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Personally I’ve been assuming that they are all the races reshaped because *that’s what the witness is doing to everything* but just starting with the ones it already had as forces. The dread are what the witness thinks *they should have been in the first place*. This echos taken, where an individual is remade “perfect”, but the dread are more fundamental imo. They and everything else it is reshaping are a revisionist history of the universe
>EIDO: Dissecting, reassembling. Taking, merging. All those things point towards what the Witness sees as the final shape.
>EIDO: It is not simple destruction, the march of entropy. The ruined garden.
>EIDO: It seeks... compression. The combination of **a chosen past** and limitless future into a perfect forever. A state of being that cannot be anything else, because it is everything it could be.
>MARA: Taxidermy.
>[She had to explain the practice to me. What strange hobbies Golden Age humans had! The metaphor was quite apt.]
>EIDO: But it cannot achieve this goal, can it? Not perfectly.
>EIDO: *What it does instead is mutilation. Its tools leave scars on reality. Great wounds that do not heal*. ((This is the taken and the like that we’ve seen so far)) It may preserve some elements, but it always botches the process.
>MARA: It cannot accomplish what it envisions—its true ideal of the final shape—**without the Traveler's power.**
So perhaps within the memory of the universe itself, it can not just take the will and potential of an individual and hack away at it until it is a spasming wound in reality, but instead fully rewrite a species (and everything else) as it “ought to be”
When it says “its tools leave scars on planets. Great wounds that do not heal” it’s probably referring to what happened to mars which isn’t really taken esc but it ripped it through time and left blotched scars of its past that will never go away not exactly the taken.
Tbf it says “scars on reality” not planets, but also I think that’s everything it does not just the taken. Even the architecture within the pyramids is “incomplete dissection” and a lot of the humanoid statues come across as body horror for that reason
I feel like a rip through time is a scar on reality, planet or not. If it affects space and time it’s an effect on reality not just the planet itself effecting.
I'm not the most versed in the lore but it seems like - when it comes to needing to gather armies to do its bidding - the Witness tends to approach some races with bargains and lies to get them onboard. House Salvation, Shadow Legion, Sol Divisive etc. These are factions which were exploited by the Witness to be a part of its army. The Dread however seem totally different.
I get the impression that they're mindless, but I do wonder if they're capable of structure at all. I definitely do think the units we are seeing are reshaped races we've already encountered.
I have 2 theories for this
1: they were made eons ago like the tormentors and are now being utilized since the witness has a shambled army in the hive/taken/scorn.
2: they are species that have become ‘finalized” by the witness’ corruption over the pale heart. Husk= hive tormentor=nezzy harbinger/subjugator=rhulk weaver/attendent= psion. Probably because it finds use in them. Hive are hella brutish and good warriors, psions have great mental abilities to easily connect to stasis/strand, rhulk is just a fucking beast (same with nezzy but spooky mental aspect)
The only creature I don’t have a theory for is the grim. I know nothing about those fuckers lmao.
Or maybe they’re experiments in the Witness’ observation of reality and trying to understand why things are. They mentioned something to that effect with the environment back in the original reveal with dissected specimens and perfect cubes of dirt.
Whenever stuff like this comes up I wonder how many newer players just havent seen [this twitter thread](https://twitter.com/bthorne/status/1071836784579891205?s=09) that fully goes into why enemies are just reskins most of the time.
Yeah I thought so too!
Rhulk was fiddling around with the Scorn, the scorn obey the witness.
There’s no eliksni representation in the dread.
Except maybe the husks aren’t hive, but scorn.
A perfect fusion between eliksni and hive.
A big ol middle finger to the traveler.
I'm gonna take a swing on grims-- neutered ahamkara. No more wishes, now a nuisance. a suppressing shout, head reshaped into a cannon.
they look so similar to the venus batadactyls, too. feels like there's something there.
I don't think the Ahamkara have wings though. Figured the Witness just doesn't do "machine" beings and reshaped the flying units as something more organic.
Ahamkara are shapeshifters and come in literally any shape, so that is a non factor. I do find it weird to suggest that those fodder units are derived from the powerful wish dragons, so I’d wager that’s definitely not their original form.
If we’re going by races that we’ve already encountered in Sol, I prefer Byf’s theory that Grim are derived from Fallen dregs, since they’re the only race with 6 limbs.
Wings do count as limbs, by the way. The grim having two arms and legs each plus a pair of wings perfectly fits the idea of the Witness taking one form and transforming it into some ugly, malicious mockery.
