Guild Wars 2

Just wonder boths sides views about the Toxic alliance.
During and after Scarlets fun time.
Are they hated, or seen as hero like figures?

We’ve very little knowledge of the alliances at all. Any speculation about things missing from the Living Story has been pointless so far. If it wasn’t in the Dead End investigation then it never happened, it wasn’t relevant, nobody noticed, or nobody cared. Whatever.

Thats pretty sad

We have had some things out of the game. There was a post on here not too long ago, making clear that normal krait view the toxic krait as being inferior/polluted/something like that, and so it should be a “kill on sight” situation. The Nightmare Court were totally chill with the toxic offshoot, from what we’ve heard- we’re told it’s because the Court is all “for the evulz”, but I really hope that’s just a thin pretext to cover something deeper going on with Mordremoth, because that explanation is 1.) lame, and 2.) not what the Court is about at all.

Eh.. that’s actually what the court is completely about. Sure, the upper levels (at times) may spew about “Freeing the tree!” but in reality 90% of the court simply does terrible things to darken the dream. The toxic offshoots and toxic alliance simply added a drastically terrible thing to the dream.

But yes, the Krait view the toxic krait as kill on sight.

But only traumatic memories will get through to the Dream. That’s what causes the Court to go after sylvari in the first place- if it was as simple as “do bad things, and you can call it a day”, they could just sit around taking turns torturing each other. It also means they have no motivation to go after other races.

Yes, some of the windbourne offshoots ended up in sylvari territories, but the bulk of the Court was around the tower, where they completely ignored the sylvari settlement that was probably literally sitting in their shadow, and instead opted to harass random bandits, caravans, and hylek. Unless the Toxic Alliance was where the Court sent all of their fresh recruits, which feels like a patently ludicrous idea, their actions were only furthering the cause of Nightmare as we understand it by pure accident, if a player they killed happened to be a sylvari. And saying that the Nightmare Court just likes to be bad is a misunderstanding of their goals, and cheapens them as a faction in the process.

The Toxic Alliance actually doesn’t do much to darken the Dream because of how few sylvari were affected by them. All that it ended up doing would have had equal benefit if they just did so without allying with Scarlet and the krait.

Mind you, it makes sense that they wouldn’t pass up an opportunity to improve their means of spreading nightmare and fear to the sylvari race, but thus far they hadn’t really done such.

Aaron Ansari.1604:

The Nightmare Court were totally chill with the toxic offshoot, from what we’ve heard-

I doubt that there’d be any edicts or even any consensus from the court one way for another. The court has it’s factions and seems to have internal rivalries, so I’d say that the toxic courtiers are probably another faction.

Wanderer.3248:

Aaron Ansari.1604:

The Nightmare Court were totally chill with the toxic offshoot, from what we’ve heard-

I doubt that there’d be any edicts or even any consensus from the court one way for another. The court has it’s factions and seems to have internal rivalries, so I’d say that the toxic courtiers are probably another faction.

Exactly. And as we’ve seen… some are semi-noble. Some are focused. Some just go and do kitten for whatever reason.

Why else would the nightmare court try to spellbind and enslave skritt (we see them doing just that in brisbane)? That’s not affecting Sylvari, so it wouldn’t affect the dream.

Unless actions they perform go into the dream regardless, and it’s not just the victim who effects the dream, but also the person performing the torture.

As the experiments with skritt were hypnosis, not torture, and we later see in TA sylvari being forcibly converted, it seems to me to make sense that they were fine tuning a tool on a group that would not bring down an organized counterattack if things went badly. The same thing might be said about the toxic courtiers, but we’ve never seen such, and as comparatively evasive as the devs have been regarding the Court compared to Scarlet’s other mooks, I get the feeling there might be something more going on.

Of course, I could be reading too much into nothing here.

Why test hypnosis on skritt? They’d likely be the EASIEST to do it to, regardless of style.

Kalavier.1097:

Unless actions they perform go into the dream regardless, and it’s not just the victim who effects the dream, but also the person performing the torture.

It think that’s the real reason. The memories of the nightmare court enter the dream, and some of what newborn Sylvari experience will be memories of torturing innocent creatures.

Kalavier.1097:

Why test hypnosis on skritt? They’d likely be the EASIEST to do it to, regardless of style.

Because if a skritt managed to escape, or if the hypnosis didn’t quite take, it wouldn’t be a big deal. What can Skrittsburgh do? If they jumped straight to sylvari, and the same thing happened, the Wardens would almost have no choice but to retaliate, and that would be a much bigger problem.

