Schrödinger's Bisexual in Destiny 2

sept 13 2022

When I first wrote my essay on queer representation in Destiny 2, I did so without any idea of the discourse that was brewing right under my nose. I don't engage with the Destiny fandom on Twitter or Reddit much, preferring to stay in my cozy little Tumblr hole, so I was completely missing some related discussions, stemming from arguments with current Destiny writers. The arguments centered around Hazel Monforton and her writing of Eris Morn and the Drifter. I'm gonna preface this by saying I have no horse in this race; while I have been vocal about my critique of Eris and Drifter's recent writing, I have no personal beef with Monforton and have praised her writing before, specifically her portrayal of trauma in Season of the Haunted. Any critique of her writing here is just that, a critique of her writing, and not meant to be an attack on Monforton herself or an invitation for anyone else to attack her.

With that clear, let me break down the current discussion and dissatisfaction that queer fans have been displaying with Monforton's writing of Eris and Drifter. Unfortunately, I do have to talk about some drama here, so bear with me. Queer fans vocally dislike the direction Monforton is taking Eris' onscreen interactions with other characters, since historically Eris Morn's onscreen relationships have often been with other women (like Ikora Rey and Mara Sov). Eris is very close to these women and many were attached to these deep friendships, with many queer fans have interpreted one or both as having romantic undertones.

Either way, fans were slightly taken about when Monforton joined the Destiny 2 writing team around Season of the Haunted and began writing a different relationship; Eris and the Drifter. The two had interactions before, back in Season of the Arrivals, and seemed to have a slightly antagonistic acquaintanceship; Drifter naturally discards people's boundaries and Eris is a very closed off woman, so the two didn't get along. He repeatedly calls Eris "Moondust" after she clearly states she's uncomfortable with the nickname and doesn't want to be called it. After he refuses to stop, Eris starts to refer to Drifter with a derogatory nickname as well. I don't actually want to call him by the nickname because, well... it has historically been used as an extremely derogatory term for Asian people, and Drifter is Asian. Bungie stopped using this nickname after Season of Arrivals, likely due to complaints, but curiously have begun re-using it in Season of the Haunted and Season of Plunder.

Setting that aside, the two had basically no more interactions until Beyond Light, when they teamed up with the Exo Stranger to investigate Stasis on Europa. Curiously, despite heavily being featured in marketing material for this expansion, Eris and Drifter actually barely feature or interact in the expansion itself— a huge missed opportunity, in my eyes. In the Witch Queen collector's edition lorebook, their relationship development is hinted at through a couple letters. Drifter sends a letter to Ikora saying "Three Eyes works for you, but now she works with me. Maybe you weren't giving her enough chances to grow," indicating that they've grown to respect and understand each other a little more (pg 13).

In Season of the Haunted, their interactions have taken three steps back into arguing, vitriol, and dislike. There are some lines and scenes that indicate a genuine friendship between the two, but they're few and far between. Although I personally dislike this relationship, especially knowing the writer views it as romantic, I'm not really here to talk about the relationship specifically, but why people were upset with it in the first place. The truth is, this could be the most interesting, well-written, poignant relationship in the world and I would still be a little disappointed with it for the sole fact that Eris used to have deep relationships explored with women, and now she only has relationships with men.

This isn't an inherently bad thing, and I'm not inherently against exploring platonic and romantic relationships between men and women ingame. My problem here is... when was the last time two women interacted onscreen in Destiny 2? Forgive me if I'm forgetting something here, but the last substantial interaction between two women that I remember was back in February with Witch Queen's launch, when Eris and Ikora have about five lines with each other on Mars. Other than that, women don't seem to really speak with each other, even when it would make sense for them to. At the end of Season of the Risen, Caiatl expresses interest in talking with Eris and thinks they'll get along; then suddenly, at the start of Season of the Haunted, Caiatl hates Eris and refuses to interact with her. Ultimately, to me it's not about ships or headcanons, but about the tangible way misogyny can creep into a narrative. For a game that has such well crafted and well developed female characters, it just kind of feels bad the writers prioritize all kinds of male/female relationships (platonic, familial, and romantic) over female/female relationships

And this is what led to the fighting on Twitter. As far as I can tell from putting the pieces together after it all happened, Monforton posted a tweet saying "I love Eris Morn" and a queer fan quote retweeted that tweet with "Eris Morn is a lesbian" and a picture of Eris in front of the lesbian pride flag. This quote retweet was absolutely, positively harmless in every way, which was why it was kind of a surprise when Monforton blocked the user and began blocking scores of other queer users who engaged with the quote retweet or tweeted things of a similar nature.

Then, Monforton began retweeting posts like "bisexuals are bisexual even if they're in a relationship with the opposite gender," and stated that this is her personal Twitter account, not a professional one. Let me be clear here; it is her personal Twitter account and she is allowed to moderate her experience on it. Monforton is a writer at Bungie, and direct interaction with the audience is up to her discretion. That said, it just doesn't look very good to block queer fans and only queer fans on the basis that they think a character is a lesbian.

The narrative that Monforton- or at the very least, the people defending her writing of Eris and Drifter- seemed to be running with is that people only hate Drifter and Eris as a couple because they hate bisexual people in male/female relationships. Only, um, what? That's far from the case. People have clearly addressed why they dislike Drifter and Eris, and that's not why. It's because the two have an uncomfortable, combative relationship in which Eris calls Drifter a racial slur and it's played off as romantic, and the fact that both Drifter and Eris seem to be chained to each other and are no longer allowed to explore any other relationship (platonic or otherwise) with any other characters. It has nothing to do with the fact that they're bisexuals in a male/female relationship. Wanna know why? Because Drifter and Eris are not bisexual.