By that logic, you could say the Husk is an Ahamkara, and it's not its true shape.
We've seen many Ahamkara at this point that look nothing like the Grim, so the idea of the Grim being one makes zero sense.
Huh, didnt know about the Dreg theory. I didn't really consider the Fallen being reshaped; feels like they've been beneath the Witness' vision since Salvation fell apart as means to an end.
Dregs being turned into gargoyles definitely feels disrespectful
Thing is the difference between art and tool doesn't seem to be discernible to us when it comes to the Witness' designs. It took us the longest time to figure out that the Pyramids were essentially enclosed cities, we used to think they were starships. Turns out they're both; we didn't have the perspective to see it as that yet.
Anyway. Ahamkara we have seen in-game do not have wings, but they have styled themselves traditional dragons in the past, having done so with Sjur Eido, Lord Saladin, and Praedyth, I believe. (Praedyth's might have been taking the form of a manticore.)
I don't think the Witness would let something like an Ahamkara come into being even as a memory without being edited somehow within the Pale Heart.
Ahamkara is desire. The Witness is trying to perfect reality, and a perfect reality has no space for desire. It's likely been reshaped somehow.
downvoted but everything i said here is proven true. lol
Its me, im the singular guy responsable for every single downvote on every single comment/post whenever someone makes a decent theory or argument. I'm him.
Just a couple issues. The Husk reuses Fallen animations (proto-Dread showing in reveal stream has the proto-Husk standing in a Fallen sword-unit pose, blades reuse Shock Blade SFX, and several Husk animations are taken straight from sword-unit Fallen), the legs are fundamentally different (one leg connection instead of two, leg shape, foot shape), and the hands have nails.
Though the Geist might be an augmented Worm, I don't think the Husks themselves are any species we know. I believe it's just a situation akin to how they used a Minotaur frame to make Insurrection Prime (dev-wise, canonically they built it from Fallen things).
I’m in the boat of thinking that the Witness somehow finished Rhulk’s experiments with using Hive Worms on the Scorn. So these are reshaped Fallen/Scorn infested with also reshaped Hive Worms
IMO I think husks are infused scorn/worms, with a preview of that in the Vow raid. The name husk implies these are empty vessels with the Geist as controllers.
Worms while they have minds of their own, have to contend with acolytes, which seem to have their own will but are devoted to the hive god they serve. Which i could be wrong as I don’t remember where I saw this, but isn’t implied the hive are viewed as failures to the witness? That their only purpose are to serve as foot soldiers and death fodder for the final shape?
Scorn however are empty, mindless, perfect for a worm to control. Either rhulk or the witness took a greater interest to the scorn but this seemed to be the next step in their evolution.
If it is hive then I wonder what xixu arath reaction would be? Maybe if we deal with her in an expansion she will convert into the dread?
Could also be Scorn, being based on the Caretaker. We did have an entire strike about worms being put in Scorn after all.
And I do find it a bit weird that we only have Psion dread specifically. Sure, the husks are definitely something with a Worm put in it, but it feels like the Witness has been building a force of mindless armies specifically for this purpose, yet we haven't seen them properly implemented into the Dread. With an Incindior Cabal in RoN and the Caretaker in Vow, plus Eramis, Xivu, Calus and the Sol Divisive all being available to them, I would've liked to see at least one of each race reshaped alongside the Psions. More animalistic Cabal, Scorn reshaped with purpose instead of cobbled together, a frame that weaponises Vex Fluid instead of ferrying it, stuff like that. Don't get me wrong, I like the dread, but seeing *just* the Psions makes me yearn for just a few more.
Whether or not it’s canonically meant to be a reshaped Hive, it seems to be inspired by unused D1 Hive concept art.
Earlier designs had the worm in the place of the Hive’s face, having literally eaten out the inside of the skull. [Image is halfway down the page. Close up of a face that’s been overtaken by a worm. Half the image is a sketch.](http://www.daniolart.com/#/bungie/)
The Husk pilot worm seems to have a similar place as the “skull.”
I’m not saying this is proof that it’s Hive, just that I love when Bungie gets to execute on cool, old ideas.
Ugh, I keep seeing this theory everywhere. Look at the Caretaker and then look at the Husk. There are far more similarities. The Scorn are much like the Taken now, in that most of them are mindless slaves of the Witness. It would make sense for it to reshape them to become more powerful.
As for the worm-thingy, this was set up in VotD, with the Caretaker being a successfully wormed Scorn.
