I don’t know if I would classify Destiny 2 as one of my favorite video games, but it is one of the games I think about the most. When I’m playing and when I’m not playing, chances are pretty good that I’m turning over some bit of trivia from the franchise’s intricate and massive lore system in my mind. Despite this, I don’t write about the game all that often. This is mostly because writing about Destiny 2 is an endeavor, and the sheer abundance of lore means even the hottest of takes need to have cited sources, otherwise 100 other lore nerds will come swooping in to tell you just how shit-eatingly wrong you are.
Destiny 2: Beyond Light is the game’s newest expansion, and with it came sweeping changes to everything the game has had to offer over the past three years. It added the Darkness-fueled Stasis subclass, gave us the surface of Europa to explore, and took away several locations that have been around since year one: Titan, Io, Mars and Mercury. The expansion’s campaign story surrounds Eramis, the leader of the new Fallen (Eliksni) House Salvation, her attempt to build an army of Stasis-wielding Eliksni to fight Guardians already beset by the Darkness elsewhere in the system, and our Guardian’s attempts to thwart her.
One thing that I have enjoyed about the game in recent years is the story’s increasing complexity over time. Darkness as a concept is no longer looked at as the unequivocal enemy; everything now operates on a gradient. We have worked with our enemies in uneasy truces and carved new paths where before those paths were expressly forbidden. The game has become a problematized conversation on the nature of power, who gets to wield it and how it gets used. These are explicit themes in the new expansion, but before anyone gets too excited and breaks out the champagne and Foucault, an insidious trope re-emerges to explain why other people, including other Guardians, couldn’t wield the new Darkness subclass, but we, the special boys and girls and nonbinary folks who are the chosen ones, can. It’s disappointing, but not actually the focus of this piece.
Briefly, the Beyond Light campaign has you dispatch Eramis and her lieutenants with extreme prejudice, using whatever weapons and means you can acquire to do so. You do this at the behest of the Vanguard; the newly-returned Exo Stranger Elsie Bray and her fireteam, which consists of the Drifter and Eris Morn; and Variks the Loyal, who helped orchestrate the assassination of Cayde-6, our favorite wise-cracking cop.
Each group mentioned has different reasons for wanting Eramis neutralized. Zavala, as always, wants to protect Guardians and the Last City from any threat. Elsie wants to prove we can wield Darkness. And Variks wants us to help him save his people, who were called to congregate on Europa under the guise of starting a colony away from humanity and creating a new life for themselves. We’re in the middle of this Venn diagram, once again the very fulcrum on which history pivots.
In order to keep going, I’m going to have to talk about some spoilers for Beyond Light. Proceed with caution if you haven’t yet finished the main expansion campaign.
Shock and Awe
After we defeat Eramis, Zavala calls us back to the Tower, where he congratulates us on a job once again well done, and asks us to return to Europa to finish the job. It’s functionally no different than any other campaign we’ve done in the game, but what got me was the language Zavala used to give us this order.
“With their Kell gone, the Fallen will be scattered and disorganized,” he tells us. “Frequent, targeted strikes will keep them that way.”
This is the language of shock and awe, a real-life military tactic used by the US-Coalition forces during the initial stage of the 2003 Iraq War. This minor piece of dialogue might pass right by average players, but it hit me like a sack of bricks.
Now look, I fully understand that not everyone read Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine as a senior in high school and got basically traumatized into being anti-war for the rest of their life, but the major distinguishing difference between games like Destiny, Anthem and Warframe and your bog-standard military-simulator shooter is the detachment from reality in more than a surface-level, “escapist” sense.
While Destiny 2 is a military-themed game, it is not a military shooter. This distinction is explored in detail by Matthew Thomas Payne in 2016’s Playing War: Military Video Games After 9/11. Payne writes, “In the former (regarding the military shooter), the player must eliminate human threats on behalf of his or her country. In the latter (regarding military-themed games), the gamer must eliminate monstrous or alien threats in a fictional world, even if that world is an overtly militarized one; consider the space marines in the sci-fi shooters Doom (1993), Halo: Combat Evolved (2001) and Gears of War (2006), or the special operations team that combats supernatural baddies in the survival horror game F.E.A.R. (2006). These are not mere cosmetic distinctions. Rather, these differences determine how games are understood as relating to reality or not — a critically important point of ‘media modality.’”
