User:Haleth/"Meagan Marie"

Eris Morn
Destiny character
First appearance	Destiny: The Dark Below (2014)
Created by	Bungie
Voiced by	Morla Gorrondona

Eris Morn is a character from Bungie's Destiny video game series. She first appears as a supporting non-player character in Destiny: The Dark Below, the first post-release downloadable content (DLC) pack for the 2014 video game Destiny, who possesses expert knowledge of the alien threat known as the Hive and advises the Guardians, protectors of Earth's last safe city. She is usually presented as a quest-giver and item vendor within the Destiny series, although she has occasionally played a proactive role to assist the Guardians.

Eris Morn is voiced by Morla Gorrondona, who also voiced members of the Hive species in the first Destiny. Gorrondona continued to voice the character in her subsequent appearances in the series and was consistently given creative freedom to interpret the character's emotional state. Eris Morn has been subject to merchandise and promotional material, and is noted by commentators as one of the most prominent characters of the Destiny series' and an important aspect of its lore.

Character overview

Unlike most other non-player characters at the Tower, the central hub area for players in the Destiny series, Eris has a detailed backstory which is revealed through conversations with the player character. Eris is originally a member of the Guardians, an organization of individuals who have access to an otherworldly power called Light after they have have been resurrected by the mysterious entity known as the Traveler, the progenitor of floating robots known as Ghosts that accompany each Guardian. Eris Morn's signature accessory, a floating solid object wreathed in a ominous green light, is a memento from an event where she participated in a hunt against powerful "wish dragons" known as the Ahamkara. After slaying an Ahamkara alongside her friend Ikora Rey, she kept a piece of the dragon’s bones as a memento.

Eris' status as a traditional Guardian changed following a mission when she traveled with a fireteam of other Guardians to an underground settlement in Earth's moon called Hellmouth. Their mission was to slay Crota, one of the leaders of the ancient race of three-eyed aliens known as the Hive, but it failed and ended in disaster. Although she is the sole survivor of her team, the Hive drained the Light from Eris and her Ghost, taking away her powers and ability to resurrect. In a bid to survive, Eris learned the Hive’s dark magic and used its power against them. When the Hive eventually took her eyes, Eris replaced them with the eyes of a Hive enemy. She also unexpectedly drew upon her Ahamkara memento's latent power, which speaks to her through voices in her head and functions as a talisman that guide her through the dark tunnels on the moon. Eris eventually escaped the moon by building a new ship out of scrap she has gathered. Eris is regarded as an expert of the Hive upon her safe return to the Guardians, and is assigned by Ikora to a network of Guardian spies known as the Hidden.

Development and portrayal

Eris Morn was developed as part of Bungie's efforts to deliver story missions which flesh out the Hive faction as part of post-launch expansion pack content released to support the first Destiny following criticism of its lack of meaningful story content. She is voiced by American actress Morla Gorrondona, who also provides the screeches and screams of various Hive enemy units like the Thralls and the Wizards. During Gorrondona's audition for Eris, a Bungie staff member told her that it would be "poetic" for the character to be played by the same person who voiced the Hive since she had lived among them for a time. Key team members such as Matt Case, Ryan Ellis, and C Paul Johnson and the entire team at Bungie elaborated the direction and tone of the series in detail for audition hopefuls in order to illustrate their vision for who they wanted Eris to be. A lifelong video game enthusiast, Gorrondona is a player of the Destiny series herself, though she has acknowledged that the series' complicated lore may be difficult to follow even for an insider like her who work on the games. Gorrondona cited instances where she listened to an explanation provided by a developmental team member, but needed to have it repeated to her again as she did not fully understand the context of what was being said.

" I don’t feel good about forcing a feeling or forcing align delivery that’s supposed to be angry if it’s not linked to something genuine. I want Eris’s experiences to be rooted in truth and real-life experiences."

— "Morla Gorrondona on playing Destiny’s Eris Morn"

While Bungie had pre-established ideas about the creative direction for Eris, they decided to give her freedom to interpret the character as she saw fit for her performances. Gorrondonadescription conjured some pretty compelling images for me and I was able able to draw from my personal life experiences to evoke strong, meaningful and comparable emotions. To prepare for the role, Gorrondona drew from her experience working in professional theatre to develop the minute details of her personality, as well as her training in improv techniques which allowed her to "make decisive but not obvious choices within seconds". She believed that these two opposing ways of thinking and creating gave her the ability to develop a robust backstory and give her character emotional heft relatively quickly, an advantage in her opinion as time management is an important factor in video game development. A priority for Gorrondona following her casting is to do justice to the character's emotional state in all her performances; to ground Eris Morn without reducing her into a caricature of a spooky character, Gorrondona drew from her personal experiences to convey the impression that Eris' experiences are connected with something from reality. She described Eris' early appearances in expansion content for the first Destiny as "slowly slipping into madness after her time spent with the Hive". For her subsequent major appearance in Shadowkeep, Eris is literally haunted by the ghosts of people from her past, which are manifested by a mysterious structure introduced in the expansion. Gorrondona described her as being emotionally burdened in a way that the general audience would think that she was burdened before, but now it has become a physical one.

In a 2019 interview with Fanbyte, Gorrondona said that she felt more connected with the character of Eris Morn and the Bungie developmental team on a personal level compared to her other roles. From her perspective, Eris is also representative of a cultural shift within the video game industry in how it approaches the representation of women and how female characters are portrayed in the medium. Noting the diversity of contemporary female video game characters by the late 2010s, she felt that she no longer feels obliged to deliberate on whether or not to accept the role of a shallow, hypersexualized female character due to the abundance of opportunities to portray "powerful and substantial" ones instead.

Reception

Several commentators regard Eris Morn as one of the most important characters within the fictional universe of Destiny. In 2016, Glixel staff ranked Eris Morn as among the most iconic video game characters of the 21st century. While drawing attention to her tragic backstory as a victim of the Hive, they also found amusement in her perpetually grim outlook even during festive seasonal evens.

Joshua Rivera from Kotaku described Eris Morn as one of the most controversial and compelling characters in Destiny lore. Eris is a symbol of the old Destiny—pretentious, overly severe, and with zero self-awareness. She was a good poster child for the least fun era of the game, a relic from when nothing in Destiny made sense and yet we still couldn’t stop playing. Quippy, charismatic characters like Cayde-6 took the forefront for Destiny 2. Often, the other characters would even poke fun at Eris Morn—and, by extension, the first Destiny’s bone-dry plot. possible resolution to one of Destiny’s grandest tragedies game’s Grimoire cards could find, her backstory was truly haunting, one of the darkest turns lurking in Destiny’s hidden lore.