and the tyrant looked upon his tyranny and wept

In pretty much every game I’ve ever played that has a revive/respawn mechanic, it’s never explained as to how it works. Which isn’t really that big of a deal to me; it’s a game mechanic that allows you to keep playing the game, case closed.

And then you have Destiny. Get gunned down by a Cabal turret? Your Ghost will have you up in a hot second. Did another Guardian fire a rocket a bit to close to themselves? Go interact with their Ghost to rez them. Did you finally kill that bastard camping an ammo spawn in Trials? Better make sure their teammates can’t get to their Ghost, or they’ll be back up doming you from halfway across the map in seconds.

Except your Ghost is more than just a flying respawn machine. He can hack stuff, mark things on your tracker/radar thingy, oh and he’s an entire character with a personality who reflects the personality of your Guardian, who barely speaks.

The nonverbal communication and interactions in cutscenes between the two are fuckin immaculate. The way Ghost tilts the parts of his shell to express emotions - annoyance, shock, excitement, curiosity… and your Guardian reacts to him usually with a glance or a look, like… idk they just kinda get each other.

But while he is your Ghost, he’s not YOUR Ghost. By which I mean, Ghost is his own, independent character. He’s not a reflection of you or anyone else, and that’s made clear when his opinions and thoughts don’t align with the actions of you as the Guardian. In a lore thing from Forsaken I believe? there is a list of things he wishes he could say to you. One of those things is how he sees that you’re going on a rampage through the Tangled Shore, and justified by the death of Cayde-6 as it may be, he doesn’t like it; it scares him. But he still loves you - that’s also on the list, and even during Beyond Light we see this when he continues to stay by our side even as we start wielding the Darkness in the form of Stasis.

That’s not to say he can’t be vengeful himself. In the lead up to the final boss battle with Savathun during the Witch Queen campaign, Savathun taunts you and your Ghost. This isn’t anything new - bosses taunt you before and during boss fights all the time in Destiny campaigns - and usually you react by wiping the floor with them, without a word in response. Except this time, Ghost is PISSED, essentially says “how fucking dare you, you killed my friends”, lists a bunch of shit the Hive have done to humanity (most of which you personally have been affected by as a combatant against the Hive), and ends off by telling her that he would rather die than serve the Hive.

Speaking of the Witch Queen, we also get to see that Ghost isn’t perfect; he absolutely despises other Ghosts who joined the Hive, and makes that abundantly clear. He’s also extremely suspicious of Fynch, the Hive Ghost who helps you out in the Throne World. Ghost is kind of an ass to Fynch, because to him, the Ghosts who joined the Hive under Savathun betrayed the Traveller and humanity. But when he realizes that most of the Hive Ghosts like Fynch were coerced into helping the Hive in their search for their Guardians, he outright APOLOGIZES to Fynch. It’s actually a pretty cool moment in the story, and it shows like… yeah, he’s capable of making mistakes, but he’s also capable of at least trying to fix them.

Alternative YouTube link for those who want it:

The line between Light and Dark is so very thin.

In Destiny, there's a chance that after you die a small drone will find you and revive you as a guardian, it basically turns you into an magic solider and gives you a second chance at life. Your ghost (the little drone that brought you back) can heal you and revive you, so long as your ghost is alive, you are immortal.

In Subnautica 2, humans have their mind stored on a cloud and then get printed into existence by a Noetic Advisor (NoA) on an available biobed. If you die the NoA can decide which "version" of you gets reprinted and what memories you retain, it can "reset" you to a previous version of yourself if it's sees fit or positive for the mission. It's technically always "your" life, but you can die and come back not being the same. There are also pretty strict rules the NoA can't overpass without human intervention, the only one we care for is that, though possible, it's extremely illegal to print duplicates of the same human.

Still, there are things that neither universes can deal with, like hunger. In both games we know of characters dying of starvation, though I think Subnautica's version is a little bit more dark and can imply stuff for Destiny too.

In Destiny is pretty straight forward, during the Dark Age everyone was killing each other (mortals, guardians or random really hot aliens) and that caused, among many other things, a food shortage. Guardians would starve to death, their ghost would revive them only for them to starve again.

But Subnautica 2? It's even fucking worse.

Everything in Proteus (the planet we landed crashed) is basically inedible to humans due to the amino-acids in the DNA of everything creating metallic proteins that we can't digest which causes "indigestion, intestinal blockage, starvation and gout." (taking directly from the PDA). You quite literally have to jump a few steps in the evolution chain by touching a random animal called "Angel Comb" in order to eat anything.

We know one of the pioneers actually gave their body as offering to the Angel Comb and asked to be able to eat in exchange, it worked and when they got reprinted the Angel Comb offered the "skip ad" equivalent of evolution to them and all the other members of the colony.

But, there it took some time to get to that. So while D2 had characters reviving only to die again of hunger and you can already call that torture. In Subnautica 2 we have humans who were surrounded by food they couldn't eat and starved even if they tried eating it, only to be reprinted and repeat the process.

But it gets even worse. There's a discarded dialog from the EA (so it can or cannot be canon) where we find out there's another, earlier, colony that had duplicates of the pioneers before they got the ability to digest. These colonist modified their biobed and NoA to print more duplicates so they can eat them. So yeah, not only we have cannibalism now, there's a high chance they were eating their own copies.

Worked on this bullshit before the news hit and finally got around to finishing it. The long con or whatever. Awesome caption

it will always choose you. you cannot die. you'll always come back because it loves you so much. you are its right and left hand, its eternal weapon. it will drown you in its light. light as horror. darkness as horror. what if it thinks you are its best friend.

There are some really, really important lore cards on random cosmetics in the Monument of Triumph.

Also, this thing!

Do Not Go Gentle:

a collaborative comic for the light, dark, and against the end of all things