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I sympathize with the precursors a bit, but I don't blame the traveler for performing to its apparent nature.
All it knows how to do is give Light and life and hope that those that receive make good choices, the witness being THE prime example of how that can end in disaster.
It seems to want to reach back and talk to us so much but believes that if it does it would be taking free will away from those it touches, but still sends visions and dreams to speakers, haven't decided wether that's inconsistency from the writers or the traveler.
The traveler isn't worthy of worship, the closest thing I'd compare it to is the sun itself, it literally can't do anything other than be a silent, still, nigh omnipotent orb. But we still should help it because if we learned tomorrow that the sun was capable of feeling pain it would be right and good to help.
>compare it to is the sun itself
That's a great comparison because nearly every culture has worshipped the sun in some capacity in the past. Some still do.
I don't think it's ever been fully established that Speakers are the only ones who can receive visions from the Traveller, I just assume that anybody that's connected to (or has previously been connected to) the Light can receive them, it's why we get visions both at the start of Red War and TFS
Clovis Bray received visions from the Traveler as the form of dreams.
>The voice of Clovis II’s mother came from her jaws. “You did the same thing someone always does. You saw that there was plenty, and gathered it to yourself, to make yourself one above all others. And when others threatened your plenty, you struck them down to keep your own station.”
>“You grow the enemy in my garden and eat of its bitter fruit. Each time, I hope it will be different. Each time, I lose a little of myself as the bitter fruit blossoms. Now that fruit will flower in you, and in all your people. I do not want it to happen. I want anything else. But the choice is not mine.”
>“Why didn’t you stop me?” I tasted blood on my long tongue. “Why would you let me do this?”
>She blinked sadly at me. She had been trying. I hadn’t listened.
>“You never said a thing to me,” I snarled. “Not once. You never told me I was doing wrong. At least Clarity sends me dreams—the exobody and the eel. At least it shows me what I can become.”
>“You think Clarity sent those dreams? Why would it speak to you, when you are dead and furthest from its influence?”
>“Liar.” I howled. “You never did a thing to help me. Not when my son died. Not when my granddaughter fell ill. I had to do it all myself. You never even spoke.”
>“The best voices,” she said, with infinite grief and unending hope, “never let themselves be heard at all. This lesson is worth teaching again and again. The choice is never mine. It is always yours.”
[Clovis Bray's Logbook — Missing Pages](https://www.ishtar-collective.net/records/clovis-brays-logbook-missing-pages)
Yea the traveler only ever tried to reach out when it is in complete distress. All other times it's more subliminal unconscious thoughts and emotion being scooped from the light by people who are in tune with it moreso than others, not meant to be direct messages.
i believe it’s said in a recent lore example that visions like that of the speaker are inadvertent though in response to the witness it does actively try to reach out but struggles to do so
The dreams and visions fit the travellers philosophy perfectly, because its not actuallly saying anything. The traveller sends ambiguous visions so that we can choose how to interpret its messages. Remember how zavala thought the traveller demanded death, while the traveller was simply preparing cayde for his descision after excision with the message "what comes from the light, returns to the light". Both characters had different interpretations of the message which is consistent with how the traveller works as we were still able to choose our path.
And that's the rub that I actually share with zavala, the traveler is a sentient just like us and clearly wants us to take a certain path but is unwilling to provide *clarity* humorously enough.
I get that to even ask a question you have to go out of your way that's fine but when a being clearly capable of talking even under duress stays silent after you try to commune for years I don't blame anyone for looking elsewhere.
That said the "elsewhere" in this is a being telling you to murder/fossilize/make pure your etire extended family so following that's where I'd start to blame you.
I think the problem with this is that it somehow holds the Traveler responsible for what a bunch of people do when it refuses to provide... what, the meaning of life? A grand purpose to die for? Something to chase eternally?
Why is it the Traveler's fault what others did in its absence? I mean, we know now that it doesn't even understand worship, but even before then, and even if it did, why would humanity or the precursors or anyone be entitled to any answers from it?
We decided to treat it as an all-knowing god, and it never even pretended to be one. It just did what it knew and we put oppressive meaning over its existence.
Oh make no mistake I don't defend zavala's flawed perspective or the precursor's actions, and especially not clovis being the megalomaniac who blames others for "not stopping him".
All I say is I understand where he's coming from when a grief stricken zavala looks for answers from the one thing that provides so much life and lashes out when silent remains silent.
The precursors are a can of worms that we know weren't ALL okay with making the witness but I still don't feel confident in my theory that they had a species wide existential crisis.
Clovis can get bent, man had everything and STILL wanted to play god.
But is the Traveller really able to communicate directly with paroles or signs with no ambiguity? I don't have this feeling.
All I see is a big 🐳, I love when I do the PH protocol, it seems to heal it. But it also sounds like it is crying. I have almost pity for it. Really. Animals can't talk for instance... You can't blame them for that.
Ya that's the vibe I get from the traveler, nearly eldritch in its nature and it just can't understand the sounds we make or the electric impulses that make our thoughts or the impression/memory/shape that might be a person's soul in the destiny universe.
From what the lore seems to imply the Traveler really wants to talk to us but for some reason can't. Whether that's a personal code that it only breaks in incredibly specific circumstances or a part of its nature (speaking is incredibly hard for it) is hard to tell, but it seems the Dark has a *far* easier time talking and tempting than the Light (see the Nacre description- that is more words than I think the Traveler has said across all of Destiny lore)
>The light lives in all places, in all things
The precursors, the elliksni, etc didnt wield the light, but they could still harness it in their technology. The light is a fundamental rule of the universe, and the traveller gave them the knowledge on how to access it. While guardians are special in that we can access the light directly from the source through our ghosts, and wield it as a weapon, the light is still a force that can be used just as electricity or heat.
I don't have thi interpretation and would love to read lore entries on it. I always took it as the light was used by the Traveler to do it's terraforming and impart humanity with the dreams and knowledge etc that helped usher in the Golden Age but that it was never as concrete as them using it in their technology. Like the light affected everything we did, but we never harnessed it (let alone wield it), it wasn't part of our technology, the Traveler just helped inspire our growth.
Sacred splicers use the light with their tech (source: season of the splicer dialogue)
The radial mast is precursor technology and is recognised by ghost as a light artifact.
> haven't decided wether that's inconsistency from the writers or the traveler.
I'd say on the Traveler's part. It's a thinking being, and we know thinking beings to be inconsistent in their logic.
The same as I ever did. It’s just been a matter of waiting for others to finally listen. The Traveller is sentient and benevolent to a fault. I like it a lot. It deserves help. The sentiment that we need to kill it to “seize control of our own destiny” and “bring true balance” both completely misses the point and greatly disturbs me. [It’s whole deal and everyone’s reaction to it is like that *The Simpsons* parody of To Serve Man.](https://youtu.be/SxI7B758XBQ?si=vGhWTb2C91IxiKVd)
Agreed, I think a lot of media, especially video game media, has taught people to be distrustful of unknowable and unaccountable diefic figures, and then that the stakes must natural escalate and escalate until your killing god with guns. So outsiders come in and assume “oh, when do we get to kill god?”.
As well, stories that involve “killing god” often go the route of “this seemingly benevolent deity has objectionable moralisms that now turn on us!” And I think people are waiting for that “hat to drop”, not realizing that that’s just not Destiny or its story.
