Guild Wars 2

Balthazar, Bringer of War, Finder of Wisdom, He That Shows Us the Final Truth Judge of the Powerful, Revealer of Strength, and Scourge of the Prideful.

Balthazar came in fire and wrath, carrying the head of his father and leading his fierce hounds, Temar and Tegon."

I have this wild theory, just wanted to hear what you all thought of it;
Balthazar wasn’t always a god: he murdered his father to claim his divinity for himself. Because of the line of succession, that role should have went to Menzies (or they should have had half of it each), which would be why there is so much conflict between the two.
We know gods are not born gods, like it was the case for Kormir, and that others might be born of a relationship between gods and humans (Grenth born of Dwayna and an unknown sculptor who’s heavily speculated to be Malchor).
So, knowing Balthazar’s untrustworthiness, the other gods joined together to bring down Balthazar and put Menzies in his place, because he is the one who should have been there from the get go.
Then there’s the Mirror of Lyssa that comes in, but we have no way to know if it was willingly given by her, or if he stole it.

sorry to pop the bubble of your theory, but that honor already goes to Menzies.
The story is kinda vague, but at some stage, Balthazar confronts Menzies, who is holding the head of their father, as the dripping blood turns Menzies light into darkness and shade.
Balthazar doesn’t kill Menzies but (I dunno, I think he knocked him into a lower realm or something)
Then Balthazar comes back out with the head of his father.
Menzies is not nicknamed The Mad as a joke.
Balthazar probably became a grumpy old man because he had to take out his brother after he killed their father.

Wooden Potatoes recently made a video with a crashcourse on the history of Balthazar based on all the lory-bits

Amaimon.7823:

sorry to pop the bubble of your theory, but that honor already goes to Menzies.
The story is kinda vague, but at some stage, Balthazar confronts Menzies, who is holding the head of their father, as the dripping blood turns Menzies light into darkness and shade.
Balthazar doesn’t kill Menzies but (I dunno, I think he knocked him into a lower realm or something)
Then Balthazar comes back out with the head of his father.
Menzies is not nicknamed The Mad as a joke.
Balthazar probably became a grumpy old man because he had to take out his brother after he killed their father.

Wooden Potatoes recently made a video with a crashcourse on the history of Balthazar based on all the lory-bits

I’m not sure what’s being implied here. Are you saying that Balthazar killed his father and THEN went after Menzies? Or that Menzies killed their father and Balthazar was bitter about it? Because as far as I can find, the ONLY information we get regarding the whole Balthazar/father’s head thing is that he appeared on Tyria holding the head of his father. That’s literally it. For all we know, he could have found it in a random field and was carrying it around as emergency rations.
It’s not even mentioned that he was fighting Menzies in that battle in which he held his father’s head. He could have been leading humans in a battle against Charr or something.

Squee.7829:

Amaimon.7823:

sorry to pop the bubble of your theory, but that honor already goes to Menzies.
The story is kinda vague, but at some stage, Balthazar confronts Menzies, who is holding the head of their father, as the dripping blood turns Menzies light into darkness and shade.
Balthazar doesn’t kill Menzies but (I dunno, I think he knocked him into a lower realm or something)
Then Balthazar comes back out with the head of his father.
Menzies is not nicknamed The Mad as a joke.
Balthazar probably became a grumpy old man because he had to take out his brother after he killed their father.

Wooden Potatoes recently made a video with a crashcourse on the history of Balthazar based on all the lory-bits

I’m not sure what’s being implied here. Are you saying that Balthazar killed his father and THEN went after Menzies? Or that Menzies killed their father and Balthazar was bitter about it? Because as far as I can find, the ONLY information we get regarding the whole Balthazar/father’s head thing is that he appeared on Tyria holding the head of his father. That’s literally it. For all we know, he could have found it in a random field and was carrying it around as emergency rations.
It’s not even mentioned that he was fighting Menzies in that battle in which he held his father’s head. He could have been leading humans in a battle against Charr or something.

