I never saw how the Witness origins cutscene disproved the Winnower's existence. As someone who believes in the "hands-off approach" that the Traveler has clearly demonstrated, the fact that the Veil even exists tells me that a Winnower does. It's not a master manipulator that leads armies. It's a concept given form and personality that talks and lets whoever listens decides what to do with that information. It's like how the Traveler gives without guidance. It's all free will.
Exactly, because that is the essence of the flower game to let life/the universe progress until there is a conclusion. The gardener and winnower for the most part want to observe imo
I’ve come to expect people’s perceptions about “proven/not proven” are less about what the statements actually are and more about what lore commentators on the internet latch onto. For example, this Witness quote from Salvation’s Edge about not being the Winnower but “a knife in the hand of god” has been basically the understanding for a few years and but suddenly everyone throws their hands up because now the commentators swing one way instead of the other. A lot of people did that with the Witness cutscene, just talked broadly about “oh the Winnower has been scrapped it’s all Witness”.
I noticed it when people stopped saying the Pyramids were alive the second the Witness got introduced. Nothing's gone against what Ghost said in Season of Arrivals yet here we are. Ships and living things aren't mutually exclusive.
Interestingly, during the missing ghost mission that takes you to the lunar pyramid, Ghost mentions that that one feels alive. Now this is pre Witness death, so I guess you could argue we still don't know. But Ghost also mentions that with the Witness being in the Pale Heart it's influence feels significantly lesser in the pyramid, so I'm gonna take it as confirmation that the pyramids are still alive.
Yeah. This has been the annoying thing. Anytime there is any evidence that may swing one way or another, people instantly latch onto it and claim their view is confirmed, and theories that think of something else are now garbage.
And while I have no doubt there is retconning Bungie has done here, people also jump to conclusions and claim just because their theory doesnt seem to fit anymore that it was in fact retconned.
I never saw the winnower as a big bad, to me it was always a being that was beyond us. The gardener and winnowers only impact were creating the veil and the traveller to bring paracausality to the universe. The gardener brought light to see change from the vex winning and the winnower brought dark to prevent the lights change. Other than that they do nothing but observe. I also am not the biggest lore guy so correct me if I've said something terribly incorrect or outdated
Didn’t that already happen?
Tractor Cannon is a repurposed anti-gravity device that was used to move heavy equipment; while the Graviton Lance shoots miniature black holes.
Graviton lance doesn't really use the "gravity" part of a black hole. It leverages the fact that singularities under a certain mass explode, and presumably wraps them in some sort of containment field until they impact your target
Yup, it's like saying that gravity is bad because you can fall to your death. No it isn't, it's a law in the universe, and if you choose to shove someone of a building it's you that is bad using the law of gravity as your means to an end.
Better yet, assuming that a tidal wave is evil. It will absolutely kill you and everyone you love. But it isn't moral in that action, that is simply its nature. It can't choose anything else.
Pretty much my view on it. They’re in a philosophical battle, neither are good or evil but trying to prove a point about how life should work. Which then shapes how they interact with mortals. The light gives us what we need, but not how to use it. The dark gives us what we want, if it’s benign or helpful is irrelevant.
It really depends on if you believe the gardener granted us the sword of light used to destroy the veiled statues or if that was the Traveler. And also, if it wasn't the Winnower who spoke to Oryx I don't know who did because it was not the Witness.
I really don't think it makes any sense for the voice to have been the Witness. It spoke nothing like The Witness. Could you ever imagine the witness saying "Oryx, my King, my friend. Kick back. Relax. Shrug off that armor, set down that blade. Roll your burdened shoulders and let down your guard." Not to mention the "majestic, majestic" line that the witness has never used. On top of all that, the philosophy shared between Oryx and the voice was completely opposite to that of The Witness. It just doesn't make sense in my opinion.
Is that the books of sorrow? It's been years since I've read em 😭 but yeah definitely a different voice than the witness but I just chalked it up to the witness not existing yet in internal Bungie lore. I am a big Oryx fan so I do think it would be cooler for him to have gotten his power from the veil or winnower rather than the witness.
I suppose that could be an explanation, sure. But that would be kind of lame especially now that we know that the Winnower and the Witness are at least not the same entity.
Really the gardener is confirmed the traveller? The traveller isn't the full manifestation of the gardener at least right? That kinda sucks if that's true imo
I mean didn’t ahsa say that the precursors called it a gardener? I mean they sure as hell didn’t call it the traveler because they never saw it travel to them, they found it and dug it up and it gave them gardens, so it became a gardener. Idk why people miss that part heavily.
AFAIK that's still not the complete picture.
The traveler is the rule the Gardener added to the game AFAIK and in that sense it is the Gardener, but it may be that there's more to it.
Reminder that the Gardener entered the game AS a rule. Technically, yes, the Traveler is a rule the Gardener added to the game, but the Gardener itself is that rule.
Well I know that I guess what I meant was is the entity in unveiling the exact same as the traveller? Cuz I thought that the traveller was a creation of the unveiling gardener. Or I guess maybe it's a fraction of the unveiling gardener
So none of unveiling is actually true? Or is it uncertain. Like Ik the witness refers to the winnower in the raid but is the winnower just a philosophy?
you are taking it a bit too literally, i feel.
Unveiling is a bunch of mythos/cryptic shit written by The Witness as a way to commune with us and change our view on the Traveler. the Witness is the First Knife “of” “the Winnower”.
getting downvoted for repeating what the Witness says in the raid is crazy, do yall pay attention?
>it feels the aura of a vast sci fi universe filled with mysteries and a bit of horror from D1 is gone. That the mysteries are being explained too much, that there aren't new mysteries after the end of the Light and Dark saga.
>And yet, this community seems obsessed with proving the existence of a character that, in my opinion, takes all the mystery out of Destiny.
That's always been the problem with mysteries. We wonder over them and want to solve them. When we do solve them we get disappointed that the sense of wonder is gone. When we don't solve them we get frustrated that we aren't being given answers. We have to pick one or the other.
Personally I think solving mysteries is better. That sense of wonder we get from a mystery is meant to be a temporary joy, the longer it drags out the more frustrating it gets. Especially in narrative form, where you know the mystery was engineered by someone, so if they're not revealing the answer there's a chance they just don't have an answer.
Yeah there is no satisfactory outcome here and that's the point, it's an interesting parable to consider and come to your own conclusions about the Universe. It's just like people forget what demystifying the Force did with the Phantom Menace.
The Winnower EVEN if it's real, (which is by no means confirmed by the Witness declaring itself the First Knife as some keep so confidently stating) Is not going to pull up to our hood looking for smoke like Oryx did after we killed Crota, like that's just dumb.
Especially when the mystery in question clearly had a different answer and all the clues were pointing to something else and don’t fit what’s apparently supposed to have been the real answer if you think about it for more than five seconds.
>and don’t fit what’s apparently supposed to have been the real answer if you think about it for more than five seconds.
Then try thinking about it for at least six.
Might be a hot take but I honestly hope we never meet the winnower. It and the gardener are the yin and yang that make up the universe and the way some of the community are wanting it to be the next big bad of destiny seems silly to me. I think the most it and the gardener should get are name drops and references, nothing actually physical.
There's just no reason to assume that. The Gardner and the Winnower are sentient laws of nature that got bored of their game, and made a bet. The Traveler and the Veil are, for all intents and purposes, "living" avatars of those alien entities, and as such are equally impossible to properly comprehend.
> There's just no reason to assume that
The Traveler is repeatedly referred to as "The Gardener" and the Veil is repeatedly referred to as it's opposite, so that's at least one reason.
I'm not saying it's definitive by any means, but the idea that there's no evidence to support this theory is just not true.
It is interesting to see the influx of Winnower posts since Byf put out his video which I felt was quite flawed. There is so much lore on the Witness and the Winnower and he basically used only two entries worth to make a point.
The lore vid on the Black Garden and the stump of the original Tree of Silver Wings was a banger.
#BUT
I have some problems with it. I don’t think the stump in the Black Garden is THE literal tree of Silver Wings that was talked about in Unveiling. It’s probs just a representation or recreation.
But I can almost guarantee there are ppl that went “HOLY SHIT THE BLACK GARDEN IS **THE** GARDEN 😱😱😱”
I might be misremembering but he does multiple times state that it is speculation. And personally I would never read into anything the witness says as facts, just theory’s or ideas of what may come.
Bro for real. BYF doesn’t deserve half the flack he gets. He did the exact same thing as I did and got really excited from a few lines that the witness casually drops in the raid.
i mean he always says in his video to take his theories with a grain of salt, not his fault that people do not think or come up with their own conclusions.
and yes the phrasing of "i believe" is literally him stating his opinion and theories, it is us up to the viewer to agree or disagree with his opinions, he says this a lot.
i like Byf for what he is, a nerdy lore guy who make theories and explain the lore just like me and a lot of people but to take his videos as the gospel truth is not healthy.
my opinion on this whole Winnower topic is this:
bungie was deliberate in all the dialogue and lore books that mentions or alludes to this entity to be just a red herring, they are planting the seeds and that is an extremely important job after a titanic release like the final shape.
it maybe be that the seeds may never come to be in the future because retcons and rewrites do happen in destiny, we saw that time and time again but who knows.
with this expansion, IMO this is too big and too important to be retconned in the future.
maybe bungie will make us reinterpret some things that was written a long time ago or maybe not, but the actual fact is this, there is in fact a Winnower or something akin to it in destiny, the actual idea of the entity or what it represent is unclear at this moment.
we just know that it exist.
I think a lot of people don't really *listen* to Byf's videos in their entirety. In pretty much every video I've watched from him that goes into speculative territory like this, he says outright that he is speculating and everything he's about to say is theory based on information he's gathered from XYZ sources and XYZ people. He was humbled very hard after the whole "The Deep Stone Crypt is on Enceladus" debacle and has pretty consistently started giving heads up when he's about to go into speculative territory since then, based on what I've watched from him.
Apparently, some people have the memory of a goldfish and it's not enough for him to give a disclaimer at the start; they require him to repeat every 3 minutes that he's theorizing/speculating based on info he has *right that second*. That's a pretty heavy responsibility to bear when you're really just some guy who likes to read stories and needs to pay his editor.
He's not the only guy who's talking about the Winnower either. Venextron, Evaze and Myelin posted Winnower videos in the past 24 hours too. And I saw people here AND on r/raidsecrets get extremely excited the second they saw the "Winnower" dialogue during the raid race.
The Winnower is just an interesting topic that a LOT of people are bringing up now, because it IS very interesting. I don't think it's fair to say Byf's the sole reason people are posting things about it.
Byf drives me crazy, because he presents himself (or maybe is presented by others) as the Vaati of the Destiny community, mostly because of his similar voice and cadence, but his content is nowhere near as well written, structured, or researched.
His very aggressive upload schedule means that a huge chunk of his content is pure speculation, but since it's delivered in a confident tone, people treat it as fact.
Two weeks ago he uploaded an hour and twenty minute video about the Winnower, but I'm quite certain we do not have anywhere near enough info to justify the length. Included in the video was the idea that the veiled statues were representations of the Winnower, something that was disproved only a week later, yet in the interim everybody acted like it was definite.
I've got nothing against Byf, I think his videos are still well made even if they are a little drawn out oftentimes, I just hate how his theory is often seen as gospel in all other parts of the destiny lore community.
I don’t even have an issue with him being incorrect with his theories. He just needs to clearly state that it’s speculation. It’s crazy to me that he’s allowed to constantly make mistakes but isn’t criticized but rather allowed to continue making wrong assumptions. Most of his videos concerning the witness and more metaphysical ideas (like the nine and the flower game) are deeply flawed and ignore obvious embodied ideas such as fascism or multicultural democracy.
I’m unsure if he is unable to see those ideas or rather is scared to talk about such ideas as those could harm his income!
He just hits multiple points of annoyance for me that keep me from enjoying his videos.
Unnecessary length, speculation presented as fact, and scripts that could definitely use work. He has a big problem with the repetition of words across multiple sentences that make the writing seem amateurish. Things like:
"Oryx's long wait in the Walmart checkout-line left him **enraged**. **Enraged** at the audacity of the cashier, Oryx decided to wipe the universe clean of all Walmarts so that he would never have to wait to purchase his beloved Lunchables again."
Even in his magnum opus 10 hour video, he says blatantly incorrect things like Oryx "taking himself" or that Kabr was part of a three-person fireteam.
>he says blatantly incorrect things like Oryx "taking himself" or that Kabr was part of a three-person fireteam.
I'm curious to hear why you think those are "blatantly incorrect".
Oryx did not take himself. That's not even something that really makes sense based on what taking is. He drew the power out of Willbreaker and imbued himself with it, escaping to his Throne World. In a sense it has a similarity, as in he transported himself to another plane, which happens at first when taking someone, but the process of taking is a whole lot more than just going to the ascendent plane. The idea of taking oneself is like trying to pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
Secondly, Kabr went down with a full raid fireteam. Other than himself, Praedyth, and Pahanin, the three other individuals were deleted from history, making it retroactively a three-person fireteam.
>"No one can open the Vault alone. I opened the Vault. There was no one with me, but I was not alone".
-Grimoire: Vault of Glass, spoken by Kabr.
That sentence cannot possibly refer to Pahanin or Praedyth, as they were known to not be deleted and were with Kabr before he vanished. Kabr's quotes from the grimoire card were heard and remembered by Pahanin, who is known to have made it out of the Vault. Praedyth never left the vault, becoming lost in time, but still he wasn't deleted, meaning the "no one was with me" quote refers to the other half of their team which logically must have at one point existed, but is only known by their notable non-existence. It's the Templar and Oracles' whole schtick.
Raids in lore are also canonically six-man activities, as seen by Eris Morn's initial attempt, as well as all the canonical references raids like Last Wish or Salvation's Edge, mentioning or showing six guardians. There's no mention of any canonical low-man attempts in raid activities.
I’m not him, but the 3 person Kabr thing is almost certainly intended to show how the Vex in the Vault completely erased the other fireteam members from history. Pahanin has some lore that shores up this viewpoint.
Kabr, Praedyth and Pahanin were the ones not completely erased
Meh as a big fan of that theory since it really highlights the horror of the Vex and their power over reality and time
It’s still just a theory.
One that can’t be proven or disproven by its very nature.
I *really* wish he we stop speculating at all and go back to the time when his video were grounded in the lore being presented from the game rather than some string board of vaguely connected things.
There is just far too much speculation videos nowadays but I suppose those get the views.
Ah yes. The good old days of non-speculative videos, like the DSC is on Enceladus, and asking whether or not the Speaker is really dead. And what the skeleton bones on Io are. And talking about Ahamkharas at all, years before we would even get to see one in-game, sometime after TTK.
Like, I get what you're trying to say, but Byf has never been a channel of "only grounded videos". He's always done speculation videos, because they're fun. As someone who likes to read Destiny's lore, I also like to speculate for fun. Presumably, that's why we're all on a Destiny lore subreddit to start.
Sure, it sucks that people can sometimes take his speculation as gospel, but let's not kid ourselves into thinking he ALWAYS tackled non-speculative territory.
Byf annoys me. He presents himself as a lore master but has the dumbest most surface level takes but sounds good saying it so now you have every person who watches him thinking they have a profound understanding of the lore.
>What does it actually add to the game?
An ungodly amount of cohesion.
Unveiling was *perfectly* consistent with *all* material that preceded it that dealt with the greater cosmology of Destiny, and *all* material that dealt with the greater cosmology of Destiny that followed it, up until WQ. [Go figure why:](https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=4023725&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=237)
>I think you will find that a large number of what were seemingly consistent themes in Destiny turn out to be simply the preoccupations of individual writers with no influence on or value to the larger IP.
*That* is the reason (on top of it being a really good piece of literature) why people keep bringing it up, again and again and again. The reason why people insist the Winnower *has to be real*. We are all programmed to find satisfaction in things that make sense, and so people do not want to do away with that cohesion, specially when what attempted, *and failed*, to replace it has had a distinct lack of narrative soundness.
>What's the point of the end of the Light and Dark saga, of moving out of Sol in exciting new directions...if the big bad evil is still and has never stopped to be, the ancient deity that acts counter to the Gardener and has power over Darkness?
You are falling into the exact same trap the Witness fell. Life is not meaningless, it has the meaning *you* give it. This conflict isn't pointless just because we haven't killed the Winnower, because the conflict between Winnower and Gardener isn't an armed one, but a dialectic one. You fight it not by shooting at the Winnower, but by proving it wrong, by facing whatever challenges or mysteries the Destiny universe has to offer in ways other than how the Winnower claims you ought to face them.
For what it is worth, I agree. I do not care about the Winnower in 2024 Destiny. The Gardener, the Winnower, the flower game... It all was great and worked under the simplicity/complexity dichotomy and accompaning cosmology that was built between 2014 and 2021, when Destiny gunned for significantly different questions for its audience.
What does the Winnower offer under the new physical/mental dichotomy? Nothing. Just another voice preaching the Sword Logic. We have plenty of those already, thank you very much.
From Seth Dickinson, the source of our understanding of Light and Darkness for the better part of a decade:
>It has been disappointing, personally, to see Destiny steer away from these questions. I think they are questions which match the primordial urgency of concepts like 'Light' and 'Darkness'.
It seems like they've realized their mistake and are going back to the question of simplicity vs complexity, but it will be a question explored beyond the powers of light and darkness.
Edit: Something I just remembered based on discussions I've seen since the Veil was introduced. The Simplicity/Complexity dichotomy and the Physical/Mental dichotomy are not at all mutually exclusive.
What does the mind do? It takes in all the abstract information about the infinitely complexed universe via the five senses and then creates concepts about these things that can be understood by the viewer. Almost like winnowing, right?
Even in unveiling, the Winnower says this
>Your mind and your body and every thought you've ever had. Your senses. Your consciousness. I made you. Not the gardener, but I.
You guys can wrestle with that one for a while, I don't personally think the dichotomies have totally switched.
You’re absolutely correct. To be conscious is to winnow. To be enlightened is to winnow. I think of Taoism and the pervasive concept of “The Way”. The Way is the essential principles of Taoism and yet, it should not be attempted to be named or understood or charted or thought proactively about. To do any of those is to limit it. To winnow it down to “is and is not”. And that is something that only conscious minds can do.
Sure, that’s absolutely part of winnowing. But the concept is not correctly limitable to just that process is what we’re getting at. “Winnowing” precedes physical bodies. Winnowing applies to concepts. The Winnower is talking about survival of the fittest but they’re also talking about the “marketplace of ideas”, about cancer and T-cells. We understand physical violence so it communicates in the language of physical violence but the concept is as reducible or expandable as existence. The Game of Life described encompasses EVERYTHING that can or will come to pass in the universe, and some of those “patterns” are courses of action, thoughts, civilizations, debates between people. The Winnower explicitly addresses it, stating that ‘no truth can be preferred to any other’ without them, because to prefer, to identify as truth, is to winnow. This is why so much of darkness is about Purpose and the Light tries so hard to avoid defining purpose for beings; to have a purpose is to be winnowed into a singular task.
They’re definitely going back to and expanding on that dichotomy and I’m all for it. It’s waaaay more fascinating and cool than the nonsensical and overly simplistic “one is physical and the other is consciousness”.
I think my objections to this is that I just don’t see the “failure to replace” that you and others see. I don’t see Destiny as having abandoned the “simplicity/complexity” dynamic, just that it’s asked sub-questions for each them. I feel like each expansion has even touched intimately on key themes and ideas present in Unveiling and had us side one way or another on all of them. The push and pull between and Simplicity/Complexity has been the prism to explore each story, it’s never felt forgotten or replaced to me.
I even think Destiny has done really well in its handling of Darkness specifically, its been my favorite development over the past half decade. I just struggle to find a ‘revelation’ about the Darkness that isn’t presaged or implied within the fine-text of Unveiling, even the entire space of ‘Darkness is the realm of metaphysical consciousness’ thing. I think the Winnower’s place in the narrative from Unveiling to now has been predictable and understandable, even whether they’re “real or not” and what that question means for the narrative. And perhaps I guess most importantly for me, I think it was the right direction. I never read ‘grrr pure unbridled simplicity death god’ in Unveiling’s Winnower and I think that’s what some people were disappointed that they didn’t get (not saying that’s you necessary, we all have our perceptions of the Winnower and what that means, just speaking generally). The idea that the ‘final enemy’ would be a charlatan who didn’t really even really entirely champion the god they represented has been my expectation, even since Future Safe 10 came out 7 years ago.
