Zapper the Cat

WANTED: Skolas, Kell of Kells

STATUS: Unknown, Unconfirmed; INTEL REQUIRED

“Her Harbingers ripped into Ceres, destroying the asteroid and killing Virixas, Kell of Wolves and more than half his House. The remaining Wolves scattered, burrowing deep into the Belt for cover.”

You ever just sit down and wonder about Bungie’s narrative choices?

Like the Guardians aren’t squeaky clean in any manner of speaking, but as a congregation of Risen, they weren’t indiscriminately murderous in general (contrast the Warlords or the Dredgens). Even Saint’s crusades were aimed primarily at, well. The leadership. His most famous story is about headbutting a Devils kell to death. Just plain logistics-wise, he was one person and the eliksni could pick up and leave at the drop of a hat. He wouldn’t have had much TIME to massacre everyone, each strike would have been on a helluva time limit. “Evil mass-murdering Saint-14” just plain doesn’t make much sense when his supposed victims can haul tail fast enough to make him spin. And, assuming he isn’t evil, Saint could well pick and choose his targets.

Compared to Mara… it sounds like Virixas had made Ceres into the main hub for the House, and the Wolf fleet was at least hundreds of thousands strong, if not millions. The lore never specifies if the numbers indicated ketches or the actual population of the house, but even if that’s referring to the individual eliksni in their army, that’s a lot. Millions of ships. Even more millions of people on those ships. The entire population of a nation — their homes — halved before they could even react.

Imagine the number of Wolf corpses still orbiting the shattered remnants of Ceres. There are almost definitely corpses of babies and children among them: Forsaken confirmed that babies are kept on ships, not to mention that’s just what happens when you use a WMD like the Harbingers.

Bungie loves talking about gray morality but they sure don’t like dealing with actual, previously-established-canon genocide. They wrote Saint — who’d lived through the Devils’ human extermination campaigns — into being a monster instead.

Doesn’t make much sense does it?

WANTED: Skolas, Kell of Kells

STATUS: Unknown, Unconfirmed; INTEL REQUIRED

“Her Harbingers ripped into Ceres, destroying the asteroid and killing Virixas, Kell of Wolves and more than half his House. The remaining Wolves scattered, burrowing deep into the Belt for cover.”

You ever just sit down and wonder about Bungie’s narrative choices?

Like the Guardians aren’t squeaky clean in any manner of speaking, but as a congregation of Risen, they weren’t indiscriminately murderous in general (contrast the Warlords or the Dredgens). Even Saint’s crusades were aimed primarily at, well. The leadership. His most famous story is about headbutting a Devils kell to death. Just plain logistics-wise, he was one person and the eliksni could pick up and leave at the drop of a hat. He wouldn’t have had much TIME to massacre everyone, each strike would have been on a helluva time limit. “Evil mass-murdering Saint-14” just plain doesn’t make much sense when his supposed victims can haul tail fast enough to make him spin. And, assuming he isn’t evil, Saint could well pick and choose his targets.

Compared to Mara… it sounds like Virixas had made Ceres into the main hub for the House, and the Wolf fleet was at least hundreds of thousands strong, if not millions. The lore never specifies if the numbers indicated ketches or the actual population of the house, but even if that’s referring to the individual eliksni in their army, that’s a lot. Millions of ships. Even more millions of people on those ships. The entire population of a nation — their homes — halved before they could even react.

Imagine the number of Wolf corpses still orbiting the shattered remnants of Ceres. There are almost definitely corpses of babies and children among them: Forsaken confirmed that babies are kept on ships, not to mention that’s just what happens when you use a WMD like the Harbingers.

Bungie loves talking about gray morality but they sure don’t like dealing with actual, previously-established-canon genocide. They wrote Saint — who’d lived through the Devils’ human extermination campaigns — into being a monster instead.

Doesn’t make much sense does it?

