Guild Wars 2

Ok, this post may get me flamed to a cinder, but I’m interested in other people’s opinions.

A lot of people really like the Charr, but they seem to be filling in some info with things that I don’t see at all.

Bluntly put, I see the Charr as barbarians. Barbarians with guns and tanks perhaps (a point I will discuss in the wall of text), but still barbarians.

Let’s take a look at my reasoning:

1. The Charr fought among themselves until someone was strong enough to unite them. Once that happened, they started looking for other people to fight. They invaded the land south of theirs and conquered it, taking it for themselves. Then the humans and their gods showed up and drove the Charr out of these lands that they had stolen from someone else and settled there. A thousand years later the Charr, saying they are reclaiming their “homeland” (Which as I mentioned, it wasn’t, they just conquered it before the humans showed up) proceed to basically commit genocide on any human kingdom they can get their claws into.

To put it in RL perspective, since most people seem ok with the Charr’s actions in the game world, how morally defensible would you find it if the Native Americans rose up and massacred everyone in the United States because they wanted their homeland back? I don’t think too many people could support that, and they really did lose their homeland, and only a few hundred years ago too.

2. They know nothing but war. That is stated very plainly, in more than one place. Charr are soldiers, nothing else. To quote the Wiki:

The charr are a military culture and their society, technology and relationships are very much focused on supporting war. Society is built around military units which charr become a part of from childhood. Non-military tasks, such as farming and trade, can be left to the young, retired, and injured. But no matter a charr’s vocation they are always viewed as a soldier and view life like a soldier. Weakness and foolishness from individuals is viewed with particular contempt, some of such acts can result in a charr becoming a gladium, or in a worse case, the charr’s name being struck from the race’s history.

So, we have a culture where the only acceptable vocation is war, unless you’re young, too old, or unfit. This is actually one of the places that their status as “most technologically advanced race” really bothers me. Clearly, many advances come from warfare. The problem is that for technology to advance enough to bring new iterations of better weapons though technology, there need to be people studying these advances. That’s kind of a tough one when well, let’s face it, the Charr have no schools, no scientists, no real education of any kind beyond making sure their children are ready to kill or die before they hit puberty. Nothing in their society fosters learning, or for that matter, really allows for it. I dare you, be a Charr who wants to be a scholar instead of a soldier, and see how far you get, you worthless gladium.

So somehow a race with no scholars, schools or education managed to magically advance their technology of war several centuries ahead of everyone else, all of whom actually hold some value to education. I mean, even the Norns have scholars among them, and you don’t build 20 story wooden halls without a darn good knowledge of architecture. Yet the Charr, soldiers to the last, trained only for war, advanced past all the other races. sniff sniff Do I detect the odor of a bull’s potty break? I swear I do all of a sudden.

Remember, a lot of our technology did come from war, but there were educated scientists developing the weapons the military wanted, they weren’t invented by Private Jones and Corporal Smith putting their heads together to invent a machine gun.

3. On top of all this, you have a society with no family bonds, cubs are put in communal homes where they are prepared to be soldiers, nothing more. (Slamming into that education thing again, oops) So in a society where you probably don’t even know who your father was and you are raised to be a soldier of your legion, do the Charr have the slightest idea how to care for someone beyond the concern and loyalty of one soldier to another? And if the answer is yes, then where does it come from?

Let us not forget that everyone being a soldier also means no artists, no entertainers, zilch. The only Charr artwork seems to be statues depicting Charr who were especially good killers, probably created by bored Charr who were crippled in battle and decided to make a statue to pass the time.

Ok, massive wall of text done, for those of you who read it and reply thoughtfully, thank you. I’d really like to know if there is anything that takes the Charr above the level of army ants on a moral or philosophical scale.

The shortest answer is that the charr are a society run as a military, but that doesn’t mean everyone in their society is a soldier as we understand the term. They recognise that other roles are important for a functioning, forward-looking society, and can identify what a particular individual’s talents are – if a particular individual is best suited towards R&D, that’s where they go.

In some ways, it might actually be a better system for advancement than what we have even today. Modern society tries to give people a good education, but after that it can be a bit of a luck of the draw whether someone who has talents in a particular area actually gets to work in that area or whether that talent goes to waste. The charr… make sure talent doesn’t go to waste.

