#c: rhie

[ascalonianlightbringer]

A tangent I originally cut out of the post, btw:

Even apart from religious practices, a lot of the most central human figures in the main story are aligned with magic/mysticism in some way. Gwen Thackeray, Lady Althea Barradin, Queen Jennah, Countess Anise, and Kasmeer Meade were/are all mesmers (chaos mages/illusionists). The maddened King Adelbern is remembered as "the Sorcerer-King" for cursing his people into eternal undeath; Vizier Khilbron of Orr used evil magic to obliterate Orr and return as a lich; the (spectacularly stylish) villainness Varesh Ossa had holy magic.

Originally the closest thing to a protagonist figure in GW1 was probably the monk Mhenlo—a cleric in all but name, with an annoying but powerful elementalist girlfriend and a friendship with the Canthan ritualist Master Togo that provided the transition between the first two GW1 games. The most important NPC in the third GW1 game, Kormir, absorbed the immense magical power of a god and became the sixth god of humanity centuries before GW2. Logan Thackeray is the main human figure in core GW2 and a Guardian (a paladin type with a mixture of heavy armor, martial skill, and fire, radiant, and defensive holy magic), while the main human NPC role later mainly shifts to Marjory Delaqua, a noir PI necromancer.

Humans are not innately magical as a species—some of them don't have any link to magic or particular connection with the gods, and the devs have said something to the effect that humans only developed magic after being brought to Tyria by their gods. Their link to the mystical is cultural and historical in-story, not racial, but also reinforced by the narrative choices to link the human story to the mystical, magical, and divine.

Speaking of GW1 and GW2 ... I've had plenty of complaints over the years about how GW2 has chosen to handle and retcon human-centric GW1 lore, the framing of the human gods, etc. That said, I've recently been appreciating that GW2 has retained a particular element of GW1's treatment of humanity and their gods that I've always really liked.

Humans in the GW universe are not really generic everymen, as humans so often are in fantasy settings. Nor are they so wildly varying and unpredictable that there's no sense of humanity having its own distinct flavor like the other playable species do. In many ways, they occupy a vaguely "elvish" position in the world—they've been on this world for a very long time and used to be a major power, or rather, made up many major powers with various warring factions that sometimes found common cause.

But in more recent eras, many of the ancient human civilizations have dwindled and/or suffered various atrocities and/or lost their minds. And culturally, humans tend to have a strong affinity for the mystical and even more for the divinely mystical, which their political power in previous eras was directly tied to. The vast majority of humans in this world are faithful worshippers of a human pantheon of six gods (formerly five).

Not all humans are magical or religious, to be sure, but a lot of them are, to the point that this seems their most distinctive cultural quality. Minor NPCs tend to have background dialogue invoking the gods ("By the Six!"), or referencing one of the gods (often but not only the goddess Dwayna, leader of the Six). The main human NPC of the core game, Logan Thackeray, continually references the gods, as do most of his military fellows.

Most interestingly, though, if you choose to play a human, you will automatically be a devout adherent of the faith of the Six regardless of any other choices you make. In addition, human PCs are blessed by one specific god among the Six whom you choose at character creation.

This mostly has minor flavor effects in practice. A priest of the god you chose permanently hangs out in your home district, and sometimes other priests of your god can perceive some mark of their deity's favor when they look at you.

Howeverrrrr, when I say "their deity," I don't mean that they exclusively worship the god they've dedicated their lives to, or that "your god"—the god whose favor you enjoy as a human PC—is your god in any remotely monotheistic way. Humans faithful to the Six are faithful to all the Six until one of the gods falls to evil. And when that god becomes the villain of the second GW2 expansion, various human NPCs are shown going through a crisis of the soul regardless of whether he was their particular patron or not. Having a more specific personal tie to one of the gods, or being particularly blessed by one of them, or being specifically devoted to a life of service to one of them, does not in any way prevent humans from devotion to the rest of the pantheon.

Mechanically, this means that no matter which deity you choose as your particular patron, your human PC starts the game with the ability to pray to Dwayna, goddess of life and air and healing. When you pray to her, a blue image of Dwayna materializes, heals you, and vanishes. As you level up, your human-based skills will extend to prayers to the other gods.

Praying to Lyssa, goddess of illusion/chaos magic and water and beauty, confounds foes by inflicting random conditions on them and random blessings on you. Praying to Kormir, goddess of spirit, order, and truth, will free you from negative effects like immobilization. The final prayer you can use, iirc, and the most powerful, is the prayer to Balthazar, the god of fire and war who ends up going super evil. If you're playing a fragile class like an elementalist or mesmer, praying to him is actually great, because he blesses you with two fierce hounds made of flame who fight alongside you and soak up damage. (Praying to Balthazar does feel a lot weirder in retrospect, I'll admit.)

