Guild Wars 2

The stereotypes are just awful.....look at this:

Sylvari:
you awaken at dawn you are diplomats and lead everything
you awaken at noon you are the productive type
you awaken at dusk you keep to yourself and study mysterious things
you awaken at night you just move around by yourself......seriously?

This is garbage and the stereotypes are ridiculously bad.

Then there is the all things have a right to grow means, “no1 can be wrong and every1 is right!”, about politics, and nothing to do with the outside world apart from the token icon and weed thing….

Srsly.

………………………………….Sb

Lemme do a rewrite to remove these self-serving people up at dawn are better than everyone following etc.

you awaken at dawn, you are self-important and egotistical to an extreme and dangerous degree to everyone following. You are a massive threat to the Noon-wakers.
you awaken at noon, you are one of millions of fish in a sea of stupid that is boundless.
you awaken at dusk, are the productive type
you awaken at night, you are diplomats and lead everything

is my US politics right or what? I just cringe so hard at seeing these grade school cliches in front of the classroom flag being put into a game.

this is no different then how Astrology Zodiac Signs/horoscopes are used in RL! (i know ppl that live by them)

I have to disagree with you there. Astrology is historical. Obviously you must mean the shallow morning coffee ones…………….(there’s them dawn ppl again…..)

Um. There’s nothing political about this. The Sylvari have their own culture.

“All things have a right to grow”, doesn’t mean “Everyone is right”. It means what it says. Everything has a right to exist. From the mighty human gods to lowly insects. Being a pacifist this seems completely inline with Ventari’s teachings. As a result Sylvari do their best not to kill needlessly or discriminate against other beings.

The cycle you are born is in literally the same thing as your zodiac sign. It’s a belief the Sylvari have that your personality is partially dictated by what time of the day you’re born during. Looking around and listening to the NPC dialogue confirm this. Some of the NPCs do follow the stereotypes of their cycle, but others don’t. There is at least one NPC who assumed another is from a specific cycle based on it’s personality, but is corrected. So there are Sylvari who are atypical for their cycle.

Ehecatl.9172:

Um. There’s nothing political about this. The Sylvari have their own culture.

“All things have a right to grow”, doesn’t mean “Everyone is right”. It means what it says. Everything has a right to exist. From the mighty human gods to lowly insects. Being a pacifist this seems completely inline with Ventari’s teachings. As a result Sylvari do their best not to kill needlessly or discriminate against other beings.

The cycle you are born is in literally the same thing as your zodiac sign. It’s a belief the Sylvari have that your personality is partially dictated by what time of the day you’re born during. Looking around and listening to the NPC dialogue confirm this. Some of the NPCs do follow the stereotypes of their cycle, but others don’t. There is at least one NPC who assumed another is from a specific cycle based on it’s personality, but is corrected. So there are Sylvari who are atypical for their cycle.

I’d prefer if you read what I wrote and what the text says, more than disagreenig for the sake of it.

Astrology is historical, but that doesn’t mean it’s correct or that everyone’s personality fits their chart (even the complete, personalised version).

My mum drew up my astrology chart while she was in hospital recovering from giving birth to me. She’d worked out the exact longitude and latitude of the maternity ward in advance, made sure she had her kit in the hospital bag, got the exact time of birth from the doctor (she had other things to worry about at the time). By the time people came to visit she was able to tell them exactly what kind of person I would be.

I’ve grown up with references to that chart, all kinds of things I did were ‘inevitable’ because of it. I have a copy at home and a couple of updated ones (which are virtually identical but more relevant to my life 30 years on). I also have a tattoo of my sun sign (Taurus) on my arm to remind me what it says about me, because a lot of it describes me exactly and I find that reminder helpful. Especially the more negative aspects, I swear it starts itching when I catch myself being unnecessarily stubborn.

But even then it doesn’t fit me completely. For example apparently I’m supposed to be uninterested in travel and prefer to stay in familiar surroundings close to home. In reality I love to travel, moved to another continent for a year and now live 2 hours from home and have talked about emigrating permanently. I find it somewhat daunting when I think about it and it can take me a while to decide to go but when I do I love it.

It’s the same with sylvari and their cycles. The description you get on the character creation screen is extremely brief (think of it like the summaries of sun signs in a magazine), but if you talk to the sylvari in-game, particularly the Luminaries (leaders) of the different cycles, you can get a lot more detail.

