Guild Wars 2

Players just can’t avoid it: it’s everywhere. From their perfect Utopian society to their major appearances in the personal story and living world, the constant perfection of the Sylvari is hammered into players everywhere. From Trahearne displacing our character’s role as the hero of the personal story to Scarlet becoming one of the most powerful and influential villains of the series, there’s simply nothing that this race can’t do wrong or worse than the other races. However, Guild Wars may have a lot of faults, but contrary to popular belief the writing is not one of them. Yes, there are corny scenes and questionable choices, but compared to other lores and stories of the genre Guild Wars’ has stood the test of time well, and A-net is always improving from the first release of the game.

This major writing gaffe of a Mary Sue race (yes, evil villains can be Mary Sue’s too. Just because Scarlet is evil doesn’t mean she doesn’t exhibit most of the Sue characteristics) is simply out of place in comparison to the more mellow and benign errors A-net has made. A-net claims Scarlet’s story will have a major payout to players, and I don’t doubt them.

Theory time.

You know those characters in movies we think are awesome? They always do the right thing, help the hero but don’t take his or her glory, and just in general are ensemble darkhorses so to speak. Then at the end of the movie they’re all “LOLz, double agent/sleeper agent/actually an kitten,” and suddenly audience members feel dumb for trusting them so easily.

That’s who the Sylvari are, and there are two major pieces of evidence that fuel this speculation.

1. Sylvari are immune to elder dragon corruption. This seems to go along with their list of Mary-Sue powers, until one considers, why? Why are they so special? Is it because they’re magical plant people?

2. The Sylvari storyline reveals that there aremore Pale-tree type creatures that birth Sylvari. Most likely one or more these lie in the Maguuma Jungle/Waste area we haven’t explored yet. Point is, they’re spreading rapidly, far faster than any other race has. In just 25 years they, through magically communal thought powers, have achieved what has taken a multitude of races, supernatural beings, and gods countless years to build up. Why? Why are they spreading so quickly?

These questions led to this speculation that the Sylvari are some form of sleeper agent for an elder dragon. Yes, this is indeed basically the Elder Dragon minion theory you’ve all heard of by now, but bear with me. Consider this. If they are minions or pawns of some sort, then the elder dragon spawning them wants them to infilitrate the world en masse. Most elder dragons do this through violence and fighting, and it rarely works out.

But this Elder Dragon, whom many suspect is Modremoth, the fabled “nature” dragon is smarter than that. (Already we have a fit here between Mo and the Sylvari: nature. But that’s beside the point.) Mo is really smart compared to his brother Elder Dragons. He’s figured out that the current dominating races cannot be defeated by pure force. The races are simply too powerful to defeat through force. So he uses the Sylvari to create a massive group of sleeper agents to overtake the world.
Their Utopian society helps them gain respect from the other races and integrate into the modern world. This is extremely important because it helps them spread out without causing problems. To alleviate suspicions against the Sylvari on being “too perfect”, Mo creates some Sylvari purposefully bad, forming the Nightmare Court. However, he screws up because the Sylvari still act perfect and have bonuses other races lack, such as corruption-immunity.
It doesn’t stop there though. Not only is Mo using Sylvari to rapidly spread his forces throughout Tyria, he is also manipulating politics. Because the Sylvari are so respected, he can do things that seem good on the surface but really only further his goals.
Like the Pact.
Think about it. All the most powerful races, organizations, and nations are now aligned together, even if only somewhat, and are in one group: one group that can easily be wiped out if one has the means to do it. The Pact may be able to resist current threats in its current region of the world. But the cost of unity has been that the Pact is confined withing the chains of those that make it up. The Pact will be hardpressed to stretch far behind the reached of the humans, Asura, Norn, and Charr. Mo can blow them out of the water in terms of numbers of this land restriction. Not only that but once the Sylvari turn evil, the Pact will be weakend by vagrant Sylvari killing off everywhere. In addition, the other Pale trees will produce Sylvari, and stockpile them in other parts of the world until Mo is ready. Now he also has a great number of backups. Pact-controlled land vs. the rest of Tyria = Evil Sylvari curbstomp
“Wait,” you say. “What about Zhaitan? Saying Mo created the Pact is saying that Mo allowed a fellow dragon to fall.”
Exactly; Mo is smart enough to create these sleeper agents; he’s also smart enough to act as a chessmaster. Zhaitan served as a starting bishop for the heroes to take in this game of deadly chess. It allowed the Pact to form under the harsh circumstances, and his reign as villain weakened part of Tyria. Mo will continue to use the other Elder Dragons as pawns to weaken the heroes until he is ready to strike.
When that time comes, he will attempt to take control of the Pale Trees and therefore Sylvari. It becomes obvious the price the Sylvari paid for having such a communal society. No Sylvari is spared, not even the soundless, because even they have a small connection with the Pale Tree.
After this point…I don’t know. I haven’t gotten that far. However, I’m not saying it will end with all Sylvari characters evil. Somehow the PC Sylvari will fix things and save their race or the world from total destruction. However, the perfect modern-day ideal progressive pedestal they’ve been put will break, just as the human’s broke after GW1. This event will serve as the conclusion to the Elder Dragon arc of Guild Wars 2 as well as the major initial history of the Sylvari. Things will change, racial tensions against the race will increase undoubtedly. However, some of the positive aspects of their influence will remain, such as the Pact. However, their impeding domination as the possible leading race will end. Trahearne may step down as Pact leader and another character of another race will take his spot. The world, and the Sylvari, will recover and move on towards the next story the world of Tyria will face.
Will it actually happen? I doubt it, but it never hurts to dream. =)

