Illustration by Brenna Connell/OutWrite
I write this on the eve of the launch of “Lightfall,” “Destiny 2”’s (“D2”’s) newest story expansion, although hopefully by the time this article is published I’ll have spent some hours exploring the cyberpunk city environment of Neomuna. I am the most excited I’ve been for any piece of media in years.
This is a huge moment for the narrative arc, which game studio Bungie has been working towards for over half a decade. At last, the Darkness that has been threatening the remnants of humanity is here, and it’s time for players to come together with allies, old and new, to kick ass in the name of protecting the people we love.
With this expansion comes a new queer canon: the reveal of the Cloudstriders, cybernetically enhanced protectors of Neomuna, including Nimbus, “D2”’s first canonically nonbinary character (who uses they/them pronouns). And can I say, they are just — whew — like — WOW. I can already tell that I’m going to be weak for Nimbus from their appearance in promotional materials because they are hot. From what I’ve seen, they seem like the young, brash, charming, cocky sort; but that cockiness is warranted because they’re skilled — so casually skilled that they just can drop down to their stomach on their little Silver Surfer board to dodge an attack and then zoom away (and look sexy as hell while doing it). Nimbus strikes me as the type of character who nearly gets themselves killed at every opportunity.
However, Nimbus is far from the first queer character to appear in “Destiny 2,” or even to play a major narrative role in the “Destiny” series. And if you weren’t aware of that… *cracks knuckles* oooohoho, you aren’t even ready for this. Buckle up, gaymers.
You may have noticed that the title of this article mentions gay robots. No, this does not refer to Nimbus — do you think I am so unversed in sci-fi tropes as to not be able to differentiate between cyborgs and robots? It just so happens that two of the most prominent, long-established, and badass characters in “Destiny 2,” Saint-14 and Osiris, are gay and in love. Saint-14 is what’s known in “D2” lingo as an Exo, which is a human consciousness inserted into a robotic physical frame; hence, gay robot(ish).
So I found this out in December of 2020 (yes, I remember the month because I went down a lore rabbit hole and took screenshots) via a tweet from Robert Brookes, a senior narrative developer at Bungie. Interestingly enough, I think a significant portion of the “D2” player base only found out about Saint-14 and Osiris in December 2022. This was thanks to the end cutscene of the “Season of Plunder” at the end of which Osiris wakes up from an evil magic coma and they kiss. They kiss right on screen and it’s wonderful and beautiful and undeniably gay. Ahh, that cutscene… I made a couple of queer “Destiny 2” friends here at UCLA last quarter and one of them alerted me when the cutscene was leaked. I remember watching it in the middle of De Neve Plaza and screeching like some sort of Eldritch creature when Saint-14 took off his helmet to kiss Osiris.
As much as I’d love to blather on about the two of them and all the other queer characters in “D2,” there is an actual point to this article that I have to get to, which is not so much to defend Saint-14’s queerness as it is to explore the discourse surrounding the validity of queer characters, storylines, and representation.
So I was playing “Destiny 2” with a friend while we chatted with another friend in a Discord voice call. We were shooting the shit, both figuratively and literally, and for whatever reason (probably because I love and adore and treasure him), I brought up the character Crow.
I said something along the lines of: “Man, I was a little jealous a couple seasons ago. It really seemed like Crow and Amanda Holliday were hitting it off, maybe even going in the romance direction, you know?”
My friend: “He’s gay though, isn’t he? So you don’t have to worry about that.”
Me: “Ehh, not 100% true.” Crow is not canonically gay, per se, but there is evidence of past romantic subtext between him and another man, an old friend of his. Of course, that doesn’t rule out him being attracted to women and other genders as well. “But you know who is undeniably gay? Saint-14.”
I was met with denial, then utter disbelief — it was a back and forth of “No, he’s not,” and “Um, he definitely is though,” for a few minutes, much to the amusement of our other friend. I found it quite amusing as well because I know my “D2” friend isn’t homophobic. He’s just, one, out of the loop because he hasn’t played much over the past couple years and/or, two, obliviously straight and not as sensitive to queer subtext.
Eventually I broke the back and forth with, “My dude, Saint-14 literally kissed his boyfriend on the mouth, as in helmet off and everything, in a cutscene at the end of last season. I don’t know what else to tell you.”
We were all still laughing and having fun. I was getting a little frustrated that he still didn’t seem to believe me, but everything was fine up until he said, “But he can’t be gay. He’s a super masculine robot with a spiky mohawk helmet, one of the most powerful characters to ever exist, alongside Osiris.”
That’s when I got a bit tense. The carefree energy of our banter drained away. “What does that even mean? How do those things somehow prove him not to be gay?”
“They can’t just retcon his character. Saint-14’s been around for so long in the game and there was never any sort of evidence that he was gay.”
Unfortunately, this was also about when my brain-to-mouth mechanism stopped working. There were a lot of things I wanted to say, but I couldn’t figure out how to say them best. “What do you mean, retcon? Retcon?? How is it a retcon if he was never ‘proven straight’ in the past? And again, how is it — how does Saint being so powerful — he can be powerful and gay. He can be a war criminal for straight up murdering all those former-enemies-now-allies of ours and also be gay!”
