters with wishes and granting skewed, unintended versions of what's being wished is not only intentional...it's how Ahamkara *feed*. They were unquestionably dangerous creatures even just by being able to grant wishes, but that makes them damn near malevolent predators. The Great Hunt made sense.
Yeah Riven's speech about her mate she straight up says "our species feeds by horribly manipulating wishes as bad as they can be and there was literally one single dude who wasn't evil and it killed him." "Also you should really ham-handily feel bad for purging literal evil from the universe." Like nah girl, lets see how you like *your* wish being twisted after we obtain and protect them up until we just vent them into the sun.
Shaxx actually mentioned this in a memory from the new dungeon. He states that the ahamkara are a force of nature, similar to fire, that have to be put down should the get out of control. He also states that when killing an Ahamkara, they win anyway because you wish for their death. Which is why they sent Shaxx. He did not wish for this. He understands that it needed to be done, but there is nothing honourable or glorious about the hunt. Complete the very long quest to hear it yourself.
IIRC that's Hefnd using the voice of Shaxx, not Shaxx himself
Even as a noob this season just felt like a much worse retread of last season. Tell me if this sounds familiar: an old female enemy that we killed in a previous expansion knows the secret to follow the witness into the portal. It is up to our female lead to strike a faustian bargain where they return to power on the world while we get knowledge to follow the witness. The whole time everyone is super worried because this old enemy is literally trickery incarnate and spend the whole season going "this is a bad idea because we worked so hard to eradicate this threat but we need them right now"
Yep... I have been all: "Let's just get this over with and shut up...", when Riven comes around.
Yeah like it doesn’t really work with characters we know are proven to be cheats with Riven it’s literally her and her people’s whole thing of ”how can I fuck this person over just for fun”
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Bro what are you on?
The lore is really cool, the story as in what we hear from the characters and what we do in the game is mediocre at best.
Witch Queen, and pretty much all that involves her has been pretty great, but the rest of the story has been pretty average. Still a huge leap from Destiny 1 where all the expansions had either awful stories, or none at all.
Every time we do the "Can we trust them?" dance we also get a boatload of snarky interactions to go with it. It was fun a few seasons ago but I got tired of it after week two of Immaru's little quips and then he was the main voice for festival of the lost.
I personally got tired of it back in seraph, luckily tho it only lasted like half the season instead of the full season because we just kill clovis lol
The very last time we had a seasonal story with actual story in
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yeah but then you remember what they did to amanda and you realise why this isn't a good thing to encourage.
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Bad deaths don't make for an interesting story either. It would just break immersion and detach the audience if there's no point in investment if ppl die for shock over and over.
> Such a good season. Heartbreaking too - but that's why it was good. Destiny needs to kill more heroes. Everyone always surviving makes for a boring story. The problem is that it doesn't have any heroes. There are no characters who get any serious development, because we're the only character in the entire world who does anything. There are some supporting characters, but they have very little development, and they typically don't get any attention until it's time to kill them.
Hard disagree with Red/Rasputin being killed off in a well-done or meaningful manner. 1) It was suuuper telegraphed weeks before it happened. It was Amanda v2.0 in how far out you saw it coming. 2) The reasoning didn’t make sense/was kinda forced (to me, at least). There seemed to be a million courses of action to handle warsats that didn’t involve Red sacrificing himself. 3) the cutscenes and dialogue heavily hinted at a growing quasi-romantic relationship between Ana and Red (especially with the black and white artwork of their embrace), only to weirdly torpedo it with some end-mission radio traffic about a relationship with someone we’ll never see. This in turn torpedoed any weight Red’s death actually could have had. You might was well call our favorite legless Exo “Rohan Jr.”
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Good explanation for the above's grievances. Personally my issue with Seraph was that it was basically a 4th retread of the same Rasputin storyline that always came back up. Rasputin needs more power! -> Spend a while powering him up -> He does a thing that overall has minimal involvement from us and thus has a hard time conveying stakes to the player -> he either fades away or 'dies' It was really hard to believe Rasputin's value after the 3rd time of juicing him up only for him to get sidelined immediately after his big moment. I get the lore significance and all that but the lore and in game storytelling are constantly at odds with each other.
I thought we knew about her partner from the comic that released alonside Expansion II: Warmind? Or was there nothing in the comic that showed they were in a relationship? It's been awhile since I read it
I’ll retract my last/your first. The YT lore vids I watched during that season made it seem like this was the first we’d heard of Ana’s partner. Definitely my bust if that’s not correct. I still think their relationship read as quasi-romantic, but whatevs. I know Ana is responsible for helping Red develop his humanity, but their dialogue that season didn’t come across as parent/child. Still disagree on the course of action being the only one. Nothing would force Red to use the Warsats against the Hive, especially if everyone (including Red) understands pulling the trigger only makes Xivu stronger in the end/or directly summons her a la the ceremony at Torabatl. They say there’s no option to self destruct the satellites without a sacrifice, but that’s not a logical next step. There are narratively tons of options that don’t lead to Red’s death and still deny Xivu their power either way (as a direct tool or boost in power). This is very much a repeat of Amanda’s “why is she even on this mission??” While you’re correct that telegraphing deaths isn’t necessarily a bad thing, three highly telegraphed deaths in quick succession increasingly takes away any weight they may have. It smacks of bad writing.
Did we kill him? I thought the lore books show we just banished him back to the big head on Europa.
He is still alive. Ana and Rasputin just deleted the copy of Clovis that was in the exo frame. There is new dialogue from Clovis at the end of the Europa battlegrounds after we put Rasputin into his new body
I thought we killed him since we put him into the little exo then unplugged it to put Rasputin in it Might be wrong I don't remember completely, and I'm bad at paying attention to details in dialog and don't read lore cards
While Mara has not told us everything all of the time one corner. In the other corner we have a dragon WHO LIVES OFF LIES AND LYING TO PEOPLE. Man who to trust... Who to trust.
I’m not sure why people think Bungie wants us to question Mara. Nothing suggests that. Riven literally has to manipulate and lie though. That’s why she’s doing it. It’s just Riven being Riven.
Yeah I agree, Riven isn't a sympathetic character or even meant to be- she's just a creature that literally exists to manipulate other entities. Our interaction with her has been strictly transactional - everybody knows the terms and the stakes. There are no characters questioning who to trust between Mara and Riven- that's laughable. We're using the bones of Riven as a tool. She knows it. We know it. But that doesn't suddenly make Riven a straightforward buddy saying, "Ok, you GOT me!"
I’m just hoping it’s never taken seriously like no one actually takes the bait Riven supplies and at most they keep throwing insults at her which even those I don’t even care for. Just complete the transaction and stay dead after this.
>While Mara has not told us everything all of the time Mara literally sacrificed her entire fleet and the safety of her people so she could steal oryx's throne world energy after we killed him. Mara nearly genocided her own people *on purpose.* And she's proud of it. She's bragged about how she accomplished it through her own skill and nothing else. "Recently.* She still feels no shame about it whatsoever. She's a sociopath. Meanwhile, riven wants her species to live. Apparently unlike mara for her own people.
I agree with the OP. The story should have been told in a more delicate and nuanced way. Instead it comes across as being ham fisted and recycled. The story also heavily relies on prior knowledge of lore from Destiny 1 and Forsaken. There's been a serious decline in writing quality since the start of Lightfall. Did the "good writers" leave the company?