In any case, the point is that you can pray to ANY human god and receive a brief visitation from that god, because the entire human pantheon are your gods even if you're only special to one of them. A similar dynamic is at work for NPCs as well. A recurring NPC in the core GW2 story, for instance, is Rhie, a priestess of Grenth, god of cold, darkness, judgment, and death (he's not evil, just goth). Even by priest of Grenth standards, Rhie is greatly favored by him, and as a result is able to perform powerful rituals dealing with the boundaries between life and death. But there's no expectation that this means she should abjure the other gods in any way, and she certainly does not (in fact, she provides a Human Religion 101 rundown about the gods in general in her first appearance in the human storyline).

And it's so common in fantasy, I feel, that polytheistic cultures are conceptualized as giving adherents a wider choice of gods to be the one they actually worship for real, often with the implication that worshipping one god in the pantheon naturally translates into hostility or apathy towards other gods in the same pantheon. And so I do enjoy playing a religiously devout character who has a special patron deity blessing her and who is emphatically polytheistic throughout her entire original storyline.

[ascalonianlightbringer]

After the previous phase of "The Orders of Tyria," in which Gwen decided to join Scholar Josir and help summon a pirate oracle's spirit, I finished the second to last, "Speaker of the Dead."

It's definitely the more serious of the two options, and I enjoyed it a lot!

It's the first mission outside central human lands (it's in north Gendarran Fields, where she hadn't even been yet), so Gwen killed a lot of centaurs getting there. She might have felt bad about this if they didn't keep slaves and sell slaves, like Gwen's sister, to even worse people when they don't—but I'm getting to that. As it is, hell with them. May Grenth have no mercy on their souls!

Anyway. Gwen found Josir and his pal, Priestess Rhie, outside a weird, creepy cavern. It turned out to be creepier than I thought, but Gwen paused to talk to Priestess Rhie. She exposited that the Six Gods used to be very influential but pulled away, yet they have not wholly abandoned the world, which fits with Lyssa favoring Gwen and Grenth favoring Rhie.

That said, a human character asking about Religion 101 despite obviously being familiar with their own gods is a little weird, though undoubtedly for GW2-only players who don't know much about them. Rhie admitted that she has no idea where the gods are now, but that it's possible they wanted to give humans more agency. Hmmm.

Gwen also asked about Grenth (god of death and ice) specifically, and Rhie explained that he's Dwayna's son, but became a god "by his own hand" (which I always forget, and which makes the Grenth vs Dwayna holiday contests in GW1 a hundred times funnier). Gwen vaguely asked if Rhie serves him, and Rhie confirmed that she's the foremost priestess of Grenth, actually. She works with the Priory and dreams of purifying the temple of Grenth in Orr.

Gwen simply characterized this as "ambitious," which I found genuinely funny. I'm pretty sure that, against the odds, this actually works for Priestess Rhie, which is nice, since I like her. Also, she has a cool outfit.

Gwen then turned to Josir, which kicked off the cut scene in which Gwen and Rhie were formally introduced, and Josir excitedly babbled about the chance to peer beyond the shroud of death and take notes on it to help other Priory members investigate ancient edifices dedicated to Grenth. Takes all kinds, I guess.

Rhie explained the mechanics of the ritual—she was going to open portals and summon Alastia Crow's spirit to get some explanations, but other things could get through while Alastia was on her way, so we needed to protect her if we didn't want the portals didn't shut down. Seemed straightforward enough.

I really enjoy that we're getting help from a god nicknamed "the Dark One" and it seems pretty legit, actually. Nice inversion of stereotypes!

So they went into the nearby caverns, full of fetid air (...), which it turns out is because

So I did an event on the way in which centaurs attacked human villages and tried to take people as slaves, and there's another which suggests that centaurs deliberately work slaves to death. So my understanding is that they take slaves, eventually kill them, then dump the bodies in this cavern without burning them or anything, which has accumulated so much ... idk, death energy from all the slave corpses that the boundary between life and death is thin there.

This is reminiscent of what Gwen (Thackeray)'s story in GW1 told us about Charr treatment of human slaves, so yeah, I have zero regrets for killing a ton of them. I see quite a bit of "Krytan humans are just as bad because of the centaurs #bothsides", but while there are individually terrible contemporary Krytans, the centaurs in Kryta are so extremely evil up to the present that I don't really get it. It's hard to imagine what the game could reveal that would make the Kryta centaurs and their practices anything but abhorrent.