Besides, skritt are also plentiful, and the other forces they’re aligned with ensure a steady supply and demand.

Wanderer.3248:

Kalavier.1097:

Unless actions they perform go into the dream regardless, and it’s not just the victim who effects the dream, but also the person performing the torture.

It think that’s the real reason. The memories of the nightmare court enter the dream, and some of what newborn Sylvari experience will be memories of torturing innocent creatures.

That only works for a while, though. After a certain point, the courtiers just become too jaded from their work for their experiences to be likely to be taken into the Dream. It would make for a good initiation, but it’s not something that is very efficient in the mid-to-long run.

Aaron Ansari.1604:

Wanderer.3248:

Kalavier.1097:

Unless actions they perform go into the dream regardless, and it’s not just the victim who effects the dream, but also the person performing the torture.

It think that’s the real reason. The memories of the nightmare court enter the dream, and some of what newborn Sylvari experience will be memories of torturing innocent creatures.

That only works for a while, though. After a certain point, the courtiers just become too jaded from their work for their experiences to be likely to be taken into the Dream. It would make for a good initiation, but it’s not something that is very efficient in the mid-to-long run.

Unless they go from “small scale” to “wide scale”. IE, instead of torturing a single person, they help poison an entire city, killing thousands easily. (Lion’s Arch)

As for hypnosis, yes, skritt likely wouldn’t be as able to form a military/heavy response… but skritt at also the easiest to do that style thing toward. It’s nothing like a Sylvari, human, or other being. It’s why I question it if their memories don’t effect the dream at all. Why bother testing a form of magic out on a being who is easily confused/misdirected anyway?

The orthodox Nightmare Court likely does not have any real objection to their Toxic brethren; the dialogue between the Toxic Baron and Baroness in the Hybrid’s chamber suggests that they still share the same goals of spreading the Nightmare through pain and suffering, although the Toxic sylvari probably are not as concerned with trying to subvert the Pale Tree and the Dream. Through their actions, however, they still serve the purposes of the Nightmare Court, so the NC take no action against them.

The orthodox krait, however, likely view the Toxic Krait as apostates and heretics who have turned away from the central faith. As mentioned above, an ANet dev (Angel, I think?) made comments alluding to this. However, I think that in some cases, a Toxic Krait may “come back to the fold”. In Timberfall Falls, for instance, there is a single Veteran Toxic Nimross atop Sipedon Deeps, not far away from the Krait Witch. He seems to be avoided by the rest of the Krait, but the fact that he’s there suggests that perhaps the Witch or the Oratuss value his power enough to let him remain.

Powers of google be praised!

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/lore/lore/How-important-is-Lore-for-you/page/2#post3702344

Angel McCoy.1832:

4. Why do her alliances…continue working with her?

Each has its own reason.

Krait: They’ve been warped by Scarlet and the Nightmare Court. By the end, the scenario had changed. Scarlet proved she could bring back a prophet to their satisfaction (whether it was actually a prophet or not, no one really knows, but the toxic krait believe it was). And they can’t exactly go join other normal krait. How do you think regular xenophobic krait would feel about these toxic ones?

The Toxic Krait have changed too much to be accepted by their regular brethren.

Wanderer.3248:

Aaron Ansari.1604:

The Nightmare Court were totally chill with the toxic offshoot, from what we’ve heard-

I doubt that there’d be any edicts or even any consensus from the court one way for another. The court has it’s factions and seems to have internal rivalries, so I’d say that the toxic courtiers are probably another faction.

Well that and after Nightmare Arbor we pretty much killed most of the top people in charge.

For those Nightmare Courtiers that actually care about the mission and aren’t simply sadists or the next step in a chain of abused-becoming-the-abusers:

There are basically two ways in which a horrible act can twist the Dream into Nightmare: it can be performed by a sylvari, or it can be performed on a sylvari. The first, therefor, allows for acts of torture and death performed on non-sylvari by a Nightmare Courtier to have the desired effect on the Dream.

However, there are limits – experiences are most likely to imprint on the Dream when they are new to the sylvari experiencing them. Thus, while a nightmare courtier can influence the Dream through torturing non-sylvari, they can’t do the same thing over and over again or sooner or later they’ll stop influencing the Dream by doing so. They can then shift to inflicting some new form of torment, but there’s probably a point where an experienced courtier has become so jaded that they’ve effectively ceased feeding their experiences of torturing others to the Dream.

