Guild Wars 2

Take a look at the attachment and the flower specifically.
It’s like a rose! (rosa rubiginosa) No, it’s like an azalea. Or maybe it’s a modiola caroliniana or chaenomeles speciosa.

Using my google-foo, I kept digging till I found the genus: Hellebores. (see attachment #2) Hellebores come in many different shapes and colors, but generally they match what I see in the Female Human Exclusive #3: 5 petals, tapering out with several stamens. “Real neato.” you might say, but looking even further, I’m seeing folklore evidences that witches long ago used them in the process of demon summoning.

That’s an apropos flower to use in the lore. (I say lore, but it’s not significant to the story.) It looks like the flower was mentioned in Harry Potter, also. As much research I’ve done on this folklore usage, I’m not really seeing any solid citations. Wikipedia, flower aficionado blogs and demonology sites all seem to posit this, but it just seems like conjoined assumptions without more historical proof that this was part of our past’s folklore. If anyone has more info on this, let us know!

Proof aside, there’s a common acceptance of demon-summoning with Hellebores nowadays so I suppose that’s quite well enough to make subtle references like here in GW2. Oh but take a closer look at the flower in-game again: It’s a reversed pentagram. (well duh, it has 5 petals.) But, no really, its rotated to point down. Reversed pentagrams were used in many cultures, even before “Black Magic” and was still considered to be a sacred symbol, for a myriad of reasons. Well whether this is significant to references of occultism, I’ll leave that up to you, but I’d like to think the character designers at Arena Net didn’t slap this together for nothing.

Or maybe they just wanted a star-fish, mermaid look. You tell me.

Honestly I think it is supposed to be a lily and that there is no such deeper meaning to it at all, especially as it doesn’t seem to fit into the lore.

To be honest, I enjoyed reading the Original Post. Really got me thinking. I gave my Human Elementalist that hairstyle. I might try to tie it into her story somehow now. Maybe a vague association of those who study and practice magic who stand united and use the flower as a symbol to recognize one another.

If I remember correctly, Hellebore is also used both as a poison and as a medicine. So, wearing a Hellebore flower could be considered advertising.