I’ve recently broken my mouse, so I’m having difficult playing the game on a trackpad, so I figured I would spend the day working on getting up to speed on the lore of the game. I’ve really enjoyed Wooden Potatoes’s GW2 Mysteries series and would like to suggest some correlations to how Scarlet might tie into some of this lore.
Let’s track back to the Zephyrites living story event. During Part II of that event, you had The Gnashblade vs. Kiel election where the players voted for one or the other characters in favor of a short term reward (reduced key prices or reduced waypoint prices) and one fractal update (either Abbadon or Thaumanova). I was initially disappointed in the turnout facing the Thaumanova Reactor fractal because it felt to me like Thaumanova was just a random facet used to introduce a boss battle.
After watching Wooden Potatoes’s Thaumanova Reactor Episode, I suddenly thought about a few things.
Firstly, we must note that Scarlet was first introduced only a couple of updates after the election, meaning that her character and content must have been under development far before ArenaNet knew what the outcome of the Gnashblade vs. Keil election would be, so maybe during the beginnings, her character had to remain vague and shallow because the fractal (either Thaumanova or Abbadon) had some explanation to her existence. While I can’t really think of much of a correlation between her and Abbadon, I can think of plenty with her and Thaumanova.
In the above linked video by Wooden Potatoes, he references a few storyline chapters from the early Asura story missions involving the Infinity Ball. He talks about how the player and Shodd (your mentor of sorts) open a portal that brings in your character and Shodd, both from the future. He goes on to say that your future self has come back to the past because he must “Kill himself.” He says it in a way that makes the player assume that his future self has come to kill his past self, but Wooden Potatoes suggests that it’s the other way around, resulting in a suicide mission of sorts that is meant to inspire past Shodd to become future Shodd.
So we know that there is a future dimension, and in this future dimension, there are Steam creatures that come and attack you before you see your future self and future Shodd. Also, the current Thaumanova reactor in its exploded state is one of the few areas in the game where you can find Steam Creatures. The other places you can find Steam Creatures are through portals/rifts in the Shiverpeaks and… surprise, the Scarlet Invasions! Wooden Potatoes makes the inference that the Aetherblades and their superior technology may be correlated with this similar future dimension.
Now ArenaNet decided to correlate Scarlet’s power and knowledge with the Asura instead of the Durmand Priory, suggesting that she’s further correlated with the race correlated with the Thaumanova Explosion, thus with the correlative property of yadda yadda yadda, she and the Thaumanova Explosion have something in common.
My personal speculation with her involvement with Thaumanova, along with the perceived Asuran resentment of her involvement with them, is that at some point, during her learning, she defected to work with the Inquest, who then together sabotaged the work being done at Thaumanova to create the explosion – all with the intention to create this rift between the two time periods (man, that was a long sentence). At that point, she traveled forward in time and built her alliance with the Aetherblades and used all of that to pull the Steam creatures to the current time. All of this probably drove her mad, thus her currently crazy disposition.
My guess is that the fractal will be the brilliant centerpiece to explaining Scarlet, and the development delay goes to show why Scarlet has been so underdeveloped to this point. I’m not a personal fan of Scarlet myself (I actually rather hate her), but after watching that video, it’s interesting to draw some conclusions. Definitely let me know if someone has already theorized this or if there are any discrepancies in my logic.
tl;dr – Scarlet caused the Thaumanova Explosion.
(edited by redhand.7168)