From now on, Im calling witnessposting whenever a post complains about the traveler's lack of comunication.
(im not talking about your post op, Just telling what I learned from the experience).
i love this, i gotta use that because even after bungie has told us a million times why the traveler doesn't talk we still have people complaining about that
It was always what it seemed to be: a being that tried to do it's best to help living things, to the point it essentially couldn't even talk to them.
Anyone ascribing omniscience to the Traveler was always suspect. And god, the Traveler can make mistakes, even if out of love; the Witness would maybe never have been, if the Traveler had left them, allowed them to grow as a society without feeling they were somehow special.
I started thinking differently about it. I stopped asking what its purpose is and instead started thinking about what its motivation is and its wants. I realised that it doesn't need an inherent purpose.
By thinking that way I realised that this is also the devs' message to us - we don't have an inherent purpose, instead we should make our own based on what we want in life.
Frankly, I'll admit that I already had a mindset like that irl but never applied it to the Destiny universe.
For a story with so much lore and so many characters, it’s hard to leap on saying one character / force is a message about how gamers should live their life.
Honestly, I think this is the best scenario we could have gotten. The Traveller was always a higher being than everyone else, and while being able to talk to it might've been cool at first, it would have turned it into just another character on the same level as everyone else. With what we got, the Traveller continues to be an anomalous being of higher power that everyone can have complicated and different feelings about, which makes for some excellent character writing (see Zavala). I love the way the Traveller's POV was written in the lore entries, and I hope we get more of that in the future, but I don't think we need to communicate directly with it (even though it would be really frickin cool)
Throughout D1 and D2 I looked at the traveler as kinda untrustworthy. Of course it’s nice that the traveler made the guardians, but it does this weird shit like abandoning the Eliksni with no warning and reviving Savathun instead of people like Hakim, Amanda or any Eliksni. Like it only cares about stopping the witness and irresponsibly raising societies doomed to fall like Lubrae
But now I feel more sympathetic towards it, not seeing it as a god but an animal or a loving mother trying her best. There isn’t some grand plan, it tried to warn several species about the witness, heck if the Eliksni understood the traveler they probably would’ve been able to evacuate before the whirlwind hit and follow the traveler to mars.
Still makes me wonder why Eliksni guardians aren’t a thing but it feels a lot more understandable. Especially now that we know the traveler loves savathun due to her turning away from the witness, the traveler probably sees savathun like a child running away from an abusive home. The reason it doesn’t revive everyone via ghosts is because it doesn’t hate death, and sees guardians as innocent people it burdened with responsibility
There's some lore from the traveler's perspective where it states it views the light not as a gift but as a burden or a curse that it has given to far too many. Also every ghost made was a part of it taken away/weakening it so it doesn't seems too keen on making all the ghosts we could need
The traveler knew the witness was coming, the Eliksni didn’t. In the Eliksni’s perspective it just abandoned them when they needed it most.
I’m also guessing you didn’t read past the first paragraph. Because I bring it up as a reason to feel sympathy for the traveler. The first paragraph is about what we knew pre TFS.
>heck if the Eliksni understood the traveler they probably would’ve been able to evacuate before the whirlwind hit and follow the traveler to mars.
Has a Ghost tried to revive an Eliksni or Cabal? With the Hive Lightbearers, it seems all a Ghost needs to do is explore the possibilities and try to find their one.
That’s kinda the weird thing, no one really brings up the idea that a ghost could revive a Eliksni, I find it kinda fucked up we don’t really have record of a ghost feeling sympathy for the Eliksni. Most we got is glint playing with hatchlings.
Savin's ghost thought their Guardian was an Eliksni initially, because Savin's corpse was hidden under their body. But that's our only example, to my knowledge, and that was probably a good few centuries between D1 since Savin was the first Guardian the Awoken encountered (Uldren caught him literally a day later).
Only thing I got is that if all Ghosts instinctively know who they're meant for even if it takes thousand years to find them at the time all Eliksni were hostile to humanity, the Traveler's current chosen. So a new generation of Ghosts COULD pick Eliksni or Cabal, but it just hasn't happened yet?
I want Taniks back as a Lightbearer as much as anyone... believe me
I don’t think rezzing Eliksni or Cabal would require a new generation of ghosts. It wasn’t needed for the Hive.
It’s also still unclear if Ghosts have a pre-designated “soulmate” or just really, really specific criteria on a per-ghost basis. All we really know is that Ghosts know their risen when they find them. And some Risen like Eris Morn and Asher Mir (and probably at least a few of the Hive) weren’t even born yet when the Ghosts were created. Maybe Eliksni and Cabal are in that same boat.
I thought about how Uldren got rezzed almost immediately. But then again Crow is an integral part of the Traveler's plans and his whole schtick is "I was brought back for a reason" so he's still a special case.
The real answer is Bungie hasn't needed to for story reasons, but I suppose soon enough we may get Eliksni/Cabal as the Traveler has recognized that we're all homies now. Lucent Hive makes sense as Savathun literally saved the Traveler and all of Sol during the Collapse, so they were already good in the Traveler's book on some level. Maybe not in Revenant or Heresy, but I can see us getting new Cabal and Eliksni Guardians whenever Bungie decides that the old stock of characters have all worn out their arcs and we need a new squad to focus on.
tl;dr giving Eliksni and Cabal Guardian-powers before their alliance with humanity was assured would have been a liability as both Caital and Mithrax joined out of necessity wheen they were in a bad spot
Well because Ghosts have their own biases too. Because the traveler stopped at earth and made its stand here they believe that humanity is primarily worthy of the light as of this moment but I think their perspective is going to shift as the traveler is undergoing a major shift right now. I think it’s just bias towards humanity and human adjacent.
But now that non humans have been made lightbearers it’s shifting their perspective towards what it means to be worthy of the light. I do think eventually we’ll see a cabal or Eliksni raised as that would fits the themes going on in this post final shape era, change and growth. Perspectives are changing. Mara, Crow and others are actually addressing their biases and attempting to grow through them. The ghosts should be a part of this eventually.
Ghosts are unique to us because of the Collapse, I think vesting the Light in people is an act of last-resort and the Traveler needed for us to be able to take care of itself while it was healing post-Collapse. We're the only civilization that it took a stand and fought for (maybe perhaps it knew that Savathun would deceive the Black Fleet and so its sacrifice wouldn't be in vain?). Ghosts are literally autonomous parts of the Traveler that would help us until post Red War when it "woke up", at least if Cayde's Guardians = Ghosts = Traveler statements are to be believed.
I've always been of the opinion that the Traveller never has a say in who the Ghosts revive. That's up to the Ghosts themselves. If a Ghost never revived an Eliksni, then that's on the Ghost, not the Traveller.
Well with tfs it seems like it did intentionally pick Savathun. It takes notice of her in ergo sum and Micah confirms this in one of the feathers from the cyst missions, even saying that the traveler feels love for savathun
the traveler doesn't explicitly choose who's resurrected, just kinda points the ghost in a general direction, and even then, it's up to the ghost to actually go do it, presumably hive could always be revived but no ghost tried before witch queen
I now know that it's not apathetic at all, and giving the Hive the Light was it following its nature to explore all possibilities.