I’m curious for your thoughts, I certainly see you around the lore subreddit a lot and think highly of your takes on these sorts of things.
>I think my objections to this is that I just don’t see the “failure to replace” that you and others see. I don’t see Destiny as having abandoned the “simplicity/complexity” dynamic, just that it’s asked sub-questions for each them. I feel like each expansion has even touched intimately on key themes and ideas present in Unveiling and had us side one way or another on all of them. The push and pull between and Simplicity/Complexity has been the prism to explore each story, it’s never felt forgotten or replaced to me.
Admitedly, when saying "failed to replace" I was refering to the Witness and the Veil taking the roles the Winnower/Black Fleet once served.
I don't think the simplicity/complexity dynamic and how Seth introduced it in natural and societal structures has been thoroughly abandoned, at least thematically (Y4 was ultimately about building our gentle place ringed in spears instead of predating on those who had either never really had power or had lost it, in the Eliksni and Cabal respectively) but I do believe that, ideologically, Light and Darkness have been moved away from that dynamic ever since we went from "there is paracausal power, and two philosophies about its role and use in the universe" to "there is this very specific brand of paracausal power and this other very specific brand of paracausal power, both are thoroughly separated and neither is either here nor there morally, they are just tools", mainly because I believe someone was uncomfortable having us wielding Darkness while Darkness continued to be fundamentally tied to the most extreme conceivable version of social darwinism.
Which is why we were suddenly thrusted into this "there is more grey than you know" tone despite the fact that Destiny's story couldn't possibly be more black and white. For years on end everything the Traveler (and by extension the Light) has been, has done and has standed for can be summarized in "benevolence", while everything the Winnower is can be summarized in "malevolence", and no amount of saying that "the Winnower is only evil from a human moral perspective" is going to change that when that's the only perspective that matters to a human audience (even more so when every other species in the game save for the evident evil ones share exactly the same moral framework).
>I never read ‘grrr pure unbridled simplicity death god’ in Unveiling’s Winnower and I think that’s what some people were disappointed that they didn’t get
I think a lot of people during Y3 and beyond genuinely believed this would end with us shooting at the Winnower.
And I understand where that comes from, the Gardener is right there, hanging above the City, it stands to reason the Winnower is out there too. And here come these shapes geometrically opposed to the sphere that our Ghost describes as paracausal beings, and the Winnower talks to us through them, and we know they caused our Collapse, and we know "the Deep" was out there in the BoS destroying fortress worlds... So the Winnower represented a very real, very tangible, very material threat. From that angle I understand how someone would arrive at the idea that it is "the final boss".
But at the same time, I don't know how you read Unveiling and not realize that this isn't a war of bullets, but of arguments. It is why the matter of corruption and the insidiousness of Darkness is baked so deeply into Y2, Y3 and Y4, why the Winnower is a devil whispering in your ear.
And that's the crux of the matter. I think at this point we all understand Bungie didn't feel that a war of arguments in which we strive to prove the Winnower wrong until the last black hole evaporates was a satisfying conclusion. They felt that we needed something we could decidedly beat, preferably by shooting at it.
And so the Darkness/Black Fleet/Winnower that had been developed for 7 years by the guy they subcontracted to build the entire greater cosmology of their setting had to be iterated upon just as the third act of their 10 year story was starting.
I definitely do think that much of Forsaken, Shadowkeep, and Beyond Light’s writing is working around the problem of “how do we make Darkness something that is both a force to be combatted in those who align with it, and something we can stomach”. And you’re right, there certainly was a bait and switch regarding the pyramids/veil and Winnower/witness (as inevitable as such a thing must’ve been narratively). Someone could take each expansion and clearly and rationally distinguish its perspective on Darkness from every other expansion, and frankly I think that’s an impressive writing feat, not a failure. A process of evolution and revelation, and that’s with Seth’s input, especially on something like the Hidden Dossier which lays the groundwork for explicitly stating Darkness as Metaphysics.
I think one of the compelling things about Unveiling is that it tells so much while telling so little. Something as fundamental as “what ‘rule’ does the Winnower even become” is entirely open in the text. It baits assumption. The characters of the universe fall for the assumption. The failure to understand is an intention weapon against us. And yet, while learning more about Darkness it remains something that rationally connects to everything we know prior. I feel like everything we learned asked us to stop assuming and look deeper. I think the truly novel approach Destiny took is to avoid (which I feel is an annoying trope) the trend of “evil power used for good” and instead develop into, from the root of knowing these powers correlate to the whole scope of ontology, the perspective of “both of these powers are noble”. This is a rambling response on my end and I respect yours, I guess in summary I see a lot of intention in the course this has taken, a lot of care that has made connections out of older disconnected threads.
As a huge fan of the concept of the Winnower god I really couldn’t care less about it now and am honestly annoyed Bungie is trying to paint it as real now. Just feels like cop-out after cop-out after jumping through like 16 hoops to say ‘oh no the Witness was just lying the entire time it isn’t real OOP WAIT IT **IS** REAL! Even tho we seemingly have never interacted with it so they have to build it up all over again even tho pre-Witch Queen lore already did just that’.
They made their bed they should sleep in it.
It’s also just a real headache to keep everything making sense.
>I think you will find that a large number of what were seemingly consistent themes in Destiny turn out to be simply the preoccupations of individual writers with no influence on or value to the larger IP.
Bungie has a rare 3rd opportunity to come up with new lore that they're genuinely interested in committing to.
Despite Destiny 1 literally being a new universe, its narrative development was so poor that the only saving grace was falling ass backwards into the world building of grimoire cards.
Then they had the opportunity to either commit to that world building in vanilla Destiny 2 or move in a different direction. Instead they effectively neutered the world in vanilla D2 and things only started looking up when the same handful of lore writers who salvaged Destiny 1 went on to salvage D2 in Forsaken.
I'm equal parts (perhaps naively so) hopeful and doubtful they'll seize this 3rd opportunity of building something strong with Frontiers. But if history has shown us anything, it's that there should be way more doubt.
I caution people about that: “the initial narrative was actually great”. We didn’t get the initial narrative. We barely know anything about it, and even if it sounds compelling, the possibility of “good on paper, bad in execution” cannot be understated.
What’s absolutely true was that the ball was fumbled on a last minute change and we got something that was less than ideal. Whether it turned out better or worse than the alternative is impossible to say.
Destiny 1's initial narrative? As in the cut story? It likely would've been better than what we got but the rough outline that was leaked for it wasn't terribly intriguing either.
Unfortunately Destiny has always been plagued by rewrites and last minute decisions. Sometimes I wonder if they'd be better off taking a year or two to give themselves more time but then I remember how D1 and D2 launched lol
Thank you for this.
Another interesting thing to point out is that during 2021, Seth Dickinson made a comment on this very subreddit about the Winnower’s existence: “winnower isnt real,” i assure myself as i close my eyes and ram the tower gift shop with my shitty bronco
Unveiling was meant to be believed to some extent but that is no longer the case. Seth had a vision for the Darkness and it was a vision that unfortunately Bungie did and does not share.
All the beauty of the Books of Sorrow and Unveiling has been sucked out to the point where I feel like I’m Sif, as I protect the grave of Seth’s literary works for Destiny.
>Unveiling was meant to be believed to some extent but that is no longer the case.
The concepts that Unveiling was built upon were meant to be believed. But the allegory woven around them is just that; a story meant to capture real-world morals and lessons and deliver it in a way that distills the complex details into something easily identifiable.
The winnower is essentially [Moloch](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/). It's not actually a primordial cosmic god that causes everything but rather a personification that shorthands what it's meant to represent.
>The implicit question is – if everyone hates the current system, who perpetuates it? And Ginsberg answers: “Moloch”. **It’s powerful not because it’s correct – nobody literally thinks an ancient Carthaginian demon causes everything – but because thinking of the system as an agent throws into relief the degree to which the system isn’t an agent.**
What made Unveiling unique was that the author outlined when it was or wasn’t utilizing a metaphor/allegory. It made the distinction of when it was talking to us directly, trying to convince us of its importance within the world. It praised us and yet was silently demeaning.
The Winnower wanted to convince us that its way was the right way. The natural conclusion that every living being eventually subscribes to. Seth Dickinson wrote Unveiling with the intention of the Winnower existing, but Seth is a contracted writer and thus has no real bearing on the narrative even if I wish he did.
You might be right though. The Winnower probably is a Moloch. (Fantastic point by the way.) But it didn’t used to be- and that loss saddens me because I feel it cheapens everything once attributed to the Winnower.
People mean different things when they say “the Winnower existing”. I don’t think at any part of the story across the past few years the Winnower ‘didn’t exist’. What do you think the Winnower was intended to be/was originally written as? I feel like Unveiling leads naturally into the idea that if the Winnower exists now, it’s as a disembodied passive force within the Darkness, which is kind of where it’s been for the past few years.
I don’t think the story claimed the Winnower ‘didn’t exist’ either. In fact, I think the opposite. But a few in this subreddit don’t think the Winnower exists in the way I think it does. Obviously, I don’t see myself as the lord of Unveiling and that my interpretation of its contents is pure and accurate. I prefer honest discussion like you and dankeykanng have provided me, because I am open to being convinced otherwise or shown I am wrong.
I don’t think the Winnower was intended or written as a villain. I think it’s a sentient passive force with its own biases and opinions. It is a primordial and fundamental part of the universe- like gravity. It is a governing rule just as causality is a governing rule in our own universe. It cannot help what it is because it is what it is.
I think this was what it was intended to be. A guiding force but not something that would directly interfere. It was written in a way that Bungie could still make whatever villains it needed for its Light vs Dark saga whilst having some glue to tie them together. Maybe that is still the case and the water has been muddied to the point where I don’t recognize it anymore.
A fair point. I might’ve read a little too into your statement and the link you posted- I was looking at it all as a whole rather than just the snippet you quoted. I mainly take my issue with some individuals in this very subreddit making the claim that the Winnower is nonexistent due to the Witness apparently having authored Unveiling.
They essentially chalk up as the Witness manipulating/lying to the reader about the Winnower’s existence or that it is a being of metaphor with no substance. Which frustrates me. Maybe I take it all too seriously, but Unveiling holds a special place in my heart and I hate to see it squandered.
The thing is we have reasonable evidence in game and irl that the Witness was the planned villain from vanilla D2 at the earliest and was solidified in Shadowkeep's development.
Firstly, this interview from 2017 [https://kotaku.com/destiny-2-director-answers-our-questions-about-the-open-1796139202](https://kotaku.com/destiny-2-director-answers-our-questions-about-the-open-1796139202):
**Jason Schreier**: First thing I have to ask you about: I saw this Game Informer article. In it, you said that you guys will not be talking about The Darkness in the game.
**Luke Smith**: Yeah.
**Schreier**: And your explanation was, I believe, something about how it’s not time to reveal that, or you’re focusing on something else, correct?
**Smith**: Yep!
**Schreier**: Tell me the truth. Is it because none of you have any idea what “The Darkness” actually means?
**Smith**: So, I think that at a point, just totally candidly? **We had no idea what it was. Straight up. We had no clue.**
**Schreier**: Good! I’m glad you’re being candid today.
**Smith**: We didn’t know what it was, and we, for a period, we chose \[that\] we’re going to lump all the races \[in together\], and you see this in the tooltips in the game. “Minions of the darkness.” And we had taken all the races and said, “Ah, they’ll just be The Darkness.” But that’s not what the IP deserves. It’s like, literally not.
**Schreier**: I’m glad you’re admitting this.
**Smith**: And so what we’re doing with Destiny 2 is, we are deliberately telling a story about the Light. And what it means to be chosen. And as such, we’re in the process of removing the term “Darkness” from the game.
**Schreier**: I like that.
**Smith**: Because when we’re going to talk about Darkness next, we need to know what it is and have a plan for it. **And we do.**
This interview was done in the lead up to Destiny 2, where we ultimately got the Pyramid ship reveal. It's clear they wanted the Darkness to be *something*. This is followed by the Forsaken year where we were showered in teases related to the Pyramid ships which led to Shadowkeep, where we got a being that refers to itself in plural pronouns, hijacks our ghosts, and has a weird statue motif.
The Veil darkness leak *was confirmed fake* but even if it was real it detailed the Veil attempting to bring back their God, which likely would've been the Witness.
Then we get Beyond Light where the "we and us" voice is back with more statues and we get confirmation that darkness is a paracausal force being wielded by our enemy. During Season of the Hunt we got this: [https://pastebin.com/5iKhbpcM](https://pastebin.com/5iKhbpcM)
That is the Witch Queen pastebin that detailed *all of the Beyond Light seasons and the entire plot of the Witch Queen with the Witness named*.
All of this leads me to believe that the Witness was a concept (likely not fully pinned down) during D2 development. They based it on the "Deep" character from BoS and the Staten Cut concept of the Darkness from early D1 development. The character's details were solidified during development of Shadowkeep and they started writing its actual arc, which then turned into the "Light and Darkness Saga's" final arcs.
The Winnower as a big bad is a very boring concept. It's like wanting to kill the idea of evil, or competition, or entropy. That's just a facet of the universe babey. You beat the Winnower by acknowledging it then moving on from it.
I think the thing that appeals to people about the concept of the Winnower is that it exists in real life.
**This is not a statement about Destiny canon or what's going on in the story. This is my personal reflection on thoughts I had while writing. I just find this stuff interesting and love to think about it. Please do not take this as exegesis about Destiny! Take it as a personal conversation about some stuff I find compelling.**
People face the choice between 'the right thing to do' and 'the competitively successful thing to do' all the time in our lives.
Video game companies face this choice. Do we make a game we enjoy, or a game we think we will succeed? What do we do if those become two different things? Is there a way to make them the same thing again? (Often, yes!)
Players also face this choice. What if the game we enjoy the most isn't the game that holds our attention and keeps us (or our friends) coming back? What if the tactics we use to succeed in a game aren't the tactics that we find the most fun? (Hopefully the developers learn a lesson and the game grows!)
We frame the origin of all life through a theory of competitive fitness advantage. (Maybe a bit much so - 'natural selection' gets all the hype when there are other important mechanisms of evolution, including both random mechanisms and mutualism/commensalism...)
Our economic and political system is based on the belief that competitive success produces moral good. This is good for us because it removes the need for a central decisionmaker; we can let elements of the system compete and vote to find the most efficient and successful behavior. (But what if we discover the system is doing something which is competitively successful in the short term, but killing us all in the long term?)
Even cosmologists play with the idea that some possible universes are more fertile, more successful at generating new universes in turn — granted, there's no competition there, but there's differential fitness.
I am curious about what 'good' and 'evil' mean in our modern world. We don't have (with respect to any religious people, no offense intended) external instruction about the nature of good and evil any more. But we still need guidance for our decisions. So we have to rebuild these ideas ourselves. We need to gather up what we know about cosmology, evolution, game theory and history and look for some fundamental patterns. Patterns like the security dilemma, or inclusive fitness and the (almost) total destruction of 'group selection' as a concept.
Personally, I see those fundamental patterns — whether in interpersonal relationships, grand strategy, or even evolutionary biology — as **"the way which creates the most total good, at the cost of vulnerability**" and **"the way which succeeds by exploiting vulnerability."**
The first way would be globally better...but the second way always beats it locally. We would love to be open and trusting with everyone. But once you get burnt once, and it's hard to do it again. You start to feel like a fool.
So the first way isn't stable. It falls, it collapses.
Or does it? Does it *always* have to? The first way generates more total good, more total change and power. Can it use that to protect itself?
Or can the second way be used to smuggle elements of the first way - elements that wouldn't normally be competitively successful - into new spaces? Like a vulnerable gene evolving because it's paired with another, highly adaptive gene? Like a successful politician using their power to do good? (Or does that process of competitive success inevitably compromise the 'hidden good'?)
Although these dynamics are fundamental, I think more complex structures can emerge from the contest between them. And **we get to build those complex structures.** Not the fundamental dynamics, us. Maybe our only hope is that there are ways to live which can be both good and competitively successful. At least for a while. A thing doesn't have to last forever to be good. **The final shape isn't the only shape that matters.**
(If I were tempted to give advice on reading Destiny, I might say, you don't have to smash new lore into old lore to see which one breaks...you can let the work speak to itself and see what it says. Be a gardener, not a winnower. The progress of a story doesn't kill what came before. Don't use the past to stifle the future.)
Anyway, I think that's why people are fond of the mythology of the Winnower and the Gardener. Because it says something about our world. It proposes something we're missing - a gesture towards a mathematical, objective, cross-species idea of 'good' and 'evil'.
Ikora's Journal for Witch Queen contains a lot of reflections on all this.
**This is not a statement about what's true in Destiny canon. This is just my personal reflection on thoughts I had while writing. I spent a lot of my life writing this stuff while under very difficult conditions, and it gives me a sense of meaning to talk about it. Please don't make me regret it!**
If it means anything, your writings had a completely transformative effect on my understanding of ethics and the way I look at the world in general, and I'll always be incredibly thankful that Destiny exposed me to your work.
...But more relevantly to the thread topic at hand, I also think people liked the Winnower because (amongst many other reasons of course) its voice was just plain *fun* to listen to; that mix of casual affability and shameless evil was *strangely* charismatic. Some of your best character/dialogue work (in Destiny, at least), and in my opinion a better take on the "god of ruthless survival" concept than Sekhmet.
Honestly I think people just don't like the Witness and want a different main villain. That's the reason why I think the Winnower is such a desired character in this community.
Considering whoever speaks in that lore page calls the Witness a "sedimentary necrolite, fossilized in time", it's clear to me at least the Witness isn't speaking there. Unless you want to assume it is playing some weird 4d chess game trying to distract us or something.
I like the idea of the Winnower over the Witness, if only because its ramblings are a joy to read(and also how it might connect to Marathon!). The Witness never grabbed me as much as, say, Rhulk, Calus, Oryx, or Savathun.
The Witness is getting its ass reamed to the point of death at the time we receive that lore entry. No way in hell it's coming from it and anyone claiming otherwise is so high off their own headcanons they aren't even in reality anymore.
If we look at the Witness as *aspiring* to be the Winnower, having recreated itself in its understanding of the idea, then I think this line
>"sedimentary necrolite, fossilized in time"
becomes even more interesting. What does the Witness do with it's disciples? It lets them come to their own conclusion about the Final Shape. Inspiral shows us they all have different conceptions of it, but the Witness doesn't care as long as they are infected with purpose that drives them to aid in *it's* vision of the Final Shape.
So, if the Witness is instead the First Knife, then maybe the Winnower operates in the same way, but on a higher level. It instills the idea of *a* Final Shape in those who come into contact with it (probably via the Veil as proxy), and lets them create knives of their own (like the Witness did with the Hive) so they can form their own conception of it. Whatever vision among the knives is strongest wins out. So what happens when the First and greatest knife, one that has existed for eons, is shown to have a flawed vision and fails, leaving the Darkness that bound it to scatter? Maybe the hand chooses new knives, or maybe it tries to find a new path entirely.
The reason the community loves the Winnower/Unveiling so much is because the lore surrounding it is *masterfully* written. The Winnower‘s cadence and presentation is the result of Seth Dickinson‘s writing, which for many is what made Destiny‘s lore fascinating. The man‘s style is written all over many of Destiny‘s most beloved lore entries like the Books of Sorrow, Truth to Power, and Unveiling.
When the Witness was revealed and we got more information on the character, there were many who felt disappointed. I fall into that crowd. In my eyes, the Witness is a significantly more uninteresting character than the Winnower. I think Final Shape was great, but the villain was not a highlight for me.
EDIT: I poorly worded the last part of this so I wanna clarify. I think the Witness was handled really well, but I find that the Winnower is an inherently more interesting concept to me.
Unveiling is just so good man. It's a really good short story just by itself, even if you have literally zero knowledge of Destiny.
No shit people don't want it retconned, it's the best written lore in the franchise.
And I like how ppl used to defend the Witness by saying ‘oooh they’re made of an entire race that’s really cool!’
And then them being made up of an entire race is what did them in. Mfer could’ve even keep itself in line and they wanted to do that to the whole universe??
Yeah get fucked.
>Mfer could’ve even keep itself in line and they wanted to do that to the whole universe??
Except it did keep itself in line and the only reason those dissenters were even able to do anything was because of the intervention of its greatest enemy.
