#adelbern critical

[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 ;_;

[anghraine]

Here's the GW1/Gwen Thackeray rambling post I promised @venndaai a ... while ago. It is extremely rambling, and also, I feel like I should probably warn for something. GW1 keeps the true brutality of the Charr invasion offscreen, but it doesn't really conceal what's happening.

Um—okay, CW for, hm, military conquest, mentions of large-scale killing and enslavement, including sometimes specific references to the means of death. Also spoilers for a lot of GW1.

As I've mentioned before, Gwen is my favorite character in the entire series, despite the GW1 writing being more uneven than GW2's (I think GW1's writing tends to be conceptually/structurally "better" but the execution on the sentence level is very unreliable). I can't remember everything I've said about it before, so here are ALL of my Gwen/Ascalon Blorbo Emotions.

GW1, especially the original game (re-titled Prophecies), tends to be very railroad-y in story terms, even by comparison to GW2. As a Prophecies character, you're an Ascalonian living in your home before the Searing, and a new member of the elite Ascalon Vanguard led by King Adelbern's son and heir, Prince Rurik.

As the game starts, you're finishing up your training in Ascalon City. You receive the command to go just outside the city to meet the trainer for your profession (usually mesmer in my case). The moment that you walk out the front gates, you see a shrine on your left, attended by a female monk, and a dark-haired little girl skipping around. Both the monk and the girl have quests for you.

The girl, of course, is the young Gwen (she had no other name back then). We're not told her age at the time, though if I recall correctly, the lore says she's ten. In my opinion, she looks and acts considerably younger.

In any case, she has lost her flute just across a nearby river. She's too afraid of the local skale to fetch it herself, and asks you to do it for her. However, when you kill the skale and go across the river, you discover the flute is broken, much to her dismay.

You do your various early adventures, and when you go back to the city to sell to the merchant, you have the option to buy things like a flute, a fairly expensive red cape, and the like. These are things you can give to Gwen. If you buy her the flute, she always has it afterwards (well, until the Searing...), and if you talk to her again after buying her a new flute, she'll follow you around and periodically heal you by playing the instrument.

You can also give her red iris flowers, to her delight. They're her favorite flower and spawn throughout the pre-Searing zones (if you talk to the right person, you'll discover that she uses them to make flower wreaths for a friendly dolyak). If you do this enough, she bonds with you, and will eventually give you something she considers valuable: a red shred of a tapestry (its purpose would not be revealed until the third expansion—it's part of a hall of achievements).

As she follows you around, she also chatters quite a lot about various things, including what little we know of her early history. Unlike a lot of NPC major characters, she has no ties to royalty or aristocracy or anything like that. She's the daughter of a random adventurer and of a village woman near Ashford Abbey. She sort of wants to be a warrior, but she really likes the mesmers' superior sense of fashion, and it's a struggle (#relatable; also, she does ultimately become a mesmer).

She mentions one specific mesmer, incidentally: Lady Althea, the daughter of Duke Barradin. Althea runs a theatre outside of the city, teaches students in illusion magic, and true to mesmer form, wears one of my favorite outfits in the game.

—but which tragically has yet to be ported to GW2. Anyway.

As the pre-Searing game progresses, we learn that after the last king died, the next person in the line of succession would have been Duke Barradin, Althea's father. He stepped aside for Adelbern, a war hero, and thus far, a competent and largely popular king who is loyally supported by Barradin, among others. The only opposition to his rule at this point comes from obnoxious snobs.

Anyway, Althea is engaged to Prince Rurik, Adelbern's son, and little Gwen wants to go to the royal wedding. She's never actually seen the prince and wonders if she ever will (she doesn't, in the event).

*deep breath* Then the Searing happens.

The Searing is devastating for both the land and the Ascalonians. The earth is turned into a cracked desolation marked with burning crystals. Rivers turn to sludge. Thousands of people are killed in the Searing alone and thousands more flee from the Charr invaders. Althea Barradin is taken captive and burned alive, down to ashes. Other people are captured and enslaved. Even GW2 says the Ascalonian aqueducts ran red with blood after the Searing.

As for the PC, you belatedly discover the details of this upon returning from a two-year Vanguard mission away from the heart of Ascalon. The full Charr invasion force is still being held back by what remains of Ascalon's armies, but Charr forces break through at points, and it's obvious the Ascalonians are now losing.

Meanwhile, the Ascalonian people are deeply traumatized. Enough of them went insane after the Searing that Ashford Abbey has been converted into a mental sanitarium. NPCs are trying to put together a census to figure out who is even alive at this point. In the battered but still standing Ascalon City, the random guards are like:

By and large, GW1 does not pull its punches.

As for Gwen, you have no idea what happened to her at this stage, though you find her flute—broken again—out in the desolation beyond Ascalon City. In fact, Prophecies never reveals what happened to her, and the two stand-alone expansions are in totally different locations with different, Charr-unrelated, plots (they're set in Cantha and Elona respectively, and for the full stories, you would make new Canthan and Elonian characters to play them).