This is a lore piece called Baron of Shanks from the Destiny Grimoire Anthology Volume II. It’s not transcribed to Ishtar Collective so I keep my own photos of it from the book. It’s an early recounting of Saint’s Crusade which is corroborated by other Eliksni and also mentions some conflicts that aren’t mentioned elsewhere. It is explicitly stated that he and his team razed entire settlements to the ground. The narrator, an Eliksni and the titular Baron of Shanks, lets Saint go and Saint leaves him unharmed, but he notes that even after this event, Saint “continued to lead campaigns against his people.”

The whole point of Mithrax’ tale about Saint being a monster is that he viewed all Eliksni as monsters. It didn’t matter whether an Eliksni was a Kell or a civilian: they were Fallen, therefore an enemy.

Saint himself admits that he did horrible things which he now deeply regrets. This whole story and his redemption arc would not make any sense if he never attacked civilians. He did. We have to reconcile with that. Dark Age was a different time and he was a different person. He is now actively working on making amends and so are the Eliksni. Mithrax also admits to killing humans, Guardians and even his own people. So do Shaxx and Saint. Saint was written as a monster to the Eliksni long before Season of the Splicer. This isn’t a new development.

That’s the whole point of the narrative currently. Humans and Eliksni did incomprehensible harm to one another but it’s time to forgive and move on because we are not supposed to be monsters to each other.

The difference between Saint and Mara is that Saint acknowledges his deeds, he isn’t hiding them and he is actively working on making amends. Mara does neither of these things.

Saint doing horrible things AND Mara doing horrible things are narrative points that can coexist. Saint living to regret it and apologising to the Eliksni while Mara sits in her Ascendant Plane with a smoothie are also narrative points that can coexist.

We have yet to see Mara come back and speak for herself. I doubt she’ll apologise for slaughtering Eliksni. We’ll have to deal with her when she is actually a relevant character in the story again. It makes no sense to bring up Mara’s war crimes when Mara isn’t even here. Mara isn’t the one arguing with Mithrax on comms, Saint is. Which is why this season focused on Saint’s war crimes.

s14’s crusades are mentioned one (1) time by name in D1 (The City Age grimoire card — “Saint-14’s crusade against the Fallen”) and once by event in Legend: Saint-14 (“The Devils without a Kell. This war was over, at last. They could finally go home.”) which sounds a lot like s14 was aiming for the kells

This book was published in 2018 and features many lore tabs back from D1.

D1 canon was incomplete. It’s a part of an ongoing story. We didn’t have all the pieces from the beggining. In D1, we had some information. That information expanded. And it didn’t expand out of character. The Crusade was hinted at from the start. We just received details over the course of time because it’s an ongoing story.

They aren’t ignoring stuff from D1, it’s literally been acknowledged. Yes, he killed Kells. We’ve also learned that he targeted the Eliksni in general to the point where they have a culturally ingrained story of a monster in his image.

Hell, Saint wasn’t even alive until Season of Dawn. We’ve received a lot of previously unknown Saint lore since he returned from the dead. Because, y'know, he is now alive and can tell us himself. On a side-note, his return from the dead has been hinted at since D1 and only happened in Y3 of D2.

There’s a difference between canon being changed or ignored and the story expanding beyond what we, as players, knew from the beginning. Bungie didn’t dump the entire history of Saint-14 on us in 2014.

@zapperthecat I am aware that Mara’s crimes have yet to be fully addressed, but that’s something for a future storyline that focuses on Mara. She hasn’t been in the story properly since The Taken King. She had a few lines in Season of the Hunt announcing her return. We’ll have to wait for that to see whether her crimes will be glossed over or not.

if you feel the new lore is consistent with the old — or if you just like it better — more power to you! to be fair, this is one place where the new lore is just contradicting the implication of the old lore, rather than stuff that was explicitly stated (see: Wolves enslavement, Rasputin subminds, who built Prison of Elders, when Variks defected, etc etc). you’re right, it didn’t have s14 explicitly saying “yep i’m just going for the kells and ignoring the babies”, it just heavily implied it.

I also don’t like the arbitrary division of lore into “old” and “new” and the implication that one is better than the other. All lore is LORE. Sometimes implications established in season 1 will be either confirmed or denied in season 10. It doesn’t necessarily mean anything was retconned; we just didn’t have all the information that the writers have.

