End of Dragons' Force of Chaos Wasn't A Retcon

[draxynnic.3719]

3 minutes ago, KnightofPhoenix.3679 said:

The Void is basically primordial singularity the way I see it - all of "material reality" (e.g. mass, energy, and matter) and magic (which in GW are natural laws) is compressed in one singular point.  So the Void is everything, but the Void is also nothing because mass, energy, and natural laws do not exist as separate phenomena.  In this state of the universe, mass, energy, and magic are in constant flux and nothing that is durable and sustainable can exist - that's why I referred to it earlier as "primordial non-existence".  This is similar to traditional predictive models of what happened at and before the Big Bang.

Now the question is, how the hell did Soo-Won come to be?  She effectively initiated the Big Bang, but she is not an infinite God that could have co-existed with the Void.  Was she the one in a trillion trillion things in flux that managed to be sustainable at that singularity?     

I think the answer is that the singularity wasn't everywhere. We know that there are other worlds, so Tyria's creation wasn't the Big Bang of the entire Guild Wars multiverse. Soo-Won possibly came from elsewhere, brought enough of the magical energy into herself that a stabilised Tyria could exist, and either used the remainder to form Tyria, or Tyria was the last thing to form spontaneously once the energy level was low enough for creations to remain stable.

She then found that she'd taken in more than she could swallow and created offspring to share the burden, and... well, we know the rest (more or less).

[Fueki.4753]

1 hour ago, KnightofPhoenix.3679 said:

Now the question is, how the hell did Soo-Won come to be?  She effectively initiated the Big Bang, but she is not an infinite God that could have co-existed with the Void.  Was she the one in a trillion trillion things in flux that managed to be sustainable at that singularity?     

I consider her to be a random evolution/mutation of life that became able to feed on the dangerous surplus of magic in Tyria, similar to how bacteria evolved/mutated to process oxygen in real life billions of years ago.

GW2 had told us again and again that a surplus of magic is dangerous. Originally, that was the reason (or at least it felt explicitly implied to be the reason) why killing three Elder Dragon at once with no replacements (and thus remove necessary magic absorption from the world) was dangerous to Tyria.

The Dragonvoid has no place in that original explanation. The Dragonvoid was just a random pull out of the air.

[Yasai.3549]

The Void is something Anet added to mirror the absence/imbalancing of the Eternal Alchemy (ie. the aspects of what makes the material world) 

The whole world was going to be destroyed and return to nothing because the embodiments of each concept were killed and being siphoned back to Soo Won, with some being filtered through Aurene. The entire plot of EoD was Soo Won "returning to nothing" because she cannot handle all the magic by herself due to all her children being killed. The Dragonvoid corruption is more or less a physical manifestation of "returning to nothing" 

[Eekasqueak.7850]

The void was just how they chose to depict what we knew would be happening since season 3. I wouldn't say it contradicts anything we'd been shown since they never got that specific with outcomes in the first place. 

[draxynnic.3719]

20 hours ago, Fueki.4753 said:

I consider her to be a random evolution/mutation of life that became able to feed on the dangerous surplus of magic in Tyria, similar to how bacteria evolved/mutated to process oxygen in real life billions of years ago.

GW2 had told us again and again that a surplus of magic is dangerous. Originally, that was the reason (or at least it felt explicitly implied to be the reason) why killing three Elder Dragon at once with no replacements (and thus remove necessary magic absorption from the world) was dangerous to Tyria.

The Dragonvoid has no place in that original explanation. The Dragonvoid was just a random pull out of the air.

The Dragonvoid is a manifestation of Soo-Won being overwhelmed with magic. It's essentially Soo-Won's equivalent of Kralkatorrik's Torment, except that Soo-Won had a bit more mental fortitude and having that happen to her required so much magic that instead of it just taking over her body, it was also able to spontaneously form representations of the other dragons and their minions. It does make sense that dumping as much magic as possible into one dragon would have a different effect than having it all released into the world would be, even if both are dangerous.

[KnightofPhoenix.3679]

19 minutes ago, draxynnic.3719 said:

The Dragonvoid is a manifestation of Soo-Won being overwhelmed with magic. It's essentially Soo-Won's equivalent of Kralkatorrik's Torment, except that Soo-Won had a bit more mental fortitude and having that happen to her required so much magic that instead of it just taking over her body, it was also able to spontaneously form representations of the other dragons and their minions. It does make sense that dumping as much magic as possible into one dragon would have a different effect than having it all released into the world would be, even if both are dangerous.

 

So you're suggesting that the Will behind the Dragonvoid is Soo-Won in her madness rather than a separate entity and that her struggle against it is reminiscent of Kralkatorrik vs his Madness? That's an interesting interpretation.  I had thought that the Dragonvoid was a separate entity (formed from the excess magic coalescing within her) that was using Soo-Won's body rather than a manifestation of her madness.  And that it's still out there even with the destruction of Soo-Won's body. 

But admittedly, I find your interpretation more appealing - it makes it so that the final boss was, in fact, Soo-Won and that much like Kralkatorrik (who was the closest to his mother) she needed to be put out of her misery.  It also contains the Dragonvoid to Soo-Won rather than a separate big bad evil that the series will have to tackle in the future - to be honest, I don't find the Dragonvoid appealing as a big evil and I think there are more interesting possibilities out there such as the Six or the entity in the Unending Ocean.  

Edited January 10, 2023 by KnightofPhoenix.3679

[Fueki.4753]

1 hour ago, draxynnic.3719 said:

The Dragonvoid is a manifestation of Soo-Won being overwhelmed with magic. It's essentially Soo-Won's equivalent of Kralkatorrik's Torment, except that Soo-Won had a bit more mental fortitude and having that happen to her required so much magic that instead of it just taking over her body, it was also able to spontaneously form representations of the other dragons and their minions. It does make sense that dumping as much magic as possible into one dragon would have a different effect than having it all released into the world would be, even if both are dangerous.

