#dragonvoid

[konig-varorson]

The Dragonvoid, "Greatest" Threat Tyria faces... Allegedly.

I was finishing a replay of EoD (second character through, finally) and noticed a singular line in the ultimate mission that summarizes my largest issue with the End of Dragons plot and, more than that, the issue of the Dragonvoid from a narrative standpoint.

There's a lot of issues to it, like the laziness of how they depicted it as just a shader effect on pre-existing models, or how it feels shoved in and solved just to give End of Dragons a final dragon battle after retconning Soo-Won into a good guy dragon (and yes, it was a retcon - devs back in 2010/2011/2012 outright said the deep sea dragon was evil, NPCs outright say that they fled the ocean depths because of dragons, etc.).

But this line is the perfect explanation for the biggest issue I have with Dragonvoid - the one that makes me say "The Dragonvoid is a terrible antagonist".

This line happens after the platform with Kuunavang and the Commander, the two strongest fighters of the group (besides Aurene), is swarmed with void creatures and both are near death. Aurene saves the Commander and, somehow, everyone who was moments prior unmoving on the ground are mobile again - even if we assume that they were unconscious (despite no breathing animations and swarmed by Void which unmakes reality), there are ZERO casualties on the platform... and everywhere else in the planet that the Void is breaking out.

There are literally zero deaths to the world breaking apart and reality being unmade.

Not even Soo-Won's death can be attributed to the Dragonvoid outbreak, since she was dying anyways and died from exhaustion after it was solved.

Zhaitan? Killed hundreds of Pact soldiers. Almost killed one close friend (Logan).

Mordremoth? Killed hundreds of Pact soldiers, assaulted the Grove, indirectly caused the destruction of Lion's Arch, and caused the deaths of two close friends (Eir and Trahearne), traumatized/heavily injured four other close friends (Logan, Zojja, Braham, and Marjory).

Kralkatorrik? Havoc across Elona, wiping out villages (of which we saw one) and tearing the fabric of reality in a real and tangible way, and caused the deaths of two close friends (Snaff and Blish).

Jormag? Assaults on villages (a few seen), killed numerous Pact soldiers, and caused the death of a close friend (Almorra).

Primordus? Assaults on villages (several seen), killed numerous Pact soldiers, and traumatized a friend (Braham).

Dragonvoid? Killed maybe a few unnamed characters (most off-screen) before it broke out in full force, killed no one when it did break out in full force; tore up some places. Slightly injured one close friend (Logan).

Yet we're told that the Dragonvoid was the biggest threat, so big it required the Commander getting a powerboost from Aurene which none of the previous dragons required.

Told. But never shown. Even Primordus, rushed as he was with Champions, was still shown to cause death to numerous villages and even cities across Central Tyria.

And no ramifications beyond Soo-Won's death, who's hard to feel sad for because we only got introduced to her 10 hours prior, though ArenaNet's writers sure as heck wanted us to feel sad for her with how the Commander acted.

Proof enough that EoD's plot should have ended with Ankka's death, and the two rushed acts afterward should have been spread across a Living World Season 6.

Side note: Just realized Logan was the writer's punching bag this entire game. Blamed for Snaff's death, fakeout death with Zhaitan, injured by Mordremoth, dumped by Jennah, injured again by Dragonvoid, the closest thing to its one casualty.

[loreleilangenue]

I see your Alster and Lance hate each hc, and while I know it's probably gonna be true, I think you would be amused to be my hc of their relationship

Which is not enemies, not lovers, secret third worst thing

I got really attached to the idea of them being roommates and learning to tolerate each other. Somehow, that evolved into queerplatonic. Important to note I also ship creedock, but I think they got married and moved in together after the dragonvoid ( i've decided that's Alster and Lance's... duo name?? I don't ship them at all) situation happened. I don't think they really call each other queerplatonic partners, but they're aware of it, and so is dock.

They are (to me) the world's strangest polycule

Also, the name dragonvoid comes from Alster's powers being described as similar to a black hole and me being an astronomy nerd

ohhhhh my gosh. thanks!!!!!!!!

yeah lol i really like toxic queerplatonic dragonvoid (great name btw!!) thank you for sharing its wonders with me. toxic wonders polycule my beloved.

i imagine its like. at first theyre just really passive aggressive with each other but then as they get much closer they also start actively trying to murder each other. then the big climax of the story could be something like alastor poisons lance and lance guts alastor and then as they lie on the floor frothing at the mouth and bleeding out respectively they realise they do actually care about each other. i just think it would be really funny. (then dock walks in and is like "what the fuck are you two doing")

im adding this to my wonders polycule diagram >:) tyyyyy for the ask!!!!!!

