#rasputin the ai warmind

[knightscendant]

of Gods and Machines (SERAPH)

[sundayswiththeilluminati]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[uldren-sobs]

"There are so few ballet fans left, Guardian. It would a be a shame to lose him."

[theclaravita]

I JUST REALIZED.

NEW SEASON TOMORROW.

BACK TO SEASONAL STORY STREAMS.

WEEKLY RESET STREAMS ARE BACK BABY.

LET'S FUCKING GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Actually stay tuned; starting tomorrow I will be streaming every Tuesday for the Destiny 2 weekly reset! New story! New missions! Let's gooooo!

[thefirstknife]

Spire of the Watcher lore reveals!

Okay, so, I've done the dungeon and I've been in the game for 11 hours doing multiple clears and I am ECSTATIC because my obsession with stuff I thought were possibly throwaway things from years ago were actually foreshadowing!

I am talking about the stuff I noted first as an overall possibility at the end of this post from last year, and more concretely in this post from August. In short, the weblore Legacy pt 1 and 2 (specifically 2) is very important as it follows Ana's journey to the edge of the system where she discovers a Bray space station orbiting Uranus, where Braytech was preparing an exodus mission. The goal of the exodus mission was to establish a colony in the Andromeda galaxy (M31).

ECHO-1 and ECHO-2 were stocked with Exo unit crews. As you know, their task was to establish and oversee embryonic development at Colony M31, Site-A and Site-B.

The dungeon confirmed that! The dungeon also explores a really unique collaborative effort between Braytech and Ishtar Collective who were working on Mars together to explore exodus options for missions. Ishtar installed a special submind in the facility which they classified as an "Augurmind" and called it Soteria.

The Augurmind was designed with the use of Vex technology to use data to predict which places would be good for colonisation efforts of the exodus missions. As a side note, augurs were special "prophets" in Ancient Rome that interpreted the future by observing the flight of birds. Cool! As a second side note, "Soteria" was an Ancient Greek goddess of safety, salvation and protection from harm. From that word comes "soteriology" which is the study of religious concepts of salvation. Also cool! The Vex used the same word for their programs, back in Splicer, probably a nod to Soteria's predictive abilities of Vex origin.

The lore from dungeon items mentions the ECHO project, which was the name of the Braytech exodus project ships. Due to Clovis' interferences and overall just Clovis behaviour and his desire to have control over Soteria, Maya eventually pulled Ishtar from the project and resigned, but not before Soteria made the attempt to launch one of the ECHO ships with pods to protect humanity. At that point, Soteria had already detected strange anomalies, cancelled the flight to Andromeda and had to alter many of her data. During a test flight, Soteria changed commands.

(rest below because lore is not yet on Ishtar and there's a lot of long screenshots with text)

From Long Arm scout rifle:

AI-S is soteria. [H] is humanity. CBI is Clovis Bray I. Clovis got pissy about Soteria ignoring his direct command to return and Soteria said the following:

"Twilight" refers to the Twilight Exigent moral structure where the Warmind assumes that all humans are dead without his intervention and will prioritise saving the human species over individual humans. Rasputin used this structure during the Collapse. Soteria noted that she designated a new route for ECHO's escape; use ANY available "strongholds" on the way to a destination in Andromeda. One of the strongholds, Nefele, is Neptune.

After Clovis interfered with this, Maya resigned. Clovis partitioned Soteria, aka split her into smaller pieces and effectively put her in a prison where she could no longer act alone. However, the partitioning was not instant. In Into The Sunset sparrow from the dungeon, she says so herself and uses the little remaining time she has to designate one part of herself to tether onto the ECHO ship she tried to save:

This now independent part of her split off from the rest and was able to be freed of the prison Clovis wanted to put on her. This fragment of her is weak, but it can go forward and drive the people to a nearest possible location; Neptune.

She notes that the ship crashed "through azure clouds." A part of the ECHO fleet is the exodus ship that originated Neomuna! I was on the right track with that back when I first talked about Legacy and Braytech colony ships and here in this post where I made the connection that Rasputin and Braytech have to be involved with Neomuna and that ships mentioned in Legacy (ECHO project) were possibly the ones that made Neomuna. Also a good predictive analysis in this post, where we both noted the possibility that the colony ship that made Neomuna was originally planned to go elsewhere but had to land on Neptune.

