Who Was I?
“Guardians aren’t supposed to investigate their past, that’s the rule.”
Yesterday was the reveal of the next Destiny 2 expansion, Warmind. I have to say that I’m a bit disappointed in the DLC’s title, but that’s a complaint for another entry. What’s rolling around in my head right now isn’t the new space we’re going to inhabit or the new armor and weapons and other goodies that are in store. No. What’s keeping me awake is the first line of the trailer, spoken by Ana Bray (or Anastasia Bray if you’re nasty): Guardians aren’t supposed to investigate their past, that’s the rule.
Not once in the years of playing Destiny did it ever occur to me that I was somebody during the years of the Golden Age or the horrors of The Collapse. I was a person. I had a life. And all of that was snuffed out when the agents of The Darkness came to destroy everything that we had built. I ceased to be, for a time anyway. Then one day, my Ghost found me among the numerous dead and brought me back from the hereafter to defend the last vestiges of humanity from extinction. Why? Why was I chosen? Was there something special about me back then? Did I do something amazing? Or did I just have the right connections? If I’m not allowed to investigate who I was, I’ll never know.
Resurrected for what purpose? To be another killing machine for The Traveler? And who is it that makes this rule that we aren’t supposed to investigate our past? And more importantly, I find it hard to swallow that any information from the Golden Age about Joe Smith is on file anywhere in the ruins of the present, so why even make this rule in the first place? I believe someone else, someone powerful, had something to say about the past recently which has also been rolling around in my head for weeks:
Let the past die. Kill it, if you have to. That’s the only way to become what you were meant to be.
Maybe not knowing who/what I was in my past is for the best and letting it go is a good thing. Maybe being chosen by The Traveler and Ghost is a form of redemption of past sins. Maybe all of the Destiny universe is actually Purgatory after a fashion.
Maybe in all these variant universes, there’s information on who I was……
And maybe I shouldn’t take video game trailers so seriously. Goodnight.