I had a few questions that I wanted to ask after you beat the game to avoid spoilers: what do you think Shin's relationship to the Guardians are like now that they have been humbled by the experience of losing their Light? How was he affected by the loss of Light? What is his relationship with the non-City humans like both before and after the campaign?
Mate, we are clearly on the same line of musings here [highfive]. And for the record, if you have thoughts of your own on this subject, pluh-huh-hease share, I am keen.
As far as I know Destiny 2 didn’t add anything to Shin’s story besides an acknowledgement he exists? That could be a hidden primer to summarise it for new players in preparation for material further down the line, or it could just be random puff piecing; either way, there’s nothing that says where Shin is or what he’s doing during the game, which is a little unfortunate because that would really useful for sussing out his character. A Shin who has been helping a non-Farm group of survivors on the other side of the occupied City would be demonstrating a different set of priorities than a Shin who hesitates, looking back at the flames, and then continues dogging the trail of the Shadows of Yor.
So, you know, fair warning that without that canon specification the responses below are even more guesswork than usual.
I’ve mentioned before that as much as I genuinely like Devrim as a character I would have loved to have seen Shin in his place, because that’s the kind of answer I want to give to “what is his relationship with the non-City humans?” I like to think that Shin has spent his post-Yor years focusing on everyone outside the walls, keeping tabs on the settlements still out there; offering to escort them to the City if they wish, but also offering to help them maintain the home they already have. He’ll deal with a pack of Fallen that have been harrassing them, scrummage up needed supplies, pitch in to mend a broken roof - whatever they need that he can give.
If that’s at all true, then he’d get on famously with those settlers, and also with ex-City folk like Hawthorne who grew disaffected with City life for whatever reason. He’d be understanding of her issues with Guardians and approving of her protectiveness towards others, and she’d find him more down-to-earth than those Light-blighted battleheads in the Tower who are oh so willing to go be heroes but probably couldn’t tell you the names of half the civilians who work among them. (Neither of them are entirely fair in their attitudes towards the City, but cranky kindred spirits are still kin.)
However, that could all be wishful thinking. Maybe he sees his role more as the watcher of the watchmen, the silent sentinel crouched in the distance, guarding the secret of Thorn. Maybe Hawthorne would find his story somewhat sympathetic, but judge that he ultimately still falls into that big picture blinkering that she clearly finds grating about Guardians (“it’s for your own good,” they say, and restrict access to the wilds or push you away from the fight or run away to Titan right when you need them). Maybe the only relationship he has with those outside the City are the awed murmurings of the one of their kind who rose to the Light.
I live in rueful admittance that there may come a day when Headcanon Shin and Canon Shin diverge severely enough that they end up glaring at each other in high offence.
I do think, either way, that Shin would care about the destruction wreaked on the City, and the loss of the Light would absolutely be a shock to the system. He’d be better braced for it than the rest of the Guardians - less “what am I now, how do I fight this fight when I only have one life to give?”, more “oh, back to me again”, and he’s been trained to fight as a simple mortal - but he clearly regards the Light and presumably the Traveler with enough respect that having that fire snuffed out would be a hollowing feeling. He has a very personal attachment to the Light, after all: he’s the only Guardian we know of to have consciously agreed to take the duty on. There’s also his Ghost, who is quite probably his last link to Jaren and his childhood: having it abruptly fall out of the sky would be hellishly emotional. It’s been there throughout some of the worst moments of his life, its known him since he was a boy, they shared the loss of a man and a home they loved and they shared the vengeance on the one who took them, and now it’s is crumpled and weak and maybe dying and he has no idea how to fix it. That’s gotta be hard.
To that end, I don’t know whether he’d regard Towerfall as a ‘humbling’ experience for the others. We’re getting into the finer nuances of headcanon here, but I see him as having a bit of a confused mix of feelings about the Tower and the City: there’s some real bitterness for sure, but there are also still the remnants of the hero worship of his youth. “If you had to live like we lived,” he’d think sometimes, “if you had to lose what I lost-”, and then they do and they have and there’s no satisfaction in it. He never wanted his story to be anyone else’s, not really, not truly. Somewhere, deep down, a small boy mourns for the final shattering of the dream - for the promised paradise of the last safe city, shining even in the night.