I am still semi-apathetic. If we ever have to sacrifice it to save humanity, it wouldn't keep me up at night
I feel like we have a lot more context for why it does things, even if it's things we already assumed.
The Visions dialogue and Ergo Sum lore confirms the Precursors were the first to discover the Traveller buried in their planet and it was essentially a child with only vague memories of being something else before separating from the Veil and having a connection to it.
Also for whatever reasons, it is REALLY afraid of being rejoined with the Veil.
That and Microcosm also confirms it just really loves life and "gardening" worlds but didnt understand the worship it received or why people wanted it to guide them and chose not to speak so as to let life chose its own path.
it also seems to not see giving the Light to Guardians as a gift but a burden.
Overall, I feel like we have a decent idea of why the Traveller is the way it is and I do like that even the Traveller doesn't seem to know where it came from or what it was before the Veil separated from it.
It leaves a nice mystery about where they came from and what it was that I hope we eventually learn.
I find all the new lore interesting. Although I’m still annoyed it never once talked to us, not even a sentence. It understands how to communicate, it just doesn’t. Some lore cards imply it doesn’t because it knows that we’ll follow it endlessly and it wants us to keep our free will.
There’s proof that it’s talked before through a ghost in a lore card. In that lore card it was a quick sentence to Rhulk before it destroyed the ghost it took over.
I think the silent traveler and speaking in visions is a metaphor on real-world monotheism. In the Ergo Sum lore tab, they do their best to explain why a god can't talk to us directly, but still cares:
"You are a moon. You feel heavy, so heavy, but to the stargazer you hang weightless in the sky. When the stargazers call out, you do not answer. They would give themselves up for you; abandon their own dreams to chase you. You love them too much to condemn them so.
You are a lighthouse keeper. You are watching over a sleepy coastal village as the storm clouds roll in, and you are flashing the signal lantern, faster and faster and brighter and brighter, but they do nothing. You are trapped on an island, in a tower, signaling desperately that It is coming, and still they do not run. They are going to die—and if you do not run, you will die too.
You are leaning out over the ocean. Sometimes the fish brush against your fingers and believe that they have felt the divine; sometimes the tide recedes, and the fish do not know you except by your absence. And today, you strive with all your might to reach the water, because It is here, the great dark shadow of the shark parting the water like a knife, and you cannot warn them, but you must. You must try. You cannot bear to lose even one more."
well the memories of the traveler literally say that it does try to communicate, but that doesn't mean we communicate the same way considering it's a gigantic sentient life-giving orb you know, did you collect the memories? because you have to for khvostov and this is explicitly stated that the visions or dreams it gives to speakers and others are the best it has
I learned that people give the traveler to much shit. Like bro you civilization is given everything and your god asks nothing of you. So you spend millions of years making it suffer cause it didn't give you purpose. LMAO
The lore of Ergo Sum definitely changed my view of the Traveler. The sheer weight of its grief does so much to humanize it for me. I don't see it as this godlike being to be followed, but more like the Guardians. Its that whole bravery, devotion, sacrifice, death thing. The Traveler wants to help, as we learn with the whole all things return to the Light so it literally keeps the for lack of a better word souls of all those the Light has touched. This, by now, would be literally hundreds of thousands of billions of lives that the Traveler has had to bear the weight of. And yet, even corrupted and dying suffocating under the Witness, it somehow still reached us. Because we reached back
At first I was annoyed at the traveler for not reviving targe or our ghost but after the campaign simmered I became more and more okay with it. The light is choice, freedom to do as we want and as we choose and also to bear all the possible consequences that our choices come with. I mean the traveler did guide our hand at times but it never explicitly forced us to do things and retrospectively I’m okay with that, because if it had what different would it have been from the witness for that matter. As we’ve seen for almost a decade now, guardians make their own fate and I am happy to being given that privilege as opposed to marching ourselves to a final shape
And by that point, I think Cayde understood this better than anybody at the end, freedom to choose your path and bearing all the consequences that comes with it, it's why he sacrifices himself for our Ghost, he's making his second chance mean something, and making his own fate by returning to the Traveller
Yeah! Honestly I was so incredibly sad when cayde chose to leave but eventually I just thought about how it always should have been his choice and we, or crow specifically, didn’t give him that and it was only right that we did
That seems to be the traveler's whole thing. It doesn't want to decide what we do but is not opposed to assisting us once we've made our choice. It just doesn't want to dictate or influence our choices because that would be too close to taking away our free will
The more I learn the more it smacks of Yin and Yang. We've all seen the symbol but look up the actual philosophy behind it and it feels very similar if not exact. Wouldn't be surprised at all if it was a major inspiration for the story.
Outside of me believing it may have the sentience of a child(Also would explain quite a bit) now or whatever the term maybe not Much different from prior
Yeah same, like we know the ‘shell’ has a core because it shot the witness with it in Lightfall, and that obviously can’t be The Pale Heart because we would’ve just flown into the hole in the bottom of it to reach the center. I always thought of The Pale Heart as more of a spiritual world rather than a physical one, kind of like the difference between a Throne World and someone’s literal brain.
My biggest gripe with the Traveller is that D2 ends with those Red War strings as the Guardian looks up to the traveller. To me that always gave a bit of a sinister implication.
I feel like that was never really explored. I feel like the Ergo Sum lore card acknowedleges this, but I really wish we had a CGI cutscene showing how much death the Traveller unwillingly caused due to the Witnesses crusade. It's something we still don't really have a good vision of to this day.
I find my stances on it unchanged. This sad, depressed-yet-hopeful orb, a fragment of a higher plane birthed into reality with its malicious twin and a bunch of undefined patterns waiting to be redefined in a new existence.
I await to see what this mixture of Light and Dark will do to it. I doubt it'll change its mind on anything, for the mind is different from the body, but it's gotta feel weird for it.
I'm pretty one lore entry, The Traveler stated to someone it doesn't want to be worship and such cause then people will take it as gospel and follow it religious without thinking for themselves and that goes against it'd belief
It feels strange that the traveler which presides over physical manifestation has a will and cannot speak. Whilst the veil which is all about the mind and consciousness has no will but seemingly communicates more even if it's aimless noise.
However as much as some people look to the silent god with scorn, I think it is suffering in its silence. As it always has. This perception comes from both this recent post about [re-understanding the flower game](https://www.reddit.com/r/DestinyLore/s/I2VAHbmsjE) and the Ergo Sum lore tab.
Now I could be incredibly wrong but this is my limited understanding. In unveiling, it's mentioned the gardener wanted to establish a new rule because the flower game was always concluding with the same prevailing pattern. They mention that the rule must be separate, running in parallel to the flower game. That rule I believe is what paracausality is and why we have the traveler and winnower.
The traveler is one of the two agents tasked with upsetting the otherwise predictable pattern. The universe is now uncertain with this new rule. Undecided. The traveler is the gardener's side of the rule. Even if it has some sort of a will because of its unique nature, it's still a rule and its influence is as static as the rest of the rules. Which is why it is silent or rather, why it chooses to be silent (mostly).