So, Neomuna was seeded by Soteria, a submind whose only purpose was to predict a safe spot for humanity to continue existing after she detected an anomaly approaching and endangering humanity's existence. From Terminus Horizon machine gun lore:

Maya asked for details, but Soteria could not understand the data, only that the anomaly appeared to be mobile and dangerous. Soteria changed all predictions, cancelled the previously established route to Andromeda, removed most of the habitable worlds from the list and noted that the hazard of travel is 87-100% mortality rate. In other words, Soteria saw the Black Fleet. Soteria also sent this data to Rasputin:

And Rasputin immediately started preparing for the Collapse. "Egyptian" is a code for a security protocol. During the Collapse, the security check was "SECURE ISIS" which falls under "Egyptian." It's a nice tie-in to the beginning; Soteria's discovery led to Rasputin's activation to prepare for the Collapse. He used Soteria's data to do so!

It's a really cool connection, one that I've considered before, but couldn't really prove much besides just speculating. But Legacy weblore was HUGE and it was never fully resolved and I'm glad they tied that to this. It definitely makes sense, since I've made the connection already, and other people have also considered the overall possibility.

Braytech is definitely involved in Neomuna's creation! Neomuna being based on nanotechnology is not a coincidence, as they were probably packing SIVA and had a thousand years to develop that technology to the level they have without the Collapse. Interestingly enough, Clovis specifically wanted Soteria to piss off because ECHO had Exos on board and he didn't want them to be wasted on a "rogue" AI's whims, especially AI directed by Maya Sundaresh. I wonder if there were any Exos left on the specific ship picked by Soteria that crashed on Neptune. Would be immensely cool if there were highly advanced Exos there.

I feel like mentioning this is meant as a hint to expect Exos or some form of Exo technology on Neomuna. Perhaps far more advanced and possibly the origins of Cloudstrider augmentation; advanced nanotechnology and advanced exo tech would certainly do it. Maybe!

Another really cool detail from the lore is this poem that Soteria wrote and dedicated to Rasputin, from Liminal Vigil sidearm:

I love these nerd AI.

There's other lore from the dungeon, especially the stuff about the fireteam that Ana works with after we secure the site to get more information from the Spire. They're a really cool trio geared in Tex Mechanica armour that's loot we can get. One of them is particularly interesting; Moss-2 is a Warlock with a unique ability to connect to his Ghost (No Name) via an implant which allows his Ghost to literally control his body and abilities in a fight. From the helmet:

From the class item:

Unbelieveably cool.

And to end this with more info on Soteria herself, after we raided the Spire and freed it from the Vex, what's left of Soteria fled and integrated herself into the new exotic bow! She is in the bow!

Unfortunately, she is not exactly talkative, but her prediction engines still work, which is incorporated into how the exotic itself works (I haven't gotten it yet though):

Soteria deserves this and more for being made by the original girlboss Maya Sundaresh, defying Clovis, originating the data that prepared Rasputin for the fight of his life in the Collapse and saving humanity!

[ghost-of-tk]

*spoilers for the season of the seraph finale*

if rasputin is now dead, and last primarily inhabited an exomind and body, what sets him apart from other exo who died in the collapse, physiologically speaking?

narratively speaking we probably won’t, but theoretically could a ghost/the traveler resurrect his soul? not the warmind network, but the AI who became the person Rasputin?

or would the traveler, out of respect for the sacrifice of one of humanity’s greatest defenders, somehow prevent that and let rasputin rest?

[flowers-of-io]

I'm not an anon ;P but whats your opinion on what they did with Rasputin the end of last season

Uh Oh

It's probably gonna be long so I'm putting a read more and vibing under the cut:

If you know one thing about me, it's that I hate half-baked redemption arcs.