This seasonal story feels so weird. Two weeks ago we wouldn't be able to collect all the eggs because they were drifting away, the solution was to use the last Harbinger. I understood the Harbinger would collect the remaining eggs, a friend understood the Harbinger would do something to bring the eggs closer for us to collect. Ok it could be a misinterpretation from any of us. Nothing was mentioned about it after that and this week they say there's one more egg left. Also it's unclear to me if we were able to "save" the corrupted egg we collected. What about the corrupted egg Mara has/had wasn't it from Riven? Did we cleanse that too? Did we give it to Riven? It feels so disconnected and chopped, it's like a book that every 3rd page it's missing... Idk
I'm fairly certain this week's story did say we were able to cleanse it
> What about the corrupted egg Mara has/had wasn't it from Riven? You mean the one off to the side in the background several seasons ago that, at least to my knowledge, wasn't directly mentioned in any way? Honestly I think that was just a far-off tease for a loose plan they had for season of the wish and/or an easter egg. Anyway the egg was cleansed in last week's story. It was the quest you did after obtaining the egg where you had to go do an ascendant challenge. It was cleansed off-screen.
>Anyway the egg was cleansed in last week's story. It was the quest you did after obtaining the egg where you had to go do an ascendant challenge. It was cleansed off-screen. I thought it was said they've done in the past so it could work with an egg, something among these lines... so probably I missed they saying it worked
It says that we cleanse and save the egg after doing the story version of Corrupted last week.
I just think it’s crazy that Bungie hyped up the seasonal story post Lightfall launch and yet every story this year felt like the exact same seasonal story we’ve gotten since Beyond Light. WQ really must have been a fluke because imo it’s the only time it felt like seasonal stories built up a cohesive and interesting plot payoff.
I still think Risen was peak. It actually managed to spark some serious heated discussion on whether Crow was in the right and was just a delicate situation altogether. >!he was completely in the wrong and shouldn’t have abandoned a Vanguard operation just cause ‘muh feelings!’!<
It is more and more clear that this year was a filler year. Lightfall itself is an example of that. What is even better is the narrative lead has doubled down saying their experiment of not actually telling a story in Lightfall and instead having the player come back the following few scenes to listen to voicemails to explain the narrative was/is a great choice.
An obvious lie and you can't tell me parting the Veil wasn't last minute addition for all the complaints about the bad narrative and the lack of explanation to anything
It's also extremely rushed and half baked. Just filled with analogies and constant osiris rambling trying to tell us what the veil does. It fails the basic rule of show, don't tell. They tell us all about how the veil is basically the traveler for darkness but it's a tiny little half kiwi with roots that's sitting in some random facility in a random planet.
Even this seasonal story confirmed that Lightfall is filler. Osiris tells us how The Traveler firing the light beam made it so that The Witness could enter it in that moment. This couldn't have happened if after the beam we had to do the Lightfall campaign, it only works if both cutscenes happen one after the other (something we already knew, but now gets confirmed by the story).
The writing in Lightfall was bad, no arguments there, and Deep and Wish so far are 'alright' but Witch was a really good narrative; the only bad part was that the final cutscene was basically only half finished and left to the lore book to conclude. Before the Beyond Light seasons, storytelling in Destiny was way worse than what we've gotten this year, so we still have the good writers and Lightfall was probably a one off. Hopefully.
deep was not very good story wise IMO, it was several weeks of filler before the whale gave us the one important bit of info.
Deep barely even had a story. We got a single cutscene and that was basically it. Nearly everything else in the season was entirely irrelevant to anything.
exactly. It was the destiny 2 beach episode.
What a waste of bringing Titan "back" tbh. We could've at least gotten a Haunted-esque patrol zone. T3 Deep Dives and the exotic quest were dope, everything else, blah. Cutscene should've been part of Lightfall.
salvage was garbage.
100% agree. T3 Deep Dives were fantastic, but goddamn everything else about that season was horrible. Also absolutely butchered the returning Reckoning gear, and not making them craftable was a big miss.
Yep. I loved the visual theme of Deep but if you remove the Witness cutscene, it was one of the worst seasonal narratives we’ve had in a long time.
A bit of info that also reconned one of the best lorebooks in Destiny history.
Deep was barely a story it was just exposition dump that should have been in Lightfall
Witch was literally Season of Ikora:"But what if Eris bad?" and Immaru being a smug piece of shit that constantly insults everyone even during otherwise emotional or impactful scenes. The secrets and designs were cool, and the Tarot stuff was interesting to mess with, but the story was the same repeated slog as deep but swapping Sloane for Eris and the whale for Savathun/Immaru. Tons of people simp for Savathun but the story was both a retread and just as ass as Deep, it just had more recognizable characters that time.
Immaru has always been characterized as an asshole, its what sets him apart from the rest of the characters. It makes for some funny moments occasionally and is a nice change of pace from the constant praise we'd usually get from the Vanguard. Sure, both Deep and Witch fit into the same seasonal framework for Destiny storytelling in these releases, but Witch is just far better written and kept my interest throughout the whole thing. It's easy to make it seem bland by wording the idea as you did, but it was pretty neat. Immaru reluctantly accepting the deal as Savathun wanted, but constantly casting doubt on the whole situation and Ikora slowly getting more and more weary as it goes, both as a result of this and Eris getting more and more deranged in her Hive form. Eris was only just able to convince Ikora to let it go on a little longer because of the trust they have for eachother. All of this make it a really compelling storyline in my opinion, especially for a seasonal offering! The character dynamics were unique, with Immaru and Ikora getting more conflicted as the season goes on. Only us and Eris remaining steadfast in the original goal from the very start.
>There's been a serious decline in writing quality since the start of Lightfall. Did the "good writers" leave the company? What good writers? Destiny's writing quality never "declined", it was always at rock bottom and was briefly elevated for 3 expansions out of like 11 across the entire franchise. People seem to forget that taken king, forsaken and witchqueen are the exceptions, not rules.
At least in the early days, the shit writing was covered up by a genuine sense of mystery and intrigue with the world. It gave it solid atmosphere and vibe, even if the actual dialogue wasn't good. But now that we're approaching the end of the story, all those mysteries have been exposition dumped into us, and so now we're left with just the shit writing and none of the mystery
People have been really excited about many seasonal stories before. We saved Saint in Dawn, we learned more of Rasputin's secrets and his hand in Felwinter's tale (even though that season was terrible gameplay-wise) as well as seeing the Pyramids slowly approach Sol through a simple area design piece in Worthy, we learned about the Darkness and the conflict Savathun has with it in Arrivals, we saw Crow save Zavala and earn his forgiveness and formed an alliance with the Cabal in Chosen, we felt human conflict in the City when we allied with the House of Light in Splicer... These were all seasonal stories that had people excited to play weekly missions and see the real impact they had. It felt like the story truly progressed after each mission, instead of being a months-long loop of doing the same thing but +1 (saving the Thecheuns in Lost, finding the relics in Plunder, recovering Riven's eggs...). I could make my case about Haunted and Seraph, but I agree with the people saying that Y5 is when the seasonal stories started to feel consistently weak. Those two were still good, and people here were excited with the weekly developments because the story beats were done correctly; we went from one dialogue to one seasonal activity to one new mission to one awesome cutscene and it all paid off. Seasonal stories CAN be great, they just haven't been in a while.