No, the implication is that Balthazar took Menzies down AFTER Menzies killed their father.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ibf-tJDeEok
Wooden Potatoes got all the lore here

And the only thing in said video that is relevant is a brief moment of what is clearly speculation somewhere around 19-20 minutes in. WP recognises that we don’t know what actually happened there and makes a couple of speculations.

Unless you have some source that I haven’t seen, we have no idea what the story of Balthazar’s father was. Could be Menzies killed him. Could be Balthazar killed him, for whatever reason. Could be that some other party killed him for reasons unknown. We don’t know.

Well, whatever the reasons, I do agree on the aspect that Balthazar was never a good guy. I mean, he was always the god of war and honor, so a fair fight before anything else. (until recently, that is, his behavior is somewhat contradictory with the plagues and documents I’ve read)

When you compare him to other gods, he’s propably not as selfish as Abaddon (at least, not until now), but he never was the good guy Dwayna is/was.
Melandru, Lyssa and Grenth I’ve always pictured as neutral good gods, like, they help humans unless the humans do messed up stuff. Melandru’s shown to bless people, but also punish those who harm nature excessively.

This thread seems to be making the assumption that Balthazar’s father was a good guy and that regardless of who killed him it was wrong to do so. What if he wasn’t? What if he was more like Menzies? A god of fire and war who was interested only in mass destruction for the sake of it.

Or simply a god of murder, (like Bhaal in Baldur’s Gate). Maybe Balthazar took what he taught him and invented the concept of war by organising a force to stop him?

I mean the only other thing we know about that point in history is that the gods lead the humans through the Mists to Tyria and then stayed here – the humans forever (or at least until present day) the gods for at least a few hundred years until the Exodus and then they only went as far as The Mists – I don’t think they went back to where they came from.

Maybe they were leading a band of desperate refugees away from a world which had been totally destroyed and at the last moment Balthazar’s father showed up to stop or destroy them and he had to kill him or he’d have followed them through and started over with Tyria.

Obviously that’s pure speculation, but moving your people to a new dimension with no way back where they came from seems like a pretty drastic move even for beings capable of travelling between worlds. It’s not something you do just because you’ve heard the weather will be nice this weekend. So there must have been some reason for it and it seems likely to me that the two factors – mass human and god migration and Balthazar carrying his father’s head – would be related.

Amaimon.7823:

Well, whatever the reasons, I do agree on the aspect that Balthazar was never a good guy. I mean, he was always the god of war and honor, so a fair fight before anything else. (until recently, that is, his behavior is somewhat contradictory with the plagues and documents I’ve read)

When you compare him to other gods, he’s propably not as selfish as Abaddon (at least, not until now), but he never was the good guy Dwayna is/was.
Melandru, Lyssa and Grenth I’ve always pictured as neutral good gods, like, they help humans unless the humans do messed up stuff. Melandru’s shown to bless people, but also punish those who harm nature excessively.

Sure, but this doesn’t say who killed Balthazar’s father.

Regarding the gods, prior to the current chapter I generally categorised the gods with the following alignments:

Dwayna: Neutral Good
Melandru: Neutral Good
Lyssa: Chaotic Good
Grenth: Lawful Neutral (he’s generally portrayed as harsh but fair – oh, and as a bit of a killjoy)
Balthazar: Neutral (he was all about honour, which is generally a lawful, even lawful good trait, but he’s too temperamental to be really called lawful, and he’s certainly too free with killing to be good)
Kormir: Lawful Good

Balthazar’s portrayal in the current chapter pushes him towards the Chaotic Evil end of the scale – he appears to have given up on honour, which was his anchor to the Lawful end of the spectrum, and apparently being willing to sacrifice a world for his own empowerment certainly pushes him towards Evil.

Danikat.8537:

This thread seems to be making the assumption that Balthazar’s father was a good guy and that regardless of who killed him it was wrong to do so. What if he wasn’t? What if he was more like Menzies? A god of fire and war who was interested only in mass destruction for the sake of it.

