#should i give her a character tag? orr

[i01-xcl]

The worst woman alive !! (psst she belongs 2 @sootah ) bites bites bites bi-

[kerra-and-company]

It is time...for another character post! This one belongs to Ari.

Ari gets her character post now because I was about to ramble about her in an ask without making a post for her again. So, this comes first!

Her full name is Ari Stormshield, and she grew up in the Ash Legion. After becoming a gladium, she joins the Order of Whispers before eventually becoming an airship pilot for the Pact.

More rambling/facts about her under the cut! And mild spoilers for everything from HoT to Icebrood, both in the post and in the tags.

Ari is the only one of my characters (so far) who I’ve given a last name. Said name has a backstory, like a lot of charr names: as a cub, she was teased often for being a guardian, especially in Ash. It was seen as a less-valuable skill, and she didn’t make many friends at first. But one day, two of the other cubs in the fahrar went out exploring and got caught in a storm, surrounded by ghosts. Their primus refused to look for them. Ari snuck out, found them, and protected them; after that, all the cubs began to actually value her magic, and value her, too. The two cubs Ari rescued, Waylon and Lifa, became part of her warband, eventually joined by a few others--Brook, Pol, and Casca.

That warband fractures many years later when, on a mission to investigate Flame Legion activity, Waylon defects. Ambushed and underprepared, the only one Ari is able to prevent from either dying (Pol) or being taken prisoner (Brook and Casca) is Lifa. Lifa is unwilling to be in a warband of two and is utterly shattered by Waylon’s betrayal, and Ari is furious that none of her superiors seem to give half a damn about her lost ‘bandmates. So, she marches straight into the (relatively hidden) Lion’s Arch Whispers headquarters and demands to be given a job. Maybe someone here will care more, and if they don’t, at least there’s better upward mobility. Eventually she’ll be able to do something on her own.

It’s not soon enough. Brook escapes on their own at some indeterminable point and refuses to return to the Black Citadel, falling off the map for several years. Casca is rescued by chance by another warband months after Brook escapes. She does return to the Citadel, but not happily. Ari doesn’t end up speaking to either of them until Bangar’s huge party that kicks off Icebrood. It’s tense, to say the least.

Ari stubbornly stays with the Order even after her former ‘bandmates no longer need rescuing; it’s the closest she has to a home now. She helps with the evacuation of Lion’s Arch after the attack on Claw Island. She also helps retake it, and she’s a face in the crowd when Kerra is named Commander. She learns to pilot in advance of the fight with Zhaitan and helps get the Glory of Tyria into the air.

This is getting longer than intended, so a broad overview of the years following: she continues serving the Pact. She builds new friendships, including a tentative one with a strange asura named Cioffi. She pilots one of the airships that crashes in Verdant Brink and just barely survives. During PoF, she liases with the Order of Shadows and tries to keep Whispers and Shadows from killing each other’s agents. On Dragonfall, she won’t stop flying choppers around the island to pick up stranded and carry supplies, to the point that Cio--and eventually Kerra, who carries a title that Ari respects--have to order her to rest. 

She’s lost in the year or two between LWS4 and Icebrood, not knowing what to do without battles to fight. She focuses on taking out the remaining Risen in Orr and the Branded in Ascalon and jumps on any opportunity to fly soldiers to a target. Finally, she accompanies Dragon’s Watch to Grothmar Valley at Kerra’s request (who was asked to invite her by both Cio and Rytlock), and she’s thrust headfirst into all the chaos. In theory, this should be what she wanted. But she reunites with Brook and Casca, too, rekindling a friendship she thought she lost, and she realizes she’s in love with Cio. 

As soon as she knows that she both has and wants a future outside of fighting, she’s trapped in a war.