First I just want to get something out there.

The Charr didn’t conquer the lands south of their initial homeland, it never says anything remotely relating to that. It just says they expanded southward. Expanding=/=conquering unless we know there was something living there in the first place. As to my knowledge the Seers, Dwarves and Mursaat were elsewhere, the Charr came into Tyria -very- early on.

Second the Charr society was built around the High Legions when the first Khan-Ur came to be. It unified them and quelled many of the internal conflicts. They are a heavily militaristic society and have been for a very long time. They held onto that society until the humans came into being and shoved them out of their expanded homeland, which caused the start of the hatred between the two races. Though I tend to sympathize more with the Charr seeing as the Humans face kitten any early possibility of coexistence by attacking them outright.

Now as for the main question, are they above the level of “barbarians” or “army ants” I would say yes. They are fairly similar to ancient Rome but with a much stronger focus on the military side. They have a very strong military and a unified society consisting of the Legions, but that does not mean they are nothing but soldiers. Blood Legion consists of -just- soldiers. They rush headlong into battle and carve everything up. Iron Legion consists of not only soldiers, but creators. They build machines of war and design complex mechanisms and even develop new kinds of technology to use. This does mean that they are blacksmiths in a very strong sense. To actually create these machines of war they need to have that skill set and blacksmithing is an -art-. The Ash Legion makes up the spies and such of the Charr society, they are intelligent but clever and I would imagine they are the more diplomatic types over the Blood Legion, but not as much over the Iron Legion.

Long story short, they have multiple facets of their society that makes it simple yet complex at the same time. Each one seemingly connecting to another and they take pride in whatever it is they do for their race, even if it might just be creating machinery and not actually fighting.

Most of your initial analysis of the Charr lore/information leads me to believe you actually haven’t taken a good amount of time to actually look into it. That isn’t meant as an insult, just as an observation.

(splitting this into two posts since apparently it’s too long >_>;; )

You have some grasp of the charr, but they’re a rather nuanced race and you need to dig a bit deeper to see them past the surface.

1. The Charr fought among themselves until someone was strong enough to unite them.

The charr, while the four legions are separate entities and don’t always get along, have not always fought. In fact, the four High Legions were united under the Khan-Ur before the humans arrived on the Tyrian continent. They remained united until the humans assassinated the Khan-Ur and threw charr into chaos. With no leader that all the legions agreed upon, they started fighting each other to be able to claim the title of Khan-Ur for themselves.

In this civil war, humans took the opportunity they had set up via the assassination and took over charr lands. The loss of the Khan-Ur also was directly responsible for the Flame Legion (formerly the Gold Legion) and shaman caste to start worshipping the Titans and enslaving and oppressing femcharr and charr not of the Flame Legion.

So when the charr took back Ascalon, they not only took back their homeland, they were in a way getting justice (or revenge) over what the humans had done to them.

I’ll also point out that humans had the chance to flee Ascalon — many did, in fact — but the human king Adelburn was the one who made Ascalon the bloody battlefield it turned into. He was also the one that unleashed the foefire, sentencing the Ascalonians who stayed to eternally hate and fight the charr instead of passing into the Mists. The charr may be militaristic, but even they were shocked and disgusted by the foefire.

2. They know nothing but war. That is stated very plainly, in more than one place. Charr are soldiers, nothing else.

Charr are a militaristic society, and no doubt are one of the — if not the — smartest races when it comes to war, but they don’t know war and nothing else.

They’re actually extremely great and innovative farmers. Since charr eat only meat and it takes a lot to keep the legions fed (especially the Black Citadel), they have to be. I believe it was charr who invented agriculture in Tyria, and as I recall, the sprinklers you see in Queensdale and other human lands to water crops are charr technology that the charr gave to humans, since humans were still using irrigation or something far less efficient.

Charr are also amazing engineers and good at solving practical problems. Granted quite a bit of what they create has a militaristic reason, but they then apply the knowledge to other things.

Every charr in the Legions may be trained as and considered a soldier, but that doesn’t mean that every charr is on the front lines. Being a farmer or engineer or merchant is a “career” path a charr can take if that’s what they’re good at. Serving the Legions doesn’t just mean serving in combat.

