#output generated

Any crash mission whose purpose is to get Rasputin into the middle of the Pyramid fleet to raise hell is A+ Certified Good Stuff by me. Really just any situation that allows him to absolutely personally Start Some Shit. Everyone keeps breaking into his places! I want him to break into theirs.

I also want Rasputin to use a SIVA swarm to repair/modify the Dreadnaught just enough to take it into a fight with Leviathan.

Pros:

finally get to see SIVA do what it's supposed to do

SIVA/Warmind tech plated onto a Hive infrastructure would look amazing

Red finally gets to use everything he learned from fighting Xol

the parallels of the Dreadnaught being Oryx's throne and the King is not coming home but perhaps for now a Tyrant will do

(I am fascinated by the parallels between Rasputin and Oryx)

how do you fight a giant haunted derelict alien warship? with another giant haunted derelict alien warship! which is not a lot but it's weird that we have two.

because you know Rasputin wouldn’t tell anyone his plan in advance. They’d ask and he’d just be like "you won’t like it.”

and then their faces when the fucking DREADNAUGHT warps into the fight

their FACES!

Calus was not expecting that

neither was Zavala

I need it.

Cons:

I do genuinely want to know what Failsafe thinks of Rasputin. Imagine some giant natural disaster hit and the only two survivors were you and the President. It'd be weird, right?

Failsafe must have known Rasputin at least a little bit since she was loaded onto one of his Exodus ships. Back during the Golden Age the AIs made it sound like having Rasputin around was reassuring, like they knew that if things got rough he would Take Care Of It. Does Failsafe still have any of that? Or is she pissed at him for surviving? I want to know the AI perspective on Rasputin both then and now so badly.

Poor Rasputin sitting on a bench staring out into space with Sleeper Simulant next to him, a device whose entire instruction manual is “this end towards problem.”

I haven't touched on this specific aspect because writing a post on Rasputin and autistic coding would be a weeks-long ordeal of rereading lore, rereading dozens of essays from autistic people, debating my own perspective, and sweating every single detail to make sure I didn't say something wrong on tumblr of all places, but yeah, strong agree. I think there's a lot of coding in there, either accidental or intentional, and I like it too.

One reason I like Bungie's AIs, and the Minds of the Iain M. Banks books that partly inspire them, is that they don't want to "be human." They don't feel compelled to change their thought processes or mental structures to follow human neurotypical norms, or aspire to experience the same sensory input as humans to become "more alive." I get so sick of those plotlines. As if there's anything special about human meatsacks! Instead Rasputin relates to us through shared culture and emotions. He shares what binds together our society, not bodies and brains but ideas and connections and experiences. He's not human and he never will be, but he wants to be part of the human world, and it takes some learning and adapting, but it doesn't take changing who he is. At the end of the day Rasputin knows he's always going to be different. It's just the nature of who and what he is. But he has a place at the table all the same.

And in Destiny's big coming showdown, Rasputin - and Neomuna, we haven't factored that in yet - will be the ones carrying humanity's banner. Those names live in him. He's an apex of human technological achievement - and social achievement, if you think about it, because the person in charge of his project* actively tried to build an evil robot overlord and it didn’t work. Other humans were so nice and connected with it so much that it said "nah bro" and became our biggest champion instead. He's the most human of us all.

So yeah I love him too. Happy New Year.

So, we know that Rasputin very much did not shoot the Traveler. He had plans to, and he was convinced to some degree that it would work, but he never did.

What if it wasn’t the Traveler he shot, though?

When he confronted the Witness at the Gate of the Garden like how we did, he got out of there somehow, and I don’t think collapsing into a heap on the floor for naptime would have saved him there.

First point is, the Lunar Pyramid is on the moon, same as the new Gate. I know the keyword there is ‘new’, but with how Vex stuff works, for all we know, once a place becomes a Gate, it was always a Gate, bear with me there.

Second, that would have been the same general area that Rasputin had LOKI CROWN pointed, whatever it was. We know the Witness didn’t intend on pulling any punches with the Collapse, so Nezarec could very much have been leading the charge straight against the Traveler.

Third, we know that all of the Pyramids are linked to one another and the Witness through the Egregore, so it could stand to reason if a Pyramid was disrupted, it could break the Witness’ focus, even just momentarily.