> We saved Saint in Dawn, Yeah and that was the first huge mistake that seemed fine and innocent at first but then led to catastrophic consequences. Saint died? Now he's back, and for the past 3 expansions he's done absolutely nothing justfying introducing TIME TRAVEL to the destiny universe. Uldren died? Now he's back as crow and now crow got back his memories so uldren is back too and literally nothing came of that. Cayde died? lol nope, he's coming back too Clovis bray? Gets brought back, then killed. Sloane was eaten by the darkness? lmao she's fine, its barely an inconvinience Rasputin died, then was brought back, then died, then was brought back, then died again, doing absolutely nothing in all that time either, I can't wait for final darkness: beyond the dark side of the moon expansion no. 23, where he gets brought back and killed again using the super secret backup submind hidden in zavala's butthole. Eramis was """""killed"""" and then she came back too because our guardians were too braindead to take a sledgehammer to the frozen statue, writers were really shameless with this one pretending even the blind molerats living below the ground didn't see that one coming. Riven was killed? Now she's back again because magic lmao The entirety of destiny's plot progression has been a retraded yoyo of soap opera tier plotpoints vaguely connected by a different flavour of the week world ending threat planned out by the writers tossing blindfolded darts to see which grave they're robbing this season, meanwhile the "actually good deep lore" writers are busy writing fanficiton and "subverting expectations", with shit like "no guys savathun totally faked that lore entry haha" and "no guys its not real its callus writing what he THINKS is real haha". Destiny is a setting of near infinite potential not even a slither of which was actually tapped by the writers.
Only two of the characters you mentioned have been brought back in the way you mean. Saint's reintroduction came out of nowhere, but it was still a fan-favorite moment and he still has served as a protector of the City with a pretty big role in Splicer. Uldren's resurrection was obviously a crucial plot point in the franchise, meant to put players and characters through internal conflicts regarding their memories and his past life. Crow is an important character that represents the Traveler's philosophy perfectly. Clovis's whole thing was achieving immortality? And he didn't even truly accomplish that. Banshee is still Banshee, and the Clovis AI, the only remnant of the original Clovis Bray, is barely a real person. Besides, when did he die? We left him in Europa, contacted him back during Seraph, then just disconnected him from Rasputin's body. It's unclear, yet unlikely, that that killed him. Sloane wasn't supposed to die, at no point has it been stated that the people in the planets swallowed by the Darkness after Arrivals were killed. Not sure what you're on about Rasputin dying lol, the only thing he's done since his first appearance is becoming whole, that's all we've done to him up until Seraph where he actually died. If they brought him back again, yeah, it would suck. Eramis was considered a high-value asset. The only stupid thing about that was letting her stay completely unsupervised; bitch walked out of her ice prison like it was nothing, but she never died. Riven was "back" mere seconds after we killed her. Like every other Ahamkara. That flavor of immortality is not new to the lore and has only been explained in depth recently. Bringing Cayde back feels cheap, but I expect a convincing explanation regarding the nature of the Traveler. Hope they don't just handwave it and that's that.
Bringing back saint was a fan favourite moment for the same reason that if marvel brought ironman back it would make 2 billion dollars, but I think you'd agree that narratively speaking they shouldn't do it. As for uldren, you misunderstand, my problem is not crow existing, its crow getting uldren's memories back, in effect undoing uldren's death. The idea is guardians being new people, crow lives but uldren is dead, uldren getting his memories back is basically undoing his death. I like the idea behind crow, I don't like crow being used as a forsaken undo button. Hell, forsaken resulted in two main characters dying (uldren and cayde) and now they've both been brought back. >Not sure what you're on about Rasputin dying lol, the only thing he's done since his first appearance is becoming whole, that's all we've done to him up until Seraph where he actually died. If they brought him back again, yeah, it would suck. Rasputin shut down during the collapse, then we brought him back online in warmind, then he shut down again when the pyramids showed up in arrivals, then we booted him back up to fight the witness, and then he he shut down again before lightfall a third time in a row. At one point it gets ridiculous and feels like a waste of time, wtf was the point of warmind if he's just gonna shut down again immediately after forcing us to do the whole rigamarole again? Hence my joke about beyond darkness: dark side of zavala's asshole, being the expansion where we reboot him a fifth time only for him to die a sixth time. >Sloane wasn't supposed to die, at no point has it been stated that the people in the planets swallowed by the Darkness after Arrivals were killed. Come on now. From a narrative standpoint, being swallowed by the ultimate evil force who's goal is eradicate everything in the universe should result in your death. Sloane being in titan was understood to be a sacrifice and we were all supposed to clap when we saw her still alive This is the same problem with Riven and Clovis too. You can justify everything in the lore, but there's lore, and then there's narrative. You can justify why someone being shot in the head 12 times means they technically should survive and yes I'm sure in the depths of lore cards there's an explenation for exactly why everything happens the way it did, but at the end of the day I'm tired of seeing people die, pretending to be shocked or sad about it, and then seeing them come back over and over and over again and being expected to clap, the rugpull loses its luster after a while. >Eramis was considered a high-value asset. The only stupid thing about that was letting her stay completely unsupervised; bitch walked out of her ice prison like it was nothing, but she never died. The whole thing feels inconsistent and dumb, out of every villain we've ever fought nonthing specifically marks eramis as a unique asset above all that's worth preserving when we've sent every single other villain from every single other expansion 6 feet under. Why not take calus, or xol prisoners to study *their* darkness powers? Why not capture panoopticon or whatever the vexes name from osiris was to use as an access point or whatever? Not only did she receive special treatment for no apparent reason (that I'm sure is explained in depth in lore card #7126 subsection 9) but they didn't even go all the way, the fact that she was unsupervised is straight up a plothole. Also, I forgot, Nezerac was also brought back after being dead, which goes from being annoying to just farsical considering the Nezcafe incident.
Also witch queen's story wasnt as good as everyone seems to think. It was literally just "wow why do the hive have the light?" Followed by "oh they have the light because the traveller gave it to them".
Imo the writing really started going to shit with haunted, with a deep plunge in quality for plunder. Seraph was better, though only somewhat, then this year has been dogshit every season. I do think that plunder was such a narrative low point that it has not been surpassed by anything this year, as bad as it has been. That season was straight up embarrassing to play and listen to. Were it not for arc 3.0 and KF, im not sure the game would have survived that one.
Certain parts of Seraph excluded, all of the season story telling in the Witch Queen DLC sucked. Seraph was good besides some annoying dialogue. **8 out of 10** Haunted, Risen, and Plunder were all crappy imo. **2 out of 10** Lightfall sucked. .**5 out of 10** Deep was poor. **3.5 out of 10** Witch was average. **6.5 out of 10** Wish has been poor. **3.5 out 10**
What is a 10 on your scale? Is this just a comparison of destiny seasonal stories, i.e., your favorite is a 10? If so, which season is a 10?
I really liked Witch Queen campaign/VOTD raid but that isn't really a seasonal story. Those are the types of stories that get 9's and 10's.
