It was odd that I noticed with Sundance, is that once she appeared and Cayde asks if that’s her, she responds with “I am what you want me to be” sorta implies that she’s taking that form. Always thought that it was the Gardner speaking through her image.
Absolutely. I think this is further backed up by the Ergo Sum lore, which is very obviously from the Traveler's perspective. It paints the Traveler as a sad being that just wants to reach out to others, and share the burden they carry or at least warn them of The Witness and other incoming threats, but it can't. If we keep this in mind, and we acknowledge that “I am what you want me to be” implies it's not Sundance, isn't it strange that """Sundance""" doesn't thank the Guardians for constantly fighting for it? or cry out in pain and agony, and beg Cayde to get us to save it? That vision also doesn't line up with the kinds of visions that The Witness was giving to the rest of the Vanguard, so it can't be them. The only other possible being it could be is The Gardener. Edit: this was written before I got to the bit where he acknowledged Ergo Sum in the video lol
Yeah, I don’t buy this and I don’t think there’s any proof of it. A better explanation is that it’s just the nature of the Pale Heart itself. We already know it is memory and consciousness given form, and that everything inside is a reflection of the outside. We also see that this inside only relates to those who have traveled in. We can thus surmise that it wasn’t the gardener at all, just Cayde’s memory of Sundance given form by the darkness inside the pale heart. That’s what everything inside the pale heart is: memory and desire made reality by the light. Darkness is tied to memory and light to reality. It is really quite simply stated in the lore. Sundance and everything inside the pale heart that *did not come from the outside* was created due to someone’s memory, not any agency or deliberate action by the gardener/traveler.
The Eliksni do call the Traveler the "Great Machine" and it wouldn't make sense for a fundamental force of reality to be subject to Ghaul's cage and Almighty, Rasputin's lasers, and other physical threats. Moreover the Winnower did used literal orbs to communicate with Eris and the Moon colonizers, so could the Traveler be the same, just a mechanism of communion for us 3d beings with the Gardener?
That's always been my take. Even Toland makes reference to "ideas that can't be expressed in the language of little gray cells" so assuming he's right there are things that aren't even on the level of the G+W that are just beyond us. With the Gardener and Winnower I assume their true forms are probably too incomprehensible and information-dense for us to interact with directly, so we use their physical proxies and their paracausal energies instead.
Even calling it a machine is a stretch since it’s just gray matter and energy. Also, the Eliksni view machines as having souls and are equally as alive as we. Maybe the Traveler is a form of life that’s so removed from us that it could only be made by the Gardener? An Avatar or deity made in flesh?
What if the reason the Gardener and Winniwercan't interact with us directly and always have to go through intermediaries (The Traveller, the Lunar Pyramid artifact) is because one of the original rules of the Flower Game is still somewhat in effect? "The only play permitted in the game is the arrangement of the initial flowers." This could possibly explain it. When the rules changed the Winnower said "And thus we two became parts of the game, and the laws of the game became nomic and open to change by our influence." So the rules can be changed, which they did by making the Gardener and Winnower a part of the game and thus creating the powers of Light and Dark, but at the end of the day, they're still just playing the Flower Game, just with a modified ruleset. They're not playing a different game entirely so the original rules must somewhat still apply, they cannot act too directly, they can only influence the pieces that are already in play, like playing a real time strategy or a tower defence game instead of a game where you act as a main character
A theory I don't see a lot, but I really like the idea of, is that both light and darkness are extensions of the "rule" created by the gardener joining the game. Given the nature of Strand, it doesn't really seem like darkness is the "rule" created by the winnower joining the game, and it is possible an intentional bit of misdirection that the dichotomy of light and darkness had been seen as synonymous with the dichotomy of the winnower and the traveler. Given that we hear so much about how the separation of light and dark is "false," the implications in the design of the veil and traveler, as well as the lore of prismatic, that the two forces once fit together, and the philosophies presented for the gardener and winnower, both darkness and the light could both come from the gardener, and rejoining them is why this is the "end of the light vs dark saga." Instead, the winnower's rule is the sword logic, like the actual tangible force that we see wielded by the hive, and occasionally other characters, that mechanically supports the winners ideal of only the strongest deserving a place in reality, and weakness being culled. One could extrapolate from the winnower saying "take what you want instead of building it yourself" and the travelers memories describing a severing briefly after it enters the universe to support the idea that the winnower is responsible for possibly severing the Gardner as it entered the universe, splitting its mind and body into the veil and traveler, which resulted in the two forces being separate but "eternally linked." The only reason the "forces of darkness" were the antagonists at the start was because the witness, as the first knife, had managed to coopt the darkness to serve the final shape, with stasis being witness brand darkness^tm that was used to try and corrupt others to its side. I think the winnower saying "in light or in dark, someone is always making my choice," could imply that it is outside of the schism of light and dark, and potentially even that pitting them against each other was a ploy to weaken the gardeners philosophy. At the very least, it would be a neat twist if it turns out that linking the veil and traveler is actually allowing the gardener itself to regain purchase in reality.
oh my i really like this idea! very cool theory i hadn't really thought about but it does make a certain amount of sense. (Though i think there's still the issue of the winnower/witness seeming to affect things through the veil, and the gardener through the traveller, and we don't really see it other way around)
@@HoneyDoll894 If this is close to the actual cannon, I think the patch for that issue would be that the veil connects all consciousness in the universe through strand, including the winnowers consciousness wherever it might be in the ascendent realm or otherwise. So, when the precursors found the veil and used it to ask a greater power for an answer, the winnower was able to reach them through it and respond, coopting the Gardners design instead of making something itself. The main lore justification for this is the one where "a voice calls out through the darkness 'what is the answering another responds 'here, I will tell you'" implying that the witness did commune with the witness through the darkness/veil initially, but from there the witness was the only one "wielding" the darkness, and was the one to offer stasis to eramis and the guardian, successfully corrupting the guardians and eris in Elsie bray's original timeline. Arguably, we've never actual seen the winnower act through the darkness besides that, only the witness who was actually made by/using the veil. The winnower has only definitively appeared in three contexts so far: 1. When oryx killed (yul?) the liar worm God and took its power through the sword logic to make the tablets with the knowledge to summon the deep. 2. In the unveiling lore book, which was translated by eris and has been implied out of game to be the witnesses retelling of a religious text, presumably given to it by the winnower. 3. In the new ship, presumably in direct communion with the guardian? As a result of killing the witness? Which could support that the guardian did, in some way, embody the sword logic by killing the witness and earning an audience with the deep as oryx once did, but this is one of those things where the place it comes from gives it a questionable place in universe. Like, is it talking to the player directly, or did this happen in game in the same way that the books of sorrow and unveiling translations did. That said, the two definitely in universe translations do come from eris, which she is able to do presumably because of her hive knowledge, and if all this is true it would help reinforce the connection that oryx is the second closest to the winnower after the witness, which is weird if we assume that the order of opponents the guardian has faced is by power level, but arguably Oryx was stronger than a lot of enemies that were faced after him. Again, if this is right, it would be interesting to comb the lore and see how often if ever "hive magic" is explicitly referred to as the darkness. I think if this theory ends up being true, it has probably been flip/floped on a little bit over the years by the writing team, especially in d1 and early d2 where even they seemed not to know what the darkness actually was. That said, i think that "the sword logic" and "hive magic" are generally referred to separately from "the darkness" most of the time. I'm pretty sure that the espically important example for this case is how in season of the witch, where everyone treated eris as being crazy for using hive Rituals and the sword logic in an era where Osiris was actively studying the veil and wielding strand alongside guardians with access to two dark subclasses. I don't remember anyone being like "this is the darkness, but not the good kind" it seems like it's own different thing as a source of power in the lore, in the same category as the power to take, which is also something that seems to be separate from the witness since the taken are still around even though the witness is now dead.
I see the traveler as a toy the Gardener dropped in the flower game. But also how she communicates to our world. Kind of like how the winnower uses the veil to communicate to our universe.