If Arenanet is going to interpret the Dragonvoid in that way in the end, it'd be a simple and decent enough solution. It just didn't feel that way in EoD and never once did any character mention any similarities (as far as I remember).

And Magic in Elder Dragons having a different effect is well-known. We also know that is released differently when Elder Dragons die, than when entities holding magic that's foreign to Tyria get destroyed. When Zhaitan and Mordremoth died, their magic was released back into the Ley Line system. With Abaddon's death, Balthazar's death and the Bloodstone incident, we have seen that Human God magic doesn't get released into the system, but ends up exploding into cataclysmic events.

Edited January 10, 2023 by Fueki.4753

[draxynnic.3719]

55 minutes ago, KnightofPhoenix.3679 said:

 

So you're suggesting that the Will behind the Dragonvoid is Soo-Won in her madness rather than a separate entity and that her struggle against it is reminiscent of Kralkatorrik vs his Madness? That's an interesting interpretation.  I had thought that the Dragonvoid was a separate entity (formed from the excess magic coalescing within her) that was using Soo-Won's body rather than a manifestation of her madness.  And that it's still out there even with the destruction of Soo-Won's body. 

But admittedly, I find your interpretation more appealing - it makes it so that the final boss was, in fact, Soo-Won and that much like Kralkatorrik (who was the closest to his mother) she needed to be put out of her misery.  It also contains the Dragonvoid to Soo-Won rather than a separate big bad evil that the series will have to tackle in the future - to be honest, I don't find the Dragonvoid appealing as a big evil and I think there are more interesting possibilities out there such as the Six or the entity in the Unending Ocean.  

It's possibly a bit more complex than that - the Dragonvoid could be argued to have split off and become a separate entity - but it definitely appears to be sharing and operating through Soo-Won's body. Soo-Won is pretty insistent that the only way to stop it is to kill her, and in every battle we have against the Dragonvoid, the end result - once we've fought through all the other manifestations - is that Soo-Won gains a period of lucidity after the Dragonvoid has been suppressed enough that it loses control of her body. Whenever Soo-Won is lucid, the Dragonvoid's ability to manipulate the outside world is sharply reduced, possibly even removed entirely, until it wins control again.

So I think the analogy with Kralkatorrik's Torment is accurate. The distinction is that in Kralkatorrik's case, Torment was completely in control - Kralkatorrik's saner personality is only able to make its influence felt once we actually enter Kralkatorrik's body physically. (And based on Edge of Destiny, this seems to have been the case before dragons started dying - the description of Kralkatorrik's mind there sounds like Torment is in control, and Snaff evidently didn't manage to catch the attention of what was left of Kralkatorrik's saner personality like Aurene did.) Torment was limited to only being able to do what Kralkatorrik is capable of, but I suspect that after having Aurene's magic added to her own, Soo-Won would have been able to do everything the Dragonvoid was doing, she just tried not to.

Which does mean that I don't think the Dragonvoid is ever coming back. The threat of the Dragonvoid specifically has been removed with Soo-Won's death. The primary risk that remains is that Aurene might find that she, too, is unable to control the world's magic on her own, leading to the development of her own version of it.

[vectorfox.6894]

I think the biggest item you can latch onto for the dragonvoid is that Aurene was a thing since at least season 2 and with that they had to have some idea of killing all the elder dragons or it would be a little scuffed for Aurene to only cover a portion of the other dragons workload so from that they had to have some idea of absorbing the power but also not making it that easy so there would be a twist and some alternate threat to your goals. If you want to prove the specific "dragonvoid" was going to be a thing then look towards the ley-line anomaly and bloodstone arcs where they re-used the idea of sentient magic with bloodstone soul(?) magic to basically create the idea of the dragons essence along with memories to create a sentient magic that has a purpose (to consume).

Do i think this was the exact plan from the start? not really because it ended up creating a lot of issues that i will post in the writing quality thread.

 

[Konig Des Todes.2086]

  

On 1/8/2023 at 4:48 PM, mandala.8507 said:

Lines from Soo-Won under the influence of the Dragonvoid for all the semantics gamers in here:

"The end is the beginning, and the beginning will be nothingness."

"You cannot avoid the undertow pulling you toward nothingness."

I don't even know how to argue against such narrow and unimaginative absolutism.

And here will be the counterpoint:

"Well, actually, this is just another example of lack of foresight and bad writing. Clearly they didn't have this concept well defined and were just winging it in EoD. Anet writers so bad, lul."

The actual counterpoint is that Dragonvoid isn't talking about Void there, but generic nihilism. 

As already pointed out in this thread, The Void != "nothingness".

On 1/9/2023 at 4:29 AM, draxynnic.3719 said:

Quoted the important part here. Matter that "changes state constantly" is the cycle of creation and destruction I was referring to: when matter changes state, that's essentially destroying what was there before and creating something new in its place. Which is going to happen naturally over time, but for anything to survive long enough to do more than think "Oh, no, not again", that cycle can't be proceeding too quickly. It's not destruction in the sense of the matter being deleted and leaving a vacuum, but in the sense that whatever the matter originally formed - a rock, a flowerpot, a person - is no longer there and something else is there in its place.

That feels a bit semantical, but I would disagree that "constantly changing" is "creation and destruction". I don't think the Void is in a constant state of flux by virtue of completely changing what it is, but I would agree that it's destruction in the sense of the matter originally formed is no longer there - because it all merges together. Rather than having a rock, you have the atoms of a rock merged with the atoms of a flowerpot merged with the atoms of a person.