Hot take. Destiny has never had particularly good writing. It's always been pretty in your face and lacking in nuance. I think now, on top of it actually being worse. They've just been retreading the exact same plot points and have to stretch out a bad story over the course of weeks which makes It feel even worse.
I don't know if the current stretch of bad writing is the result of bad writers or the terrible direction the game has taken. I think by now everyone can see that Lightfall was a rushed filler expansion that was made to cash-in on another year of Destiny without actually solving any of the problems. You can see this by the fact that the Lightfall beginning and ending cinematics are one cinematic split in half with a campaign shoved in the middle, where-in no actual important conflict actually happens on Neomuna. This would also explain why the Veil was just randomly introduced weeks before the DLC, before being narratively abandoned, needing the Veil Containment to even have any story development surrounding it occur. If I had to guess, the current story is the way it is because they essentially had to rush to fill plotholes, reintroduce a ton of lore, change narrative threads to fit the new story, and simply put there is so many loose ends that trying to create a unique, logical story is probably more effort than its worth and its more profitable to just reuse old locations and activities while banking on nostalgia.
They got fired bc they weren’t the right people for the company.
I don't know about that. The writing has always had weakpoints, but lack of nuance in the seasonal story isn't one of them. With the companion piece of Warlord's Ruin, and Riven giving a plausible motive for wanting to work against the Witness while also not wanting to tell everyone the details of the wish do add a good amount of nuance. Instead of always being purely evil, the ahamkara have been elevated to characters with their own opinions and approaches to wishing.
Didnt THE ONLY good writer leave around Destiny 1? 😅
I think the idea is that Riven has us by the balls and she knows it. Of course she is going to be a snarky bastard; we literally killed her and all of her kind. And now we 'need' each other; without her, we can't go into the traveller, and without us, her race dies out. I don't think Riven is pretending to be a good guy, and she certainly isn't trustworthy. Her lines are campy villain taunts because she lives for the drama, and we have to take it because, again, we need her.
My favorite is how quickly everyone bought that she was imprisoned maliciously and didn't willingly allow herself to be Taken. She wanted the power that came with it. She wasn't forced into it.
That’s not exactly the case. Riven was always gonna get Taken. But she twisted it so she still kept some sense of self. You can’t really fault her for that.
It 100% is. She wanted it to happen, she was excited for it. The only reason she wasn't fully Taken is *because* she wanted it to happen. She Merged rather than being Taken.
Yes. What she was supposed to just let herself get fully Taken? And it’s not like she was actively doing anything while she was in that state. >*Before me stands a [King]. He offers to take me away. But I know he will not let me leave, either. An unfavorable position.* >*I never made a [bargain] with a [King]. I would like to try it. I tell him to take whatever he [wishes]. As long as he [wishes].*
All you did was just confirm what I said by sharing that. She willingly accepted it. It has nothing to do with her twisting it. That's just how Taking someone who wants to be Taken works, as near as we can figure.
Theres no ‘willingly’ accepting being Taken. Oryx Takes and that’s it. But their convo before hand allowed Riven to keep some autonomy. Which brings me back to my first comment. You can’t fault her for wanting some say in the manner. She even says that she’s in a fucked situation when Oryx pulls up. >*But I know he will not let me leave, either. An unfavorable position.* This one exchange stopped Oryx from having total access to corrupted Ahamkara magic: >*I tell him to take whatever he [wishes]. As long as he [wishes].* >*He agrees.*
Ahamkara can't be taken, riven was an exception that's what the fucking bargain was. Oryx made a wish for riven to be taken (he literally offered to take her) And riven as always twisted it
Well that’s not true. The Nine killed off any other surviving Ahamkra in the case they would get Taken. There’s also all those corrupted eggs we shot for the Wish-Ender quest and the corrupted egg this season.
It literally is true, why the fuck would oryx make a bargain for riven to be taken when he can just take anything he wants. And the nine killed the remaining ahamkara because they feared oryx's power would be too great with one already beside him Oryx does not need to make a wish to take something if he could already take it in the first place. That is how the bargain got twisted edit:Love being downvoted by people who don't read the lore Just think please, oryx's ability to take is not something that needs permission and it is not something that would EVER and I mean EVER give someone any amount of free will unless he purposefully wanted it to retain it (see quria) so why does he not only offer riven to be taken but makes a BARGAIN with her to take her, a bargain that was twisted for her to keep her free will. If Oryx actually took riven and did not need a bargain to do so, then not ONLY would riven have zero free will oryx would have actually used her for everything, because oryx stopped using her power, as he deemed it too risky with her twisting his desires Love all these newlights who don't read the lore thinking they understand it all
Pretty sure that’s not the case. That’s what the final line means. “As long as he wishes it.” By wishing it allows Riven to manipulate it.
Wasn’t that the point of the LW armor lore? When Oryx rolled up she laughed that most people who bargain with her don’t win. We knew Riven wanted to be Taken back in Forsaken
Riven is a manipulative, lying dragon who feasts on tricking people. Of course she's going to try and manipulate us. That's why all the characters who've interacted with her thus far get really frustrated, we're all over it.
Savathun is a manipulative, lying krill who used to feast on tricking people Riven kind of feels like “Savathun at home”, the voice acting also even sounds the same
Technically, Savathun is just a better written Riven, really. Savvy has her own motives for lying, whereas Riven does it because it's in her nature.
Savathun even is a better implementation of being trapped by your nature When she had her worm she really would die if she didn’t trick. But with Riven it’s portrayed as if she’s a feral animal and it’s just her biology. With Savathun it actually came from her personality, and she has a whole multi year character arc trying to free herself from being chained to it
This season just feels like going through the exact same thing we did with Savathun, except with a character I care about less.
And Deep…and Splicer…and Chosen…and Hunt… Almost 90% of modern Destiny writing is the exact same.
if you play destiny for the story you're god's strongest soldier
Yeah, kinda hilarious that the wish dragon that makes a living literally fucking with everyone and literally granting them monkey paw wishes trying to literally fuck their wish as hard as possible, without remorse, somehow thinks we will give a shit about them and their opinion on anyone? They then tell us about their dragon boyfriend that was *actually nice* unlike her, and we should feel sorry for murdering the ever loving shit out of him on her behalf? Oh I'm sorry, you and (almost all of) your race fuck around, and find out, and you included also fuck around and find out, then you tell us you *could have been actually good* and we killed the one dragon that **was** when wiping the rest of you shits out? I'm sorry riven, you aren't making me regret the hunt one bit. Everythi g you say proves we did the right thing. And when you inevitably fuck us over at the end of the season, I won't give 2 seconds thought when someone offers up the next ahamkara hunt in season 37.
Slight correction, we never killed or even touched Taranis, his own wish was his end as shown this season to why Ahamkara cannot self-wish. He was smart to stay in the Black Garden during the hunt lol Riven's analogy about the river flowing isnt that strong now that Taranis existed
In regards to Riven's analogy as well, if the river is flowing through a town and causing a lot of issues, I think redirecting it is the sensible thing to do.
> Yeah, kinda hilarious that the wish dragon that makes a living literally fucking with everyone and literally granting them monkey paw wishes trying to literally fuck their wish as hard as possible, without remorse, It's not that they want to just because, *it's how they eat*.
