The Season of Plunder is underway, and it sees our Guardians working with a ragtag crew to take down the recently un-frozen Eramis, the Eliksni warrior who was the big boss of Beyond Light. I figured Eramis would be a part of this season back when I was wildly speculating about what it might involve, but I was wrong about her role in the story (and pretty much everything else). I thought maybe Eramis would turn face and aid us in a fight against the Vex, but instead, she’s rallied a bunch of pirates and now we’re working with the Drifter, Misraaks, and the Spider to take her down. Wait, the Spider? The guy who was last seen in Destiny 2 enslaving the new Lightbearer Crow?
Yes, that Spider. We first encounter him this season locked up in a shipping container that Drifter stuck him in to smuggle him out of the Reef. There was some indication that Spider might have been hanging out in or around the Last City back in May, during the Guardian Games, but apparently Drifter’s efforts to get him to Earth were stymied until now. Not sure if that means someone else was pretending to be Spider, if he was already there and left, or it was just a lore goof.
Regardless, we’re working with Spider again, the guy who put a bomb in Crow’s Ghost, Glint, to effectively make the new Guardian his property. Sure, Spider’s helped us out in the past — kind of — but everything about him sucks. He’s a huge creep, and there doesn’t seem to be much of a good reason for working with him rather than turning him in. Sure, he gives us his old ketch in the intro mission to Season of Plunder, but why wouldn’t we just hand him over to Mara or the Vanguard afterwards? Or, better still, stick him in one of those big cannons on the deck of his ship and launch him into the goddamn sun?
I’m probably taking this too seriously, but it’s just kind of jarring to see Spider back and living comfortably in the Last City. We’ll likely get some story over the course of the season in which naive little Eido learns the depths of the Spider’s sins — and, presumably, those of her own father — but still. Working with Eramis would seem to make so much more sense, and it would address one of the big issues with Beyond Light, which depicted Stasis as off-limits for everyone except Guardians. Eramis probably had a lot of time to think about how the Darkness used her, and allying with Darkness-wielding Eliksni would complicate the narrative of who gets to wield Darkness powers in the Destiny universe.
It might seem hypocritical of me to advocate working with Eramis — who, let’s be clear, has also done some not great shit in Destiny 2‘s narrative — but hey, Vegeta killed a lot of people in Dragon Ball Z and he’s in Fortnite now. Bungie could pull it off.
We’re only a day into Plunder, and I’m mostly joking around here — but I still feel like Eramis was wasted as a character in Beyond Light and hope she gets more development this season. As for Spider, I hope this season addresses all of the shit he’s done. Yes, there are already a lot of war criminals living the Last City (if you haven’t read Achilles Weaves a Cocoon from Season of the Splicer, it’s great), but come on, the guy is sitting in the Botza District talking about how “nothing is profitable as pain and suffering.” The vibes are terrible, stick this guy in a cannon and get him out of here.