Halo would have been the golden age as Bungie was pretty niche prior. The collapse would have been risking disembarking on their own (or higher upmismanagement).
i think the silence of the gardener has much more to do with the nature of light and dark. darkness (as far as im aware) is deeply connected to minds and consciousness, and the light is connected to physical manifestations. the light and the dark, are the channels the gardener and winnower use to communicate. this to me explains why the winnower is such a yapper, but we've never actually seen him manifest anything, really. the winnower persuades and guides a mind towards his philosophy, as we see him try with us time and time again. the winnowers first knife wasnt even made by his own hand, he just talked it into being, consciously or subconsciously. idk enough precursor lore to know if the winnower directly talked to them, as it did us. but we DO know from nacre his offer comes to everything that exists, and so they were guided towards the purpose of becoming the winnower's knife, carving unnecessary life out of reality. a flawed thesis statement of the winnowers philosophy (flawed cause the 2 dont align perfectly). meanwhile, look at the gardener, look at the traveler, and we see something completely different. it communicates using pure experiences, to communicate emotion, situations, etc... even if its through dreams, the physical sensations are whats important. after all, a whisper in your mind is not the same as the physical vibration of a sound wave. there are loopholes, like sundance in the cutscene. hell, id even say cayde 6 being here (fuck it, even the speakers!!) are all loopholes to give the gardener a voice she doesnt truly have (and they have the flaw of misinterpretation). all she has is the light as her medium: she manifested our sword, she manifested our ghosts, she manifested countless amounts of life, of physical matter for life to use for their own purpose. all with expectation that, with diversity and true freedom, the civilizations she blessed could thrive and be happy, and therefore be living by her philosophy. in that way, we have become the gardeners thesis statement. not her knife, but her flower. making our own fate is exactly what the gardener wants, even though that serves the risk of us making our fate to serve the winnower (as happened with the precursors). but think about the guardian tenets: devotion, bravery, sacrifice, death. theres a reason death is there, and why its emphasized in the cutscene with cayde. if we are to truly live by the gardeners philosophy, we cannot live to be the final shape. not in the slightest. what the gardener wants is for us to give our entire LIVES towards protecting those weaker than us. those lightless humans and eliksni in the city. the forces of empress caitl. preserving diversity in life, through those core tenets. and with the defeat of the witness, we have shown that while a knife can cut through a flower, a whole garden can break that knife. and every second we let a a being weaker than us live, we are actively objecting against the winnower and its logic. theres also a whole lot to say on the idea of us KILLING OTHERS (who are again, weaker than us) to protect those weaker than us, as it puts us in a place between the bomb and sword logic, but i have already spent a fuckton of time writing this. and also theres alot of difference between killing to protect an ally and ourselves, and killing with intent to become stronger and eventually winnow all life, like the hive. gonna conclude by saying i dont think the gardener and/or winnower are things we *can* kill in destiny with guns or swords or crazy super powers, not even with raid mechanics. while the lore has shown that they both do have experiences, they do have thoughts (and therefore minds) and maybe have bodies or physical manifestations (i personally thought the traveler and veil were their physical forms but now i question it), thats clearly not the only thing they are. they are world views, beliefs, philosophies. yeah maybe you can blow up the veil and (mayybe) the winnower with it, but you cant kill his logic. THAT IS what's most important. what we can do instead is kill those who naively believe in their strength/ability to kill us, and protect those who dont. good video
I don't think the Traveler = Gardener. According to Nacre, it seems neither the Winnower nor Gardener are restricted to the Darkness or Light. Indeed, this is foreshadowed in Unveiling, The Final Shape ("The gardener kneeled to flick a patch of sod with their trowel. It struck an open flower, causing it to shut. Although I was the closer of flowers and that was my sole purpose, I felt no fear or jealousy. We had our assigned dominions and always would.") To borrow from Gnostic lore, I think it's more accurate to say the Traveler is an emanation, an incarnation, of the Gardener. A trough. Just as each Ghost is just a small fragment of the Traveler, I think the Traveler is a "Ghost" of the Gardener, a small part of a greater whole. In our conversations with Luzaku, she speaks of the Gardener almost as though it's related to, but separate from, the Traveler. Ghost "corrects" her, saying, "You mean the Traveler... right?"
I think this is just about correct. In Magic The Gathering there are a race of beings called the Eldrazi and they are seen as forces of nature, destructive but not entirely malicious. They have 3d representations in the form of Titans. In one of the story beats its explained that what we see as Eldrazi is akin to a fish seeing you put your finger in the water, the fish sees your fingertip and assumes it is all there is of you, but outside the water the fingertip is attached to the hand and arm and body of a much larger physical entity. Combining that idea with a lot of the nods to meta physics and philosophy in Salvations Edge I think the Gardener and Winnower are very similar. Of course the writers are the only ones who truly know and I'm not sure if they even know at this point.
I’m convinced the story for the final shape was different from what we got and the more I hear theories and lore the more I’m convinced it was also cooler than what we got.
“The best voices,” she said, with infinite grief and unending hope, “never let themselves be heard at all. This lesson is worth teaching again and again. The choice is never mine. It is always yours.”
Good stuff! I think my biggest takeaway from TFS, especially with the first knife idea is that its not that the flower game was history - is that we are in-fact living in it and its just the middle act!
5:41 On a stream recently, I said t hat the winnower and gardener weren't characters, or at least characters couldn't get invested in due to how grand in scale they were. However, listening to this has convinced me that there is a lot of richness we can get out of them if they were included in more in game story and had actually dialogue. The gardener is selfish, however when it counts she makes the ultimate sacrifice. The winnower on the other hand is extremely charasmatic, sweet talking, and concerned with fairness, but he is extremely self centered and would never sacrifice for us. Those who believe in him do so because he is right, not because he is loving.
I see the Traveler as what is effectively the player character for the Gardener, as you say to directly interact with the universe. But I also think that Unveiling was just being honest in regards to what the Gardener and Winnower are now; the Light and the Darkness, the paracausal powers themselves. I also agree with you on the secret fourth option for why it didn't speak to us directly (except Cayde, it was a good loophole and Sundance was 100% the Gardener in that cutscenes to me). The silence is inherently the point of the Light, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have preferences or desires or things it wants to tell us. The two aren't mutually exclusive, even if it is frustrating for everyone involved. The only thing I disagree on slightly is that the Gardener was acting selfish for introducing both of them into the Flower Game. At the very least, I think that's entirely subjective. On the one hand, it did bring suffering to a game that likely didn't even have the concept of consciousness to begin with (since that's tied to Darkness, which is paracausal and wasn't in the universe before the new rules) and only a conscious being can truly suffer. On the other hand, now the things born in the game have a say in their own fates, can make some of their own choices, and don't have to blindly/perfectly follow the Winnower's logic. But those are just my thoughts.
i agree with you about the gardener not being selfish really, but i very much disagree about taking the flowergame literally. like of course its not really something you can prove, and maybe some of the lore like patternfall nudges things into that direction, but i really think the flowergame is actually a metaphor and not just literal non thinking flowers. like that they are actually universes with different creatures and beings that like in the real world have thoughts and emotions and feelings and the traveller didn't bring pain into the universe. To be honest it's pretty obvious that both the winnower and witness have the same concept of suffering, which is basically meaningless existence, which is like the universal philosophical question. Because when you start asking the question about the meaning of life, that's when it truly becomes meaningless, but it doesn't have to be so. Both the winnower and witness cause great suffering across the universe, far more suffering than what the gardener's ideology requires
@HoneyDoll894 I don't think the Flower Game is or should be taken literally, I never said that. I'm actually not sure at all what you're talking about for that part.
