by Candria Slamin
Last year, after months and months of trying, my girlfriend finally convinced me to play Destiny 2. I never thought it would happen. I once used to pride myself on not playing first-person shooters, especially not first-person shooter MMOs. I mean, to give you better context as to how monumental this was, the last first-person shooter I played willingly was Unreal Tournament with my dad a decade ago. But, when we found ourselves in lockdown during a pandemic, I decided to let her walk me through the (now vaulted) “Red War Campaign.” To call this attempt rough would be nicer than it was. My aim was absolute dogshit. I often got overwhelmed by the sheer amount of gameplay mechanics and things happening on screen. The fights were arduous or downright impossible given my lower level. But somehow, I would find myself thinking about the game late at night. Even with the odds of “It’s a FPS MMO” against it, there was something at Destiny 2’s heart that kept me close. Then, one frigid day in December, I realized what it was.
The lore.
Bungie (the company that makes Destiny) has done a lot of work building a world full of lore and interesting characters over the course of both Destiny and Destiny2. And, to my pleasant surprise, a good chunk of those characters are gay as hell. My girlfriend had told me about the gay man characters like Devrim Kay, Saint-14, and Osiris, so I knew there were some gay people from the start. However, what I did not anticipate were all the gay women. My god, all the gay women I found made my heart leap…and then immediately sink. You see, while there are three explicitly gay men in Destiny, there are ten explicitly gay women. Three times as much, but none of them are as talked about as the three men. When I say “not talked about as much,” I mean “The list of ‘LGBT Characters In Video Games’ on Wikipedia only lists the men” types of not talked about. I mean “When Osiris and Saint-14 were finally confirmed to be gay by Robert Brookes, a narrative designer at Bungie, every games media site on the planet wrote about it, yet no one’s done the same for any of the women.” I’ve spent so much time reading through the lore, it seemed to me that the knowledge of all these lesbians and bi women and trans women would be commonplace, and yet just the other day I had someone ask me for proof of the character Mara Sov being gay. Now, about six months after my official headlong dive into Destiny, my biggest question isn’t “So, what in the hell is the Darkness?”
It’s “Why are all the gay women invisible?”
In 2018, I had what I call “a fucking time.” I graduated college in May. I signed up with a faction of AmeriCorps in June. Moved out to Texas in July with this big plan of finishing the gig, going to grad school and being with my then-boyfriend. And then, before I had fully unpacked my things into my San Antonio apartment, I had broken up with said boyfriend, decided against grad school, and fallen into a failed quasi-romantic-sexual relationship with a girl friend of mine. By August I was going through it. Up until that moment, I had very confidently ID’d as bisexual. I saw it like this: I knew I liked girls. I knew I had the capability to be with a girl. However, it all felt abstract. My attraction to women was just something on the back burner of my mind. This thing with my friend made that attraction very material. Suddenly, I wanted to actually be with a girl. It scared me. Instead of leaning into this new revelation, or openly confessing whatever I was feeling towards my friend at that time, I dug further into attempting to date men. By late September, I had (unfortunately) downloaded Bumble and started the whole dating app process. But, the harder I tried to make things work with men and the more I ran from my feelings, the harder it was to be bi.
The running, as it always does, turned ugly. There came a point, during the mild Texan fall, where it became impossible for me to even think of the words “my girlfriend” in relation to myself. What came instead was “What girl would want me?” I would stay up until 4AM most nights just trying to get myself to switch to the “Women” option on Bumble. I started to joke about how if I finally realized I was a lesbian, I’d just become a nun. I refused to fully acknowledge my love for my friend because thinking about it made me feel predatory. As cliché as it sounds, I locked myself into a closet of shame and fear and wouldn’t come out for anything. It didn’t matter that I knew my family or friends or workplace wouldn’t treat me differently. It didn’t matter that I knew I loved my friend and that she already knew. I stayed there in that closet for a good long bit. When I quit my job in January 2019 and moved back home to Virginia in February, I was still there. It wasn’t until my friend stopped talking to me abruptly that the closet started to unravel. It took another month of post-breakup-depression and two more failed attempts to date men for it to start clearing.
In April 2019, I looked myself in the mirror and said “Okay fine! I’m a lesbian!” I met my girlfriend a couple of weeks later, and when I finally said the words “Hey Ma, this is my girlfriend, Marci,” I wondered why it took me so long.
