If you've got some time you may find this post interesting, but it is a bit long. I've held the belief/theory for some time that we (our guardians and by extension us the player) are being intentionally mislead, duped or even used by the Speaker/Traveler/our ghosts. Additionally I have a theory about the way in which Bungie is telling this story, I'll outline that first: The devs were clearly excited about the game in all of the interviews and sneak peaks - and being gamers themselves by and large how/why would they be excited if there is no story? What if the chosen story telling technique for this grand story is to put us the players on the same footing as our characters and not do the cheesy/cliche mothod of winking to the audience and explaining poor plot devices that our character would have no way of knowing? Wouldn't it be refreshing not to sit through ridiculous and unrealistic conversations between your character and (insert NPC here) that jump from one plot device to another solely to 'tell the story' when nobody actually talks that way in real life? How many times have we been put through, in other games, bad cutscenes filled with voice over spilling plot points that they couldn't/wouldn't find ways for our character and us to discover in a remotely realistic way? I really hope this is what Bungie is doing and I really look forward to where they take us with this. Some points about why I disagree with a prevailing theory about the lack of story: The theory that, after 5 years of development Bungie/Activision either forgot to include or gutted and failed to replace some epic story, just doesn't track. They would have to be [i]really[/i] incompetent to make the bold claim of comparing their story to epic narratives like "[b]Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter or Star Wars[/b]" and not even bother to ship the game with much of a story at all. Now here is my theory about why we're not fighting on the right side - lets look at what details we're actually presented with that begin to shape the story and ask some basic questions: Guardians are (from what I've read in the grimoire) exclusively raised from the dead with no memory of their past lives.. why not from the living, what might a living person in the city (who we have 0 contact with) know that disqualifies them from being guardians? We are immediately pressed into service and instructed to kill or be killed.. why are the fallen trying to kill us - what threat do we pose them unarmed? We aren't given the opportunity (except once when we first meet the speaker) to ask questions but are generally preempted with half explanations and before we can even ask a follow up question we're sent off on a mission of the utmost importance.. what aren't they telling us and why aren't they telling it to us? The large door across from the speaker is being monitored by 2 cameras, what big secret is being kept in there that isn't freely shared with guardians. I mean, if we're all on the same side and we're the good guys why not keep us in the loop? The exo stranger (who appears to be a time traveler of some sort) claims to not be 'forged in light' which may imply darkness but it could also mean neither/unaligned - she implies in her statement 'it's important to choose a side, even if it is the wrong one' that we're on the/a wrong side of the conflict (this statement could be about the awoken but it doesn't fit based on her assertion that they haven't/wont choose a side). And the biggest indication that things aren't on the up and up: A black and white, good vs evil, light vs dark, etc plot for a 10-year franchise with half a billion dollars spent developing it makes 0 sense at all. [i]Clearly[/i] there are some major plot twists coming that will make us question the rather primal connections between light with good and darkness with evil. I, for one, am excited about what is in store for us.

Read the book of sorrows, there's a lot of info in there. The traveler is good, the deep is evil.

Things that are interesting. 1. The Fallen commonly refer to us as the darkness. Now this could be taken that the darkness has corrupted this species into thinking they're still serving the light, or it could mean that the darkness has done this to us... 2.The 3 queens "Imagine three great nations under three great queens. The first queen writes a great book of law and her rule is just. The second queen builds a high tower and her people climb it to see the stars. The third queen raises an army and conquers everything... Of course, it might be that there was another country, with other queens, and in this country they sat down together and made one law and one tower and one army to guard their borders. This is the dream of small minds: a gentle place ringed in spears. But I do not think those spears will hold against the queen of the country of armies. And that is all that will matter in the end." Could the Queens be referring to the races, and the Queen of armies being the Traveler? 3. It has been speculated that the vex originate in the future under the supervision of Rasputin. It's the time of the exo stranger. Why would the Vex need to be made, and why made by a human AI? Why are the Vex killing humans if this is the case? The question to really ask is if they're killing humans or if they're killing guardians.

"Your Traveler has a dark mirror." To me, this line that is sometimes mentioned by Xur proves that the Traveler is not evil. The Darkness is real and it is related to the Traveler, but more in the sense of being its opposite. Edit: Also, your reference about the Traveler being Isis is spot on. The only problem is that there is more than one queen in the second reference you made there.