That's my understanding of the Void's interaction, but also that it goes beyond simply matter but also laws of physics and magic as well - it isn't matter that's changing state constantly, but the foundation of reality itself. 

On 1/9/2023 at 4:29 AM, draxynnic.3719 said:

And from memory of what we've been told about the Mists, that's something that's happening in the wilder parts of the Mists. The places we can visit are the places that, for one reason or another, are stable (in the sense that they're not going to have something else created on top of them) at least for long enough for adventurers to do whatever they're there for and get out again.

As far as I can recall, there is no statement nor implication that matter is in a constant but slow state of flux in The Mists. It's merely constantly creating things out of protomatter, and nothing more. Some of these things are imperfect, leading to demons and fractals, and other things are good enough, leading to realms, planets, and new species like skyscales and Razah.

The closest thing to "constantly shifting" that is tied to the Mists as far as I can recall is Exordium - and that's less a property of the Mists and more a property of the legendary greatsword.

On 1/9/2023 at 6:55 AM, KnightofPhoenix.3679 said:

Now the question is, how the hell did Soo-Won come to be?  She effectively initiated the Big Bang, but she is not an infinite God that could have co-existed with the Void.  Was she the one in a trillion trillion things in flux that managed to be sustainable at that singularity?     

Unfortunately to define that question, we first need to define what the Void is in scope. We have no clue just how large-scale the Void is, and for all we know it can just be a localized situation, or it could be as perpetually existing as the Mists is. Similarly, we'd need to know if it really was just Void and Soo-Won, or if Soo-Won was traveling and came across the Void.

Either way as Drax said, we know that the Void wasn't everything, as other planets and things exist - it was the "big bang" only for Tyria. The main question there is just whether the Void is a single pocket issue the size of a planet, or if it's bigger and Soo-Won just took a chunk of Void to create Tyria...

4 hours ago, draxynnic.3719 said:

The Dragonvoid is a manifestation of Soo-Won being overwhelmed with magic. It's essentially Soo-Won's equivalent of Kralkatorrik's Torment, except that Soo-Won had a bit more mental fortitude and having that happen to her required so much magic that instead of it just taking over her body, it was also able to spontaneously form representations of the other dragons and their minions. It does make sense that dumping as much magic as possible into one dragon would have a different effect than having it all released into the world would be, even if both are dangerous.

I would disagree, as Harvest Temple strike / The Only One story shows that the Dragonvoid was taking personality from every Elder Dragon.

It corrupted Soo-Won most directly because she was a host for all six domains of magic that made the Void, thus a host for the Dragonvoid, but the Dragonvoid was a persona created from all six Elder Dragons, not just one. It's why we destroy six dragon hearts rather than just one. And Soo-Won was doing all she could to hold it back, hence why its power is sharply decreased when she gains lucidity.

[KnightofPhoenix.3679]

23 hours ago, Fueki.4753 said:

And Magic in Elder Dragons having a different effect is well-known. We also know that is released differently when Elder Dragons die, than when entities holding magic that's foreign to Tyria get destroyed. When Zhaitan and Mordremoth died, their magic was released back into the Ley Line system. With Abaddon's death, Balthazar's death and the Bloodstone incident, we have seen that Human God magic doesn't get released into the system, but ends up exploding into cataclysmic events.

That's not entirely accurate - we know that Balthazar's magic was absorbed by Aurene (when she harnesses her magic in one scene, an image of Balthazar, Zhaitain and Modremoth show up) as well as Kralkatorrik (indeed, his ability to open mortals into the mists came from Balthazar who was able to do that even when he was at his weakest).   Furthermore, Kormir took the brunt of Abaddon's magic and ascended into godhood herself.  So the magic that gods harness can be absorbed in the event of a god's death. 

But you are right in that it doesn't appear that divine magic is as unstable and "corrupting" as dragon magic (and arguably, it doesn't appear to be as powerful).  It also seems likely that upon a god's death, the magic is more likely to explode than go into the leyline network for some reason (maybe cause divine magic comes from the mists and not Tyria's "natural magic", i.e. dragon magic). 

[Fueki.4753]

35 minutes ago, KnightofPhoenix.3679 said:

That's not entirely accurate - we know that Balthazar's magic was absorbed by Aurene (when she harnesses her magic in one scene, an image of Balthazar, Zhaitain and Modremoth show up) as well as Kralkatorrik (indeed, his ability to open mortals into the mists came from Balthazar who was able to do that even when he was at his weakest).   Furthermore, Kormir took the brunt of Abaddon's magic and ascended into godhood herself.  So the magic that gods harness can be absorbed in the event of a god's death. 

But you are right in that it doesn't appear that divine magic is as unstable and "corrupting" as dragon magic (and arguably, it doesn't appear to be as powerful).  It also seems likely that upon a god's death, the magic is more likely to explode than go into the leyline network for some reason (maybe cause divine magic comes from the mists and not Tyria's "natural magic", i.e. dragon magic). 

I meant it more as comparison what happens when magic doesn't get absorbed.

Kormir's primary goal when taking in Abaddon's magic was to prevent a disaster, not to become a god. It'd have exploded otherwise. The Bloodstone would also have exploded, of Balthazar hadn't sucked up most of the magic. Balthazar's death would likely have resulted in Elona being wiped clean of life, had the dragons not snacked on the magical storm.

That's a strong contrast to the deaths of Zhaitan and Mordremoth, with their magic was simply flowing back into the ley lines.

However, we don't know if this difference happens due to properties from Elder Dragon and Human God magic, or if the Human God magic simply is incompatible with the Ley Line system, because Human God magic stems from another world.

