The Traveler is not evil, for -blam!-'s sake. This isn't -blam!-ing Warhammer 40k.

At one point in a cut scene the stranger say's it's better to pick the wrong side than pick no side at all. At the end of the game in the final cut scene she head nods towards the traveler and says it is where the real fight takes place.

Okay today I was playing destiny patrol in the Cosmo drone and as I killed the fallen it shrieked "the darkness!" Also the queen has slave fallen and don't the class names titan, hunter, and warlock sound villainous?

I'm not sure if anyone's heard this theory before, but I think the traveller IS the black garden. If you click the links that go to the early sketches of the traveller it looks like the black garden is inside the traveller. http://imgur.com/a/0dELh There are also grimoire cards that reinforce this: [i]"I am Pujari. These are the visions I have had of the Black Garden. The Traveler moved across the face of the iron world. It opened the earth and stitched shut the sky. It made life possible. In these things there is always symmetry. Do you understand? This is not the beginning but it is the reason. The Garden grows in both directions. It grows into tomorrow and yesterday. The red flowers bloom forever. There are gardeners now. They came into the garden in vessels of bronze and they move through the groves in rivers of thought. This is the vision I had when I leapt from the Shores of Time and let myself sink: I walked beneath the blossoms. The light came from ahead and the shadows of the flowers were words. They said things but I will not write them here. At the end of the path grew a flower in the shape of a Ghost. I reached out to pluck it and it cut me with a thorn. I bled and the blood was Light. The Ghost said to me: You are a dead thing made by a dead power in the shape of the dead. All you will ever do is kill. You do not belong here. This is a place of life. The Traveler is life, I said. You are a creature of Darkness. You seek to deceive me. But I looked behind me, down the long slope where the blossoms tumbled in the warm wind and the great trees wept sap like blood or wine, and I felt doubt. When my Ghost raised me from the sea there was a thorn-cut in my left hand and it has not healed since. "[/i] It says we were made by dead power and if you look at the precision damage area on a vex it could be light. This could mean that the same thing that brought guardians back from the dead is the same thing keeping the vex alive. This is why there is no story; we just do as we are told like the vex [i]"The knife had a million blades. And you were giant, powerful and swift. But the knife pinned you. Cut your godly flesh away. Very little was left, you are sure, because you feel insignificant now. The hard slick heart of your soul: That is what remains. A body small as a river stone, and just as simple. You picture yourself as a piece of indigestible grit, a nameless nothing hiding among other nameless stones. Perhaps you glitter like a gem, yes. Pride makes you hope so. If only you could see yourself. But you have no eyes. Not the dimmest sense survives. What lives is memory, and what slim portion of these thoughts can you trust? The knife stole much more than your body. "[/i] Notice how it says "The hard slick heart of your soul". Just like the heart we kill in the black garden mission. [i]"Beyond the towering Meridian Bay gate lies the Black Garden, adrift in time and space. And within the Garden dwell the Vex of the Sol Divisive, frozen in rapture. We have precious little insight into the Divisive's behavior. They seem central to Vex actions in the solar system: the Garden is clearly a place of enormous power. Legends and scant field reports all indicate that the Divisive Vex behave religiously. Why would a hyperintelligent, time-spanning thought mesh exhibit religious behavior? The answer seems as obvious as it is chilling: if the Vex found worship and devotion more effective than any other behavior, they would adopt worship. Whatever the Vex found - or made - in the Garden, it transcends even their power. "[/i] The vex seem to behave religiously towards the garden, just as we are to the traveller. They are both very powerful and at the end of the black garden mission it says you're back on Mars which is where the traveller is discovered in the opening cutscene. Now I've just got my own theories. Vex are known for making bases in celestial bodies; maybe this is to mimic their God which is the traveller. The ghosts are also from the black garden and they were 'made' by the traveller. Overall, I think they're is an overwhelming amount of evidence that the traveller is the black garden

I'm too lazy to scroll through the thread to see if this has been posted already but I'm just gonna throw it out there, there was that one thread the other day that explained how Destiny's story was originally much different than the one we were sold. The story that had to do with "the Crow", who is possibly the Queens Brother? Anyway, in that story, you're kidnapped by the Crow and some of his followers (includes The Stranger and The Speaker) and they give you the information that The Traveler is not good, bit evil, and in fact summoned the Darkness to destroy us. After Bungie's lead writer left, it was changed. People are thinking this plot twist will be explored in The House of Wolves, Plague of Darkness, or one of the next installments in the Destiny franchise.

