Void and god's potential tie in?

[Bast.7253]

This kind of hinges on knowing how Soo Won and the Void tie into each other. If I remember right, it almost seemed like she said in the beginning it was her and the void, or maybe I'm misremembering and the void is just something that existed before Soo Won, independent of Soo Won, and starts to manifest when the balance of magic can't be held. 

So she was lonely and decided to create more dragons, right? She wanted to be a mother? Is the void just something that was able to break into the realm of Tyria when Soo Won and thus the "Dragonvoid" came to be instead of just "void." Because dragon magic, the magic native to Tyria and the binding force of all life on Tyria, was fractured when Soo Won decided to essentially give up her prismatic/Aurene like ability to filter magic in an attempt to split it among others? 

I'm still fuzzy on the whole story here. Was she struggling to maintain the balance to begin with and Aurene is truly different and able to filter it better? I kind of got the sense that Aurene is basically what Soo Won was before she split. 

What about the god's magic? Something about it seems to be able to help dragons stave off void. Soo Won, in a facility using jade tech (chunks of a material made by the petrification magic of Dwayna) and we have Aurene - the first of her kind. Is her success solely because she was exposed to Balthazar's magic from a young age, pre-ascension? Is she able to metabolize that magic signature and create a balance that the others couldn't? 

If the void corrupted the dragon's in this way, what potential could they have to corrupt the human gods? Is that the reason for Balthazar going crazy? Is that the reason for Abaddon's slow fall into what he became? Are they beings that were never equipped to fill the role in their realm's "The All?" Could this corruption have afflicted the human god's when they arrived on Tyria? Or at least some of them?

Is that part of the reason for their exodus?

Could Kormir be the Aurene of the human gods? A being born native to Tyria able to withstand living and being exposed to Tyria's native magic and then gifted with ascension into the human pantheon. 

It's a bit of a stretch but it feels like the void is something introduced to be more than just a "dragonvoid", at the very least due to the fact that the containment facility helped Soo Won stave off the void until Ankka torched the place. 

[ugrakarma.9416]

Quote

Could Kormir be the Aurene of the human gods? A being born native to Tyria able to withstand living and being exposed to Tyria's native magic and then gifted with ascension into the human pantheon. 

...

I don't think is the case of gods need a "special link" to solve Tyria magic unbalance.

Gods are shown to have no problem manipulating any kind of magic, so they don't need an "aurene". And much more: they can remove divine magic from other gods.

Balthazar absorbed magic from BloodStone (which proves to be extremely harmful to ordinary beings) with no side effects and also from Jormag/Primordus without going insane.

The curious fact is that Balthazar has this ability, even after having his divine powers removed, which leaves 2 options: was it an ability learned after aeons of being a God, or is it an innate ability, linked to the "being"/creature type that he is.

That would be another reason the writers took the gods out of the picture, because it's very ex-machine and repetitive for the magic of the gods to solve everything, even the Dragon Magic imbalance, probably thats why the history just didnt go to the route: a god came and handled the magic balance, end of history. The POF history would ended when they meet Kormir.

But also theres the point, the gods, specifically Kormir feared they can't damage control a clash with Elder Dragons, then instead of create balance, they will make unbalance worse leading to chaos.

I don't imagine that Gods need an external excuse to go crazy, in Greek mythology it's full of capricious Gods who end up getting into trouble or creating trouble for others. And why the Gods become capricious? because they're just Gods, not humans, so they don't need a psychological disorder(the "void", "evil energy" etc) to get bad, they're just being themselves.

The problem with the external evil narrative, which drives everyone crazy, is that in the end no one is a real villain, it becomes the "psychiatry doctor's office" narrative, everything would be fine if the Gods or Elder Dragons took a medicine to calm down and hold back the "coming madness". I honestly didn't like the addition of the Void into the lore(but a note: im adept of "let writers do their work" so don't take criticism here too serious, they have their reasons to change direction).

 

Edited April 16, 2022 by ugrakarma.9416

[Konig Des Todes.2086]

6 hours ago, Bast.7253 said:

This kind of hinges on knowing how Soo Won and the Void tie into each other. If I remember right, it almost seemed like she said in the beginning it was her and the void, or maybe I'm misremembering and the void is just something that existed before Soo Won, independent of Soo Won, and starts to manifest when the balance of magic can't be held.