In that sense it’s almost more of a humbling for Shin; perhaps the kind that finally draws him behind the walls as more than a fleeting visitor. They are making some changes of their own, after all, with Hawthorne on board and efforts to make the Tower more integrated with the rest of the City. Maybe he’d be interested in having a voice in that. Maybe he’d have found himself with a greater appreciation for their perspective, even as they got a glimpse of his. Maybe with the Traveler blossoming a-fresh overhead he’d finally, tentatively, wary but willing, start to shuck the ‘renegade’ tacked on ahead of Hunter.
Shin lies belly-flat among scrub and stone for twenty-six minutes, midday sun baking him into the earth. On the twenty-seventh, he puts three bullets through a Fallen Captain.
“Hell, Malphur,” the Guardian shouts, shading their eyes. Scarred metal draws seamlessly back together along their arm; dark stains sink through fabric to the flesh that spilled them, a river in reverse. “Is that where you’ve been this whole time?”
In the moment before Shin fired, the Guardian had been moving eagerly to meet the Captain’s sparking blades.
(1/2) Yeah, I was pretty bummed that the Gunslinger side quest didn't feature a Last Word grimoire card snippet (The Thorn one felt less relevant tbh). I wouldn't be surprised if they had a future DLC planned that focuses more on the people outside of the City, and tied the Shadows of Yor subplot into it. I do think that Towerfall did humble some Guardians at least, most notably Zavala and Ikora, while Cayde continues to be Cayde.
I honestly do not know what they were thinking when they selected the grimoire quotes for the subclass quests. Thorn isn’t even about a Hunter anymore! It’s about a Titan who used a corrupted handcannon! What does that have to do with Nightstalking? On the other hand, at least we didn’t have to watch them give Shin a bad southern accent or something.
Ohhh, I do hope there are some DLCs that give us more to do with the civilians. I don’t know how likely a Shadows of Yor DLC is, though. There have just been a few too many times that I’ve thought “oh, well, obviously this bit of lore will come up again” and it didn’t, haha. Then again, they’ve built on bits of lore I wouldn’t have expected (a la Rise of Iron) so I probably oughta just wait and see.
Yeah, some humbling definitely did occur. And for the better, I think.
Cayde could have had a very interesting relationship with Shin. It’s such a shame that the interesting parts of his character are confined to small snippets like the letter fragments to his son and some other out of game stuff.
He really could! I vaguely recall a one-off line from Cayde about Jaren, but nothing much about Shin. It’s intriguing that the two wayward Hunters - Eris being the other - seem to turn to Ikora over their actual Vanguard, and probably reflective of how new Cayde still is to the role. He’s not terribly good at handling Eris, so it’s possible he’s also clumsy with Shin, and subsequently they have more respect for Ikora’s steadier advice and influence.
I’m hoping we’ll see more of Cayde’s serious side going forward. Nothing like nearly dying to take back your conquered home to help you mature into your leadership position.
Part of me also wants to see Shin take part in the Leviathan raid with five other Guardians that he tolerates, partly to see how he would operate in an alien environment and partly to see his reactions to how tacky the place is.
You know, this ask made me realise I’ve never thought of Shin going offworld! There’s no real reason he couldn’t or wouldn’t, but I guess I just link him so strongly to Earth that it’s kind of weird trying to picture him bopping around in an alien environment, as you say.
I haven’t done the raid myself, but I hear Calus is also really fond of decorative vases.
Settled in “the heart” of a long, heavily forested mountain range prone to harsh winters.
The combined protection of the mountains and the woods hid them well enough that they weren’t targeted in town-crushing force by Fallen or human aggressors.
Descriptor of the much better-equipped City as “shining even in the night” possibly suggests a low-tech lifestyle. Alternatively, it could suggest that Palamon keeps a blackout protocol at nights to avoid attracting attention from town-crushing aggressors.
Also possibly suggests they are close enough to the City to have heard word of it at all, which is further supported by both Jaren Ward and Dredgen Yor approaching the town on foot from the same direction (’south’).
They did have a “trail” that lead into town that was used by various drifters as well as the aforementioned individuals, and they still suffered losses to the Fallen; Shin’s birth parents are noted to have been “taken by Dregs”.
