thefirstknife - Tumblr blog

[thefirstknife]

fallen angel

(a repaint of my other version of this piece, because I thought I could do it better.)

(reference images can be found in my twitter thread for this piece)

Image ID: Eris morn from Destiny 2, reclining against rocks, her chest and abdomen covered with a shroud. Her arms are raised to hover below her Ahamkara bone orb. Her right arm shields her face so only her eyes peek above the arm. They are glowing green. Her body is covered in deep scars from bullet holes and claw marks. The background is two jutting rocks set in front of something akin to a lavender-coloured sunrise. The image is based off Cabanel’s “Fallen Angel” painting. Eris is portrayed here with tan skin, brown hair cut short and shaggy, and a hive-like carapace surrounding her three hive eyes. End ID.

[thefirstknife]

embrace the dark

[thefirstknife]

Bit of left-field question, but: I'm in the middle of a deep dive on exos and reboots, and wondered about your take on something. In earlier lore I've lost track of--iirc something involving Lakshmi-2 researching the topic, I'd be indebted if anyone had a link--suggested that reboots in exos are rare and not fully understood in the present day. I figured that jibed, since it's implied in Legacy's Lament lore that a proper reboot requires fresh Alkahest, which would be hard to come by. But now the Entelechy lorebook offhandedly mentions modern exos all having been rebooted several times since the Collapse. So I'm curious if I missed something, or there's a wire crossed in loreland, about how widely known the need for reboots are/how to go about them, or if everything post-Collapse would have just been exos hitting spontaneous boots for unknown reasons. Thanks for your time!

I couldn't find any mention of it in Legacy's Lament so if you have some specific line you're thinking of, plese share! The only thing I can think of is this:

"Clovis. You, me, and every other Exo… we deserve the life we were promised. If this portal falls, and we die, we lose that life. And if we're gone, and the Vex find some other way back, humanity is doomed. So, let's shut it down. Hell, let's swallow the damn key. But the portal stays."

Elsie explaining to Banshee (at the time Clovis-43) why they can't destroy the Glassway portal; because Exos need those Vex to live. I always read this as Elsie thinking about how if their bodies are destroyed and have to be remade, they would need Alkahest again, as well as Alkahest being needed to make brand new Exos in case they are needed to fight the Vex again. I'm not sure if it relates to resets, though a possibility exists.

But generally speaking, a reboot should not require Alkahest mostly because of what Lakshmi-2 researched; she was researching Spontaneous Exo Reset Syndrome which is a rare condition that causes an Exo to reset on their own, spontaneously. Nobody knows what causes it. Here's one of my posts about it with links to others I've made about it before.

Two cases of it had an Exo spontaneously rebooting in the middle of combat and one rebooting in the middle of a journey back home in a jumpship, so it's virtually impossible that a reset requires some special equipment and Alkahest. Otherwise, it wouldn't be possible to reset like that out of nowhere, unless there's some internal mechanism that works through Alkahest. But applying new source of Alkahest shouldn't be needed, if we go by this information.

Maybe there's a way to do reset with Alkahest and maybe that reset is better, but they can be reset without it apparently. The spontaneous reboot is not really supposed to be happening and nobody knows why it does, so Exos really shouldn't be going through that a lot (and there's only a few known cases). I think there's a difference between regular resets and spontaneous Exo reset syndrome; regular resets may occur because of some sort of trauma or memory overload or something similar, while the syndrome appears to happen completely involuntarily, uncontrolled and sometimes almost lethal as it can incapacitate the person entirely.

It's still fairly unclear how resets happen and how an Exo decides to go through them. Lakshmi theorised that Lightbearers don't need resets at all because a Ghost protects them somehow which seems to hold true. I don't think we have any specific data on civilian Exos resetting. A lot of Exos needed resets back in the Golden Age while fighting on Europa, but that probably has a lot to do with combat and stress.

Still, Ada-1 is one of the two Exos that have never reset. In her case, likely because she was made in a different way in comparison with others. She doesn't seem to experience DER at all and doesn't have to mimic basic humanisms (literally has no mouth). There's only a single mention of another Exo with no resets, here, called Mist-1. They appear to be a civilian and we know nothing else about them that isn't in this tab.