[redwoodrroad]

ramblings on guild wars 2 storytelling

im thinking about.... the shadow of the dragon

like ok idk if i should tag this as spoilers at all because it’s all old news, but im really thinking about the shear cleverness that the writers at arenanet had for the shadow of the dragon. like in the dream / prologue quest for sylvari, even caithe doesnt know what the shadow of the dragon is--she says it’s like nightmare court influence, and shit man! the quest is even called “Fighting the Nightmare” like a big fuckin red herring to what the shadow of the dragon really is. and ok upon writing more, im gonna put everything under a cut and tag it anyway because there are definitely spoilers for everything between the ending of the personal story to the end of living world season 2. let me know what you think !! also heres a hot pic of my sylvari but go ahead and read the rest below:

so.... the dream. caithe tells you one thing, but you even go to the pale tree eventually and shes like “this is a sign that you must fight and defeat the elder dragon. uh zhaitan, i mean--definitely--definitely zhaitan, no one--no one else, nope, all zhaitan.” and you as the player just Accept It. and why wouldn’t you accept it! you TRUST her, she’s the first leader figure you know of when you first start as a sylvari, and if youre playing the game for the first time as a sylvari, she’s really the ONLY leader figure you know of, and it’s fascinating and immersive. you really feel like you can trust the pale tree because everyone sets her up to be the wisest among the sylvari, and the widely-accepted assumption is that she created the sylvari anyway. even if you chose the green knight sub-dream thing and meet Malyck, learning that he probably came from another tree, the theories just stop there: there must be other trees. of course, some researchers would take note that there were several seeds in the cave from which Ventari got the one seed, and their next question had always been, “but where did the seeds come from?” and who would even think about there being some overarching thing like a dragon being the source of the seeds??

back to the dragon: what i really wanted to get at was the Wyld Hunt. caithe helps you fight the shadow of the dragon, and the pale tree tells you it’s your wyld hunt to track down the aspects of the dream--the image you see (the white stag, the green knight, or the shield of the moon), the aphorism of ventari, and Zhaitan. she tells you that a major part of your wyld hunt is to kill zhaitan. to me, i feel like the other two things are smaller; theyre less awe-inspiring and amazing and risky, and the game sets them up to be solved over the course of like.... a couple days. once you’re at the right level, of course. the zhaitan campaign is LONG and requires the three orders of tyria to come together, and you form an entire guild, you fight for and lose Claw Island, the main lookout spot for the trade center of all of central tyria, like there’s weight to the zhaitan campaign that the other two sub-dream things just don’t have, and not only does the game set it up that way, but the writing itself makes you FEEL the weight of it. you even lose your mentor to zhaitan, so that really, to me, solidifies zhaitan as the Pinnacle sylvari player character antagonist.

snap cut to Trahearne cleansing Orr. this is his wyld hunt, and it’s Big for him. think about it--he’s been working towards this for thirty years; he’s the FIRST firstborn, and he has been working towards his wyld hunt for the entirety of the sylvari existence. when you help him cleanse orr, and you’re standing there watching him bask in realizing that he was able to complete that task, you can just feel how meaningful that moment is to him. in my mind, the sylvari player character expects that to be what they’re gonna feel when they defeat zhaitan--remember, they probably didn’t get that with the other two accomplishments, even though those things were also major parts of the dream.

so you fight zhaitan, and..... you win. the pact wins, zhaitan goes down, and theres a huge party in fort trinity. there’s no.... like..... game mechanic that would give you the feeling or satisfaction of completing a wyld hunt, and the time that i first played the personal story, it felt..... underwhelming. if i was to imagine it from a sylvari perspective, at least (my commander is human, but my sylvari is with him through the story, so ideally he would get the sylvari-centered dialogue). even when you talk to caithe, she says, “Our shared Wyld Hunt started together, so it's fitting that we end it together.” caithe Says that you completed your wyld hunt, and that’s really the only validation you get as a sylvari in this epilogue. on first glance, that really seems like.... kind of bad. like a bad wrap-up. thats it? thats my wyld hunt? what about trahearne’s moment of exhilaration? and you even talk to him later and hes like realizing how much of a weight was lifted off of him in finishing his wyld hunt, and hes absolutely living for it--but for the sylvari player character? you get none of that. like i said, at first glance, this almost sort of seems like a weird cop-out, like the writers just didnt know what to do or how to translate that feeling from trahearne to the player character. even when the character says “yes! i completed my wyld hunt!” it’s.... sort of dry. in my mind, it’s meant to feel dry: like even the player character can’t convince themselves that they really completed it, and of course, we’re not convinced either as the players.