For example sylvari born in the cycle of dawn are not just diplomats. In the simplest, most general sense it means they’re empathic, talkative and friendly. They’re good at both speaking and listening which means they can be good diplomats, but also means they could simply be the ‘life of the party’ who’s always chatting to everyone in the bar and cracking jokes, or the one who notices when a friend seems unhappy and takes the time to talk to them and find out why. But they may not be as good at acting on that information.

Whereas a sylvari born to the cycle of noon prefers to get on and do things. They might notice a friend is unhappy and persuade them to go to a party to cheer them up – without knowing the reason they’re unhappy to begin with. It might help, it might actually make things worse but they’d rather try doing something that sit and talk about a problem.

And then you’ll get some sylvari who will fall in between the two. Either because of when they were born or simply because they don’t fit the stereotype for their cycle any more than I fit the stereotype for my sign. They’ll be the ones who sit and listen to their friend explain why they’re unhappy for a bit, and then stop them complaining and suggest a solution.

But basically the sylvari cycles don’t mean any more than which god the humans follow, or which college the asura attended. Not all followers of Grenth are obsessed with death, and not all noon sylvari are constantly on the go doing things. It’s just a rough guideline to how they might be more inclined to act.

wolfie.7296:

Ehecatl.9172:

Um. There’s nothing political about this. The Sylvari have their own culture.

“All things have a right to grow”, doesn’t mean “Everyone is right”. It means what it says. Everything has a right to exist. From the mighty human gods to lowly insects. Being a pacifist this seems completely inline with Ventari’s teachings. As a result Sylvari do their best not to kill needlessly or discriminate against other beings.

The cycle you are born is in literally the same thing as your zodiac sign. It’s a belief the Sylvari have that your personality is partially dictated by what time of the day you’re born during. Looking around and listening to the NPC dialogue confirm this. Some of the NPCs do follow the stereotypes of their cycle, but others don’t. There is at least one NPC who assumed another is from a specific cycle based on it’s personality, but is corrected. So there are Sylvari who are atypical for their cycle.

I’d prefer if you read what I wrote and what the text says, more than disagreenig for the sake of it.

Ehecatl is absolutely right in his statement, however.

You claimed that “everything has a right to grow” means “everyone is right and no one is wrong” but that’s just simply false – there’s a group of sylvari near one of the vistas in Upper Commons (east of the asura gate) which talks about the tenents and their meanings and I believe this is one of them. The explanation given is exactly has Ehecatl says – everything has a right to live and you shouldn’t kill indiscrimenantly. Another example is in one of the earlier short stories we got – Cadeyrn (who would become founder of the Nightmare Court) wanted to kill infant krait because he believe they’d grow up to be as vile as the adult krait (especially if left to grow up under the adult krait) however other sylvari stopped him because they haven’t done any wrong yet and should have a right to grow up because they just might prove to grow to be good individuals instead of like most krait.

It’s a niave view half the time but that just falls in line with the fact that the sylvari are a new race and as both individuals and as a society they are still learning the ways of the world.

The cycles are exactly as Ehecatl said too, they are not stuck-in-stone things nor is it stereotyping as you claim, but it is more of a general rule of thumb. It’s far from absolute. And you even got the cycle descriptions wrong and are very clearly obviously overexagerating for the sake of proving yourself right.

Dawn are typically more diplomatic, but they are not self-righteous or egotistical in the least. Some dawn NPCs we know are in fact the most selfless of sylvari. Noon tend to be more proactive rather than reactive – doesn’t make them productive, just that they prefer to act first. Dusk is just that they tend to be scholars (nothing about isolation there) and night tend to be less forward and outright giving (again nothing about isolation there) – e.g., sylvari of dawn, noon, and dusk are more likely to extrapolate when asked a question while night are more likely to answer as specifically as possible without giving unasked for information (example: in Ghosts of Ascalon, Killeen, a night sylvari, tells Seraph where Dougal Keane hid something, but because she wasn’t asked she didn’t tell the Seraph that she had re-hidden said something in a new location immediately after Dougal hid it).

But again, these are “guidelines” – no different than “charr of Iron Legion tend to be more technical and mechanical in their lifestyle” or “humans of Ascalon are more militant due to a thousand years war with the charr” – there is probably a good 20% or more outlier from these descriptions.

This is little different from being able to tell who’s British due to the way they act or talk or type.