@@MelancholicBodhisattva i think i misunderstood what you said a little bit, but I don't think being conscious or the ability to experience pain is paracausal. if you refer to that time where the winnower says it designed our minds and consciousness i think thats spesifically referring to evolution and humans which is what lead to them being a thing (and i think it considers evolution as part of sword logic)
@HoneyDoll894 see, I disagree about that. It's evident from Unveiling and quite a few other pieces of lore that the Flower Game/ the universe before paracausality was a significantly different place to what it is now, and not just because of paracausality. The fight between the Gardener and the Winnower in the Garden broke fundamental symmetries, symmetries that likely are referencing the ones that generated the 4 fundamental forces of reality that used to be a single perfect one before they split. There's references to how their fight caused unique inflationary volumes and separate timelines for each infant universe, how the "shockwaves" of their blows were what allowed dark matter to flow into filaments that were the beginnings of galaxies. And with Micah-10 and the Travelers' memories, there's now two references of the true birth of time, the one talking about how there was a difference now between what is and what was. All of these things are spoken about like they've never happened before in the game, that they came about only because of the fight and paracausality being introduced. That leads me to believe that a universe that didn't have 4 fundamental forces but a single super force, didn't have time but was likely fully causally deterministic, didn't have galaxies, etc, life was fundamentally different from what we would consider it now. In fact, since Bungie is doubling down on the Vex being the OG final shape of the Flower Game thanks to the message from the Winnower, we can make a decent guess that all life back then were very similar to the Vex. And according to the lore, the Vex can influence themselves in the present from both the past and future, are not conscious, don't feel pain in any significant way, and they don't have the ability to make their own choices, just whatever is naturally most efficient. I really don't think it's a stretch in the least to say life in the Garden wasn't conscious nor had any degree of free will. I'd say I need quite a bit of evidence to prove the opposite since the evidence that I see points to these conclusions.
@@MelancholicBodhisattva you might be right, but do note that the winnower also says that life would suffer if they changed the rules, which means that it already considered at least philosophical suffering possible in the flowergame
I take "the end of the Light and Darkness saga" as meaning no more darkness as an enemy. This saga in the end was about the traveler a light user vs the witness a darkness user and ended with the witness dying and the traveler changed to a hybrid being of light and dark. This saga established the light and darkness as forces like gravity or radiation. Imho as you can't eliminate gravity from the universe you can't eliminate the dark or the light from the destiny universe. The wills behind these forces are in a competition with "the game" but they aren't in a "war" they aren't trying to destroy each other, most likely that isn't even a possibility. Imo whatever happens to the traveler doesn't affect the gardener at all. You can break someone's keyboard, they will be angry at you, they will lose the match, they will need a new keyboard to play again tomorrow but they won't be fiscally harmed. This is how I see it. The winnower won't be our enemy, he is not a god for us to kill, he is not trying to destroy the last city or the Earth. He is like a guy watching a football match and doing sports bets. If we take the "final shape" as the end result of the match. The witness's final shape is a loss for him. That final shape is different from the original, the one that he wants to see again. So imo this was the end of the saga because we guardians and the traveler are no longer the "light" army. We are now representing both sides. So what follows is the winnower talking with us so in the end we follow his path. Maybe something like converting Guardians to Crusaders. Leaving behind the "protect humanity and the city" to focus in "destroying what lays outside our domain" something like that will please the winnower. Also from the original 4 races only the hive had darkness powers, the other 3 were only "normal" aliens so in this new saga we won't be fighting "the darkness" anymore. So like in the beginning we will fight individuals and groups that oppose us It doesn't matter if they have light like Savathun's brood, the new powers of the echoes or something totally different. To me that is the future of destiny, new enemies with known or unknown powers and the winnower and the gardener being with us not against us.
Gardener and Winnower = Husband and Wife. The biblical allusions have me thinking about the comparisons to Adam and Eve. The tree of knowledge and once sin entered the picture it led to the separation or the disunity between husband and wife. Looking at Destiny through a biblical theological lens, it makes me think perhaps some of the same beats happened in the unveiling story.
Me personally I think it was the traveler talking through the guise of sundance to cayde and all the visions/memories are the travelers own, the bit that gets me is in the iconoclasm mission you hear one of the dissenters hint at the idea that the gardener is imprisoned somewhere
It was promoted as the end to the Light and Dark saga but in playing TFS it’s actually the end of the Light vs Dark saga. No more reverence of the holy light and fear of the bad darkness.
I never thought the Traveler was the Gardener, it just doesn't make sense. If the entity that created the entire universe was too weak to fight off Nezarec's fleet and the Witness, both of which are infinitely weaker than the entire universe, it would be a paradox. To think about it, perhaps Winnower and Gardener don't have to be singular entities: their being permeates the entire universe, where Light creates Material world and Darkness creates Ascendent plane. Maybe they spread themselves during the creation for the universe to appear. That's why everyone is one in the Light, that's why Darkness remembers: when we come back to them, we become part of them, like we used to be before we were created
I see the Gardener and Winnower as ideas that exist on a higher plane, not as physical entities. Metaphor and what not. The idea made the Traveler and the Traveler carries out those ideas, but the physical shell of the Traveler is not the Gardener, much the same as the Witness was not the Winnower. In a higher plane, the Gardener and Winnower exist.
Just wanted to say thank you for making this video. I have been waiting for a creator to cover this topic since TFS came out and this really covered questions I had. I feel more at ease and excited at the future going forward. Amazing video and can’t wait to see wait you make in the future!
Just because the Light vs Dark saga is over doesnt mean we wont get more on the Gardener. The Winnower is clearly being built up to. But remember its not Light vs Dark anymore its Light and Dark, in unison. No doubt there have been retcons but the recent lore show that Bungie acknowledges the old lore
10 years deep literally INSIDE the traveler and instead of giving us cutscenes or in game interactions denoting important lore and developments we once again get very esoteric dialogue through comms. Hope everyone has fun in this next saga.
Another fantastic video. I agree with the assessment of why the writers didn't include the Gardener or the Winnower in the campaign story. Was I a little disappointed? Sure. But it made sense from a narrative perspective focusing on the end of a saga and the culmination of 10 years of gameplay story telling to not include effectively background characters to move focus away from the characters and plot that needed to be told to the audience. They did a wonderful job putting a ribbon on the story, and setting the stage for more to come, and I don't think we've seen or heard the last of the Gardener or the Winnower.
The Gardener (her) spoke to us in the Quest "Visions of the light" on IO after the red war. The Traveler spoke to us with a high female Voice. Ask us for Help and quoted the Guardian tenets. I dont know any thing more about her but I believe like Osiris said that Light and Dark are one and the same force. Traveler and Veil as one being. The Traveler as the body and the veil his mind. So maybe the flower game is just a tale a metaphor?
You are dead right about that. The main reason I didn't add it was because it wasn't made clear that it was the Gardener rather than the Traveler, but that being said I included the convo with Cayde so it should have counted.
@@Venextron Well Traveler/Gardener...its difficult to say yea. Ikora said in the quest "The Traveler spoke to you and only you were allowed to hear its voice" So yea maybe it was her Voice... Some said it was the light .. But wheres the difference? As Osiris said: the Veil is a physical Manifestation of the power over the mind. So the Traveler is a Manifestation over the physical??
So frustrating. Once again the freaking Darkness side gets anything big first. They got pyramid ship in collector edition as playable while we dont have traveler ship even now (dont cap we can get a freaking space rock and a car as a ship), they get the winnower confirmation first also while we removed the witness from the pale heart and just get a white screen again.
im really interested to see how they explain darkness connection to memories a little more, how it seems in the lore now it feels like the dark represents memory while the light represents a fresh start, but the gardener clearly has some memory (ergo sum tab, etc) it just doesn't seem to be structured the same as we are used to memories being structured. Will the introduction of darkness to the traveler and possibly gardener make her remember more details? your point about the darkness changing the traveler/gardener is really interesting as now we have the gardener being affected by darkness, but winnower isn't necessarily affected by light? theres a lot for bungie to play with
Really good video! Your interpretation of the Gardener creating the Ghosts and became fractured makes a lot of sense, and makes a lot more sense when it’s compared to Gnosticism. Great breakdown, always enjoy your videos :)
About the changed pale heart, bungie said somewhere ( maybe in one of their videos ) that we will get to see a pure traveler/pale heart. Maybe its one of the pre-final shape vid. However, they did not tell us what that exactly means. Does it mean when we finish an overthrow and the area is 'clear/pure'? Does that mean the landscapes combine themselves and the monolith is gone so is the witness memories(probably not,wasted asset)? Does that mean the monolith will be gone? I can't find a good enough answer without removing the dark part of the map and with it there is no way that means a pure pale heart.