flash forward to scarlett’s war. flash further to living world season 2. if you played it, you know exactly where im going: you go to the leadership summit in the omphalos chamber in the grove to talk about the new elder dragon situation, and lo and behold.... the shadow of the dragon appears. for non-sylvari player characters, this is just kind of a whatever moment--it’s WILD, and it’s surprising, and you realize there’s really more trouble brewing than anyone expected, especially any of the racial leaders, right?--but it’s not..... a discerning, familiar, ironically-terrifying moment. when youre a sylvari player character, you practically saw this coming. I really imagine this as the moment--the Defining moment--that the sylvari player character realizes that their wyld hunt isnt actually over and only just began with the death of zhaitan.

and then you go through the rest of season 2. you follow caithe’s memories in order to find her, and in these memories, she and faolain are trying to track down another firstborn whom Knows something. you go through three significant memories, and once you get to the cave that houses the third memory...... and you realize exactly where the sylvari came from. beyond the pale tree, beyond ventari, beyond malyck, beyond the seeds, beyond the cave--it all comes down to the dragon. the dragon Mordremoth. if you’re sylvari, you realize it on a level beyond that which anyone else in the immediate vicinity can even comprehend. for my characters, my human commander learns the truth, and his sylvari boyfriend has to just watch him turn around and process the information in silent horror. then of course, you face the shadow of the dragon for Real. and THIS is the moment the sylvari player character’s wyld hunt is truly completed. i imagine that after defeating it, the sylvari player character actually Has that moment of satisfaction that trahearne experienced the year before, and it feels spectacular. it’s everything they expected it to be!

but it’s instantly overshadowed by the full realization that sylvari are dragon minions to modremoth. small victories and huge defeats, much like we’ve seen in many of the more recent chapters. much like we saw with the end of the mordremoth campaign too, much later.

really i made this post out of my own complete realization that the magnitude of the sylvari wyld hunt wasn’t cruelly brushed aside or downplayed in the personal story; rather, it was purposefully downplayed because the sylvari player character hadnt completed their wyld hunt as the pale tree “wisely” suggested. and to bring that back in season 2 and Continue to utilize this concept of small victories crossed with massive defeats.... look i just think this stuff is great, i just keep learning more and more about this game and all its compelling uses of storytelling, and i hope this made sense because it’s 2:30am as im writing this sentence, and i ALSO hope you find it as compelling as i do

i also hope im not reiterating a point someone else has already made once haha, and if so..... same hat! :D and thank you @luxaleigh for listening to me ramble on about this earlier tonight this stuff is so fun to think about

[antisocialxconstruct]

god i love connie and she's changed so much!!! would you ever write out a full summary for everything she's been through? even entirely going through her tag i feel like there are gaps missing :'o

Thank you! It’s true, she’s changed a TON both as a character and in-fiction as a person. I’ve been working snippets of her backstory into Trip Switch (which admittedly has been on hold for a while), but never just written out a comprehensive summary. Soooo, why not now? Under a cut because it’sss gonna get wordy. (SERIOUSLY it’s like 2k words I’m so sorry)

Conlaeth awoke from the dream back in 1310, (making her around 20 at present day.) She was a talented elementalist but never really took to any of the roles that opened up for her in the Grove, and was only there for a short time before all the talk of adventure and finding her destiny made her restless and eager to travel.

Her first stop was Lion’s Arch, and she immediately fell in love with the ocean air and the feeling of life and constant change in the city. Eventually she fell in with a fellow named Forrest Kincaid, who finagled her a position aboard the Splitblade, a pirate ship (named for its captain, Tydus Splitblade) on which he was the first mate. Conlaeth earned her place but was always a bit of an outsider, as the crew was acutely aware she was only there because Kincaid had taken a liking to her. This divide was worsened after Captain Splitblade was killed in combat and Kincaid took his place, naming Conlaeth as his second in command and elevating her past the ship’s quartermaster, Indira Sulaman, who everyone agreed was the obvious best choice. Kincaid very quickly proved to have been a better yes-man than he was a captain, and Conlaeth became increasingly frustrated with having to answer to someone she felt was incapable of leading when it seemed so obvious to her how to do better.