The way Destiny 2 works is that 75% of its lore is written as in-game books that can be accessed in a menu. The other 25% is mostly made of cutscenes or spoken dialogue. Most of the character development and backstories happen in the written lore. It’s also not necessary to read through the lore tabs to understand what’s happening in any given expansion or season in Destiny 2. Because of this, it’s easy to miss all the gay text in the game. For example, if you didn’t read all 50 lore entries split between the lore books “The Marasenna” and “The Awoken of the Reef,” you’d miss 100% of the times Mara Sov is wonderfully gay with her very large girlfriend, Sjur Eido. Or, say you didn’t want to read the lore book “Your Friend, Micah Abram” or six other entries attached to weapons or in-game cosmetics about Micah-10, you’d miss that Micah-10 is a trans woman living somewhere in Siberia. Hell, even some of the lore that’s considered canon isn’t even in game. If one just so happened to miss the release of a short comic run, they’d also miss Ana Bray and her girlfriend, Camrin Dumuzi, living up a pretty domestic life. Without my deep dive into lore hosting websites like Ishtar Collective, I’d never know about lesbian characters like Eriana-3, Wei Ning, Maya Sundaresh, and Chioma Esi.
Even with the lore being so missable, there are lore bits that are just known. The biggest of these is “the helmet stayed on,” which is the ending line from an entry in which Mara Sov wishes for someone to read Shakespeare to her and Lord Shaxx is magically teleported directly to her to do so. The whole entry has an air of silliness to it, especially with the last line referencing how Shaxx has never been seen without his helmet. And yet, this one extremely silly, throwaway entry is possibly the most referenced bit of lore I’ve come across. I Googled the phrase “the helmet stayed on” and found a very large amount of Reddit threads and YouTube videos and random tweets referencing the one entry. As funny as the line is, it’s distressing. There’s so much written content about Mara’s relationship with Sjur (and in game content, as when Sjur died, Mara built a whole statue to her), but no one outside of the gay Destiny 2 fans I know seem to talk about it. Every Reddit-Dude-Bro seems to be convinced Mara fucked Shaxx in a one night stand because of one entry. Her relationship to Sjur is erased, along with every other gay woman.
To be fair to the men of Destiny 2, their gayness is also hidden behind the extra, easy to ignore lore. Devrim’s husband, Marc, seems to only have been mentioned once in lore that may not be accessible in the game now. And when Saint-14 and Osiris’s relationship was finally made canon by Brookes, those same Redditors violently rejected the notion. What’s different between the gay men and the gay women of Destiny 2 is how the fandom interacts with the content. So while it’s wonderful that there are people who aren’t giant dicks over Saint-14 and Osiris being together, or that all three men are listed in Wikipedia’s big “LGBT video game characters” list, it seems to come at the cost of the erasure of every woman in the game. Erasure to the point where people (even non-Redditors) will genuinely believe Mara Sov and Lord Shaxx got it on one night before they’ll believe Mara Sov was capable of having a girlfriend who loved her.
It’s 2021 now. My girlfriend and I celebrated our second anniversary together by nursing me back to health after my vaccine shot. I routinely tweet about how girls are so very hot. My friend and I joke about how we’re now “lesbian support ex-girlfriends for a not quite relationship that nearly was.” I don’t really even remember what it was like to find men attractive and have realized I had at least 4 different crushes on girl friends from my past. For the most part, I’m good now, and so extremely secure in my whole femme lesbian vibe that it feels weird to remember I wanted so desperately to not be like this. But I didn’t. And when I ask myself “girl, why did you shove yourself into a closet,” I know why now. My reason is linked to the reason why everyone seems to be stuck on “the helmet stayed on,” but no one discusses the canon mention of Mara being so worried about something she can’t “wrestle” with her girlfriend one night.
While no one wants to talk about gay women happily loving each other, the baby gays who find themselves abruptly in love with a woman can sink into a sea of confusion, shame, and fear. And when we’re drowning in a closet we never thought we’d be in, the representation we need doesn’t get made or discussed. It’s a vicious cycle. But when these baby gays finally find themselves outside that cycle, when they find themselves in a group of gay women suddenly the world opens up. Suddenly the gay women characters are right there in front of them and have been the whole time. That closet melts away and is forgotten about.
And suddenly, the helmet comes off.
Candria Slamin (she/her) is a recent college graduate from Virginia, USA. When she’s not being a poet, she’s busy being a giant nerd on the Internet. Find her on Twitter at @candyslam_.
