#pax vowkeeper

[anghraine]

squirrelwrangler said:

I love reading your struggles w/ GW2's treatment of the Charr and Ascalon. every time I resist the urge to shower you with XIV lore to pick your brain over the Garleans and the multi-expansion examinations of imperialism, anti-colonialism, etc...

Aww, thanks! I'm glad someone enjoys it—sometimes I do have to vent, lol, but I rarely expect others to care. I've got a thing in drafts about my wildly AU headcanon for my Charr PC, since the only way I can tolerate having one is to imagine an "are we the baddies?" epiphany that leads her to turn her back on the Charr war machine. (Except to try and awkwardly make things right insofar as it's possible for one person to do while also throwing herself into the fight against the dragons.) But I wavered about actually posting it because I was like ... eh, that's probably too niche even for the people who do care about the GW2 stuff.

(The Charr are sort of steampunk Roman-themed as a society in GW2, and most have Latin given names + some hardcore Nounverber surname/epithet like "Foereaver" or whatnot. I decided my Charr keeps the format and never tries to pretend she's anything but a Charr or that she doesn't care about Charr honor, she just comes to feel that the "victory at any cost" ethos is actually dishonorable. So she renames herself Pax Vowkeeper and tries to find a better way.)

WRT FFXIV, it's hard to know how I'd respond without experiencing the story myself. But I do like to see other people engaging with their preferred MMOs the way that I've been engaged with Tyria's lore for the last seventeen years!

[ascalonianlightbringer]

It's been a long time since I first fell in love with pre-Searing Ascalon in Guild Wars: Prophecies. But I'm still nostalgic enough that I periodically visit Ebonhawke just to go home to human Ascalon, and I loved this view of it :)

[anghraine]

I was posting about it on the sideblog, but ... while I've been Charr hateblogging for years, I'm a little torn between resenting the "unrepentant war criminals living on land conquered through repeated massacres they treat as righteous" and my growing affection for my Charr character, who 1) has a floofy tail and 2) I headcanon as a counter-cultural activist.

Pax!

[anghraine]

In keeping with my Ascalonian rageblogging: a ranking of my major PCs by how troubled they are over the legacy of the Charr invasions.

1- Althea Fairchild and Gwen Velazquez: a tie for first! Both are from proudly Ascalonian families, if on opposite ends of the Divinity's Reach social hierarchy—Althea comes from Kryta's and Ebonhawke's nobility, Gwen from the streets of Divinity's Reach. But they both loathe the entire Charr culture and everything it stands for with their entire beings. (Think me x 10.) They can keep a lid on the nuclear rage, but they definitely feel it.

2- Xiulan Azar: her mother is a descendant of Orrians who immigrated to Kryta shortly before the Charr invasion, and while her specific forebears weren't killed, the horror of what happened—and is still happening—to the Orrian people weighs on her. She's deeply sympathetic to Ascalonians as well as to the tiny surviving Orrian community, who mostly keep their heritage to themselves.

3- Pax Vowkeeper is a Charr, and once had it all: respected parents, esteem from her warband, a triumphant record, even relative uniqueness as her revenant abilities manifested. But unlike many, she found it increasingly difficult to ignore the price of victory as she became more attuned to the ghosts. Eventually, she gave up everything, changed her name to Pax, joined the Durmand Priory, and tried to discover a way to regain her sense of honor while defending Tyria.

4- Isabel Batista is not as furious as Althea, Gwen, and Xiulan. But in her quiet, scholarly way, she does not like Charr culture or trust individual Charr unless she knows them personally. She does not think the Searing, the initial Charr invasion, the various war crimes, the overall conquest, and the war over 200+ years can be accurately treated as separate events. She's particularly troubled by the destruction of Ascalonian artifacts, and the most open to friendship with Pax when she turns over some of them.

5- Victoria Langmar is the adopted daughter of Althea's aunt, and fairly close to Althea. But Victoria's feelings about her adoption into the aristocracy are complex, and she's uncertain she can even be considered Ascalonian without knowing where her birth parents' families came from (Elona by way of Kryta, it turns out) or what happened to them (killed by the White Mantle). She certainly sides with the Langmar-Fairchilds and her/their people in general, and she has long regarded the Charr as a threat to humanity and her home, but it's complicated, and she does welcome the prospect of peace.