There also seems to be a growing trend with charr being more philosophical and scholarly. It’s not common and may even be looked down upon by some, but with such groups as the Priory and a cease fire with other races, it’s now an option for charr.

And fahrars do more than just teach to kill — charr cubs actually get a pretty good education. They may not have to do poetry or handwriting like humans, but they do get taught history, how to read and write, math, some learn how to raise and train devourers, and practical things like that. They aren’t taught to be mindless soldiers who only do what they`re told.

3. On top of all this, you have a society with no family bonds, cubs are put in communal homes where they are prepared to be soldiers, nothing more. (Slamming into that education thing again, oops)
There are some blood-family bonds with the parents and cubs keeping tabs on each other, but charr don`t believe that blood is what determines who you are or who your greatest allies are. A warband is a family. They aren’t tied by blood but by experience and friendship. A warband is a group where everyone grew up together and where everyone has to rely on everyone else to come out of things alive. That creates bonds just as powerful — if not more so — as saying blood alone. If a warband member is lost, you can bet that it`s like losing a brother or sister (and in fact, ’bandmates do tend to call each other brother and sister).

The charr may look like warmongering barbarians on the surface, but they`re actually quite the practical and altruistic (minus the Flame Legion, of course) society. Their societal structure also allows them to advance faster than the other races even though the charr don’t use any magic at all. Asura have a heck of a time working together and make things up as they go along, humans rely on gods and magic to do too many things and they’re preoccupied with not being pushed entirely out of tyria, norn are too individualistic and nomadic to do what the charr have done, and sylvari are too new to really have a chance to do anything. If anything, the dredge are more likely to advance technology (pure technology, not magic or a mix of the two) than the non-charr playable races are.

If you want to know more about the charr, I recommend reading:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/The_Ecology_of_the_Charr
http://www.gameplanet.co.nz/pc/games/2002041.Guild-Wars-2/features/136930.20110427.Introducing-Guild-Wars-2s-Charr/
http://www.arena.net/blog/scott-mcgough-on-writing-the-charr
http://www.arena.net/blog/the-legions-of-the-charr
And even going through the charr areas and listening to random NPC’s talk and listen to/read dialogue

Oh, and to add salt to the wound. According to this guy, the charr farmers and cattle hrders outside the Black Citadel can’t exist, either. Nor can the charr fishermen. Because they were never in a school that taught them these things. Nor are these war-based vocations.

Because the charr don’t have schools, let alone schools where non war-based vocations are taught. Right?

Hopefully you can all see why you should listen to this guy as much as you should listen to one of those crazies you meet on a street corner, yelling about the end of the world. Both have done about the same amount of research.

KryTiKaL: It can be inferred from the Ecology of the Charr that they conquered others under the Khan-Ur, but the wording is ambiguous. However, we DO know from the Planet of the Grawl blog post that the grawl are indigenous to Ascalon, and the charr conquered them, enslaving some and forcing others out into the Shiverpeaks and other places. Now, just like the human invasion, what caused that isn’t known – the grawl are a rambunctious lot, so it COULD be that the charr invaded in order to pacify them. Personally, though, I doubt it. You don’t develop a society along such militaristic lines as the charr without intent to be aggressive (although it certainly is possible for such a society to come to value peace afterwards).

@Zephire: The only evidence the Khan-Ur was assassinated by humans is circumstantial. It’s probably most logical that humans or others associated with humans did it, but the invasion could simply have been taking advantage of an offered opportunity.

OP, go to the Black Citadel inside the Imperator’s Core (big round thingy in the middle). There you can find tons of charr doing innovative things. One of them is even talking about how hes found a way to harness “lightning” (electricity) and wants to use it to replace steam engines. Another talks about how he has finally figured out how to fix the stability problem of adding rotating turrets to to those large tanks.

Now go upstairs to the Command Core (very top inside the instance, on the left) and talk to the Iron Legion tribune, Bhuer Goreblade. Then wait for the random banter between him and his assistant. The guy has inventions sitting in his office that he works on constantly between his regular duties. He also seems to have a problem misplacing his screwdriver.