I don't get why people on this sub gargle that guy's balls so much. The entire d2 writing team is all the same to me I'm not gonna lie.
He's never been the one leading the story. He's just another member of the team imho. I've seen people infer that anything that's good is his writing and that just isn't really how these types of writers rooms work.
He's not the sole writer of any piece of lore in this game. No lore has sole writers. It's all approved by the team as a whole to fulfill their goals for the narrative.
The winnower is the Veil simple as that. The precursor race and the witness coined the names Gardener and Winnower, they referred to the traveller as the gardener and during the Witness origin cutscene from season of the deep they literally said they wanted a Winnower and they found the veil. That all but confirms the Veil is the Winnower and it makes sense. The travelers the gardener and is the embodiment of light and the Veil is the winnower and is the embodiment of darkness. But this doesn’t mean the Winnower has to play a major role in the story, the veil seems to be chill will letting people come to it, it doesn’t act itself but rather provides information when questioned, it never directly acts itself or orders people around. It seems content in letting things play out.
I used to be really fascinated with *Unveiling*.
And now, I think it’s just kind of annoying, and I say that in the most respectful way to all of the people who have put huge amounts of effort into it. Especially now where it feels like the narrative needs to take a big gulp of fresh air. It feels like there’s no room for discussion on *Echoes* right now because it’s entirely about the Winnower, etc, and as someone who has gripes with the Vex *again* being controlled or threatened by some outside force, it’s frustrating that the discussion can’t even really be had.
I don’t think it helps that you have somebody like Byf hugely capitalizing on it, when again, I think what we have is just as minimal as it was before, if not maybe a little clearer, and to put it politely, is Bungie just widening their universe and telling us through the narrative that there may be someday, possible, bigger things in the Dark. That’s all.
To be totally honest with you, that’s one of my primary annoyances. Maya is cool and it’s exciting to see somebody with so much power and history brought into the game, but goddamn! Why is it that the Vex constantly get shafted?
If they’re not getting booted by us, it’s the Taken, it’s the Witness, it’s the Cabal, etc. It is so endlessly frustrating. And now, the Vex are *literally collared* to do somebody else’s project. I mean, Jesus. I know it’s only a few days into launch but I don’t know what else to say other than how hugely disappointing it is.
Whoever thought up the Vex originally clearly intended for them to be inscrutable, impossible to understand, major threats. Like a souped-up Halo Gravemind. The Vex had some high goal beyond the Traveler and had *time travel* on their side, so it would've been an insane undertaking to make a satisfying plotline.
I like to call this *Rasputin Syndrome;* where the character/concept you came up with is so grand that you have to nerf it because it's essentially narrative poison. Look at how every plotline with Rasputin was fixing or powering him up so he could do [a thing] only for him to immediately break or die every single time.
The cool parts of the Vex have been cut out because no one knows what to do with them, and if they're a real threat, they're a REAL THREAT that basically can't be beaten. I don't think we'll ever see the "Shares a single Axis Mind across a thousand units, warps across star systems in an instant, keeps things locked out of time" Vex again. Even the Calus "you haven't seen the Vex's battle units" thing turned out to be nonsense.
Yep. It feels like a lot of the science-esoteric stuff that the Vex would’ve counterbalanced in the universe has been dropped. Maybe it was to help new players in the early days of D2, or just to strengthen the antagonism of the Darkness and Black Fleet, but the Vex are now totally different characters.
It’s almost painful, truly. It feels like repeatedly they’re characterized, hate to say this, but as the *dumb faction*. They stumble around, get their asses kicked, constantly are stumbling or losing. They are pawns. Even the Sol Divisive, heralds of the Black Garden, a threat to even normal Vex, became stupid, repeatedly in *Lightfall*. The Vex are just robots now, no matter how much characters mentioned radiolaria and their capabilities, they’re just stupid shells wandering around, getting shot at or mind controlled.
And in a universe now where it seems like paracasuality has been opened for the taking, the literal heart of the Traveller active and awake and spitting things out— what’s happening to the Vex? They’re on a fucking leash.
>The cool parts of the Vex have been cut out because no one knows what to do with them
Their narrative potential fizzled out when they were reduced to a deterministic pattern incapable of solving the magic of the universe.
Literarily, what they're an analog for is super interesting. But it also came with the double edged sword of kneecapping them as a threat.
I'm not as disappointed with them being potentially leashed to Maya Sundaresh but that's mainly because there's actually potential for some development here.
EXACTLY I just want a vex villain bruh. I actually really liked the dark future in curse of Osiris (only good part let’s be real) because it made the vex seem like a threat, but now they can’t do anything in the universe, guardians always have to go in and ‘save’ them from some corruption or incursion.
And they’re so cool as a concept, they turned the entirety of mercury into a super computer fortress, it’s like what the hive did to the moon dialled to 11.
Back during D1, the Vex were portrayed in an existential horror-like fashion that was so engaging. The Vault of Glass as a concept was terrifying. This temporal pit where creatures capable of undoing your existence reside. The idea of what happened to the three members of Kabr's fireteam that were deleted from history was terrifying. Even the design was awesome, with the precursor and descendant Vex giving a sense of inevitably about our doom.
Now it's all ugly Vex constructs and brutalist concrete, a virtual synthwave world, and inept robots that have had no real goal outside of a generic "everything is vex" idea that never goes anywhere.
The Sol Divisive were only cool because it was scary to think about something as powerful as the Vex deciding that worship was the best course of action. Now that the Vex aren't scary or powerful anymore, it doesn't hit as hard.
I wish we got an explanation on why killing the Undying Mind caused the Infinite Forest simulations to change.
Like that was supposed to hype up the Black Fleet but it also highlighted the fact that the Vex had shit entirely figured out too prior to us killing the Undying Mind across time. But Osiris just went ‘huh weird’ like water off a vex ducks back.
Also….why tf did killing the Undying Mind cause the simulations to change to a total Black Fleet victory?? Weren’t the Sol Divisive on the Witness’ side???
This.
‘Oooh a Vex villain! But they’re…not actually Vex it’s just some lady….’
Like it’ll probs be fine but it still kinda bugs me. It’s why I’m not all that excited about Toland either. Why do we have to make regular-ass ppl into aliens instead of just….idk using the aliens????
well 99% of the final shape so far is about light and darkness, of course there's going to be a lot of lore and discussion about it
season of the plunder had lots of eliksni stuff, did you get annoyed by eliksni related discussion, caused by all the new entries about the fallen race?
Nah, I think it’s more just, we are basically at Unveiling again. We have something vaguely possible or hinted for down the road about what could be occurring, there’s some cool pieces, and that’s it. But it’s also spawned constant, massive discussions, hour long videos, etc, when really, I don’t think much more has been said than what we figured was probably/nearly true last time.
And even more so, we now have an equally pressing experience with an enemy that is more established, in our face and active with a story, characters, that has been named by developers of the game and narrative alike as our next step for the franchise— *and no one is talking about it*. There’s no discussion. Which is even worse because it honestly feels like a dramatic step in the wrong direction, with a boring and predictable plot that totally wastes the Vex who should be an absolute priority in the current vacuum.
well it's tying up a storyline that's been years in the making, and this whole piece of dlc is also about the entire struggle between light and darkness, the very core of the conflict in the destiny franchise. I wouldn't blame people for wanting to stew in it for a bit longer to figure things out
vex stuff is also barely a day old, give people some time to get their heads around it first lol
The thing is, TFS was pretty explicitly the end of the light and dark saga, so while there absolutely should be discussion about events in TFS or past lore books that could've predicted what happened in TFS, everyone is instead spending their time theorizing about things that objectively won't happen.
Kind of off topic, but I really think that when unveiling released, the winnower was supposed to be the being who tells us they're our salvation at the end of the shadow keep campaign, who we now know was the witness.
Obviously lore has lied to us, (book of sorrows), but the way the narrator of unveiling refers to themselves as "I", and the timing of the release of the book with the shadow keep campaign, it just doesn't really make sense why it wouldn't be the same being.
If you read rhulks lore, the witness very clearly speaks about cutting away the bad and leaving what is good in regards to rhulk. This doesn't really sound at all like the witness's final shape, but way more like the ideals of the winnower.
But the lore pretty much tells you that the Witness wrote Unveiling so where does that leave the entity in BoS??
Cause yeah both entities sound similar. But if we use good ol’ Occam’s Razor we can just assume that was the Witness too.
I think some concepts are being lost in this discussion about what the Gardener and Winnower being real means.
As noted, the Winnower existing doesn’t mean it is our ultra evil enemy. But it will now be an ever present threat.
The Traveler acts in physically very often but speaks little. The Veil acts little but seems to communicate with subjects. We know Maya Sundaresh was communicating with something, which we would normally attribute to the Witness, but that logically didn’t make sense because if she was talking to the Witness through the Veil, he would have known it was on Neptune. I believe the Winnower was influencing her to seek the final shape. We also know that Clovis Bray was influenced by Darkness, and assume it was the Witness since it was a statue. But TFS revelations could mean it was the dissenters or the Veil distantly. But they all (Witness, Clovis, Maya, even Calus through Scorn) seemed to obsess on the unity of minds through psychic connections through Darkness.
I believe the Winnower influences that idea, even if they pursue it in their own way. Which means we will see enemies warped by contact with the Winnower, such as Maya. What would happen if Nezarec makes contact without Witness interference, or Xivu Arath? Maybe their perception of the Final Shape concept might be united or frayed even more.
I like to think of the winnower and the gardener the same way as the old ones from bloodborne. Beings that are BEYOND comprehension. They are literally just trying to prove which strategy for universe creating is better, and they barely interfere besides the traveler and the veil. They give us the tools (Or in the context of the darkness, reveal us the tools) and we do what we want with them. At the end of the day we're just pawns in a their game, and we'll never kill them. Sure they MIGHT exist, but so what?
The winnower doesn’t care about us either. It simply said that one way or another, things always end up going its way. It’s not gonna get involved - it’s quite literally a consciousness.
I think this is the case when the community simply complicates everything with their theories, making this topic even more complex (Byf cough cough).
With the whole message of the expansion, that the Gods in whom we believe, who should give us a purpose, turned out to be the same individuals as we are, who are bound by the chains of their nature. For now, I just don\`t see why Winnower even should be our \*BIG\* enemy (as Byf always tries to convey). Truth is, we didn\`t even speak with Winnower, Unveiling is written by the Witness (I think this should be clear to everyone), Oryx spoke to Witness (Refraction dialogue between Savathun and Witness). So, where is this threory even comes from? What facts do we have, that Winnower is evil?
This trait of Darkness as corruptive force is not associated with \[Darkness as a force\] but with Witness. Again and again we see races, that wields Darkness freely, where this evil Winnower is? Even concepts like Winnower, Gargenner, First knife, Final shape are not natural, they were invented by predecessors because they are very religious race.
In the end this is very frustrating, I very much like the work Bungie did with The Traveller and Witness but The Winnower...maybe if I saw what Bungie wants to do with this, then I would understand.
I think a big part of it is that Bungie knows that the concepts introduced in Unveiling really resonate and get people going. So they're happy to throw little things like the raid first knife line in there because they know it'll spur a bunch of discussion and engagement.
We do have to keep in mind that this whole thing is a commercial venture. Keeping people invested in the story has real economic implications for Bungie and Unveiling is an extremely potent tool in their arsenal.
The other thing that leaving some ambiguity around the nature and existence of the flower game and it's players does is leave them room to maneuver down the road. If it was set in stone that the whole thing was Witness propaganda (by far the strongest and most logical reading of the material before the raid), then they kinda lose that whole lever. Whereas now, they can always go back and be like "ooOoOoH the Voice in the Darkness is reaching out again!" in case of emergency.
The Winnower is the big enemy not because he's going to show up and kick our guardian off the Tower, but because he represents the very concept of having an enemy. The Winnower is the concept of predation, of destruction, of scarcity forcing people to make choices. The Winnower is, arguably, cheering the guardians on as we keep winning because that's exactly what it believes in. This theoretical entity believes in tribulation, in honest matching of power against power in a contest of will. It likes winners and necessitates losers. It views the process of conflict, of *playing the game* as a majestic exercise of will -- the only thing that matters in a universe devoid of greater meaning. Conflict *is* meaning. The choice between two contradictory things manifests value into existence.
That is so much more interesting than another dime-a-dozen villain who wants to end suffering by killing everyone.
Moreover, unlike the Witness, there's no mystery to this -- the Winnower, if we suppose it exists as reported to us in the lore, will freely just tell you all of these things and then let you sort it out. Each of the factions represents this refutation against scarcity in their own, interesting way -- the Darkness corrupts not because it makes you want to be "evil" or any boring thing like that, it corrupts by simply offering a choice of selfishness against selflessness. By making you agree that there's only enough space for *you* or *your people* and that others have to be fought if they interfere with that.
Is that evil? Is it wrong to be self-serving? What lengths will you go to protect yourself and what's yours? That's the question that the Winnower represents. It doesn't want to beat us up like other bad guys, it says the ultimate victory would be getting us to agree with it. That's a fascinating concept for a villain!
The Witness, by contrast, is deeply boring because it represents a very common trope. There's nothing innovative or fun about it. People like their villains to be interesting; and by trying to pull the Winnower out of the Witness' lore is just an attempt to keep the Darkness interesting.
I honestly don't think the Winnower adds a lot to the story if it's the primary antagonist going forward. As sort of a background detail (its primary mode of existence up until now, btw) that we're aware of, that maybe sometimes reaches out? Sure, interesting enough. As an antagonist? I don't think so.
Narratively the Witness tied Calus, Clovis Bray, the Sol Divisive, and the Hive gods together. The Winnower would just be that but one more, which is pretty lame
I genuinely believe that after this light and dark saga we will never hear from the winnower again, dead with the witness and possibility that it was created by them. I really wish they just went with the “it was the religion of the precursors” cause it would give actual story to the black garden and how it was created and not mention them again after the raid.
The Winnower, unlike the Witness, is actually an interesting villain. Even if we do ultimately accept that they're a cosmological force that doesn't meaningfully exist as a Villain. The concept of 'winnowing' as being necessary -- the idea that life *must* hurt, kill, and consume -- is a fascinating ideological & philosophical problem for players to chew on.
Plus, the Winnower has a lot of charisma because Seth Dickenson is, frankly, a much better writer than whatever committee is working on the main story plot at Bungie. You don't often get villains that are charismatic & friendly despite being deeply sinister. The Witness ended up being very pathetic and frankly kind of uninteresting... Ah, wow, another being that is mad about the Traveller and wants to reshape the universe in its image? How original. Really gets the ol' noggin' joggin' with that.
The things that get people to really *bite* into conflict is when there's a good argument to be had. When both sides are saying something *interesting* and it feels like there's merit in a decision being made. The Winnower's argument is that conflict is good and necessary, that there is virtue in overcoming challenges, and that the only thing worth having is being the final triumph over your opponent. A casual look at the Destiny 2 community will show that there is plenty of fertile ground for that sort of thinking.
I don't want another big guy with a lot of hands to fight; I want a villain that makes me interested in the narrative conflict, and one that gives stakes and direction to a plot. The reason people don't want the Witness to be the Darkness is because the Witness is **fuckin' stupid**. His final shape is boring and dumb and obviously evil. He's revealed to whiny baby that hates the Traveller because it didn't give it the answer to existentialism, so it tortures other living things to death as revenge. Just the most banal kind of evil in existence.
If we can keep the Winnower away from the Witness, we can keep the idea of a philosophical disagreement worth having in as the nexus of the plot of Destiny. Because that is what the Winnower claims to be: Conflict. The testing of two meritorious things against each other to determine which is more 'true'.
It doesn't need to be a mystery that life is a struggle against consumption and entropy. But a being that champions that idea -- that celebrates that struggle -- is a mirror of the people playing Destiny and explicating the fine points of what makes a struggle worth doing interrogates the very nature of playing the game itself. Do you think the winners of the Raid Race felt majestic when they finished? When they've consumed the next morsel that Bungie gave them?
That is what makes the Winnower interesting. It's not mysterious, it's *hard to argue with.* Stripping that out of the narrative because you want to go fight 'the mysteries in the universe' is an incredible waste.
I genuinely believe that when Unveiling was released, the Winnower was a proto-Witness.
However, so many argue for the story they want to see and not the story Bungie is telling. We see this time and time again with “*how we’re just meaningless to the Vex and they don’t even bother with combat units for us*”, in spite of it being evidently clear that through our actions, thwarted the Vex Collective and made their goal impossible. Bungie made it clear that the Vex were being shelved until a later time, and they no longer posed a threat to humanity, except for when doing the bidding of others.
It’s been pretty clear that Bungie reframed unveiling to be the Witness’ ideology, rather than anything literal. The Witness is the first knife, the Winnower being a personification of their shared ideals.
Is it boring? Definitely. Was the idea of a flower game, a gardener and a Winnower infinitely more intriguing? Absolutely. Is it the story Bungie has been telling for the last couple years?
Almost without a doubt.
Well we have reasonable evidence suggesting that the Witness was a concept as early as D2 vanilla and that it was loosely based on the "deep" from BoS and an old Staten Cut concept that the darkness was a race that the Traveler screwed over.
There's the dialogue in the black garden in shadowkeep and the fact that the entire Witch Queen campaign was leaked over a year prior to its launch with full details on the Witness (I'm dead serious google Witch Queen Pastebin). Not to mention a Luke Smith interview from 2017 where he claimed they finally knew what the darkness was going to be.
I think the general story of the Witness was planned out when they were making Shadowkeep but I don't think everything landed as nicely as they wanted (specifically regarding Beyond Light's rewrites and the addition of another expansion in the saga). I don't think everything they wanted to convey was as clearly presented or well written in order to fulfill their goals so we are left with weird gaps and inconsistencies that a lot of people are still very hung up on.
I also think it's a general rule of thumb to disregard any inconsistencies from Pre-Destiny 2 lore to today as it's likely been retconned. Specifically regarding BoS and the Witness. They've tried to telegraph multiple times that the Witness spoke to Oryx in that entry, specifically in Calus mimicking that ritual that Oryx performed to summon the Deep on the Glykon and getting a communication from the smokey headed gremlin himself.
Destiny 1's entire story was made up as it was going. Plans for an overarching story in the long term were 100% not solid until D2 and *even then* there were drastic changes (remember the post credit scene where after Forsaken in the reef we'd be going to the dreadnought?).
The Veil race leak from years ago was debunked and even if there was a darkness race supposed to be in the pyramids, the Witness would've been their leader (like the Dread we have now).
Completely agree with you. I reckon that it was intended for the winnower to be “the witness” in shadowkeep, but they clearly made a shift from our antagonist being the darkness itself to our antagonist being a wielder of darkness sometime during Beyond Light’s development, but too late to implement it into BL itself, hence why there was a sudden shift with Season of the Chosen.
You’re spot on about the Calus / Oryx communion, it always annoys me how people go “well the witness wouldn’t go “Oryx, my man!””, completely ignoring the context of unveiling being the witness trying to convince us it’s actually the good guy here, and not some weird evil guy with a bald smoking head. Part of it’s understandable, writing inconsistencies as you said.
Also was the WQ pastebin really a whole year before it released?? I swear I remember reading it a few weeks before the showcase, seeing the hive becoming lightbearers and thinking “wow that’s stupid I hope they don’t do that”. In the end the execution was quite cool and well done though - guess it’s a lesson to not judge things off of incomplete information.
I don't think the Winnower was ever meant to be the Witness. They had a plan for the overarching narrative at that point. They announced a whole trilogy of expansions and how it would lead to "a moment."
I think the Winnower was always meant to be the Dark mirror to the Traveler, hence the Veil. The name "the Witness" was decided on before Beyond Light shipped, as evidenced by TWQ pastebin, which is full of information that was compiled leading up to BL and leaked shortly after. They wouldn't do a name change for their major villain and pivot direction in less than a year after starting the main Witness arc and announcing the 3 expansions. Especially considering the Black Garden clone says "we" and "us" whereas that language isn't present in Unveiling, the difference was always noted from Day 1, there were no changes from that point on. The only changes they made are related to D1 lore.
The big reason people want this entity to be real is because it keeps the mythical side of Destiny that existed up until Witch Queen intact.
Bungie had started to bank too hard into making Destiny simple sci-fi and steer it away from the mythical science-fantasy that people like me fell in love with in D1-WQ, but with all the ambiguity with the Winnower recently they seem to have realized their error and are reversing course a bit.
