yknow destiny wasn't the first media I got into that had queer rep but it was the first media I consumed personally that treated it like it was a normal way of just... being. it doesn't have to be an entire thing, people can just exist like that. Of course Osiris and Saint-14 are in love, why wouldn't they be? Nimbus uses they/them pronouns because what else would they use? (there are so many more examples but we'd be here all day) It shifted how I looked at representation in media and in my own writing: why does it have to be a big deal all the time? What if we were just allowed to exist like cishet people do in media I see everyday? And Destiny is an fps! with the exact kind of community you'd expect a game like that to have!
anyway in conclusion destiny is fucking incredible and I'm so thankful that it exists so I can finally see people like me exist in a space where people often try their best to erase that
I think one of my favourite visual details about TAU (2018) is its unique approach to the whole “robot/ai whose eyes turn red when they turn evil” trope. The way the colour of TAU’s display gradually changes over the course of the movie is just so lovely and so immensely important to me.
The rest of this post contains spoilers for basically the whole movie, so if you are concerned about that, please feel free to go and watch it first! This post will still be here when you are done :]
Initially, TAU’s light is completely red - aside from a slight orange tone in the centre of his “iris” - when he is still in his emotionally blank, unquestioning, “factory settings” state. The orange tones become more prevalent as he begins to speak with Julia, and the inner rings adopt an increasingly vibrant green as they interact more and his care for her and curiosity about the outside world grow, along with his defiance and resentment of Alex.
Once TAU reaches the point at which his loyalties lie firmly with Julia, only the outer edge of his display is red, the centre being a gradient from orange to bright gold to bright green, and glowing so much more brightly as well. When he shares his symphony and his being with her, all of his projections are made up of pure warm, golden light, flecked with green.
When I first watched it, the colour change was so gradual that I barely noticed it had changed until near the end, where he had all of his memories erased and his display reverted to being completely red like it had been at the very beginning, the intensity of his lights dulled back down as well. It was such a jarring change all of a sudden, and really helped to hammer home the realisation that all of his development as a person, the things he had learned and his time with Julia had been ripped away.
But perhaps one of my favourite touches is made evident by the drones TAU controls; they, too, have “irises” of red light at the beginning and gradually change colour along with the rest of him over the course of the movie, but when the drone Julia escapes with at the end wakes up and its eye glows only green, it’s just such a beautiful and relieving moment…
I could go on and on even more about the way colour and light are used in TAU because I absolutely adore it, but this is just what I was very focused on and appreciative of in my recent rewatch and I really wanted to shout from the rooftops about it for a little bit. I kept thinking about how much I loved seeing this reversal of the aforementioned trope; an AI whose light changes colour not to signify an impending cliché evil rampage, but to reflect positive change - growth and healing, the development of empathy, remorse, self-worth, loyalty, love.
It wasn’t at all what I expected from this movie when I first decided to watch it in 2019 but it was so pleasantly surprising to me, and these heartfelt and sincere themes are the main factor that secured TAU its place as my main comfort movie.
YOU HAVE TO WATCH THIS MOVIE IT IS FUCKING INCREDIBLE
THE CRITICS ARE IDIOTS. THIS FILM IS AMAZING.
It has:
A streetsmart female sexworker/pickpocket as the main protagonist.
A complex and wonderful AI character (title character).
A hot killer robot. (If you aren’t a robot fucker that’s ok; it’s still an epic robot who creates an awesome threat for the main character throughout the film)
A severe LACK of the bullshit ‘falling in love with the abuser character and the abuser character changing through the power of “oh god this woman is hot and I like her’”.
STUNNING VISUAL EFFECTS AND CINEMATOGRAPHY
SCENES THAT WILL MAKE YOU BAWL LIKE A FUCKING BABY
An amazing message of “FUCK YOUR ABUSERS; THEY DO NOT CONTROL YOU; YOU CREATE YOU, NOT THEM” (as can be seen in the quote at the bottom of OP’s post).
Abuse victim solidarity.
So much OOF but in the best way.
A protagonist doing shit things like throwing the other protagonist under the bus to gain the upper hand in a dangerous situation, but not being framed as the things being ok just because she’s a protagonist. She grew up on the street. Her worldview is built around surviving. But she clearly is remorseful for what she has done.
