Guild Wars 2

I never understood why the Flame Legion is the “enemy” in the Charr world. I know Blood, Ash, and Iron are different legions but are not “at war” with each other, while they all have a common enemy with the Flame Legion. Could someone please clear this up for me? Why is the Flame Legion considered the “bad guy”?

So, long in the past, the charr fought the humans and lost. Humans moved into charr lands in Ascalon, pushing the Charr out and building the Great Wall. The charr saw that the humans worshiped gods, and decided they needed gods of their own. The Flame Legion discovered the Titans, who they worshiped as gods. With the power of the Titans, the Flame Legion rose to predominance.

Now, the Flame Legion had a few differences from the others. First, they placed magic-users and mystics at the forefront of their leadership. Second, they totally excluded female charr from combat and leadership roles. The other groups weren’t so happy with this, but the Flame Legion was so powerful they could suppress dissent. With the power the Titans gave them, the Flame Legion launched the most successful attack since the fall of Ascalon, known as the Searing. They broke the Great Wall and invaded Ascalon.

Eventually, however, the Titans fell — the player characters in Guild Wars 1 totally defeated them, literally killing the Flame Legion’s gods in front of the charr leadership. The other legions, seeing that the Titans were fallible and the Flame Legion was weak, revolted and overthrew the Flame Legion. With the help of a secretly-trained army of female charr, the other three Legions cast down the Flame Legion, and renamed them the Gold Legion, as a sort of insult. Technology came back to the fore, replacing reliance on magic, and the charr determined that any god that wanted to rule them would have to survive their resistance first.

The Flame Legion are still around, still trying to get people to return to the old structure, by force if necessary — because really, that’s Option #1 for a charr.

because flame is trying to destroy the other legions and take over, the other three work together as different parts of the charr military, if flame wasn’t evil they’d just be a legion that specializes in magic, like blood specializes in combat, ash in information, and iron in machines

“Everything changed when the Flame Legion attacked.” :P

Flame legion is more or less the exiled old regime after a change of leadership.

Feuer – lmao! My boyfriend always wants to turn the human character intro into that opening… I’d never thought to apply it to the charr.

Gulbrandr cover it pretty well (this history is why I wanted to role-play an angry feminist charr!). Basically the Flame Legion is/was run by the ‘shamans’ who were a religious ruling caste for a long time. Not only did they mislead the other charr into following what turned out to be a false religion, they tried to hold onto dominance over the others even after the Titans fell. It took quite a while between that, and then the beginnings of the revolution, and then Kalla Scorchrazor and the uprising of the female charr – who, by the way, became repressed because a female charr had stood up to the Flame shamans’ attempts to take over, and they wanted to punish and discourage females.

Nowadays, the Flame Legion are outcast because the other Legions threw off and rejected pretty much everything they once stood for. The Flame association with magic (like the fire magic they gained from the Titans) further separates them from current trends towards charr-made technology.

Feuer Liebt Mich.8524:

“Everything changed when the Flame Legion attacked.” :P

Only the player characters, master’s of all 8 professions could stop them. But when the world needed them most, they blew up.

I still remember a brief exchange from Guild Wars: Eye of the North that really showed the opinions of the Flame Legion, even if it was 250 years before the current Flame Legion…

Flame Legion Charr: …the humans are to the south. The Heirophant means to feed them to our new Gods.
Player Character: Those are not gods.
Flame Legion Charr: Do you think we care? What matters is that others think they are.

The Flame Legion were nothing but a bunch of power-hungry charr who built their religion on lies and deception.

to further what gulbranr said:

I can’t give youa source right now because I don’t have the time to look for one, but here’s what i remember of the story of how the legions came to be.

There was a king of sorts, who was in charge of all of the charr. He had four different sons, and when that king died, for the four of them fought over who would take up his mantle. They never came to an agreement and eventually split the charr population into the four different legions.

(here’s where my memory gets alitttle fuzzy – no pun intended.)

Three of the legions lived together in realative peace, but those three legions all seemed to agree that the flame legion was weak. For the most part, charr did not believe in magic (that is what the flame legion specialized in) and shunned those that used it. They thought that the use of magic was promoting the stories of the Human Gods, and thus shunned it.

The flame legion eventually left the rest of the charr population and went to live in the mountains to the east of Ascalon. There, they met the Titans, fresh out of the Founry of Failed Creations, and under direct orders from Abbadon. The Flame legion brought the Titans back to Ascalon with them, and the titans helped them rain down the Searing upon Ascalon.

I think Gulbrandr got pretty much the rest of the story down :P

If you want the blow by blow behind the Charr…

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/The_Ecology_of_the_Charr

good stuff in there