Yes Bungie needs a disposable villain

They made Taniks the new Randal. A mix of laziness and wanting it to sorta be an Easter egg.

Yes. The Flower Game. The simulations. Here is an excerpt: [i]"Then darkness. n I'm awake. I see a tower. THE Tower. I'm in the Last City. It's… thriving. Bustling with life. Children laughing. There's a small parade. I fight through the crowd to find Cayde-6 at the center of it. "I think I finally got him this time!" he shouts as a beardless Zavala greets him. "Taniks has been dead before," Zavala says. From behind him emerges Ikora Rey, like a vision. "Let the new Hunter Vanguard bask. He's earned it." I'm so sick of this scene. Of hearing these words ever since the day I killed my sister. That was the first time. Now I've lost count. No matter what I do, it always ends the same. Blood and betrayal. Then I'm back where I started. Right here. I'm being taunted, punished. Forced to relive this loop. There has to be a way out. I will find it. I have to save my sister".[/i] Spoilers... or potential spoilers if my theory is correct. She did this time. By telling Ana everything. This is how Rasputin usually becomes an exo/robot: [i]"Finally, we find it. The place where Exos were born. Ana covers her nose as we're greeted with a rotten smell. Slowly, we turn the corner and see a decomposing corpse desperately clinging to a lever on a console. "The Drifter…," Ana says. Hard to tell how long he's been here. We pry his hand from the console and carry him out of the room to try and purge the stench. "What do you think he was doing here?" I ask. "Most likely the same thing we are," Ana says, plugging in her drive. "But he failed. Probably for the best. He doesn't deserve another chance." It's depressing, seeing him like that. All alone down here… Ana works the console. "Uploading now. Should be out of here soon. Grab that lever." I pull down, and a latch opens, releasing Radiolarian fluid into an empty pool nearby. I catch Ana staring at the spot where we found the Drifter's body. "You ever think about what we could have done differently?" she poses. All the time. "Not really," I answer. "So much of this death and destruction stems back to us, to our family. I know Clovis was responsible for a lot. He had a hand in bringing the Darkness to this world." "How do you know that?" I ask. "I found a journal the last time I was here. It's old, and half the pages were torn out, but it had a lot of information about him that was salvageable." Of course, she's been here before. Clearly, she's not telling me the whole truth. "What else was in it?" I ask. "Outside of the redacted memos and experiments, there were stories and recollections of our family. It's all from his perspective, so he was never the villain. But still, maybe he wasn't as bad as we thought. He seemed to care about us, in his way." "Really?" "He did some good, Elsie." "I was there, Ana. I saw the things he did. He was delusional. Of course, he was never the villain in his own story." We sit for a while and wait in silence. The pool begins to bubble. Ana jumps to her feet as a sleek metal hand emerges from the fluid. Slowly, the Exo rises. Silky liquid drips from the tendrils that conjoin the parts. Eventually, it takes its first steps out of the pool. "Red?" Ana asks timidly. Its head turns. Glowing eyes of scarlet meet ours, and it speaks… Russian. "Welcome back, old friend," Ana says". [/i] ••••••••••••••••••••• This time it was different. He's talking to us now.

Taniks cannot rest and shall return until he finally gets a house.

Yeah, they explain it in each strike lmao