It's vague, but definitely seems to be the latter. The Void seems to be your Tyrian version of primordial essence that the first mythological god (in this case, Soo-Won) is born from and creates the world from.

6 hours ago, Bast.7253 said:

So she was lonely and decided to create more dragons, right? She wanted to be a mother? Is the void just something that was able to break into the realm of Tyria when Soo Won and thus the "Dragonvoid" came to be instead of just "void." Because dragon magic, the magic native to Tyria and the binding force of all life on Tyria, was fractured when Soo Won decided to essentially give up her prismatic/Aurene like ability to filter magic in an attempt to split it among others? 

I'm still fuzzy on the whole story here. Was she struggling to maintain the balance to begin with and Aurene is truly different and able to filter it better? I kind of got the sense that Aurene is basically what Soo Won was before she split.

My understanding is that Soo-Won was able to maintain balance (near?) perfectly originally, but when she created the other Elder Dragons, she took on the domain of water and thus became unable to maintain balance alone as she was no longer connected to the other five domains.

The Void didn't "break into the realm" but rather began to manifest from within the world due to the merging of magical domains through the deaths of the Elder Dragons. Without the Elder Dragons' deaths, the Void would have never reared its ugly head. However, it was still influencing the Elder Dragons, resulting in things like Kralkatorrik's Torment, where the more the Elder Dragons consumed unfiltered magic from the ley-lines, the more it influenced them. Thus the more greedier of the Elder Dragons (Primordus and Kralkatorrik) were more animalistic while the less greedy (Jormag and Soo-Won) were more coherent and negotiable (if distant and uncaring in Jormag's case).

The Void is, ultimately, all things combined. It "seems" like nothing because it is "everything at once"; it's blackish because it's all colors in additive form (e.g., like mixing paints together until you get black) - whereas ley-lines, also "everything at once" is whitish because it's all colors in subtractive form (e.g., like light). The world itself is the Void separated into distinctly separate things.

More than that, the Void also breaks down all it touches until it merges into the Void - thus everything that touches the Void becomes all things combined; this perpetual breaking down of all things is the antithesis of the Mists, which is the perpetual creation of all things. It's my theory - and actually a theory I have held since Don't Fear The Reapers quest in GW1 was released in 2009, that The Void is basically the "recycling plant" of The Mists, which breaks down all things into protomatter for the Mists to continue create - a perpetual cycle that is billions of billions years in length as what's created slowly destabilizes and breaks down. Mind you, currently we only know the Void holds sway with Tyria - not all of the Mists (aka multiverse), so this paragraph is still pretty much just hypothetical.

The Dragonvoid appears to be the Void given sapience through influence from the Elder Dragons, who had in turn been corrupted over the eons by the Void being present in the mixture of magic. One can say it's like the combination of the six Elder Dragons' souls and minds.

 

Or at least that's my understanding. As mentioned, it's all very vaguely told - partially because a lot of the writers working on S4/IBS/EoD are soft worldbuilders, as opposed to hard worldbuilders, given the various interviews and commentaries they made. TL;DR of that - they're focused more on the characters' stories, rather than creating stories within a world with deep lore.

6 hours ago, Bast.7253 said:

What about the god's magic? Something about it seems to be able to help dragons stave off void. Soo Won, in a facility using jade tech (chunks of a material made by the petrification magic of Dwayna) and we have Aurene - the first of her kind. Is her success solely because she was exposed to Balthazar's magic from a young age, pre-ascension? Is she able to metabolize that magic signature and create a balance that the others couldn't? 

I don't think the origins of the jade had anything to do with Soo-Won's staving off the Void. The jade was merely functioning as a storage device for the magic siphoned off of Soo-Won. The reason Soo-Won was able to hold back the Void was because she was being consistently drained of magic since shortly before Zhaitan's death. The container could have been anything really - jade was just a sufficient container that was in mass supply and immediate access to Joon, who's mother was a jade seller.