Thoughts on the friendly Hive lady called The Traveler "The Gardner" during the campaign? Ghost corrected her, she didn't....exactly deny his correction, but didn't confirm it either?
I think some lines from the Lucent Hive Witch Luzaku has her using the name “Gardener” almost synonymous with Traveler. As for the Traveler’s origins, we do know where it came from. In D2 Y1 during the subclass quest for voidwalkers we have nameless dialogue being played, which we now can recognize as Toland who is talking. Toland says that the Traveler came from the Void. (Maybe by extension the Veil too) And now in TFS, we have a nightfall gun called Scintillation with a quote from Toland: “A Paltry Echo of the Ascendant Plane.” Scintillation is the flashing and sparkle of light via chemical reaction. The Ascendant Plane, Sea of Screams, The Void, whatever you want to call it has the answers. (Another dub for Toland and Bad Juju enjoyers!)
@@jockeelly and it was using the Void to travel when it can fly thru space with ease and with no concern for time? The difference doesn’t matter. Its origin is not of our world.
Nah, the Ascendant Plane is an aspect of Darkness, and the Void is confirmed to be a form of Light. They're 100% not the same thing, even if they are both mysterious.
@@MelancholicBodhisattva Void is light but it behaves like Darkness and was the closest thing we had to Darkness for a while (also mentioned in the quest). It breaks things down by making them Volatile and Weak and whatever’s left is Devoured to make us strong. Sounds like a familiar logic. Either way, the Ascendant plane is more of an empty space. Even if it was pure Darkness, remember that the Traveler was originally one with the Veil, the avatar of Darkness.
There was dialogue in tfs that stated the gardener and traveler were “one and the same”. I’m desperately hoping that means the veil is in some way intrinsically linked to the Veil, which we heard even less about this far. These episodes had better not just be a means to move on. I need answers.
"I'm what you wanted me to be" is such a weird line to me and could have so many implications. At first I thought it was the Witness since that line seems so out of place. Maybe now it is the Gardener, recollecting sundances personality to speak to cayde Also the Gardener not wanting to speak to us is straight up refuted in the ergo sum lore Lastly, I still think the Winnower calling The Witness a stinky fossilised rock is just so funny to me
I feel that the new saga will focus significantly less on The Traveler. This chapter is now over. I think we will start getting more information on the Gardener and the Winnower, but not necessarily have them physically appear in the story. I feel there is a strong chance we will see the rising of a new Oryx-type entity that will follow closely the logic of the Winnower.
What about the Lucent Hive though? I was under the impression that there were new ghosts born for the hive. At least that’s what the cutscene of Savvy being resurrected appears to imply. Did the gardener sacrifice herself again? Or am I totally off about the hive ghosts. That’s the only thing that confuses me about this.
The Gardner doesn't communicate with us because she wants us to do our own thing. She doesn't want to influence us in ANY way. If she said anything, that might inspire us to do something. I know I'm being vague, but I have to use the broadest definitions of influence. She might express that she is in trouble and whether she asks us to defend her or not, we may feel compelled to do so, and she doesn't want that. So the best way to not influence us is to not communicate with us
But Micah's dialogues are the memories of the Traveler, not the Gardener. It wasn't the Gardener that was splitter herself apart to make the Ghosts, it was the Traveler. My theory is, instead, in the same way that the Traveler split itself apart to make the Ghosts, the Gardener had to split herself apart to make the Traveler and the Veil to give us Light and Darkness in order to change the outcome of the flower game. The Gardener and Winnower aren't light and darkness, but instead, bomb logic and sword logic. Edit: What I mean is, both light and darkness are from the Gardener. Before she added the "new rules" to the game, there was no paracausal powers in play. The Winnower's play is simply natural survival of the fittest, ie the Sword Logic.
I think there's also a secret 5th reason why the Gardener doesn't communicate with us after the Witness was defeated: She didn't need to. The universe was no longer under threat, or at least, not any threat her creations couldn't handle independently.
Honestly, I disagree with the idea that Bungie is setting up the Winnower as the next big threat. If anything, I feel the opposite. The few snippets of lore we get tells us that it’s simply sitting in the background, observing. He isn’t some malevolent god wanting to destroy us, he even says that when we defend ourselves, we are enacting The Final Shape by proxy. That’s the difference between him and The Gardener. The Winnower observes, The Gardener intervenes. He has no quarrel with us, and honestly, why would we have a quarrel with it. The Winnower and The Gardener have become more than characters, they themselves have become rules of the universe itself. As long as there is life, there will always be conflict. So I don’t think our next big bad is just gonna be another god embodying Darkness, because we just did that. I think Bungie is gonna be experimenting and pushing us towards something new.
Saying this campaign is a 9 out of 10 is laughable. This campaign was on the same comparable base of the Red War. It's decently good but almost all the real storyline comes out of the after campaign quests and encounters. Unfortunately most of the playerbase (and especially content creators because their lively hood really depends on it, after the year plus long run of the game being in its worst spot ever) is looking at the expansion (even though we've barely scratched the surface of it, so far) through misguided rose colored glasses because it isn't sucking as bad as it's been the past 2 seasons. Hopefully things get better for the game, but the Echoes model seems to look like it'll be the same ole,, same ole slow downturn again.
the problem of you guys is that you doesnt really want a cohesive plot with themes and characters, you want all the mystery they are building up answered otherwise its trash
I think that the story is pretty slow to get going, but once the gang is reassembled the last parts of it are really good. I think the writers, knowing this is the Biiiig Finale wanted to give each of the characters a bit of room to breathe and be them, and I think it worked pretty well. It was never going to be perfect, no art is, but if we take a 5/10 to be an average game (which we really should, people seem to think average is 7 or 8 out of 10), then I think a 9 is a pretty accurate place to put Final Shape. In my opinion, it’s very good, and I love a lot about it besides the main story, but it’s also up to opinion and it’s okay to have a different one.
@@isaaclevi1487I think this might be a little uncharitable. Yes, I think people had expectations going in about what we might see or hear or learn, but I don’t think they want EVERY mystery solved or shown. I think most mystery enjoyers know that the best mysteries are the ones that raise more questions than they answer.
It was odd that I noticed with Sundance, is that once she appeared and Cayde asks if that’s her, she responds with “I am what you want me to be” sorta implies that she’s taking that form.
Always thought that it was the Gardner speaking through her image.
That was sort of my interpretation of that as well.
Absolutely. I think this is further backed up by the Ergo Sum lore, which is very obviously from the Traveler's perspective.
It paints the Traveler as a sad being that just wants to reach out to others, and share the burden they carry or at least warn them of The Witness and other incoming threats, but it can't. If we keep this in mind, and we acknowledge that “I am what you want me to be” implies it's not Sundance, isn't it strange that """Sundance""" doesn't thank the Guardians for constantly fighting for it? or cry out in pain and agony, and beg Cayde to get us to save it? That vision also doesn't line up with the kinds of visions that The Witness was giving to the rest of the Vanguard, so it can't be them. The only other possible being it could be is The Gardener.
Edit: this was written before I got to the bit where he acknowledged Ergo Sum in the video lol
Yeah, I don’t buy this and I don’t think there’s any proof of it. A better explanation is that it’s just the nature of the Pale Heart itself. We already know it is memory and consciousness given form, and that everything inside is a reflection of the outside. We also see that this inside only relates to those who have traveled in.
We can thus surmise that it wasn’t the gardener at all, just Cayde’s memory of Sundance given form by the darkness inside the pale heart.
That’s what everything inside the pale heart is: memory and desire made reality by the light. Darkness is tied to memory and light to reality.