Edited January 11, 2023 by Fueki.4753

[anninke.7469]

So now when the Human God magic got absorbed by Aurene, did it get filtered and blended in the rest or is it still different? Would it explode or go to the ley lines? 🤔

[Konig Des Todes.2086]

2 hours ago, KnightofPhoenix.3679 said:

That's not entirely accurate - we know that Balthazar's magic was absorbed by Aurene (when she harnesses her magic in one scene, an image of Balthazar, Zhaitain and Modremoth show up) as well as Kralkatorrik (indeed, his ability to open mortals into the mists came from Balthazar who was able to do that even when he was at his weakest).   Furthermore, Kormir took the brunt of Abaddon's magic and ascended into godhood herself.  So the magic that gods harness can be absorbed in the event of a god's death. 

But you are right in that it doesn't appear that divine magic is as unstable and "corrupting" as dragon magic (and arguably, it doesn't appear to be as powerful).  It also seems likely that upon a god's death, the magic is more likely to explode than go into the leyline network for some reason (maybe cause divine magic comes from the mists and not Tyria's "natural magic", i.e. dragon magic). 

Balthazar's magic did release in an explosion - or more accurately, a storm. It was contained by Aurene and Kralkatorrik, thus not being as devastating. But we were there point blank and until Aurene at all the magic she could at the time, we were so dibilitated from the sudden release of magic we couldn't move.
Again the same with Kormir, absorbing the exploding magic of Abaddon.

Yes their magic can be contained upon death - but so can an Elder Dragons' and that doesn't change the fact that when an Elder Dragon's magic isn't contained it simply flows back into the ley-lines harmlessly, while with the gods it explodes violently.

As to the gods' strength vs dragons' - I would say the gods' is naturally stronger, but the Elder Dragons are a lot more variable in power, and as such can become much, much stronger with enough absorbed magic. Kormir was unintentionally destroying the Sanctum, the heart of her realm, because the Commander merely suggested that she fight Balthazar for us and she got upset.

 

One piece of clarity, @Fueki.4753 too, but the Bloodstone is not god magic - while the gods did split the Bloodstones, the Seers made the original Bloodstone out of Tyrian magic, and the gods strengthened it using Zhaitan's magic. The Bloodstones are pure Tyrian magic. The reason for its explosion is because the White Mantle was filling it to the brim with souls for the past 200 years, combined with it absorbing magic from Zhaitan's and Mordremoth's deaths and the increase of magic in ley-lines - and then, like idiots, they cracked the shell destabilizing it.

If killing an Elder Dragon is like pouring a bucket of water back into a stream, the Bloodstone was like a waterballoon being filled to its max, and then poking it with a needle to burst it. And killing a god is like having a mega waterballoon pop.

 

16 minutes ago, anninke.7469 said:

So now when the Human God magic got absorbed by Aurene, did it get filtered and blended in the rest or is it still different? Would it explode or go to the ley lines? 🤔

It should also be noted that Balthazar wasn't a god anymore, and the vast majority of his magic at the time of death came from Bloodstone, Jormag, and Primordus - e.g., all Tyrian magic. Similar to Primordus during Champions, he did change the magic somehow to more closely resemble his original magic it seems, but it wasn't actually Human God magic.

 

That said, the entire lore behind the volatile magic nodes in S4 is that it is the influence of Balthazar's god-flavored Tyrian magic entering the system, similar to how the lore behind the unbound magic nodes in S3 is that it's magic that is overflowed out of the ley-lines.

[Fueki.4753]

24 minutes ago, Konig Des Todes.2086 said:

One piece of clarity, @Fueki.4753 too, but the Bloodstone is not god magic - while the gods did split the Bloodstones, the Seers made the original Bloodstone out of Tyrian magic, and the gods strengthened it using Zhaitan's magic. The Bloodstones are pure Tyrian magic.

Don't we all love blatant retcons?

The GW1 wiki clearly states that the Gods created the Bloodstone to limit the magic humans could use - magic they were gifted by Abaddon.

Edited January 11, 2023 by Fueki.4753

[Konig Des Todes.2086]

2 hours ago, Fueki.4753 said:

Don't we all love blatant retcons?

The GW1 wiki clearly states that the Gods created the Bloodstone to limit the magic humans could use - magic they were gifted by Abaddon.

GW1 wiki also clearly states that the gods have rewritten history on more than one occasion... like Abaddon's existence, and him giving out magic.
Not sure that counts as blatant retcon when the source material is already called out as being fundamentally unreliable. 🤔

Either way, GWW editors have a hard on for hating GW2 and one in particular has been going on a multi-year crusade to remove all references to GW2 and its lore.

[Ashen.2907]

On 1/7/2023 at 5:47 PM, Konig Des Todes.2086 said:

It's pretty clear from context that the Void references before EoD weren't referring to the Void, but rather a generic void. ArenaNet did add it in from nowhere, but it isn't a retcon because there was nothing there in the first place.

Retroactive continuity can only occur if you're rewriting something. If you're filling in a blank, it isn't a retcon.

 

Also using Joko as the first source is hilarious because he's a pathological liar and everything he said there was wrong. Hell, well over half of the clips you use is not even referencing the Elder Dragons and void together, it's just a generic void. you just brought in a bunch of clips where the word "void" was used while completely and utterly ignoring the context. Yes, vocabulary exists. Void is not a word invented by ArenaNet in 2022.

The only instance of Void, capitalized, used by ArenaNet before EoD is in Dhuum's title, The Voice in the Void. Whether this has any relation to The Void is unclear. The only time the word "void" is used in relation to the Elder Dragons is in the PoF cinematic in Kesho, and in The Map of the All, but both cases is used in a very obviously generic "nothingness" concept, and not a coalescence singularity of all magic that breaks down and consumes all it touches that The Void is.