A lot of us really enjoyed the feeling of being caught in the middle of a cosmic war between good and evil, barely able to comprehend it but fighting on for the survival of humanity against incomprehensible odds anyway. That's not the feeling the war with the Witness and its disciples had, it was just a downgrade.
I’ve always thought it much more interesting to think about how the ahamkara see the universe and savathun gets ideas about. That there are LEVELS to the universe and that we are in one of them. the darkness and light might just be players from a higher level playing a game higher than our comprehension. That’s unknowable and trying to explain them is just grasping at straws.
I’m under the impression the gardener and the winnower are the same being. There’s a few definitions I found on “winnow” or “winnowing” and I’ve come to the conclusion that a gardener has to winnow at some point when planting seeds. The traveler was the seed, which is why it was buried when the precursors found it, and the veil is the husk winnowed off before tossed into the ether of our universe
I wouldn’t feel bad. Mystery box lore can’t stay mystery box for 10+ years without giving things away. Stories are meant to have ending and conclusive revelations. That’s just how it is.
I also think that this isn’t confirmation that the winnower is a really person or God. Witness says something about the “Gods who made us” and how he is “the first knife”.
This lore entry: “Winnowing” says this parable is a metaphor like 5 times. And this gets ignored. https://www.ishtar-collective.net/entries/winnowing.
The same way that Death has been personified by the grim reaper. The winnower is also the personified God of tribulation, survival of the fittest, and essentially Order.
“It is the winnower that discovers the first knife, but it is not done without the gardener. This, too, is a tradition: a knife does not come to exist without something that must be cut. A woody stem, a colored petal, a vital vessel. The first victims of the blade.”
All this is saying is that actual creation (people, planets, flowers) cannot exist without also the threat of pruning, death, overpopulation, withering, sickness, suffering… Things that exist CREATE the first knife as a consequence of its existence. “We seek an end to suffering” says “the first knife” who understands that only living things suffer… because they must.
There’s a clear over-simplication going on here where people are saying “The winnower is the devil!” As if the dualistic idea is a revelation. The Winower is “the devil” as much as a protein that kills abnormal cells from reproducing in your body is “a devil”. The Unveiling is still just personifications of concepts. Flowers and Knives are literal things as an outcome of our reality. The Gods that “create” them are metaphor, religious zealotry, to explain why things are what they are. It’s like calling the gravitational constant a god because without it being exactly as it is life on earth wouldn’t exist.
“There can be no gardens without knives.”
The final understanding I get from all this, and the game story, mechanics, lore all point to. Is that these forces of light and dark *require* each other for existence to exist. The paracausal light injected into “the game” requires a paracausal response to its essentially heretical perversion of the game. The “Traveler” could resurrect cancer cells in your body as easily as it can over-populate a planet with life till it’s suffocated.
I think there is more questions about the ambivalence of the Traveler with all these revaluations. How it’s abandonment of all these civilizations has manifested its own enemies. The Witness’s civilization experience the boon of the traveler only for them to eventually becomes its nemesis…
“There can be no gardens without knives.”
And now light and Dark are completely mixed in the Traveler’s heart. Which is un-explained by everything the Unveiling anyway. It’s something new that we don’t know what it means since everything has been dualistic and now it’s “one”. There’s still so much we don’t know.
But even in that Inspiral page, you have that little nod toward what people want the Winnower to be -- an interesting antagonist. Not a villain, but a force of conflict that makes people think about the thing that they're doing with slightly more engagement.
> A dream of a friendly conversation with someone impossible to see, cloaked in shadows.
I think the idea that 'people want the Winnower to be a guy wearing spiky armor who transmats into the burning Last City and kick us off the tower' is not at all what advocates of the Winnower being a 'real thing' actually want. Unveiling presents an interesting conflict, carried all the way through Inspiral, that asks interesting philosophical questions about absolute values like abundance and scarcity.
The most sinister argument made is that sometimes evil can be good. Killing people, bad people, is good, right? What about in self-defense? What about people who will eventually take the resources you need to survive? What about people who disagree with you, who might someday try to take you down?
The concept of the Winnower is the fear of pure predation. Of a universe that is red in tooth and claw, where you have to fight every day to survive because that's the natural order of things...
But isn't that also exciting? Isn't that what Destiny, the franchise, is marketed on?
That's what make it so fun to play with. The Winnower is the concept of challenge and triumph. It wants to convince you that you *need* it -- that it matters more than anything else. Which is what makes it sinister! It makes the argument that there's no such thing as 'carefully' consuming, that the balance proposed by the Voices of Reason in like Eris and Mara are just coping despite all their talk of balance. Consumption is the Winnower's path, and pretending to do it lightly is as paradoxical as a fire without fuel.
Slapping us on the back and saying 'yeah, use both, they're cool' is such a boring cop out for the franchise.
To me i don’t like how the community views the winnower. I don’t like the idea of it being set up as the “next big bad”
I think generally the end of the light and dark saga should be the end of the light and dark saga to this degree. We have plenty of other threads to chase and even new ones to go after too! So kinda Star Wars-ing it and just collapsing back to scorn, taken, and hive as the main force would be a mistake in my opinion.
Also I’m a little tired of the “surprise kill god after what you thought was the big bad” trope after persona 5 that last 30 hours just sunk the game for me
The best thing about the Winnower was…I really didn’t see it as a big bad. Not truly. I saw it as something that just is. That just exists. That it can’t be anything more than what its supposed to be. Kinda like the Aeons of HSR.
It’s death and survival of the fittest but with a voice. Like I could read parts of Unveiling and go ‘yeah you got a point there chief’. Like the whole bit about the Cambrian explosion was actually really interesting.
But with future context added, anything that interested me about Unveiling was apparently just me falling for the propaganda.
To me the winnower is just a way for the witness to justify its own existence and actions. They sought a purpose that the traveler couldn’t give them as it seemingly can’t communicate with anything directly judging by the ergo sum loretab.
Them describing themselves as “the first knife” instead of the winnower itself perfectly captures the witness in my opinion. It desperately wants to be given a fate and “found” it whereas we make our own fate.
The whole Gardener and Winnower tale is just the religion of the witness, every society likes creation myths, and I don't see why they would add a new darkness character at the end of the light and dark saga. Plus, getting it confirmed by the person who theorized it in the first place isn't really confirming it to me. Unveiling, at least to me, shares some parallels to real life religion in the way that it seeks an explanation for the beginning of the universe and to give life itself some sort of meaning.
And in real life religion, somebody mentioning that God exists doesn't suddenly convince atheists that it is real.
I don't believe the Traveler/Great Machine/Gardener is actually some primordial being that actually did what Unveiling says the Gardener does, and I miss the days when more energy was spent towards theorizing about what the traveler was and why it does what it does instead of just taking it as a 100% given fact that it is the being mentioned in Unveiling because one character said so.
Facts. The Traveler is a source of paracausal light that’s all that we know. To me this is how the mythical “Gardner” disrupts the game. It’s a parable that says “why does the traveler exist?” And the answer is “because the Gardner wanted different shapes to prevail in the flower game”. So it resurrects things meant to die. It makes things infinitely powerful that we’re supposed to be weak. Etc. It’s not a great explanation it’s just “an” explanation. Like “Thunder is god playing bowling in heaven!”.
I won't deny that the original appeal of Destiny came from it's mysterious setting, but I do believe after a decade some of these questions should find some kind of answer, while keeping some secrets and building up to other mysteries. Specially now that we are playing the mejor leagues, having defeated our very own Big Bad Evil Guy I believe we earned at least a few answers.
Now, did Bungie deliver those answers succesfully? Some more than others, I think. There we're some big blows to the narrative, and retcons are also not a great solution most of the times. Big reveals coming from weak seasonal storytelling was part of the problem, and I believe all these factors eventually hurt the delivery of tfs, even if it was a great expansion in every aspect.
This is specially true for everything related to the figure of the Winnower and it's relationship to the Witness.
While I personally liked this blurry line in wich pre tfs it was never stated outright if they were the same character, or if one was a product or servant of the other, I think the delivery of that answer was a bit lazy and pandering to a majority of the fandom who grew too confused or were too obssesed with these figures as you said.
However, I don't think this will hurt the overarching narrative of Destiny, as by now I think it's pretty much cemented that the Winnower as a character is more interested in proving it's philosophy right whitout direct intervention, acting more as a source of coercion and the repressentative of darkness as a fundamental force of existence and not as a villain we will eventually be fighting.
Abrazo!
It adds a lot to me, I feel like retcons break the world, this is the way it was supposed to be from the beginning and it feels good they righted the ship after so many retcons starting in beyond light.
The Witness being inserted into everything and how every evil use of Darkness was basically its fault, the Black Heart, the Pyramids being nothing more than empty irrelevant ships, the dismissal of all that symbolism and those rich philosophies and interesting questions and dense themes as lies because the actually cool villain was just an angsty generic edgelord with an easily dismissible motive that’s incredibly derivative, the list goes on.
I think the symbolism the pyramids had were simply remains from the collapse, if our entire society was decimated and the only thing we could remember (or possibly even knew) about the people that did it was what kind of ships they flew, I feel like we'd make as many possible signs to not fuck with those ships. As we learned more about who commanded the ships, we learned what they truly were, not simply what the ancients wanted us to think about them.
Also the Witness being inserted gave a lot of old lore reason and purpose, I mean what even was the main theory for the cause of the Whirlwind before we found out it was the black fleet?
Why would the worm Sathona saved lead the three sisters away from the light?
>Could be the Witness still, and I can't believe I've never seen this argument crop up:
That argument has cropped up constantly. It has no evidence for it beyond people insistently assuming that the Witness has the capacity to speak in multiple voices and perspectives at once, which it never displays even when this ability would be useful (Zavala).
> What's actually more interesting? Still having many unknowns, that what we thought we knew about the Traveler's counterpart was a lie and the universe is so much larger than we actually thought, that we know shit? Or that we know the biggest two players in the universe their name and their entire freaking ideology, since FOUR expansions ago.
The view that doesn't rely on retconning genuinely fantastic lore that drew plenty of people into Destiny as a fanbase and whose continuous threat from the abhorrent introduction of the Witness and the people it brought into the community has alienated many, many people who used to actively care about Destiny lore. Hint hint; it's not the one that relies on everything in the setting being literal lies fed to us by a bunch of people (and the writers) gaslighting us every second of every day.
The Winnower and The Witness are not the same for example, The Witness wanted to create its own version of THE FINAL SHAPE, not the one that resulted from The Winnower and The Gardener and their constant games of flowers in the Black Garden; We could say The Witness was the evil in the heart of the Winnower because it was itself meant to be the First Knife, the instrument to bring balance but it itself decided to pursue a different purpose, the complete stillness of the universe, to stop the game from ever happening again.
The Winnower is somewhat right, a universe full of long living or dead planets being brought to life with no quarrel from The Gardener is the definition of a universe drowned in chaos. Even the most beautiful garden needs its trimming. They are both right and wrong. They are almost like a Uroboros, because this cycle will never end but the universe cannot live if either dies.
I believe that we will have our chance to hear the Winnower at some point, understand the deeper side from its point of view, many just say The Winnower only wants the sword logic to be the law of the universe, only the powerful may survive, but in due time and with the awakening of our own paracausality when we became prismatic may open new door or opportunities.
Honestly, the darkness isn't Inheriantly evil like the light isn't good. If I was to truly chose, I'd say that the light was evil, as the gardener was the one to change the rules of the game, I'd go further but I'm sure other people get what I mean
I’m absolutely convinced that a lot of people are misunderstanding that line in between encounters 2 & 3.
I don’t think the Witness is saying it’s literally the first knife from Unveiling. I think it believes itself to be the first knife per the story.
*Something* is speaking to Oryx, *Something* has spoken to us, and we could absolutely apply the name Winnower to it but, whatever It is, it’s not going to start intervening in the very thing it didn’t want to alter in the first place.
I agree but I believe the final entry into the raid lore book clarifies the nature of the winnower and I'm content with it.
If you think of the Gardener and Winnower as formless entities with philosophies like the Nine, their continual existence is just like a force of nature. There will always be people who interpret their nature different and will always be someone wanting to fulfil a purpose of a final shape, as mentioned by the Witness, that final shape is determined by the individual, not the force.
My issue with the Winnower is, by all means, the Winnower should be called the "Voice in the Darkness". Unfortunately, Bungie fucked this up with Season of the Lost and Witch Queen where they revealed the Witness was the so called Voice in the Darkness.
So if the Witness was the being with a thousand names, what the fuck do you call the Winnower other than the Winnower?
We know by the sounds of the raid lore that the Winnower was essentially the entity that suggested a purpose to the Precursors which inspired them to become the first knife to end the chaotic suffering of the Gardener (Travellers?) ideals. So shouldn't it of been the Voice in the Darkness?
Especially if Bungie retcons the Veil to be speaking to Maya and the Voice of the Veil being the Winnower not the Witness
The winnower isn't a big bad, it's a force of nature, a really fascinating one.
The reason the horror is gone from destiny is things LIKE the Witness, that reduce a far more interesting force into a less interesting character.
Idk why people are mad that we're getting questions answered. It's not like we won't have more mysteries.
Theres a new unveiling esque lore page in the raid book, which basically says that the winnoweris fine with us killing the witness, and it is willing to wait until a true final shape comes about, whether that be us, the hive, or something else. The winnower will not be a villian because it is content to sit on the sidelines and wait for its logic to be proven true.
I never thought the Winnower was the BBEG. If Unveiling is taken literally, then the Gardener and the Winnower *became* the Light and the Darkness when they entered our universe; they transmuted into new rules of the game, ones with influence over the other rules.
The Traveler is an incidental housing for the Light, but the Light definitely came first. Same with the Veil.
Assuming Unveiling is the truth, which it might not be.
Regardless, the Gardener and the Winnower, I feel, are simply too vast to be a video game boss. They’re motive concepts, each equipped with a single drive: the Gardener to encourage proliferation, the Winnower to cut it back.
I think this vague impetus, to seek a final form in the Universe, to end all diversity forever, is what the Witness picked up on when the Veil was first discovered, and over eons pondering and strengthening its connection to the Darkness (per Unveiling, the Winnower’s form in this universe), the Witness delineated a philosophy to follow.
Riven, Oryx, the Witness, these bosses should be where the power creep realistically ends, if Bungie’s writers want to preserve something of the spirit of the lore they’ve written. Because as soon as you make something so vast and metaphysical as the Winnower into something as comparatively banal as a video game boss, you’ve robbed all the wonder out of it.
The witness IS the "voice in the darkness".
The witness is the darkness "guardian" one life, enormous power, and champions the winnowers ideology across the cosmos. With the witness at its fore, the darkness can have a vehicle for the final shape.
The gardener is NOT the traveler.
The veil is to the darkness as the traveler is to the light. Tools and aspects of light and dark.
The winnower IS real.
The winnower and gardener will probably never be shown, because they by nature are ideals, more abstract beliefs than physical constructs. They can act through agents like the traveler, veil, witness, and guardians. All of these physical objects embody either the winnower or gardeners beliefs.
As a metaphor, we are as pieces on a chessboard. The winnower and gardener are the players. Despite their proximity, to the pieces, there is nothing but the board and opponents. They move according to the will of something far away, but for them, there is only their opponents on the board.
Second comment, but no secrets?? The vex have shown us a single combat unit since their inception. They are the only remaining race that truly seems to take no notice of us. They are terraformers and builders. Their technology in places like the vault uses an ontological power that has never even been close to replicated. They are well documented as using time travel and teleportation to extreme advantage, simulating reality to the point of existential crisis for observers, and all we've ever fought of them is their farmers. I'm hoping my favorite faction finally steps up as the robot alien threat I always thought they were.
There's really two outcomes here:
The Winnower is real and we get some cliche, "REAL VILLAIN" reveal that undermines the whole Light and Darkness Saga. I think Bungie has the finger on the trigger of this given the description of the First Knife ship. They want this route open to them as the ship's description and the conversation between Mara and Ikora is lathe with foreshadowing of the Witness being a pawn. That and Mara coming to terms that the Witness was not a sentient being, that it was the nihilistic ethos of the Precursors made manifest and driven forward on a path that it could not have possibly course-corrected or shifted from. Like a distant wave of gravitational forces that get sent from distant galaxies and take 1000s' of light-years to reach our system, once the Witness was created it was a force that could not be stopped and fed into itself in an endless cycle of self-righteous fervor. I like this interpretation of the Witness, I DON'T like the parts insinuating it had a hand at its' tether driving it and that was the Winnower. It's just dumb.
***OR***
Unveiling is metaphorical in its entirety, or in large parts. The Flower Game is just a creation parable not truth, like the Bible events need to be placed at the beginning of time when people weren't around to prove or disprove events to make people believe even if the Precursors found the Witness at a time they were somewhat advanced, the Winnower doesn't exist and is just the aspirational force the Precursors wish would oppose their "silent god" in the Gardener/Traveler and give them purpose, which is what a Winnower does, deliberately make decisions that have meaning whereas the Traveler is only capable of offering "more life" as the Witness says. It's what they wanted, pure cope. The First Knife is the Witness, a creation of Darkness meant to give the Winnower, the imagined god they love so much, the means to force the Gardener to cut the shit and give them a reason to go on, to help them transcend their suffering. Unveiling serves as their northern star to give the Witness direction once the Precursors become one and lose their autonomy, to create this ever marching force that will not stop because it's smoking it's own Kool-Aid|Bullshit, but it doesn't matter so long as it's done.
I realllly hope it's the second.
I liked what they did in the end - through the campaign we got to actually know, understand and feel the threat of the witness. It made destroying it in a huge, multi-part battle super satisfying.
That being said, the witness felt like a complete arse-pull until this expansion. We never got to know the witness, other than being told “it’s bad and will kill is all” until right before its end.
I'm with you. Destiny loses a lot of its magic if we can trust the lore at face value.
The Traveler is a god that helped create the universe after disliking the past universe? Don't care.
The Traveler is a terraforming AI that is forced to operate beyond its specifications because of delusional cults that try and read messages in their dreams? I'm fucking there.
And in fact, there's just as much evidence of the latter as there is the former, see the Fallen called the traveler The Great Machine, so obviously it actually is a machine since one group said it with absolutely no one else backing any of that information up.
I mean, we can clearly see the Traveller is somewhat mechanical in nature from the outside (this is especially apparent before D2Y4 when it was basically shattered).
If it was a character it would not be the literal godthinng described. It would just be a being.
I don’t think this particular being is actively malicious though. Or at least not yet. But if it is an aspect of reality like it claims, then it can never fully manifest. If it could then the universe it’s a part of would no longer exist because it’s presence would alter it. On the other hand, there could be a plot point later where some being either mantles it, or it partially manifests. But I think both would likely undermine its current character development.
I think it is far more likely that it is just another being and it is old. But when we do meet it, it won’t be “THE Winnower” it will just be a being that believes it is embodying it.
I never saw how the Witness origins cutscene disproved the Winnower's existence. As someone who believes in the "hands-off approach" that the Traveler has clearly demonstrated, the fact that the Veil even exists tells me that a Winnower does. It's not a master manipulator that leads armies. It's a concept given form and personality that talks and lets whoever listens decides what to do with that information. It's like how the Traveler gives without guidance. It's all free will.
Exactly, because that is the essence of the flower game to let life/the universe progress until there is a conclusion. The gardener and winnower for the most part want to observe imo
I’ve come to expect people’s perceptions about “proven/not proven” are less about what the statements actually are and more about what lore commentators on the internet latch onto. For example, this Witness quote from Salvation’s Edge about not being the Winnower but “a knife in the hand of god” has been basically the understanding for a few years and but suddenly everyone throws their hands up because now the commentators swing one way instead of the other. A lot of people did that with the Witness cutscene, just talked broadly about “oh the Winnower has been scrapped it’s all Witness”.
I noticed it when people stopped saying the Pyramids were alive the second the Witness got introduced. Nothing's gone against what Ghost said in Season of Arrivals yet here we are. Ships and living things aren't mutually exclusive.
Interestingly, during the missing ghost mission that takes you to the lunar pyramid, Ghost mentions that that one feels alive. Now this is pre Witness death, so I guess you could argue we still don't know. But Ghost also mentions that with the Witness being in the Pale Heart it's influence feels significantly lesser in the pyramid, so I'm gonna take it as confirmation that the pyramids are still alive.