I’d perhaps lost the thread of my thoughts with the war criminal remark because our other friend piped up, “Ah, I know what he’s talking about, though, you wouldn’t necessarily want to make the one queer character be a bad guy.”
“No, but he’s not — that’s not what I’m — there are other gay characters too, it’s not like he’s the only gay character. He’s not a villain, it’s a commentary on the messed up nature of war, and Saint’s been going through a whole redemption thing. Reparations are being made. And not all queer characters need to be perfect and good!” I sound a lot clearer here than I did at the time because I was starting to get pissed.
“Yeah,” the first “D2” friend said, “but wouldn’t it be better if they just made a new character rather than retconning an established character? Like, it seems kind of messy in an ‘Overwatch’ Soldier: 76 gay reveal way. Rather than someone like Tracer where it’s pretty established in her character.”
What, because she looks like a lesbian, and Saint-14 doesn’t look like a gay man?
Eventually I just let it go. I’d shut down and was absolutely incapable of forming a coherent argument. Hahaha. Ha.
But very soon after the call ended — far too late at night, as is often the case when playing “Destiny 2” — my mind started racing once more. As is stereotypical of introverts, my brain processes my thoughts at a delay, so I did eventually figure out exactly what I wanted to say in response to my friend.
There are a couple themes I’d like to dwell on here. One is the misleading preconception that a man obviously can’t be queer if he’s masculine, physically capable, and badass. For one: my dude, have you heard of the gay subculture of bears? These guys are often the bulky, brawny, traditionally masculine sort of gay folks that Saint-14 would fit in with.
Secondly, I thought we were over defining who can or cannot be gay based on how they look or act — so Saint-14 can’t be gay because he’s the robot god of war, but Crow can because he’s a twink? Maybe I’m just spending too much time in queer spaces on and offline nowadays. Maybe I’m getting out of touch with average, heteronormative ways of looking at things as opposed to the dialectic of radical queerness vs. outright bigotry. Just in case you need to hear it again as a reminder or an affirmation: there’s no particular way to look or be queer, whether it’s regarding your gender, sexuality, or romantic orientation.
An important point from the conversation with my friend is his saying of Saint-14, “He’s never been gay.” Well, he’d never been explicitly straight, either. Here we can take a peek at a fundamental underpinning of the cisheteropatriarchy: the automatic assumption of heterosexuality as default. A lot of people have trouble with this in media these days. “Well, they just suddenly made him gay! He was straight before!” Was he? Or is that belief grounded in the assumption that he was straight because he didn’t embody a gay stereotype? Characters need proof to validate being gay but not being straight. Very funky, I’d say.
That leads quite neatly into my final point, which deals with the issue of queer representation in general. Especially with recent remakes of popular franchises, there have been some clashing complications in trying to “be truthful to the original content” and “reflect a broader viewership/playerbase/world.” The outcry that haunts me the most was about Black elves and dwarves in “The Rings of Power,” a recent extension of “The Lord of the Rings” lore onto the screen. White people getting offended over attempts at racial and ethnic representation in outdated content shares parallels with homophobes’ and transphobes’ outcry over queer rep.
“Destiny” as a franchise has been around since the first game came out in 2014. Osiris and Saint-14 have been around since then in the form of legend in “Destiny 1” and physical presence in “Destiny 2” at the end of 2017 and 2019, respectively. From the start of their intersecting timelines in the game, there were signs of their relationship. Their stories and lives were intimately intertwined. This is for another time, but Saint-14 literally died while trying to search for an exiled Osiris. Osiris then broke time to bring Saint back to life. I mean, it’s just kinda gay.
Sure — you could, as my friend did, insist, “No, but they were like brothers, they were best friends since they were young.” Riiiiiight. Brothers. Homies. History will call them the best of friends. Not to dunk on the importance of platonic intimacy between men, but if someone is going to stand there and tell me there’s no proof that they were gay until they “unexpectedly” kissed, I would point out that if one of them were a woman, I don’t think there would be such an outcry about “Oh, I didn’t see it, they’re just friends.”
I will say there’s always room for growth and realization. My friend and I played “Destiny 2” again just this past weekend, and he was showing me through the Prophecy Dungeon (considering it was 1 a.m., I think I did a relatively good job of not failing). We zoomed across an extraplanar desert on our ground vehicles, searching for our exit, when we happened to trigger some new dialogue from the non-player characters who were supervising our mission.
The characters, Eris Morn and the Drifter, mention something about Osiris saving Saint-14. Drifter says: “Well, call me old-fashioned, but if I broke time to save my knight in shining armor, I’d want ’em to stop foolin’ around and climb my tower.”
Over Discord, I hear my friend say, “Huh.”
I think he’s starting to get it.
IN MEMORIAM: This article is dedicated to Lance Reddick, the voice actor for “Destiny”’s Commander Zavala, who passed away early on in the editing process of this article. While not directly related to this article, both Reddick and Zavala have helped make “Destiny” the game it is from the very beginning in 2014. Rest in peace, Commander.
Credits:
Author: Brenna Connell (She/They)
Artist: Brenna Connell (She/They)
Copy Editors: Min Kim (They/Them), Bella (She/They)