How and why random civilians would need and complete their resets is I believe unknown. But the vast majority did go through them so the CE is fine on that front. Obviously tracking down the very rare individuals who haven't reset might be difficult, on top of the possibility that someone like Mist-1 may have died since. Ada-1 is a special case who wouldn't remember the Collapse because she died during.

[thefirstknife]

boop your titan (100% death rate)

[thefirstknife]

Hi it’s me the egregore in your walls

Omg. An honor!!!!! Thank you egregore.

[thefirstknife]

I was wondering, and maybe I just missed it, but do we know exactly how the current invasion of The Last City started?

Was it stated anywhere or is that part of the weekly lore we are getting via the sealed weapon rooms in the Hall of Champions?

It was genuinely not specified! It's also strange because the Pyramids are not over the City when you're in the Tower, but they are when you're on Midtown in Onslaught:

I KNOW this is because changing the skybox in the Tower for this is probably not worth it; they would have to revert it after a while anyway, but still. I think that the view from Midtown should be what's canonically happening and I would've loved to see something in lore about how people reacted when the Pyramid ships appeared over the Last City! It's a big deal!

So far the lore book from the sealed rooms has not mentioned anything in particular. Honestly, only the cutscene at the start of Into the Light says anything about an invasion:

"Now across the Last City territory, the forces of the Witness surge. Our borders are under siege."

Shaxx's initial quest said this:

And Ikora said this:

There's really no mention of a specific starting point or what the reactions were when Pyramids literally appeared in the Earth's sky. Most likely it's just meant to be a conclusion of the invasion of Earth that started all the way back in Defiance/at the start of LF, with the Witness' forces following some sort of final directive to prevent us from going into the portal. I'm giving them a pass for this not being more detailed because Into the Light was not originally planned.

It would be pretty nice to see some reactions though. Pyramids over the City has been one of those things I've always wanted to see. And! It has been prophesied :) :

The sphere of the Traveler was gone. In its place, an obsidian monolith at least twice the size dominated the sky. In the Last City’s place was a swirling dust storm, tinged purple by the dying light.

A little more dramatic than we have it, but this image of the Pyramid over the City in the place of the Traveler has been a thing I've always wanted to see. It's somewhat a dream come true to see it on Midtown now, but I would definitely prefer if it were more detailed, with more lore about reactions and if they had been able to change the Tower skybox.

Maybe we'll get something as it goes on, but I wouldn't expect some wildly detailed insight into it. Which again, I can forgive due to the circumstances in which Into the Light was made.

[thefirstknife]

[thefirstknife]

I respect the people trying to understand the sudden pronoun switch for The Witness, but I think the simple answer is just that whoever wrote the flavor text for that Shaxx screen just forgot and defaulted to masculine pronouns.

Yeah, it's definitely a mistake.

It's not too big of a deal, mistakes happen, but so many people use wrong pronouns for the Witness all over the internet and it's annoying to see this sort of a mistake at this point.

[thefirstknife]

Destiny 2 | What is a Guardian? "Are we gods? We are connected to the weft and weave of the universe. No one knows how long we live. We stand alongside those without our gifts. We know intimatley their lifespans, their mortality, despite their resilience. Mortals live more intensley than any Guardian I've known, love harder perhaps. They know tomorrow is never guaranteed, that everything they could become dies with them. So, are we protectors? Our gifts were meant to defend against impossible threats. Those who need us have never needed us more, but we could do nothing and they would still die. What is a Guardian in that moment? Now across Last City territory, the forces of The Witness surge. Our borders are under siege. Does that make us soldiers? Pushing back buys us only time, but the alternative is unthinkable. We built a city none of us dared to dream of, with allies from unlikeley places. We have never had more to lose. I turn the question to you on the eve of our darkest hour. What is a Guardian? Define us in this moment for all time." - Ikora Rey

[thefirstknife]

WAAAA I LOVE HIM

[thefirstknife]

[thefirstknife]

uldren eyes 👁 👁

[thefirstknife]

I will not elaborate

[thefirstknife]

