Guild Wars 2

This is something I have always wandered. If the Asura lived underground from the beginning of the species till the last 350 years, shouldn’t they have been blind ala moles? Whats the use of having eyes underground when its dark?

They lived in places with natural light sources beneath the surface. You can see some of these strange light sources in the eye of the north expansion. Kind of like the light source in journey to the center of the earth.

magic.

or huge kitten eyes that let them see with minimal light.

Various possibilities:

Magic.
Infrared vision.
Evolved in an area with natural light sources.
Originally surface creatures that went underground, and took some form of light with them, and hid this history.

That’s actually a very interesting question. In many burrowing animals, we see an atrophying of the eyes – an evolved blindness. The eyes either become incredibly small and barely functional or disappear altogether. However, in many nocturnal animals, we see quite the opposite. The Slow Loris, a nocturnal lemuriform primate, has particular large eyes. These large-eyed animals are not burrowing, but we can assume that their reason for large eyes is shared by the Asura: they live in low-light conditions. This is echoed by the fact that the Asura actually do show some visual artistic sense in the first game, presumably right after they were b& from being underground. This would indicate that their visual acuity is not only adequate, but indeed good enough to allow cultural design based on it.
I’m now wondering about their ear shape. They’ve got rather large (presumably sensitive) ears, and the Ear itself is clearly a large part Asuran culture (“My ears!”, etc.). What were they listening for underground?

^ sound propagates faster through solid objects than through gases.

maybe their sensitive ears let them listen to the sounds coming from the ground more easily, rather than having to put their ears on the ground to listen to it.

or maybe they just grew big for no reason at all. chance is as much of an evolutionary factor as adaptation. so maybe they randomly evolved big ears, and not having any disadvantages caused by it (and the fact that it seems other asuras find the ears to be rather attractive), it stuck around.

just like us humans lost our fur due to evolution, but because we could make clothes, it didn’t matter.

My guess is that the Asura evolved as nocturnal surface-dwellers to start with and were driven underground a long, long time ago, prior to the development of their technology. Once there, they had no real reason to come up again until they were driven out by the Destroyers. Even a few thousand years (and we don’t know how long they’ve lived underground) isn’t long enough for major evolutionary pressures to take effect, so they almost certainly had the large eyes and ears before they moved underground.

The large ears may be an example of runaway sexual selection: see also the peakitten’s tail (if that gets filtered to peakitten I will lol).

Edit: It did. I am loling. I mean, of course, the male version of the species in which the females are called peahens.