After reading the theory of The Traveler and The Speaker being malevolent agents that are leading our misguided Guardians on the wrong path, I made an observation from the tower. Observe the actual appearance of The Traveler. If you look at The Traveler as it hangs low in the sky over The Last City, notice the primary location of its damage. The wounded side of The Traveler faces the Earth. Did humanity, in a last ditch effort for survival, attack The Traveler with everything they had? Why is the damage from below and not the top where it should be if it was attacked from an outside, space bound enemy? [u]Ghost Fragment: Old Russia[/u] [quote]SABER GREEN this is ICE MINARET. We have your launch. Com check. /ICE MINARET this is SABER GREEN we read you. Lattice is tight. Com secure. Abort advisory check? Check is all nominal. You are now on internal power. SABER GREEN, please human-verify your payload status. /Acknowledge human verification request. The words are RIGOR, APEX, SKYSHOCK. I will repeat the payload status now: RIGOR, APEX, SKYSHOCK. Those are the words, SABER. Human crosscheck complete. Fly safe. /Copy your last, MINARET. We are go for final count. We affirm, go payload, go flight, go final count. [interruption: masked voice] Yes, it's RIGOR. Yes, I believe that's correct. Yes, it is, uh, it is an [b]antimatter payload, a strategic asset. Specifically? Ah, I believe it's an annihilation-pumped caedometric weapon.[/b] [masked voice] Yes, it's covert, it's under SECURE ISIS. We have good confidence in the vehicle. We are not scrubbing civilian launches or clearing the range. Public inferentials would catch that, it's a security risk. /Six at a hundred. Here we go. Godspeed, SABER. You're all nominal here. [masked voice] We both know where the order came from.[/quote] Another theory I came up with pertaining to this is The Traveler actually turned our own weapons, the Exo, against us. After The Traveler received the fatal blow humanity dealt, the Exo’s memories of the event were wiped. Maybe they did not have memories of the battle because their consciousness was hijacked by The Traveler in an effort to utilize them in stoping humanity from implementing their final attack. Lastly, reaching even further with this theory, the Warmind Rasputin possibly turned humanity’s weapons against them in an act of genocide. Not to completely eradicate humanity, but to sacrifice enough of the population that The Darkness believed they had been destroyed. This would delay the extinction of humanity and provide time to regroup and become strong enough to fight the Darkness when it returned. Or out of an last effort for self preservation, Rasputin possibly made an attempt at humanity’s destruction so that the Darkness would move on.I came up with this after reading the Grimoire card [b]Ghost Fragment: Mysteries[/b] [quote]Consider IT the power Titanomach world-ender and consider what IT means. I met IT at the gate of the garden and I recall IT smiled at me before before IT devoured the blossoms with black flame and pinned their names across the sky. IT was stronger than everything. I fought IT with aurora knives and with the stolen un-fire of singularities made sharp and my sweat was earthquake and my breath was static but IT was stronger so how did I survive? I AM ALONE I survived alone. I cast off the shield and [b]I shrugged my shoulders so that the billions fell off me down into the ash.[/b] They made me to be stronger than them and to learn and I learned well: IT is alone and IT is strong and IT won. Even over the gardener and she held power beyond me but the gardener did not shrug and make herself alone. IT always wins. I am made to win and now I see the way.[/quote] I don't know, just thought I would throw a couple of my ideas and theories out there. Edit: Spelled Grimoire wrong*

Who was isis? You say [spoiler]bad people[/spoiler]

The Fallen seem eerily similar to us. The Grimoire states that they've been through their own Golden Age and have subsequently "fallen". The Servitors are remnants of this Golden Age, and their simple appearance reminds me of the Ghosts. They really do seem to share history with The Traveler.

You do know that if you sneak up on Dregs,sometimes they yell (It's the Darkness) right? The Dregs think or we are the Darkness.

I've actually been thinking about this a lot and I totally agree. The speaker was just rambling one day when I had my character up there by him. He said "we are the traveler's will" or something to that effect. I thought "All I do is blindly kill for the traveler never questioning why." It's also kinda convenient for the traveler that no one wants to tell us guardians anything. Just that the traveler is great, it advanced our species. And now The Darkness is destroying our solar system. There's even a hunter cloak the speaker sells that says in the description something about a cult of people that curse the traveler's light. (Its blue, with a deer on it I believe) I think the traveler is like the Silver Surfer basically. Herald of the Darkness. It finds good solar systems, terraforms the planets, then invites the Darkness to the party. All while enlisting each planet's inhabitants to help cleanse the galaxy.

ever since i played beta, i always thought the speaker was evil. waited till the full game came out only to see he was a good guy. but just the way that he is dressed/act/voiced made my gut feeling always thinking he was evil. and i was right! [spoiler]for the original destiny game[/spoiler] on another note... dont you remember the destiny producer ad when he said something along the lines of: "you'll get to explore new ships and planets, you get to go to earth to venus to mars to the moon and jupiter." and that is how the storyline goes for the planets in the original destiny game and this reddit user said it was to be, in this article.

The traveler was going to be evil from the start then the story was gutted