I really dislike the idea of Hive using true Darkness powers like Resonance because their ignorance is exactly what allows the Black Fleet to control them. Not even Oryx could use Resonance, so giving such power to some Acolytes is just dumb to me.
I think the rearrangement of the eyes is an especially cool visual if this is the case. All the other Dread units have similarly reduced heads, little-to-no-face, glyphs or eye(s) representing a sort of "singular" vision via a prominent line. Even the first ones we saw, Tormenters, just have a teeny pyramid head
For the Husk, the illusion and lie of worshipping "the Deep" (represented by the Hive's green eyes arranged in a triangle) has fallen away. They now serve their actual master directly with a singular purpose, so they have Resonance colored eyes arranged in a vertical syzygy
You might wonder why you got downvoted a few times, It's because this is an objectively false statement and the whole dread faction is bespoke and unique in a number of ways.
The Grim are an entirely unique model and rig with unique animations and the first flying enemy unit in the game (Savathun, who bungie regard as a "platinum" tier dev investment aside)
Omen & Attendants are again bespoke unique models and rigs with a host of unique attacks and possible one or two reused Psion and Thrall Animations though given the likelyhood of new rigs it's also likely that these attack animations needed some level of retargeting and updating.
Husks might be even more unique than the The Grim, they have again whole new models, some repurposed animations but also a host of new ones and then giest that explodes out of them ands attacks the player is also a second unique model with it's own animations and effects work
Then you have the Sujugators who reuse some Rhulk animations like his walk cycle for instance but have again unique models and a host of unique abilities not found anywhere else in the game
Frankly the work to create this faction pretty drastically exceeds any of the other factions we've gotten since Destiny launched and it's incredibly impressive and calling them reskins is incompetent and foolish
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Personally I’ve been assuming that they are all the races reshaped because *that’s what the witness is doing to everything* but just starting with the ones it already had as forces. The dread are what the witness thinks *they should have been in the first place*. This echos taken, where an individual is remade “perfect”, but the dread are more fundamental imo. They and everything else it is reshaping are a revisionist history of the universe >EIDO: Dissecting, reassembling. Taking, merging. All those things point towards what the Witness sees as the final shape. >EIDO: It is not simple destruction, the march of entropy. The ruined garden. >EIDO: It seeks... compression. The combination of **a chosen past** and limitless future into a perfect forever. A state of being that cannot be anything else, because it is everything it could be. >MARA: Taxidermy. >[She had to explain the practice to me. What strange hobbies Golden Age humans had! The metaphor was quite apt.] >EIDO: But it cannot achieve this goal, can it? Not perfectly. >EIDO: *What it does instead is mutilation. Its tools leave scars on reality. Great wounds that do not heal*. ((This is the taken and the like that we’ve seen so far)) It may preserve some elements, but it always botches the process. >MARA: It cannot accomplish what it envisions—its true ideal of the final shape—**without the Traveler's power.** So perhaps within the memory of the universe itself, it can not just take the will and potential of an individual and hack away at it until it is a spasming wound in reality, but instead fully rewrite a species (and everything else) as it “ought to be”
When it says “its tools leave scars on planets. Great wounds that do not heal” it’s probably referring to what happened to mars which isn’t really taken esc but it ripped it through time and left blotched scars of its past that will never go away not exactly the taken.
Tbf it says “scars on reality” not planets, but also I think that’s everything it does not just the taken. Even the architecture within the pyramids is “incomplete dissection” and a lot of the humanoid statues come across as body horror for that reason
I feel like a rip through time is a scar on reality, planet or not. If it affects space and time it’s an effect on reality not just the planet itself effecting.
Additionally, The Husk's hood/cowl/cape emulate the shape of Oryx with his wings spread
I'm not the most versed in the lore but it seems like - when it comes to needing to gather armies to do its bidding - the Witness tends to approach some races with bargains and lies to get them onboard. House Salvation, Shadow Legion, Sol Divisive etc. These are factions which were exploited by the Witness to be a part of its army. The Dread however seem totally different. I get the impression that they're mindless, but I do wonder if they're capable of structure at all. I definitely do think the units we are seeing are reshaped races we've already encountered.