It is really quite simply stated in the lore. Sundance and everything inside the pale heart that *did not come from the outside* was created due to someone’s memory, not any agency or deliberate action by the gardener/traveler.
The Eliksni do call the Traveler the "Great Machine" and it wouldn't make sense for a fundamental force of reality to be subject to Ghaul's cage and Almighty, Rasputin's lasers, and other physical threats. Moreover the Winnower did used literal orbs to communicate with Eris and the Moon colonizers, so could the Traveler be the same, just a mechanism of communion for us 3d beings with the Gardener?
That's always been my take. Even Toland makes reference to "ideas that can't be expressed in the language of little gray cells" so assuming he's right there are things that aren't even on the level of the G+W that are just beyond us. With the Gardener and Winnower I assume their true forms are probably too incomprehensible and information-dense for us to interact with directly, so we use their physical proxies and their paracausal energies instead.
Even calling it a machine is a stretch since it’s just gray matter and energy. Also, the Eliksni view machines as having souls and are equally as alive as we. Maybe the Traveler is a form of life that’s so removed from us that it could only be made by the Gardener? An Avatar or deity made in flesh?
What if the reason the Gardener and Winniwercan't interact with us directly and always have to go through intermediaries (The Traveller, the Lunar Pyramid artifact) is because one of the original rules of the Flower Game is still somewhat in effect?
"The only play permitted in the game is the arrangement of the initial flowers."
This could possibly explain it. When the rules changed the Winnower said "And thus we two became parts of the game, and the laws of the game became nomic and open to change by our influence."
So the rules can be changed, which they did by making the Gardener and Winnower a part of the game and thus creating the powers of Light and Dark, but at the end of the day, they're still just playing the Flower Game, just with a modified ruleset. They're not playing a different game entirely so the original rules must somewhat still apply, they cannot act too directly, they can only influence the pieces that are already in play, like playing a real time strategy or a tower defence game instead of a game where you act as a main character
Almost like they’re both inside and outside our reality. Within and without simultaneously; like any paracausal God should be.
A theory I don't see a lot, but I really like the idea of, is that both light and darkness are extensions of the "rule" created by the gardener joining the game. Given the nature of Strand, it doesn't really seem like darkness is the "rule" created by the winnower joining the game, and it is possible an intentional bit of misdirection that the dichotomy of light and darkness had been seen as synonymous with the dichotomy of the winnower and the traveler.
Given that we hear so much about how the separation of light and dark is "false," the implications in the design of the veil and traveler, as well as the lore of prismatic, that the two forces once fit together, and the philosophies presented for the gardener and winnower, both darkness and the light could both come from the gardener, and rejoining them is why this is the "end of the light vs dark saga."
Instead, the winnower's rule is the sword logic, like the actual tangible force that we see wielded by the hive, and occasionally other characters, that mechanically supports the winners ideal of only the strongest deserving a place in reality, and weakness being culled. One could extrapolate from the winnower saying "take what you want instead of building it yourself" and the travelers memories describing a severing briefly after it enters the universe to support the idea that the winnower is responsible for possibly severing the Gardner as it entered the universe, splitting its mind and body into the veil and traveler, which resulted in the two forces being separate but "eternally linked."
The only reason the "forces of darkness" were the antagonists at the start was because the witness, as the first knife, had managed to coopt the darkness to serve the final shape, with stasis being witness brand darkness^tm that was used to try and corrupt others to its side.
I think the winnower saying "in light or in dark, someone is always making my choice," could imply that it is outside of the schism of light and dark, and potentially even that pitting them against each other was a ploy to weaken the gardeners philosophy. At the very least, it would be a neat twist if it turns out that linking the veil and traveler is actually allowing the gardener itself to regain purchase in reality.
oh my i really like this idea! very cool theory i hadn't really thought about but it does make a certain amount of sense. (Though i think there's still the issue of the winnower/witness seeming to affect things through the veil, and the gardener through the traveller, and we don't really see it other way around)
@@HoneyDoll894 If this is close to the actual cannon, I think the patch for that issue would be that the veil connects all consciousness in the universe through strand, including the winnowers consciousness wherever it might be in the ascendent realm or otherwise. So, when the precursors found the veil and used it to ask a greater power for an answer, the winnower was able to reach them through it and respond, coopting the Gardners design instead of making something itself. The main lore justification for this is the one where "a voice calls out through the darkness 'what is the answering another responds 'here, I will tell you'" implying that the witness did commune with the witness through the darkness/veil initially, but from there the witness was the only one "wielding" the darkness, and was the one to offer stasis to eramis and the guardian, successfully corrupting the guardians and eris in Elsie bray's original timeline.
Arguably, we've never actual seen the winnower act through the darkness besides that, only the witness who was actually made by/using the veil. The winnower has only definitively appeared in three contexts so far:
1. When oryx killed (yul?) the liar worm God and took its power through the sword logic to make the tablets with the knowledge to summon the deep.
2. In the unveiling lore book, which was translated by eris and has been implied out of game to be the witnesses retelling of a religious text, presumably given to it by the winnower.
3. In the new ship, presumably in direct communion with the guardian? As a result of killing the witness? Which could support that the guardian did, in some way, embody the sword logic by killing the witness and earning an audience with the deep as oryx once did, but this is one of those things where the place it comes from gives it a questionable place in universe. Like, is it talking to the player directly, or did this happen in game in the same way that the books of sorrow and unveiling translations did.
That said, the two definitely in universe translations do come from eris, which she is able to do presumably because of her hive knowledge, and if all this is true it would help reinforce the connection that oryx is the second closest to the winnower after the witness, which is weird if we assume that the order of opponents the guardian has faced is by power level, but arguably Oryx was stronger than a lot of enemies that were faced after him.
Again, if this is right, it would be interesting to comb the lore and see how often if ever "hive magic" is explicitly referred to as the darkness. I think if this theory ends up being true, it has probably been flip/floped on a little bit over the years by the writing team, especially in d1 and early d2 where even they seemed not to know what the darkness actually was. That said, i think that "the sword logic" and "hive magic" are generally referred to separately from "the darkness" most of the time. I'm pretty sure that the espically important example for this case is how in season of the witch, where everyone treated eris as being crazy for using hive Rituals and the sword logic in an era where Osiris was actively studying the veil and wielding strand alongside guardians with access to two dark subclasses. I don't remember anyone being like "this is the darkness, but not the good kind" it seems like it's own different thing as a source of power in the lore, in the same category as the power to take, which is also something that seems to be separate from the witness since the taken are still around even though the witness is now dead.
I see the traveler as a toy the Gardener dropped in the flower game. But also how she communicates to our world. Kind of like how the winnower uses the veil to communicate to our universe.
Bungie is the gardener. Halo was the first collapse. They changed the rules to avoid a repeat of death and starting over.
Halo would have been the golden age as Bungie was pretty niche prior. The collapse would have been risking disembarking on their own (or higher upmismanagement).