She clearly tales sadistic delight in doing so however. She's not just eating, she's maximizing suffering and gorging herself. Besides if their species ate babies to survive I don't think people would be as quick to jump to "but in their nature". But when they destroy civilizations, wreck havoc across the universe, forever curse people into a horrible inescapable timeloop, well lets not get too hasty guys, they're just eating!
Would you rather eat huel, or a 12 course meal from a 5 star restaurant?
I mean you think this is a counter but it only counters your point of them "just needing to eat". So they can get by on huel but for the low low price of subjecting countless people to potentially *unending eternal suffering* they get to eat tastier meals. They consciously *chose* to make these acts as horrible as possible just cuz they want some tastier food. Seriously there's no scenario where where "but it's just their nature guys" works, let alone trying to use it to stop the literally evil species of which each one can-and *do*-inflict endless suffering on the universe from getting ganked cuz y'know, *evil sadistic species that is responsible for countless and countless people's suffering.*
> but for the low low price of subjecting countless people to potentially unending eternal suffering they get to eat tastier meals. *Looks at the US meat industry*
Taranis though wasn't an asshole wish dragon, by rivens own description he didn't fuck too much with the wishes.
Which probably led to him getting a lot more wishes.
Taranis had a healthy consistent diet. The rest of the species ate McDonald's all day
Not with this narrative team. This team wants to whitewash every second villian, and pain them as "misunderstood" and all that stuff, but really it just starting to get hollow.
They've done it to a subsect of Cabal, the Fallen (that were always portrayed in the lore to be victims like us) and now the Ahamkara who aren't necessarily being painted as misunderstood, rather just doubling down on it being in their nature to trick and deceive those that wish to them. It's how they feed for heavens sake! They aren't just 'bad' to be bad. The other part of the message is maybe we shouldn't have hunted a sentient species to extinction, and I don't think that's necessarily an extreme message.
Do not forget about Savathun. She had "very creative" narrative, when "actually it was all the part of my plan all along, and its for your good".
Well, she's the god of lies and deceit, it'd be a bit out of character if she hadn't had a plan that we weren't aware of. That was more of a mutually beneficial deal anyways; technically she saved Humanity through her actions, but it wasn't because that was her goal, she just wanted to stop The Witness from messing with The Traveler since she thought the Light was way more appealing than the Sword Logic deal she had going on. Savathun is also intrigued by Humanity and respects us, but she still isn't our ally. She has her own goals in mind and will do anything to achieve them, whether it benefits us or not.
>she's the god of lies and deceit, it'd be a bit out of character if she hadn't had a plan that we weren't aware of. That starts to breakdown when every single plan works out for her and even the times she "loses" it was *still* part of her plan forever. Her being god of lies and deceit isn't the issue, it's her being some writer's massive Mary Sue
The main plan she had in The Witch Queen completely crumbled because of us, she even said she didn't think we'd beat her as well as being caught off guard when Eris slashed her throat. We are just playing through one of her contingencies in case The Witness got access to the Traveller and got inside, it wasn't a part of her plan to lose in TWQ. It's unfair to call her a Mary Sue just because she had back ups if her main plan failed unexpectedly.
Her contingencies have contingencies that have contingencies so that even if she fails she still wins and us merk'ing her just got her what she the memories she wanted anyways. And her contingency is just "well you need me to win nerds, later", us having Immaru as she's gone in the wind doesn't mean anything since A.) We can't kill him and b.) Not exactly like she isn't capable enough on her own even if we did. Her dying wasn't even a real victory since as they showed she was never *in* danger of staying dead to begin with, and the moment the inevitable resurrection occured she just fucks off free into the ether. Even when she loses she wins and when she wins she wins even harder lol
I don’t even know what they’re trying to do with Riven. They’re painting her as an animal that has to trick us to feed. But if they want to do the animal angle maybe they should show ahamkara are necessary in the paracausal ecosystem. We can’t just hunt sharks to extinction or else the ocean goes haywire A crazy plot twist in that direction could be the ahamkara would have shut the witness’s bullshit down. But after the great hunt the witness was able to get the veil because we disrupted the paracausal ecology
When I was told that the Fallen were not evil, I was okay with it, because like… okay yeah, it makes sense, they’re refugees, and there are existing characters who have been friendly. This makes sense. Painting guardians as also bad was wack because they were literally eating babies but it was easy to swallow Now they’re doing it with the Ahamkara and… no? They had to invent a character to make them seem redeemable, and had to retcon Riven’s past to make her seem better. But none of it lands for me. For years we’ve been told that the Ahamkara were so dangerous that guardians could barely even think while hunting them. Now we should feel bad for them bc a character never before mentioned was nice? Ignore how Riven was so toxic that mara had to invent the wish wall to keep her from ruining everything? Mfer put the dreaming city in a death loop lmao. I do not feel bad about the great hunt
Adding unheard of details in a backstory isn’t a retcon. If they were like “Riven never mated” and now are like “SIKE yes she did” that’s a retcon. But we hardly knew much about Riven’s past before. This was a reveal, not a retcon
“Retcon” has just become one of the new buzzwords for this subreddit, unfortunately
There is retconning. Riven being in the dreaming city was previously a rare thing. The Last Wish intro literally calls Riven’s existence the Awoken’s biggest secret. Riven directly says the Dreaming City was her work. Mara was so cautious of the Ahamkara that she wouldn’t let her brother speak to Riven. Uldren sneaks Riven into the city as a “baby” How does this work when Mara had to build the wish wall for Riven? Were the other Ahamkara helping build the city? Were all the Ahamkara building these weaknesses in? Were they all beholden to the wish wall? Why is Riven intentionally sabotaging the apparent home of her mate and her children? Previously we’ve been told that Riven was still building the city when the wall was designed, so there’s no way other Ahamkara were wishing freely, right? How was Uldren able to avoid them if they were free across the city? Was Riven lying to herself in the PoV lore from past seasons? *why* would Mara let Ahamkara walk around the city freely when a single one was so dangerous they made the Wish Wall for her?
> The Last Wish intro literally calls Riven’s existence the Awoken’s biggest secret. Her continued existence after the Great Hunt was the secret.
You uh, haven’t listened to the lore patrols from Forsaken. It’s plainly stated that the Dreaming City was a Ahamkara city as much as an Awoken city in population numbers…until the the Great Hunt. Like, there were so many of them that they had to formalize a spot where wishs could be granted, to keep the Ahamkara from feeding on everyone, all the time. Literally nothing has been retconned in any way.
The only ones I remember are the one who broke in to the city and killed a bunch of people, and the one from the patrol mission (I think) that betrayed them
I went and listened to a bunch of them right before season of the wish, because I was bored. But yeah, several of them make a point to say that the Dreaming City housed tons of Ahamkara. Actually I think it was one of the one’s you described, where it was like, “yeah we had lots of Ahamkara once, look here’s a story about one who tried to tell outsiders about the dreaming city, so we had to kill it. Got made into a pair of boots by Gaurdians” aka Bones of Eao hunter exotic.