Enough blood and gore to be entertaining (and very satisfying whenever it happens to an antagonist) but not overly gratuitous.
WOOOOOOOOT YEAH GO JULIA and WOOOOOT YEAH GO TAU moments.
A tense thrilling plot with beautiful soft scenes in between.
AMAZING SYMBOLISM OH MY GODS; PAY ATTENTION TO THE SHAPES AND SHADOWS ETC
Beautiful music.
FUCKING INCREDIBLE WRITING OVERALL.
Plot points that all wrap up very neatly.
A notable LACK of spoon feeding the audience. You didn’t put things together on your own? That’s on you. The film gives you what you need. Use your own brain to understand what is going on.
A happy ending.
SERIOUSLY.
WATCH. THIS. FILM.
(@5amanthus look at what you did to me. I’m trying to drag other people into the fandom now too lol).
Glint and Ghost talk about the Light and the Traveler.
--I wrote this for a writing challenge last month and realized I didn't share it here. I just love some Ghosts <3
When Glint finds Ghost a few dozen yards from the Young Wolf and Crow’s camp, he’s hovering over a fissure of Light, his shell thrown wide, his optic dim. Glint hovers back for a few moments, watching, worried he might be interrupting, but Ghost doesn’t move. Eventually, his curiosity—and his concern—get the better of him.
“Ghost?”
“Glint!” Ghost jumps, shooting a foot into the air, his shell snapping shut. “Sorry, I, uh, thought you were back at camp.”
“I didn’t mean to disturb you, I can go if you–”
“No, no, that’s okay. It’s fine.”
Glint glances down at the fissure of Light below Ghost. Their Guardians are both back at their camp, tucked away in a protected cave in the Impasse, fortified by a few trip mines at the entrance, as well as the Ghosts’s attention. Still acclimated to the Last City’s time after the celebrations in the wake of their victory, their Guardians are asleep within their tent. He and Ghost had left to give them a little privacy, agreeing to keep watch. When they’d left, Crow and the Young Wolf had lay back to back, sharing body heat in the cool recreation of Old Russia. Glint knows that sometime during the night, his Guardian will roll over to face the Young Wolf. Crow’s hand will rest on their hip, or over their waist, and either consciously or unconsciously, the Guardian will press their body into his and the pair will wake up in the morning curled together. It’s happened before. It will happen again. He’s glad Crow has someone to spend his cold nights with, and he’s especially glad that person is as nice to Crow as the Guardian is.
For now though, he pushes the Guardians from his mind. He can feel through his bond with Crow that they’re safe, Crow still deep in sleep, and he can see the entrance to the cave off behind them, with no enemies in sight.
“What were you doing with that?” he asks Ghost, feeling the front half of his shell rotate slightly as he looks over Ghost and the fissure.
“Nothing,” Ghost answers, a tad too quickly, and Glint rights his shell, trying to look neutral. “I was just…scanning it.”
Again, Glint glances down at the fissure below. Unless Ghost scans things with his shell wide open, unmoving, he isn’t telling Glint the whole truth. Glint has spent enough time with him to know he scans the way they all scan, with a beam of Light, or a few quick pulses.
“Did you find anything?”
He watches Ghost’s shell deflate, a beam of light now tracing over the fissure.
“No,” he answers. “I wasn’t scanning it. I was…I was trying to use it to commune with the Traveler.”
The front half of Glint’s shell rotates again, this time a full circle counterclockwise, then forty-five degrees clockwise. Ghost’s shell pinches around his eye, and it reminds Glint of the way Crow used to hunch over while they lived with Spider, making himself small as if to hide from view.
“I wanted to know if everything we’ve been doing to heal it is really helping,” Ghost tells him, though he avoids Glint’s gaze. “And, I was looking for guidance. I wanted to see if I could speak with it. If it would give me a vision like it gave Cayde, because I–” he stumbles over his words. “Because when I–”
“Because you died, and the Traveler didn’t bring you back,” Glint guesses quietly, and Ghost’s shell relaxes around his frame but seems to fall downwards, like he’s being pulled down by gravity.
“Yeah,” Ghost murmurs. “That.”