Hope you don't mind me barging in on the pronouns discussion but since the Traveler's almost always been referred to with it/its pronouns, I think the Witness has had them applied to it for largely the same reasons; the main reason both in-universe and out seems to be emphasizing that they're mysterious and not within our understanding. (Source: Peach and Balthazar's argument in Ghost Stories)

That's also true, I don't mind at all! That writer I linked also mentioned how they use it/its for the Traveler. The Traveler has also been referred to with she/her a few times, but it's mostly tied to the perception someone has of it; like when it appeared as a big mother wolf in Clovis' dream speaking with the voice of Clovis' wife, and in Mk. 44 Stand-Asides (I think those are the only two examples). Otherwise it's almost always it/its.

That might tie with what this other ask:

Also an interesting angle to consider and would pair with the Traveler. These entities are definitely... something conscious and alive, they both have their own personalities and wishes and ideals, but they're also concepts far above what we can fully comprehend.

It would still be nice to have more of that with less eldritch characters of course.

[thefirstknife]

I don't think it's necessarily "outdated" consider negative implications of it/it's for the Witness--it's about the context of it being an enemy of humanity, something to be fought and beaten and probably destroyed to prevent it from continuing to try to harm us that makes brings up the questions about if there was any un-personing intended in the choice of pronoun use. It's all about the context of it. Do any of our allies also use it/it's? I can't really think of any off the top of my head... There's something about our Big Enemy We Must Destroy being it/it's while enemies that have also become allies over time (or even other enemies we slew) remaining having pronouns that haven't historically been used to strip personhood. (There's also a world of difference between somebody reclaiming it/it's for itself and being assigned it/it's by people who don't like it)

Oh, that makes a lot more sense to me now!

Unfortunately we don't know if the Witness likes it, or even knows or cares. I think it would be interesting to explore more about it in TFS and possibly to get some extra insight into its actual thoughts (because we really don't know a lot given its manipulative nature). Not just for pronoun reasons, but overall to see how the Witness views our perception of it (if it has any views of it at all).

With the context you're thinking of, yeah I can see that. I'd like for more cool pronoun stuff with our allies. There are plenty of options to go into it; obviously there's aliens with different concepts of gender, but I would also like for this to be added to human characters as well, and not just aliens. As cool as exploring weird alien genders is, I think there should also be human characters to relate to.

Neomuni are a good option for that, as they've already explored some of it. Obviously there's Nimbus, but I really like how casually and easily gender fluidity was presented in this lore tab. The character just switches pronouns between she/her to he/him and the text doesn't make a huge thing out of it; this is normal to Neomuni. I would like to see more of it, and more representation like that for other pronouns and neopronouns for sure.

[thefirstknife]

quick lil rend of two ghost ocs of mine <3

[thefirstknife]

Come to think of it... Does the Witness itself ever use any pronouns for itself? Or is that just... Humanity decided to refer to the Witness as "it"? Because that has whole layers to it, stripping agency and personhood from the Witness, reducing it to an object. Which made sense before we knew anything about it, but seems a little odd now that we've seen it and clearly know it's no mere "thing".

The Witness only ever refers to itself with "we" or "us." So we really don't know what it would prefer. Not even the Disciples really refer to it as anything other than the Witness. Everyone else just uses it/its. I doubt the Witness will tell us which pronouns it prefers at any point, but you never know!

It does bring interesting questions to the table, because there's a lot of people who use and prefer it/its pronouns for themselves. I believe that defaulting to think that it/its is only for objects is fairly outdated even by our standards, let alone for the standards of the Destiny universe. However, I think it's still interesting that those were chosen by the characters specifically and not any other pronouns. For example, given the plurality of this being, and the fact that it refers to itself in plural, using a plural pronoun like "they" would also be fitting, but nobody ever does. Curious! It's possible that the goal was to make the difference between other they/them characters, especially given how the YW has been referred to as they/them consistently in the recent years.

As a bonus, here's one of the official writers for Bungie confirming it's only it/its for the Witness, with a little comment about it as well. This was before the Witness cutscene; it's also possible that these pronouns were chosen to reveal as little as possible about the Witness' origins.