Shortly after, in the chaos of a particularly bad storm at sea, Kincaid was struck by an improperly fastened canon and knocked overboard–Conlaeth was the only one to witness this, and by the time she sent up the call for help, he had been swept too far out to sea to be rescued. Once they were safely back in port, there was a lot of debate over whether she should be allowed to take command, and more importantly whether she had intentionally let Kincaid die. (To this day, Conlaeth has never definitively answered this question.) In an effort to set right his first and worst misstep, she asked Indira to endorse her as captain in exchange for a position as her right hand, and requested six months to prove she could turn the Splitblade’s career around. Indira reluctantly agreed, and the two worked together over that time–through a combination business both over and under the table–to redefine trade routes and establish solid relations with the other pirate factions along the coast, essentially turning the Splitblade from a renegade pirate ship into the flagship of a robust smuggling ring. Her main opposition at the time was the Defiant, captained by another, more cutthroat and dangerous ex-Lionguard pirate named Su Qinhe. In an effort to remove her from the equation, Conlaeth quietly sowed disquiet amongst Su’s crew before miraculously coming to their aid when Su’s first mate staged a mutiny, during which Su was mortally wounded and then abandoned on the coast of Southsun. Unfortunately no one else amongst Su Qinhe’s crew had the capacity to command such a large company, and the Defiant faded into obscurity, giving Conlaeth free reign of the Sea of Sorrows. (This is important later.)

And everything would have been GREAT, if not for those pesky elder dragons. In 1321, while rendezvousing with another vessel off the coast of Orr, the Splitblade was attacked unexpectedly by an Orrian bone ship backed up by one of Zhaitan’s dragon champions. Both living ships were devastated, and Conlaeth made it out with only a dozen survivors from her crew. While scavenging the wreckage they found that much of the other ship’s cargo had been taken by the risen, but Conlaeth discovered an amulet amongst the ruins that resonated with magical energy, and which she felt compelled to keep for reasons she couldn’t explain. She would continue to carry it with her as a memento, but beyond that she thought little of it. (This is also important later.) When the survivors returned to Lion’s Arch, rumors abound about what had happened to the Splitblade. Many suspected misconduct or incompetence on Conlaeth’s part, and not knowing how to handle such a grievous hit to her reputation, Conlaeth abandoned what remained of her crew and her operation and fled to Divinity’s Reach. There she caught wind of a fledgling military organization being built to fight the elder dragons, and with no solid career direction and a deep-seeded resentment for Zhaitan, who she personally blamed for the loss of her ship, joining the Vigil seemed like the perfect next step.

She didn’t take to the military life immediately, but once she was able to swallow her pride long enough to play the game and work her way through the ranks, she was able to prove herself as an adept and strategic leader, and easily secured a position as warmaster of a squadron dedicated to pushing back against Zhaitan specifically. After leading both the defense and the retaking of Claw Island, she was put forward to fill the role of Commander in the freshly forged Pact, and while there were some concerns about her character, her leadership and past experience in the Sea of Sorrows couldn’t be denied.

Her final year-long battle against Zhaitan proceeds more or less in-line with the personal story, with one notable exception. In the course of their campaign the Pact discovered that Zhaitan gained energy by consuming magical artifacts, which it sent its servants into the world to collect. Suddenly, Conlaeth had an answer to a five year old mystery: why the risen had attacked her ship and left none of the cargo in their wake. Outraged at the revelation that the Splitblade had been little more than collateral damage, she insisted on personally leading the assault on the Mouth of Zhaitan; he knew it would not vindicate her, but it would be intensely satisfying. When they found the Mouth beneath Kitah Mans it was surrounded by a vast collection of magical artifacts, which might not have been noteworthy except for the peculiar reaction it triggered in the amulet she had carried with her since the Splitblade’s destruction–when the Mouth overpowered her and her elemental magic failed her, she tapped into some other energy she did not understand, tearing a rift in reality itself that decimated the Mouth.

This was understandably jarring, but she was never able to replicate the event, and eventually pushed it to the back of her mind as an unrepeatable quirk of circumstances. Zhaitan was defeated, and with nothing else quite as dire on the horizon, she turned her attention to less single-minded business helping to organize the Pact as a general military presence across Tyria.