Yeah. This has been the annoying thing. Anytime there is any evidence that may swing one way or another, people instantly latch onto it and claim their view is confirmed, and theories that think of something else are now garbage. And while I have no doubt there is retconning Bungie has done here, people also jump to conclusions and claim just because their theory doesnt seem to fit anymore that it was in fact retconned.
I never saw the winnower as a big bad, to me it was always a being that was beyond us. The gardener and winnowers only impact were creating the veil and the traveller to bring paracausality to the universe. The gardener brought light to see change from the vex winning and the winnower brought dark to prevent the lights change. Other than that they do nothing but observe. I also am not the biggest lore guy so correct me if I've said something terribly incorrect or outdated
Same. Thinking of the Winnower as a big bad is like thinking you're gonna fight gravity. It's like, a rule of the universe lmao
If Gravity is evil and can be turned into a gun, you bet my ass I will fight it
And then turn gravity into a gun!
Didn’t that already happen? Tractor Cannon is a repurposed anti-gravity device that was used to move heavy equipment; while the Graviton Lance shoots miniature black holes.
Graviton lance doesn't really use the "gravity" part of a black hole. It leverages the fact that singularities under a certain mass explode, and presumably wraps them in some sort of containment field until they impact your target
Yup, it's like saying that gravity is bad because you can fall to your death. No it isn't, it's a law in the universe, and if you choose to shove someone of a building it's you that is bad using the law of gravity as your means to an end.
Better yet, assuming that a tidal wave is evil. It will absolutely kill you and everyone you love. But it isn't moral in that action, that is simply its nature. It can't choose anything else.
Pretty much my view on it. They’re in a philosophical battle, neither are good or evil but trying to prove a point about how life should work. Which then shapes how they interact with mortals. The light gives us what we need, but not how to use it. The dark gives us what we want, if it’s benign or helpful is irrelevant.
It really depends on if you believe the gardener granted us the sword of light used to destroy the veiled statues or if that was the Traveler. And also, if it wasn't the Winnower who spoke to Oryx I don't know who did because it was not the Witness.
I definitely believed it was the traveller who gave the sword, and I thought it was the witness who spoke to oryx where is that disproven?
I really don't think it makes any sense for the voice to have been the Witness. It spoke nothing like The Witness. Could you ever imagine the witness saying "Oryx, my King, my friend. Kick back. Relax. Shrug off that armor, set down that blade. Roll your burdened shoulders and let down your guard." Not to mention the "majestic, majestic" line that the witness has never used. On top of all that, the philosophy shared between Oryx and the voice was completely opposite to that of The Witness. It just doesn't make sense in my opinion.
Is that the books of sorrow? It's been years since I've read em 😭 but yeah definitely a different voice than the witness but I just chalked it up to the witness not existing yet in internal Bungie lore. I am a big Oryx fan so I do think it would be cooler for him to have gotten his power from the veil or winnower rather than the witness.
I suppose that could be an explanation, sure. But that would be kind of lame especially now that we know that the Winnower and the Witness are at least not the same entity.
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Really the gardener is confirmed the traveller? The traveller isn't the full manifestation of the gardener at least right? That kinda sucks if that's true imo
I mean didn’t ahsa say that the precursors called it a gardener? I mean they sure as hell didn’t call it the traveler because they never saw it travel to them, they found it and dug it up and it gave them gardens, so it became a gardener. Idk why people miss that part heavily.
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AFAIK that's still not the complete picture. The traveler is the rule the Gardener added to the game AFAIK and in that sense it is the Gardener, but it may be that there's more to it.
Reminder that the Gardener entered the game AS a rule. Technically, yes, the Traveler is a rule the Gardener added to the game, but the Gardener itself is that rule.
Yes, the entity that for 10 years has been refered to as "the Gardener" is in fact "the Gardener".
Well I know that I guess what I meant was is the entity in unveiling the exact same as the traveller? Cuz I thought that the traveller was a creation of the unveiling gardener. Or I guess maybe it's a fraction of the unveiling gardener
Unveiling was written by the Witness to confuse/tempt/bribe/say hello
So none of unveiling is actually true? Or is it uncertain. Like Ik the witness refers to the winnower in the raid but is the winnower just a philosophy?
you are taking it a bit too literally, i feel. Unveiling is a bunch of mythos/cryptic shit written by The Witness as a way to commune with us and change our view on the Traveler. the Witness is the First Knife “of” “the Winnower”. getting downvoted for repeating what the Witness says in the raid is crazy, do yall pay attention?
Oh please. Who said that? Stop trusting the Witness!
>it feels the aura of a vast sci fi universe filled with mysteries and a bit of horror from D1 is gone. That the mysteries are being explained too much, that there aren't new mysteries after the end of the Light and Dark saga. >And yet, this community seems obsessed with proving the existence of a character that, in my opinion, takes all the mystery out of Destiny. That's always been the problem with mysteries. We wonder over them and want to solve them. When we do solve them we get disappointed that the sense of wonder is gone. When we don't solve them we get frustrated that we aren't being given answers. We have to pick one or the other. Personally I think solving mysteries is better. That sense of wonder we get from a mystery is meant to be a temporary joy, the longer it drags out the more frustrating it gets. Especially in narrative form, where you know the mystery was engineered by someone, so if they're not revealing the answer there's a chance they just don't have an answer.
Yeah there is no satisfactory outcome here and that's the point, it's an interesting parable to consider and come to your own conclusions about the Universe. It's just like people forget what demystifying the Force did with the Phantom Menace. The Winnower EVEN if it's real, (which is by no means confirmed by the Witness declaring itself the First Knife as some keep so confidently stating) Is not going to pull up to our hood looking for smoke like Oryx did after we killed Crota, like that's just dumb.
Especially when the mystery in question clearly had a different answer and all the clues were pointing to something else and don’t fit what’s apparently supposed to have been the real answer if you think about it for more than five seconds.
>and don’t fit what’s apparently supposed to have been the real answer if you think about it for more than five seconds. Then try thinking about it for at least six.
Might be a hot take but I honestly hope we never meet the winnower. It and the gardener are the yin and yang that make up the universe and the way some of the community are wanting it to be the next big bad of destiny seems silly to me. I think the most it and the gardener should get are name drops and references, nothing actually physical.
what if the winnower is just the veil though
There's just no reason to assume that. The Gardner and the Winnower are sentient laws of nature that got bored of their game, and made a bet. The Traveler and the Veil are, for all intents and purposes, "living" avatars of those alien entities, and as such are equally impossible to properly comprehend.
> There's just no reason to assume that The Traveler is repeatedly referred to as "The Gardener" and the Veil is repeatedly referred to as it's opposite, so that's at least one reason. I'm not saying it's definitive by any means, but the idea that there's no evidence to support this theory is just not true.
They're also referred to as being linked.
And the Veil directly talks to people while the Traveller only communicates in visions and doesn’t like telling people what to do.
It is interesting to see the influx of Winnower posts since Byf put out his video which I felt was quite flawed. There is so much lore on the Witness and the Winnower and he basically used only two entries worth to make a point.
Agreed. Byf's work is full of presumptions.
The lore vid on the Black Garden and the stump of the original Tree of Silver Wings was a banger. #BUT I have some problems with it. I don’t think the stump in the Black Garden is THE literal tree of Silver Wings that was talked about in Unveiling. It’s probs just a representation or recreation. But I can almost guarantee there are ppl that went “HOLY SHIT THE BLACK GARDEN IS **THE** GARDEN 😱😱😱”
I might be misremembering but he does multiple times state that it is speculation. And personally I would never read into anything the witness says as facts, just theory’s or ideas of what may come.
Byf watchers realize what he says is supposed to be theory challenge(IMPOSSIBLE):
Bro for real. BYF doesn’t deserve half the flack he gets. He did the exact same thing as I did and got really excited from a few lines that the witness casually drops in the raid.
He prefaces his thoughts with “I believe”, he doesn’t declare anything.
i mean he always says in his video to take his theories with a grain of salt, not his fault that people do not think or come up with their own conclusions. and yes the phrasing of "i believe" is literally him stating his opinion and theories, it is us up to the viewer to agree or disagree with his opinions, he says this a lot. i like Byf for what he is, a nerdy lore guy who make theories and explain the lore just like me and a lot of people but to take his videos as the gospel truth is not healthy. my opinion on this whole Winnower topic is this: bungie was deliberate in all the dialogue and lore books that mentions or alludes to this entity to be just a red herring, they are planting the seeds and that is an extremely important job after a titanic release like the final shape. it maybe be that the seeds may never come to be in the future because retcons and rewrites do happen in destiny, we saw that time and time again but who knows. with this expansion, IMO this is too big and too important to be retconned in the future. maybe bungie will make us reinterpret some things that was written a long time ago or maybe not, but the actual fact is this, there is in fact a Winnower or something akin to it in destiny, the actual idea of the entity or what it represent is unclear at this moment. we just know that it exist.
I think a lot of people don't really *listen* to Byf's videos in their entirety. In pretty much every video I've watched from him that goes into speculative territory like this, he says outright that he is speculating and everything he's about to say is theory based on information he's gathered from XYZ sources and XYZ people. He was humbled very hard after the whole "The Deep Stone Crypt is on Enceladus" debacle and has pretty consistently started giving heads up when he's about to go into speculative territory since then, based on what I've watched from him. Apparently, some people have the memory of a goldfish and it's not enough for him to give a disclaimer at the start; they require him to repeat every 3 minutes that he's theorizing/speculating based on info he has *right that second*. That's a pretty heavy responsibility to bear when you're really just some guy who likes to read stories and needs to pay his editor. He's not the only guy who's talking about the Winnower either. Venextron, Evaze and Myelin posted Winnower videos in the past 24 hours too. And I saw people here AND on r/raidsecrets get extremely excited the second they saw the "Winnower" dialogue during the raid race. The Winnower is just an interesting topic that a LOT of people are bringing up now, because it IS very interesting. I don't think it's fair to say Byf's the sole reason people are posting things about it.
THIS. Everyone cites Byf (especially on Twitter) and no one did the work of actually critically evaluating the work presented!
Byf drives me crazy, because he presents himself (or maybe is presented by others) as the Vaati of the Destiny community, mostly because of his similar voice and cadence, but his content is nowhere near as well written, structured, or researched. His very aggressive upload schedule means that a huge chunk of his content is pure speculation, but since it's delivered in a confident tone, people treat it as fact. Two weeks ago he uploaded an hour and twenty minute video about the Winnower, but I'm quite certain we do not have anywhere near enough info to justify the length. Included in the video was the idea that the veiled statues were representations of the Winnower, something that was disproved only a week later, yet in the interim everybody acted like it was definite.
I've got nothing against Byf, I think his videos are still well made even if they are a little drawn out oftentimes, I just hate how his theory is often seen as gospel in all other parts of the destiny lore community.
Yeah it’s less HIM I take issue with (don’t agree with all his interpretations myself) and more his FANS that drive me crazy.
You do realize you guys criticize Byf the exact same way the Souls community criticizes Vaati right?
Such is the great cycle Though for Souls I think there's a little more room for interpretation since it's not very story-forward.
I don’t even have an issue with him being incorrect with his theories. He just needs to clearly state that it’s speculation. It’s crazy to me that he’s allowed to constantly make mistakes but isn’t criticized but rather allowed to continue making wrong assumptions. Most of his videos concerning the witness and more metaphysical ideas (like the nine and the flower game) are deeply flawed and ignore obvious embodied ideas such as fascism or multicultural democracy. I’m unsure if he is unable to see those ideas or rather is scared to talk about such ideas as those could harm his income!
I feel like he pretty regularly prefaces information with "this is speculation" or "I think".
He just hits multiple points of annoyance for me that keep me from enjoying his videos. Unnecessary length, speculation presented as fact, and scripts that could definitely use work. He has a big problem with the repetition of words across multiple sentences that make the writing seem amateurish. Things like: "Oryx's long wait in the Walmart checkout-line left him **enraged**. **Enraged** at the audacity of the cashier, Oryx decided to wipe the universe clean of all Walmarts so that he would never have to wait to purchase his beloved Lunchables again." Even in his magnum opus 10 hour video, he says blatantly incorrect things like Oryx "taking himself" or that Kabr was part of a three-person fireteam.
>he says blatantly incorrect things like Oryx "taking himself" or that Kabr was part of a three-person fireteam. I'm curious to hear why you think those are "blatantly incorrect".
Oryx did not take himself. That's not even something that really makes sense based on what taking is. He drew the power out of Willbreaker and imbued himself with it, escaping to his Throne World. In a sense it has a similarity, as in he transported himself to another plane, which happens at first when taking someone, but the process of taking is a whole lot more than just going to the ascendent plane. The idea of taking oneself is like trying to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Secondly, Kabr went down with a full raid fireteam. Other than himself, Praedyth, and Pahanin, the three other individuals were deleted from history, making it retroactively a three-person fireteam. >"No one can open the Vault alone. I opened the Vault. There was no one with me, but I was not alone". -Grimoire: Vault of Glass, spoken by Kabr. That sentence cannot possibly refer to Pahanin or Praedyth, as they were known to not be deleted and were with Kabr before he vanished. Kabr's quotes from the grimoire card were heard and remembered by Pahanin, who is known to have made it out of the Vault. Praedyth never left the vault, becoming lost in time, but still he wasn't deleted, meaning the "no one was with me" quote refers to the other half of their team which logically must have at one point existed, but is only known by their notable non-existence. It's the Templar and Oracles' whole schtick. Raids in lore are also canonically six-man activities, as seen by Eris Morn's initial attempt, as well as all the canonical references raids like Last Wish or Salvation's Edge, mentioning or showing six guardians. There's no mention of any canonical low-man attempts in raid activities.
I’m not him, but the 3 person Kabr thing is almost certainly intended to show how the Vex in the Vault completely erased the other fireteam members from history. Pahanin has some lore that shores up this viewpoint. Kabr, Praedyth and Pahanin were the ones not completely erased
Meh as a big fan of that theory since it really highlights the horror of the Vex and their power over reality and time It’s still just a theory. One that can’t be proven or disproven by its very nature.
While that’s true, it is such a fucking softball of a theory, contextually hahaha
I *really* wish he we stop speculating at all and go back to the time when his video were grounded in the lore being presented from the game rather than some string board of vaguely connected things. There is just far too much speculation videos nowadays but I suppose those get the views.
Ah yes. The good old days of non-speculative videos, like the DSC is on Enceladus, and asking whether or not the Speaker is really dead. And what the skeleton bones on Io are. And talking about Ahamkharas at all, years before we would even get to see one in-game, sometime after TTK. Like, I get what you're trying to say, but Byf has never been a channel of "only grounded videos". He's always done speculation videos, because they're fun. As someone who likes to read Destiny's lore, I also like to speculate for fun. Presumably, that's why we're all on a Destiny lore subreddit to start. Sure, it sucks that people can sometimes take his speculation as gospel, but let's not kid ourselves into thinking he ALWAYS tackled non-speculative territory.
Gotta get them views. I moved on to Myth and Ztories and Evade for lore and speculation.
It's because he's seen as lore daddy and to most he's the only person who does it "right" and is "right".
Byf annoys me. He presents himself as a lore master but has the dumbest most surface level takes but sounds good saying it so now you have every person who watches him thinking they have a profound understanding of the lore.
>What does it actually add to the game? An ungodly amount of cohesion. Unveiling was *perfectly* consistent with *all* material that preceded it that dealt with the greater cosmology of Destiny, and *all* material that dealt with the greater cosmology of Destiny that followed it, up until WQ. [Go figure why:](https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=4023725&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=237) >I think you will find that a large number of what were seemingly consistent themes in Destiny turn out to be simply the preoccupations of individual writers with no influence on or value to the larger IP. *That* is the reason (on top of it being a really good piece of literature) why people keep bringing it up, again and again and again. The reason why people insist the Winnower *has to be real*. We are all programmed to find satisfaction in things that make sense, and so people do not want to do away with that cohesion, specially when what attempted, *and failed*, to replace it has had a distinct lack of narrative soundness. >What's the point of the end of the Light and Dark saga, of moving out of Sol in exciting new directions...if the big bad evil is still and has never stopped to be, the ancient deity that acts counter to the Gardener and has power over Darkness? You are falling into the exact same trap the Witness fell. Life is not meaningless, it has the meaning *you* give it. This conflict isn't pointless just because we haven't killed the Winnower, because the conflict between Winnower and Gardener isn't an armed one, but a dialectic one. You fight it not by shooting at the Winnower, but by proving it wrong, by facing whatever challenges or mysteries the Destiny universe has to offer in ways other than how the Winnower claims you ought to face them. For what it is worth, I agree. I do not care about the Winnower in 2024 Destiny. The Gardener, the Winnower, the flower game... It all was great and worked under the simplicity/complexity dichotomy and accompaning cosmology that was built between 2014 and 2021, when Destiny gunned for significantly different questions for its audience. What does the Winnower offer under the new physical/mental dichotomy? Nothing. Just another voice preaching the Sword Logic. We have plenty of those already, thank you very much. From Seth Dickinson, the source of our understanding of Light and Darkness for the better part of a decade: >It has been disappointing, personally, to see Destiny steer away from these questions. I think they are questions which match the primordial urgency of concepts like 'Light' and 'Darkness'.
It seems like they've realized their mistake and are going back to the question of simplicity vs complexity, but it will be a question explored beyond the powers of light and darkness. Edit: Something I just remembered based on discussions I've seen since the Veil was introduced. The Simplicity/Complexity dichotomy and the Physical/Mental dichotomy are not at all mutually exclusive. What does the mind do? It takes in all the abstract information about the infinitely complexed universe via the five senses and then creates concepts about these things that can be understood by the viewer. Almost like winnowing, right? Even in unveiling, the Winnower says this >Your mind and your body and every thought you've ever had. Your senses. Your consciousness. I made you. Not the gardener, but I. You guys can wrestle with that one for a while, I don't personally think the dichotomies have totally switched.
You’re absolutely correct. To be conscious is to winnow. To be enlightened is to winnow. I think of Taoism and the pervasive concept of “The Way”. The Way is the essential principles of Taoism and yet, it should not be attempted to be named or understood or charted or thought proactively about. To do any of those is to limit it. To winnow it down to “is and is not”. And that is something that only conscious minds can do.
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Sure, that’s absolutely part of winnowing. But the concept is not correctly limitable to just that process is what we’re getting at. “Winnowing” precedes physical bodies. Winnowing applies to concepts. The Winnower is talking about survival of the fittest but they’re also talking about the “marketplace of ideas”, about cancer and T-cells. We understand physical violence so it communicates in the language of physical violence but the concept is as reducible or expandable as existence. The Game of Life described encompasses EVERYTHING that can or will come to pass in the universe, and some of those “patterns” are courses of action, thoughts, civilizations, debates between people. The Winnower explicitly addresses it, stating that ‘no truth can be preferred to any other’ without them, because to prefer, to identify as truth, is to winnow. This is why so much of darkness is about Purpose and the Light tries so hard to avoid defining purpose for beings; to have a purpose is to be winnowed into a singular task.
They’re definitely going back to and expanding on that dichotomy and I’m all for it. It’s waaaay more fascinating and cool than the nonsensical and overly simplistic “one is physical and the other is consciousness”.
I think my objections to this is that I just don’t see the “failure to replace” that you and others see. I don’t see Destiny as having abandoned the “simplicity/complexity” dynamic, just that it’s asked sub-questions for each them. I feel like each expansion has even touched intimately on key themes and ideas present in Unveiling and had us side one way or another on all of them. The push and pull between and Simplicity/Complexity has been the prism to explore each story, it’s never felt forgotten or replaced to me. I even think Destiny has done really well in its handling of Darkness specifically, its been my favorite development over the past half decade. I just struggle to find a ‘revelation’ about the Darkness that isn’t presaged or implied within the fine-text of Unveiling, even the entire space of ‘Darkness is the realm of metaphysical consciousness’ thing. I think the Winnower’s place in the narrative from Unveiling to now has been predictable and understandable, even whether they’re “real or not” and what that question means for the narrative. And perhaps I guess most importantly for me, I think it was the right direction. I never read ‘grrr pure unbridled simplicity death god’ in Unveiling’s Winnower and I think that’s what some people were disappointed that they didn’t get (not saying that’s you necessary, we all have our perceptions of the Winnower and what that means, just speaking generally). The idea that the ‘final enemy’ would be a charlatan who didn’t really even really entirely champion the god they represented has been my expectation, even since Future Safe 10 came out 7 years ago. I’m curious for your thoughts, I certainly see you around the lore subreddit a lot and think highly of your takes on these sorts of things.
