I wrote this twitter thread out at like 3 am and figured I’d share it here because I was starting to write Too Many Words™ at my actual website and needed to stop.
here’s why I don’t like where they’re taking Uldren/Crow’s story in Season of the Lost
- He’s the “least-paracausal” Guardian who has had the least opportunity to have any self-determination of basically any Guardian in the video game Destiny 2 by Bungie dot com.
Paracausality is Destiny’s version of magic but it’s also just generally a “do whatever the fuck I want” card the game gives all players and (presumably) lightbearing/magical NPCs.
Paracausality is the prime reason why our Guardian is the “fulcrum upon which the universe turns” – why we’re always present for or having influence on Major Shit That Happens in the universe of the game. It’s the in-story justification for “being a player character syndrome.” Not all Guardians – or any paracausal being – are equally paracausal. Guardians are strong but Ahamkaras – wish-dragons – were so powerful in this regard they were capable of talking to players through the in-game loretabs and books (something Savathun can also do, incidentally).
It’s implied that no character on the Guardian side of shit is quite as powerful as we are but like, you’ve got characters like Asher Mir who were powerful enough to keep the Vex from completely assimilating him until the very last moment of his presumed existence. Uldren/Crow is – I mean, if there was an opposite of “paracausal=powerful” he’d be it. And I’m not saying that to hate on the guy but he got captured by the Spider and his Ghost was booby-trapped until we showed up and freed them both.
He is so ultimately un-paracausal that his entire post-resurrection existence has been effected by how the player base responded to finding out he’d been resurrected. IN THE LORE, he gets shot and killed on-sight by Guardians multiple times – the implication being gamers did it. He’s been led by the nose this whole time. And when you take into consideration that Mara Sov expected him to be turned into a Guardian, isn’t happy about it, but baked that possibility into her contingency plans, it becomes apparent that everything in his life has been planned.
The most fascinating thing about Guardian “culture” as depicted in Destiny/2 is the apparent rule codified by the Vanguard that Guardians are neither defined by or should go looking for their past lives, under any circumstances. The idea is that every Guardian is a blank slate. And they are free to do whatever they want, but heavily encouraged to join in the Vanguard’s efforts to protect the Last City. Hunters are the best example of this kind of freedom as they are the primary folks in the game exploring the wilds beyond the walls whenever they want. The Drifter, the Dredgens and Dredgen Yor/Shin Malphur especially are also exemplars of the sort of “do what thou wilt” attitude among Guardians, but their behavior is less “sanctioned.”
Crow is 100% a Hunter, but everything about his life is constrained by everything – his sister, Savathun, the Spider, other Guardians, the Vanguard – he hasn’t really had the chance to make a single decision for himself. Like it’s all preordained. like even the prospect that he’ll be the next Hunter Vanguard is a fuckin called shot from six miles out. It was called the moment he shot Cayde in the chest back in twenty-fucking-eighteen.
- I just want to see Crow live his best life as a Davey Havok impersonator in an AFI cover band and instead I’m forced into considering helping Mara Sov try to fuckin recondition him back into the shitty, smarmy, spoiled fuckin jerk her brother was.
Those Colin Spacetwinks tweets from a couple weeks ago about how insufferable Crow is as a Guardian are spot on, yet he’s considerably better than when he was Uldren. I hated that asshole. Mara Sov obviously liked him because he was stupid and smarmy (thus a good tool), but goddamn.
Mara seems to think it’s possible to format the blank slate that is Crow, so to speak, and reimage his old personality onto said slate to bring Uldren back fully, but as a Guardian. Personally I think that sucks for a bunch of reasons! Not least of which is that’s unfuckinethical.
Like the real-life studies that slowly figured out that it was impossible to revert people back to blank slates involved torturous human experimentation with electroshock therapy, and while I’m sure there’d be a “cooler sci-fi way” Bungie’d make up in the video game, just… ugh. Especially since, now that Crow has seen some version of past Uldren’s actions, he has made it p clear that he doesn’t want to be that person. However Mara feels, Crow has expressed a desire as a separate person, and I just dread that it’s gonna be overridden by her own desire.
ultimately what I’m talking about is whether or not Crow has agency and that is an open question, up in the air rn. Sucks!