Theory: Malyck's tree is the 'original' type
We know the blighting trees are corrupted; part of the VB map meta is to halt the corruption process of one.
We know the Pale Tree is inspired and fortified somehow by the influences of Ventari and Ronan.
Maybe Malyck’s tree is what happens when the seeds are left completely alone? Maybe one escaped all notice and was allowed to grow unaltered? A seed implies a parent plant; maybe the whole “print plant-based copies of life forms and send them out into the world” strategy has been going on for some time, just using animals (sometimes so loosely they passed as more ordinary plants) and only recently using sentients.
Not sure how to square this with Wynn’s revelation that the trees come from Mordremoth and belong to him. But then why would he need to corrupt them before they’ll make blighted Mordrem? Is Mordremoth as we encounter him in the game also somehow blighted, deviated from his original state? Maybe by the release of Zhaitan’s magic?
But as for Malyck’s tree. Do you think they’ll ever pick up that thread again, or will they just say Mordremoth got to it and it became an ordinary blighting tree, end of story?
I don’t think Malyck is still canon, he was in an early ps chapter, and then completely neglected by anet. As for the seeds, they’re already mordremoth’s, corruption in this game doesn’t necessecarily mean he corrupted the thing. Some things only exist in the corrupted state, which means the elder dragon controls it, or his magic flows through it. The blighting trees are most likely the ‘native state’
First off, we know that the Pale Tree is a purified dragon minion, effectively since we know sylvari are minions but not under the irrevocable (by normal means) will-enslavement that all dragon minions are (note: by normal means I mean there has been a single method t o freeing a dragon minion’s mind as we have observed which was a highly resource-consuming ancient ritual unknown to modern society until after Zhaitan’s death).
Given that it’s heavily suggested Malyck’s tree comes from the same cave as the Pale Tree was in as a seed that Ronan found, and given that it’s known that Malyck is younger than any other sylvari and heavily implied there are no other sylvari of his tree at the time of his birth (weeks before the PC meets him), it seems highly unlikely that Malyck’s Tree is older than let alone the origin of the Pale Tree.
As for “But then why would he need to corrupt them before they’ll make blighted Mordrem?”
The Blighting Trees are not corrupted Pale Trees, but rather the Pale Tree is a purified Blighting Tree. The Blighting Trees would be most likely corrupted normal trees.
Sylvari need to be “recorrupted” in non-standard ways because they’ve been purified and, the implication is, they are protected from standard corruption by the Dream – so Mordremoth has to attack via the Dream to “convert” rather than “corrupt” by bombarding the sylvari with thoughts until they cannot differentiate between their own and Mordremoth’s thoughts.
@Amaimon: Malyk is 100% still canon. Net has stated they still plan to further his plot, and intended to do so in HoT but ran out of time. They’ve not retconned him out of existence – any loose plots are never given such treatment, they’re just left alone until ArenaNet is “ready” to tackle them.
Also, blighting trees cannot be a native state, since they are dragon minions and no dragon minion is a natural state due to the nature of dragon corruption (which makes minions) changing the physical attributes of whatever it makes into minions. In other words, the “timeline” for their state would be “Unknown Native State” → Blighting Tree → Pale Tree.
Stop treating GW2 as a single story. Each Season and expansion should be their own story.
(edited by Konig Des Todes.2086)
I don’t think Malyck is still canon, he was in an early ps chapter, and then completely neglected by anet. As for the seeds, they’re already mordremoth’s, corruption in this game doesn’t necessecarily mean he corrupted the thing. Some things only exist in the corrupted state, which means the elder dragon controls it, or his magic flows through it. The blighting trees are most likely the ‘native state’
Malyck is indeed still canon. He was mentioned in Season 2, Chapter 4 in one of the books of the Hidden Arcanum. He never made it into Heart of Thorns, but he was thought about before its release. I’m still hoping that he might reappear in one of the Living Story chapters, but at this point, I don’t think we have any reason to go back into the Jungle besides the Dragon lab unless Primordus decides he wants another new summer home.