We’re in a bit of a lull in Destiny 2‘s seasonal content at the moment, so we’ve been playing on our alts a little bit. Since the seasonal mission voice lines change after Amanda dies during the storyline, playing through them on a character who hasn’t hit that point yet allows you to hear the older ones. In one Battleground mission, Amanda laments not being able to fight on the frontlines, as she and Devrim muse on the seemingly arbitrary nature of who is resurrected by the Traveler’s Light. And if this, and other voice lines throughout the season are indications that Amanda is coming back as a Guardian in Destiny 2, that will be a real shame.
Amanda’s death in Destiny 2 was awkwardly executed in the first place, but bringing her back as a Guardian would only make things worse. Sure, Bungie could use Amanda’s resurrection to wring some pathos out of Amanda and Crow’s relationship — they were friends shortly after Crow returned to the city, only for Amanda to distance herself from him after she learned that he was originally Uldren Sov. Having Crow on the other side of that, with Amanda having no memory of him, could be interesting, maybe. But Destiny 2 isn’t even sticking to its rules about how the Light works lately, anyway.
In the Witch Queen collector’s edition lore, Ikora explains that the Light takes away memories in order to create a clean slate and erase hatred and animosity. This doesn’t always work — we know that many Lightbearers committed atrocities during the Dark Age — but it’s an interesting quirk of worldbuilding. Some Guardians maintained a connection to who they were, like Felwinter and Ana Bray, but nobody was ever really the same person as they were while they were alive.
Until we got to Crow, that is. In the Season of the Lost, Crow regained his memories of his life as Uldren Sov from Savathun. The Witch Queen herself later regained her own memories through the work of the Guardians in the Witch Queen expansion. And in the Season of the Haunted, Crow made peace with the Memory of Uldren Sov in a narrative process seemingly designed to make Crow what he was supposed to be in the earliest versions of Destiny, a fun, risk-taking companion to the player.
So we now have Lightbearers regaining their memories left and right, which in our view makes the Light less mysterious and tragic and more just a generic source of superpowers. In Battleground dialogue after Amanda’s death, characters point out that even if she were to return, she wouldn’t really be her — but that’s no longer really the case, given how easily multiple characters have regained their original sense of self after resurrection.
If Destiny 2 is moving towards the return of Amanda and possibly even Rasputin as Guardians, it’ll further undermine the already confusing and ill-established stakes of the world as they exist right now. If nobody important to the plot can really, truly die, then we’re essentially in Dragon Ball Z territory, which would be a major step back, narratively, from the state of the game post-Witch Queen.