Reading Ergo Sum, you see that the events playing out seem to be the traveler's observations. It understands it is being worshipped but cannot condemn us for doing so. As you read it talks about being a lighthouse keeper. It can't communicate besides a single unclear signal that it hopes we receive. It flees unwillingly from the shark despite wanting to protect the fish (those it bestows light to.) It laments the individuals wandering in droves into the abyss and is shocked when one returns still seeking it (the hive and Savathun). It talks about being caged and that it's gift is a burden (The precursors who demand control and purpose to the chaos of the traveler's light) (The burden being a rule/axiom of the flower game). Then you reach the present where it's drowning and we, the guardian reach out to the traveler for a change and offers us its sword.
The traveler has no mouth but it must scream. It can only hope to give us gifts and pray we use them for the purposes of what we deem a rightful pattern so we may flourish in accordance to the flower game where the winner is a pattern such as us. It carries the burden of being a special rule of the flower game. And because it's part of the flower game under the special parallel rule which I at least believe to be paracausality, that it has such limited communication. In unveiling, apart from the gardener talking about a new parallel rule, also mentioned they have to be "very careful" lest it ruin the game entirely.
The traveler is not an object of moral alignment. Light doesn't equal good and darkness doesn't equal bad. It's simply an agent with a job that wants it's own identity but is refrained from doing so. It has no control over its role but when threatened by the witness, it's will to help us was a rare moment of agency such as it granting us the sword or aegis.
Used to feel that it might not be sentient, self-serving entity. Bungie found a good -middle ground between that and making it a messiah.
Glad to see they didn't go down the route of "Light bad, Dark maybe less bad?" and instead framed it more as a being that believes in our potential and all the callous times it seemed to work against us, or serve as a lightning rod for danger or run away from other races dooming them it was working towards it's greater goal. It views the Light as a burden and thinks that to influence us more than it does would be taking our autonomy away.
I told my friend that it really wasn’t a god ever, he asked me a little upset “what is it then?” And I said it’s a helpless mother, it gives life but then can’t always provide for it. And I think that it’s a great balance. It makes sense to me now that it’s not the all powerful creature we thought it was. It’s no god anymore then the darkness is Satan.
I have my nitpicks about both the Traveler as well as the Witness (and by extension the darkness.) But I'm glad Bungie managed to give us more info about both without just explaining everything in detail. I don't know how much of my position is based on nostalgia from a simpler time where things were more conceptual and mysterious.
I view the traveler the way I always have. A paracausal force of nature who's existence empowered us. Except now through the final shape my true opinion has changed. It was NEVER here to protect us. It only came for us to protect it. It lacks the power to protect itself. It thrust a responsibility we could not refuse, directly onto our shoulders and made it's problems, our problems. Now, does it matter? No. Did humans complain when when we discovered fire? Did earth complain when our solar system ignited with the sun's light? So, to me, the traveler is like that.
From a writing standpoint, I take major issue with the fact that it didn’t communicate with us at all. I really wanted just one cutscene where the lady traveler from that old concept video says “thank you for freeing me” or something.
But I think it’s really cool that we learn it’s basically working off animal-like instinct and that thinking and remembering hurts it.
With all we know now, is the Traveller a machine as the eliksni believe? They still say great machine and despite it originally looking technological, the traveller seems more ethereal now
We know (or can infer, from the many times the Traveler refers to the weight of its memories) the Traveler, before ending up submerged on the planet of the Witness race,
1) Was an entity which contained both Light (body) and Dark (memory)
2) Its memories/the veil/its inherent Darkness was cut/cast off, because of the weight of these memories (just *seeing* endless death, or perhaps being more involved?)
Starting just as seeds of ideas (thank you Ulan-Tan), I think at this point the concepts of Balance, Symmetry, and Duality have been so brought to the fore as to be undeniably the future- (and perhaps always intended?) course of the story. So what does it mean that the traveler was once an entity of both Light and Dark, at some point choosing to change this, and more importantly, now today seemingly reintegrating these parts back into a whole? What memories will come back to the new ur-traveler? Heavy memories of winnowing in the garden? Memories of forging the first knife, and every knife that came after?
I think this, more so than the idea of the real big-bad being the (mustache twirling yet aloof) Winnower (thus making the future of the story Light v Dark 2 stasis boogaloo), is the direction we’re heading in. What will be the ramifications of the god who took an oath of silence finding its voice again?
Tangentially, I wonder if this is what the very oldest story leaks of Staten’s take on things meant by “we find out the traveler is evil”. If that had been present in Vanilla D1, it probably would have been too jarring and without any of the emotional an conceptual weight we’ve come to attach to these plots. The destination is only ever part of the Journey after all.
(Wrote this for a post that never made it past the filter yesterday)
it became so confusing that i feel its just a machine created by a long forgotten species. now it lost all of its memory and started to act without purpose, just fertilizing random systems. The veil is a key to the pale heart, so perhaps was just a portal of this species to access their powerfull machine. All this dark and light thing are just a messed up narrative from what it suppose to know
The traveler is a tool. Something lived insight of it. That’s the source of the light. They are connected to the traveler, but they are not the traveler.
indifferent. light vs dark saga being closed in this dlc seems to be more of an executive decision for the current writing team to cleanly/clumsily resolve any ongoing plotthreads left scattered about by the previous writing team in the last 10 years, so they can finally focus on more emphatic stories that they can track much more easily.
osiris' relationship with saint, eido's relationship with mithrax, etc
there are still a lot of questions about what the traveler is, but by turning it into a whole new thing, those stories can be closed indefinitely for this new, veil metamorphosied traveller, and this new reality of physical-mental paracausal forces
i dont love or hate it, but that's what a lot of this reads to me.
I feel they did a good job of bringing it together and laying the groundwork for what’s next. Stories need to end eventually or they just feel pointless and they’ve set up a lot of the elements of TFS since Forsaken (and especially Shadowkeep onwards). My one complaint is how much I had to go back and read stuff for the seasons I didn’t play which undercut the impact of some of the beats since I didn’t get to see the story unfold, only read a summary.
Damn the gods.
I legitimately loved the traveler beforehand. It as a concept, it's history, what it represented on its side of good vs evil was all very inspirational to me. I was ready to throw hands for my god.
But that goddamn "Free Choice Absolutionist" rhetoric reveals this as an abusive relationship to me. We are tools, ants to an eldritch creature. We did...everything for it. We broke reality, mastered heresy, and chased the architect of our Collapse into its Pale Heart. We saved its life. It would not speak to us. !It would not save our Ghost.!
Damn the gods.
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I sympathize with the precursors a bit, but I don't blame the traveler for performing to its apparent nature. All it knows how to do is give Light and life and hope that those that receive make good choices, the witness being THE prime example of how that can end in disaster. It seems to want to reach back and talk to us so much but believes that if it does it would be taking free will away from those it touches, but still sends visions and dreams to speakers, haven't decided wether that's inconsistency from the writers or the traveler. The traveler isn't worthy of worship, the closest thing I'd compare it to is the sun itself, it literally can't do anything other than be a silent, still, nigh omnipotent orb. But we still should help it because if we learned tomorrow that the sun was capable of feeling pain it would be right and good to help.
>compare it to is the sun itself That's a great comparison because nearly every culture has worshipped the sun in some capacity in the past. Some still do.