It also states in the cosmodrome on dead hive remains a million deaths are not enough for master rahool in othe words the cryptarch

The below I posted in a comment to a thread about an alternative story. Now seeing how most NDAs are invalid once the product has released I firmly believe I'm safe in sharing the Destiny story when I was invited to a User Research Case Study done by Bungie in early 2013. Note: Test Group = the people in my testing session. Group = Crow's Group. A run down of how the Destiny story was around early 2013. Crow ends up being introduced earlier on in the story, in the place of the Exo Stranger, which is interesting to note. This story revolved around discovering that there was something wrong with the Speaker, and the Traveler. As a Guardian, you were abducted by this yet to be named group led by Crow. In the second mission on Earth you got to a certain point, and he swooped down knocked you out, and brought you to this secret base on Mars. There you met with some Guardians that abandoned the Traveler, the Speaker, and the Light so to speak. It was led by Crow, a burly old human, the Exo Stranger (Who evidently in this variant of the story was male, but had relatively the same personality), and one or two Guardians who lost their Ghosts. It had this predictable plot where the Traveler was the cause of the collapse of the Golden Age because this group found out through their travels that the Darkness was a spawn of the Traveler rather than it's rival. Essentially when the Traveler was brought to Earth it unleashed the Darkness and took over the majority of the technology that Humanity used, turned it against them and nearly wiped it out. As that happened centuries ago the truth was twisted through the speakers that the Traveler protected Earth in it's darkest moment rather than destroying it. They send you to Venus to lure out a Gatekeeper, and steal it's core which supposedly held an AI that could help bring the truth to light about the Traveler, and the Speaker to the citizens of the City. Around this point I recall going to Mars to retrieve the remains of another powerful AI that the Cabal was repurposing for their own use. Then at the end of that mission the test group was sent about 10 hours further into the game where we assaulted a Hive base on the Moon, after the group discovered from an AI that the Hellmouth (IIRC it was a different name then) was a housing for a super weapon that could revive the Traveler from it's dormant state so it could wreck havoc on Humanity again. That's all I vividly remember from the story from that session. I wanted something different, but it felt like yet another halo game. The planet progression was different too, it was Earth > Venus > Mars > Moon. Also the deactivated Spider Walker near the start of the released game is a reference to the Spider Walker in the internal build I played where the Fallen dropped down a bunch of Shanks, Vandals, Driegs, and a.. spider walker. Luckily around mission 7 after returning from Venus to grab an old Starmap I could finally defeat the thing.

The Traveler is evil. The Hive, Fallen, Vex, and Cabal, there all after the Traveler/black hole who destroyed there place and now his in earth were after taking a few hits from all factions. He resides here and with little of his power he revived us so we can could continue to destroy his threats. A Fight he couldnt finish. So now all factions are setting camp around earth to attack Traveler for destroying there home planets but also fighting each other for dominiance. So his using us and once we get rid of his threat we are next. The End

Our ghost started a new war with the cabal , during the exclusion zone mission, this is later proved during the strike on Mars the guy says whether we wanted to or not we have stepped into a new war with cabal

There is a grimoire card from Rasputins perspective and he clearly mentions not being able to defeat something powerful, he also mentions what I assumed to be the traveler being gravely wounded by it too. It would be great if the game had a story and we didn't have to make it all up ourselves.

Who is/what "Master Roul?" And why doesn't a million souls satisfy him/it? There is a cave beside a hive ship in it the bones of ancient evil whisper.....then scream.

I remember after the first mission on Venus where you first encounter and defeat the Vex you talk to the stranger and she mentions through the middle of the dialogue that "a side must be chosen even if it's the wrong side" that seems to me supportive of the theory that the traveler is not as pure as it seems to be. It could also be more expansive in its meaning that there may not be a "correct" alliance to choose. I personally think fallen, vex, hive, cabal, traveler, etc should not be trusted as humanity and or guardians in general are used as cattle or instruments to further these entities agendas which do not favor ours. Just my 2 cents

Xur does say "your traveler has a dark mirror" or something like that

I saw something a while back about the future war cult found a time machine or something that would show the future but humans couldn't handle what they saw. So they rebuilt an exo they found to use the machine. That exo is none other than the stranger. That why she said she was not born of light. It was also thought that she is from the future were you fail to stop the darkness in the card someone talking referred to a ghost as little light just like the stranger. Idk were I saw this might have been reddit if I find it I will post a link.

I don't think it's as easy as black and white, good and evil.. There is something in between. Just like a good person can sometimes act in an evil manner towards someone he/she doesn't like. I think the traveller has both these sides inside it and we just haven't found out it's true intentions yet.

Omg I know,why don't we let the story writers actually give us a story and not the players

The Traveller went to a system where she could confront the Darkness. That's our solar system. Humanity was chosen to fight alongside the Traveller. Was this the wisest choice? Was it the best choice? When humanity went to meet the Traveller, first contact with an unknowable entity that had been reshaping the worlds of our system, we did it armed with guns. Humanity bravely travelled across space, set foot on an alien and potentially hostile world, and walked up to a powerful, mysterious entity, and they did so only with rifles and courage to defend them. Humanity was the best choice for the conflict. Did this choice benefit or doom humanity? The Traveller did give us the Golden Age. We did end up suffering the Collapse, but there's no way of knowing if we wouldn't have been targeted by the Darkness or the followers of the Darkness sooner or later anyway. We know for sure that the Vex were active in this system billions of years before the Traveller arrived. I'm not sure if we know enough to say if humanity would have been better off without the Traveller.