This.

 

If ANet had chosen to color Void creatures red and call it The Crimson instead, it would not make every use of the word crimson, scarlet, or even red over the course of the game's life a reference to this one plot device.

[mandala.8507]

6 hours ago, Konig Des Todes.2086 said:

Yes their magic can be contained upon death - but so can an Elder Dragons' and that doesn't change the fact that when an Elder Dragon's magic isn't contained it simply flows back into the ley-lines harmlessly, while with the gods it explodes violently.

Spirit Vale called. It would like a word with you on this misinterpretation of the lore. 

[mandala.8507]

3 hours ago, Ashen.2907 said:

If ANet had chosen to color Void creatures red and call it The Crimson instead, it would not make every use of the word crimson, scarlet, or even red over the course of the game's life a reference to this one plot device.

This is the same energy as the students in a literature class who say "red is just a color" when an author has blatantly said they use colors to symbolize other things in their writing.

It also is an argument rooted in the idea the Void was recently fabricated in the lore, but I think players willing to look beyond the bold-faced, surface-level narrative will recognize the themes of light vs. dark, good vs. evil, order vs. chaos, and day vs. night woven into the world of Tyria and its stories from the very outset of the game.

The precision to which certain nomenclature is used throughout the world is rather impressive, and it can be an awesome tool for identifying the common threads connecting all these seemingly distinct and isolated tales together.

Another great case for this is the use of the term "shattered" in the lore and the world. This term quite literally is a placeholder for the destabilization of existence that comes from exposure to unstable eternal magics, but it is apparent to me we're not ready to believe Arenanet can use words to mean something in the lore beyond their literal definition in the English language without explicitly stating it.

The takes in this thread are interesting. And interesting is the only thing I can mean by that, if you catch my drift.

[Konig Des Todes.2086]

1 hour ago, mandala.8507 said:

Spirit Vale called. It would like a word with you on this misinterpretation of the lore. 

Oh, such as?
The fact that the Vale Guardian device was affected by the surge of magic in the ley-lines?
The fact that the spirits were knocked loose from the Bloodstone, affected by the surge of magic in the ley-lines.
The Slothasaur being mutated by the increase of ambient magic in the area while sitting over a ley-line?
The fact that no one else was affected, only things that gather magic or sitting in/on ley-lines? Like the Bloodstone, Vale Guardian device, Aurene's egg?

The Pact were point blank range of Mordremoth's death, with zero consequences. Things attached to the ley-lines like the Bloodstone would be affected, but that's the extent of it.

If I'm missing something, please do be a tad bit more specific than hundreds of lines of dialogue.

1 hour ago, mandala.8507 said:

This is the same energy as the students in a literature class who say "red is just a color" when an author has blatantly said they use colors to symbolize other things in their writing.

The thing is that in this case, the author did not say that they "use colors to symbolize other things". You're just assuming that they are.

[mandala.8507]

15 minutes ago, Konig Des Todes.2086 said:

If I'm missing something, please do be a tad bit more specific than hundreds of lines of dialogue.

It's not my job to educate you, especially when you're being incredibly antagonistic and patronizing right from the jump with zero provocation. Engage with the resources available to you instead of relying on your memory alone and you might find the answer.

[draxynnic.3719]

On 1/10/2023 at 11:59 PM, Konig Des Todes.2086 said:

  

 

That feels a bit semantical, but I would disagree that "constantly changing" is "creation and destruction". I don't think the Void is in a constant state of flux by virtue of completely changing what it is, but I would agree that it's destruction in the sense of the matter originally formed is no longer there - because it all merges together. Rather than having a rock, you have the atoms of a rock merged with the atoms of a flowerpot merged with the atoms of a person.

That's my understanding of the Void's interaction, but also that it goes beyond simply matter but also laws of physics and magic as well - it isn't matter that's changing state constantly, but the foundation of reality itself. 

I think we need to take into account here that some of the lore isn't just what's written, it's what we see ingame.

 

What does the Void create out of its energies? Minions. Minions that echo the minions of past Elder Dragons (just as some creatures in the Mists mirror creatures on Tyria), to the point that when the Dragonvoid has different energy concentrations related to different dragons, the void minions in that area correspond to the same dragon.

 

This doesn't say "rock merged with flowerpot merged with person" to me. The Dragonvoid is creating distinct regions themed around different dragons. Not just in the minions themselves, there are features of the landscape in Dragon's End that are clearly themed around dragons like Jormag and Primordus. What we don't see - since the Dragon's End part of the story is probably only a couple of days - is whether in a few days time those landmarks would all be twisted around to different dragons, and whether a Void Mordrem might be reconfigured into a Void Icebrood (something it does with it's own - aka Soo-Won's - body during the story finale, where at the very end it starts transforming into the other dragons at random). And I think that's what Taimi is referring to. Life can't survive if it might be spontaneously reconfigured into something else at a moment's notice.

On 1/10/2023 at 11:59 PM, Konig Des Todes.2086 said:

As far as I can recall, there is no statement nor implication that matter is in a constant but slow state of flux in The Mists. It's merely constantly creating things out of protomatter, and nothing more. Some of these things are imperfect, leading to demons and fractals, and other things are good enough, leading to realms, planets, and new species like skyscales and Razah.