Reminds me of the story of marathon
😮
Oh shit it’s all a marathon reference durandal you clever bastard
i think the silence of the gardener has much more to do with the nature of light and dark. darkness (as far as im aware) is deeply connected to minds and consciousness, and the light is connected to physical manifestations. the light and the dark, are the channels the gardener and winnower use to communicate. this to me explains why the winnower is such a yapper, but we've never actually seen him manifest anything, really. the winnower persuades and guides a mind towards his philosophy, as we see him try with us time and time again. the winnowers first knife wasnt even made by his own hand, he just talked it into being, consciously or subconsciously. idk enough precursor lore to know if the winnower directly talked to them, as it did us. but we DO know from nacre his offer comes to everything that exists, and so they were guided towards the purpose of becoming the winnower's knife, carving unnecessary life out of reality. a flawed thesis statement of the winnowers philosophy (flawed cause the 2 dont align perfectly).
meanwhile, look at the gardener, look at the traveler, and we see something completely different. it communicates using pure experiences, to communicate emotion, situations, etc... even if its through dreams, the physical sensations are whats important. after all, a whisper in your mind is not the same as the physical vibration of a sound wave. there are loopholes, like sundance in the cutscene. hell, id even say cayde 6 being here (fuck it, even the speakers!!) are all loopholes to give the gardener a voice she doesnt truly have (and they have the flaw of misinterpretation). all she has is the light as her medium: she manifested our sword, she manifested our ghosts, she manifested countless amounts of life, of physical matter for life to use for their own purpose. all with expectation that, with diversity and true freedom, the civilizations she blessed could thrive and be happy, and therefore be living by her philosophy.
in that way, we have become the gardeners thesis statement. not her knife, but her flower. making our own fate is exactly what the gardener wants, even though that serves the risk of us making our fate to serve the winnower (as happened with the precursors). but think about the guardian tenets: devotion, bravery, sacrifice, death. theres a reason death is there, and why its emphasized in the cutscene with cayde. if we are to truly live by the gardeners philosophy, we cannot live to be the final shape. not in the slightest. what the gardener wants is for us to give our entire LIVES towards protecting those weaker than us. those lightless humans and eliksni in the city. the forces of empress caitl. preserving diversity in life, through those core tenets. and with the defeat of the witness, we have shown that while a knife can cut through a flower, a whole garden can break that knife. and every second we let a a being weaker than us live, we are actively objecting against the winnower and its logic.
theres also a whole lot to say on the idea of us KILLING OTHERS (who are again, weaker than us) to protect those weaker than us, as it puts us in a place between the bomb and sword logic, but i have already spent a fuckton of time writing this. and also theres alot of difference between killing to protect an ally and ourselves, and killing with intent to become stronger and eventually winnow all life, like the hive.
gonna conclude by saying i dont think the gardener and/or winnower are things we *can* kill in destiny with guns or swords or crazy super powers, not even with raid mechanics. while the lore has shown that they both do have experiences, they do have thoughts (and therefore minds) and maybe have bodies or physical manifestations (i personally thought the traveler and veil were their physical forms but now i question it), thats clearly not the only thing they are. they are world views, beliefs, philosophies. yeah maybe you can blow up the veil and (mayybe) the winnower with it, but you cant kill his logic. THAT IS what's most important. what we can do instead is kill those who naively believe in their strength/ability to kill us, and protect those who dont. good video
I don't think the Traveler = Gardener. According to Nacre, it seems neither the Winnower nor Gardener are restricted to the Darkness or Light. Indeed, this is foreshadowed in Unveiling, The Final Shape ("The gardener kneeled to flick a patch of sod with their trowel. It struck an open flower, causing it to shut. Although I was the closer of flowers and that was my sole purpose, I felt no fear or jealousy. We had our assigned dominions and always would.")
To borrow from Gnostic lore, I think it's more accurate to say the Traveler is an emanation, an incarnation, of the Gardener. A trough. Just as each Ghost is just a small fragment of the Traveler, I think the Traveler is a "Ghost" of the Gardener, a small part of a greater whole.
In our conversations with Luzaku, she speaks of the Gardener almost as though it's related to, but separate from, the Traveler. Ghost "corrects" her, saying, "You mean the Traveler... right?"
I think this is just about correct. In Magic The Gathering there are a race of beings called the Eldrazi and they are seen as forces of nature, destructive but not entirely malicious. They have 3d representations in the form of Titans. In one of the story beats its explained that what we see as Eldrazi is akin to a fish seeing you put your finger in the water, the fish sees your fingertip and assumes it is all there is of you, but outside the water the fingertip is attached to the hand and arm and body of a much larger physical entity.
Combining that idea with a lot of the nods to meta physics and philosophy in Salvations Edge I think the Gardener and Winnower are very similar.
Of course the writers are the only ones who truly know and I'm not sure if they even know at this point.
2:50 bro really had to do the Tormentor like that huh
I’m convinced the story for the final shape was different from what we got and the more I hear theories and lore the more I’m convinced it was also cooler than what we got.
“The best voices,” she said, with infinite grief and unending hope, “never let themselves be heard at all. This lesson is worth teaching again and again. The choice is never mine. It is always yours.”
Good stuff! I think my biggest takeaway from TFS, especially with the first knife idea is that its not that the flower game was history - is that we are in-fact living in it and its just the middle act!
5:41 On a stream recently, I said t hat the winnower and gardener weren't characters, or at least characters couldn't get invested in due to how grand in scale they were. However, listening to this has convinced me that there is a lot of richness we can get out of them if they were included in more in game story and had actually dialogue. The gardener is selfish, however when it counts she makes the ultimate sacrifice. The winnower on the other hand is extremely charasmatic, sweet talking, and concerned with fairness, but he is extremely self centered and would never sacrifice for us. Those who believe in him do so because he is right, not because he is loving.
Just started my lunch break. I have been waiting on this video. Perfect timing
Same here lol
I see the Traveler as what is effectively the player character for the Gardener, as you say to directly interact with the universe. But I also think that Unveiling was just being honest in regards to what the Gardener and Winnower are now; the Light and the Darkness, the paracausal powers themselves.
I also agree with you on the secret fourth option for why it didn't speak to us directly (except Cayde, it was a good loophole and Sundance was 100% the Gardener in that cutscenes to me). The silence is inherently the point of the Light, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have preferences or desires or things it wants to tell us. The two aren't mutually exclusive, even if it is frustrating for everyone involved.
The only thing I disagree on slightly is that the Gardener was acting selfish for introducing both of them into the Flower Game. At the very least, I think that's entirely subjective. On the one hand, it did bring suffering to a game that likely didn't even have the concept of consciousness to begin with (since that's tied to Darkness, which is paracausal and wasn't in the universe before the new rules) and only a conscious being can truly suffer. On the other hand, now the things born in the game have a say in their own fates, can make some of their own choices, and don't have to blindly/perfectly follow the Winnower's logic.
But those are just my thoughts.
i agree with you about the gardener not being selfish really, but i very much disagree about taking the flowergame literally. like of course its not really something you can prove, and maybe some of the lore like patternfall nudges things into that direction, but i really think the flowergame is actually a metaphor and not just literal non thinking flowers. like that they are actually universes with different creatures and beings that like in the real world have thoughts and emotions and feelings and the traveller didn't bring pain into the universe.
To be honest it's pretty obvious that both the winnower and witness have the same concept of suffering, which is basically meaningless existence, which is like the universal philosophical question. Because when you start asking the question about the meaning of life, that's when it truly becomes meaningless, but it doesn't have to be so. Both the winnower and witness cause great suffering across the universe, far more suffering than what the gardener's ideology requires
@HoneyDoll894 I don't think the Flower Game is or should be taken literally, I never said that. I'm actually not sure at all what you're talking about for that part.
@@MelancholicBodhisattva i think i misunderstood what you said a little bit, but I don't think being conscious or the ability to experience pain is paracausal. if you refer to that time where the winnower says it designed our minds and consciousness i think thats spesifically referring to evolution and humans which is what lead to them being a thing (and i think it considers evolution as part of sword logic)
@HoneyDoll894 see, I disagree about that. It's evident from Unveiling and quite a few other pieces of lore that the Flower Game/ the universe before paracausality was a significantly different place to what it is now, and not just because of paracausality. The fight between the Gardener and the Winnower in the Garden broke fundamental symmetries, symmetries that likely are referencing the ones that generated the 4 fundamental forces of reality that used to be a single perfect one before they split. There's references to how their fight caused unique inflationary volumes and separate timelines for each infant universe, how the "shockwaves" of their blows were what allowed dark matter to flow into filaments that were the beginnings of galaxies. And with Micah-10 and the Travelers' memories, there's now two references of the true birth of time, the one talking about how there was a difference now between what is and what was.