Now go make a random newbie charr and choose Iron Legion. Watch the cinematic. Iron Legion is ALL ABOUT finding innovative solutions to solving their problems, military and non-military alike. The Blood Legion and Ash Legion don’t really do this, but Iron Legion? Those guys are the thinkers and scholars of the charr, but they’re also soldiers, and just because you’re a soldier doesn’t mean you’re constantly on the front lines stabbing and killing things.

Heres a RL example. US military has many research divisions, but the Air Force has the most/largest research projects going on. Every single one of their researchers are enlisted men and women who have gone through basic training. They ALL know how to fire a weapon and can handle themselves in a combat situation, yet some never see any real fighting.

Just because you have a military society doesn’t mean there isn’t R&D going on. R&D definitely requires scholarly thinking, but its not required to teach every soldier these methods. Most likely what happens is those that prove themselves to be extra innovative and smart get assigned to R&D tasks and get extra on the job training from their superiors.

First off, I want to thank you guys for informative, well thought out replies, exactly what I was hoping for. Zephire, I’ll be reading through all of those links. One of the reasons I made this post is that I am actually playing a Charr as one of my toons, and kept running into situations where the background and in-game info just didn’t seem to mesh all that well.

/removes unused asbestos suit.

This was a nice change, an actual discussion over a somewhat inflammatory topic. I’m going to like this community.

I’m going to drag this discussion over to a sidenote for a second. Your “IRL example” is racist and ignorant, and I wish you hadn’t used it. For one thing, illegal seizure of Indian lands happened much more recently than “hundreds of years ago” – there are ongoing court cases about seized land, after all. For another, you talk about Indian nations “rising up and massacring” people like a spaghetti Western, not-so-subtly implying that Indians are violent barbarians. Kindly leave your caricatures at the door in the future.

To address your post in general, I would like to point you towards the NPC Irena Airblade and her son; they’re at the entrance to the Imperator’s Core ground level. She’s a farmer, and she tells her son that the fahrar is supposed to help him discover what his talents are. (It’s also a really sweet conversation, but that’s beside the point.) I also found a group of asura NPCs who came to learn metallurgy from the charr – asura, who are about as likely as my cat to admit they don’t know better than everyone else. Yeaaaah.

I still think this topic is utterly ridiculous.

Everything in the game and the lore contradicts the OP. The OP says there are no schools, and yet there are fahrars (the charr take on schools), the OP says that the charr are taught only war, and yet there are fishermen and farmers, the OP says that there are no charr artists, and yet art around the Black Citadel is plentiful.

The OP makes claims about charr conquest which don’t exist in any lore piece I’ve ever read. The OP says that there are no charr scholars, and yet there’s the Durmand Scriptorium right there in the Black Citadel. The OP says that there are no charr thinking of technologies outside of warfare, yet there are charr working on just that (helicopters for transportation, electricity for clean power, and so on).

The OP says a lot of things, all of which he’s invented and have absolutely no relevance to the game or the lore. This thread is just trolling. I will insist upon that. I don’t think it’s right that forum moderators sit on their hands and allow this. It’s annoying for charr fans because it’s a spread of misinformation to potential roleplayers.

Basically, everything in the OP is utter nonsense. All of it.

Zephire.8049:

If you want to know more about the charr, I recommend reading:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/The_Ecology_of_the_Charr
http://www.gameplanet.co.nz/pc/games/2002041.Guild-Wars-2/features/136930.20110427.Introducing-Guild-Wars-2s-Charr/
http://www.arena.net/blog/scott-mcgough-on-writing-the-charr
http://www.arena.net/blog/the-legions-of-the-charr
And even going through the charr areas and listening to random NPC’s talk and listen to/read dialogue

Thanks for posting the links! I have learned a lot from reading post by you and AuldWolf but the links are greatly appreciated.

