First off, I don't believe the Speaker/Traveller/Vanguard are evil, I just disagree with the way they do things and with their objectives. I will list below reasons why I don't trust them and want to leave. [b]Point 1->[/b] They claim all enemies are minions of the Darkness, this is an outright lie. The Fallen(or Eliksni) attack the city because they want the Great Machine back, they want to be in the Light, they even live off of an artificial form of it (ether). The Cabal are fleeing from it, or at least from Oryx (quote "Death comes on Wings"), hinting that they're one of the millions of worlds mentioned in the World's Grave. The Vex, to be fair, do contain one Divisive (their factions) who really does worship the Darkness. However, they're not spreading the Darkness, they're using it to further their objective. It was determined by their higher Minds that worshipping it was the optimal course of action because it grants them power. The Hive are the only ones who are clearly 100% certain minions of the Darkness, or if you want to be semantic, minions of the Worm Gods, who themselves are servants of the Deep/Darkness. [b]Point 2->[/b] They banned Osiris and Toland. Both for roughly the same reason: knowing too much about the Vex and the Hive, respectively. Kicking out people who's function is to learn about the enemy for the heinous crime of knowing the enemy, seems legit. Unless I'm misremembering they even banned Toland while he was warning them instead of listening, which lead to the Great Disaster, so good job there. [b]Point 3->[/b] The Traveller is a coward. It gave the Eliksni a Golden Age, then fled like a bitch and left them to die. Now it's helping us kill them. It gave us a Golden Age, then was gonna flee like a bitch again before Rasputin forced it to stay, quote "coerce pseudoaltruistic [O] defensive action". Which is smarty talk for "force the Traveller to be nice and protect humanity". And even then, it's not really protecting humanity, it's protecting itself. And if the Speaker is legit in contact with it, he's either getting fooled or he's in on it. [b]Point 4->[/b] They ordered the Ahamkara exterminated. This one isn't as direct of a point so it will require some setup. The Ahamkara came from the Void around when the Traveller arrived, which either means they used the passage to come to our plane as the Traveller passed through, or (more likely imo) were just following it because they know it always leads to a civilization. Afaik there's no mention of them speaking to Golden Age people but they made deals with Guardians, giving knowledge in exchange for unspecified things (presumably it varied from individual to individual). They also fostered their egos and pushed them to violence. Which I know sounds bad when said like that but let me clarify. Ego in this context refers to the "ahamkara" concept in hindu philosophy (that's why they're called that), and in this philosophy you're supposed to get rid of your "ahamkara" (or in this case, physically kill it) so that you stop thinking of yourself and become subserviant to the Lord , which in this case would be the Traveller, or maybe just the Speaker and/or Vanguard. Reinforcing this idea, here's the quote on the legendary Warlock helmet from TDB, Symmetry Fang VI: "There are six factors in true Csikszentmihalyian flow. First is the loss of self". There are 2 sub-points I want to make from this. One: Csikszenmihalyian refers to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who is an hungarian philosophy professor who posits that one achieves "flow" when one's skill level at an activity and the challenge of that activity are in balance, ie. when something is *just* the right amount of hard then things are perfect. Which is good in a videogame, according to most gamers, but not when you're defending your civilization, if your failure means the deaths of your wards it's better to win at all costs. And Two: the "loss of self" mirrors the idea of getting rid of your "ahamkara" and becoming subserviant, which is BS, that means the Tower wants obediant slaves, -blam!- that shit. Further supporting this is the Stormcaller quest cutscene, where Ikora says that the true meaning of being a Warlock is channeling power, not controlling it. Basically, be a mindless vessel for the Traveller's power, an agent of it's will (wasn't gonna make the point but note that this would sorta make you "Taken" by Light). They would have us be angels when we could instead become gods. [b]Point 5->[/b] They are deceptive. This links to a few elements above and reinforces Point 4. The Tower tells you all enemies are part of the same always-pure-evil overall group and when another voice than theirs comes along they silence it. Does this sound like a trustworthy pure-good lot to you ? [b]Point 6-> [/b] The competition has a better offer. I'll start by quoting the Calcified Fragment 32 Grimoire card, Book of Sorrows verse 4:2 Majestic, Majestic: [spoiler]Oryx, my King, my friend. Kick back. Relax. Shrug off that armor, set down that blade. Roll your burdened shoulders and let down your guard. This is a place of life, a place of peace. Out in the world we ask a simple, true question. A question like, can I kill you, can I rip your world apart? Tell me the truth. For if I don’t ask, someone will ask it of me. And they call us evil. Evil! Evil means ‘socially maladaptive.’ We are adaptiveness itself. Ah, Oryx, how do we explain it to them? The world is not built on the laws they love. Not on friendship, but on mutual interest. Not on peace, but on victory by any means. The universe is run by extinction, by extermination, by gamma-ray bursts burning up a thousand garden worlds, by howling singularities eating up infant suns. And if life is to live, if anything is to survive through the end of all things, it will live not by the smile but by the sword, not in a soft place but in a hard hell, not in the rotting bog of artificial paradise but in the cold hard self-verifying truth of that one ultimate arbiter, the only judge, the power that is its own metric and its own source—existence, at any cost. Strip away the lies and truces and delaying tactics they call ‘civilization’ and this is what remains, this beautiful shape. The fate of everything is made like this, in the collision, the test of one praxis against another. This is how the world changes: one way meets a second way, and they discharge their weapons, they exchange their words and markets, they contest and in doing so they petition each other for the right to go on being something, instead of nothing. This is the universe figuring out what it should be in the end. And it is majestic. Majestic. It is the only thing that can be true in and of itself. And it is what I am.[/spoiler] Not only is this honest, the Darkness actually tells it's followers exactly what it wants and it's not hypocritical about it. While the Traveller makes nice for a bit then -blam!-s off at the 1st sign of trouble, the Darkness tells people what it wants to do and why, and then does it. More importantly it's true. This is how the universe actually works, weak and maladapted things die and disappear, strong and well adapted things continue to exist. Friendship and peace aren't universal laws, they're just fleeting concepts that bags of chemical reactions tend to like. Also, look at what it wants of it's "minions", to become the Perfect Shape. Be the best and most powerful you can be, strive to exist forever, your continued existence is all that matters because it's the only thing that's objectively true. Also also, before someone wrongly assumes, I don't want to join the Hive, I want to side with the Darkness itself. And I don't necessarily want to abandon the city either. The Darkness doesn't care who wins, if I used it's power to kill wipe out the Hive it would still be a good thing in it's book. TL;DR: the Traveller/Speaker/Vanguard are dumb cowardly assholes, I don't want them in my Solar System anymore. The Darkness sounds pretty swell. Edit: Annd this just passed 300 upvotes, so thanks everyone for all the interest. And also for nearly all comments being positive or constructive. Which btw, while I can appreciate being defended, please try to be polite about it, hateful back-and-forths are just a waste of time. P.S. I don't think it's really relevant and personally don't mind too much but a friend of mine found it jarring that everyone in the comments refers to me as a "he".