6- Alexandra Díaz is the most "Krytan" of my Ascalonian characters. She's spent all her life in Divinity's Reach, mostly in the Salma District without much contact with the Ascalonian community, and the main influences on her are other local commoners like her friend Petra. She and her sister are conscious of their background and proud of their people's grit and resolve, but they're much more preoccupied with the here and now, and strongly support the treaty with the Charr. It's time to move forwards.

7- Magister Siobhán of the Durmand Priory does intellectually understand the various causes of the human-Charr conflict, as a historian. But she's a young sylvari interested in adventure and seizing the moment, and what's needed in the moment is fighting dragons! All this hostility and tension over something that basically ended before Siobhán even came into the world, and specific episodes of which are almost unfathomably distant in time, seems a pointless distraction. Humans and Charr can gain so much more by working together. Hasn't the Priory shown that?

[ascalonianlightbringer]

On the one hand, I intensely dislike mainstream Charr culture, their pretexts for war crimes, their refusal to make amends or even acknowledge wrongdoing in any way, and the game's retcons of GW1 to try and make this somehow palatable.

On the other, my Charr character has a very floofy tail.

[ascalonianlightbringer]

brotherskywalker replied to this post:

My character not acting the way the script for the game plays out is definitely something I struggle with in the game. I’m fine with it for some characters, but I have some where I don’t even read the dialog because it’s so different than how I think my character would act.

Yup, same—obviously, but the character in my head can be really different from what we're kind of forced to be in the script. Sometimes the script is fine for certain characters, for sure. And I appreciate that GW2 railroads less than GW1. But it can still be very railroad-y at points, and hard to reconcile what's happening with even other onscreen behavior/personality traits/background (for me, the human PC seems so much more hardcore in the street rat background than most of the other personal story arcs that it can be really jarring).

And that's not even getting to the limitations when it comes to imagining backstories beyond what the game provides. I've got a human thief and a charr revenant who in my headcanon are both complicit in war crimes (the thief was a Separatist). But they realized, with increasing horror, that their respective organizations were committing atrocities, and both left to regain their senses of honor by joining the fight against the dragons. Neither of these characters can be reconciled with the personal story script, and I just sort of ignore it for them.

I'm really feeling it now, because there are vanishingly few personality/background-specific options in the Order arcs, even the ones restricted to certain starting species. Like, there's a point where Tybalt sort of sympathizes with murderous centaurs over hating humans, and there's no human-specific response, when you really think there would be. I'm sitting there thinking—centaurs sold my character's sister into slavery in a 100% canon plot, and I have nothing to say to this?! So yeah, I definitely feel you.

[ascalonianlightbringer]

So, my GW2 headcanon post series has Tybalt helping my human PC functionally map the Plains of Ashford. After finishing the zone ... this actually makes some things about it work better, because a lot of the dialogue seems to assume you're Charr. With Tybalt in the picture (if only in my imagination), I can imagine that the Charr-specific lines are directed at him.

Otherwise, we've got Gwen—my extremely Ascalonian human who is walking through the graveyard of her people for the first time, in sorrow and seething rage—getting NPC remarks about how she's a credit to the legions, etc.

The Priory people in Ashford are pretty cool, by the way. Even the Charr ones talk about trying to understand the ghosts better and study (not always just destroy) the Ascalonian artifacts and relics. This also fits really well with my headcanon for how Pax, my Charr character (née Octavia), started the long process of turning her life around by saving a bunch of Ascalonian artifacts from destruction and taking them to the Priory.

Also, after playing Ascalonian humans for some 17 years and having the Charr continually go on about how we're pathetic mice, it's actually pretty fun to blast the big Flame Legion soldiers off their paws by sheer force of magic and just obliterate them. Gwen is a level 80 mesmer with a Power build, so they're usually dead before they have time to turn around.