AuldWolf, I let your first post go, but since you seem intent on insulting, I’ll respond to you. You claim my info doesn’t exist in any lore, while ignoring the fact that I directly quoted the wiki as to the nature of Charr society and posting nothing that refutes or adds to the info from said wiki. And you kind of make my point for me as well by pointing out the charr fishermen, farmers, etc. According to the wiki, and I again quote “Non-military tasks, such as farming and trade, can be left to the young, retired, and injured” while in game we have healthy adult farmers and scholars. Game and lore contradict each other, leaving a rather confused view of the Charr.
As for the fahrars, again I will quote the wiki “As soon a cub is weaned, around being a year old, they enter a fahrar of one of their parents’ legion. The fahrar is the cubs’ first warband and they are trained as a military unit under supervision of an adult and are considered an adult when the warband no longer needs supervision. The cubs are taught to unify and define their own social structure and the warband shares a root name which they incorporate into their surname. While ancestry is known and acknowledged, the parents have little to do with the raising of the cub, and as such warbands are viewed as a charr’s family and the bonds of loyalty and kinship formed between them are stronger than those of other races’ families.”

Doesn’t exactly sound like a college prep course to me, more like, hmm… perhaps boot camp? And straight from the lore that I haven’t even looked at, mind you.

I think a lot of the misinformation you mention most likely comes from the fact that the lore and game basically contradict each other in places, which is one reason I posted this topic in the first place. Actually look at the entry on the wiki (which I took the vast majority of my Charr view from) instead of just dismissing my post because you don’t agree with it. My original post was the view I took away from reading that information and applying it to a society as a whole. Where your society says you must be a soldier or you are an outcast, where do laboratory scientists and artists fit in? Again, I refer you to the quote above about non-military tasks, from the official lore, and ask you how it matches the fact that there is indeed a scriptorum in the Black Citidel.

Trust me, I have far better ways to spend my time than trolling, I’m actually trying to be convinced or shown how the contradicting facts work out so I can play a Charr properly, because in the wiki at least, they have some bad PR people

Siadea, I wanted to address your concern in it’s own post, because it can be a touchy subject. First off, if I offended you, I apologize, but I believe you are reading a little too much into it. I used the Native Americans as a hypothetical example not because I think they are barbarians (Heck, my wife has Shoshone ancestry) but because they were the first RL example I could think of that involved a native people being forced out of their homes by invaders, much as the Charr were in the lore. I was just pointing out that Native Americans had a similar situation to the Charr, and much more recently than the gap between Charr losing part of their land and their invasion to reclaim it, yet I doubted that anyone would be ok with them attacking the rest of America to reclaim their land, while the Charr invasion seems to be pretty well accepted by the playerbase in general.

I’m sure there were any number of European examples I could have used for the same hypothetical situation, I just used the example I did because it is one of the more recent, widely known examples of a people losing their homeland to outside invaders.

I’d appreciate it if you gave me a real apology, rather than claim that I’m the one with the problem. Just because your wife has Shoshone ancestry doesn’t absolve you from making really offensive statements, which you did and are continuing to do.

Taking the wiki as a source for lore information can be dangerous (except for transcriptions of official articles) – there’s stuff in there which is someone’s (possibly the majority of the player base’s, possibly just the person who happened to write it and no-one has got around to fixing it) interpretation or speculation presented as fact.

However, on the other side of the equation:

“The grawl are native to Tyria, and Ascalon in particular. The earliest mention of them is found in early charr military tributes that predate the arrival of humans in the area. In these annals, the charr are always portrayed as victors with the defeated grawl pulling the charr commanders in great chariots. The charr dominated the grawl, forcing them into the Shiverpeak and Blazeridge Mountains and beyond, where they lived at a subsistence level.” – http://www.arena.net/blog/planet-of-the-grawl

While the grawl aren’t exactly the most historically-minded race in the game, when the first mention of them is the charr gloating over kicking their behinds and forcing them into the mountains, it is pretty suggestive. While the charr might have had their reasons, the indignities that the charr of the past have heaped on their defeated foes are certainly not the behaviour of a peaceful race that only fights in self-defence.

KryTiKaL.3125:

First I just want to get something out there.

The Charr didn’t conquer the lands south of their initial homeland, it never says anything remotely relating to that. It just says they expanded southward. Expanding=/=conquering unless we know there was something living there in the first place. As to my knowledge the Seers, Dwarves and Mursaat were elsewhere, the Charr came into Tyria -very- early on.

The Grawl.

I’m pretty sure the Forgotten were supposed to be in that area as well but Areanet have been all over the place with Forgotten information.