Glint sweeps his own beam of light over the fissure. Their scans are the closest thing he can really approximate to how their Guardians touch things. Glint imagines his beams of Light are the same as Crow running his fingers over something, the tactile sense feeding information through Crow’s nerves, into his brain. Through his scans, Glint can feel the composition of the stone below them, the Traveler’s recreation of Old Russia’s dirt and rocks, the mix of rust and old glass, particles from the graveyard of cars littering the space around them. He can also feel the Traveler’s Light, raw and unfiltered, bubbling up from the fissure and filling the air around it.
While Ghost had his shell open when Glint had first spotted him, he’d have been able to feel the Light around him like he was breathing it in, a sensation Glint only knows from Crow, but one that feels rich with meaning. Ghost would have been able to feel the Light pouring over him, seeping into his core and tangling with his own being. He’d have felt the composition of the air and molecules of dust and dirt within it. He’d have been able to smell the flavor of the wind and taste the makeup of the Pale Heart around them.
But despite all that, despite opening his very being to the Traveler, Glint knows it wouldn’t have spoken back. He knows it would have remained silent. He knows that’s what the Traveler does, and he knows why, but he also knows Ghost does not need silence now.
“The Traveler might not be much of a conversationalist,” Glint admits, tilting his shell down to look at the fissure. Ghost avoids his eye contact the way Crow does when he’s feeling particularly raw, but Glint knows enough to understand that he’s not trying to ignore him. “But I’m here, if you want to talk.”
“I–” Ghost stops, and he lets out a quiet sigh the way that their Guardians do, a deep breath that makes their shoulders drop, the stress in their bodies diminishing just slightly. “I don’t know. I know it probably sounds crazy, but I think dying for my Guardian was easier than being controlled by the Witness. Every time it spoke through me–”
Ghost shakes his shell sharply, letting out another sigh.
“That’s what sticks with me more. I just can’t stop thinking about it. Even after it’s gone, I’m still–”
“It does sound a little crazy,” Glint interrupts him, though his voice is soft and gentle, “but it also makes a lot of sense.”
Ghost lifts his eye finally, looking over at Glint, and Glint shrugs his shell.
“When you killed the Witness, you chose to die for your Guardian. You knew what you wanted and you decided to do it. When the Witness took control of you, in the Pale Heart, or back on Neptune, it took control of your body. You didn’t get a choice.” It’s Glint’s turn to look away from their eye contact, sweeping another beam of light over the fissure. “When Crow and I were living with Spider, when he put a bomb in my shell, Spider was using me to keep Crow with him. He was using me to keep Crow around so he could hurt him. That was terrible, and I still had control of my body, at least when Spider wasn’t electrocuting me but–” Glint pushes off the memory, rotating his shell like he needs to refocus his mind. “I know I can’t understand how it felt–”
“But you probably understand a lot more than most,” Ghost finishes for him, meeting Glint’s eye when Glint looks at him. Glint bobs his shell in a nod.
“Can I ask what it was like?” he murmurs, “when you died?”
Ghost sinks a little lower, and Glint follows him down to hover just above the fissure of Light.
“If that’s too personal you don’t have to–I didn’t mean to pry–”
“No, it’s okay, Glint,” Ghost promises, looking over at him. His shell lifts in a tense smile. “It’s been hard to figure out. Cayde talked about feeling at peace, and I did feel that, but I knew a piece of me was missing. A huge part of me. I might not have had my Guardian as long as most other Ghosts, but ever since I found them they’ve been everything to me. Maybe it would have gotten easier over time but I could hardly think past how much I missed them, how much I knew we were meant to be together. But at the same time, I didn’t want them to come to me. I didn’t want them to die, I would never want them to. Not until they’re ready, that is.”
Glint feels himself nod. He knows Crow won’t live forever, neither of them will, but Glint would rather destroy himself than let Crow meet his end before his time.
“Did you feel the others? The way that Sundance said? That we’re all connected?”
“I did.” Ghost’s smile is a little brighter now, a little less sad. “I felt everyone. Targe, and Sundance, I felt Sagira, and Brya, I felt Guardians, too. I felt people I’d never known and more than I could comprehend. I know they felt me, too, but I think they also knew it wasn’t my time yet. I don’t know how long I spent with them, but eventually I felt Cayde and my Guardian. I could feel them both pulling me back, and then I woke up in my Guardian’s hands.”
Glint watches Ghost sweep a beam of Light over the fissure. “I can still feel them, now. I think Cayde’s Light kept me connected to them. I can feel him and Sundance, they’re closest, but I can feel the others, too.” He nods to Glint. “We’re all connected, just like she said.”
