its easy to miss if you didnt do the achievements for it especially as it was kind of unfolding live but what it is is that a bunch of the awakened that were traveling through the portal from fahranur to rata primus during the instant the commander destroyed rata primus sort of got turned into fractals. like literally.
it builds off of what we already knew from fractals + mistlock sanctuary + wvw (yes) that the mists loves creating 'ripples' of things that touch it, which it'll near infinitely spit out repeated echo copies of, and so the awakened that were going through that portal when the destination become lost basically hit the mists so hard that it kind of instantly obliterated them and replaced them with mists clones of themselves. on top of that, they just get launched through rifts into places at random because this is what happens when gates get damaged, and this actually happens to braham and the commander at the end of A Bug In The System as well-- we just don't get turned into fractal copies because the gate was damaged as opposed to destroyed. yay!
what's also neat to me, though, is that as opposed to the fractals* we are familiar with, the fractal awakened are actively decaying. (*this includes mistlock sanctuary and wvw and revenant legends, which are also all fractals or things functionally similar. wahoo!)
here's the bits from ninn's journal about it that i really like:
Comparisons against archived golem scans indicate that the Awakened observed have significant degradation consistent with extraplanar overexposure. Left unopposed, they degenerate after a period of minutes into undifferentiated material.
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The collapse of portal integrity, in the abscence[sic] of a stable endpoint, caused a phenomena inversion, obliterating the Awakened and trapping their remnants in an interstitial state. See related studies attached [clearance check].
The current attacks are created by this Mist-based repetition phenomenon, similar to the research submitted by [clearance check]. The attacks do not represent a new strategy on the part of Awakened command and do not pose tactical or political challenge to existing Peacemaker forces in their areas. The repetition phenomenon will decay until attacks case in approximately [clearance check] years.
what this sort of implies and what makes sense with the current mists lore we have is that, as i mentioned with the ripples, the 'seize onto something and constantly make rippled echo fractal copies of it' thing is something the mists just sort of... does. it's just a gigantic magic pond and everything that touches it ripples across it.
what sets the actual Fractals of the Mists Dungeon apart, as well as mistlock, is that dessa invented machines that basically grab onto these ripples and force them to constantly repeat themselves ad infinitum (Ha Ha) with a sort of forced hard timeline reset so that she can study them without them decaying
what's Also neat and horrifying about it is that we know from both SOTO and the mistlock sanctuary npcs that the people who live within fractals *are* real people-- presumably part of why dessa makes the fractals loop is to preserve the purity of the fractals/the original events within, otherwise the people inside would just begin making their own decisions as they slowly faded away. the SOTO fractal islands are sort of functionally different, but they are not forced to flow in a loop and can leave the islands without it being a problem, so they get to live out their lives. the fractalized awakened are not being stabilized by any sort of mechanism, but also cannot leave, which means that even though they're sort of 'walking ghosts' who are only pale copies of their original selves, they are both fully sentient and have awareness! potentially even an awareness that something is wrong! neat stuff!