Meanwhile, Prince Rurik (who adored his fiancée Althea) and the PC gradually realize the Ascalonians can't win this war. They need to accept the help offered by their traditional enemies in Kryta and take refuge there for the sake of their people. King Adelbern is ... not the same after the Searing and increasingly irrational. He refuses and disowns his son when Rurik argues with him.

Rurik is like ... fuck it, and he leads anyone who will go with him into the Shiverpeaks to get to Kryta, including the PC. Some friendly dwarves help out (there were lots of dwarves back then), while the malevolent Stone Summit (who I think oppressed the dredge??) try to kill the refugees and end up just murdering Rurik for no particular reason. This series of events is why the Ascalonian sector of Divinity's Reach is "Rurikton," though he himself never made it to Kryta.

BTW, Rurik's sword would be found and seized by Rytlock many generations later. This is what Logan is referring to in GW2 when he snaps at Rytlock, "Gut me? With what? That human-made sword you looted from Ascalon?" And 200+ years after the fact, Adelbern is still grief-stricken by how terribly wrong things went with Rurik. His mental state seems to have declined even faster after Rurik's death, which Rytlock mocks him over in the Ascalonian Catacombs dungeon. This is a tangent, but, well.

After Rurik's death, you lead the refugees the rest of the way to Kryta. There, the also-theocratic but ostensibly benevolent White Mantle leadership of the country has offered you a settlement for the Ascalonian refugees. (The settlement is continually besieged but still standing in GW2, though the Ascalonians there are treated fairly dismissively.) You help the settlement and White Mantle for awhile before discovering the latter are super evil. You end up switching allegiances, and helping to overthrow them and place the daughter of the former king of Kryta (who fled during the Charr's triple invasion of Kryta, Orr, and Ascalon) on the throne.

(This post doesn't get into the invasions of Kryta and Orr, which don't have even the tenuous justification of the invasion of Ascalon. But they also happened around the same time, and the Orrians were terrified of experiencing what the Ascalonians did.)

The plot continues but is mostly unrelated to this arc. So you deal with Canthan stuff in Factions and then Elona stuff in Nightfall. And then, some eight or nine years after the Searing, you end up traveling wayyyyy north into Norn lands (this is the first time we encounter Norn) and discover a sanctuary there, the Eye of the North, which is actually home to a bunch of Ascalonians.

I can't remember if it's a GW2 retcon or not, but the Norn were actually pretty pro-Charr as far as the invasion went, apparently because they thought it was super badass, so they let the Charr pass through their lands. But they also let Ascalonian strike teams have a base up north, presumably also because they found it badass (I don't actually remember the rationale for the Ascalonian base otherwise).

Anyway. These Ascalonians are the early Ebon Vanguard, who at the time, are an elite force answering to King Adelbern and operating deep behind Charr enemy lines. Their numbers have grown, however, through the rescue and recruitment of human former slaves, prisoners, and refugees of the Charr. This matters because you're greeted by one of them when you arrive—a Vanguard member named Gwen.

Yup, it's her, at last.

So we find out what happened to her. She has some quests, and becomes both a hero (an NPC companion with a lot of player control options) and actually playable in a sort of mini-episode where you try to finagle her escape from the Charr and find out what her life was like before then.

Real bad, it turns out.

Back in/after the Searing, her mother was killed, and tiny Gwen wandered desperately around the devastated landscape, looking for help. This is kindly illustrated!

Instead, the Charr found her and enslaved her, which was apparently their standard practice for children. According to Gwen's official story, she "toiled under the constant lash" of Charr masters for seven years. Many other human slaves around her either broke and/or were killed. Gwen herself was afraid of the Charr but also developed a seething hatred of them.

At seventeen, she tried to escape and was quickly recaptured and judged useless by the Charr, except as a final entertainment. See, they had this fun practice of setting up gladiatorial matches inside their camps "for the glory of the legions." They'd set unarmed human slaves against wild animals and get a kick out of the humans being disemboweled (this is 100% canon!). So here's 17-y-o Gwen right before her planned disembowelment:

However! Gwen was smart and tricky enough to outwit the beast supposed to kill her, and she managed to kill it (iirc) and escaped into the labyrinthine tunnels below. These turned out to be the Charr's grisly depository for the bodies of those killed in the death matches over the years. Gwen was hardened enough by then to make her way through the dead, determined to escape for good. On the way, she discovered a book of mesmer spells and was able to learn them as she continued on.

She knew she'd be killed in an even more painful way if she were ever captured again, and the only thing to do was to keep going. She emerged from the tunnels and fled her pursuers, striking out for the mountains. On the way, she was discovered again—this time, by members of the Ebon Vanguard operating in Charr territory. She escaped with them, joined the Vanguard, and served them loyally.