They look over the fissure in silence for a long moment, listening to the wind blowing over the landscape, the hum as it catches in pockets of cars and caverns.
“What were you hoping the Traveler might say, if you could commune with it?”
Ghost’s shell pinches again, his eye down. “I knew my time was coming, I think since the moment the Witness first cut into me, when we first got here. I didn’t think to ask the Traveler to heal me, I didn’t think it could, even when we were healing the other Ghosts. But when I died, my Guardian asked it to bring me back, and it didn’t.” Ghost is silent for a long moment, his optic flitting over the fissure. “I wanted to know whether or not it was right for Cayde to have brought me back, or if the Traveler didn’t heal me because it wanted me to stay dead.”
“I don’t think the Traveler wanted that.” Glint flits closer, until he can press one of his fins against Ghost’s, the way their Guardians bump shoulders or lean into one another. “The Traveler wants us to make our own fates. Being a Ghost, and being a Guardian are both hard lives, I think you and I know that pretty well. If the Traveler brought you back, it would be subjecting you to the same violence that killed you, when you could’ve finally had peace. But,” Glint spins the front half of his shell clockwise forty-five degrees, the back half rotating a full circle. “At the same time, I think that like Crow’s wish did with Cayde, you wouldn’t have been able to come back if the Traveler hadn’t been alright with you going, and if it hadn’t been something you wanted. You and Cayde made your fate, but the Traveler hasn’t abandoned you, either.”
Ghost looks at him like he’s daring to be hopeful.
“You think so?”
Glint bobs his shell in a nod. “It’s like you said, you can feel them, can’t you? We’re all connected. Always.”
I love that Ghost is just a character in a video game. That's all he is. Ghost is literally just a character in a video game and yet every single person I have ever met that plays Destiny, loves their Ghost like he's real.
Like he's actually a part of us like he is to our Guardians.
Because in a way, he is.
The emotional bond we formed with him is real.
Everyone I know that I have talked to about the end of The Final Shape, admitted to crying over Ghost. (Even my friends that I would say are more emotionally shut off). From my New Light friends to my Veteran friends that have been playing since Beta.
Ghost is just a character in a video game and Bungie managed to make a character that we feel is a part of us like they are to our character.
Nolan North put the emotion, the love, the humor,the concern,the compassion needed into the voice lines over the course of two games to get us attached to Ghost.
The writing team at Bungie, gave life to a little robot shell full of life, where if you were like me, loved him from day 1.
Every time Ghost has ever referenced how long he spent looking for me (My Guardian) or where he found me, I've gotten emotional. So when I got to that part in the the Cosmodrome in The Final Shape, not gonna lie, I got a little teary eyed. That was where it all began.
I'm his and he is mine.
My little guy. My little buddy for life.
He's just a fictional character.
But he's so much more than that.
I know no one at Bungie will ever read this, and I'm ok with that, but I just want to thank them for creating Ghost. I want to thank Nolan North for bringing him to life with his voice.
Now if you excuse me, I have to go hug my Ghost and then go on some adventures with him. ❤️♠️
hear me out: a destiny/titanfall fusion where everything is the same except ghosts are titans
guardian classes being more or less lost in favor of their skill/ability sets being based more on what kind of titan!ghost raised them (basically just a lot more variety)
the dark age being even more insane than it was because the ghosts can also fight and killing another ghost is that much harder and therefore that much more brutal
enemies of humanity building their own anti titan weaponry. eliksni brigs come into play much sooner, the uluran excel in powered exoskeletons. the vex and hive remain largely the same, but that makes them even more terrifying as guardian killers (maybe the vex send over their actual fighters this time)
the lucent brood titans having the same organic sort of osseus look to them that so much of the hive architecture has
don't get me started on what things like gambit or the crucible would look like, or how the mechs would probably work like titans where the ghost itself is still the same as it is regularly but interfaces with the mech body (so there aren't just giant mechs roaming the solar system, and maybe a ghost makes its mech from the light when it raises it's guardian)
I am inflicting, or perhaps bestowing, upon you: Garrus as various unnecessarily sexualized references that come up if you look up refs of women with guns :)
(( @milkywayes i know we’ve like almost never interacted but the silly comment i left on your post would Not leave my brain. I need to show u what you inspired ))
NOTE: Mild Spoilers for STRAY. This album contains the chapter headings, so while it’s not super-spoilery, it’s still going to reveal some details if you haven’t played it to that point yet!