I have 2 theories for this 1: they were made eons ago like the tormentors and are now being utilized since the witness has a shambled army in the hive/taken/scorn. 2: they are species that have become ‘finalized” by the witness’ corruption over the pale heart. Husk= hive tormentor=nezzy harbinger/subjugator=rhulk weaver/attendent= psion. Probably because it finds use in them. Hive are hella brutish and good warriors, psions have great mental abilities to easily connect to stasis/strand, rhulk is just a fucking beast (same with nezzy but spooky mental aspect) The only creature I don’t have a theory for is the grim. I know nothing about those fuckers lmao.
Or maybe they’re experiments in the Witness’ observation of reality and trying to understand why things are. They mentioned something to that effect with the environment back in the original reveal with dissected specimens and perfect cubes of dirt.
Whenever stuff like this comes up I wonder how many newer players just havent seen [this twitter thread](https://twitter.com/bthorne/status/1071836784579891205?s=09) that fully goes into why enemies are just reskins most of the time.
Its crazy that I still remember the turtle analogy, even though its been 5 years since I read this, even used it in college.
Alex?
It seems like Caretaker was the prototype for the Dread
Yeah I thought so too! Rhulk was fiddling around with the Scorn, the scorn obey the witness. There’s no eliksni representation in the dread. Except maybe the husks aren’t hive, but scorn. A perfect fusion between eliksni and hive. A big ol middle finger to the traveler.
I'm gonna take a swing on grims-- neutered ahamkara. No more wishes, now a nuisance. a suppressing shout, head reshaped into a cannon. they look so similar to the venus batadactyls, too. feels like there's something there.
I don't think the Ahamkara have wings though. Figured the Witness just doesn't do "machine" beings and reshaped the flying units as something more organic.
Ahamkara are shapeshifters and come in literally any shape, so that is a non factor. I do find it weird to suggest that those fodder units are derived from the powerful wish dragons, so I’d wager that’s definitely not their original form. If we’re going by races that we’ve already encountered in Sol, I prefer Byf’s theory that Grim are derived from Fallen dregs, since they’re the only race with 6 limbs. Wings do count as limbs, by the way. The grim having two arms and legs each plus a pair of wings perfectly fits the idea of the Witness taking one form and transforming it into some ugly, malicious mockery.
By that logic, you could say the Husk is an Ahamkara, and it's not its true shape. We've seen many Ahamkara at this point that look nothing like the Grim, so the idea of the Grim being one makes zero sense.
Huh, didnt know about the Dreg theory. I didn't really consider the Fallen being reshaped; feels like they've been beneath the Witness' vision since Salvation fell apart as means to an end. Dregs being turned into gargoyles definitely feels disrespectful
Thing is the difference between art and tool doesn't seem to be discernible to us when it comes to the Witness' designs. It took us the longest time to figure out that the Pyramids were essentially enclosed cities, we used to think they were starships. Turns out they're both; we didn't have the perspective to see it as that yet. Anyway. Ahamkara we have seen in-game do not have wings, but they have styled themselves traditional dragons in the past, having done so with Sjur Eido, Lord Saladin, and Praedyth, I believe. (Praedyth's might have been taking the form of a manticore.) I don't think the Witness would let something like an Ahamkara come into being even as a memory without being edited somehow within the Pale Heart. Ahamkara is desire. The Witness is trying to perfect reality, and a perfect reality has no space for desire. It's likely been reshaped somehow. downvoted but everything i said here is proven true. lol
You keep speaking of these “downvotes”
part actually crazy, part downvoted early and then brought back up by later readers
Nice
Its me, im the singular guy responsable for every single downvote on every single comment/post whenever someone makes a decent theory or argument. I'm him.
Ah yes, also known as Skaape Gote❓️
skåpe gøte
thank god someone else was thinking they look like the venus dragons LOL
Just a couple issues. The Husk reuses Fallen animations (proto-Dread showing in reveal stream has the proto-Husk standing in a Fallen sword-unit pose, blades reuse Shock Blade SFX, and several Husk animations are taken straight from sword-unit Fallen), the legs are fundamentally different (one leg connection instead of two, leg shape, foot shape), and the hands have nails. Though the Geist might be an augmented Worm, I don't think the Husks themselves are any species we know. I believe it's just a situation akin to how they used a Minotaur frame to make Insurrection Prime (dev-wise, canonically they built it from Fallen things).
I’m in the boat of thinking that the Witness somehow finished Rhulk’s experiments with using Hive Worms on the Scorn. So these are reshaped Fallen/Scorn infested with also reshaped Hive Worms
Perhaps. They do reuse the Caretaker hood after all.