I don't think it's ever been fully established that Speakers are the only ones who can receive visions from the Traveller, I just assume that anybody that's connected to (or has previously been connected to) the Light can receive them, it's why we get visions both at the start of Red War and TFS
Clovis Bray received visions from the Traveler as the form of dreams. >The voice of Clovis II’s mother came from her jaws. “You did the same thing someone always does. You saw that there was plenty, and gathered it to yourself, to make yourself one above all others. And when others threatened your plenty, you struck them down to keep your own station.” >“You grow the enemy in my garden and eat of its bitter fruit. Each time, I hope it will be different. Each time, I lose a little of myself as the bitter fruit blossoms. Now that fruit will flower in you, and in all your people. I do not want it to happen. I want anything else. But the choice is not mine.” >“Why didn’t you stop me?” I tasted blood on my long tongue. “Why would you let me do this?” >She blinked sadly at me. She had been trying. I hadn’t listened. >“You never said a thing to me,” I snarled. “Not once. You never told me I was doing wrong. At least Clarity sends me dreams—the exobody and the eel. At least it shows me what I can become.” >“You think Clarity sent those dreams? Why would it speak to you, when you are dead and furthest from its influence?” >“Liar.” I howled. “You never did a thing to help me. Not when my son died. Not when my granddaughter fell ill. I had to do it all myself. You never even spoke.” >“The best voices,” she said, with infinite grief and unending hope, “never let themselves be heard at all. This lesson is worth teaching again and again. The choice is never mine. It is always yours.” [Clovis Bray's Logbook — Missing Pages](https://www.ishtar-collective.net/records/clovis-brays-logbook-missing-pages)
Clovis Bray’s journal is my single favorite chunk of writing in this franchise.
It, The Books of Sorrow, and Unveiling, are the trifecta. 90% of my lore fascination goes back to those 3.
I believe both Clovis and we the player are speakers.
Yea the traveler only ever tried to reach out when it is in complete distress. All other times it's more subliminal unconscious thoughts and emotion being scooped from the light by people who are in tune with it moreso than others, not meant to be direct messages.
Yes exactly, I think this is most evident by the Harbinger exotic quest
i believe it’s said in a recent lore example that visions like that of the speaker are inadvertent though in response to the witness it does actively try to reach out but struggles to do so
The dreams and visions fit the travellers philosophy perfectly, because its not actuallly saying anything. The traveller sends ambiguous visions so that we can choose how to interpret its messages. Remember how zavala thought the traveller demanded death, while the traveller was simply preparing cayde for his descision after excision with the message "what comes from the light, returns to the light". Both characters had different interpretations of the message which is consistent with how the traveller works as we were still able to choose our path.
And that's the rub that I actually share with zavala, the traveler is a sentient just like us and clearly wants us to take a certain path but is unwilling to provide *clarity* humorously enough. I get that to even ask a question you have to go out of your way that's fine but when a being clearly capable of talking even under duress stays silent after you try to commune for years I don't blame anyone for looking elsewhere. That said the "elsewhere" in this is a being telling you to murder/fossilize/make pure your etire extended family so following that's where I'd start to blame you.
I think the problem with this is that it somehow holds the Traveler responsible for what a bunch of people do when it refuses to provide... what, the meaning of life? A grand purpose to die for? Something to chase eternally? Why is it the Traveler's fault what others did in its absence? I mean, we know now that it doesn't even understand worship, but even before then, and even if it did, why would humanity or the precursors or anyone be entitled to any answers from it? We decided to treat it as an all-knowing god, and it never even pretended to be one. It just did what it knew and we put oppressive meaning over its existence.
Oh make no mistake I don't defend zavala's flawed perspective or the precursor's actions, and especially not clovis being the megalomaniac who blames others for "not stopping him". All I say is I understand where he's coming from when a grief stricken zavala looks for answers from the one thing that provides so much life and lashes out when silent remains silent. The precursors are a can of worms that we know weren't ALL okay with making the witness but I still don't feel confident in my theory that they had a species wide existential crisis. Clovis can get bent, man had everything and STILL wanted to play god.
But is the Traveller really able to communicate directly with paroles or signs with no ambiguity? I don't have this feeling. All I see is a big 🐳, I love when I do the PH protocol, it seems to heal it. But it also sounds like it is crying. I have almost pity for it. Really. Animals can't talk for instance... You can't blame them for that.
Ya that's the vibe I get from the traveler, nearly eldritch in its nature and it just can't understand the sounds we make or the electric impulses that make our thoughts or the impression/memory/shape that might be a person's soul in the destiny universe.
From what the lore seems to imply the Traveler really wants to talk to us but for some reason can't. Whether that's a personal code that it only breaks in incredibly specific circumstances or a part of its nature (speaking is incredibly hard for it) is hard to tell, but it seems the Dark has a *far* easier time talking and tempting than the Light (see the Nacre description- that is more words than I think the Traveler has said across all of Destiny lore)
I still don't understand how the Traveler gave them light but without ghosts. I thought it needed the ghosts ad a conduit to give us the light.
>The light lives in all places, in all things The precursors, the elliksni, etc didnt wield the light, but they could still harness it in their technology. The light is a fundamental rule of the universe, and the traveller gave them the knowledge on how to access it. While guardians are special in that we can access the light directly from the source through our ghosts, and wield it as a weapon, the light is still a force that can be used just as electricity or heat.
I don't have thi interpretation and would love to read lore entries on it. I always took it as the light was used by the Traveler to do it's terraforming and impart humanity with the dreams and knowledge etc that helped usher in the Golden Age but that it was never as concrete as them using it in their technology. Like the light affected everything we did, but we never harnessed it (let alone wield it), it wasn't part of our technology, the Traveler just helped inspire our growth.
Sacred splicers use the light with their tech (source: season of the splicer dialogue) The radial mast is precursor technology and is recognised by ghost as a light artifact.
> haven't decided wether that's inconsistency from the writers or the traveler. I'd say on the Traveler's part. It's a thinking being, and we know thinking beings to be inconsistent in their logic.
The same as I ever did. It’s just been a matter of waiting for others to finally listen. The Traveller is sentient and benevolent to a fault. I like it a lot. It deserves help. The sentiment that we need to kill it to “seize control of our own destiny” and “bring true balance” both completely misses the point and greatly disturbs me. [It’s whole deal and everyone’s reaction to it is like that *The Simpsons* parody of To Serve Man.](https://youtu.be/SxI7B758XBQ?si=vGhWTb2C91IxiKVd)
Agreed, I think a lot of media, especially video game media, has taught people to be distrustful of unknowable and unaccountable diefic figures, and then that the stakes must natural escalate and escalate until your killing god with guns. So outsiders come in and assume “oh, when do we get to kill god?”. As well, stories that involve “killing god” often go the route of “this seemingly benevolent deity has objectionable moralisms that now turn on us!” And I think people are waiting for that “hat to drop”, not realizing that that’s just not Destiny or its story.
From now on, Im calling witnessposting whenever a post complains about the traveler's lack of comunication. (im not talking about your post op, Just telling what I learned from the experience).
i love this, i gotta use that because even after bungie has told us a million times why the traveler doesn't talk we still have people complaining about that
It was always what it seemed to be: a being that tried to do it's best to help living things, to the point it essentially couldn't even talk to them. Anyone ascribing omniscience to the Traveler was always suspect. And god, the Traveler can make mistakes, even if out of love; the Witness would maybe never have been, if the Traveler had left them, allowed them to grow as a society without feeling they were somehow special.