Unfortunately, I don't have time for a sufficiently deep dive, and the information might be gone now, but the things you describe as 'imperfect", such as fractals, do seem to indicate that things can disappear as well as reappear. Fractals do at least reset, after all, and the original generation of skyscales was highly unstable, with the skyscale collection being about stabilising the new generation so it wouldn't suffer the same fate. At the very least, I think it's reasonable that if there's a level of energy at which spontaneous creation occurs, there will also be a level at which it would potentially be destroying existing material to create something anew in its place. This is, after all, generally taken to be part of the reason why elementalism is referred to as the school of 'Destruction' - elementalist magic is often more along the lines of transformation, which essentially translates to destroying one thing to create something else in its place.

On 1/10/2023 at 11:59 PM, Konig Des Todes.2086 said:

I would disagree, as Harvest Temple strike / The Only One story shows that the Dragonvoid was taking personality from every Elder Dragon.

It corrupted Soo-Won most directly because she was a host for all six domains of magic that made the Void, thus a host for the Dragonvoid, but the Dragonvoid was a persona created from all six Elder Dragons, not just one. It's why we destroy six dragon hearts rather than just one. And Soo-Won was doing all she could to hold it back, hence why its power is sharply decreased when she gains lucidity.

Foreshadowed with Kralkatorment as well - defeating it required destroying incarnations of the magic of Mordremoth, Zhaitan, and Balthazar. The Dragonvoid having all six (and each in a purer, more powerful form) is probably a function of Soo-Won having almost all of the power of all six at the time. Keep in mind that at the end of the Icebrood Saga, all of the power that had formerly been in the other five dragons was concentrated in Soo-Won and Aurene, apart from that they returned through the reactor and the ley line network respectively. And the whole point of Ankka's plot was to take most of Aurene's magic (it took an infusion of magic, ironically from dragonjade, to get Aurene back on her proverbial feet again at all) and shunt it into Soo-Won. Instead of the fractions of the power of Zhaitan and Mordremoth that Kralkatorrik had, Soo-Won - and therefore the Dragonvoid - had a much higher proportion of all five. Thus allowing the Dragonvoid to manifest all of them at something close to full power.

[Konig Des Todes.2086]

4 hours ago, draxynnic.3719 said:

I think we need to take into account here that some of the lore isn't just what's written, it's what we see ingame.

 

What does the Void create out of its energies? Minions. Minions that echo the minions of past Elder Dragons (just as some creatures in the Mists mirror creatures on Tyria), to the point that when the Dragonvoid has different energy concentrations related to different dragons, the void minions in that area correspond to the same dragon.

 

This doesn't say "rock merged with flowerpot merged with person" to me. The Dragonvoid is creating distinct regions themed around different dragons. Not just in the minions themselves, there are features of the landscape in Dragon's End that are clearly themed around dragons like Jormag and Primordus. What we don't see - since the Dragon's End part of the story is probably only a couple of days - is whether in a few days time those landmarks would all be twisted around to different dragons, and whether a Void Mordrem might be reconfigured into a Void Icebrood (something it does with it's own - aka Soo-Won's - body during the story finale, where at the very end it starts transforming into the other dragons at random). And I think that's what Taimi is referring to. Life can't survive if it might be spontaneously reconfigured into something else at a moment's notice.

One of the pieces of lore is that Void != Dragonvoid.

Yes, Dragonvoid creates distinct regions themed around different dragons, but that's not the same as the Void, which seems to just mindlessly (as it very literally has no mind or persona) deconstructs and merges things. Dragonvoid is a personality put onto Void and is capable of manipulating Void similar to how Soo-Won can - in large part, no doubt, because Soo-Won was able to manipulate the Void (somehow). Similarly, Ankka had a very minor ability to manipulate the Void to either recreate Zhaitan energies from it, or manipulate the Zhaitan energies within Void.

4 hours ago, draxynnic.3719 said:

Unfortunately, I don't have time for a sufficiently deep dive, and the information might be gone now, but the things you describe as 'imperfect", such as fractals, do seem to indicate that things can disappear as well as reappear. Fractals do at least reset, after all, and the original generation of skyscales was highly unstable, with the skyscale collection being about stabilising the new generation so it wouldn't suffer the same fate.

Things the Mists create eventually dying because it isn't everlasting is, imo, far less a case of "the Mists is in a constant state of flux" and more just that things eventually die and fade away. And as mentioned, Fractals are implied to be unstable not because they'd disappear eventually (though they probably would), but because things can break out of their loop and enter other realities - e.g., the Mist Stranger's dialogue on the Twisted Marionette and Dessa's dialogue telling us that removing instability is the same as killing hostiles.

4 hours ago, draxynnic.3719 said:

At the very least, I think it's reasonable that if there's a level of energy at which spontaneous creation occurs, there will also be a level at which it would potentially be destroying existing material to create something anew in its place. This is, after all, generally taken to be part of the reason why elementalism is referred to as the school of 'Destruction' - elementalist magic is often more along the lines of transformation, which essentially translates to destroying one thing to create something else in its place.

As I said in a much earlier post, when The Voice of The Void nickanme was first given to Dhuum back in 2010, along with the lore about Dhuum, I pretty much theorized right then and there that The Void could be exactly what you describe - that it was, in effect, a massive recycling function for The Mists.

The issue with the theory is that even to this day, it's completely baseless. Because as things stand, The Void is only related to Tyria's magic system - not the entire multiverse.

And while it would make sense to say that there is a level at which energy would potentially be destroying existing material so something new can be created in its place, there's simply no evidence for this. For all we know, the Void is a purely localized anomaly within the multiverse and the Mists does constantly create things without a need of a recycling bin.