I believe in this case it’s very consistent as multiple lore pieces for the past years have referred to the “Crusade of Saint-14” as something very violent. With each new lore, we’ve gotten extra bits and pieces of information that paint the whole picture. And the whole picture is that Saint has been killing Eliksni indiscriminately.

This can obviously be upsetting. I love Saint-14 and him having a past so violent is rightfully upsetting, but it’s something we have to accept because otherwise we’re ignoring the entire point of his character development and growth.

You can dislike the direction of the story without calling it a retcon. I personally think that the direction of the story is very compelling, especially in the case of Saint-14 who is seen as a beloved figure by humanity, but as a monster by the Eliksni. Upon learning about this, Saint is rightfully shaken to his core and vows to do better. There is nothing objectively inconsistent about that, nor is it a retcon.

@thefirstknife The amount of research we’ve done regarding eliksni lore showcased to us, at least, that there was a very clear shift between D1 eliksni lore and D2 eliksni lore. Forsaken, for example, was a big turning point in eliksni lore, ranging from big things like the Wolves slavery retcon to the Prison of Elders being a collaboration between the Wolves and the Reef rather than being Mara’s preexisting trophy collection. Variks’s characterization change might not be a definitive retcon, but it’s certainly jarring for him to shift from grimly pretending loyalty for survival, to being the Sovs’ weird... butler. Skolas’s final speech to Mara was also incredibly confusing to read in the light of everything related to the Scatter.

I have admittedly little to no attachment to Saint-14′s lore. It’s an interesting insight into the early City Age and the aftermath of Twilight Gap. It’s not significantly more violent or disturbing than anything else warriors do in Destiny. In fact, as you can see in my original post, I am proposing that the lore could be made far more disturbing if certain elements in the D1 lore are acknowledged. 

For example, the superior firepower of the Houses, and the Devils in particular, up until D1 has been completely ignored in this new lore, as has their policy of “shoot on sight” for humans (which we got elaboration on even in D2 in the Ghost Stories lore, so hey, intra-D2 inconsistencies). Their living sacrifices to their Prime, the piles of human skeletons we see in the Devils’ lair, the way the Devils would hunt people down, even tiny, harmless groups of survivors such as Amanda’s family. It’s just... not addressed. Not even by Saint, who by all rights should be talking about it. The unprovoked death and destruction that drove Saint to hunting the eliksni is simplified to ‘I SAW THEM EAT BABIES’ (and by House Rain, a House of prophecy that was, according to Variks, who didn’t have a reason to lie, very, uh, dead), only for that statement to be retracted mere months later.

Which is it, Bungie? Was there a communication breakdown between your writing team and now you’re backpedalling to compensate? At least give me a complete timeline!

There’s the very clear goal of ‘eliksni allies’ and I can appreciate that, but it’s quite clumsily done. This should be fraught and messy, but the current writing direction has made it feel peculiarly sanitized. Like they very much do not want to write a complicated, imbalanced reconciliation narrative.

And regarding Mara, her future storyline isn’t the issue: it's a fact that we’ve already gotten D2 canon stating that the Prison of Elders was a collaboration between the Wolves and the Reef, contradicting Mara’s D1 ownership. We’ve got D2 canon that says they were peacefully gifting amethysts to the archons as equals. That’s at least 50 years of Mara’s autocratic rule over the Wolves (chained wolves, Variks and Skolas were both very clear on that matter in D1) just… gone? Into some lore black hole? A matter that was a large aspect of the Last City’s relation with the eliksni, and particularly in the House of Wolves DLC, has been completely overwritten.

Before the Great Delete:

Twitter: Link

Pillowfort: Link

Simplified, of course, as this doesn’t take into account characters like Grayor or Resilient title Dregs and Vandals. Higher and Lower Barony are also entirely theoretical, as are High Priests. All the original Houses seem to be meritocracies with a good heaping of theocracy. The SIVA House of Devils is a full theocracy lead by Archon Prime (Aksor), Archpriest (Vosik) and the SIVA corrupted Sepiks Perfected.