#[meanwhile in ebonhawke: a messenger arrives with the news that ascalon city has fallen

[anghraine]

Meanwhile: I have so much I have to do, and so much I want to do, and suddenly my brain was possessed by an incredibly niche AU fanfic plotbunny.

It's not only for the Guild Wars video games (hardly the most popular series out there!), and not only GW1 fic in particular (the first game was on a far smaller scale than GW2 and had a much smaller userbase with maybe five fics on AO3). The fic concept specifically appeals to me as a way to unfridge Althea Barradin, an NPC I latched onto in 2005 out of all proportion to her screentime and frankly how well her lines were written. But it's not only that she's an underwritten GW1 character, or even just that she's one who only appears in Guild Wars: Prophecies—the very first GW game. She's actually only alive in the tutorial zone and is a mentor to PCs of one specific class that happens to be my personal favorite, mesmers (they're elegant spellcasters specializing in chaos magic, illusion magic, and other sneaky, unpredictable stuff).

There's a cataclysmic war crime committed against your people at the end of the tutorial, and a time jump to two years later, when you discover that Althea disappeared in all the upheaval and has not been seen since. You get a quest to discover what happened to her, only to find out that the answer is "dragged off and burned alive by the war criminal invaders." The worst resolution for my teenage pixel crush :( Anyway, you briefly interact with her ghost and gather her ashes to take to her father so both of them can find some kind of peace.

BUT

I sometimes think about how Althea's father (Duke Barradin) was originally next in line in the royal succession. He has already stepped aside for a popular war hero to become king instead when GW1 starts, and there's even a quest in the tutorial to make sure he and his people are faithful to the war hero king, Adelbern. At that point, Adelbern seems to be a good stabilizing authority figure after a lot of internal conflict, but he can be a bit short-sighted and self-aggrandizing in ways that become disastrous when his subjects are massacred in a massive magical attack that devastates the land and people (even GW2 acknowledges that this was so destructive that the aqueducts ran red with the blood of his people).

Adelbern is very obviously not equipped to handle the absolutely dire situation he ends up facing. He's already snapping under this incredible strain in GW1 and disowns his adult son (and it seems only child) for rightly questioning him, only to break even further when said son dies tragically. From what can be pieced together, he only went further downhill after that, becoming more unreasonable, absolutist, and desperate until he completely lost his mind.

Meanwhile, Duke Barradin—Althea's father and the guy who got skipped over for Adelbern in the first place—seems a far steadier and less egocentric figure. He gracefully accepted Adelbern as king before the game, and serves him with loyalty and discipline for the rest of his life, rather than taking Adelbern's ascension as a personal affront or holding a grudge or turning on him in the face of his own tragedies or anything. So I occasionally wonder what would have happened if Ascalon had kept to the traditional succession and Duke Barradin had become the next king, rather than Adelbern.

The cataclysm and invasion still would happen, but I think Duke Barradin would have been more resilient and less obsessed with his personal power and authority. He seems deeply fond of his daughter and I suspect wouldn't have disowned her over a tactical disagreement. Basically, from everything we saw of this guy, I think he'd have handled this situation a lot better than Adelbern—but this is such a niche scenario that requires so much information that I didn't feel like writing it.

But yesterday I was re-reading an idle post I'd made a couple of years ago that mentioned the concept in passing and suddenly realized that in that scenario, Althea would have been the heir rather than her canonical fiancé, Prince Rurik. Instead of tragic war victim Althea whose awful, awful death in an atrocity of war matters mostly because of how terrible her father and fiancé feel about it, she would be Princess Althea, the heir to a now desperate and struggling kingdom. We'd get Althea prioritizing saving her people above everything else, while Rurik gets the horrible death that illustrates the stakes of the war.

In a way, that would even make a bit more sense, logistically. In the game, Althea is a fancy illusionist strongly associated with her theatre just outside of Ascalon City, at this point the seat of Ascalonian power. Even after all this devastation, it took decades for the Charr armies to get far enough into Ascalon to seriously besiege it (before the remaining population was reduced to undying vengeful ghosts, too). It's not beyond belief that a warband could have reached the theatre, and it's also possible that Althea might have been in a more dangerous location at the time of the Searing, since lots of people were dragged off, including children. Just a bit odd in terms of where you would expect a fancy civilian noblewoman specifically to be, even a powerful and highly skilled spellcaster like Althea.

Rurik, on the other hand, is an intimidating warrior, and he's heavily involved with Ascalon's military, especially the Ascalon Vanguard that he himself leads. There's every reason for him to be fairly near the battle lines even without expecting the Searing. The fact that he's one of the main leaders of the Ascalonian military defense would hardly save him from being sacrificed in this terrible way.

(And this might still be a better end than the one he actually gets in canon, in which he's resurrected as an undead servant and forced to serve an evil lich until you kill him for good, freeing him. Getting reduced to ash by the Charr would at least spare him that.)

Despite a certain degree of pathos, though, Rurik was always a bit annoying IMO. He is a very archetypal honorable warrior dude, not as hidebound as Adelbern nor as blind to the reality of the threat they're facing, but his personal approach still tends towards an attitude of "if hitting my problems with my sword doesn't solve them, I didn't hit them hard enough." The PCs really have to handle anything that needs more diplomacy or subtlety.

Althea, though, is a very different kind of person—subtle, tricky, versatile—so I don't think a Princess Althea would necessarily be nailed to the same path as Prince Rurik is in canon. Mesmers in GW2 canonically use their powers of illusion to make themselves appear they're in a particular place when in reality they're skulking invisibly somewhere else, which could easily keep her from being an identifiable target where Rurik was striding around a snowscape with a giant flaming sword when he was killed. I don't think the premise requires Princess Althea dying the same way at all.

I can imagine, for instance, that the AU king might send a reliable, competent, and trusted figure like Althea to ensure the refugees get across the mountains, especially if he wants Althea "safely" out of the country. But as an illusionist, Althea could definitely take precautions that were not available to Rurik, and would be expected to do so.

So there's this whole "okay, if Althea isn't killed like in canon or even like Rurik is in canon, and I manage to completely unfridge her, how does her survival and the AU in general affect the GW1 plot? What is changed about the later canon revelations of what's going on in this era from Eye of the North and GW2?"

I don't have time for this and it's so incredibly specific that it's difficult to even explain to anyone else, but it's also possessing my brain ;_;