4 hours ago, draxynnic.3719 said:

Foreshadowed with Kralkatorment as well - defeating it required destroying incarnations of the magic of Mordremoth, Zhaitan, and Balthazar. The Dragonvoid having all six (and each in a purer, more powerful form) is probably a function of Soo-Won having almost all of the power of all six at the time. Keep in mind that at the end of the Icebrood Saga, all of the power that had formerly been in the other five dragons was concentrated in Soo-Won and Aurene, apart from that they returned through the reactor and the ley line network respectively. And the whole point of Ankka's plot was to take most of Aurene's magic (it took an infusion of magic, ironically from dragonjade, to get Aurene back on her proverbial feet again at all) and shunt it into Soo-Won. Instead of the fractions of the power of Zhaitan and Mordremoth that Kralkatorrik had, Soo-Won - and therefore the Dragonvoid - had a much higher proportion of all five. Thus allowing the Dragonvoid to manifest all of them at something close to full power.

It should be noted that with Kralkatorrik, we did not destroy the facets per se. Based on the dialogue and objectives, Aurene was simply removing the magic from Kralkatorrik to weaken him - mechanically this is done by bringing facet NPCs to 0 HP and then using a special action skill.

Counteractively, with the Dragonvoid's Elder Dragon hearts, we actively are destroying the hearts and Void manifestations of the Elder Dragons, not absorbing or redirecting the magic, based on the dialogue and objective wording.

 

I feel that creates a bit of a distinction between the two events, but more than that, I do not see how Soo-Won having all six domains in her body declares that the Dragonvoid is equivalent to "Soo-Won's Torment" so to speak. As we saw in Harvest Temple, the Dragonvoid is more than just a twisted persona of Soo-Won which is what Kralkatorrik's Torment was. It was Kralkatorrik's Torment and the other five dragon's in a weird meld. It even blatantly quoted Kralkatorrik's Torment, Jormag, and Mordremoth outright:

The Dragonvoid: Your efforts are futile. Join us. Be liberated from your fear.
Detective Rama: I hate to admit it, but that's

thing's starting to make a lot of sense.
Gorrik: Jormag is the master of lies: don't listen to a thing it says!
The Dragonvoid: You wound us, master asura.
Gorrik: Good!

[...]

Gorrik: Well...that was certainly effective!
The Dragonvoid: Aren't you tired?
The Dragonvoid: I will set you free.
The Dragonvoid: A world free of strife.
Gorrik: One dragon down. Only four to go...
Detective Rama: And one big ball of nasty.

Ivan: Unleash your fury, Commander!
The Dragonvoid: Blind! Lost!
The Dragonvoid: Your world ends!
The Dragonvoid: Anguish! Malignity!

The Dragonvoid: Embrace oblivion.

Marjory Delaqua: I'll die before I let you take her from me too!

It technically also quotes Primordus and Zhaitan but... well... the game didn't really have anything to quote so sadly we only get growls and roars. Which to me shows that it's an amalgamation of all six personalities, rather than "Soo-Won's Torment" which by name would imply just her own personality.

Yes, Kralkatorrik's Torment was foreshadowing Void and Dragonvoid's existence (but their name wasn't foreshadowed at all imo), but they're still fundamentally different - Kralkatorrik's Torment was a split personality established by Kralkatorrik consuming other domains of magic over the many millennia. Jormag began to go insane with Torment in the same light during Champions (even gets a story step called Jormag's Madness to symbolize this), and like Kralkatorrik being animalistic, Primordus was animalistic for the same reasons - conflicting magic twisting and simplifying his mind over millennia.

But Dragonvoid itself appears to be a merging of the six Elder Dragon's Torment, rather than just Soo-Won's, and given form by manipulating the Void itself - which it then used that ability to create minions based on the Elder Dragons' five kinds of minions.

18 hours ago, mandala.8507 said:

It's not my job to educate you, especially when you're being incredibly antagonistic and patronizing right from the jump with zero provocation. Engage with the resources available to you instead of relying on your memory alone and you might find the answer.

My antagonism is because you just respond with "you're wrong" without any explanation for why I am wrong (to be more clear: you were antagonistic first). It's not your job to educate me, but you're already prompting yourself into the position of it and then not. It's not my job to discuss with you, it's not your job to post on the forums, yet here we are - we're not here for jobs, we're here because we want to be.

I don't just rely on my memory, I usually verify on the wiki to make sure I'm remembering correctly.

There is nothing in Spirit Vale that I can find - and that includes the other two Forsaken Thicket and Season 3 Episode 1 content - which indicates otherwise of my prior statement - that the Elder Dragons' magic harmlessly go back into the ley-lines upon death if not immediately absorbed.

The only things affected by the Elder Dragons' magic are the things sitting on and already being influenced by the ley-lines, and that effect is merely being given a jolt of magic. The amount of jolt dependent on the proximity to major ley-lines near the Elder Dragon's death.

So if you have proof that I'm wrong, say what that proof is. And not just go "you're wrong now kitten off".

[mandala.8507]

3 hours ago, Konig Des Todes.2086 said:

to be more clear: you were antagonistic first

I offered a discussion topic with a video and this was your response:

On 1/7/2023 at 8:47 PM, Konig Des Todes.2086 said:

It's pretty clear from context that the Void references before EoD weren't referring to the Void, but rather a generic void. ArenaNet did add it in from nowhere, but it isn't a retcon because there was nothing there in the first place.

Retroactive continuity can only occur if you're rewriting something. If you're filling in a blank, it isn't a retcon.

 

Also using Joko as the first source is hilarious because he's a pathological liar and everything he said there was wrong. Hell, well over half of the clips you use is not even referencing the Elder Dragons and void together, it's just a generic void. you just brought in a bunch of clips where the word "void" was used while completely and utterly ignoring the context. Yes, vocabulary exists. Void is not a word invented by ArenaNet in 2022.