Originally had no formalised government, just “basic tenets [of law] agreed upon by all”.
Spent some years under the dictatorship of Magistrate Loken, who took it upon himself to oversee their laws. He is implied to have lost part or perhaps all of his family, likely to Fallen, which lead him to see his harsh rulings as protection for the town.
During his time in power, it was customary for Loken to formally greet newcomers to the town, and he was capable of pulling together at least nine gunslingers to do his bidding, though how willingly is unclear.
Though seemingly resource-poor, the town took care of orphans which suggests it was customary to look out for their vulnerable members. Strangers to the town were also offered access to a room and hospitality.
Had a courtyard.
After Jaren Ward joined the township, they would sometimes track Fallen, presumably to eradicate them from the area.
Several of these people may have belonged to Palamon and survived Dredgen Yor’s purge, likely by being part of Ward’s hunting party: Brevin, Trenn, Mel, Kressler, Nada.
1) He’s not actually from the wild wild west. Bungie obviously drew heavily from this genre in crafting the backstories behind Thorn and Last Word; a small town, a young man, a dark stranger who murdered his pa(s), and a final stand-off on a ridge that just about had tumbleweeds blowing through it. The Old West is well and truly dead, though, and Palamon itself is a post-post-apocalyptic mountain town in thick forest striving to stay hidden from alien invaders - the exact location is never mentioned, but it doesn’t sound like cowboy country. Leaning too hard into that western influence can therefore be limiting, and risks clashing with the vibe of Destiny’s wider worldbuild.
2) He’s an outsider among the Guardians. Shin is so far the only canon Guardian we know to have been raised while living, and thus the only canon Guardian we know to have full memory of his life. He had a home outside the City, he had a family outside the Tower, and - perhaps most critically - he had experiences with and opinions of Guardians before becoming one himself. He doesn’t even have his own Ghost! All of these things will inevitably influence how he feels about and interacts with the cultures and hierarchies we’re so familiar with as players.
3) He does not consider himself a hero. By Shin’s own words, he considers the boy who watched Palamon burn to be a coward. He found the first attempt at hunting Yor to be exhausting, and understood the others’ growing discontent; by the time he faces Yor himself the two present emotions are anger and “an overwhelming need for [...] an end”. Once the deed is done, he just feels sad. He is able to acknowledge that Yor was a broken man, just as he was able to recognise that same condition in Loken, and he is noticeably reluctant when it starts to look like the Shadows may also need dealing with. Shin does not hold himself up as any sort of a champion and does not hold his killing of Yor up as any sort of an admirable accomplishment. It was just a thing that needed to be done, and cost a hell of a lot in the doing.
4) Shin’s writings are biased. It’s literally the first thing he admits! It’s a bias that shows most clearly in his recollections of Jaren (which also makes this point a good thing to remember when writing Jaren), as he uses strongly emotive phrases: pure, heroic, the finest Hunter the system will ever know. And yet there are also hints at conflicted feelings: “I couldn’t admit it at the time”, he says of understanding Jaren’s questionable choice to face Yor alone; “I should have guessed,” he says of Jaren’s adoption of him. The writings are therefore a fantastic guide to Shin’s feelings years after the time periods he is writing about, but not a set guide to how he has felt at every point in his life and definitely not a set guide to the wider context of what happened.
Dredgen Yor/Rezyl Azzir for writing meme, if you're still doing that?
1) The canon is contradictory. Bungie could personally rappel into my bedroom at 4am to tell me Rezyl’s story had been planned from the beginning and I’d still be calling bullshit. Even putting aside the class warfare (badum psh), there are some really critical pieces that don’t quite click together across the cards. Early Thorn cards carry the heavy implication that Yor knew exactly what he was risking when he created Thorn (”I thought I saw a way" / “maybe I just wasn’t strong enough”), but The Triumphant Fall has Rezyl putting the gun together without realising what he was inviting in. Thorn 1 talks about pride being a driving motivation, the Rezyl cards focus more on fear and weariness.