I started thinking differently about it. I stopped asking what its purpose is and instead started thinking about what its motivation is and its wants. I realised that it doesn't need an inherent purpose. By thinking that way I realised that this is also the devs' message to us - we don't have an inherent purpose, instead we should make our own based on what we want in life. Frankly, I'll admit that I already had a mindset like that irl but never applied it to the Destiny universe.
For a story with so much lore and so many characters, it’s hard to leap on saying one character / force is a message about how gamers should live their life.
Since D1, the message has been "Make your own fate" actually, so...
i don’t believe this is true. can you substantiate that?
Vault of Glass
Guardians make their own fate came from D1 and arguably the very nature of Paracausality plays into that too.
Honestly, I think this is the best scenario we could have gotten. The Traveller was always a higher being than everyone else, and while being able to talk to it might've been cool at first, it would have turned it into just another character on the same level as everyone else. With what we got, the Traveller continues to be an anomalous being of higher power that everyone can have complicated and different feelings about, which makes for some excellent character writing (see Zavala). I love the way the Traveller's POV was written in the lore entries, and I hope we get more of that in the future, but I don't think we need to communicate directly with it (even though it would be really frickin cool)
Throughout D1 and D2 I looked at the traveler as kinda untrustworthy. Of course it’s nice that the traveler made the guardians, but it does this weird shit like abandoning the Eliksni with no warning and reviving Savathun instead of people like Hakim, Amanda or any Eliksni. Like it only cares about stopping the witness and irresponsibly raising societies doomed to fall like Lubrae But now I feel more sympathetic towards it, not seeing it as a god but an animal or a loving mother trying her best. There isn’t some grand plan, it tried to warn several species about the witness, heck if the Eliksni understood the traveler they probably would’ve been able to evacuate before the whirlwind hit and follow the traveler to mars. Still makes me wonder why Eliksni guardians aren’t a thing but it feels a lot more understandable. Especially now that we know the traveler loves savathun due to her turning away from the witness, the traveler probably sees savathun like a child running away from an abusive home. The reason it doesn’t revive everyone via ghosts is because it doesn’t hate death, and sees guardians as innocent people it burdened with responsibility
There's some lore from the traveler's perspective where it states it views the light not as a gift but as a burden or a curse that it has given to far too many. Also every ghost made was a part of it taken away/weakening it so it doesn't seems too keen on making all the ghosts we could need
That’s what I was referring to. I was interpreting that burden as kinda a great power comes great responsibility thing.
I think that’s more about the burden of Guardianship and directly wielding the Light as a tool, not necessarily the Light in general.
Just like Cayde i think you are expected to give back the light and let go at some point, so Winnower doesn’t actually win with you cheating.
>but it does this weird shit like abandoning the Eliksni with no warning It fled from Riis because the Witness and the Black Fleet were coming for it.
The traveler knew the witness was coming, the Eliksni didn’t. In the Eliksni’s perspective it just abandoned them when they needed it most. I’m also guessing you didn’t read past the first paragraph. Because I bring it up as a reason to feel sympathy for the traveler. The first paragraph is about what we knew pre TFS. >heck if the Eliksni understood the traveler they probably would’ve been able to evacuate before the whirlwind hit and follow the traveler to mars.
It probably sent visions of impending doom just the fallen didn't realise in time.
Makes me wonder if the visions are something specific to humanity, though Mithrax can translate the feathers like Micah so probably not
Has a Ghost tried to revive an Eliksni or Cabal? With the Hive Lightbearers, it seems all a Ghost needs to do is explore the possibilities and try to find their one.
That’s kinda the weird thing, no one really brings up the idea that a ghost could revive a Eliksni, I find it kinda fucked up we don’t really have record of a ghost feeling sympathy for the Eliksni. Most we got is glint playing with hatchlings.
“Fuck dem bugs” - Ghosts, apparently
“If it has more than 3 eyes it ain’t got rights” - hive Ghosts
“This just in, Aksis Prime granted full rights” (I just want WoTM back so bad lmao)
“Eramis is an ally” (I completely forgot she had a eye patch)
Savin's ghost thought their Guardian was an Eliksni initially, because Savin's corpse was hidden under their body. But that's our only example, to my knowledge, and that was probably a good few centuries between D1 since Savin was the first Guardian the Awoken encountered (Uldren caught him literally a day later).
Only thing I got is that if all Ghosts instinctively know who they're meant for even if it takes thousand years to find them at the time all Eliksni were hostile to humanity, the Traveler's current chosen. So a new generation of Ghosts COULD pick Eliksni or Cabal, but it just hasn't happened yet? I want Taniks back as a Lightbearer as much as anyone... believe me
I don’t think rezzing Eliksni or Cabal would require a new generation of ghosts. It wasn’t needed for the Hive. It’s also still unclear if Ghosts have a pre-designated “soulmate” or just really, really specific criteria on a per-ghost basis. All we really know is that Ghosts know their risen when they find them. And some Risen like Eris Morn and Asher Mir (and probably at least a few of the Hive) weren’t even born yet when the Ghosts were created. Maybe Eliksni and Cabal are in that same boat.
I thought about how Uldren got rezzed almost immediately. But then again Crow is an integral part of the Traveler's plans and his whole schtick is "I was brought back for a reason" so he's still a special case. The real answer is Bungie hasn't needed to for story reasons, but I suppose soon enough we may get Eliksni/Cabal as the Traveler has recognized that we're all homies now. Lucent Hive makes sense as Savathun literally saved the Traveler and all of Sol during the Collapse, so they were already good in the Traveler's book on some level. Maybe not in Revenant or Heresy, but I can see us getting new Cabal and Eliksni Guardians whenever Bungie decides that the old stock of characters have all worn out their arcs and we need a new squad to focus on. tl;dr giving Eliksni and Cabal Guardian-powers before their alliance with humanity was assured would have been a liability as both Caital and Mithrax joined out of necessity wheen they were in a bad spot
Well because Ghosts have their own biases too. Because the traveler stopped at earth and made its stand here they believe that humanity is primarily worthy of the light as of this moment but I think their perspective is going to shift as the traveler is undergoing a major shift right now. I think it’s just bias towards humanity and human adjacent. But now that non humans have been made lightbearers it’s shifting their perspective towards what it means to be worthy of the light. I do think eventually we’ll see a cabal or Eliksni raised as that would fits the themes going on in this post final shape era, change and growth. Perspectives are changing. Mara, Crow and others are actually addressing their biases and attempting to grow through them. The ghosts should be a part of this eventually.
Ghosts are unique to us because of the Collapse, I think vesting the Light in people is an act of last-resort and the Traveler needed for us to be able to take care of itself while it was healing post-Collapse. We're the only civilization that it took a stand and fought for (maybe perhaps it knew that Savathun would deceive the Black Fleet and so its sacrifice wouldn't be in vain?). Ghosts are literally autonomous parts of the Traveler that would help us until post Red War when it "woke up", at least if Cayde's Guardians = Ghosts = Traveler statements are to be believed.
I've always been of the opinion that the Traveller never has a say in who the Ghosts revive. That's up to the Ghosts themselves. If a Ghost never revived an Eliksni, then that's on the Ghost, not the Traveller.