We do see in other parts of the game that divine magic holds a certain antithetical effect on the Elder Dragons, their corruption, and their minions though. But I don't think this relates to the Void per se.

Aurene's success wasn't due to Balthazar though - if it was, then Kralkatorrik would have gotten better after eating Balthazar's magic. Instead, he got worse. This is probably because Balthazar's magic wasn't true divine magic, but Tyrian magic warped to reflect the properties of divine magic - or something along those lines at least. Balthazar had his divinity stripped from him, and the magic he released came from the Bloodstone, Jormag, and Primordus from during Season 3.

Season 4 implies Aurene's unique nature comes from her bonding with mortals and sharing magic. However, Jormag does this in IBS with Bangar and Ryland and then suffers from making use of the Frozen, going mad in a poor display of writing. So even if bonnding is a factor, it clearly isn't the primary cause.

One theory is that it's because Aurene was born from multiple magics - she was a crystal egg made of Kralkatorrik's domain, and was born from receiving a mixture of Zhaitan's and Mordremoth's magic from Mordy's death. Three domains in one created Aurene, and she was never afflicted with Torment, even before properly bonding and sharing magic..

6 hours ago, Bast.7253 said:

If the void corrupted the dragon's in this way, what potential could they have to corrupt the human gods? Is that the reason for Balthazar going crazy? Is that the reason for Abaddon's slow fall into what he became? Are they beings that were never equipped to fill the role in their realm's "The All?" Could this corruption have afflicted the human god's when they arrived on Tyria? Or at least some of them?

Is that part of the reason for their exodus?

Could Kormir be the Aurene of the human gods? A being born native to Tyria able to withstand living and being exposed to Tyria's native magic and then gifted with ascension into the human pantheon. 

It's a bit of a stretch but it feels like the void is something introduced to be more than just a "dragonvoid", at the very least due to the fact that the containment facility helped Soo Won stave off the void until Ankka torched the place. 

I would rather hope ArenaNet doesn't go this route. Because it creates a poor and boring way to villainize the Six Gods needlessly and just swap out our ten year long plot of "evil Elder Dragons capable of destroying the world" with "evil Six Gods capable of destroying the world". Which is just, well, boring. It's not much surprise some of ArenaNet's more interesting stories dealt with the lesser evils of Joko and Bangar than the Elder Dragons.

That said, should there be some external influence that caused Abaddon's fall (entirely plausible but I would rather they tie it into Abaddon's unnamed predecessor and the inherited knowledge and not some ambivalent primordial force of the multiverse that cannot be removed lest you destroy all existence itself), Kormir shouldn't be immune. Right off the bat, it was pretty heavily hinted from the Mad Souls and Tormented Spirits in the Realm of Torment that Kormir is doomed to go mad from loneliness and Abaddon's knowledge eventually, and even be the downfall of the other gods.

[DanAlcedo.3281]

The only tie in of Void and Gods i could see it that the last world the gods terraformed could have been destroyed by it.

The world Humans originaly came from.

[Sajuuk Khar.1509]

10 hours ago, DanAlcedo.3281 said:

The only tie in of Void and Gods i could see it that the last world the gods terraformed could have been destroyed by it.

The world Humans originaly came from.

This is the only kind of tie in that I would be OK with seeing.

Even still, I would more prefer to see something akin to a Burning Legion-esque army of Mist demons, rather then "it was the void" for what destroyed the human homeworld, so we could get an expansion on the Mist demons a bit

[Konig Des Todes.2086]

On 4/16/2022 at 5:52 AM, DanAlcedo.3281 said:

The only tie in of Void and Gods i could see it that the last world the gods terraformed could have been destroyed by it.

The world Humans originaly came from.

Given the resurgence of Utopia lore in the Complete Art of Guild Wars, a heightened interest in said lore becoming the next GW2 plot, and the writer for said artbook being the narrative lead for expansion 4, it wouldn't surprise me if ArenaNet tries to make Utopia lore canon. That said, however, some parts of GW2 lore directly conflicts with Utopia lore - particularly that the current gods (Dwayna, Melandru, and Balthazar in particular) come straight from another world, while Utopia lore more-or-less says they came to be in the Mists realm Xotecha. The easiest way to remedy this is to make the human homeworld and Xotecha one and the same.