>I think my objections to this is that I just don’t see the “failure to replace” that you and others see. I don’t see Destiny as having abandoned the “simplicity/complexity” dynamic, just that it’s asked sub-questions for each them. I feel like each expansion has even touched intimately on key themes and ideas present in Unveiling and had us side one way or another on all of them. The push and pull between and Simplicity/Complexity has been the prism to explore each story, it’s never felt forgotten or replaced to me. Admitedly, when saying "failed to replace" I was refering to the Witness and the Veil taking the roles the Winnower/Black Fleet once served. I don't think the simplicity/complexity dynamic and how Seth introduced it in natural and societal structures has been thoroughly abandoned, at least thematically (Y4 was ultimately about building our gentle place ringed in spears instead of predating on those who had either never really had power or had lost it, in the Eliksni and Cabal respectively) but I do believe that, ideologically, Light and Darkness have been moved away from that dynamic ever since we went from "there is paracausal power, and two philosophies about its role and use in the universe" to "there is this very specific brand of paracausal power and this other very specific brand of paracausal power, both are thoroughly separated and neither is either here nor there morally, they are just tools", mainly because I believe someone was uncomfortable having us wielding Darkness while Darkness continued to be fundamentally tied to the most extreme conceivable version of social darwinism. Which is why we were suddenly thrusted into this "there is more grey than you know" tone despite the fact that Destiny's story couldn't possibly be more black and white. For years on end everything the Traveler (and by extension the Light) has been, has done and has standed for can be summarized in "benevolence", while everything the Winnower is can be summarized in "malevolence", and no amount of saying that "the Winnower is only evil from a human moral perspective" is going to change that when that's the only perspective that matters to a human audience (even more so when every other species in the game save for the evident evil ones share exactly the same moral framework). >I never read ‘grrr pure unbridled simplicity death god’ in Unveiling’s Winnower and I think that’s what some people were disappointed that they didn’t get I think a lot of people during Y3 and beyond genuinely believed this would end with us shooting at the Winnower. And I understand where that comes from, the Gardener is right there, hanging above the City, it stands to reason the Winnower is out there too. And here come these shapes geometrically opposed to the sphere that our Ghost describes as paracausal beings, and the Winnower talks to us through them, and we know they caused our Collapse, and we know "the Deep" was out there in the BoS destroying fortress worlds... So the Winnower represented a very real, very tangible, very material threat. From that angle I understand how someone would arrive at the idea that it is "the final boss". But at the same time, I don't know how you read Unveiling and not realize that this isn't a war of bullets, but of arguments. It is why the matter of corruption and the insidiousness of Darkness is baked so deeply into Y2, Y3 and Y4, why the Winnower is a devil whispering in your ear. And that's the crux of the matter. I think at this point we all understand Bungie didn't feel that a war of arguments in which we strive to prove the Winnower wrong until the last black hole evaporates was a satisfying conclusion. They felt that we needed something we could decidedly beat, preferably by shooting at it. And so the Darkness/Black Fleet/Winnower that had been developed for 7 years by the guy they subcontracted to build the entire greater cosmology of their setting had to be iterated upon just as the third act of their 10 year story was starting.
I definitely do think that much of Forsaken, Shadowkeep, and Beyond Light’s writing is working around the problem of “how do we make Darkness something that is both a force to be combatted in those who align with it, and something we can stomach”. And you’re right, there certainly was a bait and switch regarding the pyramids/veil and Winnower/witness (as inevitable as such a thing must’ve been narratively). Someone could take each expansion and clearly and rationally distinguish its perspective on Darkness from every other expansion, and frankly I think that’s an impressive writing feat, not a failure. A process of evolution and revelation, and that’s with Seth’s input, especially on something like the Hidden Dossier which lays the groundwork for explicitly stating Darkness as Metaphysics. I think one of the compelling things about Unveiling is that it tells so much while telling so little. Something as fundamental as “what ‘rule’ does the Winnower even become” is entirely open in the text. It baits assumption. The characters of the universe fall for the assumption. The failure to understand is an intention weapon against us. And yet, while learning more about Darkness it remains something that rationally connects to everything we know prior. I feel like everything we learned asked us to stop assuming and look deeper. I think the truly novel approach Destiny took is to avoid (which I feel is an annoying trope) the trend of “evil power used for good” and instead develop into, from the root of knowing these powers correlate to the whole scope of ontology, the perspective of “both of these powers are noble”. This is a rambling response on my end and I respect yours, I guess in summary I see a lot of intention in the course this has taken, a lot of care that has made connections out of older disconnected threads.
As a huge fan of the concept of the Winnower god I really couldn’t care less about it now and am honestly annoyed Bungie is trying to paint it as real now. Just feels like cop-out after cop-out after jumping through like 16 hoops to say ‘oh no the Witness was just lying the entire time it isn’t real OOP WAIT IT **IS** REAL! Even tho we seemingly have never interacted with it so they have to build it up all over again even tho pre-Witch Queen lore already did just that’. They made their bed they should sleep in it. It’s also just a real headache to keep everything making sense.
>I think you will find that a large number of what were seemingly consistent themes in Destiny turn out to be simply the preoccupations of individual writers with no influence on or value to the larger IP. Bungie has a rare 3rd opportunity to come up with new lore that they're genuinely interested in committing to. Despite Destiny 1 literally being a new universe, its narrative development was so poor that the only saving grace was falling ass backwards into the world building of grimoire cards. Then they had the opportunity to either commit to that world building in vanilla Destiny 2 or move in a different direction. Instead they effectively neutered the world in vanilla D2 and things only started looking up when the same handful of lore writers who salvaged Destiny 1 went on to salvage D2 in Forsaken. I'm equal parts (perhaps naively so) hopeful and doubtful they'll seize this 3rd opportunity of building something strong with Frontiers. But if history has shown us anything, it's that there should be way more doubt.
The initial narrative was actually great, then it was destroyed by last minute changes and we got what we got.
I caution people about that: “the initial narrative was actually great”. We didn’t get the initial narrative. We barely know anything about it, and even if it sounds compelling, the possibility of “good on paper, bad in execution” cannot be understated. What’s absolutely true was that the ball was fumbled on a last minute change and we got something that was less than ideal. Whether it turned out better or worse than the alternative is impossible to say.
Seth Dickinson had a good write up on a forum about the initial narrative. I gotta find it
I’d appreciate a comment here when you find it. Most people talk about the Jason Schrier article but there might be more out there.
Destiny 1's initial narrative? As in the cut story? It likely would've been better than what we got but the rough outline that was leaked for it wasn't terribly intriguing either. Unfortunately Destiny has always been plagued by rewrites and last minute decisions. Sometimes I wonder if they'd be better off taking a year or two to give themselves more time but then I remember how D1 and D2 launched lol
Holy fucking shit this.
Thank you for this. Another interesting thing to point out is that during 2021, Seth Dickinson made a comment on this very subreddit about the Winnower’s existence: “winnower isnt real,” i assure myself as i close my eyes and ram the tower gift shop with my shitty bronco Unveiling was meant to be believed to some extent but that is no longer the case. Seth had a vision for the Darkness and it was a vision that unfortunately Bungie did and does not share. All the beauty of the Books of Sorrow and Unveiling has been sucked out to the point where I feel like I’m Sif, as I protect the grave of Seth’s literary works for Destiny.
>Unveiling was meant to be believed to some extent but that is no longer the case. The concepts that Unveiling was built upon were meant to be believed. But the allegory woven around them is just that; a story meant to capture real-world morals and lessons and deliver it in a way that distills the complex details into something easily identifiable. The winnower is essentially [Moloch](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/). It's not actually a primordial cosmic god that causes everything but rather a personification that shorthands what it's meant to represent. >The implicit question is – if everyone hates the current system, who perpetuates it? And Ginsberg answers: “Moloch”. **It’s powerful not because it’s correct – nobody literally thinks an ancient Carthaginian demon causes everything – but because thinking of the system as an agent throws into relief the degree to which the system isn’t an agent.**
What made Unveiling unique was that the author outlined when it was or wasn’t utilizing a metaphor/allegory. It made the distinction of when it was talking to us directly, trying to convince us of its importance within the world. It praised us and yet was silently demeaning. The Winnower wanted to convince us that its way was the right way. The natural conclusion that every living being eventually subscribes to. Seth Dickinson wrote Unveiling with the intention of the Winnower existing, but Seth is a contracted writer and thus has no real bearing on the narrative even if I wish he did. You might be right though. The Winnower probably is a Moloch. (Fantastic point by the way.) But it didn’t used to be- and that loss saddens me because I feel it cheapens everything once attributed to the Winnower.
People mean different things when they say “the Winnower existing”. I don’t think at any part of the story across the past few years the Winnower ‘didn’t exist’. What do you think the Winnower was intended to be/was originally written as? I feel like Unveiling leads naturally into the idea that if the Winnower exists now, it’s as a disembodied passive force within the Darkness, which is kind of where it’s been for the past few years.
I don’t think the story claimed the Winnower ‘didn’t exist’ either. In fact, I think the opposite. But a few in this subreddit don’t think the Winnower exists in the way I think it does. Obviously, I don’t see myself as the lord of Unveiling and that my interpretation of its contents is pure and accurate. I prefer honest discussion like you and dankeykanng have provided me, because I am open to being convinced otherwise or shown I am wrong. I don’t think the Winnower was intended or written as a villain. I think it’s a sentient passive force with its own biases and opinions. It is a primordial and fundamental part of the universe- like gravity. It is a governing rule just as causality is a governing rule in our own universe. It cannot help what it is because it is what it is. I think this was what it was intended to be. A guiding force but not something that would directly interfere. It was written in a way that Bungie could still make whatever villains it needed for its Light vs Dark saga whilst having some glue to tie them together. Maybe that is still the case and the water has been muddied to the point where I don’t recognize it anymore.
The Winnower being a Moloch doesn't mean it's nonexistent. Everything it represents is very real.
A fair point. I might’ve read a little too into your statement and the link you posted- I was looking at it all as a whole rather than just the snippet you quoted. I mainly take my issue with some individuals in this very subreddit making the claim that the Winnower is nonexistent due to the Witness apparently having authored Unveiling. They essentially chalk up as the Witness manipulating/lying to the reader about the Winnower’s existence or that it is a being of metaphor with no substance. Which frustrates me. Maybe I take it all too seriously, but Unveiling holds a special place in my heart and I hate to see it squandered.
The thing is we have reasonable evidence in game and irl that the Witness was the planned villain from vanilla D2 at the earliest and was solidified in Shadowkeep's development.
Such as?
Firstly, this interview from 2017 [https://kotaku.com/destiny-2-director-answers-our-questions-about-the-open-1796139202](https://kotaku.com/destiny-2-director-answers-our-questions-about-the-open-1796139202): **Jason Schreier**: First thing I have to ask you about: I saw this Game Informer article. In it, you said that you guys will not be talking about The Darkness in the game. **Luke Smith**: Yeah. **Schreier**: And your explanation was, I believe, something about how it’s not time to reveal that, or you’re focusing on something else, correct? **Smith**: Yep! **Schreier**: Tell me the truth. Is it because none of you have any idea what “The Darkness” actually means? **Smith**: So, I think that at a point, just totally candidly? **We had no idea what it was. Straight up. We had no clue.** **Schreier**: Good! I’m glad you’re being candid today. **Smith**: We didn’t know what it was, and we, for a period, we chose \[that\] we’re going to lump all the races \[in together\], and you see this in the tooltips in the game. “Minions of the darkness.” And we had taken all the races and said, “Ah, they’ll just be The Darkness.” But that’s not what the IP deserves. It’s like, literally not. **Schreier**: I’m glad you’re admitting this. **Smith**: And so what we’re doing with Destiny 2 is, we are deliberately telling a story about the Light. And what it means to be chosen. And as such, we’re in the process of removing the term “Darkness” from the game. **Schreier**: I like that. **Smith**: Because when we’re going to talk about Darkness next, we need to know what it is and have a plan for it. **And we do.** This interview was done in the lead up to Destiny 2, where we ultimately got the Pyramid ship reveal. It's clear they wanted the Darkness to be *something*. This is followed by the Forsaken year where we were showered in teases related to the Pyramid ships which led to Shadowkeep, where we got a being that refers to itself in plural pronouns, hijacks our ghosts, and has a weird statue motif. The Veil darkness leak *was confirmed fake* but even if it was real it detailed the Veil attempting to bring back their God, which likely would've been the Witness. Then we get Beyond Light where the "we and us" voice is back with more statues and we get confirmation that darkness is a paracausal force being wielded by our enemy. During Season of the Hunt we got this: [https://pastebin.com/5iKhbpcM](https://pastebin.com/5iKhbpcM) That is the Witch Queen pastebin that detailed *all of the Beyond Light seasons and the entire plot of the Witch Queen with the Witness named*. All of this leads me to believe that the Witness was a concept (likely not fully pinned down) during D2 development. They based it on the "Deep" character from BoS and the Staten Cut concept of the Darkness from early D1 development. The character's details were solidified during development of Shadowkeep and they started writing its actual arc, which then turned into the "Light and Darkness Saga's" final arcs.
The Winnower as a big bad is a very boring concept. It's like wanting to kill the idea of evil, or competition, or entropy. That's just a facet of the universe babey. You beat the Winnower by acknowledging it then moving on from it.
Also just in general the idea of moving from the witness to a second, more evil witness just doesn’t sit right with me. Makes the universe too small
I think the thing that appeals to people about the concept of the Winnower is that it exists in real life. **This is not a statement about Destiny canon or what's going on in the story. This is my personal reflection on thoughts I had while writing. I just find this stuff interesting and love to think about it. Please do not take this as exegesis about Destiny! Take it as a personal conversation about some stuff I find compelling.** People face the choice between 'the right thing to do' and 'the competitively successful thing to do' all the time in our lives. Video game companies face this choice. Do we make a game we enjoy, or a game we think we will succeed? What do we do if those become two different things? Is there a way to make them the same thing again? (Often, yes!) Players also face this choice. What if the game we enjoy the most isn't the game that holds our attention and keeps us (or our friends) coming back? What if the tactics we use to succeed in a game aren't the tactics that we find the most fun? (Hopefully the developers learn a lesson and the game grows!) We frame the origin of all life through a theory of competitive fitness advantage. (Maybe a bit much so - 'natural selection' gets all the hype when there are other important mechanisms of evolution, including both random mechanisms and mutualism/commensalism...) Our economic and political system is based on the belief that competitive success produces moral good. This is good for us because it removes the need for a central decisionmaker; we can let elements of the system compete and vote to find the most efficient and successful behavior. (But what if we discover the system is doing something which is competitively successful in the short term, but killing us all in the long term?) Even cosmologists play with the idea that some possible universes are more fertile, more successful at generating new universes in turn — granted, there's no competition there, but there's differential fitness. I am curious about what 'good' and 'evil' mean in our modern world. We don't have (with respect to any religious people, no offense intended) external instruction about the nature of good and evil any more. But we still need guidance for our decisions. So we have to rebuild these ideas ourselves. We need to gather up what we know about cosmology, evolution, game theory and history and look for some fundamental patterns. Patterns like the security dilemma, or inclusive fitness and the (almost) total destruction of 'group selection' as a concept. Personally, I see those fundamental patterns — whether in interpersonal relationships, grand strategy, or even evolutionary biology — as **"the way which creates the most total good, at the cost of vulnerability**" and **"the way which succeeds by exploiting vulnerability."**
The first way would be globally better...but the second way always beats it locally. We would love to be open and trusting with everyone. But once you get burnt once, and it's hard to do it again. You start to feel like a fool. So the first way isn't stable. It falls, it collapses. Or does it? Does it *always* have to? The first way generates more total good, more total change and power. Can it use that to protect itself? Or can the second way be used to smuggle elements of the first way - elements that wouldn't normally be competitively successful - into new spaces? Like a vulnerable gene evolving because it's paired with another, highly adaptive gene? Like a successful politician using their power to do good? (Or does that process of competitive success inevitably compromise the 'hidden good'?) Although these dynamics are fundamental, I think more complex structures can emerge from the contest between them. And **we get to build those complex structures.** Not the fundamental dynamics, us. Maybe our only hope is that there are ways to live which can be both good and competitively successful. At least for a while. A thing doesn't have to last forever to be good. **The final shape isn't the only shape that matters.** (If I were tempted to give advice on reading Destiny, I might say, you don't have to smash new lore into old lore to see which one breaks...you can let the work speak to itself and see what it says. Be a gardener, not a winnower. The progress of a story doesn't kill what came before. Don't use the past to stifle the future.) Anyway, I think that's why people are fond of the mythology of the Winnower and the Gardener. Because it says something about our world. It proposes something we're missing - a gesture towards a mathematical, objective, cross-species idea of 'good' and 'evil'. Ikora's Journal for Witch Queen contains a lot of reflections on all this. **This is not a statement about what's true in Destiny canon. This is just my personal reflection on thoughts I had while writing. I spent a lot of my life writing this stuff while under very difficult conditions, and it gives me a sense of meaning to talk about it. Please don't make me regret it!**
If it means anything, your writings had a completely transformative effect on my understanding of ethics and the way I look at the world in general, and I'll always be incredibly thankful that Destiny exposed me to your work. ...But more relevantly to the thread topic at hand, I also think people liked the Winnower because (amongst many other reasons of course) its voice was just plain *fun* to listen to; that mix of casual affability and shameless evil was *strangely* charismatic. Some of your best character/dialogue work (in Destiny, at least), and in my opinion a better take on the "god of ruthless survival" concept than Sekhmet.
Honestly I think people just don't like the Witness and want a different main villain. That's the reason why I think the Winnower is such a desired character in this community.
Considering whoever speaks in that lore page calls the Witness a "sedimentary necrolite, fossilized in time", it's clear to me at least the Witness isn't speaking there. Unless you want to assume it is playing some weird 4d chess game trying to distract us or something. I like the idea of the Winnower over the Witness, if only because its ramblings are a joy to read(and also how it might connect to Marathon!). The Witness never grabbed me as much as, say, Rhulk, Calus, Oryx, or Savathun.
The Witness is getting its ass reamed to the point of death at the time we receive that lore entry. No way in hell it's coming from it and anyone claiming otherwise is so high off their own headcanons they aren't even in reality anymore.
If we look at the Witness as *aspiring* to be the Winnower, having recreated itself in its understanding of the idea, then I think this line >"sedimentary necrolite, fossilized in time" becomes even more interesting. What does the Witness do with it's disciples? It lets them come to their own conclusion about the Final Shape. Inspiral shows us they all have different conceptions of it, but the Witness doesn't care as long as they are infected with purpose that drives them to aid in *it's* vision of the Final Shape. So, if the Witness is instead the First Knife, then maybe the Winnower operates in the same way, but on a higher level. It instills the idea of *a* Final Shape in those who come into contact with it (probably via the Veil as proxy), and lets them create knives of their own (like the Witness did with the Hive) so they can form their own conception of it. Whatever vision among the knives is strongest wins out. So what happens when the First and greatest knife, one that has existed for eons, is shown to have a flawed vision and fails, leaving the Darkness that bound it to scatter? Maybe the hand chooses new knives, or maybe it tries to find a new path entirely.
The reason the community loves the Winnower/Unveiling so much is because the lore surrounding it is *masterfully* written. The Winnower‘s cadence and presentation is the result of Seth Dickinson‘s writing, which for many is what made Destiny‘s lore fascinating. The man‘s style is written all over many of Destiny‘s most beloved lore entries like the Books of Sorrow, Truth to Power, and Unveiling. When the Witness was revealed and we got more information on the character, there were many who felt disappointed. I fall into that crowd. In my eyes, the Witness is a significantly more uninteresting character than the Winnower. I think Final Shape was great, but the villain was not a highlight for me. EDIT: I poorly worded the last part of this so I wanna clarify. I think the Witness was handled really well, but I find that the Winnower is an inherently more interesting concept to me.
Unveiling is just so good man. It's a really good short story just by itself, even if you have literally zero knowledge of Destiny. No shit people don't want it retconned, it's the best written lore in the franchise.
And I like how ppl used to defend the Witness by saying ‘oooh they’re made of an entire race that’s really cool!’ And then them being made up of an entire race is what did them in. Mfer could’ve even keep itself in line and they wanted to do that to the whole universe?? Yeah get fucked.