All of these things are spoken about like they've never happened before in the game, that they came about only because of the fight and paracausality being introduced. That leads me to believe that a universe that didn't have 4 fundamental forces but a single super force, didn't have time but was likely fully causally deterministic, didn't have galaxies, etc, life was fundamentally different from what we would consider it now. In fact, since Bungie is doubling down on the Vex being the OG final shape of the Flower Game thanks to the message from the Winnower, we can make a decent guess that all life back then were very similar to the Vex. And according to the lore, the Vex can influence themselves in the present from both the past and future, are not conscious, don't feel pain in any significant way, and they don't have the ability to make their own choices, just whatever is naturally most efficient.
I really don't think it's a stretch in the least to say life in the Garden wasn't conscious nor had any degree of free will. I'd say I need quite a bit of evidence to prove the opposite since the evidence that I see points to these conclusions.
@@MelancholicBodhisattva you might be right, but do note that the winnower also says that life would suffer if they changed the rules, which means that it already considered at least philosophical suffering possible in the flowergame
I take "the end of the Light and Darkness saga" as meaning no more darkness as an enemy.
This saga in the end was about the traveler a light user vs the witness a darkness user and ended with the witness dying and the traveler changed to a hybrid being of light and dark. This saga established the light and darkness as forces like gravity or radiation. Imho as you can't eliminate gravity from the universe you can't eliminate the dark or the light from the destiny universe. The wills behind these forces are in a competition with "the game" but they aren't in a "war" they aren't trying to destroy each other, most likely that isn't even a possibility. Imo whatever happens to the traveler doesn't affect the gardener at all. You can break someone's keyboard, they will be angry at you, they will lose the match, they will need a new keyboard to play again tomorrow but they won't be fiscally harmed. This is how I see it. The winnower won't be our enemy, he is not a god for us to kill, he is not trying to destroy the last city or the Earth. He is like a guy watching a football match and doing sports bets. If we take the "final shape" as the end result of the match. The witness's final shape is a loss for him. That final shape is different from the original, the one that he wants to see again.
So imo this was the end of the saga because we guardians and the traveler are no longer the "light" army. We are now representing both sides. So what follows is the winnower talking with us so in the end we follow his path. Maybe something like converting Guardians to Crusaders. Leaving behind the "protect humanity and the city" to focus in "destroying what lays outside our domain" something like that will please the winnower. Also from the original 4 races only the hive had darkness powers, the other 3 were only "normal" aliens so in this new saga we won't be fighting "the darkness" anymore. So like in the beginning we will fight individuals and groups that oppose us It doesn't matter if they have light like Savathun's brood, the new powers of the echoes or something totally different. To me that is the future of destiny, new enemies with known or unknown powers and the winnower and the gardener being with us not against us.
Gardener and Winnower = Husband and Wife.
The biblical allusions have me thinking about the comparisons to Adam and Eve. The tree of knowledge and once sin entered the picture it led to the separation or the disunity between husband and wife. Looking at Destiny through a biblical theological lens, it makes me think perhaps some of the same beats happened in the unveiling story.
Holy crap I'd never thought of that and it fits very well with Bungies penchant for Biblical allegory! I think you're on to something here!
Me personally I think it was the traveler talking through the guise of sundance to cayde and all the visions/memories are the travelers own, the bit that gets me is in the iconoclasm mission you hear one of the dissenters hint at the idea that the gardener is imprisoned somewhere
It was promoted as the end to the Light and Dark saga but in playing TFS it’s actually the end of the Light vs Dark saga. No more reverence of the holy light and fear of the bad darkness.
I swear I saw some lore where the gardener describes screaming out but being unable to be heard? Cannot remember where it was from.
Byf’s video on Ergo Sum.
@@AJ_Sparten1337 Thank you
I never thought the Traveler was the Gardener, it just doesn't make sense. If the entity that created the entire universe was too weak to fight off Nezarec's fleet and the Witness, both of which are infinitely weaker than the entire universe, it would be a paradox. To think about it, perhaps Winnower and Gardener don't have to be singular entities: their being permeates the entire universe, where Light creates Material world and Darkness creates Ascendent plane. Maybe they spread themselves during the creation for the universe to appear. That's why everyone is one in the Light, that's why Darkness remembers: when we come back to them, we become part of them, like we used to be before we were created
I see the Gardener and Winnower as ideas that exist on a higher plane, not as physical entities. Metaphor and what not. The idea made the Traveler and the Traveler carries out those ideas, but the physical shell of the Traveler is not the Gardener, much the same as the Witness was not the Winnower. In a higher plane, the Gardener and Winnower exist.
Just wanted to say thank you for making this video. I have been waiting for a creator to cover this topic since TFS came out and this really covered questions I had. I feel more at ease and excited at the future going forward. Amazing video and can’t wait to see wait you make in the future!
That's why she gave the light to the hive so we can return more ghosts to the light making the garden whole agian
That Sundance theory is pretty convincing lol
“I’m what you wanted me to be.”
THE WINNOWER!!
THE WINNOWER IS REAL!!!!
Just because the Light vs Dark saga is over doesnt mean we wont get more on the Gardener. The Winnower is clearly being built up to. But remember its not Light vs Dark anymore its Light and Dark, in unison. No doubt there have been retcons but the recent lore show that Bungie acknowledges the old lore
Oh man I noticed the LOTR similarities too during the campaign. You can tell they got inspired by fellowship
10 years deep literally INSIDE the traveler and instead of giving us cutscenes or in game interactions denoting important lore and developments we once again get very esoteric dialogue through comms.
Hope everyone has fun in this next saga.
Another fantastic video. I agree with the assessment of why the writers didn't include the Gardener or the Winnower in the campaign story. Was I a little disappointed? Sure. But it made sense from a narrative perspective focusing on the end of a saga and the culmination of 10 years of gameplay story telling to not include effectively background characters to move focus away from the characters and plot that needed to be told to the audience. They did a wonderful job putting a ribbon on the story, and setting the stage for more to come, and I don't think we've seen or heard the last of the Gardener or the Winnower.
The Gardener (her) spoke to us in the Quest "Visions of the light" on IO after the red war. The Traveler spoke to us with a high female Voice. Ask us for Help and quoted the Guardian tenets. I dont know any thing more about her but I believe like Osiris said that Light and Dark are one and the same force. Traveler and Veil as one being. The Traveler as the body and the veil his mind. So maybe the flower game is just a tale a metaphor?
You are dead right about that. The main reason I didn't add it was because it wasn't made clear that it was the Gardener rather than the Traveler, but that being said I included the convo with Cayde so it should have counted.
@@Venextron Well Traveler/Gardener...its difficult to say yea. Ikora said in the quest "The Traveler spoke to you and only you were allowed to hear its voice" So yea maybe it was her Voice... Some said it was the light .. But wheres the difference? As Osiris said: the Veil is a physical Manifestation of the power over the mind. So the Traveler is a Manifestation over the physical??
So frustrating. Once again the freaking Darkness side gets anything big first. They got pyramid ship in collector edition as playable while we dont have traveler ship even now (dont cap we can get a freaking space rock and a car as a ship), they get the winnower confirmation first also while we removed the witness from the pale heart and just get a white screen again.
17:13 Venextron is the Winnower confirmed
im really interested to see how they explain darkness connection to memories a little more, how it seems in the lore now it feels like the dark represents memory while the light represents a fresh start, but the gardener clearly has some memory (ergo sum tab, etc) it just doesn't seem to be structured the same as we are used to memories being structured. Will the introduction of darkness to the traveler and possibly gardener make her remember more details? your point about the darkness changing the traveler/gardener is really interesting as now we have the gardener being affected by darkness, but winnower isn't necessarily affected by light? theres a lot for bungie to play with
Really good video! Your interpretation of the Gardener creating the Ghosts and became fractured makes a lot of sense, and makes a lot more sense when it’s compared to Gnosticism. Great breakdown, always enjoy your videos :)
About the changed pale heart, bungie said somewhere ( maybe in one of their videos ) that we will get to see a pure traveler/pale heart. Maybe its one of the pre-final shape vid. However, they did not tell us what that exactly means. Does it mean when we finish an overthrow and the area is 'clear/pure'? Does that mean the landscapes combine themselves and the monolith is gone so is the witness memories(probably not,wasted asset)? Does that mean the monolith will be gone? I can't find a good enough answer without removing the dark part of the map and with it there is no way that means a pure pale heart.