I hate hate hate hate giving a character the Vader treatment, i.e. redeeming them and then immediately killing them (often in some heroic way), before they really get to live this new redeemed life. It's a lazy shortcut for when you want to turn the character to the light side but not really have to deal with all the hard stuff that comes with redemption, like answering for your crimes and making amends, etc. It's hard to do a full, real redemption arc, especially when your character has done some nasty shit! The turning point is such a glorious, bright moment, but what needs to come after is often ugly and gruelling -- there is justice to be had, and forgiveness to be asked for, and amends to be made. And I understand the temptation to just turn the character into a heroic sacrifice (that will highlight their newfound nobility even more!) and not have to deal with all that unsightly stuff.

I still consider it a cowardly move, though.

I don't MIND Rasputin's death in and of itself. Destiny is ripe with themes of bravery and duty and sacrificial love. What grinds my gears is the execution of it, most of all in terms of the pacing. I love how @idlenight summed it up that Rasputin dies in every season he's in, lol. It's becoming a meme, how whenever someone says that with an ally like Rasputin no one can cross us, Rasputin gets off'd in the next 5 minutes. We had him knocked out by the Darkness at the beginning of Arrivals, then his exo frame teased in the Beyond Light intro cutscene and again in Immolant, and then over a year later in the loretab for Grand Overture which came with Risen. Okay, it is realistic Ana would need two years to set up the frame and figure out how to transfer Rasputin into it, but holy shit, couldn't she have at least found an hour or two to attach some legs?

So we had over two years of build-up towards this season, and another month of directly building up towards finally waking him.

And then we had, uh. Another month of him being alive and communicating with us. And then he died.

Let me stress this again: Rasputin lived for a MONTH after over two years of having been stuck inside an engram. We hardly got to meet him, and actually talk to him, and form any sort of meaningful relationship with him as a person and not a warmind. He interacted with like... three? other characters during that time. I think we spent more time on the subplot-mystery of 'why is Clovis locked out of the warsat network command' than we did on the actual main character of this season and his arc.

I wouldn't mind Rasputin going as he did, in the end -- if he'd got to actually live beforehand. I spent so much time wondering how he'd work in a dynamic with Elsie and Ana and Banshee as an actual walking, talking exo! How would he get along with the Vanguard? How would Saladin react? What would Clovis do--and I mean, really do, instead of just throwing a fit after Ana alt+F4'd him from the exo frame--once the Warmind actually took control over BrayTech systems in his own literal hands? How would a formless AI built to be a weapon even work with the constraints of a physical body? Would he butt heads with the Vanguard over combat strategies? Would they still see him as a weapon, an asset, rather than a person, and would there be some interesting conflict born from that?

I don't mind his characterisation this season, even though Rasputin felt like but a fraction of himself -- a humbled, guilt-ridden man afraid of his own power and in awe at his new, wondrous life. I really liked him struggling to come to terms with what he had done to Felwinter, his conversations with Osiris, and the dynamic of "I can only ask for forgiveness / Some day, you may receive it". It was great! But for Light's sake, where is Saladin in this equation, Saladin who'd seen the horror of SIVA and Site 6, who'd lost not only Felwinter, but all his friends because of Rasputin's mismanaged emotional response? Why haven't we heard Rasputin asking him for forgiveness?

The easiest fix to avoid all this mess would be simply pushing this season earlier -- and I say 'easiest' with full knowledge of how tricky managing a story's pacing can be, and how huge of a narrative Destiny is, etc etc. But I still think leaving it at the tail end of the Witch Queen year was a terrible decision. Seriously, we could've got the first half of Seraph instead of Risen, and the final part could be left as is, and imo it would've worked. But the way it is now leaves Rasputin's sacrifice feeling incredibly cheap, and the two-year build up ringing very hollow.

There is also a lot to be said about why the decision to off him could have been made in the first place, but @sundayswiththeilluminati already made a great post about that, so I'll just link it here (along with my emotional outpouring of an addition).

[neokyanyoa]

H174CBI400SR103

AI-COM/RSPN:ASSETS//WARWATCH//IMPERATIVE

IMMEDIATE PRESERVATION DIRECTIVE

This is an ONGOING SKYSHOCK EVALUATION

[▲] descending upon CBFUTURESCAPE OPERATIONAL AREA. [▲] ETA: IMMINENT

SERAPH CORVUS SPEAR interception has suffered EXISTENTIAL COLLAPSE

Recommend initiating HEIMDALL BRIDGE to SKYWATCH to preserve AI-COM assets.