IF they go this route, then the cause of the human homeworld's strife would end up being this "ancient unknown force of evil" that killed the previous generation of gods (including Dwayna's father) which includes the demonic Tanneks as minions and potentially be heralding Menzies forces.

 

IMO, making the Void being what destroyed the human homeworld by itself would be rather bland and boring. The Void isn't an entity after all - it's basically entropy given another form. And there's no stopping that. It's even more of a "fight against impossible nature" than the original depiction of the Elder Dragons and given the potential scope of the Void, something you just cannot stop, merely slow down or temporarily pause.

 

That said, I should stress that the human homeworld was never said to be destroyed. The whole idea of such comes from exaggerating the notion that the Six Gods "fled" their homeworld because of three lines from the Orrian History Scrolls:

1. "[Dwayna] chose Tyria and brought with her those who would make this world a paradise. As she had promised, Dwayna led her people to peace."
2. "The two who are one, Issa and Lys, brought with her the hope and beauty of humanity. While the other gods focused on building Arah and beginning a new future, Lyssa gave them joy and helped them forget the past."
3. "Among them was Abaddon—once secret-keeper, now betrayer. How you have fallen from the glorious days of old. What passed beyond in the Mists, only you remember."

These three lines only really tell us two things:

1. Dwayna wanted to create paradise.
2. Everyone but Abaddon forgot what happened.

Now the first line implies, but does not confirm, that some major strife happened. People jump to the conclusion of "the world was destroyed", and use the Harbinger of Woe's armor textures as possible outcome of the human homeworld (despite there being literally zero ties between the two hinted in-game), but that's not the only possibility. Overrun by war, political strife, or simply being exiled (should there be a larger number of gods, for example) are all equal possibilities.

Just like how people take Balthazar carrying his father's head when entering Tyria to be a sign that Balthazar killed his father to become god, despite the fact that gods' bodies break apart upon death as seen with Abaddon and Balthazar, and that there's other possible outcomes - such as carrying the head not in triumph but in sorrow (e.g., "this is all I have left of him"). The line's super ambiguous about it.

What's curious though is the second line - which may mean that Dwayna's desire to create paradise is ultimately unrelated to why they left for Tyria... But also implies that the reason made the others (humans? gods? left ambiguous) sad. Which... having to leave your home as refugees, voluntarily or not, will always have some melancholy to it.

 

Which is to say... it could be that the human homeworld is perfectly fine and well, and the Six only fled it because they merely disagreed with what was in place... There's an interesting potential plot there.

[Amanda Whitemoon.6173]

as i said before, this expansion with Void, has a very clear point about aurene's bond with mortals, even the trailers talk about mortals, not any bond, but the bond with mortals.

its still my theory that the magic of tyria (this white-allmagic, made from void-allmagic, is slowly reverting back to the void-allmagic, but the dragons filter out this void-allmagic from the leylines, wich creates a buildup in their bodies making them go mad, when we killed them the void buildup went back into the leysystem causes all kinds of troubles. and my theory is that here comes Aurenes bond with specifically mortals is that she shares the filtered void with mortals, but in tiny tiny amounts. and when mortals die, they take the tiny amound of void back to the mists, out of the ley-system.

wich explains why there is such a focus on her bond with mortals, because mortals die.

 

i dont know what the gods have to do with it, but there is still this thing with divine magic being supereffective/resistand with dragonmagic, but as said before, we dont know if this is with Leyline-allmagic, or void-allmagic, or both.

 

Konig, your theory is that mists/void is basicly the same part of a yin/yang coin of creation/destruction.

Soowon just made a planet with creation and kept it in a creation-form with the filtering even through it wants to revert to destruction-form, but if the leyline magic is the white-creation-dragon magic, wich seemingly divine opposes, so i gess it also opposes void.

 

we just have to wait and see , as they said the god story wasnt over yet, we may get more answers.

 

 

[Delta.1526]

On 4/16/2022 at 1:58 PM, ugrakarma.9416 said:

...