There are numerous ways to handle this: prioritise one interpretation over another, try to blend the edges together to seek a middle ground, dropkick Bungie out the window because if they can’t keep their own character straight then it’s your city now. It doesn’t matter what you choose to do, as long as you recognise it’s a choice that’s gotta be made.
2) There is one consistent theme, though: the emotional toll of endless war. Rezyl’s story is the story of a man who fought for so long that he lost sight of the little picture. Rezyl reflects on enemies becoming “afterthoughts”, just one more battle in an endless string of battles; reflects on “growing tired of small wins, however meaningful”; he travels to the moon out of worry humanity was under even greater threat than they knew and their hope for a safe future thus that much feebler, and he fights with little passion or care for his own safety. Likewise, Yor kills out of boredom and sees no particular difference between approved enemies and supposed innocents, refers to the Light as a crutch, and points out that despite literal centuries of fighting as a grand hero, the same battles keep coming back around. “I tire of it,” he says. “I tire of you.”
We don’t know exactly what the Darkness whispered to Rezyl, but in light of the above, this card is worth consideration.
3) His relationship with the Hive is complicated at best. There is not yet any conclusive evidence whether Yor took up Hive magics outside of Thorn, and no evidence at all that he had any further dealings with the Hive. He clearly regards them with some sort of respect: is implied to have taken his name from their language, and even as Rezyl is able to appreciate the strange parallels between himself and their dark champions. He acknowledges them as nightmares, however, and his faith is in the “shadow” (aka, ye olde Darkness, as identified by his Ghost) directly. Does he see them as allies, inspiration, competition? It’s unclear, and open to plenty of interpretation.
4) His relationship with himself is even gnarlier. All claims to the contrary, Rezyl does not cease to exist when Yor makes his ascension; at absolute minimum, Yor still carries with him knowledge of the City, the Tower, the Light, and all their workings. His toying with Shin stands out as a peculiarity, enough so that Jaren’s Ghost calls him out for it, and it’s notable that he seems to deliberately target a settlement he once helped - there’s something very human in whatever strange game he is playing. Is there a kernel of regret buried deep within? Is there fear his fall is not as justified as he believes, a need to prove his new philosophy true? What sort of peace is it he feels? Just as writing Rezyl should foreshadow Yor, I believe Yor should backshadow Rezyl.
5) He is a remarkably (and coolly) sardonic asshole. Unfortunately a lot of Yor’s cards take place as audio logs, which means we don’t get any stated tone, but my god he is still so clearly - and casually! - being a dick sometimes. Evil has a sense of humour, who knew? He’s also quite dispassionate; he engages with the bandits almost disinterestedly even as they threaten him, and is unoffended by the condemnations flung by Jaren’s Ghost. (”Impressed?” “Far from it.” “To each their own.”) From the fierce battle on the moon to the moment Shin guns him down, Rezyl/Yor keeps his cool.
Sorry if you've answered this before, but assuming a Guardian was to talk to Shin (Either on the rare occasion Shin visits the Tower or just when the two cross paths), what are good ways to get into Shin's good graces?
This is going to sound terribly facetious but: be like Jaren.
More specifically, I think he’d favour Guardians who care about the little people. Most Guardians seem to live solely within the segregated society of the Tower or their own equally segregated worlds, which is understandable given that being an amnesiac corpse imbued with life by an alien power for the sole purpose of fighting an impossible war does not leave one primed for making nice with the civilians. Even Guardians that make an effort sometimes bear casually callous attitudes; Cayde helps out with City dodgeball for the kids, but he also dismissed the technomite breakout as harmless because it didn’t harm Guardians, nevermind that it would have been a plague of devastating proportions for the City proper.
Shin’s been one of the little people. Any sort of disregard or belittlement of non-Guardians is going to immediately highlight the gulf between him and the others, whereas someone who at least tries to understand the mortal perspective stands a better chance of forging some common ground.
Beyond that, I reckon he’d prefer people understand the weighty duty of a Guardian’s role over the frequently flippant or the glory-hounds, people who have a wanderer’s experience over people who’ve stuck close the City, and people who don’t make a Thing out of his history over people who are way too interested in his personal trauma. Also possibly people who can let a silence sit a while over people who literally can’t keep their trap clapped for five goddamn minutes, h’oh dear lord he is trying to have a moment here.