This is an aspect I’ve considered myself – for all we know it was Balthazar’s father who was responsible for the catastrophe, and Balthazar was carrying his father’s head in triumph (a pyrrhic victory, but triumph nonetheless).

Which just reinforces that we don’t know, and anyone who claims to have the answer had better have sources to back it up.

No one who rules the divine realm of war is going to be sunshine and kittens. Your options are to get the better sides (honor, camaraderie, use of violence to defend) or the worse (hate, cruelty, deranged mass-slaughter). The domain of war isn’t going anywhere.

by the way, didn’t we leave the previous realm because it was unsustainable for humans?

I have a new theory, what if Balthazar’s and Menzies’ father was Rodgort, the original flame. I mean, Rodgort only exists as a primal source of fire, jokingly named after a cartoon character one of the gw1 devs watched. But from a lore-point of view, it’s not impossible for Rodgort to be their father, and Balthazar could’ve usurped the aspect of fire from him. What if Balthazar and Abaddon did it together, depose Arachnea and Rodgort and take their reins of power.
(this is all just theorycrafting)

I think it is possible for someone to be a god of war and be more restrained than Balthazar, however. You can be a god who doesn’t murder people in a fit of rage, as Balthazar did in GW1’s history. You can be a god who advocates fighting in defence of yourself and your friends, family, and allies, instead of rampant conquest because you think your victims will be easily defeated… as Balthazar did according to the Orrian scrolls. You can be a god who promotes using tactics to overcome your foe with the least loss of lives over whipping up your troops into a vicious rage and simply charging. In short, you can be a god of war who promotes restraint and protection of those who need it over rampant aggression.

Athena, while she has her flaws, is an example of this – she is a goddess of war, but she advocates using peaceful means to settle conflicts it at all possible.

PS The Rodgort theory is plausible, but note that what we’ve seen of Rodgort seems to indicate a dragon or a dragon-like demon.

draxynnic.3719:

PS The Rodgort theory is plausible, but note that what we’ve seen of Rodgort seems to indicate a dragon or a dragon-like demon.

yea, true, but as long as it has a humanoid shape, anything goes for the human gods.
I mean, in some depictions of the human gods they look pretty warped. Take Abaddon and Melandru, they’ve forgone some human traits in exchange for some.. aesthetic adaptations.. Various depictions of Melandru show her as half a tree, physically fused.
I like how Abaddon, as the lord of flies, was given a somewhat fly-like face.
Then there’s Dhuum, there was never any flesh on his body, he was like a lich, green glowing magic bound to a skeleton in a large suit of armor with some capes wrapped around.
So in that aspect, really anything goes when it comes to the shape of a god. I think they’ve left a physical form behind, and that their desire to manifest in a human shape is correlated to their human sanity.
I mean that in the sense as, the more their mentality changes to be less human, the more likely they are to manifest in a inhumanoid form. So with that theory, it could be possible that like Abaddon, Rodgort was once human, but after taking a much more demonic form can be reasoned that the old him was no longer in there

Amaimon.7823:

I have a new theory, what if Balthazar’s and Menzies’ father was Rodgort, the original flame.

Based on the components to make the legendary torch, Rodgort was a dragon of some sort. At the very least, Rodgort – if it were a real being – is depicted as a dragon, even in the skill icons of GW1.

If Rodgort has a tie to the Six Gods, then I would place it as a pet of Balthazar’s theoretical predecessor (as Temur and Tegan are to Balthazar).

Of course it could be possible that Rodgort was an Elder Dragon AKA another world’s Primordius. That wouldn’t prevent him from being Balthazar’s father yet if that is the case that would make Balthazar a rogue champion like Glint.

As for accusations that Balthazar is honorable… In GW 1 his killing a guy who beat him in a game is treated as normal for him yet his induction of Kaolai into Tahnnakai Temple is treated as a rare thing.