And fourth, we’ve seen how the Cabal can adapt to paracausal forces and counter them, and it’s Rasputin’s job to be paranoid, I could buy that he had the Traveler studied just for the sake of always having a silver bullet in case it went rogue. Keyword, singular, silver bullet.

What I’m thinking is, what if, during the final moments of the Collapse and Rasputin’s duel, he made the choice to redirect LOKI CROWN’s firepower at the Lunar Pyramid and put that to ground instead of the Traveler? Severing the Witness’ connection like that, even momentarily, would’ve been enough for him to initiate MIDNIGHT EXIGENT.

That’s a lot, I know, but I feel Very Strongly about Rasputin being able to stand up to paracausal forces in any way shape or form even if Destiny’s going to boil down to ‘Light and Dark Good, Everything Else Unimportant’, and thinking of him having a victory like that gives me a bit of vindication. Would love to hear your thoughts.

I can’t imagine Rasputin having anti-paracausal weaponry and not at least trying it against the Pyramid Fleet the way he tried everything else. Odds are good that Rasputin launched LOKI CROWN, or reused its assets under another name, against the Witness. He may have repurposed it into the SURTR DROWN mentioned as "in progress but negative effect." Keeping the Traveler from leaving would be a lower priority at that point than just finding something, anything, that worked. And if he did end up in a face-to-face where the Witness, let’s say, took offense at Rasputin’s rejection of the honor of Disciplehood, kneeing it in the balls with a nuclear warhead would be the best way for him to escape. But from what we've heard so far Nezarec's Pyramid was hurled into the Moon by the Traveler's detonation, and it’s not (yet) canon that Rasputin ever met the Witness at all. I'd like to give Red at least partial credit for the kill on Nezzy, but until we get more details I can't justify it.

I will die on the hill that Rasputin is too big not to be at least a little paracausal. If Darkness “comes from within” and the eliksni can directly manipulate ambient Light then I don’t see why Rasputin needs a permission slip from a beachball to go ham. Paracausality is fundamentally a matter of thought and will and Rasputin has both of those in spades. Arguably he’s never been anything but thought and will. And are we really pretending that a couple kilometers of ice is all it takes to stop a Worm God? Rasputin kept Xol pinned, not that glacier. He says he doesn’t understand it, but neither do Guardians and we manage just fine. Honestly I think the main reason he doesn’t use it is because his story arcs go very hard-scifi and the writers avoid the space magic. This season will put that to the test though and I can’t wait for the results.

But even without direct paracausality Rasputin can and should be able to step to paracausal threats. The Hive die to an orbital laser strike same as everyone else (even if they sometimes come back). The Cabal have built Light- and Darkness-suppressing tech, and if they can work it out, Rasputin can too. He also had some serious weaponry during the Golden Age, and not just "secular" stuff.

In the message outlining LOKI CROWN Rasputin discusses "full caedometric and noetic release," and in another lore card he’s moving an “annihilation-pumped caedometric weapon” into place. "Caedometric" is not a real word, but we've seen it a couple times in Destiny. It literally translates to “cutting-measure” or “to cut the measure” and I think it means weaponry that directly warps spacetime, similar to the Culture’s “gridfire”: damage done by invoking the mass-energy structures underpinning space. Caedometric weapons are also wielded by the Ecumene in its fight against the Hive - this is some very advanced tech - and said weapons are only authorized when the Ecumene orders “maximum theater overkill.” The potential for collateral damage is likely very high. They work, too: they can’t kill Oryx, but the Ecumene’s forces slay him in the material world often enough to force him back to his throne. Rasputin’s caedometric weapons are likely much cruder and weaker than the Ecumene’s, like the first nuclear weapon compared to today’s - but it’s still, y’know, a nuke.

Noetic weapons are for another type of battlefield. “Noetic” means relating to the mind or to knowledge itself, and this is Vex stuff: weaponized patterns that infect, corrupt, or just plain destroy the mind. It’s one of the contingencies covered in the Codes & Procedures handbook for the K1 Anomaly, which warns of:

NOETIC EVENT. A canary panel has detected a noetic event, including substrate-free syntactic replicators, adversarial inputs, oncomemes, Vex-type viral semiotic signifiers, and frequency-based heuristic exploits.

Oncomemes. What a fantastic word! “Onco” means “cancerous.” Cancerous memes. That covers a lot of memes, really. Rasputin had weaponized memes. He faced the Vex, and he learned from them.

So both caedometric and noetic-type weapons are a) very advanced, b) bad news, and c) part of Rasputin’s arsenal. Neither is explicitly paracausal, but both can be wielded against paracausal entities. 

Paracausal weapons did show up during the Golden Age. When Elsie decides to shut down Clovis’ Vex gate by any means necessary, she goes to a research institute dedicated to the Traveler and secures a “topological thought,” an “irreal artifact of the Traveler’s Light,” as the core of a weapon to hard-crash every Vex on the forgeworld. Elsie Bray is brilliant and clever, and when it comes to paracausality it helps to have a mind driven more by the subjective than the objective, but if Elsie could hotwire a paracausal bomb in a couple days I think Rasputin could work out the same idea at some point during the Golden Age. The stumbling block here is the acquisition of said irreal artifact. “Irreal” is a synonym for “unreal,” but in philosophy has more specific connotations of being incapable of existing at all in this reality - not simply “unreal” like a unicorn, but “irreal” like incompatible with our spacetime. While Rasputin could requisition whatever he liked, he probably couldn’t make an “irreal” thing. A finite number of artifacts means a finite number of weapons, and if they all came from the Traveler that’s one of the only sources Rasputin couldn’t commandeer. 

So if Rasputin did make paracausal weapons, he would only have a few. I can’t imagine he had a lot of chances to test them, and since it’s paracausal simulating it can only go so far. That would give him a small supply of unique weapons whose efficacy (and side effects) he can’t be sure of. In that case setting them up as a failsafe against the Traveler is the most logical use. The Traveler is the entity most likely to need paracausal weapons to bring it down, and if he has to fire on it then so many other things have already gone wrong that the potential fallout is the least of his problems. Hence this is probably the arsenal he deployed as LOKI CROWN.

We do!

In brief: small copy of Rasputin.

In detail: Rasputin made Felwinter to test his own morality and behavior - I have a post in the works about how this act takes on even more significance given what we've learned this season - so Felwinter contains a miniature model of all the relevant moral and personality structures Rasputin could cram in there. He was meant to mimic Rasputin's personality well enough to give Rasputin important data like, "Am I a petty autocrat?" If Felwinter had failed Rasputin's assessments - based on the mythological references involved Rasputin seems to have evaluated for greed, tyranny, and/or lack of empathy - Rasputin would have concluded that he himself also demonstrated these qualities and should therefore, essentially, abdicate his position of power. So in short Rasputin designed Felwinter to be as much like himself as a model housed in a single processing node and shrunk to fit inside an Exo brain could be, because he was meant to serve as a small-scale replica of Rasputin's own behavior.

There are so many possibilities. There always are when it comes to Rasputin! That's part of what makes him so delicious as a character.

First off I think Osiris/Saladin/Shaxx/anyone else will take some time to get used to the idea that Felwinter is back to some degree and it's not just Rasputin mimicking or puppeting dead memories. Being distributed and able to fragment and rejoin means Red’s concept of identity and self is more fluid than humans/Guardians are used to - we're already seeing that with the subminds - and Osiris, Saladin, and Shaxx will need to deal with what's not quite the person they once knew, but what is also not just a recording or hologram. Felwinter's experiences are now part of the huge shifting web of thought and connection that is Rasputin proper. Red seems to have been desperate to “wake up” in time to warn us about Clovis’ deception, and as previously noted Rasputin is terrible at talking to people, but Felwinter figured it out, so in order to communicate Red probably integrated Felwinter a lot faster and more fully than he otherwise might have. So we might see some turbulence as this new complex of thoughts and memories settles in as part of him, and that’s going to look weird to us non-distributed entities. Seeing how Red deals with the other subminds will help Osiris understand how Rasputin’s consciousness differs, but Saladin will probably call it malicious or insulting to Felwinter’s memory without understanding how much Felwinter and Rasputin overlap.

Once they're over that hurdle, it's time for the difficult emotional journey of Felwinter's past comrades squaring themselves with what and who Felwinter really was. Osiris acts like he's hoping Rasputin learned from Felwinter without letting himself acknowledge the idea that maybe a lot of the traits he admired in Felwinter and values in himself - fearlessness, intensity, tenacity, independent judgement, a willingness to cross boundaries - came from Rasputin in the first place. I don’t know how that’ll shake out for all of them long-term.