Guild Wars 2

I just finished reading Sea of Sorrows. And the one thing I couldn’t wrap my head around was the 3-year old kid, Dane. Like, who is his father again?

1256 AE: Cobiah meets his wife, Isaye, after they have been apart for over seven years. Later he finds out that she has had a child of her own named Dane, who is only three years old. And after that, Isaye confesses that Cobiah is actually Dane’s father…

Did I miss a spot in the book where Isaye sneaks back into Lion’s Arch after four years and has her way with a drunken Cobiah? Does Cobiah not know how the bird’s and the bee’s work? Does love truly conquer all, even time and space?

If there’s something in the story I overlooked please let me know. Because it looks like Cobiah is getting pwned with some other guys’ kid.

Timeline notes from the book
Act Four begins in 1256 AE. (page 309)
Cobiah thinks back to the day Isaye left, over 7 years earlier. (page 325)
Isaye’s 3-year old son is introduced. (page 387-388)
Isaye tells Cobiah that she was pregnant when she left Lion’s Arch, and that 3-year old Dane is his son. (page 467)

I remember there being two possible explanations, and I’m digging the evidence back up for the first (will update this post) but for the second- Sea of Sorrows is rife with minor inconsistencies, including numerical ones. Point in case, in the fight that ended Act 1, the charr crew loses more sailors than they had to begin with, and still have enough left over to form the core of Cobiah’s pirate crew. So something like the years not adding up may well be a mistake.

clearly the kid was born on the tyrian equivalent ot the 29th of february.

See, you’re messing up at the “3-year old” part. Cobiah suspected the kid was three years old. Dane’s actual age is never explicitly told, though given Isaye’s comment he’d be 6-7 (depending on how the “seven years” is rounded to). An odd mistake to make but some people just have a really bad time guessing others’ ages (myself included), or Dane may have just been a slow developer.

the kid could be as young kitten . if she left cobiah before any signs of pregnancy became visible, it was on a very early stage. mess with the way people refer to years based on just the year that’s slapped on the calendar (december 2013 is a year ago, even though it’s been just one month since 2014), and those 7 years could easily be 6 and some months.

cobiah suspecting the kid is 3 is the reason he assumes it’s not his kid, which is part of why he’s surprised by the revelation (that and “oh BTW you’re a father” )

Konig Des Todes.2086:

See, you’re messing up at the “3-year old” part. Cobiah suspected the kid was three years old. Dane’s actual age is never explicitly told, though given Isaye’s comment he’d be 6-7 (depending on how the “seven years” is rounded to). An odd mistake to make but some people just have a really bad time guessing others’ ages (myself included), or Dane may have just been a slow developer.

Or simply it was a huge oversight. See, you’re really splitting hairs with that explanation, you know.

“The 3-years old part was Cobiah’s suspicion, the kid’s age wasn’t actually given.”

How is that splitting hairs? Every time the boy’s age was brought up, from my memory at least, the book was saying “looks like” “seemed to be” or other similar phrases. It was all Cobiah’s guess that the boy looked three.

The rest was just me theorizing on how Cobiah could have made the mistake.

Oversight is possible, nonetheless, but not the only possibility. And I kind of expect the Narrative Continuity Designer to not succumb to mere oversights. Especially such plot pivotal ones.

“The child was young, a boy not more than three years old, with a mop of dark hair and bright blue eyes. Burbling happily to himself, he kept one hand in his mouth, the other wrapped around the Shining Blade’s fingers, toddling along despite his drooping eyes and sleepy smile. […]

I see no sign of Cobiah’s estimation of the boy’s years in those sentences. The narration plainly declares he can’t be more than three, while the description makes it clear that it is truly a very young child. Or are you going to argue that their son was a degenerate, stuck on both a physical and mental level of 3-year-old despite being 7 actually?

At the sight of her, the child brightened. “Mama!” He pulled the hand out of his mouth and waved at her eagerly. Spotting Tenzin, the boy tried to pull away from the Shining Blade and run toward them both, […]

Again, what you’d expect from a 3-year-old. It’s also important to note that the boy has absolutely no idea what’s going on, whereas I’d eat my hat if a 7-year-old couldn’t sense the terror of his mother (who’s being hurt multiple times in front of his eyes by the swords keeping her at bay) and his mother’s friend, the tension in that room, the veiled danger he’s in, as well as the gazillion signs of something being terribly off with that mongrel of a prince and the things he’s talking about.

Good luck splitting the hair out of that!