The only instance of Void, capitalized, used by ArenaNet before EoD is in Dhuum's title, The Voice in the Void. Whether this has any relation to The Void is unclear. The only time the word "void" is used in relation to the Elder Dragons is in the PoF cinematic in Kesho, and in The Map of the All, but both cases is used in a very obviously generic "nothingness" concept, and not a coalescence singularity of all magic that breaks down and consumes all it touches that The Void is.

If you could enlighten me on where in my original post I laughed at you (presuming from the context of your comment at how stupid my ideas are) and explained to you how vocabulary works mockingly, I'd appreciate it.

I take full credit for matching your energy after you decided to ego on me, but I started nothing.

Anyhoo...

Essentially, Tyria is just a magical ecosystem and all magical beings and objects are stored energy within the ecosystem. The dragons, then, would be the largest vessels for stored magic in that system. Of course they have other roles besides storage. In theory, they also filter or cleanse the magic. You could think of them as a kidney in an organism, except instead of simply extracting and expelling the waste out of the system, they convert it into something more palatable that can be released back into the world.

Unfortunately, it seems Tyria was always in a strained equilibrium and this created a natural, but violent volatility within the ecosystem giving rise to the dragon cycle.

When the gods arrived on Tyria and began to add vast quantities of external magic (and already present stored magic like the Bloodstone) to the ecosystem, things got worse and the balance could no longer be maintained. Eventually, the death of the god Abaddon and the release of a decent portion of his magic into Tyria (as Kormir admits she could not absorb his power fully) prematurely triggered the next dragon cycle, which according to the Forgotten, the Mursaat, and the Kodan were getting out of control even the last time 10,000 years ago.

Then along comes the Pact Commander who understandably seeks to end Zhaitan's spiraling magical consumption threatening to wipe out all life on Tyria and destabilize the system anyway by adding magic to an already overwhelmed elder dragon who had no chance of filtering the magic successfully anymore.

But removing him as a vessel for containing the magic only delayed and exacerbated the destabilization of Tyria. His magic was released out into the world. Yes, through ley lines, but not exclusively. Ley lines are simply a conduit for magic. A natural pathway for rapid and concentrated flow. But the magic is released into the system as a whole, which does affect everything.

Then Scarlet, having lost control of her shattered psyche, initiates Mordremoth's rise.

Again, another dragon who can't stay balanced any longer and starts spiraling out of control. And again, the Commander kills it.

This magic didn't simply flow into the ley lines harmlessly, as you believe. It exploded out into the world in all kinds of ways.

This shockwave is felt across the entire Maguuma jungle. The bandits in the Spirit Vale describe it as a windstorm that seems to have catalyzed all sorts of magical phenomenon in the Spirits Woods, including freeing souls from the bloodstone and waking the Vale Guardian.

It also, along with the explosion of the Bloodstone, triggers the formation of pockets of unbound magic, a common feature throughout all of season 3 denoting this excess unbound energy floating freely through Tyria's magical ecosystem.

Moredemoth's death even allows Arkk to penetrate the Mists in his attempt to continue his mother's work and ultimately seek to find her somewhere within the fractals themselves.

And all this magic affects us as well.

We start seeing anomalies and have to seek a way to reforge an ancient Forgotten device to bind the excess energies our proximity to so much unbound magic has imbued us with.

And Balthazar's death was much the same to Mordremoth's, unlike how you've distinguished the two.

He dies, his magic is released, whipping up a storm, and while both Kralkatorrik and Aurene absorbed the bulk of the magic, again we had a dragon begin to spiral out of control because of it, and this time the system was so unstable that the magic was not only unbound, but volatile. We couldn't even stand to touch it ourselves without special training and Aurene's purifying influence.

Void is simply the final state of this destabilized chaotic eternal magic, and just as in lore, it was always a constant.

In summary, I disagree with your opinion because it is demonstrably incorrect.

[Konig Des Todes.2086]

8 hours ago, mandala.8507 said:

I offered a discussion topic with a video and this was your response:

If you take disagreement with your opinion and pointing out that some of your examples are contextually unrelated as being antagonizing, and respond with being abrupt and rude, then I honestly just feel sorry for you. And that only works to show that any form of discussion or debate with you is simply pointless.

I will respond to this part though:

8 hours ago, mandala.8507 said:

This magic didn't simply flow into the ley lines harmlessly, as you believe. It exploded out into the world in all kinds of ways.

The cinematic is very much being artistic in its depiction. The end of the Mouth of Mordremoth meta is the same moment as that "explosion" (as the story and meta occur simultaneously), and it's just a brief flash.
Plus, if it was an "explosion", then how did the Commander and Dragon's Watch - who were very literally in the heart of Mordremoth's area - let alone the entire Pact army, completely unaffected? As Season 3 and Path of Fire show, specifically via Burden of Choice achievement and Crystal Desert bounties, an exposure to an excess of magic results in insanity and instability. Even if you try to explain away the Commander's apparent immunity with a connection to Aurene (something that only helped later down the line as seen with the subplot in S3E1 where we need to find an amulet the White Mantle use to redirect unbound magic to be harmlessly absorbed, as well as with the use of the Shadowstone in Burden of Choice side story), that wouldn't account for Braham, Caithe, Canach, Marjory, and Rytlock (or the rest of the Pact army), or why there is no explosion at the end of the meta - just a brief flash.

So yes, ley-lines begin to overflow after Mordremoth's death, and things like the Bloodstone, Aurene's egg, and the Vale Guardian defenses connected to the ley-lines begin to overcharge. But there was no explosion at Mordremoth's death and this is proven by the fact that the Commander, Dragon's Watch, Laranthir, and the rest of the Pact present still lives and is unaffected.