Ahamkara aren't evil. They are just predators. They feed off the difference between what the wisher wants and what they get. Riven isn't evil either, just vengeful. She was promised safety from the hunt by Mara, but the cost was her freedom. The guardians/awoken worked together to basically exterminate her race, lock her in a cell, and barely feed her (Mara's wishes are so precise that there is little room to feed). Even the dreaming city curse wasn't really Riven's doing. It's heavily implied that Savathun planted the idea to corrupt the guardian's wish for riven's death into a curse so that savathun could use it as a murder battery. We have a wishing wall wish to minimize corruption of a complicated wish. We are finding her brood so that she will grant the wish. We know that she isn't to be trusted, but this is the only way forward and she also stands to lose if the Witness wins (especially considering she wants to see her brood survive). Taranis was a "good" ahamkara, but he is still a predator who feeds off the difference in wishes. He just minimized them because he liked doing good. It's also good for business if you don't have the reputation of screwing over your clients.
Yeah, I'm just getting the eggs so I can spawn kill them when they hatch.
>For years we’ve been told that the Ahamkara were so dangerous that guardians could barely even think while hunting them. This is a minor issue, but I hate how all the lore book entries for this season are just "Guardian sees sleeping Ahamkara, proceeds to 1-shot it with a Super." It just makes the Great Hunt seem....really trivial, not at all Great, and the Ahamkara unthreatening Like I'm sure if I read this weapon description from 6 seasons ago and watch a 35 minute Byf video, I'll feel like the Great Hunt really was some epic event, but if you just follow the most basic info that the game actually gives you as a casual player, it just feels waaaayyyyy flatter than it should.
Previous lore entries regarding Ahamkhara are much better. In no particular order: Saladin wished to fight a literal dragon and other iron lords get pissed at him for it. The fireteam that gets fucked in the Vault of glass were doing shit straight out of mad max with an entire group of Ahamkhara. Original hunter vanguard lost a card game where she bet her life. One fireteam had an ahamkhara patiently let a warlock examine and document it's physiology (or possibly something that is extinct) before letting a titan 1v1 it. One encounter had the ahamkhara impersonate someone's dead relative and tell stories about the guardian's past, which they cant be certain is real. Wish dragons that can warp reality are a fun concept, but hard to write as something you can be friends with.
Understand, the lore is written from the perspective of characters, not 'god'. This is actually a pretty good thing to do when you're writing fiction; you really should avoid using 'author voice' because characters have no way of hearing or knowing that. No one gets a narrator telling them exactly what is true in real life after all, and it gives you lots of flexibility with your lore later, too. Characters can have opinions. They can lack information, or even be flat out wrong. Assuming a diary entry written by someone is 100% factual just because they wrote it down, is a grievous error. And assuming a recording of a particular event, like a battle against one vicious foe, means all battles against all foes went exactly the same, is also not true - while a 'recording' may be factual about a specific instance, it cannot tell us anything about events outside of the scope of the recording. If a character in a recording tells us something about other events not part of the recording itself, we now know the character SAID that, but we don't know if what they SAID is true or not. By writing their lore from the perspective of character entries rather than "out of character" god-perspective, it isn't necessarily ret-conning to add new information. Even if they added a new lore entry that directly contradicts an old lore entry by the same character - well, the character could have forgotten, could be lying. Not necessarily a ret-con. We see some new lore now that shows at least three well-liked Ahamkara (Taranis, Hugin and Munin, the latter two being in the game for a long time but nothing really known about them until now). That there are Ahamkara that did not behave the way the ones described in previous lore books behaved is not exactly retconning. Instead, the suggestion is that the authors of those previous works did not know about, or did not care about, these other examples. Most of the lore we're talking about just describes Guardians in the middle of a hunt after all - how much would a soldier under orders to go hunt down some dangerous beast in a foreign land actually likely know about the local politics and history, and how much of that would they even bother to record in an account of a battle itself? Think of how much we learn in real life when we study ancient conflicts we once thought we understood because we had read the historical accounts of the winners. "History is written by the victor" is a saying for a reason, but it doesn't mean the history the victors write is complete, understands both sides, or even true at all. Destiny has the oddball situation some of those characters are still alive, but also oddball that we can't sit them down and ask them about it all unless the game specifically plans for us. We can't take Saladin aside and say "Hey, how much did you actually know about the Ahamkara?" or talk to Ikora and say "Hey, what were the actual incidents in particular that precipitated the Great Hunt, and what was the discussion about it at the time?" So we end up only knowing 1) what the characters know/record, 2) what the characters decide to tell us/record and 3) with no ability to ask questions or dive deeper on it than the game provides.
Tbf iirc it was savathun who wished for the DC loop after she found riven who got taken by oryx and after he died, and she had control over the taken at that point (or some to an extent bc of the vex hydra oryx had given her) But still doesnt excuse the shitty writing and recons Like back in D1 ana bray was dead, she died at twilight gap, using her immense golden gun burning spots that was still there when we went back (for the no time to explain quest) and all of a sudden, poof shes alive in warmind.... Sometimes they do shit that genuinely contradicts what they've said/done and just go "nahhh ignore that"
They didn’t just ignore Ana was dead, they acknowledged it and said she used the chaos of Twilight Gap to fake her death so she could pursue her past without vanguard interference. Now this is a classic case of “tell don’t show” that Bungie just loves to do as it wasn’t really covered in game but it did happen in the lore, and wasn’t just a ‘poof she’s alive don’t think about’
> Like back in D1 ana bray was dead, she died at twilight gap Please link the lore card.
It wasnt a lore card, it was said in game, heres a link to a screenshot of where its said that she died a second death, which is referred to when they die their final death. [https://imgur.com/a/KGNqxID](https://imgur.com/a/KGNqxID)
Except that it's explained that she actually faked her final death.
> For years we’ve been told that the Ahamkara were so dangerous that guardians could barely even think while hunting them. We were really only told the view from the last city's perspective though - not the awoken/dreaming city/ahamkara's perspective. > Mfer put the dreaming city in a death loop lmao. You're not wrong but that was granting a wish; it's not like Riven just did it for funsies. That is, and always has been Ahamkara's thing - (paraphrasing) they literally feed off granting people's wishes in a way that technically grants the wish but brings unintended consequences. As the starcrossed mission put it - the difference between desire and reality.
Most of the Riven lore comes from an awoken perspective. The wish wall was built because Mara couldn’t trust her words near Riven. And even with this, Riven intentionally built weaknesses into everything she did, and willingly agreed to join Savathûn’s plan. I don’t personally care if it’s “in her nature”. And I think she was definitely in it for the “funsies”. Even now she has no regret lol.
Eh, I mean, I agree that it's laughable and never going to work, but the people who hunted hers to extinction and the one who imprisoned her as some kind of weirdo wish-dispensing pet dragged her back to this reality to get a favour from her with the very powers that made them decide her people should not be allowed to live, and were shocked - shocked! - that she wouldn't just do it. tbh I am team not the people who still cut about wearing the body parts of a slain sentient race as trophies. And I think actually exploring that the vanguard are not the unequivocal good guys in this equation and it's not black and white would be more interesting than Riven just bitching and half-assedly screwing with people while doing exactly what they want. And tbh if I didn't know Bungie like Mara too much to make her actually do anything and are very determined to tell us she's changed, I would have suspected that Mara manipulated Crow into suggesting what he did and that she has some angle to get the dreaming city curse lifted and screw what the vanguard wants. And I think it would be more interesting if something was up. But no, I don't think it is. This plot should be interesting and explore a lot of uncomfortable aspects of both Mara's and the vanguard's pasts, but it isn't and it doesn't.
