Guild Wars 2

Would someone do me a favor and edit the wiki? A while ago I made a thread about magic and mists and I said my understanding was magic was like the lifeblood/essence of the planet. I finally found where I got that impression: http://esprits-dorr.fr/node/261

Angel McCoy: Magic is the lifeblood of Tyria. The entire world is infused with it, and it flows through everything via ley lines that criss-cross the planet.

And the wiki page says…

GW2 Wiki: Magic is a still-unclear force of nature in the world of Tyria.

This really frustrated me because I thought I had the right understanding then the wiki page confused me. Turns our I had the right understanding all along. Magic is the lifeblood of Tyria. It permeates everything in it, including the people. When we cast Magic we’re tapping into Tyria’s “soul” so to speak.

Magic being the “lifeblood/essence” of a planet is a pretty common theme in fantasy universes too. It seems like someone on the wiki page was over-rationalized things a bit, especially since the page on the Mists goes off about multiverses of all things (as if ArenaNet actually incorporates theoretical astrophysics into their lore writing :/ )

1) You can edit the wiki yourself easily.

2) How do you define “lifeblood of Tyria”? Will Tyria die without magic, or is it just so much a part of the world that the two cannot be distinguished? All Angel says is that magic flows across the world and within it. She does not explain the nature of magic at all. Simply saying that magic is the “lifeblood of Tyria” does not state that it is the soul of Tyria nor does it state that it “permeates everything in it, including the people.” (Though the latter does get heavily implied in several other places).

3) The wiki is not wrong at all. Magic is still an unclear force. Just saying it is the “lifeblood of Tyria” does not define or describe what magic is, just how important it is to the world and how much a part of the world it is. Besides if you read the rest of the paragraph you’d have: " It is known to be a finite resource that is just as much a part of those living in the world as the world itself, being intertwined with the ecosystem, and powers spellcasting." Syntax aside, the bolded part states the exact thing that Angel McCoy stated.

4) The wiki does not contradict your beliefs nor Angel’s statement and was, in fact, rewritten recently to match Angel’s interview.

5) About the Mists and multiverses, the fact that multiverses exists has been known since Prophecies, in the Prophecies manual excerpt about Lord Odran – “Over the years, Lord Odran learned to use the Rift to travel across the multiverse.”

Konig Des Todes.2086:

2) How do you define “lifeblood of Tyria”?

Just that it is the core-reality of Tyria. It’s not so much that Tyria would die without Magic as it is that everything on Tyria would die.

5) About the Mists and multiverses, the fact that multiverses exists has been known since Prophecies, in the Prophecies manual excerpt about Lord Odran – “Over the years, Lord Odran learned to use the Rift to travel across the multiverse.”

Yes, but literature deals with themes, not laws of physics. Even science-fiction literature uses themes, although those themes are built upon hypothetical rules created in the story. To me the “multiverse” of Tyria is just a justification in the story for why we’re able to battle cross-server through the Mists. When you take it too literally I think it becomes absurd (i.e. they could make an expansion where we warp to an alternate reality where the bloodstones were never fractured, the Forgotten rule Tyria, and humans are extinct)

Anywho, thanks for the reply.

You cannot really prove that “everything on Tyria would die” without magic. I mean, humanity, for example, came from a world with little to no magic. To simply say that magic is the “lifeblood of Tyria” is no different than saying that magic courses through the planet and thrives everywhere and that there’s a very strong chance of things dying off without it – but given the fact that things can and have survived without magic (how the world is at the end of every dragon awakening cycle for example), to state that everything would die off is definitely false – unless after every dragon awakening and consumption of all magic in the world, all new life comes from somewhere else rather than evolves from previously un-sapient species (while dragon minions do target wildlife, they don’t seem to focus on them so much as the sapient actively-magic-using species).

Besides, can you be certain she was being literal? ArenaNet loves to beat around the bush or be elusive/unclear about topics they answer.

And literature can deal with laws of physics if the writers wish to. And who’s to say that ArenaNet couldn’t take a story to an alternate reality? ’sides, multiverse within the GW-verse existed long before WvW and any other kind of cross-server stuff happened. The first cross-server things around was Hall of Heroes and the Favor of the Gods, which in lore only specified that the gods cast favor on a specific world (as opposed to universe or dimension).