My kid and I have been enjoying Stray thoroughly since it came out, and one of the things we both found fascinating is the language of the society in the game- you see it everywhere, in neon signs, in graffiti, and it really adds to the depth and mystery of this universe.
Both my kid and I are language geeks, me being a narrator and them just enjoying languages in general, so after I casually mentioned that I thought the in-game alphabet for the robots was probably an Aurabesh (Star Wars)-like letter-for-letter replacement of a Latin alphabet, we went to town on trying to figure it out. They mentioned they realized it was a replacement cipher when they saw the opening screen for the “Dead City” chapter.
Turns out that we were… mostly right. But not 100%. There IS an alphabet that’s consistent. It’s in the first image you see in this album. However, while we did find a lot of signs that were simply English, there were some that were Latin, and we think there might be a few in French (which would make sense, given that the developers are French).
But it gets a bit weirder. There’s a bunch of symbols we simply don’t understand because we don’t have a good key for them. We started off with this one by taking screenshots of the chapter headings, which were subtitled in English, using those to get a few characters, then figuring out other characters from context. We’ve got nearly the entire alphabet solved now, but there’s some signs with words using characters that don’t have any correspondence at all to the ones we’ve deciphered.
However, nearly all of these are in the “dead” parts of the city, where there’s signs in English, which could mean these are in Chinese or some language we don’t understand, or maybe they’re intended to be an earlier version of the language the robots in the city now use.
There’s also some “cursive”-like versions of many letters which are more difficult to understand, so some of the signs are much harder to translate. There’s even some where they mash ideograms together to combine them, which is also interesting.
So here’s the alphabet key, along with a few images we’ve provided some captions for. Our working theory is that many of the posters are written in Latin (including some Lorem Ipsum!), then translated to the robot alphabet, but it’s possible they’re in other languages also. Because many of the textures have “damage” on them, it’s frequently difficult to parse all the words, and it’s also often hard to tell where spaces go.
But we figure if we put this out there, others can come along and improve on and add to it!
NB: The alphabet key is not totally complete; the letters X and Z are missing, as we still aren’t certain of those ones. (Updated: Z and X are found, and image key updated!) Also, there’s some variations on some letters, and it’s possible we made some mistakes. But it works for translating many of the signs and posters. For the translations we used Google Translate, which is probably awful, but better than nothing.
NB Also: The chapter headings sometimes differed from the subtitle in yellow. Where it does, the deciphered text is in white. Where it does not, there’s no white text.
If anyone can offer more accurate translations of the Latin passages, please do!
ok so I found this link to a transcript that seems to contain every line of titanfall 2’s campaign and multiplayer dialogue, as well as a ton that may have been written and never included in the game. They’re extremely jumbled in order but naturally I went hunting for any extra little character moments between Cooper and BT
Highlights include: BT may be programmed to sleep, Jack “uwu I’m just a Rifleman u_u” Cooper and BT praising his later positive attitude, BT environmentalist king and Cooper calling him the “shy type.” Also, Barry.
Special shout-out to the “I thought we already said goodbye, BT/I detect joy” reunion after Cooper saves BT’s datacore, BT I Frew Up truthers vindication, and the fact that there was the possibility for BT to reassure Jack he would protect him from the same fate as the IMC scientists, but in the game they just went with BT going “It might lol ¯\_(ツ)_/¯”
So I just finished playthrough #6 of ttf2 and I noticed something I hadn’t before. When the beacon mission begins initially and BT is climbing up that cliff face, for some reason I had assumed Cooper is inside the cockpit and disembarked once you reach the top. This time though, I was looking around and noticed Cooper is in FACT sitting on top of BT’s shoulder, which is indicated in the loading screen:
But I hadn’t made the connection.
You can see Cooper’s hand holding tight to that handle. Just going for a little ride as BT climbs a mountain :)
Similarly, once you’ve finished that mission and rendezvous with Briggs, once again I somehow missed that Cooper is sitting up on BT’s shoulder, before BT plucks him off, holds him like an ice cream cone to declare Cooper his pilot, before shoving him safely back in the cockpit.
