Simply put, Trahearne is a bad fanfiction character.
- Everyone loves him. In fact, the three orders all happily unite beneath his banner, not because he’s qualified as a military leader, a strategist, or really anything beyond being a scholar, but because he’s Trahearne.
- Trahearne is the only being brilliant enough to think that the orders should unite against the dragons. Given the mentality of each order, this is utter crap: the Priory are brilliant, the Vigil believe in victory at all costs, the OoW is incredibly cunning and clever. And I am supposed to believe that not one of them said “Hey, you know what? We’re fighting against the dragons…and you’re fighting against the dragons…and so are they. We should work together!”?
- He appears with almost no pretense and our characters blindly follow him. Let’s recap, shall we? The charr storyline has you, a soldier, ultimately follow someone with no experience. The norn are expected to follow someone who cannot demonstrate strength. The asura are expected to follow someone clearly inferior to them. The humans are told to answer to someone whose orders come from a magic tree. Only the sylvari have any real reason to follow him.
- The Pact, which is itself made up of an elite few, is expected to lead the charge. Zhaitan has gone from being a massive threat to someone felled by what is a comparatively small portion of the Tyrian population, despite being arrayed against overwhelming numbers, ancient and powerful magic, virtually unlimited resources, and not to mention sheer incredible power.
- The story goes from being about our particular race to being about our particular faction to being about the Pact. Those I have associated with in my story are gone, replaced by mere glimpses and flashes of characters that appear briefly and then vanish. The only real constant is Destiny’s Edge, who have been omnipresent: you receive letters of congratulations from them, see them in dungeons. Yet their role is petty at best.
- Furthermore, with DE, these well-known and well-established characters are made secondary to Trahearne. I can see the world uniting behind these five heroes, who even had a little spiel in Edge of Destiny about how each of them bringing their unique talents made them a superior team (during the Lion’s Arch arena bit). Heck, Rytlock has incredible military experience as a tribune! Logan has great experience too, being one of the highest-ranked military individuals in Kryta. Eir’s cunning and skill, as well as her tactical knowledge, makes her exquisite in small-group combat. Zojja is brilliant and probably has an army of golems that she and others have tinkered with. Caithe is the morale-booster, the glue, and the one who knows just how hard-hitting a surgical strike can be. If you told me at any point in the story that the world was uniting behind them, I’d be all for it because it is the most logical thing to do.
Expecting anyone to follow Trahearne because a tree said so? No. I’d not follow him any more than I’d follow the crazy man on the street corner screaming about the coming apocalypse, or the man who said that he is driven solely by a dream or some sort of providence. Trahearne is shoe-horned in, made to seem like he is important, and the real heroes – Destiny’s Edge, our characters, those characters we’ve interacted with along the way – are made to sit in the back seat and obey his every whim.