So the winower is the diedact and the gardener is the librarian? And the traveler is the forerunner rings and the witness is the prophets? Lol
This actually makes more sense than it should
Thoughts on the friendly Hive lady called The Traveler "The Gardner" during the campaign? Ghost corrected her, she didn't....exactly deny his correction, but didn't confirm it either?
I think it was a nod towards there being more to the Light than we realize for sure.
I think some lines from the Lucent Hive Witch Luzaku has her using the name “Gardener” almost synonymous with Traveler.
As for the Traveler’s origins, we do know where it came from. In D2 Y1 during the subclass quest for voidwalkers we have nameless dialogue being played, which we now can recognize as Toland who is talking. Toland says that the Traveler came from the Void. (Maybe by extension the Veil too)
And now in TFS, we have a nightfall gun called Scintillation with a quote from Toland: “A Paltry Echo of the Ascendant Plane.” Scintillation is the flashing and sparkle of light via chemical reaction.
The Ascendant Plane, Sea of Screams, The Void, whatever you want to call it has the answers.
(Another dub for Toland and Bad Juju enjoyers!)
The Traveler coming from the Void means that it travels across the Universe through the void, not that is was born from the Void
@@jockeelly and it was using the Void to travel when it can fly thru space with ease and with no concern for time? The difference doesn’t matter. Its origin is not of our world.
Nah, the Ascendant Plane is an aspect of Darkness, and the Void is confirmed to be a form of Light. They're 100% not the same thing, even if they are both mysterious.
@@MelancholicBodhisattva Void is light but it behaves like Darkness and was the closest thing we had to Darkness for a while (also mentioned in the quest). It breaks things down by making them Volatile and Weak and whatever’s left is Devoured to make us strong. Sounds like a familiar logic.
Either way, the Ascendant plane is more of an empty space. Even if it was pure Darkness, remember that the Traveler was originally one with the Veil, the avatar of Darkness.
Sounds like even if we did find the gardener, she'd be in a coma.
There was dialogue in tfs that stated the gardener and traveler were “one and the same”. I’m desperately hoping that means the veil is in some way intrinsically linked to the Veil, which we heard even less about this far. These episodes had better not just be a means to move on. I need answers.
Before the first knife, there was the edge.
Edit: I agree the writers made the right decision imho.
"I'm what you wanted me to be" is such a weird line to me and could have so many implications. At first I thought it was the Witness since that line seems so out of place. Maybe now it is the Gardener, recollecting sundances personality to speak to cayde
Also the Gardener not wanting to speak to us is straight up refuted in the ergo sum lore
Lastly, I still think the Winnower calling The Witness a stinky fossilised rock is just so funny to me
10:10 I would if this means the gardener will be able to communicate with our ghost easier now
Man were do you get that Outro music from. It sounds like something straight out of Destiny 3
It's from the Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem extended soundtrack.
Great take on it, thanks for the insight.
I caught that Episode 3 reference.
A surprise to be sure, but a welcome one.
@@Venextron I have been trained in your reference arts by Count Prequelmemes.
The Traveler is The Gardener's Ghost
I feel that the new saga will focus significantly less on The Traveler. This chapter is now over. I think we will start getting more information on the Gardener and the Winnower, but not necessarily have them physically appear in the story. I feel there is a strong chance we will see the rising of a new Oryx-type entity that will follow closely the logic of the Winnower.
The only way we will be able to “see” the Gardener, let alone talk to it, is if All of the ghosts reunited with the Traveler.
The gardener is the bird
What about the Lucent Hive though? I was under the impression that there were new ghosts born for the hive. At least that’s what the cutscene of Savvy being resurrected appears to imply. Did the gardener sacrifice herself again? Or am I totally off about the hive ghosts. That’s the only thing that confuses me about this.
The Gardener is separate from the Traveler, and every lore that speaks in 3rd person of the Traveler is the Gardener describing it.
Isn't the gardener the ghosts? I thought that was the implication of the vision but maybe I am missing something.
The Gardner doesn't communicate with us because she wants us to do our own thing. She doesn't want to influence us in ANY way. If she said anything, that might inspire us to do something. I know I'm being vague, but I have to use the broadest definitions of influence. She might express that she is in trouble and whether she asks us to defend her or not, we may feel compelled to do so, and she doesn't want that. So the best way to not influence us is to not communicate with us
About why cayde, doesnt it seems simpler to just say because bungie allowed cayde to interface with the fracture instead of us?
But Micah's dialogues are the memories of the Traveler, not the Gardener. It wasn't the Gardener that was splitter herself apart to make the Ghosts, it was the Traveler.
My theory is, instead, in the same way that the Traveler split itself apart to make the Ghosts, the Gardener had to split herself apart to make the Traveler and the Veil to give us Light and Darkness in order to change the outcome of the flower game. The Gardener and Winnower aren't light and darkness, but instead, bomb logic and sword logic.
Edit: What I mean is, both light and darkness are from the Gardener. Before she added the "new rules" to the game, there was no paracausal powers in play. The Winnower's play is simply natural survival of the fittest, ie the Sword Logic.
I think there's also a secret 5th reason why the Gardener doesn't communicate with us after the Witness was defeated: She didn't need to. The universe was no longer under threat, or at least, not any threat her creations couldn't handle independently.
11:30 I lost…….
Honestly, I disagree with the idea that Bungie is setting up the Winnower as the next big threat. If anything, I feel the opposite. The few snippets of lore we get tells us that it’s simply sitting in the background, observing. He isn’t some malevolent god wanting to destroy us, he even says that when we defend ourselves, we are enacting The Final Shape by proxy. That’s the difference between him and The Gardener. The Winnower observes, The Gardener intervenes. He has no quarrel with us, and honestly, why would we have a quarrel with it. The Winnower and The Gardener have become more than characters, they themselves have become rules of the universe itself. As long as there is life, there will always be conflict. So I don’t think our next big bad is just gonna be another god embodying Darkness, because we just did that. I think Bungie is gonna be experimenting and pushing us towards something new.
Ill give you an answer bungie doesnt give a shit about the gardener 😂😂😂
I don’t see why you’d get background on the traveler. It’s better left a mystery
I have no idea how you’re able to sift through all the cringe interpersonal drama to get what little lore they actually make now.
Jesus what a shit opinion. Found the edge lord
Why do so many lore players use double primary 😭 it’s so trash and has zero benefits
Saying this campaign is a 9 out of 10 is laughable.
This campaign was on the same comparable base of the Red War. It's decently good but almost all the real storyline comes out of the after campaign quests and encounters.
Unfortunately most of the playerbase (and especially content creators because their lively hood really depends on it, after the year plus long run of the game being in its worst spot ever) is looking at the expansion (even though we've barely scratched the surface of it, so far) through misguided rose colored glasses because it isn't sucking as bad as it's been the past 2 seasons.
Hopefully things get better for the game, but the Echoes model seems to look like it'll be the same ole,, same ole slow downturn again.
the problem of you guys is that you doesnt really want a cohesive plot with themes and characters, you want all the mystery they are building up answered otherwise its trash
I think that the story is pretty slow to get going, but once the gang is reassembled the last parts of it are really good.
I think the writers, knowing this is the Biiiig Finale wanted to give each of the characters a bit of room to breathe and be them, and I think it worked pretty well.
It was never going to be perfect, no art is, but if we take a 5/10 to be an average game (which we really should, people seem to think average is 7 or 8 out of 10), then I think a 9 is a pretty accurate place to put Final Shape. In my opinion, it’s very good, and I love a lot about it besides the main story, but it’s also up to opinion and it’s okay to have a different one.
@@isaaclevi1487I think this might be a little uncharitable. Yes, I think people had expectations going in about what we might see or hear or learn, but I don’t think they want EVERY mystery solved or shown. I think most mystery enjoyers know that the best mysteries are the ones that raise more questions than they answer.