At this moment, you can get an uwu kawaii anime rocket launcher in Destiny 2. In the first game, we stopped the Fallen from getting access to dangerous hive-mind nanoparticles called SIVA and rekindled the fucking Knights of the Round Table in the process. Destiny as a franchise combines low fantasy with science-fiction in deliberate ways. The Awoken, for example, are just fucking elves. This makes the pivot to real 2003 US military policy kinda fucking jarring in that context, to! be! quite! honest!
So what’s the big deal? Why is shock and awe jarring?
Shock and awe is also known as the doctrine of rapid dominance, and it was initially devised in 1996 by Harlan Ullman and James P. Wade, Jr. for the National Defense University Institute for National Strategic Studies.
“The goal of Rapid Dominance will be to destroy or so confound the will to resist that an adversary will have no alternative except to accept our strategic aims and military objectives,” Ullman and Wade write in their 1996 paper. “To achieve this outcome, Rapid Dominance must control the operational environment and through that dominance, control what the adversary perceives, understands, and knows, as well as control or regulate what is not perceived, understood, or known.”
The reason they believed the US was capable of achieving Rapid Dominance was because of “the uniquely American ability to integrate […] these junctures of strategy, technology, and innovation.” In other words, America was sufficiently advanced in their eyes to be able to disorient an enemy and keep them disoriented on a semi-permanent or permanent basis. They said, “To affect the will of the adversary, Rapid Dominance will apply a variety of approaches and techniques to achieve the necessary level of Shock and Awe at the appropriate strategic and military leverage points. This means that psychological and intangible, as well as physical and concrete, effects beyond the destruction of enemy forces and supporting military infrastructure will have to be achieved.”
As Naomi Klein puts it in The Shock Doctrine, “In open defiance of the laws of war barring collective punishment, Shock and Awe is a military doctrine that prides itself on not merely targeting the enemy’s military forces but, as its authors stress, the ‘society writ large’—mass fear is a key part of the strategy.”
A Long, Bloody History
The history of our Solar System in Destiny‘s universe is not extremely well-fleshed-out. For all the lore we have, not much of an effort has been put into assigning dates or time frames to things. Part of this is because Guardians are effectively immortal, as long as their Ghosts aren’t damaged or destroyed. Part of this is because the Collapse itself is a massively disorienting event in the game’s history. The second dark age it led to essentially reverted the scattered humanity that survived the Darkness’s onslaught to a medieval state – early Guardians, known at the time instead as “Risen,” or “Warlords,” sometimes ruled over their own little fiefdoms of survivors.
I’ve talked at length before about what I think of the way human society is ordered in the world of Destiny, and I don’t want to belabor the point or repeat myself too often here, but suffice it to say that even in the golden light of the Last Safe City on Earth, a cold authoritarian streak runs through. It’s not enough for Guardians to be the “natural” leaders; they create intelligence and propaganda machines to suppress rank-and-file Guardians and mortal humans alike. And as seemingly the only people who can move freely about the system without (much) fear of death, Guardians have made a lot of enemies from the very beginning of their existence. The Fallen, or Eliksni are one such group of enemies.
There are two defining wars between humanity and the Fallen in Destiny’s history: The Battle of Six Fronts, and The Battle of Twilight Gap. The first battle, Six Fronts, was a rallying cry for a still-scattered humanity that the settlement under the Traveler was a safe haven from the harsh wilds, a signal that humanity was far from over, far from doomed, and that it had its Guardians. Saint-14, Osiris and Ana Bray emerged from Six Fronts as heroes for their incredible feats of bravery and determination against a crushing Fallen onslaught. But aside from what we know – that Guardians won and held the City – there aren’t that many details about Six Fronts. The most lasting piece of information we have comes from the Mark of the Six Fronts, a reoccurring Titan mark:
“Four orders of Titans held six approaches in the first great battle around the Last City, and not one front broke.”
Twilight Gap was a much different story, in almost every way. The City was nearly overrun by a united Fallen horde and numerous Guardians were killed defending mortal civilians. The only reason humanity didn’t breathe its last breath in this battle is because Awoken queen Mara Sov intercepted a Fallen House, the House of Wolves, traveling through Awoken territory and forcibly took it over. From the perspective of anyone who lived through this brutal, horrific war on either side, it makes sense to carry hostilities forward through the years, decades and possible centuries that followed.