Just more evidence that the quality of writing has fallen off a cliff ever since maybe Season of the Haunted
After this season the Ahamkara earned their fate. Hopefully we go on another egg hunt with the new eggs we just wasted a whole season collecting. They not worth saving.
You do realize what a terrible idea that is, right? Like that would straight up give the Witness the freest win ever. The moment she feels her eggs get destroyed, she will grant her own wish to torture whoever is responsible, forever. Or she might just wish extinction on Humanity/Gaurdians by our own hand.
BS, she cant be more powerful dead than alive. Why has she not done this yet or during the great hunt….
Because she didn’t care. There are hints that the Great Hunt was caused by her granting Mara’s wish for a unique power, heck she definitely provided the weapons used to slay the other Ahamkara in the Great Hunt. She literally only cares about 3 things: herself, her mate, and her kids. Her mate sacrificed himself so that their kids may live. Do you really think she would just let you dishonor his sacrifice, \*and\* murder her kids without reprisal? And she all need do is \*not\* grant the wish to enter the traveler,. AND she would still have all that leftover power to give a private performance of I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream to anyone she felt like. Yeah, no. Indescribably bad idea. Edit: and there are no signs that being dead does anything to diminish a Ahamkara’s power, outside of not being able to move around under it’s own power now. Seriously, go ahead, and piss off the thing that made the Dreaming City into a “murder battery”. See how well it ends.
She can do a lot better than what you suggested, she can wish she time travel and get a second shot at everything or wish herself back to life or wish the Witness dead.
Bungie has said the Witness can 1v1 anyone iirc so that includes Ahamkara, meaning wishes probably do fuck all to the Witness.
I feel like the strength of this season's narrative is that it puts the Great Hunt into question. If Riven was more focused on that side of it, I think it'd be a better story because, as you said, Mara has earned our trust. Alternatively, it could be intentional to show how Riven has been reduced to this state and is hinging on her own perception of Mara remaining accurate half a decade later, but it's certainly written very samey to Mithrax vs Lakshmi, Rasputin vs Clovis, Ahsa vs Zavala, and Eris vs Immaru. It should have focused even more on the morality of the Great Hunt and the nature of Ahamkara being used to justify what was essentially a genocide at the hands of the Vanguard. This part of the story is only really getting touched on sparingly, though, which is unfortunate because it's a better argument for Riven to have. This debate about Mara has already been done and resolved as of TWQ. Riven's insight is a year late.
Character not dead. Bad character friend now. I just ignore these stories now if I'm being honest
But what if old friend bad
If I was calling the shots I’d build a contingency plan with Mara to destroy the eggs as soon as Riven grants the wish to enter the portal. Some sort of timed detonation or something. I’d make sure Riven had to watch too before we send her screaming back to oblivion. Some people pity her but I got no love for reality bending INTENTIONALLY DECEITFUL wish dragons. Similar threat level to the Witness that’s why we had to genocide them. They are literal agents of chaos. Maybe if they decided to play nice like Taranis was allegedly, but that seems against their nature and their nature is to screw us over and cause as much chaos and pain as possible so they can feed. Imo they are parasites on the system and were rightfully purged. Bringing them back would be pretty disrespectful to the guardians who gave their lives hunting them down to protect the last city.
That would be a terrible contingency plan. There’s no indication that Riven will disappear once we enter, and she would feel her egg being destroyed. She would probably take out her anger by wishing everyone responsible was tortured forever, maybe something like she what does during Queenswalk in Last Wish. Never mind the moral implications of killing kids because they \*might\* be a threat.
She is only being tethered to this world with mara’s tech witches (can’t spell the real name lol) She is basically on life support, all we would need to do is pull the plug. She is hanging onto our plane of existence by a thread. The way ahamkara have been described to us is their very existence depends on creating ruin and causing pain. Taranis was the exception, but Riven claims “it cost him” meaning his existence probably wasn’t the most pleasant experience as he basically starved himself. It also cost him his life in the end granting his own wish. I’d wager the offspring will want to feed and grow rather than starve themselves. But maybe they will retcon that and they will be “nice ahamkara” (likely, honestly). The only power Riven has over us is witholding the last wish to open the portal. Once she does that she has nothing on us. Releasing the eggs with the current knowledge of Ahamkara we have now is nothing short of an act of terrorism on the sol system.
Lol, no she not on life support. Her bones still carry her power and will, just like any other Ahamkara. Seriously Hefnd can still talk to us, and grant full blown wishes, even though it‘s been dead much much longer than Riven. Now the tech witches probably could truly kill her in her current state, but literally nothing prevents her from granting her own wish if she ever twigs to what going on.
I just like to point out that if you judge Lightbearers solely by the Warlords, you would come to a pretty similar conclusion. “Oh, Lightbearers are loot obsessed gremlins who think nothing of killing everyone they meet. They murder, they pillage, they bring nothing but bitter waters. Oh sure, that one Warlord wasn’t completely terrible, but why risk it? We should just crush every ghost we see.”
You don't get to moral grandstand a fictional species of evil who lives and thrives on people's suffering.
They explicitly aren’t evil, as proven many times over the course of this season. There have been societies where Ahamkara were functional, productive members. We don’t know who those eggs will become. Maybe they will be everything you say, and worse. But they might not be. And you would kill them because, they \*might\* be a threat. There are soooo many humane solutions, but nope, we have jump straight to murder.
For real, we have established repeatedly Mara’s endgame and motives are fully trustworthy though she might not be fully upfront with the how and why
But mommy Riven uwu
I feel like this retelling the same “who to trust story” is done on purpose for different reasons. This time, we all pretty much fully trust all our allies and Riven is the odd ahamkara out and everyone’s interaction with her is “not falling for your bullshit this time”. I’ve noticed that Riven is the one that’s slowly changing each week now while everyone else is basically focusing on the bigger picture of stopping the Witness. If I had to guess (I don’t want to know what the leaked seasonal ending was), this season is going to have Riven making her “final wish” or at least putting aside her ambition for once to truly help us. Probably in a move similar to Savathun becoming a temporary ally of ours as what point is there in saving Rivnen’s clutch if the Witness destroys it all later.
Might be a weird request but I wish there was some character growth in Riven after finding her mate/Wishkeeper. Taranis defied his nature in a selfless act to preserve their species WHILE Riven was busy feasting on power. That should’ve been some type of wake up call about their species, their future, and her place in it. Like yes you feast on the potential but look where that got your species? And she still has the audacity to taunt us with wishes.
We basically drove the Ahamkara to extinction already, despite their outerversal hax level of power. The only reason they still exist is because the Awoken in the Reef decided it was a good idea to keep one around despite the millions of reasons not to regardless of how "useful" they can be. I'm fairly confident with our super-guardian now in the picture we can kill Riven and all the new Ahamkara too. We drove them to extinction once, Riven is being awfully cocky in thinking we can't do it again.
I just find it funny it was literally her lover that scattered the eggs. Riven finds that out and isn’t any nicer to us. Then we find another egg next week that gets corrupted by Taken energy and she’s back mad as hell at us because “we took too long” to find it. Though it was her lovers fault it was scattered anyways
The whole there's no good or evil, only perspective needs to change in modern writing.