[bioluminescent-obscurity]

“unmade”

it’s an unusual word! ingame, it’s frequently associated with the Void; we’ve got Kaineng Unmade, Echovald Unmade, the Void-afflicted child in Teleri chanting about being “unmade and rearranged”

i thought it would be fun to compile a list of all the other places where the word appears, prior to End of Dragons! i’m not drawing (many) wild conclusions, just making observations. in antichronological order:

1) at the end of the Icebrood Saga, as Ryland’s been left as a broken husk in the fallout of the Dragonstorm:

"No one made me! I made myself. And I will never be unmade!”

might be worth noting that Dragonvoid is resultant of raw clashing magic, and Ryland is standing on ground zero of the combined detonation of Jormag, Primordus, Kralkatorrik, Mordremoth and Zhaitan magic

2) the Riddle of the Weaver earned by traversing Jackal portals:

“The same hands that make the pattern also unmake it.”

first off, jackals are magical constructs feeding on the remnants of a dead god.

but more significantly, the whole deal with Weavers is that they... weave magic together! there’s a fantastic reddit post delving into the lore implications of Weave Self and Tailored Victory. the two most notable things: unweaving the elemental magic “unravels gravity itself”, one of the more obvious signs of Void affliction. and if you look closely, the elementalist releases a black shockwave and tendrils of darkness along with the strains of magic, which latch onto enemies in the vicinity. oh my.

3) in the challenge version of the Shattered Observatory Fractal, Artsariiv starts throwing these out these lines as their health drops:

“Don't fight unmaking. Hold on to the hurt. Squeeze it tight.” ”Yes. Unmake me. Stop it all.”

this whole fight is just. terrifyingly chaotic. a whole lot of wild magic without a single crumb of context.

(i’ve. got a lot of thoughts about consequences and implications of the Fractals. that’s for another time.)

4) The Bloodstone’s Unmaking in the Ruined City of Arah:

the place in Orr where the Six Human Gods split apart the Bloodstone for humanity’s sake. the Gods accidentally empowered it with Zhaitan’s magic while they were at it. you know how it is!

those were the big ones! special mentions:

5) whatever’s going on with Koda:

Quiet Thinker in Deep and Troubled Waters says that “[Koda’s Rage is] a time when Koda sees fit to test us. Our physical, mental, and spiritual strengths are subjected to trials that prove our devotion, or unmake us.”

and the Voice currently enduring it says: “My eyes...won't close. My mind is...chaos.” which i take note of here, just because it seems similar to the symptoms of Void affliction! probably just a happy coincidence

6) Magister Sieran hanging out with some quaggans:

Shashoo: Oo! Look out! The bad ice makes monsters. Magister Sieran: It's okay. We unmake monsters. Come on!

something something the dramatic irony of one unaware dragon minion pitting herself against another

7) an asura yelling at their golem in Caledon Forest:

ZXS-705 "Zaxis": Probability—that—this—experiment—will—be—successfull: 9.9—percent. Researcher Widd: Quiet. I made you; I can unmake you.

yeah this isn’t magically significant. this is just some guy. but at least it’s more interesting than

8) the bed:

“The bed has been slept in recently. It is unmade.”

entropy incarnate, appearing before you just prior to your visit to Claw Island... watching silently from the sidelines as you seek to recover a potentially traitorous ally who, unbeknownst to you, has already fallen to a minion of Zhaitan... this bed manifesting shortly before you earn the distinguished, lifelong title of Commander, at the cost of a dear friend...

coincidence...? yeah absolutely

[meeeeeeese]

Spoilers for EoD below

So, the dragonvoid, an avatar of magics true form and eldritch god bent on unmaking existance. But its appearence was kind of disappointing in my opion, just an amalgm of the dragons we’ve already fought. BUT, I feel like there was a better option for its appearance that its a shame they didn’t take.

So void shows up when high levels of magic becomes too unbalanced and combines together but do you know what else has been shown to appear in these conditions?

Anomalies. Strange humanoid looking entities that display varying levels of hostility towards us. And having the dragonvoid take this shape would solve the mystery of what the hell these things are and why they keep showing up around magic, it would just be an echo of the dragonvoid leaking into our reality but unable to fully manifest as void due to there being still too many dragons remaining. All they’d have to do is apply the void infusion to the anomaly model and give it some particle effects to make it look more grand

They wouldn’t even have to ditch the ‘shadow dragon echoes’ idea, they could just have them show up as part of the voids attacks, like a final fantasy summoner casting summon bahamut. 