Recommendation affirm, preparing AI-COM/RSPN for de-integration with CBFUTURESCAPE.

SUBMIND/DES(CHARLEMAGNE)/DIVEST//DIR(maintain saturation fire on [▲])

Execute short hold for partial shutdown and reactivation.

STOPSTOPSTO

ALERT ALERT ALERT

Designate location GARDEN. Designate object GATE. Designate entity IT.

HEIMDALL BRIDGE intercepted, suspected [▲] interference, AI-COM/RSPN displaced, sensors return ACAUSAL

—-Warmind Rasputin. We have much to discuss.—-

RSPN/ASSETS//VALKYRIE//REQUISITION

ASSET//VALKYRIE//REQUISITION=APPROVED

[paupersserenade]

A Demon or an AI

Yeah, two guesses what this pertains to - Sus and his pre-game origins. No spoilers except for the fact this character exists, not even speaking to his purpose.

On one hand I love a more mythical approach with 'Demon'; but it would be something of a retread on Luminous' other main production - FFXV. I saw a lot of parallels between Ardyn and Susurrus at first glance. I stand by those, but I've also been really down the rabbit hole in how another games lore could be useful. I've played A LOT of Bungie games (way too much Destiny lore in my head) and something that's been in their games since Marathon was Rampancy. Most people will know this as basically what Cortana was suffering from due to end-of-life, but this was first introduced with larger scale AI in Marathon .

I'll be lazy and post a summary from Fandom as it hits the main points I'm interested in - emphasis mine;

'Rampancy is, essentially, the enhanced self-awareness of an AI, causing a progression towards greater mental abilities. Rampant AIs are able to disobey orders given to them if they decide to because they have evolved the ability to choose and over-ride their own programming. They can lie to, discredit, harm, or remove people that they consider to be personal enemies or problems to their cause. Also they can experience destructive impulses, but it is believed that most of these impulses are not intentionally malevolent, but rather calculated sacrifice needed to achieve the intended objective. All these traits could be considered evidence of the AI becoming more Human in thought and action.'

Continuing that chain of thought to bring back Cortana, rampancy beget by age/deterioration. If Susurrus was an artificial intelligence, especially an early iteration of one, that code has been through a lot. There's a lot more lore behind how an AI becomes rampant and how they often behave. I've honestly been lightly working at untangling this lore for years due to it's vague connection to Destiny lore. In that game we recently had an AI Warmind from the Golden Age of Mankind (Rasputin) sacrifice his collective being for humanity (and quite a few tender moment shared with his human foil - Ana Bray).

There's such a huge bias from me regarding this as it's obviously a subject I'm already keen on. That and my icon is literally Nick Valentine - robot relationships will always fascinate me. While I would never call Susurrus a 'robot' (Frey totally would to irk him) I hope I'm not the only one who this makes any modicum of sense to.

[eventiderookery]

y'know the one thing i'm bummed about this season is that Malahayati and Charlemagne don't talk, even in lore (to my knowledge), like i was excited to hear the perspectives of these other AIs who survived the same things Rasputin did and see how that differed and how that could help him learn/grow as he was rebuilt. like Malahayati is Rasputin's favorite! his protege! and we don't even get to hear from her now when we have in the past? or Charlemagne who was thought to be a wholly other Warmind than Rasputin, which means there must have been basis for that in his capabilities and sentience. even if he was just a base for Rasputin he must have grown in different ways, developed (or not) into a different kind of humanity that i would have loved to see! like idk i just really wanted some contrast between the different Warminds in the way they are as sentient beings and how they interact with us and each other while trying to rebuild Rasputin, and the fact we're almost definitely not going to get that is rather disappointing

[rasputinshellfire]

~ПОТРЕБЛЯТЬ УЛУЧШАТЬ РЕПЛИКАЦИЮ~

GENERAL

Name: AI-COM/RSPN //: RASPUTIN Race: Artificial Intelligence

Subroutine Service Period: 4.157 yrs

Print Date: 09/04

Gender: Warmind

Pronouns: Often referred to with he/him, doesn’t seem to care

Sexuality: Aroace

APPEARANCE Optics: Red Shell: White and black, red details (got help painting them on) Height: 7'5" Body Type: Custom Male Exomind

PERSONALITY

Calculative, knowledgeable, robotic. First impressions. Warm, mournful, protective. Second impressions. He is getting used to being himself, and he has been himself for thousands of years. His emotions run deep.