But onwards into the hellish death cave. Priestess Rhie prayed to Grenth to hear her and called upon the dead in his name, and three portals instead of one materialized. Grenth really likes her, apparently. Also, despite the ten-year-old animation, it looked really cool IMO:

So, Gwen and Josir fought off a bunch of malevolent shadow beasts that came through the portals, then Alastia showed up (in very little spirit clothes) and Rhie questioned her. It turned out that Kellach cheated Alastia's gang of pirates and took Orrian artifacts they had plundered to try and help Kryta and the queen (why on earth they would plunder Orrian artifacts is a question for another day). Alastia knew he would become corrupted and didn't really care, figuring the problem would resolve itself.

He became cursed and the undead followed him, so he returned to attack the pirates and demand that Alastia remove the curse. She couldn't do it, but got a final revenge by telling him he had to bathe in royal blood to remove the curse, so that his attempts to help Kryta would become his and Jennah's undoing.

The PC automatically is appalled by the realization that Kellach is going to attack Queen Jennah. I imagine Gwen's feeling was more like "Shit, he's going to attack the queen. Did you think NOW was the time for a succession crisis?!"

Alastia:

I'm not sure she's completely wrong, tbh, though siccing Kellach on the rest of Kryta and Jennah definitely was.

Priestess Rhie, meanwhile, was appalled and told Alastia to beg mercy of Grenth. But Alastia actually stuck around and Gwen was able to talk to her. It turned out that Gwen already has a reputation—among the dead.

Hatred and fear? She's already living up to her namesake :D

Anyway, the ferocity response above was definitely the most her, so I went with that. I was actually kind of surprised that Alastia wasn't more hostile—it seemed a reasonably neutral warning, and her reply to Gwen was:

Huh.

Gwen's response was pretty neutral: "We'll see, oracle."

It's also possible to talk to Josir, and he was actually really upset at the danger to Queen Jennah. I keep forgetting the Order representatives are humans and at least some are Krytans who have a direct stake in the country's affairs.

Gwen's response re: Jennah actually worked for my headcanon, for once: "Calm down, Josir! We have to think rationally." She figured the best thing to do was tell Logan and let him handle the threat to Jennah. Seems reasonable, honestly.

So back to Divinity's Reach to consult with Logan.

I sometimes play a different MMO that has no waypoints and damn is it nice not to have to run all the way from Gendarran Fields to DR. I've played on and off since launch, so I remember the Dark Times before gliders and mounts. But at least we've always had waypoints.

[hinducosmos]

Krishna's Antidote pulls Shiva's Fever (like coronavirus) from his chest Sonya Rhie Mace wrote : Amazing image of a fever from a detail of a page from the Usha-Aniruddha, painted by Nikka, 3rd son of Nainsukh of Guler, c. 1775, Bhuri Singh Museum, Chamba. (via Twitter: Sonya Rhie Mace)

[empyrhien-blog]

NAME/ALIAS: Kristen

FAVORITE APOCALYPTIC MOVIE/GAME/SHOW: Anything and everything in this genre lbr. (Pacific Rim is up next on my to watch list as of literally this mo, how blessed). Most recent that comes to mind is Mad Max because what a movie amirite. I’m a goner for all things space dystopia related so I cannot fully express how much Interstellar, Arrival are also my shit. We get to wax poetic about space, time, death, destruction ???? holla at me

ROLE INTEREST(S): Eva Rhie coming to a dash near you soon. Got some legacy ties to NASA, but she’s ex-military who waded over to the torchlight rebellion post disbanding. All hail anarchy, kiddos. Weapons specialist--melee; the chick gets old school down and dirty in a fight. She’s got all the toys so come spar with her thnx

EVENTS/TASKS YOU WANT TO SEE: Look, anything and everything. There’s nothing I love more than a good chara interaction no matter what the dynamic. I just want to write with y’all and explore the glory. Otherwise, something in  s p a c e  would be !!! And because we all here love pain and writing about it, any mass tragedies are welcome ofc. I live for angst, so as long as we have some of that, we good.

FOUND THE RP: Fallon and Grey are enablers and masterminds that create exquisite masterpieces. I am but a meager muse falling prey (willingly). Here we are.

[hinducosmos]

Shiva Under Trees c. 1780 Pahari, Kangra school, Color on paper © Cleveland Museum of Art Zooming in to this close detail, he took my breath away. Masterpieces do that sometimes, even when only a fragment. (via Twitter: Sonya Rhie Mace)