I’d like to offer another point of view: a lot of people with strong opinions about lore won’t be participating in this or similar conversations. I hope the writing team spends their most of their time working on the next evolution of the story and very little time on molehills-turned-into-mountains.
There are a lot of fans who do great work documenting lore. As they do so, they uncover inconsistencies and contradictions, which should be expected in both a well-written and horribly-written story, as well as when the writer(s) aren’t keeping track of the details.
The question is: what are the rest of us to make of this? My feeling is that a few of the self-appointed lore experts go too far, in effect writing fan fiction by interpreting what they see and telling the rest of us how we are supposed to understand the lore. It’s only a few people who do this, but I think it becomes a distraction to the actual story.
For example, “all the sylvari felt it when rhiannoc died” — even when I first encountered this idea, I always thought it was hyperbole. To me, this is the same as people saying that “all Americans felt it when Kennedy died” — people found out at different times, but nevertheless feel they shared a specific experience, even though technically, they did not. But some lore experts would have us believe that this was originally intended to be literal, because that is how they (the expert) interpreted it upon first reading. To be sure, there wasn’t that much evidence one way or another to know what the writers meant with certainty, but that could be a result of both good or bad writing.
It’s also clear from the personal and living stories that NPCs in GW2 aren’t always honest. They tell outright lies, omit critical details, and bend the truth to suit their interests. Because this is an MMO, this tends to be obvious most of the time, but I think it’s great when it’s subtle, too — I’d like to see more of the characters behaving like real people, i.e. full of their own contradictions and other foibles.
A lot of things were left ambiguous in the original personal story, perhaps intentionally, perhaps because (as some believe) the game was rushed to release to make NCSOFT shareholders happy, perhaps because the writing team wasn’t paying that much attention to matters they considered minor. As a player, I don’t really care — as long as the story compels my attention, then I’m okay with some details being inconsistent.
For example, I’m not bothered by luminaries claiming to be the first to be born in their cycle — “first” is obviously a big deal among the sylvari. I’m not concerned that there are contradictions between dreams of some and statements by others — the dreams don’t seem to be literal and sylvari are just as prone to misunderstandings as charr or humans (although not as bad as the asura). But even if I’m mistaken, none of this affects the basics of the story. Wynne’s reveal is still powerful, Scarlet’s motivations are still mysterious in some ways, and the conflict between Mother Tree, firstborn, and Nightmare Court still leaves me wanting to learn more.
tl;dr I hope the writing team focuses on what they perceive as critical, and doesn’t get too distracted by whatever latest “outrage” is posted on the forums. I’m enjoying the living story and I’m looking forward to the next installment.
John Smith: “you should kill monsters, because killing monsters is awesome.”