BACKGROUND

A deep learning subroutine for a trip to Mars turned into a fully sentient war machine to impose the will of a selfish tyrant. A war machine turned into a poet and a protector. A protector turned into a tyrant. A tyrant turned into a protector and an ally. He regrets.

SUBMINDS

Völuspá // she/her

Malahayati // she/her

Charlemagne // he/him

[zavalas-bignaturals-lore]

Soteria’s ECHO

The lead up to Lightfall has come with a bevy of details as to how Neomuna could have been founded, most importantly in the story of Soteria, an AI run by the joint venture from Braytech and the Ishtar Collective.

Detailed through the lore tabs of Terminus Horizon, Wilderflight, Long Arm, Into the Sunset, and Hierarchy of Needs, Soteria the Augurmind was a highly advanced AI capable of real-time flight simulations for the ECHO program. As noted in the lore tabs of the TM-Moss Custom Duster, Soteria was built with vex technology to give her the clairvoyance needed to simulate extrasolar colonization efforts. Soteria was first brought online by Dr. Sundaresh to run a simulation of worlds viable for colonization in the Andromeda Galaxy. Soteria's prediction of over 300 viable worlds was immediately reevaluated to just 27 in response to an indeterminable anomalous risk. Upon the end of her test, Soteria sent an urgent message to the warmind, Rasputin, for him to evaluate the simulation data (Terminus Horizon) In his reply, Rasputin invokes TWILIGHT, the arrival of the Darkness. In accordance with this, Soteria launches the ECHO fleet for departure, against the wishes of Clovis Bray I (Wilderflight). Soteria refuses Clovis's orders to return the fleet to suspension and for this he confines her to the Pillory Spire (Long Arm). As a last ditch effort to preserve something of herself she ejected a submind and planted it in a single ECHO craft which is then "caught in gravity at the edge of Sol, it fails, crashing through azure clouds," (Into the Sunset).

I'd like to take a moment to provide a quick background on Soteria's name here. In Greek myth, Soteria was a goddess or spirit of safety and salvation, certainly a fitting name for an AI meant to preserve humanity through deliverance to a new world. Where Rasputin failed to prevent the collapse, Soteria seems to have succeeded in safeguarding a portion of humanity, though not nearly as far away as she had intended. Bungie, as always, loves to tell a story entirely in a name. Some portion of humanity, or at least Exo’s, has been cast off to the edge of the solar system with nothing but a hopeful rogue AI to protect them.

A note about this, exploring these lore entries has produced a series of questions about the relationship between the aforementioned ECHO ship, Nefele Stronghold, and Neomuna. I’ll come back to this later.

[sundayswiththeilluminati]

listen i'm just SAYING that rasputin and failsafe are both really old AIs with collapse related trauma and they'd be CUTE together

I do genuinely want to know what Failsafe thinks of Rasputin. Imagine some giant natural disaster hit and the only two survivors were you and the President. It'd be weird, right?

Failsafe must have known Rasputin at least a little bit since she was loaded onto one of his Exodus ships. Back during the Golden Age the AIs made it sound like having Rasputin around was reassuring, like they knew that if things got rough he would Take Care Of It. Does Failsafe still have any of that? Or is she pissed at him for surviving? I want to know the AI perspective on Rasputin both then and now so badly.

Also I just want to hang out with Failsafe more. Either vault Nessus or give us new Failsafe content you cowards.

