(Lore and narrative long post incoming.)
You know what's always bothered me a tiiiiiiny bit about gw2's story?
How later on (getting most obvious during the Kralkatorrik arc) there's SO much emphasis on dragons being beyond powerful. Not just country, or world, but reality destroying levels of powerful and unendable.
We took the first one out with just a fleet of airships and a lot of soldiers. (And yes, to be fair there's the fact that every subsequent dragon slurped up part of the last one's magic as well as other various magical bullshit here and there to account for why it got harder, but shh.)
I was playing through the personal story today, and remembered Primordus and Jormag though. How they were each other's weakness and that felt (mostly) perfectly fair for a final confrontation/reason we could finally manage to kill them.
So now, like 13 years later, I'm looking at the og personal story again and going: "Fuck it. Regardless of whether it was intended or not, my ass is convinced that having Trahearne, Caithe, and all the immune to risen corruption Sylvari running around Orr, eventually cleansing it properly and all that, is WHY we were able to take Zhaitan down in a much more meaningful way then the game ever textually (or at least explicitly) acknowledges.
Back in the day (i.e. before HoTs, or HELL even the Scarlet arc came out), I'd always felt that thematically there HAD to be at least one Sylvari involved in everything that happened to actually start the process of killing the unkillable. That they represented a force of hope, empathy and togetherness that the other races were too old and jaded to achieve without a push (at least in time to not die/nearly die horribly like all the civilizations alive during every other dragon cycle). Frankly I still think the most cohesive narrative is one with a Sylvari commander, but that's neither here nor there.
We also know from Jormag and Primordus that the dragons are more then capable of fighting each other for strength and territory via the use of their minions, champions and their own magical energy. Why not say that a minion of the Dragon of Life (which by the way was a theory that had some good teeth back in the day before we knew for SURE what Mordy was and how he would act) Plants and Nature actively dispelling the Dragon of Death's hold on Orr wasn't a much bigger part of how it died then we gave it credit for.
Stumbled upon this scene/quote earlier which got me thinking about all this:
And yeah, fuck it, that's canon to me now.
It was the Pale Tree and The Dream (which to be fair, we also know beyond doubt that Mordy still had some influence over) that created Trahearne and Caithe and the many other Sylvari who got the general task of "fuck up Zhaitan's shit and kill him dead" as a life's purpose after all.
The very first Sylvari literally WAS "born to undo Zhaitan's work"!
So yeah. I guess that means it was Ventari's and Ronan's fault this particular dragon cycle started fucking up. >.>
~Ooooh you want to hear my comparison's of a major minion of Mordy's (the Pale Tree) being freed from him versus a major minion of Kralkatorrik (Glint) being freed from him so bad. You definitely want me to keep talking and get more vibes based and speculative and this post to be ten thousand years long ooooh~ Conversation about how that affects Caithe and/or a Sylvari commander relating to Aurene? No? Okay yeah, that's probably for the best.