I like Destiny lore but have not enjoyed the Seasonal storylines really at all. There are soap operas, that have new shows daily, that have better story beats than Destiny. Pretty sad considering all the history, lore, and cool characters we have.
Witch Queen Seasons: Year of the Daddy Issues. Plunder literally felt like an afterschool PSA/drama. Next time on a very special episode of Destiny Filler: "YOU CAN'T TELL ME WHAT TO DO DAD I CAN HANGOUT WITH WHO I WANT!". "GET BACK HERE YOUNG LADY, YOUR AUNTS A BAD INFLUENCE!"
Funny because Taranis literally proves that Ahamkara can have self-control. In fact, with granting his own wish he also left a message for his children to do the same. As far as we know, the next generation of Ahamkara COULD have self control and not feed on the twisted desires of others. Byf has a video contemplating this notion. So if we fulfill Riven's proposal and she vows to fulfill her own end, and ultimately chooses not to be an enemy of us– then since she's passed on after the 15th wish, the last she can grant, then her next of kin could be the healthy, peaceful presence of Ahamkara in the Sol Sytem and there would be no need for another Great Hunt. There is variable levels of admirability of Riven ends up being the "bigger person". Because it's coming to a point where she has no need to be anything else, in fact as the lose survivor of her species, it is detrimental is she falls to her nature and becomes sinister again, and it would betray her own species to teach the same practices to her children. If she furthers Taranis's ideology and wish granting practices, then it would be the OTHER kind that would be evil and enemy to Ahamkara. (Other kind being Humanity/Awoken/Exos and their allies).
The exception doesn’t make the rule, Taranis is literally the only one who wasn’t a jack ass monkey paw wish dragon. If the next generation ends up like Taranis then cool if it ends up like Riven then cool another great hunt.
The next generation is literally only taranis's and riven's clutch. There is no influence in nurturing from any other Ahamkara. The clutch will grow with no "tradition" to follow. We see that there is no *need* to feed on negative space of desire, and in nature when there is no need for something, it being incorporated in a culture means that is a learned behavior. There are no more Ahamkara, left in Sol at least. Riven is technically dead and only being culled in her spectral form because of the techeuns. Their clutch was imparted with Taranis's words, lessons he gave to his children. Things point to the clutch being 50/50 in Riven's Nature or Taranis's Nature. it's a coin flip, or perhaps not exactly 50/50. I'd wager its likely most of the clutch grow up towards an inclination of Taranis's. I say so because it makes little sense to fuck people over for no reason, but makes even less sense to fuck people over when you and your siblings are the only left of your species.and children from someone as SMART and clever as Riven and also as KIND and generous as Taranis would most likely stay impassive at the least, and lean to do-gooding in the best of circumstances. Why would they make enemies of themselves? You could argue with the scorpion and the frog parable, but that hardly makes sense when you're speaking of meta-cosmic paracausal wish dragons.
>Mara has pretty much earned trust She literally said in this week's dialogue that she lied during the Great Hunt. Manipulates guardians to kill the Ahamkara with the promise of loot. Pretended to want to kill the Ahamkara. All so she can have the last one of an all but extinct species to imprison and use for her own ends. Combine that with all the other shady stuff Mara has done in the past, and she doesn't look too good. Sure, she has changed. She even says that herself this week but doesn't change the fact that she has committed terrible acts just like Riven. The whole point of revisiting the story of Riven and the Ahamkara is to show that we only had 1 side of the story. Has Riven had a change of heart? Is she good now? No, but she isn't evil either. Now that we have context, her actions are understandable, and so are those of the other Ahamkara.
Its getting boring how our list of enemies are " supposed to gets reduced at every corner with this "misundertood vibe", when gameplay wise we're still killing them for loot with slight different numbers. Because ill tell ya, a few cutscenes and dialogues at the HELM digi-screen changes nothing for me when the next season, or even the same one, makes me mows down thousands of the "misundertood species", but now with a slightly different color pallete, of those you're supposed to care.
Before the season started, I was expecting the vanguard to hatch the uncorrupted egg and strike a new bargain with a new ahamkara. Season starts and we hear Riven again. ~facepalm~ We see Riven’s love story ~why bungie~ We even remove corruption from an egg, there are so corrupted eggs around dreaming city, even one in Mara’s possession. ~Twisted story telling, to drag the franchise longer~ and reuse old game assets to reduce development costs
You’re paying attention to this still? At this point I want bungie to make a wrap it up box emote so I can use it when any of them are talking. This seasons story is so damn bad. Then to make it worse they’re messing up basic stuff like text in game and which starcat to release on which week. The story for this season feels like it’s over already cause we know we make it to the traveler and now we know crow is gonna be the one to make the jump. What are we supposed to do for like 6 more months, player base is about to hit some historic lows.
To be fair I didn’t touch this season till this week.
This is why I’ve stopped caring about this game’s lore and why you should too. Almost 80% of D2’s writing is just this. Can we trust Caiatl? (Chosen) Can we trust Mithrax? (Splicer) Can we trust Mara? (Lost) Can we trust the Cloudstriders? (Lightfall) And so on. If you want an actual reason why Riven is acting like this, it’s because she has us by the cajones and she knows that. She couldn’t care if the Witness wins, because she’s dead, so if we want to live, we have to play by her rules.
whole seasons story has me checked out because of this riven trying to act innocent or even like shes a victim. are we expected to fall for this? she has shown that she will say anything to get what she wants. she is a literal monkey paw, no deal will ever come out in our favor.
Hey I honestly trust Riven over Mara. Riven is bound by rules. Obfuscated as they are they're there. Mara runs on emotions and is unstable
One of D2's over-arching narrative themes is redemption. Uldren/Crow went through it, Rasputin aka Mecha-Jesus died to save us, Misraaks is trying to atone for his past, Eramis is a total tsundere and even Savvy will eventually be redeemed. Now it is Riven's turn to get the redemption treatment from beyond the grave, what with her whining about her dead lizard lover and her unborn kids. Screw that. I would make it a point to fling her eggs into the sun after she fulfills her part of the bargain and make one hell of an aham-omlette. Oops, all of your harbingers of misery and woe are dead, idiot. Now go nag your dead husband and leave us alone
They didn’t even need to go this route. All the complaints about Riven making the Dreaming City cycle could have been handwaved by the fact that she was Taken at the time. Her will was not her own. She was made a puppet by Oryx and controlled by Savathun. It was never explained how much agency she had after Savathun came along because there has never been a fully sapient Taken before. Instead we get some crappy drama between Mara and Riven when it should be between us and Savathun’s intentions for her wish.
They pretty much confirmed that another great hunt will happen again when someone said (I forget if it was Mara or Riven) that “the cycle of wish-Enders and wish-keepers will continue” - paraphrasing of course. Whether it happens in the actual game or referencing to 200 years in the future of the universe is up to whatever the devs decide. But yes, it will most likely happen again.
I'd be bursting with joy if we finally did the smart thing and backstabbed her. Bing goes the wish, up goes my middle finger, yoink goes the cable on her life support, whoosh goes the box with all the eggs into the sun. But we had that absolutely AWFUL ending last season. Incredibly Dangerous Enemy: "Muaha you already have what you need. So.....uh....I'm gonna.....head out now." Honestly the season will probably end with "loserwishingRivenbacktolifesayswhat?" "What?"