I don't think is the case of gods need a "special link" to solve Tyria magic unbalance.

Gods are shown to have no problem manipulating any kind of magic, so they don't need an "aurene". And much more: they can remove divine magic from other gods.

Balthazar absorbed magic from BloodStone (which proves to be extremely harmful to ordinary beings) with no side effects and also from Jormag/Primordus without going insane.

 

I feel like you and I might have very different definitions of 'without going insane'. Balthazar went full "I Am Conflict" when the other Gods told him he couldn't fight against the dragons. Abaddon went full "Act Without Mercy" when the other Gods put some restrictions on magical knowledge. Dhuum went full "I Am The End" when people started using rez shrines. The Gods are not immune to being warped by their domains, we've killed/imprisoned three of them for getting a bit too into their day job.

[Konig Des Todes.2086]

1 hour ago, Delta.1526 said:

 

I feel like you and I might have very different definitions of 'without going insane'. Balthazar went full "I Am Conflict" when the other Gods told him he couldn't fight against the dragons. Abaddon went full "Act Without Mercy" when the other Gods put some restrictions on magical knowledge. Dhuum went full "I Am The End" when people started using rez shrines. The Gods are not immune to being warped by their domains, we've killed/imprisoned three of them for getting a bit too into their day job.

I feel this oversimplifies Dhuum and especially Abaddon.

While Dhuum in GW2 really is just "bring about the finale Ending to all life" in the very, very short screentime he gets, in GW1 it was a bit more nuanced in that Dhuum was just very, very unjustified and universally punishing. 

Similarly, Abaddon was very nuanced - he didn't go full out 'act without mercy' when the other gods restricted magic, it was a series of events over centuries, the last straw being the genocide of his most faithful people at the hands of the Forgotten because they defiled a few statues (and maybe killed some priests? that's unclear iirc). The "restrictions on magic" was a big event and point of disagreement between Abaddon and the Five, but it wasn't actually the thing that led to conflict.

Similarly with Abaddon, waging war because he was ignored or not consulted time and time and time again and turning into wanting to rule the pantheon alone doesn't really come off as him "being warped by their domains", as that's not a very smart thing to do (nor is "act without mercy" part of his domain).

[ugrakarma.9416]

4 hours ago, Delta.1526 said:

 

I feel like you and I might have very different definitions of 'without going insane'. Balthazar went full "I Am Conflict" when the other Gods told him he couldn't fight against the dragons. Abaddon went full "Act Without Mercy" when the other Gods put some restrictions on magical knowledge. Dhuum went full "I Am The End" when people started using rez shrines. The Gods are not immune to being warped by their domains, we've killed/imprisoned three of them for getting a bit too into their day job.

its my fault, because i didn't used a proper word.... "insanity" i mean the bloodstone effect we observed in humans in Bloodstone Fen, perhaps "completely mad" is best description, i mean screaming   around, and act irrationaly agressive. in other words, Bloodstone magic is observed to be extremely harmful to normal beings. Balthazar didn't changed(mentally) after absorved that magic.

About "being warped by their domains" is more a lore forum theory/suspicion than a canon thing.

I particularly dislike applying human definitions of "psychological normality" to gods. Gods are capricious (in mythologies), above all, because they are immortal, that's a long story that ends in endless philosophical debates.

Mythologies are usually created to also serve as moral didactics, that's why Gods in many mythologies represent something/values(the "domains" in gw2 universe), so it's kind of walking on eggshells, coming to the conclusion that they go crazy because they are "obsessed" with their domains..

I would be no surprise, if the mystery about gods past, was explained later in something like "the war god is destined to conflict(sooner or later) with the god of life", and this filling the mystery about Balthazar/Dwayna.

And why hasn't this narrative been so forced yet? because its lead to narrative where would it be up to us the "hero/commander" to settle this fight, so we are going again trying "save the world" from the over-powered beings clashing.

And that actually happened not with Gods, but with the Fire x Ice(Jormag x Primordus) plot, theyre destined to fight each other just because "fire is opposite of ice".

 

Edited April 26, 2022 by ugrakarma.9416

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