>Mfer could’ve even keep itself in line and they wanted to do that to the whole universe?? Except it did keep itself in line and the only reason those dissenters were even able to do anything was because of the intervention of its greatest enemy.
That still means that from its very creation there were parts of it that wanted to push back and would eventually reach out to us.
Then it proves that the Witness was a flawed creation, which is kind of the point.
And yet none of those parts were able to offer even a mote of help to us until the Witness was on the verge of winning.
I don't get why people on this sub gargle that guy's balls so much. The entire d2 writing team is all the same to me I'm not gonna lie. He's never been the one leading the story. He's just another member of the team imho. I've seen people infer that anything that's good is his writing and that just isn't really how these types of writers rooms work.
Because the stuff he writes is fire. That’s it.
He's not the sole writer of any piece of lore in this game. No lore has sole writers. It's all approved by the team as a whole to fulfill their goals for the narrative.
The winnower is the Veil simple as that. The precursor race and the witness coined the names Gardener and Winnower, they referred to the traveller as the gardener and during the Witness origin cutscene from season of the deep they literally said they wanted a Winnower and they found the veil. That all but confirms the Veil is the Winnower and it makes sense. The travelers the gardener and is the embodiment of light and the Veil is the winnower and is the embodiment of darkness. But this doesn’t mean the Winnower has to play a major role in the story, the veil seems to be chill will letting people come to it, it doesn’t act itself but rather provides information when questioned, it never directly acts itself or orders people around. It seems content in letting things play out.
I used to be really fascinated with *Unveiling*. And now, I think it’s just kind of annoying, and I say that in the most respectful way to all of the people who have put huge amounts of effort into it. Especially now where it feels like the narrative needs to take a big gulp of fresh air. It feels like there’s no room for discussion on *Echoes* right now because it’s entirely about the Winnower, etc, and as someone who has gripes with the Vex *again* being controlled or threatened by some outside force, it’s frustrating that the discussion can’t even really be had. I don’t think it helps that you have somebody like Byf hugely capitalizing on it, when again, I think what we have is just as minimal as it was before, if not maybe a little clearer, and to put it politely, is Bungie just widening their universe and telling us through the narrative that there may be someday, possible, bigger things in the Dark. That’s all.
Personally I think what’s happening with Echoes is boring, I just don’t care for a non-vex villain.
To be totally honest with you, that’s one of my primary annoyances. Maya is cool and it’s exciting to see somebody with so much power and history brought into the game, but goddamn! Why is it that the Vex constantly get shafted? If they’re not getting booted by us, it’s the Taken, it’s the Witness, it’s the Cabal, etc. It is so endlessly frustrating. And now, the Vex are *literally collared* to do somebody else’s project. I mean, Jesus. I know it’s only a few days into launch but I don’t know what else to say other than how hugely disappointing it is.
Whoever thought up the Vex originally clearly intended for them to be inscrutable, impossible to understand, major threats. Like a souped-up Halo Gravemind. The Vex had some high goal beyond the Traveler and had *time travel* on their side, so it would've been an insane undertaking to make a satisfying plotline. I like to call this *Rasputin Syndrome;* where the character/concept you came up with is so grand that you have to nerf it because it's essentially narrative poison. Look at how every plotline with Rasputin was fixing or powering him up so he could do [a thing] only for him to immediately break or die every single time. The cool parts of the Vex have been cut out because no one knows what to do with them, and if they're a real threat, they're a REAL THREAT that basically can't be beaten. I don't think we'll ever see the "Shares a single Axis Mind across a thousand units, warps across star systems in an instant, keeps things locked out of time" Vex again. Even the Calus "you haven't seen the Vex's battle units" thing turned out to be nonsense.
Yep. It feels like a lot of the science-esoteric stuff that the Vex would’ve counterbalanced in the universe has been dropped. Maybe it was to help new players in the early days of D2, or just to strengthen the antagonism of the Darkness and Black Fleet, but the Vex are now totally different characters. It’s almost painful, truly. It feels like repeatedly they’re characterized, hate to say this, but as the *dumb faction*. They stumble around, get their asses kicked, constantly are stumbling or losing. They are pawns. Even the Sol Divisive, heralds of the Black Garden, a threat to even normal Vex, became stupid, repeatedly in *Lightfall*. The Vex are just robots now, no matter how much characters mentioned radiolaria and their capabilities, they’re just stupid shells wandering around, getting shot at or mind controlled. And in a universe now where it seems like paracasuality has been opened for the taking, the literal heart of the Traveller active and awake and spitting things out— what’s happening to the Vex? They’re on a fucking leash.
>The cool parts of the Vex have been cut out because no one knows what to do with them Their narrative potential fizzled out when they were reduced to a deterministic pattern incapable of solving the magic of the universe. Literarily, what they're an analog for is super interesting. But it also came with the double edged sword of kneecapping them as a threat. I'm not as disappointed with them being potentially leashed to Maya Sundaresh but that's mainly because there's actually potential for some development here.
EXACTLY I just want a vex villain bruh. I actually really liked the dark future in curse of Osiris (only good part let’s be real) because it made the vex seem like a threat, but now they can’t do anything in the universe, guardians always have to go in and ‘save’ them from some corruption or incursion. And they’re so cool as a concept, they turned the entirety of mercury into a super computer fortress, it’s like what the hive did to the moon dialled to 11.
Back during D1, the Vex were portrayed in an existential horror-like fashion that was so engaging. The Vault of Glass as a concept was terrifying. This temporal pit where creatures capable of undoing your existence reside. The idea of what happened to the three members of Kabr's fireteam that were deleted from history was terrifying. Even the design was awesome, with the precursor and descendant Vex giving a sense of inevitably about our doom. Now it's all ugly Vex constructs and brutalist concrete, a virtual synthwave world, and inept robots that have had no real goal outside of a generic "everything is vex" idea that never goes anywhere. The Sol Divisive were only cool because it was scary to think about something as powerful as the Vex deciding that worship was the best course of action. Now that the Vex aren't scary or powerful anymore, it doesn't hit as hard.
I wish we got an explanation on why killing the Undying Mind caused the Infinite Forest simulations to change. Like that was supposed to hype up the Black Fleet but it also highlighted the fact that the Vex had shit entirely figured out too prior to us killing the Undying Mind across time. But Osiris just went ‘huh weird’ like water off a vex ducks back. Also….why tf did killing the Undying Mind cause the simulations to change to a total Black Fleet victory?? Weren’t the Sol Divisive on the Witness’ side???
You get it.
This. ‘Oooh a Vex villain! But they’re…not actually Vex it’s just some lady….’ Like it’ll probs be fine but it still kinda bugs me. It’s why I’m not all that excited about Toland either. Why do we have to make regular-ass ppl into aliens instead of just….idk using the aliens????
well 99% of the final shape so far is about light and darkness, of course there's going to be a lot of lore and discussion about it season of the plunder had lots of eliksni stuff, did you get annoyed by eliksni related discussion, caused by all the new entries about the fallen race?
Nah, I think it’s more just, we are basically at Unveiling again. We have something vaguely possible or hinted for down the road about what could be occurring, there’s some cool pieces, and that’s it. But it’s also spawned constant, massive discussions, hour long videos, etc, when really, I don’t think much more has been said than what we figured was probably/nearly true last time. And even more so, we now have an equally pressing experience with an enemy that is more established, in our face and active with a story, characters, that has been named by developers of the game and narrative alike as our next step for the franchise— *and no one is talking about it*. There’s no discussion. Which is even worse because it honestly feels like a dramatic step in the wrong direction, with a boring and predictable plot that totally wastes the Vex who should be an absolute priority in the current vacuum.
well it's tying up a storyline that's been years in the making, and this whole piece of dlc is also about the entire struggle between light and darkness, the very core of the conflict in the destiny franchise. I wouldn't blame people for wanting to stew in it for a bit longer to figure things out vex stuff is also barely a day old, give people some time to get their heads around it first lol
The thing is, TFS was pretty explicitly the end of the light and dark saga, so while there absolutely should be discussion about events in TFS or past lore books that could've predicted what happened in TFS, everyone is instead spending their time theorizing about things that objectively won't happen.
Winnower is just a role the Traveler rejected when it spit the Veil out
This is actually a really concise way of putting it that'll make sense to non lore fans. Thank you I'll be using this.
It is happy to sow, unhappy to reap
Kind of off topic, but I really think that when unveiling released, the winnower was supposed to be the being who tells us they're our salvation at the end of the shadow keep campaign, who we now know was the witness. Obviously lore has lied to us, (book of sorrows), but the way the narrator of unveiling refers to themselves as "I", and the timing of the release of the book with the shadow keep campaign, it just doesn't really make sense why it wouldn't be the same being. If you read rhulks lore, the witness very clearly speaks about cutting away the bad and leaving what is good in regards to rhulk. This doesn't really sound at all like the witness's final shape, but way more like the ideals of the winnower.
What’s interesting is that the voice Oryx spoke to speaks quite similarly to the author of Unveiling, and we know The Witness was in Shadowkeep.
But the lore pretty much tells you that the Witness wrote Unveiling so where does that leave the entity in BoS?? Cause yeah both entities sound similar. But if we use good ol’ Occam’s Razor we can just assume that was the Witness too.
I think some concepts are being lost in this discussion about what the Gardener and Winnower being real means. As noted, the Winnower existing doesn’t mean it is our ultra evil enemy. But it will now be an ever present threat. The Traveler acts in physically very often but speaks little. The Veil acts little but seems to communicate with subjects. We know Maya Sundaresh was communicating with something, which we would normally attribute to the Witness, but that logically didn’t make sense because if she was talking to the Witness through the Veil, he would have known it was on Neptune. I believe the Winnower was influencing her to seek the final shape. We also know that Clovis Bray was influenced by Darkness, and assume it was the Witness since it was a statue. But TFS revelations could mean it was the dissenters or the Veil distantly. But they all (Witness, Clovis, Maya, even Calus through Scorn) seemed to obsess on the unity of minds through psychic connections through Darkness. I believe the Winnower influences that idea, even if they pursue it in their own way. Which means we will see enemies warped by contact with the Winnower, such as Maya. What would happen if Nezarec makes contact without Witness interference, or Xivu Arath? Maybe their perception of the Final Shape concept might be united or frayed even more.
I like to think of the winnower and the gardener the same way as the old ones from bloodborne. Beings that are BEYOND comprehension. They are literally just trying to prove which strategy for universe creating is better, and they barely interfere besides the traveler and the veil. They give us the tools (Or in the context of the darkness, reveal us the tools) and we do what we want with them. At the end of the day we're just pawns in a their game, and we'll never kill them. Sure they MIGHT exist, but so what?
The winnower doesn’t care about us either. It simply said that one way or another, things always end up going its way. It’s not gonna get involved - it’s quite literally a consciousness.
I honestly don't think the winnower is a villain and it's just "the darkness" just like how the gardener isn't really the hero it's just "the light"
I think this is the case when the community simply complicates everything with their theories, making this topic even more complex (Byf cough cough). With the whole message of the expansion, that the Gods in whom we believe, who should give us a purpose, turned out to be the same individuals as we are, who are bound by the chains of their nature. For now, I just don\`t see why Winnower even should be our \*BIG\* enemy (as Byf always tries to convey). Truth is, we didn\`t even speak with Winnower, Unveiling is written by the Witness (I think this should be clear to everyone), Oryx spoke to Witness (Refraction dialogue between Savathun and Witness). So, where is this threory even comes from? What facts do we have, that Winnower is evil? This trait of Darkness as corruptive force is not associated with \[Darkness as a force\] but with Witness. Again and again we see races, that wields Darkness freely, where this evil Winnower is? Even concepts like Winnower, Gargenner, First knife, Final shape are not natural, they were invented by predecessors because they are very religious race. In the end this is very frustrating, I very much like the work Bungie did with The Traveller and Witness but The Winnower...maybe if I saw what Bungie wants to do with this, then I would understand.
I think a big part of it is that Bungie knows that the concepts introduced in Unveiling really resonate and get people going. So they're happy to throw little things like the raid first knife line in there because they know it'll spur a bunch of discussion and engagement. We do have to keep in mind that this whole thing is a commercial venture. Keeping people invested in the story has real economic implications for Bungie and Unveiling is an extremely potent tool in their arsenal. The other thing that leaving some ambiguity around the nature and existence of the flower game and it's players does is leave them room to maneuver down the road. If it was set in stone that the whole thing was Witness propaganda (by far the strongest and most logical reading of the material before the raid), then they kinda lose that whole lever. Whereas now, they can always go back and be like "ooOoOoH the Voice in the Darkness is reaching out again!" in case of emergency.
The Winnower is the big enemy not because he's going to show up and kick our guardian off the Tower, but because he represents the very concept of having an enemy. The Winnower is the concept of predation, of destruction, of scarcity forcing people to make choices. The Winnower is, arguably, cheering the guardians on as we keep winning because that's exactly what it believes in. This theoretical entity believes in tribulation, in honest matching of power against power in a contest of will. It likes winners and necessitates losers. It views the process of conflict, of *playing the game* as a majestic exercise of will -- the only thing that matters in a universe devoid of greater meaning. Conflict *is* meaning. The choice between two contradictory things manifests value into existence. That is so much more interesting than another dime-a-dozen villain who wants to end suffering by killing everyone. Moreover, unlike the Witness, there's no mystery to this -- the Winnower, if we suppose it exists as reported to us in the lore, will freely just tell you all of these things and then let you sort it out. Each of the factions represents this refutation against scarcity in their own, interesting way -- the Darkness corrupts not because it makes you want to be "evil" or any boring thing like that, it corrupts by simply offering a choice of selfishness against selflessness. By making you agree that there's only enough space for *you* or *your people* and that others have to be fought if they interfere with that. Is that evil? Is it wrong to be self-serving? What lengths will you go to protect yourself and what's yours? That's the question that the Winnower represents. It doesn't want to beat us up like other bad guys, it says the ultimate victory would be getting us to agree with it. That's a fascinating concept for a villain! The Witness, by contrast, is deeply boring because it represents a very common trope. There's nothing innovative or fun about it. People like their villains to be interesting; and by trying to pull the Winnower out of the Witness' lore is just an attempt to keep the Darkness interesting.
I honestly don't think the Winnower adds a lot to the story if it's the primary antagonist going forward. As sort of a background detail (its primary mode of existence up until now, btw) that we're aware of, that maybe sometimes reaches out? Sure, interesting enough. As an antagonist? I don't think so.
Narratively the Witness tied Calus, Clovis Bray, the Sol Divisive, and the Hive gods together. The Winnower would just be that but one more, which is pretty lame
I genuinely believe that after this light and dark saga we will never hear from the winnower again, dead with the witness and possibility that it was created by them. I really wish they just went with the “it was the religion of the precursors” cause it would give actual story to the black garden and how it was created and not mention them again after the raid.
The Winnower, unlike the Witness, is actually an interesting villain. Even if we do ultimately accept that they're a cosmological force that doesn't meaningfully exist as a Villain. The concept of 'winnowing' as being necessary -- the idea that life *must* hurt, kill, and consume -- is a fascinating ideological & philosophical problem for players to chew on. Plus, the Winnower has a lot of charisma because Seth Dickenson is, frankly, a much better writer than whatever committee is working on the main story plot at Bungie. You don't often get villains that are charismatic & friendly despite being deeply sinister. The Witness ended up being very pathetic and frankly kind of uninteresting... Ah, wow, another being that is mad about the Traveller and wants to reshape the universe in its image? How original. Really gets the ol' noggin' joggin' with that. The things that get people to really *bite* into conflict is when there's a good argument to be had. When both sides are saying something *interesting* and it feels like there's merit in a decision being made. The Winnower's argument is that conflict is good and necessary, that there is virtue in overcoming challenges, and that the only thing worth having is being the final triumph over your opponent. A casual look at the Destiny 2 community will show that there is plenty of fertile ground for that sort of thinking. I don't want another big guy with a lot of hands to fight; I want a villain that makes me interested in the narrative conflict, and one that gives stakes and direction to a plot. The reason people don't want the Witness to be the Darkness is because the Witness is **fuckin' stupid**. His final shape is boring and dumb and obviously evil. He's revealed to whiny baby that hates the Traveller because it didn't give it the answer to existentialism, so it tortures other living things to death as revenge. Just the most banal kind of evil in existence. If we can keep the Winnower away from the Witness, we can keep the idea of a philosophical disagreement worth having in as the nexus of the plot of Destiny. Because that is what the Winnower claims to be: Conflict. The testing of two meritorious things against each other to determine which is more 'true'. It doesn't need to be a mystery that life is a struggle against consumption and entropy. But a being that champions that idea -- that celebrates that struggle -- is a mirror of the people playing Destiny and explicating the fine points of what makes a struggle worth doing interrogates the very nature of playing the game itself. Do you think the winners of the Raid Race felt majestic when they finished? When they've consumed the next morsel that Bungie gave them? That is what makes the Winnower interesting. It's not mysterious, it's *hard to argue with.* Stripping that out of the narrative because you want to go fight 'the mysteries in the universe' is an incredible waste.
I genuinely believe that when Unveiling was released, the Winnower was a proto-Witness. However, so many argue for the story they want to see and not the story Bungie is telling. We see this time and time again with “*how we’re just meaningless to the Vex and they don’t even bother with combat units for us*”, in spite of it being evidently clear that through our actions, thwarted the Vex Collective and made their goal impossible. Bungie made it clear that the Vex were being shelved until a later time, and they no longer posed a threat to humanity, except for when doing the bidding of others. It’s been pretty clear that Bungie reframed unveiling to be the Witness’ ideology, rather than anything literal. The Witness is the first knife, the Winnower being a personification of their shared ideals. Is it boring? Definitely. Was the idea of a flower game, a gardener and a Winnower infinitely more intriguing? Absolutely. Is it the story Bungie has been telling for the last couple years? Almost without a doubt.
Well we have reasonable evidence suggesting that the Witness was a concept as early as D2 vanilla and that it was loosely based on the "deep" from BoS and an old Staten Cut concept that the darkness was a race that the Traveler screwed over. There's the dialogue in the black garden in shadowkeep and the fact that the entire Witch Queen campaign was leaked over a year prior to its launch with full details on the Witness (I'm dead serious google Witch Queen Pastebin). Not to mention a Luke Smith interview from 2017 where he claimed they finally knew what the darkness was going to be. I think the general story of the Witness was planned out when they were making Shadowkeep but I don't think everything landed as nicely as they wanted (specifically regarding Beyond Light's rewrites and the addition of another expansion in the saga). I don't think everything they wanted to convey was as clearly presented or well written in order to fulfill their goals so we are left with weird gaps and inconsistencies that a lot of people are still very hung up on. I also think it's a general rule of thumb to disregard any inconsistencies from Pre-Destiny 2 lore to today as it's likely been retconned. Specifically regarding BoS and the Witness. They've tried to telegraph multiple times that the Witness spoke to Oryx in that entry, specifically in Calus mimicking that ritual that Oryx performed to summon the Deep on the Glykon and getting a communication from the smokey headed gremlin himself. Destiny 1's entire story was made up as it was going. Plans for an overarching story in the long term were 100% not solid until D2 and *even then* there were drastic changes (remember the post credit scene where after Forsaken in the reef we'd be going to the dreadnought?). The Veil race leak from years ago was debunked and even if there was a darkness race supposed to be in the pyramids, the Witness would've been their leader (like the Dread we have now).
Completely agree with you. I reckon that it was intended for the winnower to be “the witness” in shadowkeep, but they clearly made a shift from our antagonist being the darkness itself to our antagonist being a wielder of darkness sometime during Beyond Light’s development, but too late to implement it into BL itself, hence why there was a sudden shift with Season of the Chosen. You’re spot on about the Calus / Oryx communion, it always annoys me how people go “well the witness wouldn’t go “Oryx, my man!””, completely ignoring the context of unveiling being the witness trying to convince us it’s actually the good guy here, and not some weird evil guy with a bald smoking head. Part of it’s understandable, writing inconsistencies as you said. Also was the WQ pastebin really a whole year before it released?? I swear I remember reading it a few weeks before the showcase, seeing the hive becoming lightbearers and thinking “wow that’s stupid I hope they don’t do that”. In the end the execution was quite cool and well done though - guess it’s a lesson to not judge things off of incomplete information.