It's genuinely kind of galling to me, as a bisexual person, that Monforton and other Drifter/Eris fans want to deflect any criticism from their favorite ship by saying it's biphobia without actually exploring these characters being bisexual in the first place. Drifter and Eris are not bisexual. They have never been confirmed as such either in lore books or ingame, and it's frustrating that when queer fans criticize a male/female realtionship for being so prominent when canon queer relationships still are pushed to the sidelines, they're shut down with accusations of biphobia because they couldn't read Monforton's mind and see that actually, she's portraying these characters as bisexual.

Discussions of bisexual representation can often devolve into this kind of discourse about the validity of only having bisexual people in straight-passing relationships featured in media. Let's set aside Drifter and Eris' "drama" for a moment, because it's not really about them. It's about how the reaction to their relationship and Monforton's defense of them can lead into a greater discussion of representation versus reality. Obviously, in real life, I would never shame or invalidate a bisexual person for only having relationships with the opposite sex. They're still bisexual and still queer. They are a real, living person who can't control who they're attracted to.

But characters in a vidego game are not real, and they don't have agency. They don't make their own decisions. Someone else is, literally, controlling who they are attracted to and who they are paired up with in a relationship. So to deflect criticism from only displaying male/female relationships onscreen by saying "It's actually queer rep because they're bisexual and bisexuals are allowed to only be in relationships with members of the opposite sex," is not a real argument because it completely ignores the fact that someone wrote them that way. And writers, even queer writers, can sometimes have unconscious biases. I think a hard pill for people to swall is that what is good representation and validating for one queer person can be poor representation and invalidating to other queer people.

Something interesting I came across while writing my other essay on queer representation in Destiny 2 was a reply to the thread in which bisexual writer Robert Brookes confirmed that Osiris and Saint-14 were always written to be gay. The reply was angry that another relationship that had always been ambiguously queer, Uldren and Jolyon, had been "retconned" in Season of the Lost due to a lore piece referencing what some believed to be Jolyon's dead wife. I want to be completely fair and mention that in the referenced lore piece, only a name is mentioned, not the relationship she had with Jolyon, but obviously many interpreted this as his wife.

Brookes responded with "Bi people exist" which is the most bafflingly unrelated retort he could have possibly made. Jolyon and Uldren's relationship is not canon, and neither is Jolyon is canonly bisexual. It makes sense that fans are upset with a "no-homo" backpedal to a relationship that was only ambiguously gay in the first place, and the justification that "bi people exist" is strange when again, Jolyon is not a real person who cannot choose his attraction and is not even canonly bisexual in the first place.

It would be one thing if this female character that is introduced is actually deeply important to Jolyon and his character, something that the writers included because they were passionate about exploring her character and Jolyon's relationship with her, but that isn't the case. This character had never been mentioned before and has never been mentioned again. It doesn't come off as passionate writers organically writing a backstory for Jolyon, but a sloppy and lazy attempt to get people to stop interpreting Jolyon and Uldren as queer because, look, dead wife!

At the end of the day, there's a reason that many bisexual characters only date members of the opposite sex, despite the fact that in real life there are many bisexual people who prefer or only date members of the same sex. It's not because writers genuinely want to represent the bisexual community, because if that was the case there would be a varied mix of bisexual characters; bisexual men and women who date only women, bisexual men and women who date men and women, and bisexual men and women who date only men. Bisexual representation is instead dominated by bisexual women dating men and bisexual men dating women. This is because companies have run the numbers and have decided this is the "safest" way to please both queer fans and homophobic fans. As a bisexual person, I don't want my sexuality to become a compromise.

Listen, I get the kneejerk reaction. Speaking from experience, it's hard to let go of the internalized shame of being bisexual and feeling like no matter who you date, you won't be queer enough. So when you see someone critiquing a character for being in a male/female relationship that you interpret (or maybe in Monforton's case, are consciously trying to write) as bisexual, the immediate reaction is to become defensive— bisexuals are valid even when they're in a straight relationship! But narrative decisions don't happen in a vacuum. Let's unpack why authors decide to make characters bisexual, never meaningfully explore what that means for their identity and relationships, and then only allow them to have relationships with members of the opposite sex.

Maybe it's genuinely an accident and they don't see how they're coming across. Maybe they want to explore same sex relationships, but are being prevented by leadership. Maybe the author is bisexual and has been writing what they know, and then doesn't want to admit they may have inadvertently hurt their own community. Maybe it's a conscious, malicious choice by leadership teams because a company wants the support of queer fans without doing anything to support those queer fans in return.

To bring it full circle, the fact of the matter is that there are no meaningful onscreen queer relationships in Destiny 2, despite there being several main characters who are canonically queer and in same-sex relationships. So it's hurtful to see same-sex relationships, even friendships, be dropped so that men and women can interact with each other in ways that toe the line between platonic and romantic, with fans and Bungie employees on social media always interpreting these relationships as romantic. Crow and Amanda, Caiatl and Zavala, Eris and Drifter; who's next? Ikora and Saladin? Petra and Spider? Shaxx and Mara Sov— oh wait, they already did that one, despite the fact that they canonically never slept together and Mara is a lesbian (pg 21).

I'm bisexual. I want bisexual representation in Destiny. But calling a character bisexual on your personal Twitter solely to make queer fans seem unreasonable for wanting same-sex relationships to be treated the same as straight ones is not the way I want my sexuality to be used and not the "representation" I want to have. We need more than characters who are only bisexual when it helps the author win a Twitter argument. We need more than just Schrödinger's bisexual in Destiny 2.

*I stole the term "Schrödinger's Bisexual" from here.