An fresh, recently kidnapped sylvari as the victim, however, presents a double hit – there’s whatever influence the courtier still has on the Dream, plus the considerably more potent hit coming from the innocent sylvari victim that presumably has never had such torment before. As a third benefit, broken sylvari victims tend to become courtiers themselves, turning them into another source of recruits. So the Nightmare Court does benefit from inflicting pain on non-sylvari, it just benefits much more from sylvari pain.

All that said, the mechanism of the Nightmare Tree is a bit too impersonal for any of these vectors to apply. When a cloud of hallucinogens drifts over a human village, the Courtiers responsible are likely not present to feed the experience to the Pale Tree, and while Krytans and sylvari seem to be fairly friendly with one another, there still aren’t that many sylvari in the human settlements in and around Kessex. So the ideology of the Court isn’t getting much from this.

However, as I’ve reflected a few times, there seems to be a number of types of Courtiers. There’s the true believers, such as [SPOILER] in the White Stag storyline. There’s the victims, who have essentially had their minds broken by the Nightmare and are simply repeating the cruelty that was inflicted upon them. And then you have the sylvari that joined the Nightmare Court simply because it gives them open license to be evil.

I suspect that the Toxic Courtiers are mostly from the latter category. Some of the courtiers from the first category would probably, in fact, be incredibly angry at them – there are certainly courtiers that regret that they have to cause suffering but believes the ends (a sylvari race that is free to be whatever it needs to be and has the ruthlessness needed to survive) justify the means, however misguided those ends might be. Those courtiers may well find the Toxics to be especially blasphemous, as they are inflicting pointless suffering that does not further the cause.

I’m getting an impression, though, that the first category is increasingly becoming the minority among the Court. It was probably more dominant among the earlier recruits, but I think nowadays the Court has shown its true colours such that the ideology has become an increasingly transparent excuse and few sane sylvari fall for it any longer. Now, it’s probably mostly about teh evulz.

draxynnic.3719:

I’m getting an impression, though, that the first category is increasingly becoming the minority among the Court. It was probably more dominant among the earlier recruits, but I think nowadays the Court has shown its true colours such that the ideology has become an increasingly transparent excuse and few sane sylvari fall for it any longer. Now, it’s probably mostly about teh evulz.

Has the court changed or has the writing changed? I know it ends up being the same thing, but the way Scarlet’s alliances were written, it feels like any enemy organisation being “mostly about teh evulz” is a trend in the writing, not a deliberate direction for that faction to go in. That’s why they back-pedalled and said the alliances are “splinter groups” – because their Living Story presence was shallow and didn’t match their complexity before Scarlet came along.

Personally I really enjoyed the original ideologies of the Nightmare Court. It never sat well with me that the sylvari were blindly indoctrinated into Ventari’s teachings. Going as far as to torture puppies and “do it for teh evulz” isn’t a sympathetic stance, but there was a compelling middle ground that doesn’t really get explored. If we’re being fair, Cadeyrn had a lot of good points, the least of which is the unearned privilege of being a Firstborn.

Fortunately Caithe has some bite to her and we may get to explore some more compelling sylvari if Maguuma opens up this year.

I think it may be a bit of both, honestly, but the Court has definitely changed from the original presentation and intended purpose which is also presented in some personal story steps – freeing the Pale Tree from the guidance of the Ventari Tablet so it can act on its own accord, and doing so by utilizing the Nightmare as a tool. Somewhere down the line (people say with Faolain in this thread but I think it started with Cadeyrn even given the very end of the blog post Dream and Nightmare where he talks about spreading the sylvari race’s power through violence and darkness), it turned from the original selfish “The Mother Tree will hear my voice, for I am the first of the Secondborn and thus important enough to be heard because I was first!” to the more noble “the sylvari will live the way we choose to, not follow the teachings of some other race who thinks they know how to live, for how can we believe them?” that was the original(?) high ranking courtiers (such as Gavin in the White Stag storyline, whom shuns the newer recruits like Sariel, a favored of Faolain, for her violent antics) to the new “we will spread darkness and bath in the blood of innocents!” that is the Nightmare-influenced Nightmare Court.

They say Caithe and Faolain found something, a darkness. Caithe turned away while Faolain embraced it. That likely affected the nightmare court a bit

I wonder if it’s something like Doctor Who’s Weeping Angels. “That which holds the image of an angel becomes itself an angel”.

When Caithe saw Zhaitan, since I’m not sure if Faolain herself saw him as well, it put the imagine and feeling of the Elder Dragons and their corruption into the Dream, and that imagine was able to grow and slowing start infecting parts of Dream on its own accord.

Faolain didn’t see Zhaitan. Caithe is clear that only herself and trahearne have seen Zhaitain and lived.

