Gussie Fink-Nottle @ Madeline Bassett: Send newts.

I like a LOT of things about the progression of time between guild wars 1 and 2 obviously, I’m obsessed with repeated instances of the same locations in video games over periods of time. But one of the best things about it I think is that gw2 did not get bogged down in reverence to its predecessor’s locations. 

I just did the Ascalon City comparison, for example, and if you played gw2 fresh without knowing the prequel (as I did), you’d NEVER know Ascalon City’s ruins were in any way important. There’s nothing there. There’s wall, but there’s tons of wall. There’s an underwater hero point like many others. The charr didn’t build anything there. There’s no memorial. For the area that will evoke the most heartache if you were invested in gw1. It’s the starting area, it’s the original players’ first experience and home. Its destruction at the hands of the charr is made complete in that it’s nothing now, not reclaimed, not repurposed. 

I don’t get the sense they were overly pandering and that’s a really good thing. The world was allowed to change without a bunch of visible hints and callouts to make gw2 players feel out of the loop. The history was set up, but it’s history. There are references on occasion, sure, but it’s not embedded in the world’s basis. Humans aren’t the most important race any more, we aren’t retreading the same themes and we’re moving past the grudges. 

And I guess this occurs to me a bunch but if you dare subject yourself to reddit, there’s a common rhetoric that only the gw1 devs know what they’re doing, that the quality of gw2 nosedived when they expanded their team and any deviance from the values and intentions of the original game and crew are evidence of failure. And that’s just completely wrong, and to me, it’s imperative to the quality of the sequel that it has that distance from its source.

GW1 (2006) // GW2 (2017)

The Ruptured Heart

The Mouth of Torment, once a gateway between the Tyrian world and the realm of Abaddon, dominates the centre of The Desolation. 

There was once a human city here called Morah, already abandoned and crumbling by the events of Nightfall that culminated here. By the modern era, nothing remains. 

The toxic atmosphere used to keep out all except ghosts. Now there are Awakened patrols, a nearby fortification of Balthazar’s Forged, and humans from the Order of Shadows guard the camp at Torment’s Watch that leads to their headquarters. 

When Nightfall occurred reality was punched through at the Heart, the permanently scarred and warped place where Abaddon was defeated and banished by his fellow gods. Dark energy hovering over a total abyss let mortals cross into Abaddon’s domain. The Forged have covered the rift with plating and are now using the smaller but still active portal to usher reinforcements over the weakened barrier between worlds. 

This… was not a commission, I just made this for myself.

Oh, this is beautiful. My boy! 😍

I went through a lot of unencrypted voice audio data from gw2.dat and found this stuff here. There probably are more lines such as these but recorded and patched in later and thus encrypted. I’ll try to collect them when I go through the personal story again on a different alt :V

पढ़ते जाएँ

This is wonderfully helpful.

There’s also Sam: “It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something.”

What are we holding onto Sam?

There’s good in this world, Mr. Frodo, and it’s worth fighting for

I was high off my ass last night and had this dream where I was in this dense ass forest and sitting there was a tall woman. She was so tall I couldn’t see her face but she was wearing gold and I was like “uh…hi?” And she said “I made you, do you know that?” And I nodded and she was like “I hear your thoughts. Why do you hate my creation? Why do you try to destroy yourself? I made you perfect as you are. Please don’t break my heart”. Then she started crying and it flooded and I woke up with fucking heart palpitations like what does it Mean™️????

polar opposite of this post

inspiration struck and would not let me go until i drew this

This is really beautiful!!!

Oh fuck

Chapter 15: Nightmare Instance

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The so-called protagonist’s privilege, was that even if he stepped in dog shit, there would be a hidden scroll or elixir inside, probably.

As Shen Qingqiu flashed back on this segment, his facial expression kept changing erratically. He failed to notice even when the others addressed him; Yue Qingyuan had to repeatedly call him many times, before he finally returned to himself. “What?”

पढ़ते जाएँ

Soon:

We get to hunt down Good Ol’ Uncle Steve and his trusty chainsaw.

@mad-queen-thorn

what the fuck is going on in this

it gets worse

sexuality and beauty. she looks like a slamander

I have a theory.

The artist is a Deep One from Innsmouth.

Look at that lady’s eyes. She has ‘prodigious bulging eyes that never closed’, located on the sides of the head much like a goldfish’s. Her nose also lacks nostrils, because since when do fish need nostrils to breathe? The Deep Ones have ‘necks with palpitating gills on the side’!  There’s only a vestigial lump where the nose should be! Note that the artist likes to draw ladies in poses that hide the sides of their necks in some fashion, it’s probably an RL habit of concealing their gills slipping into their work. And her mouth…..I have never seen a mouth so much like that of a fish before, running from jaw to jaw, ready to gulp in an underwater prey.

And the men! Look at the soldiers in the lower left panel. They are pallid, with their predominant skin color being grey-green. This is clearly the described skin color of the Deep Ones. They are also portrayed with weak legs that should be unable to bear their weight on land, since of course the Deep Ones don’t understand how gravity works anywhere but underwater. And their faces! The distended foreheads….the froglike lack of a neck, the bulging, Angler Fish-like chins………..

Clearly, by trying to normalize their looks, the Deep Ones are preparing for their eventual landfall and hegemony over the Earth as the earth warms and the sea levels rise.

This book is a sign that the end is nigh. The Deep Ones rise, and Dagon is coming.

ANNE CARSON

‘The Glass Essay’ from Glass, Irony, and God (1994);

personal photos, original edit

Forgal is upsettingly underrated.