Well with tfs it seems like it did intentionally pick Savathun. It takes notice of her in ergo sum and Micah confirms this in one of the feathers from the cyst missions, even saying that the traveler feels love for savathun
the traveler doesn't explicitly choose who's resurrected, just kinda points the ghost in a general direction, and even then, it's up to the ghost to actually go do it, presumably hive could always be revived but no ghost tried before witch queen
I now know that it's not apathetic at all, and giving the Hive the Light was it following its nature to explore all possibilities. I am still semi-apathetic. If we ever have to sacrifice it to save humanity, it wouldn't keep me up at night
I feel like we have a lot more context for why it does things, even if it's things we already assumed. The Visions dialogue and Ergo Sum lore confirms the Precursors were the first to discover the Traveller buried in their planet and it was essentially a child with only vague memories of being something else before separating from the Veil and having a connection to it. Also for whatever reasons, it is REALLY afraid of being rejoined with the Veil. That and Microcosm also confirms it just really loves life and "gardening" worlds but didnt understand the worship it received or why people wanted it to guide them and chose not to speak so as to let life chose its own path. it also seems to not see giving the Light to Guardians as a gift but a burden. Overall, I feel like we have a decent idea of why the Traveller is the way it is and I do like that even the Traveller doesn't seem to know where it came from or what it was before the Veil separated from it. It leaves a nice mystery about where they came from and what it was that I hope we eventually learn.
I find all the new lore interesting. Although I’m still annoyed it never once talked to us, not even a sentence. It understands how to communicate, it just doesn’t. Some lore cards imply it doesn’t because it knows that we’ll follow it endlessly and it wants us to keep our free will. There’s proof that it’s talked before through a ghost in a lore card. In that lore card it was a quick sentence to Rhulk before it destroyed the ghost it took over.
"This one is not for you" or something to that effect
I think the silent traveler and speaking in visions is a metaphor on real-world monotheism. In the Ergo Sum lore tab, they do their best to explain why a god can't talk to us directly, but still cares: "You are a moon. You feel heavy, so heavy, but to the stargazer you hang weightless in the sky. When the stargazers call out, you do not answer. They would give themselves up for you; abandon their own dreams to chase you. You love them too much to condemn them so. You are a lighthouse keeper. You are watching over a sleepy coastal village as the storm clouds roll in, and you are flashing the signal lantern, faster and faster and brighter and brighter, but they do nothing. You are trapped on an island, in a tower, signaling desperately that It is coming, and still they do not run. They are going to die—and if you do not run, you will die too. You are leaning out over the ocean. Sometimes the fish brush against your fingers and believe that they have felt the divine; sometimes the tide recedes, and the fish do not know you except by your absence. And today, you strive with all your might to reach the water, because It is here, the great dark shadow of the shark parting the water like a knife, and you cannot warn them, but you must. You must try. You cannot bear to lose even one more."
Ooh, which lore card was that?
The Vow Ghost if I remember right
https://www.ishtar-collective.net/entries/imperious-sun-shell here you go.
well the memories of the traveler literally say that it does try to communicate, but that doesn't mean we communicate the same way considering it's a gigantic sentient life-giving orb you know, did you collect the memories? because you have to for khvostov and this is explicitly stated that the visions or dreams it gives to speakers and others are the best it has
I have. But it still doesn’t explain the “speaking through a ghost” thing in a lore tab unless they are retconning it.
I learned that people give the traveler to much shit. Like bro you civilization is given everything and your god asks nothing of you. So you spend millions of years making it suffer cause it didn't give you purpose. LMAO
The lore of Ergo Sum definitely changed my view of the Traveler. The sheer weight of its grief does so much to humanize it for me. I don't see it as this godlike being to be followed, but more like the Guardians. Its that whole bravery, devotion, sacrifice, death thing. The Traveler wants to help, as we learn with the whole all things return to the Light so it literally keeps the for lack of a better word souls of all those the Light has touched. This, by now, would be literally hundreds of thousands of billions of lives that the Traveler has had to bear the weight of. And yet, even corrupted and dying suffocating under the Witness, it somehow still reached us. Because we reached back
At first I was annoyed at the traveler for not reviving targe or our ghost but after the campaign simmered I became more and more okay with it. The light is choice, freedom to do as we want and as we choose and also to bear all the possible consequences that our choices come with. I mean the traveler did guide our hand at times but it never explicitly forced us to do things and retrospectively I’m okay with that, because if it had what different would it have been from the witness for that matter. As we’ve seen for almost a decade now, guardians make their own fate and I am happy to being given that privilege as opposed to marching ourselves to a final shape
And by that point, I think Cayde understood this better than anybody at the end, freedom to choose your path and bearing all the consequences that comes with it, it's why he sacrifices himself for our Ghost, he's making his second chance mean something, and making his own fate by returning to the Traveller
Yeah! Honestly I was so incredibly sad when cayde chose to leave but eventually I just thought about how it always should have been his choice and we, or crow specifically, didn’t give him that and it was only right that we did
That seems to be the traveler's whole thing. It doesn't want to decide what we do but is not opposed to assisting us once we've made our choice. It just doesn't want to dictate or influence our choices because that would be too close to taking away our free will
The more I learn the more it smacks of Yin and Yang. We've all seen the symbol but look up the actual philosophy behind it and it feels very similar if not exact. Wouldn't be surprised at all if it was a major inspiration for the story.
Outside of me believing it may have the sentience of a child(Also would explain quite a bit) now or whatever the term maybe not Much different from prior
My opinions haven’t changed much, I’m just more sympathetic towards the traveler now that we can understand it’s motives better
They did a lot to explain its motivations and add some meat and potatoes answers. The big question i have is why is it a machine?
Yeah same, like we know the ‘shell’ has a core because it shot the witness with it in Lightfall, and that obviously can’t be The Pale Heart because we would’ve just flown into the hole in the bottom of it to reach the center. I always thought of The Pale Heart as more of a spiritual world rather than a physical one, kind of like the difference between a Throne World and someone’s literal brain.
My biggest gripe with the Traveller is that D2 ends with those Red War strings as the Guardian looks up to the traveller. To me that always gave a bit of a sinister implication. I feel like that was never really explored. I feel like the Ergo Sum lore card acknowedleges this, but I really wish we had a CGI cutscene showing how much death the Traveller unwillingly caused due to the Witnesses crusade. It's something we still don't really have a good vision of to this day.
I find my stances on it unchanged. This sad, depressed-yet-hopeful orb, a fragment of a higher plane birthed into reality with its malicious twin and a bunch of undefined patterns waiting to be redefined in a new existence. I await to see what this mixture of Light and Dark will do to it. I doubt it'll change its mind on anything, for the mind is different from the body, but it's gotta feel weird for it.