However, I wonder if it’s tied into what Scarlet saw/the secret of Caithe Scarlet claimed to know.

Personally, I think it’s an actual change, and it’s a change that was inevitable.

Even in Cadeyrne’s mind, it’s unclear how much of his motivation is the semi-noble ‘free the sylvari from the imposition of another being’s morality’ and how much is simply punishing the Pale Tree for not giving him special treatment. Either way, it’s likely that when the Court was in its formative stages, they couldn’t just advertise “We’re looking to cause pain and torture for the sake of causing pain and torture!” or they’d get squished before they could reach enough critical mass to. The semi-noble ideal to justify the pain and torment, however, meant that they had the opportunity to recruit enough non-psychopaths in the early stages that, by the time the rest of sylvari society realised how corrupt they actually were, they’d already grown strong enough that they could not be so easily dispatched.

It may also have helped if the initial recruitment stages kept hidden just how they were planning to “free the sylvari from the influence of the tablet” until new recruits were too far in to back out – thus stopping the Firstborn and Wardens from going “you’re planning to torture people to twist the Dream? Not on our watch!” until, again, they were too strong to be put down so easily.

Now, though, the Nightmare Court has very much shown their true colours. At this point, any noble-minded sylvari is probably going to look at them and decide that even if they agree with the theory, the ends just don’t justify the means. Meanwhile, however, the Nightmare Court seems to have stopped relying on sylvari joining them as a voluntary act a long time ago. They probably get a few that are simply sadists, but a lot of their recruits are those that were so touched by Nightmare before emerging from their pods that they felt they had no other choice, or those that were tortured into joining such that they were literally driven sufficiently insane that they now want to pass on that torment to others. Basically, I think the Nightmare Court has entered a phase where it neither needs nor cares about the justification and has become self-sustaining – they’re spreading pain because, whether through natural sadism, being touched by the Nightmare, or having been tortured until they broke, they enjoy spreading pain. Some of the original courtiers that joined for loftier reasons are probably still around and continue to wield influence due to their seniority, but they’re being increasingly outnumbered and marginalised.

Consider, after all, the Nightmare Courtiers we see in personal story and in Twilight Arbor:

I’d admit that the NC was probably going to wind up the way there are now since the beginning, it’s a slippery slope from “extremists with a cause” to “psychopaths with an agenda”, but I still think there is still something lurking behind it all though. The whole irreversible change from “falling into Nightmare” raises way too many red flags.

I think a bigger red flag would be Tiachren from the Shield of the Moon storyline. While Ysvelta acts with love and nobility in the Nightmare (not too dissimilar from Gavin), if you choose to defend Astorea instead of confronting Ysvelta, Tiachren will be turned to the Nightmare. Before such he speaks of honor and love overcoming all; but being converted, to quote him: “Let us celebrate our union with fire and blood. We’ll make the Pale Tree gorge herself upon the pain of these dreamers!”

This shows a very obvious personality change right to the players’ eyes, whereas all other Nightmare Courtiers were Courtiers as long as we, the players, have known them. Caithe, Morrigu, and others have known Courtiers before they fell to Nightmare and tell us that they’ve changed a lot, but we the players never see such states.

I wonder if it makes a difference, personality-wise afterwards, on how a sylvari turned to the Nightmare, since we have about two or three or so different types of converts.

• Touched by the Nightmare since “birth”. (Though it could be argued that they were already NC.)
• Embraced later in life for whatever reason.
• Those that are forcefully converted by torture.

We know from here that no sylvari awaken into nightmare. They might have been influenced enough by the darkness in the Dream to seek the Court out, but until they do so they haven’t reached the consumed-by-evil point of no return that marks a Courtier. They’d more likely fall into the second category, and we know from pre-release stuff that the Court uses some special pageant to “awaken the nightmare within their spirit”. Since I can’t see someone being tortured cooperating with such a thing until they’re already that far gone, I imagine those conversion pods probably have a less refined way to force the change on them.

We do see recruits in the heart where you infiltrate a NC base who claim that they’ve felt called to the Nightmare since before they emerged to the pod, although they didn’t know what it was until they found it. No Sylvari is born directly into that state of being so consumed by Nightmare that they cannot return, but it seems they certainly can be born with a predilection towards that direction.

And at the bottom line, regardless of their claimed motivations what the Court is feeding into the Dream is not experiences of freely choosing one’s path independent out the philosophies of outsiders, but experiences of pain, destruction, and forceful conversion through torture. Those sylvari who are influenced by the Nightmare while in the Dream, then, are being influenced by those experience, not by the Court’s claimed (and increasingly hollow) ideals.