Our Guardian is born sometime after Twilight Gap, and we’re roped into this conflict almost from moment one of our second lives. Throughout Destiny, we take out numerous Kells and Archons trying to consolidate power around them, to the point where, by the beginning of Destiny 2, there simply aren’t any Fallen Houses left, to the point where a hardscrabble of Dregs, Vandals and Captains have to make their own organizations. This is where the balance of power starts to shift. We start to more explicitly understand the Eliksni as pitiable scavengers rather than a formidable fighting force. Throughout the Red War campaign, we are frankly unconcerned with the Fallen at all, save for moments where we are asked to clear them out like rodents or vultures. Our main concern during Curse of Osiris were the Vex; Warmind, the Hive. Even when we got to Forsaken our secondary villain was an anti-technological, necromantic former Fallen group called the Scorn, who hated regular Eliksni as much as they hated Guardians. Since our first interaction with Mithrax in Titan’s post-Red War world quest we have even worked with the Fallen on several occasions. Beyond Light is really the first major time we’ve had to deal with modern, competent-in-their-portrayal enemy Eliksni since Rise of Iron.
What we do in Beyond Light is surgically remove top Eliksni from power, yet again. It’s a move we’ve made over and over. And when it’s done, we have an opportunity to simply leave the Eliksni who want to peacefully remain on Europa alone. But instead, we continue the fight against third- and fourth-string lieutenants who may or may not have believed so fully in what Eramis was doing in the first place. Why else would Bungie bother putting side-missions in where you can save other Eliksni from Eramis’s forces? When Zavala tells us to keep the Fallen “scattered and disorganized,” it feels now, more than ever, like we are engaging in collective punishment over the actions of a few. And this fuckin sucks.
Illusions Dissolved
If I have a thesis it’s this.
In the game, in the lore, there is mounting evidence that times are changing with regard to our relationship with the Eliksni. A substantial amount of time has passed since Twilight Gap, and an even longer gap between now and the Battle of Six Fronts. New Guardians who do not have a direct link to this age-old conflict are being born all the time; this is true of the Eliksni as well. The power of the old Fallen Houses has been utterly broken, and the Vanguard has consolidated quite a bit of power itself, despite recent losses. The Vanguard has also stated plainly that it is not an invading or occupying force. This complicates any further military-style action or even future acts of sheer revenge.
In the real world, the fact of a so-called forever war impacts nearly all of us, whether we want it to or not. I will enter my 30s late in 2021, right around the 20th anniversary of the beginning of the war in Afghanistan. For some folks, they have never known a day where the United States wasn’t engaged in some form of warfare somewhere in the world, whether with traditional boots on the ground or with drones. Our video games, especially our first-person shooters, have shifted to create experiences that more and more closely mirror actual wartime conditions.
Games like Destiny or Halo before it lean more into the gamey aspects of war, offering visions of war so cartoonish it’s easy to separate yourself from the actions you take in-game. Slaughtered 1000 Hive Thrall just now? Well look, I needed the ingredients to make Xur some cookies for the Dawning (an in-game event that’s actually happening right now). Killed 50 Cabal in cold blood? It’s for a bounty, I needed some materials to upgrade my guns. We do our murder chores daily so we can optimize our characters and meet challenges set by Bungie. We know it has nothing to do with reality.
But Zavala using the language of 21st-century military strategists to tell me to keep playing past the endgame pops the bubble of this illusion, and brings the entire enterprise crashing down for me. As another, shittier kind of gamer might say, “Immersion ruined!!!”
Since encountering this piece of dialogue, I haven’t really been playing a bunch of Beyond Light. I know there’s another storyline I could be following, involving a new Guardian, Crow, who serves the Spider. I know there’s some juicy, fat Clovis Bray lore there for me to sink my teeth into. I know there’s a whole fun festive thing going on. But the knowledge that the relationship between Guardians and Eliksni has actually possibly shifted into war crime territory has kind of made it less fun for me to play. And so, I’m gonna step back from the game for now.
My hope is that a resolution occurs between Guardians and the Fallen that doesn’t involve us finally wiping them all out. For just this one time, I really want the language of video games to forget to include violence. The principal actors who can actually make a difference in this regard are the developers at Bungie, who I know genuinely care about their game. As the Exo Stranger is fond of saying, the line between light and dark is so very thin; killing an entire species because we could, not even because they remained a threat to us, strikes me as crossing that line in a more definitive way than using Stasis powers.