Guild Wars 2

I am beginning to think that the human gods and the Elder Dragons are one and the same. Anyone else believe this might be true?

From the wiki:

The Six Human Gods are a group of deities worshiped by the humans.

In relation to the Dragons:

Ancient jotun stelae indicate that throughout prehistory, the Elder Dragons have gone through cycles of awakening, destruction, and hibernation, each time ending an era of life in Tyria and bringing forth a new one. As contact with other continents has been severed, it is not known whether or not the Elder Dragons are unique to the continent of Tyria. However, the records surviving from the previous cycle mention only six dragons.

I am thinking that maybe these gods arrive with a new race occasionally, and then withdraw. When they withdraw, they become the Dragons and go on a cleansing of Tyria before they are put to slumber and return as the gods again. This would be something like a creator/destroyer cycle similar to the storylines of Bungee’s Myth series.

If this is true, the human gods will never return again, but six new ‘gods’ will appear to raise up another race in the future after the dragons have cleansed Tyria or been put to sleep.

Anyone else have thoughts on this?

A major flaw in this idea, other than that there is no pretty (non messy) way to match up the gods and the dragons, is that the gods cause devastation when destroyed. We know for a fact that the gods are vessels for magic, this we learned from Guild Wars Nightfall. When you kill Abaddon, he starts to release the magic he held. The magic threatens to be unleashed and destroy much of the world, but Kormir runs inside (having been blessed by the gods) and absorbs the magic and becomes a new god. When Zhaitan is killed no such thing happens.

I also want to point out that the gods are not gone. During the ending of the storyline one of your options is to summon an avatar of Grenth, the god of death, and you learn that he is still around and kicking.

Zhaitan is explicitly stated to be different from the six gods (each god is denounced by risen; one of Grenth’s Reapers outright states Zhaitan is stealing souls from Grenth). And no Elder Dragon is Kormir, who was a mortal, nor Abaddon, nor Dhuum.

They are not the same. This is proven in the personal storyline. Furthermore, this has been a common – and wrong – theory that has flooded this forum.

And this is ignoring the fact that Kralkatorrik doesn’t fit any of the Six Gods, nor does Jormag, once you get past the basic appearances. Jormag has mind powers, but is tied to ice – thus he’s a mix of Lyssa and Grenth; Kralkatorrik is purple so people link to Lyssa but that’s the only connection and Abaddon was also purple in color affiliation.

Once you get past the Balthazar/Primordus and Abaddon/Water connections, it all false apart very fast.

The connection is only superficial. It only makes sense if you don’t know many details about the dragons and the Six. There are various types of magic in Tyria, and the dragons devour them while the gods are associated with them in different ways. Necromancy and Zhaitan, for example, are not connected except through an association with death (and if I recall correctly, even the type of death magic Zhaitan uses to create the Risen has been confirmed to be different than the type Necromancers use).

Yes, because the death magic that Zhaitan uses appears to rip the soul from the Mists and place it back within the body, only under Zhaitan’s command. No other necromancy is known to do this. Even Palawa Joko just seems to merely trap the spirits of those he kills within their rotting bodies, as opposed to ripping them out of the Mists.

Well, lets step back and look at this from an even more distanced stand point.

Were the dragons woken up? or did they wake up on schedule?

The world of Tyria seems to go through cycles of destruction and birth, I believe this is hinted at during Prophecies, but anyways.

What if the dissapearance of the Gods who bring growth and new life into the world is followed by Destruction brought by the Dragons?

More and more species are dissapearing from Tyria all the time as this period of Godlessness goes on and now the Dragons have come only escalating the speed of this death.

What people often overlook when discussing these kinds of theories is that the human gods did not leave Tyria recently, they left a long time ago – long before the original Guild Wars campaigns, in fact. Check the timeline: the Exodus of the Gods marks the year 0 AE (After Exodus). They retreated from Arah, where they dwelled among humans, after the debacle with Abbadon and the creation of the Bloodstones. GW1 starts in 1070 AE at the earliest (the Searing), Kormir becomes a goddess in 1075 AE.

The human gods seem to have continued to withdraw further from human affairs after this and through the intervening time up to GW2. They’re been gone from Tyria itself for well over a thousand years, though. Whatever their reasons for communicating less, I don’t think it’s reasonable to assume that something dramatic happened to them in the time just before GW2.

Plus, Primordus was stirring during Eye of the North and Balthazar was still pretty involved in things at that point. Not sure how that fits with your theory.