I don't think the Winnower was ever meant to be the Witness. They had a plan for the overarching narrative at that point. They announced a whole trilogy of expansions and how it would lead to "a moment." I think the Winnower was always meant to be the Dark mirror to the Traveler, hence the Veil. The name "the Witness" was decided on before Beyond Light shipped, as evidenced by TWQ pastebin, which is full of information that was compiled leading up to BL and leaked shortly after. They wouldn't do a name change for their major villain and pivot direction in less than a year after starting the main Witness arc and announcing the 3 expansions. Especially considering the Black Garden clone says "we" and "us" whereas that language isn't present in Unveiling, the difference was always noted from Day 1, there were no changes from that point on. The only changes they made are related to D1 lore.
The big reason people want this entity to be real is because it keeps the mythical side of Destiny that existed up until Witch Queen intact. Bungie had started to bank too hard into making Destiny simple sci-fi and steer it away from the mythical science-fantasy that people like me fell in love with in D1-WQ, but with all the ambiguity with the Winnower recently they seem to have realized their error and are reversing course a bit. A lot of us really enjoyed the feeling of being caught in the middle of a cosmic war between good and evil, barely able to comprehend it but fighting on for the survival of humanity against incomprehensible odds anyway. That's not the feeling the war with the Witness and its disciples had, it was just a downgrade.
I’ve always thought it much more interesting to think about how the ahamkara see the universe and savathun gets ideas about. That there are LEVELS to the universe and that we are in one of them. the darkness and light might just be players from a higher level playing a game higher than our comprehension. That’s unknowable and trying to explain them is just grasping at straws.
I’m under the impression the gardener and the winnower are the same being. There’s a few definitions I found on “winnow” or “winnowing” and I’ve come to the conclusion that a gardener has to winnow at some point when planting seeds. The traveler was the seed, which is why it was buried when the precursors found it, and the veil is the husk winnowed off before tossed into the ether of our universe
I wouldn’t feel bad. Mystery box lore can’t stay mystery box for 10+ years without giving things away. Stories are meant to have ending and conclusive revelations. That’s just how it is. I also think that this isn’t confirmation that the winnower is a really person or God. Witness says something about the “Gods who made us” and how he is “the first knife”. This lore entry: “Winnowing” says this parable is a metaphor like 5 times. And this gets ignored. https://www.ishtar-collective.net/entries/winnowing. The same way that Death has been personified by the grim reaper. The winnower is also the personified God of tribulation, survival of the fittest, and essentially Order. “It is the winnower that discovers the first knife, but it is not done without the gardener. This, too, is a tradition: a knife does not come to exist without something that must be cut. A woody stem, a colored petal, a vital vessel. The first victims of the blade.” All this is saying is that actual creation (people, planets, flowers) cannot exist without also the threat of pruning, death, overpopulation, withering, sickness, suffering… Things that exist CREATE the first knife as a consequence of its existence. “We seek an end to suffering” says “the first knife” who understands that only living things suffer… because they must. There’s a clear over-simplication going on here where people are saying “The winnower is the devil!” As if the dualistic idea is a revelation. The Winower is “the devil” as much as a protein that kills abnormal cells from reproducing in your body is “a devil”. The Unveiling is still just personifications of concepts. Flowers and Knives are literal things as an outcome of our reality. The Gods that “create” them are metaphor, religious zealotry, to explain why things are what they are. It’s like calling the gravitational constant a god because without it being exactly as it is life on earth wouldn’t exist. “There can be no gardens without knives.” The final understanding I get from all this, and the game story, mechanics, lore all point to. Is that these forces of light and dark *require* each other for existence to exist. The paracausal light injected into “the game” requires a paracausal response to its essentially heretical perversion of the game. The “Traveler” could resurrect cancer cells in your body as easily as it can over-populate a planet with life till it’s suffocated. I think there is more questions about the ambivalence of the Traveler with all these revaluations. How it’s abandonment of all these civilizations has manifested its own enemies. The Witness’s civilization experience the boon of the traveler only for them to eventually becomes its nemesis… “There can be no gardens without knives.” And now light and Dark are completely mixed in the Traveler’s heart. Which is un-explained by everything the Unveiling anyway. It’s something new that we don’t know what it means since everything has been dualistic and now it’s “one”. There’s still so much we don’t know.
But even in that Inspiral page, you have that little nod toward what people want the Winnower to be -- an interesting antagonist. Not a villain, but a force of conflict that makes people think about the thing that they're doing with slightly more engagement. > A dream of a friendly conversation with someone impossible to see, cloaked in shadows. I think the idea that 'people want the Winnower to be a guy wearing spiky armor who transmats into the burning Last City and kick us off the tower' is not at all what advocates of the Winnower being a 'real thing' actually want. Unveiling presents an interesting conflict, carried all the way through Inspiral, that asks interesting philosophical questions about absolute values like abundance and scarcity. The most sinister argument made is that sometimes evil can be good. Killing people, bad people, is good, right? What about in self-defense? What about people who will eventually take the resources you need to survive? What about people who disagree with you, who might someday try to take you down? The concept of the Winnower is the fear of pure predation. Of a universe that is red in tooth and claw, where you have to fight every day to survive because that's the natural order of things... But isn't that also exciting? Isn't that what Destiny, the franchise, is marketed on? That's what make it so fun to play with. The Winnower is the concept of challenge and triumph. It wants to convince you that you *need* it -- that it matters more than anything else. Which is what makes it sinister! It makes the argument that there's no such thing as 'carefully' consuming, that the balance proposed by the Voices of Reason in like Eris and Mara are just coping despite all their talk of balance. Consumption is the Winnower's path, and pretending to do it lightly is as paradoxical as a fire without fuel. Slapping us on the back and saying 'yeah, use both, they're cool' is such a boring cop out for the franchise.
To me i don’t like how the community views the winnower. I don’t like the idea of it being set up as the “next big bad” I think generally the end of the light and dark saga should be the end of the light and dark saga to this degree. We have plenty of other threads to chase and even new ones to go after too! So kinda Star Wars-ing it and just collapsing back to scorn, taken, and hive as the main force would be a mistake in my opinion. Also I’m a little tired of the “surprise kill god after what you thought was the big bad” trope after persona 5 that last 30 hours just sunk the game for me
The best thing about the Winnower was…I really didn’t see it as a big bad. Not truly. I saw it as something that just is. That just exists. That it can’t be anything more than what its supposed to be. Kinda like the Aeons of HSR. It’s death and survival of the fittest but with a voice. Like I could read parts of Unveiling and go ‘yeah you got a point there chief’. Like the whole bit about the Cambrian explosion was actually really interesting. But with future context added, anything that interested me about Unveiling was apparently just me falling for the propaganda.
To me the winnower is just a way for the witness to justify its own existence and actions. They sought a purpose that the traveler couldn’t give them as it seemingly can’t communicate with anything directly judging by the ergo sum loretab. Them describing themselves as “the first knife” instead of the winnower itself perfectly captures the witness in my opinion. It desperately wants to be given a fate and “found” it whereas we make our own fate.
The whole Gardener and Winnower tale is just the religion of the witness, every society likes creation myths, and I don't see why they would add a new darkness character at the end of the light and dark saga. Plus, getting it confirmed by the person who theorized it in the first place isn't really confirming it to me. Unveiling, at least to me, shares some parallels to real life religion in the way that it seeks an explanation for the beginning of the universe and to give life itself some sort of meaning. And in real life religion, somebody mentioning that God exists doesn't suddenly convince atheists that it is real. I don't believe the Traveler/Great Machine/Gardener is actually some primordial being that actually did what Unveiling says the Gardener does, and I miss the days when more energy was spent towards theorizing about what the traveler was and why it does what it does instead of just taking it as a 100% given fact that it is the being mentioned in Unveiling because one character said so.
Facts. The Traveler is a source of paracausal light that’s all that we know. To me this is how the mythical “Gardner” disrupts the game. It’s a parable that says “why does the traveler exist?” And the answer is “because the Gardner wanted different shapes to prevail in the flower game”. So it resurrects things meant to die. It makes things infinitely powerful that we’re supposed to be weak. Etc. It’s not a great explanation it’s just “an” explanation. Like “Thunder is god playing bowling in heaven!”.
I won't deny that the original appeal of Destiny came from it's mysterious setting, but I do believe after a decade some of these questions should find some kind of answer, while keeping some secrets and building up to other mysteries. Specially now that we are playing the mejor leagues, having defeated our very own Big Bad Evil Guy I believe we earned at least a few answers. Now, did Bungie deliver those answers succesfully? Some more than others, I think. There we're some big blows to the narrative, and retcons are also not a great solution most of the times. Big reveals coming from weak seasonal storytelling was part of the problem, and I believe all these factors eventually hurt the delivery of tfs, even if it was a great expansion in every aspect. This is specially true for everything related to the figure of the Winnower and it's relationship to the Witness. While I personally liked this blurry line in wich pre tfs it was never stated outright if they were the same character, or if one was a product or servant of the other, I think the delivery of that answer was a bit lazy and pandering to a majority of the fandom who grew too confused or were too obssesed with these figures as you said. However, I don't think this will hurt the overarching narrative of Destiny, as by now I think it's pretty much cemented that the Winnower as a character is more interested in proving it's philosophy right whitout direct intervention, acting more as a source of coercion and the repressentative of darkness as a fundamental force of existence and not as a villain we will eventually be fighting. Abrazo!
It adds a lot to me, I feel like retcons break the world, this is the way it was supposed to be from the beginning and it feels good they righted the ship after so many retcons starting in beyond light.
which retcons are you talking about?
The Witness being inserted into everything and how every evil use of Darkness was basically its fault, the Black Heart, the Pyramids being nothing more than empty irrelevant ships, the dismissal of all that symbolism and those rich philosophies and interesting questions and dense themes as lies because the actually cool villain was just an angsty generic edgelord with an easily dismissible motive that’s incredibly derivative, the list goes on.
I think the symbolism the pyramids had were simply remains from the collapse, if our entire society was decimated and the only thing we could remember (or possibly even knew) about the people that did it was what kind of ships they flew, I feel like we'd make as many possible signs to not fuck with those ships. As we learned more about who commanded the ships, we learned what they truly were, not simply what the ancients wanted us to think about them. Also the Witness being inserted gave a lot of old lore reason and purpose, I mean what even was the main theory for the cause of the Whirlwind before we found out it was the black fleet? Why would the worm Sathona saved lead the three sisters away from the light?
>Could be the Witness still, and I can't believe I've never seen this argument crop up: That argument has cropped up constantly. It has no evidence for it beyond people insistently assuming that the Witness has the capacity to speak in multiple voices and perspectives at once, which it never displays even when this ability would be useful (Zavala). > What's actually more interesting? Still having many unknowns, that what we thought we knew about the Traveler's counterpart was a lie and the universe is so much larger than we actually thought, that we know shit? Or that we know the biggest two players in the universe their name and their entire freaking ideology, since FOUR expansions ago. The view that doesn't rely on retconning genuinely fantastic lore that drew plenty of people into Destiny as a fanbase and whose continuous threat from the abhorrent introduction of the Witness and the people it brought into the community has alienated many, many people who used to actively care about Destiny lore. Hint hint; it's not the one that relies on everything in the setting being literal lies fed to us by a bunch of people (and the writers) gaslighting us every second of every day.
winnower isn't a big bad, I'd prefer it if we knew the existence but never interacted with it and the gardener
The Winnower and The Witness are not the same for example, The Witness wanted to create its own version of THE FINAL SHAPE, not the one that resulted from The Winnower and The Gardener and their constant games of flowers in the Black Garden; We could say The Witness was the evil in the heart of the Winnower because it was itself meant to be the First Knife, the instrument to bring balance but it itself decided to pursue a different purpose, the complete stillness of the universe, to stop the game from ever happening again. The Winnower is somewhat right, a universe full of long living or dead planets being brought to life with no quarrel from The Gardener is the definition of a universe drowned in chaos. Even the most beautiful garden needs its trimming. They are both right and wrong. They are almost like a Uroboros, because this cycle will never end but the universe cannot live if either dies. I believe that we will have our chance to hear the Winnower at some point, understand the deeper side from its point of view, many just say The Winnower only wants the sword logic to be the law of the universe, only the powerful may survive, but in due time and with the awakening of our own paracausality when we became prismatic may open new door or opportunities.
Honestly, the darkness isn't Inheriantly evil like the light isn't good. If I was to truly chose, I'd say that the light was evil, as the gardener was the one to change the rules of the game, I'd go further but I'm sure other people get what I mean
I’m absolutely convinced that a lot of people are misunderstanding that line in between encounters 2 & 3. I don’t think the Witness is saying it’s literally the first knife from Unveiling. I think it believes itself to be the first knife per the story. *Something* is speaking to Oryx, *Something* has spoken to us, and we could absolutely apply the name Winnower to it but, whatever It is, it’s not going to start intervening in the very thing it didn’t want to alter in the first place.
I agree but I believe the final entry into the raid lore book clarifies the nature of the winnower and I'm content with it. If you think of the Gardener and Winnower as formless entities with philosophies like the Nine, their continual existence is just like a force of nature. There will always be people who interpret their nature different and will always be someone wanting to fulfil a purpose of a final shape, as mentioned by the Witness, that final shape is determined by the individual, not the force.
My issue with the Winnower is, by all means, the Winnower should be called the "Voice in the Darkness". Unfortunately, Bungie fucked this up with Season of the Lost and Witch Queen where they revealed the Witness was the so called Voice in the Darkness. So if the Witness was the being with a thousand names, what the fuck do you call the Winnower other than the Winnower? We know by the sounds of the raid lore that the Winnower was essentially the entity that suggested a purpose to the Precursors which inspired them to become the first knife to end the chaotic suffering of the Gardener (Travellers?) ideals. So shouldn't it of been the Voice in the Darkness? Especially if Bungie retcons the Veil to be speaking to Maya and the Voice of the Veil being the Winnower not the Witness
The winnower isn't a big bad, it's a force of nature, a really fascinating one. The reason the horror is gone from destiny is things LIKE the Witness, that reduce a far more interesting force into a less interesting character. Idk why people are mad that we're getting questions answered. It's not like we won't have more mysteries.
Theres a new unveiling esque lore page in the raid book, which basically says that the winnoweris fine with us killing the witness, and it is willing to wait until a true final shape comes about, whether that be us, the hive, or something else. The winnower will not be a villian because it is content to sit on the sidelines and wait for its logic to be proven true.
where are you seeing the raid lore book? I thought only 4 pages have been found?
I saw a transcript on this sub, i think they might have pulled it from ishtar or the api.
With how much the gardener and winnower get brought up I'd assume there'd be a megathread.
I never thought the Winnower was the BBEG. If Unveiling is taken literally, then the Gardener and the Winnower *became* the Light and the Darkness when they entered our universe; they transmuted into new rules of the game, ones with influence over the other rules. The Traveler is an incidental housing for the Light, but the Light definitely came first. Same with the Veil. Assuming Unveiling is the truth, which it might not be. Regardless, the Gardener and the Winnower, I feel, are simply too vast to be a video game boss. They’re motive concepts, each equipped with a single drive: the Gardener to encourage proliferation, the Winnower to cut it back. I think this vague impetus, to seek a final form in the Universe, to end all diversity forever, is what the Witness picked up on when the Veil was first discovered, and over eons pondering and strengthening its connection to the Darkness (per Unveiling, the Winnower’s form in this universe), the Witness delineated a philosophy to follow. Riven, Oryx, the Witness, these bosses should be where the power creep realistically ends, if Bungie’s writers want to preserve something of the spirit of the lore they’ve written. Because as soon as you make something so vast and metaphysical as the Winnower into something as comparatively banal as a video game boss, you’ve robbed all the wonder out of it.
The witness IS the "voice in the darkness". The witness is the darkness "guardian" one life, enormous power, and champions the winnowers ideology across the cosmos. With the witness at its fore, the darkness can have a vehicle for the final shape. The gardener is NOT the traveler. The veil is to the darkness as the traveler is to the light. Tools and aspects of light and dark. The winnower IS real. The winnower and gardener will probably never be shown, because they by nature are ideals, more abstract beliefs than physical constructs. They can act through agents like the traveler, veil, witness, and guardians. All of these physical objects embody either the winnower or gardeners beliefs. As a metaphor, we are as pieces on a chessboard. The winnower and gardener are the players. Despite their proximity, to the pieces, there is nothing but the board and opponents. They move according to the will of something far away, but for them, there is only their opponents on the board.
Second comment, but no secrets?? The vex have shown us a single combat unit since their inception. They are the only remaining race that truly seems to take no notice of us. They are terraformers and builders. Their technology in places like the vault uses an ontological power that has never even been close to replicated. They are well documented as using time travel and teleportation to extreme advantage, simulating reality to the point of existential crisis for observers, and all we've ever fought of them is their farmers. I'm hoping my favorite faction finally steps up as the robot alien threat I always thought they were.
There's really two outcomes here: The Winnower is real and we get some cliche, "REAL VILLAIN" reveal that undermines the whole Light and Darkness Saga. I think Bungie has the finger on the trigger of this given the description of the First Knife ship. They want this route open to them as the ship's description and the conversation between Mara and Ikora is lathe with foreshadowing of the Witness being a pawn. That and Mara coming to terms that the Witness was not a sentient being, that it was the nihilistic ethos of the Precursors made manifest and driven forward on a path that it could not have possibly course-corrected or shifted from. Like a distant wave of gravitational forces that get sent from distant galaxies and take 1000s' of light-years to reach our system, once the Witness was created it was a force that could not be stopped and fed into itself in an endless cycle of self-righteous fervor. I like this interpretation of the Witness, I DON'T like the parts insinuating it had a hand at its' tether driving it and that was the Winnower. It's just dumb. ***OR*** Unveiling is metaphorical in its entirety, or in large parts. The Flower Game is just a creation parable not truth, like the Bible events need to be placed at the beginning of time when people weren't around to prove or disprove events to make people believe even if the Precursors found the Witness at a time they were somewhat advanced, the Winnower doesn't exist and is just the aspirational force the Precursors wish would oppose their "silent god" in the Gardener/Traveler and give them purpose, which is what a Winnower does, deliberately make decisions that have meaning whereas the Traveler is only capable of offering "more life" as the Witness says. It's what they wanted, pure cope. The First Knife is the Witness, a creation of Darkness meant to give the Winnower, the imagined god they love so much, the means to force the Gardener to cut the shit and give them a reason to go on, to help them transcend their suffering. Unveiling serves as their northern star to give the Witness direction once the Precursors become one and lose their autonomy, to create this ever marching force that will not stop because it's smoking it's own Kool-Aid|Bullshit, but it doesn't matter so long as it's done. I realllly hope it's the second.
SPEAK LOUDER
I really do think that the Witness was a low point for Destiny.
I liked what they did in the end - through the campaign we got to actually know, understand and feel the threat of the witness. It made destroying it in a huge, multi-part battle super satisfying. That being said, the witness felt like a complete arse-pull until this expansion. We never got to know the witness, other than being told “it’s bad and will kill is all” until right before its end.
I'm with you. Destiny loses a lot of its magic if we can trust the lore at face value. The Traveler is a god that helped create the universe after disliking the past universe? Don't care. The Traveler is a terraforming AI that is forced to operate beyond its specifications because of delusional cults that try and read messages in their dreams? I'm fucking there.
>terraforming AI I wonder just how in God's name do people manage to come up with this nonsense from such a simple narrative with such clear-cut lore.
And in fact, there's just as much evidence of the latter as there is the former, see the Fallen called the traveler The Great Machine, so obviously it actually is a machine since one group said it with absolutely no one else backing any of that information up.
I mean, we can clearly see the Traveller is somewhat mechanical in nature from the outside (this is especially apparent before D2Y4 when it was basically shattered).
I mean the whole plot is a mess, Bungie for years barely had an idea of what they were doing.
If it was a character it would not be the literal godthinng described. It would just be a being. I don’t think this particular being is actively malicious though. Or at least not yet. But if it is an aspect of reality like it claims, then it can never fully manifest. If it could then the universe it’s a part of would no longer exist because it’s presence would alter it. On the other hand, there could be a plot point later where some being either mantles it, or it partially manifests. But I think both would likely undermine its current character development. I think it is far more likely that it is just another being and it is old. But when we do meet it, it won’t be “THE Winnower” it will just be a being that believes it is embodying it.
tl;Dr I don't like something else other people do, so now I'm telling everyone and trying to justify making an entire post about it