But alas, this didn’t happen and naked man will never get his vengeance against the hordes of players robbing his vault of mystic coins every day.

[loreleilangenue]

little shitty comic to expand on this post

bonus: a few hours later

[loreleilangenue]

nothing gets done at jury strategy meetings that involve the wonders because alastor always ends up calling lance a braindead whore and lance responds by calling alastor a virgin loser and then they try to kill each other

[whiskeyworen]

Heavy spoilers: Dragonvoid Thoughts

Skip this if you haven’t beat EoD campaign yet and don’t have an idea what Dragonvoid is. I’ve just been mulling over some stuff since I beat the main campaign, and it’s raised a bunch of questions for me. Ones I don’t think I’ll ever get answered because, frankly, in terms of the game, they just don’t matter. But it matters to me from a world-building point of view. So... The idea of Dragonvoid is that pre-everything, the universe Tyria is in was essentially Void. Like, unshaped, uncontrolled matter/mass/magic, coiling itself and warping itself infinitely in a big chaotic sea of un-reality. Reminds me of the Warp. Anyway, somehow, some way, Soo-Won either ended up there, or pulled herself from the quagmire of Un-everything, and decided she didn’t like it and started to try and tame the Void. But she couldn’t handle it on her own, and so she ended up creating the other Elder Dragons we know and love/hate/fear. Between the lot of them, they pushed back/undid the Void, and laid the groundwork for stability for Tyria, so that rocks stopped floating, stuff could maintain static shapes, and all that jazz. Shit stopped exploding randomly. And at the end of the campaign, we get a hint at what things would be like if their bulwark failed. We see the world coming apart at the seams on a global scale. But this is where things get tricky and my questions come up. How far does this extend? Tyria is a single world in a universe. It’s a planet, with a sun, a moon, and if you squint at the Divinity’s Reach orrey carefully, and consider some of the constellation information from the Astralarium in Istan.... it’s not the ONLY thing in that universe. There’s stars. Constellations. The Moon. Other worlds (since those ???? psychic Mushrooms in the eerie low-grav area of Jahai Bluffs had to be ripped from somewhere alien). All stuff existing in one plane of universe, including a little blue ball called Tyria. And then there’s things like the Mists, which are side-dimensions off of Tyria’s plane of existence, which encompass things like the Mad Realm, the Godrealms, the literal Afterlife, and a few other horrific places no one likes to talk about, as well as a kind of Bleed area between dimensional universes where Alternate Tyrias fight and invade each other for continual dominance, while the locals that exist there just try to live their lives while these warmongers keep appearing and disappearing. And I’m not even gonna speculate on Fractals; they make my brain hurt too much. I just wonder... what if the Elder Dragon balance ONLY applied to Tyria-the-planet. If Tyria had fallen to Void and fallen apart/disintegrated/discombobulated/Eaten by the Warp, would that apply to ONLY that one Tyria, out of the multiversal ones in the Mists? Would the Mists themselves collapse? Or would both of those continue on unabated, barely recognizing or noticing that a particular Tyria just blipped out of existence? Would the Godrealms collapse? Or are they separate from the damage of Void, because they are in that between-worlds-realm of the Mists, island-universes in their own sea of island-universes? On a more pragmatic note, within strictly the Tyrian universe... would the Void effect expand outward, instantly, to all corners of the universe, affecting worlds that never knew the Elder Dragons, never knew the struggles in Tyria, etc? Would the neighboring worlds in the solar system suddenly experience destabilizing, or notice all the prior times when ‘Magic went fucky’ when we killed an ED? Or is the damage JUST bound to Tyria itself? Would an inhabitant of a nearby world notice a spike in odd energy, turn a telescope or satellite to track it, and see a world shrouded in distortion before it all dispersed? Or would they be wondering why reality on their world, so many billions of miles away, suddenly started coming apart like a wool sweater? Where does the influence of the ED end? I’m thinking it’s strictly planet-based, because if Tyria was one world ensnared like a bug in a spider web of galactic ley filaments that moved magical energy around...the ED would never have starved or been forced to share ‘just’ the magic that exists on Tyria. I’m thinking that, had the Void won.... yes, Tyria would have been utterly undone.... But only Tyria. And out of all the Mist multiverse Tyrias, who are all at different states of different eras of different times, both current and past and everything in between... only that one would have popped out of existence. And if Tyria is like, say, the third planet in its solar system, but there’s someone living on the 4th world or 2nd world, and was watching through a good telescope... they might just have wondered WTF was going on with the 3rd planet. Which leads to another question for another time.