Guild Wars 2

My current theory is that the Mists (kind of like dark energy/matter in our universe – if those exist – but significantly more apparent, tangible, and visible) surrounding planets, realms, stars, etc. effectively serve as physics-negating medium which allows light to seemingly travel instantaneously from a star light years away to Tyria. The Mists is also the protomatter of everything, and I view it as if the stuff that had been before the Big Bang was still around, surrounding us. The physical laws would not prevail under such conditions, thus the light of a star coursing through the Mists might act abnormally.

And besides, Orrians worked a LOT with the study of the night sky, hence the creation of the astrolables spoken of in SoS. Constellations (Vizier’s Tower, Grenth’s Eye), the star called Dwayna’s Heart, and Arah serving as the zero point for latitude (and not Tyria’s equator). With all that measurement to devise a functioning way for telling one’s location in a north-south direction (and something which works very similarly to our early positioning system) I really doubt the night sky’s just another ruse of the Mists. Tyria has a burning, enormous gas globe that provides the world heat and light and keeps the planet spinning and revolving in a 360-day-long cycle (there IS no extra 5 days, there never was, and never will be). The millions of stars up there do the very same, except their light reaches us faster than it would be possible normally.

I think the easiest explanation is probably also the most logical one:

Tyria is a planet in outer space, and there are other planets, moons, stars and a sun. Just like on our own world.

The Mists is an alternate reality. From which things are born, and where we go when we die. It is the glue that keeps everything together.

Bright stars appear simply as a coincidence. It is left up to interpretation. More likely the appearance of a new star does not indicate the birth of a new dragon, but it coincides with the event, and is thus seen as an omen. Whether the two events are related is entirely up to the observer.

I think it’s mistaken to call the Mists an alternate reality. Personally, I’d mostly call it the base medium of reality for all worlds/dimensions. This is an apt explanation for how it interacts with all things, it may be the table upon which every universe, dimension, and reality rests. At the very core, the very center of the table, lays the Rift, which acts as the nexus for all these different universes, dimensions, and realities.

Every time we visited the gods’ realms, the Realm of Torment, and so on, we may very well have traveled to another universe or reality entirely, but it needn’t be that the Mists was its universe that they occupied. If anything, the Mists seems best understood as another word for the multiverse.

The reason so many suggest their dead family members go there is probably because while they may like to think they went to a better place, be it Eternal Paradise, the Underworld for judgment (rather than straight to its bad areas), Hall of Spirits, Sky Above the Sky, or the Great Forge, they’re not so certain of the deceased’s character to cast judgment.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

But the fact that there are planets and moons and stars, means there would also be space. As in, no air, no gravity, and pretty cold.

That is where you’re wrong.

There can be air. There can be a lot of things. It just has to be invisible to the naked eye is all. We don’t know anything about what’s so far up from Tyria’s surface, so we cannot say that just because we see stars and we know that the Tyrians think there are planets, that there must be “nothing inbetween.”

Besides, you’re outright wrong to call the Mists an alternate reality. Because the Mists is, in actuality, all around us in the game. It’s best to see via the Defend the Mists norn storyline what I mean – but twice you go into the Mists, through a portal that lands you in the exact same space, everything just looks different. And this follows through with the notion that the Mists “touch all things” from the excerpt I posted before.

The Mists isn’t so much a place, as it is where places reside within – much like outer space. While we’re on Earth, we’re still in outer space to a degree; similarly, while people are on Tyria, they’re still in the Mists to an equal degree if not more.

I’d go with Leon’s words – that the Mists is best described as the multiverse on a whole – more than anything else. And certainly more than a mere “alternate dimension.” The Mists contains alternate dimensions – as well as Tyria’s own – but it is not an alternate dimension in of itself.

I’m not going to argue the nature of the Mists with you Konig, you have studied it way more than I have. And Gmr Leon also agrees with you. So that’s two lore experts agreeing on the same thing.

But on the point about Tyria having space, that is where I disagree with you. And technically, space is not “nothing”. It’s a lack of air, for sure. But there’s more than that obviously. I just find it hard to believe that since the people of Tyria witness planets, moons and stars, that for some reason they would not have space. It seems like the writers were going for a familiar model of a solar system.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

I’m not going to argue the nature of the Mists with you Konig, you have studied it way more than I have. And Gmr Leon also agrees with you. So that’s two lore experts agreeing on the same thing.

But on the point about Tyria having space, that is where I disagree with you. And technically, space is not “nothing”. It’s a lack of air, for sure. But there’s more than that obviously. I just find it hard to believe that since the people of Tyria witness planets, moons and stars, that for some reason they would not have space. It seems like the writers were going for a familiar model of a solar system.

Frankly, I don’t agree with him entirely on the space matter either. I think he doesn’t even necessarily think that it possesses one characteristic over another, for that matter, mostly it seems he’s just trying to maintain the null position. That is, we have no information one way or another as to the nature of extraterrestrial affairs besides the Mists, so to assume that the the universe/reality/dimension Tyria occupies has a space as we know it outside itself would be a mistake.

On that point, I can agree, we cannot properly speculate on the nature of outer space in Tyria’s universensionality-thing given that we lack any in-game sources that suggest what it may be like. At most, we know that air, aether/ether, and the Mists are present as near-invisible aspects of space (at least one of which seeming to exist as the multiversal-base), but to what extent the first two stretch beyond Tyria into the space surrounding it and between it and the other worlds in Tyria’s own universensionality-thing, as well as how it may behave out there, we simply do not know.

…We really need a good term for single-fragment universe-dimensional-realities. Closest word that comes to mind is brane, but that may be a bit too theoretical physicsy for everyone else.

I may be wrong, as I still consider myself very new to the ring when it comes to debating GW lore (I have spent years reading and absorbing, but many times the information was incorrect or speculation), but in my mind the existence of Celestial beings seen in Cantha seems to point towards there being something more to what we consider Outer Space that we have IRL. Now I am not stating that there is no solar system, moon, sun, etc, but at the same time I am not opposed to the idea that Tyria itself is just a large realm within the Mists (and the sky we see is instead perhaps other realms/fractals/etc). At the very least, I believe we can all agree that outer space is, in some way, different from the outer space that we know just because, should it be similar, collections of stars separated by millions of light years somehow hold the souls of humans (and possibly other creatures) in the form of celestial beings. Similarly a star born is supposed to point to an ED rise even though, should RL physics come into play, it would take millions of years for the light of that star to reach Tyria.

Something is different, something.