Balthazar having any sportsmanship is treated as rare not common.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

Amaimon.7823:

I have a new theory, what if Balthazar’s and Menzies’ father was Rodgort, the original flame.

Based on the components to make the legendary torch, Rodgort was a dragon of some sort. At the very least, Rodgort – if it were a real being – is depicted as a dragon, even in the skill icons of GW1.

If Rodgort has a tie to the Six Gods, then I would place it as a pet of Balthazar’s theoretical predecessor (as Temur and Tegan are to Balthazar).

I agree and disagree. As I stated in my last message, human gods are capable of taking complete disrupted forms, as is evident in the case of Dhuum, Melandru and Grenth, but even more extremely so in the case of Abaddon. We only know the facial bit of Rodgort looks either demonic or draconoid, so it’s entirely possible that Rodgort took a different shape when he moved around. It could be that the demon/dragon’s head is the shape he took before his subjects, or that he took such a shape because he was corrupted beyond repair. Remember that Abaddon’s form was completely twisted by madness as well.
Besides, all we have is a weapon’s icon to describe Rodgort. Who’s to say he really looked like that.
The mayans (or azteks, I always mix them up) worshipped Quetzalcoatl, a giant feathered snake. But he was worshipped as a red-haired viking to sailed a little too far south.

Mickey Frogeater.1470:

That wouldn’t prevent him from being Balthazar’s father yet if that is the case that would make Balthazar a rogue champion like Glint.

I’d rather not have the picture of a dragon being the parent of a human-looking being.

Mickey Frogeater.1470:

As for accusations that Balthazar is honorable… In GW 1 his killing a guy who beat him in a game is treated as normal for him yet his induction of Kaolai into Tahnnakai Temple is treated as a rare thing.

Balthazar having any sportsmanship is treated as rare not common.

Yet if you talk to any priest of Balthazar, Zaishen member, etc. they will all preach about the honor of war as Balthazar’s teachings. Even Balthazar’s own words shows that he once did believe in the glory and honor of war but no longer does.

Amaimon.7823:

I agree and disagree. As I stated in my last message, human gods are capable of taking complete disrupted forms, as is evident in the case of Dhuum, Melandru and Grenth, but even more extremely so in the case of Abaddon.

Erm, how exactly are those three “disrupted forms”?

All four of them, in fact, are of humanoid appearance in their “true statues” – Abaddon has the ‘head and hands’ look because, based on gw.dat entries, his body was destroyed when he was defeated and he had to make a new one (which was incomplete by the time we reached him). While Dhuum does show to be just the upper half of a skeleton, he was also defeated and usurped (which by all other cases (read: Abaddon) means death so Dhuum could be an undead, by technicality, for all we know and that his “living, god” appearance was more humanoid). Grenth is always depicted as a human, but wearing a mask (and it is always specified as a mask). Melandru, like Dwayna, is depicted with wings, and other than that Melandru has made appearances through trees but her own being is not half-tree by all indication.

So other than Abaddon rebuilding a body, and a potentially undead fallen god, I’m not seeing any evidence of “disrupted forms”.

This is especially true for the “Rodgort is Balthazar’s father” given that Balthazar is far from having any draconic appearances. We saw his face and his body and it was 100% humanoid. More humanoid than Dwayna. Unless Rodgort changed his appearance after having Balthazar, or Balthazar is actively hiding draconian features, that doesn’t really hold.

Honestly, I think it’s more plausible that Rodgort was a “fire dragon” of legend in the same way that Glint was a “crystal dragon” (potentially excluding connections to Elder Dragons).

Rodgort was a man
I mean, he was a dragon man
Or maybe he was just a dragon
But he was still Rodgort!

Burninating the countryside,
Burninating the peasants
Burninating all the peoples
And their thatched-roof cottages!

When all the land is in ruins
And burnination has forsaken the countryside
Only one guy will remain
My money’s on
Rodgort!

And the Rodgort comes in the night!

I can’t be the only one who was thinking that while reading this topic right? It’s kind of surprising how closely the song fits the theories in this topic.