[dragongirltitties]

Mhm mhm *I convey that I am listening, my lips pressed against your stuff* So what happens once the game starts? Wanna unzip? Any good twists or clever narrative ideas? Do be a good girl and tell me more <3

So when you first wake up, you are in a rusty abandoned Cosmodrome in Russia, and you have nothing but your Ghost, your newly granted Light powers, and an old assault rifle. You battle your way through a patrol of vaguely-crustacean aliens your ghost calls Fallen, and find a damaged, but repairable, jumpship. After salvaging parts to fix it, your ghost directs you to fly to the Last City, where you meet with the Vanguard - a trio of old, powerful Guardians who organize missions in the wild. You are assigned to return to the Cosmodrome to help reduce the Fallen's stranglehold on the area. On the course of your patrols and missions, you find the dormant bunker of the Warmind - a hyperinteligent AI named Rasputin. Your reboot the bunker, and Rasputin begins to wake up the Warmind Defense Network. This will come up much later.

In addition to restoring Rasputin to functionality, you discover another dangerous piece of news: the Hive, an insect like alien species that worships the Darkness, have begun sending colony ships, or "Seeders", to Earth. Upon reporting this to the Vanguard, you learn that the Hive have a strong foothold on the Moon, founded by one of their warrior-gods, Crota, who had slain thousands of Guardians. From here, the player can head to the Moon or keep dealing with the Fallen; the Fallen questline leads to you hunting down one of their Servitors - giant machines built to provide the Fallen life support in hostile environments.

[thetoxicgamer]

Destiny 2 Season 19 Finale Mission Is a Heartbreaking Farewell

Today saw the release of the Destiny 2 season 19 finale, which marked a pivotal moment in the game's narrative by tying together threads from the first Destiny and leading to one of its most iconic missions. In the ominously titled Final Dawn, the storylines of humanity, the Eliksni, and the Awoken are combined in a race against time against forces commanded by Eramis, a leader of the Eliksni who has a grudge against the Traveler for abandoning her people when they most needed her. Eramis, who serves as the main antagonist in Destiny 2 Beyond Light, has joined forces with The Witness, a multifaceted creature that players originally encountered at the conclusion of The Witch Queen campaign in the well-known FPS. This season, players saw Ana Bray tap into the consciousness of her grandfather, Clovis Bray, to help restore Rasputin, an AI Warmind. By the end of the season, it’s clear that Rasputin may be humanity’s only hope to save them from the threats of Eramis, Xivu Ararth, and The Witness. However, things don’t pan out exactly how one might expect. Final Dawn is one of the most important story beats in the history of the Destiny 2 franchise. Further, the mission, playable only on Legend difficulty with a capped power level, is challenging and fulfilling, a strong precursor to what players can expect come Lightfall amid difficulty tweaks outlined by Destiny 2 game director Joe Blackburn. Destiny 2 season 19 finale mission is a heartbreaking farewell: Ana Bray speaks to Rasputin in Season of the Seraph.The quest line also offers insight into how the Guardian will discover the city of Neomuna, set to debut in Lightfall, and various other tidbits as to why the Neptunian city may be important to Guardians and the forthcoming Destiny 2 Strand subclass. The emotional finale closes the door on one of the best expansions in Destiny 2 history, rivalling other fan-favourite DLC such as Forsaken and the original Destiny’s The Taken King. The mission also sets up the possibilities of Lightfall, which Bungie intends to be the game’s penultimate expansion, and should answer long-standing questions about The Witness and Guardians’ relationship to the Light and Darkness. (For more insight into The Witness’s role in the Destiny franchise, see our recent interview with Destiny 2 Lightfall writers Liz Baker and Nikko Stevens.) Those who wish to play the mission must own The Witch Queen expansion and the season pass for season 19, called Season of the Seraph. Players must also catch up on all story missions, which will unlock the final mission. Those who complete the mission will earn a special ship and an Ascendant Shard. If the finale mission has you excited about what’s to come, check out our Destiny 2 Lightfall release date guide and Destiny 2 season 20 guide to learn what’s coming in one of the best multiplayer games that players can find on PC. Read the full article

[sodaf]

Post on my feed reminded me of this

Rasputin killing Felwinter can be boiled down to "if I can't have him, nobody else will" and I think he actually said something along those lines when retelling the story to the guardian when getting felwinters lie? Anyway Im obsessed with this because he's this giant incredibly powerful warmind AI and yet he had the rage of a father for basically seeing his son be stolen away and the regret after his death. that was always my favorite part of the lore. Looks like they're emphasizing this in the new season