Not a Hidden agent

other media wants their aliens and monsters to have aesthetic appeal above anything else; even if something is meant to horrify you, they want it to be good to look at. anything that makes a design unattractive past a certain point is usually left on the cutting room floor. and this is an understandable practice! humans are a very aesthetically inclined species!

but look at the aliens in destiny!

they’ve got weird stuff going on! cabal faces straight up look like a scrotum! psions are soooo egg-shaped and malnourished looking, and hive have a bad case of muppet mouth on top of looking like human skeletons with bug parts grafted on. eliksni are gangly and awkwardly shaped and in-game they are constantly hunched over.

a lot of the times (except for with the hive), these features are covered with armor and helmets, and i think that's pretty unfortunate because the base designs for these guys are so interesting to look at!!!

the same principals go for unique enemies like rhulk and nezarec. they're ugly!!! and that's the appealing part!!! rhulk's head is long and almost perfectly cylindrical and his feet can't decide if they're hooves or paws; nezarec has a face like a rotary phone and a second, vestigial thumb, as well as weirdly shaped monkey feet.

and it would be one thing if these features were presented to evoke horror -- but the thing is, i would argue, they're not. they're just presented. it's never a matter of "look how scary this thing is." even though we meet most of these aliens as enemies, their looks are allowed to just... be what they are. they don't look like that to scare us. they just look like that.

So it's all wrapped up, right? It rhymes and everything. I remember that when I draw first version of this art (below) I was wondering if we ever get something more symmetrical, more grand and equal to the Cayde's End. There is this sense of completion and closure of sorts, seeing story not just refering, but actually reflecting itself.

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