Admittedly the period surrounding LS season 1 and 2 is a bit fuzzy, as I wasn’t playing the game regularly at the time so I don’t have as firm a grasp on the story (as such some of the details here might still be tweaked in the future). I’m inclined to think she was peripherally involved in those events but wasn’t the star player, so most of her familiarity with DE2.0 came toward the end. What I DO know is that she was on the ground coordinating during the assault on Lion’s Arch, and that when the Breachmaker struck the leyline and threw everything into chaos, she felt it. It was the same force she had tapped into against the Mouth of Zhaitan, but on a level that was now overwhelming and all around her. She had to remove herself from the battlefield before inadvertently hurting someone, but after the initial wave it ebbed enough for her to collect herself. Afterward, with the Pact already moving in to aid Lion’s Arch, she stepped in to assist the ensuing investigation into Scarlet, hoping somewhere along the way she’d get some answers to her own questions. What she eventually surmised was that the amulet she had taken from Orr reacted violently to especially high concentrations of magic, which was becoming an increasingly present risk. However, even without fully understanding it, over time she was able to gain some control over it, utilizing it as a new combat skill.

It wasn’t until Rytlock’s triumphant return out in Maguuma, and the striking similarity between his new-found abilities and the ones she had cultivated, that she got some clue to what she was actually doing. Her best guess was that the amulet itself had some seed of magic that weakened the divide between Tyria and the Mists, and that with enough energy it could cause that division to fracture (the truth is that it was designed to open portals, but she was using it wrong which is why she was getting violent momentary rifts instead. I’m not sure she ever actually figured this out for herself.)

Her role against Mordremoth is also fairly in-line with canon, although I think in spite of her doing her best to keep both herself and her small team together, she struggled significantly with the dragon’s influence, and tended to confide in Canach (and Caithe when she made herself present)  to the exclusion of anyone else. This bred a bit of mistrust for her amongst the remains of the Pact, and when she managed to defeat Mordremoth but returned with Caladbolg and no Marshal, their suspicions became more solid. The parallels with her rise to power aboard the Splitblade were not lost on those familiar with her history, and it was decided that she could not be rewarded for killing Trahearne by being given his command. She was “encouraged” to retire from the Pact so that no one would have to explain why the Commander was being discharged after killing two elder dragons, and she was once again a free agent.

Just before the events of season 3, she was visited by a familiar face: Su Qinhe, who had been trapped at the edges of the Mists for years obsessing over the role Conlaeth had played in her death and the destruction of her reputation and legacy. With how turbulent the magical atmosphere of Tyria had become, she’d been able to cross back over the threshold, motivated by a wholly single-minded desire for revenge. She cornered Conlaeth in Lion’s Arch, incapacitated her and took the amulet, and nearly killed her right there in the street. Conlaeth was only saved by the intervention of Somheirle (an old contact she’s kept in touch with, he’s always been around I just haven’t mentioned him). Conlaeth was deeply shaken by the encounter, and by the fact that her injuries and the loss of the amulet not only robbed her of her rift abilities, but the elemental magic she could have fallen back on. She was still recovering when she got called out to Hoelbrak for Eir’s memorial and subsequently got swept up in the hunt for Caudecus. In Bloodstone Fen she came into possession of a gauntlet inlaid with bloodstone shards (looted from a White Mantle corpse), which seemed to have similar qualities to the amulet she lost. She turned its abilities on the White Mantle and Caudecus without a second thought, having a very convenient blind spot for the implications of the bloodstone-poisoned forces she encountered along the way. As the threat of “Lazarus” and the active elder dragons compounded with her ever-present fear of another encounter with Su, Conlaeth was forced to lean more and more on the bloodstone’s influence, never realizing or admitting that it was slowly poisoning her–after all, if it let her protect Aurene, stop a crazed Caudecus, and even face down the hounds of Balthazar, it must be worth it. She eventually chased a lead on Balthazar into Orr, only to discover it was false information planted by Su in order to lure her into a final confrontation. This time Conlaeth was more than equipped for the fight, but her attempt to stop Su once and for all resulted in the bloodstone infection nearly consuming her as well–once again she was saved by Somheirle, who had recognized the threat of corruption and been working behind the scenes to find a way to stop it. Disoriented, Conlaeth turned on her allies, and had to be restrained so the bloodstone infection could be cut away before it spread, which cost her the entirety of her left forearm.

She eventually came back to herself as she recovered, but once again she had been brought low by the consequences of her own choices, and it put her in a fairly dark headspace. She was already questioning whether she was fit to carry on in her role when news reached her of Balthazar moving into Elona, but she chose to view it as a chance to redeem herself.