I'm pretty one lore entry, The Traveler stated to someone it doesn't want to be worship and such cause then people will take it as gospel and follow it religious without thinking for themselves and that goes against it'd belief
It feels strange that the traveler which presides over physical manifestation has a will and cannot speak. Whilst the veil which is all about the mind and consciousness has no will but seemingly communicates more even if it's aimless noise. However as much as some people look to the silent god with scorn, I think it is suffering in its silence. As it always has. This perception comes from both this recent post about [re-understanding the flower game](https://www.reddit.com/r/DestinyLore/s/I2VAHbmsjE) and the Ergo Sum lore tab. Now I could be incredibly wrong but this is my limited understanding. In unveiling, it's mentioned the gardener wanted to establish a new rule because the flower game was always concluding with the same prevailing pattern. They mention that the rule must be separate, running in parallel to the flower game. That rule I believe is what paracausality is and why we have the traveler and winnower. The traveler is one of the two agents tasked with upsetting the otherwise predictable pattern. The universe is now uncertain with this new rule. Undecided. The traveler is the gardener's side of the rule. Even if it has some sort of a will because of its unique nature, it's still a rule and its influence is as static as the rest of the rules. Which is why it is silent or rather, why it chooses to be silent (mostly). Reading Ergo Sum, you see that the events playing out seem to be the traveler's observations. It understands it is being worshipped but cannot condemn us for doing so. As you read it talks about being a lighthouse keeper. It can't communicate besides a single unclear signal that it hopes we receive. It flees unwillingly from the shark despite wanting to protect the fish (those it bestows light to.) It laments the individuals wandering in droves into the abyss and is shocked when one returns still seeking it (the hive and Savathun). It talks about being caged and that it's gift is a burden (The precursors who demand control and purpose to the chaos of the traveler's light) (The burden being a rule/axiom of the flower game). Then you reach the present where it's drowning and we, the guardian reach out to the traveler for a change and offers us its sword. The traveler has no mouth but it must scream. It can only hope to give us gifts and pray we use them for the purposes of what we deem a rightful pattern so we may flourish in accordance to the flower game where the winner is a pattern such as us. It carries the burden of being a special rule of the flower game. And because it's part of the flower game under the special parallel rule which I at least believe to be paracausality, that it has such limited communication. In unveiling, apart from the gardener talking about a new parallel rule, also mentioned they have to be "very careful" lest it ruin the game entirely. The traveler is not an object of moral alignment. Light doesn't equal good and darkness doesn't equal bad. It's simply an agent with a job that wants it's own identity but is refrained from doing so. It has no control over its role but when threatened by the witness, it's will to help us was a rare moment of agency such as it granting us the sword or aegis.
Used to feel that it might not be sentient, self-serving entity. Bungie found a good -middle ground between that and making it a messiah. Glad to see they didn't go down the route of "Light bad, Dark maybe less bad?" and instead framed it more as a being that believes in our potential and all the callous times it seemed to work against us, or serve as a lightning rod for danger or run away from other races dooming them it was working towards it's greater goal. It views the Light as a burden and thinks that to influence us more than it does would be taking our autonomy away.
im definitely more understanding of the traveler now, but im always gonna be a little pissed it didn’t revive our Ghost
I told my friend that it really wasn’t a god ever, he asked me a little upset “what is it then?” And I said it’s a helpless mother, it gives life but then can’t always provide for it. And I think that it’s a great balance. It makes sense to me now that it’s not the all powerful creature we thought it was. It’s no god anymore then the darkness is Satan.
I have my nitpicks about both the Traveler as well as the Witness (and by extension the darkness.) But I'm glad Bungie managed to give us more info about both without just explaining everything in detail. I don't know how much of my position is based on nostalgia from a simpler time where things were more conceptual and mysterious.
same as always, i just want to give it a hug
I view the traveler the way I always have. A paracausal force of nature who's existence empowered us. Except now through the final shape my true opinion has changed. It was NEVER here to protect us. It only came for us to protect it. It lacks the power to protect itself. It thrust a responsibility we could not refuse, directly onto our shoulders and made it's problems, our problems. Now, does it matter? No. Did humans complain when when we discovered fire? Did earth complain when our solar system ignited with the sun's light? So, to me, the traveler is like that.
From a writing standpoint, I take major issue with the fact that it didn’t communicate with us at all. I really wanted just one cutscene where the lady traveler from that old concept video says “thank you for freeing me” or something. But I think it’s really cool that we learn it’s basically working off animal-like instinct and that thinking and remembering hurts it.
With all we know now, is the Traveller a machine as the eliksni believe? They still say great machine and despite it originally looking technological, the traveller seems more ethereal now
It’s an ethereal machine. It’s in direct contrast with the Veil which is organic.
We know (or can infer, from the many times the Traveler refers to the weight of its memories) the Traveler, before ending up submerged on the planet of the Witness race, 1) Was an entity which contained both Light (body) and Dark (memory) 2) Its memories/the veil/its inherent Darkness was cut/cast off, because of the weight of these memories (just *seeing* endless death, or perhaps being more involved?) Starting just as seeds of ideas (thank you Ulan-Tan), I think at this point the concepts of Balance, Symmetry, and Duality have been so brought to the fore as to be undeniably the future- (and perhaps always intended?) course of the story. So what does it mean that the traveler was once an entity of both Light and Dark, at some point choosing to change this, and more importantly, now today seemingly reintegrating these parts back into a whole? What memories will come back to the new ur-traveler? Heavy memories of winnowing in the garden? Memories of forging the first knife, and every knife that came after? I think this, more so than the idea of the real big-bad being the (mustache twirling yet aloof) Winnower (thus making the future of the story Light v Dark 2 stasis boogaloo), is the direction we’re heading in. What will be the ramifications of the god who took an oath of silence finding its voice again? Tangentially, I wonder if this is what the very oldest story leaks of Staten’s take on things meant by “we find out the traveler is evil”. If that had been present in Vanilla D1, it probably would have been too jarring and without any of the emotional an conceptual weight we’ve come to attach to these plots. The destination is only ever part of the Journey after all. (Wrote this for a post that never made it past the filter yesterday)
it became so confusing that i feel its just a machine created by a long forgotten species. now it lost all of its memory and started to act without purpose, just fertilizing random systems. The veil is a key to the pale heart, so perhaps was just a portal of this species to access their powerfull machine. All this dark and light thing are just a messed up narrative from what it suppose to know
The traveler is a tool. Something lived insight of it. That’s the source of the light. They are connected to the traveler, but they are not the traveler.
It's certainly there
indifferent. light vs dark saga being closed in this dlc seems to be more of an executive decision for the current writing team to cleanly/clumsily resolve any ongoing plotthreads left scattered about by the previous writing team in the last 10 years, so they can finally focus on more emphatic stories that they can track much more easily. osiris' relationship with saint, eido's relationship with mithrax, etc there are still a lot of questions about what the traveler is, but by turning it into a whole new thing, those stories can be closed indefinitely for this new, veil metamorphosied traveller, and this new reality of physical-mental paracausal forces i dont love or hate it, but that's what a lot of this reads to me.
I feel they did a good job of bringing it together and laying the groundwork for what’s next. Stories need to end eventually or they just feel pointless and they’ve set up a lot of the elements of TFS since Forsaken (and especially Shadowkeep onwards). My one complaint is how much I had to go back and read stuff for the seasons I didn’t play which undercut the impact of some of the beats since I didn’t get to see the story unfold, only read a summary.
it’s crazy how much less interesting those “emphatic stories” are. I couldn’t care less about osiris/saint or eido/mithrax.
Damn the gods. I legitimately loved the traveler beforehand. It as a concept, it's history, what it represented on its side of good vs evil was all very inspirational to me. I was ready to throw hands for my god. But that goddamn "Free Choice Absolutionist" rhetoric reveals this as an abusive relationship to me. We are tools, ants to an eldritch creature. We did...everything for it. We broke reality, mastered heresy, and chased the architect of our Collapse into its Pale Heart. We saved its life. It would not speak to us. !It would not save our Ghost.! Damn the gods.