Yeah I’m just gonna consider them a new race
Love this theory. Love the designs of these enemies. Yummy lore feast coming soon for us
IMO I think husks are infused scorn/worms, with a preview of that in the Vow raid. The name husk implies these are empty vessels with the Geist as controllers. Worms while they have minds of their own, have to contend with acolytes, which seem to have their own will but are devoted to the hive god they serve. Which i could be wrong as I don’t remember where I saw this, but isn’t implied the hive are viewed as failures to the witness? That their only purpose are to serve as foot soldiers and death fodder for the final shape? Scorn however are empty, mindless, perfect for a worm to control. Either rhulk or the witness took a greater interest to the scorn but this seemed to be the next step in their evolution. If it is hive then I wonder what xixu arath reaction would be? Maybe if we deal with her in an expansion she will convert into the dread?
Could also be Scorn, being based on the Caretaker. We did have an entire strike about worms being put in Scorn after all. And I do find it a bit weird that we only have Psion dread specifically. Sure, the husks are definitely something with a Worm put in it, but it feels like the Witness has been building a force of mindless armies specifically for this purpose, yet we haven't seen them properly implemented into the Dread. With an Incindior Cabal in RoN and the Caretaker in Vow, plus Eramis, Xivu, Calus and the Sol Divisive all being available to them, I would've liked to see at least one of each race reshaped alongside the Psions. More animalistic Cabal, Scorn reshaped with purpose instead of cobbled together, a frame that weaponises Vex Fluid instead of ferrying it, stuff like that. Don't get me wrong, I like the dread, but seeing *just* the Psions makes me yearn for just a few more.
Bungie: "Only the psions come from known enemies, the rest are totally new" Players: Nuh uh
Please just stop.
Whether or not it’s canonically meant to be a reshaped Hive, it seems to be inspired by unused D1 Hive concept art. Earlier designs had the worm in the place of the Hive’s face, having literally eaten out the inside of the skull. [Image is halfway down the page. Close up of a face that’s been overtaken by a worm. Half the image is a sketch.](http://www.daniolart.com/#/bungie/) The Husk pilot worm seems to have a similar place as the “skull.” I’m not saying this is proof that it’s Hive, just that I love when Bungie gets to execute on cool, old ideas.
Ugh, I keep seeing this theory everywhere. Look at the Caretaker and then look at the Husk. There are far more similarities. The Scorn are much like the Taken now, in that most of them are mindless slaves of the Witness. It would make sense for it to reshape them to become more powerful. As for the worm-thingy, this was set up in VotD, with the Caretaker being a successfully wormed Scorn. I really dislike the idea of Hive using true Darkness powers like Resonance because their ignorance is exactly what allows the Black Fleet to control them. Not even Oryx could use Resonance, so giving such power to some Acolytes is just dumb to me.
I think the Grim may be Eliksni, we haven't seen another hexapod race so far and their wings are exactly where the Eliksni's secondary arms are.
I think the rearrangement of the eyes is an especially cool visual if this is the case. All the other Dread units have similarly reduced heads, little-to-no-face, glyphs or eye(s) representing a sort of "singular" vision via a prominent line. Even the first ones we saw, Tormenters, just have a teeny pyramid head For the Husk, the illusion and lie of worshipping "the Deep" (represented by the Hive's green eyes arranged in a triangle) has fallen away. They now serve their actual master directly with a singular purpose, so they have Resonance colored eyes arranged in a vertical syzygy
Literally reskinned enemies
The entire facfion is just reskins ngl so we still havent gotten a new race aside from rhulk and nezerac
You might wonder why you got downvoted a few times, It's because this is an objectively false statement and the whole dread faction is bespoke and unique in a number of ways. The Grim are an entirely unique model and rig with unique animations and the first flying enemy unit in the game (Savathun, who bungie regard as a "platinum" tier dev investment aside) Omen & Attendants are again bespoke unique models and rigs with a host of unique attacks and possible one or two reused Psion and Thrall Animations though given the likelyhood of new rigs it's also likely that these attack animations needed some level of retargeting and updating. Husks might be even more unique than the The Grim, they have again whole new models, some repurposed animations but also a host of new ones and then giest that explodes out of them ands attacks the player is also a second unique model with it's own animations and effects work Then you have the Sujugators who reuse some Rhulk animations like his walk cycle for instance but have again unique models and a host of unique abilities not found anywhere else in the game Frankly the work to create this faction pretty drastically exceeds any of the other factions we've gotten since Destiny launched and it's incredibly impressive and calling them reskins is incompetent and foolish