Sylvari aren’t perfect. Rather, the ones who still follow the Pale Tree and the Tablet aren’t.

They’re incredibly naive and easy to mislead. They do not, as a whole, understand deception without more life experience. To many of them, it’s relatively simple to deceive and then entrap them. Even Cadach isn’t much of a deceiver. Faolain is cagey, and hints at possibilities but she doesn’t outright lie.

Scarlet doesn’t seem to engage in wholesale deception either (assuming it is all hallucination what happens inside the Tower with her speaking), she is very . . . very blunt and simple when she acts or speaks. She may have motives but she’s not outright concealing them behind deceptions . . . much like Faolain, her take on deception tends more towards letting people make assumptions which are wrong and not correcting them.

So far her only outright lie is one of omission, regarding the bombs in the Royal Pavillion. “Oh, did I say five bombs? There were six.” Not lying, but also not mentioning the sixth bomb until it was too late.

We’ll see what’s coming though.

Very true, and I suppose perfection is somewhat extreme word choice, but my main point is that their blatant favoritism currently story-wise may lead to serious repercussions.

Vincent Highwind.3054:

Very true, and I suppose perfection is somewhat extreme word choice, but my main point is that their blatant favoritism currently story-wise may lead to serious repercussions.

Currently I’d say the focus is almost as much on humans so far these last few months. Especially on the humans in Kryta.

Though to be honest, I wouldn’t mind some variety at all. We had one shared Living World chapter with the norn and the charr in danger and being targeted and no more since. Was the response really that bad over the locations of Frost and Flame? Really?

minor thing — please put a little warning at the beginning about Personal Story spoilers

The way I see it Sylvari are like robotic AI. They are like Skynet. They look so perfect and helpful on the outside. But some day they will be the doom of us all. XD

A race that’s born purely good are easily manipulated into a force of pure evil. They do not even understand what it means to be good. They are programmed to be good. So it will be easy to program them into evil.

I understand why the “spawn of Mordremoth” theory is appealing but honestly the opposite makes more sense to me. That is: the dragons are parasites sucking away on the planet’s magic (like Lavos) and the Sylvari are the planet’s defense mechanism. Tyria itself spawned the Sylvari specifically to combat the dragons. That’s why they’re immune to corruption and why the devs give them center stage.

I also think the devs just really, really like them.

It’s a nice theory and one that has been mentioned a few times. The difficulty with it that I see is how will you explain away player characters that are Sylvari? If they all have their “Order 66” moment and are suddenly switched from good to bad, what happens to all the player characters? Do they forcibly become bad? Do the players get a choice in what happens to their character? If they remain on the good side, why? Why are player characters immune to the command to turn?

Further, we know that dragons feed on magic. They absorb it to gain their strength to the point of where they have most of it while the world has little magic left in it. This then sends the dragons to sleep, which slowly releases magic back into the world. Given this then, why would a dragon make a race of people (Sylvari) that will have to use magic. If the dragon wants to absorb magic, why make something that you have to give magic to?

I remember very early on, when the Sylvari were first mentioned, there was talk – and I’m unsure if it was from Arena Net or fan driven, but there was talk of the Sylvari being unknown. Their motivations were unknown. Were they good or were they evil? I wonder if the speculation that the plant dragon having Sylvari as its minions is driven from this early speculation?

Lastly, the Sylvari get a ton of “air time” because Angel McCoy (sorry if that’s not the right spelling) has said she adores the Sylvari and she is the one to do most of the writing.

Sylvari….they’re like weeds.

It’s just too much Sylvari in the story.
Mr. It won’t end well, Scarlet, Canach. Heck, we even have to ask the kitten tree for directions during PS…
I know that Sylvari are new race and ANet wants to push us into their lore and race, but do Sylvari have to be everywhere?
Give me some Charrs..