That's not the end, though. By the time the PC meets Gwen, she is still very psychologically damaged, and part of her ruthlessness and rage comes from lingering fear. In the course of the plot, you end up freeing some Charr dissenters—not dissenters from the conquest or the Searing (this is explicit), but from being subject to theocratic rule based on gods who have turned out to be false (this is why Charr in GW2 are so hung up on trusting weaponry and "not false gods"). One of these dissenters is Pyre Fierceshot, a Charr hero by GW2 (and also a playable companion-hero in GW1). Gwen is immediately and intensely hostile towards him, as might be expected, while he proves to actually be trustworthy.

He calls her "mouse" (as Charr call all humans) and vaguely trolls her, but is ultimately fairly understanding of why she's so angry and scared. He turns out to be kind of trying to help her overcome her terror, and when the PC asks if he blames her for her rage and fear, he responds, "No. She was a prisoner of the Charr." But in his view, her fear is still crippling her and he's trying to get her to overcome it (because she's not useful!).

Gwen and Pyre end up cooperating in order to accomplish assorted things, but mainly working to spark a Charr revolution against the shaman caste whom Gwen and Pyre both have reasons to want gone (as does the PC, especially if you're a Prophecies character—and therefore an Ascalonian survivor of the Searing). Gwen does ultimately end up processing (some of) her trauma and overcoming her fear, and faces Pyre again. He asks if she's come to apologize, and this is what she says:

I want you to know: I do not like you. I do not forgive you. But most of all, I do not fear you. I hate you. There’s a difference.

me: 😍

I was concerned that her arc would culminate in her being shown to be wholly unreasonable and forgiving the Charr dissenters even though they're deeply complicit in what she, the PC, and their people have suffered. But no! She never forgives the Charr (at least in life), and she is never anything but a relentless opponent of them who seeks revenge and gets a lot of it, because she kills so many Charr that they remember her with fear and hatred as Gwen the Goremonger.

What an icon <3

Sometimes people will be like, well, the conflict depends on your POV, the Charr did bad things, but so did Gwen to become the Goremonger #bothsides. And I'm just like, "how dare you besmirch the honor of my blorbo, Gwen did nothing wrong in her entire life, THANKS."

But then we get to my least favorite part of her arc, though she remains incredible overall. It's the obligatory het stuff that I was complaining about awhile ago.

I don't know when they decided she was going to be the ancestor of the human mentor in GW2—maybe it was planned the whole time for Eye of the North (third expansion), maybe not. They had a sort of proto-Living World thing with new releases after the core Eye of the North story while working on GW2, which were meant to culminate in the founding of Ebonhawke. The arc got cut short because of a push from higher-ups to get GW2 out (RIP, Ebonhawke arc that I would have been incredibly into).

Some of what we did get, though, involved Gwen's romance with Keiran Thackeray, another member of the Vanguard. He made "advances" that she coolly rebuffed, but this turned out to be more a product of her trauma and difficulty connecting with people or trusting them than anything else. When she thought he and his unit had died, she was deeply upset that she'd never get the chance to make things right blah blah blah. It's got shades of Han/Leia in ESB, which would normally be a compliment (my favorite movie!), but isn't from me (I dislike the Han/Leia dynamic in 80% of ESB, actually!).

Anyway, he's not actually dead, and she's super relieved, and they end up getting married, and I suspect this whole "she needs to get over being cold and hard and he's just the guy to do it" dynamic exists mostly for the sake of Logan's existence in GW2. There's also a subplot involving her dead mother being on Team Keiran that I won't go into, but it all just feels kind of forced "of course our strong female character needs a man" to me.

It might annoy me a bit less if Logan, the result and likely partial cause of Gwen getting slated for romance, were not as bland as the romance itself. But while I generally like him, he is very milquetoast. I used to call him the beige heartthrob and even so, only realized how bland he is when I played a sylvari, and discovered the mentors are not all like that.

On the bright side, the obligatory het romance does not prevent Gwen from a life of righteous bloody vengeance. If anything, her husband likely helped out, which makes him slightly less annoying. They served together in the north until Adelbern sent the Ebon Vanguard and a suspicious number of civilians south to establish/fortify/defend Ebonhawke. Gwen's superior had died earlier and Gwen was in charge by then, and to go by the account in GW2, she made for an inspiring and hardcore leader on the way to Ebonhawke and in its defense over the rest of her life. She's a beloved hero and icon to the Ascalonians of over 200 years later, and her grave is still imbued with the magical power of being that cool.

[anghraine]

In concept, I really like the development of Rytlock Brimstone’s relationship with Logan Thackeray throughout Guild Wars 2, but on the other hand

Adelbern: We’ll destroy you as you destroyed us! Rytlock: You frighten no one with your meaningless threats. We’ve killed you before; we’ll do it again!

For context, Rytlock is referring to his people’s brutal conquest of Adelbern’s kingdom, which involved a devastating attack on the landscape and enslavement/burning alive/slaughter/etc of civilians, including small children.

Adelbern: What have you done? Rytlock: Your champions are gone, ghost! Just like your son and your kingdom!

me: