scallyswaggin aquanaut 🫧🐋🪸

Honorable mention to the lore tabs I wrote for Sparrow racers Marcus Ren and Enoch Bast; a queer fan in the deep South emailed me about how they were moved to tears by seeing same-gender relationships in the lore. -Grant K. Roberts

Like, we all knew this. It was absolutely undeniable that Marcus and Enoch were meant to be viewed as a couple. There was literally zero doubt in my mind about it ever since I read it for the first time back in year 1.

But there's really something about being told from the author himself that this was the intended read. Especially in the world of people often denying obvious queerness just because specific labels aren't used in an over the top way where characters just say their sexualities in a way that feels unnatural and weird. I always appreciated the way Destiny did this because it forced you to take the text at face value in the same way you would have to do it for any heterosexual couple. Nobody ever expects a character to say "I am heterosexual," they just accept obvious tells in the text, but for whatever reason queer characters are never afforded the same.

Except in Destiny, which always integrated things like that so neatly into the text. And seeing people ignoring it or denying it because a character didn't show up to say "I am gay" was always frustrating, but I prefer it this way and I am so glad that writers never backed down, and instead just introduced queer characters into the story with dignity and respect that any character deserves.

And every single time anyone suspected or asked if some character is queer, the writers would just go "well yeah, that's how we wrote them, you read it correctly." And it makes the world of Destiny so much more rich with queer characters because of it. Because this is just one extra proof that whenever we suspected it, we were correct. We were always correct because queerness was always intended and written into the setting.

Fictional small town in the middle of nowhere in real country: par for the course in any genre

Fictional major city in real country: standard fair, but it's usually clearly based on a real city

Fictional suburb of real major city in real country: strange but I can see the application

We do have an answer for that, from the lore on gear from the exotic mission. I'll put it under read more because it's easiest to hide spoilers:

But the pain is not a flaw to be excised. It is the gold in the cracks.