Guild Wars 2

Siadea, I wanted to address your concern in it’s own post, because it can be a touchy subject. First off, if I offended you, I apologize, but I believe you are reading a little too much into it. I used the Native Americans as a hypothetical example not because I think they are barbarians (Heck, my wife has Shoshone ancestry) but because they were the first RL example I could think of that involved a native people being forced out of their homes by invaders, much as the Charr were in the lore. I was just pointing out that Native Americans had a similar situation to the Charr, and much more recently than the gap between Charr losing part of their land and their invasion to reclaim it, yet I doubted that anyone would be ok with them attacking the rest of America to reclaim their land, while the Charr invasion seems to be pretty well accepted by the playerbase in general.

I’m sure there were any number of European examples I could have used for the same hypothetical situation, I just used the example I did because it is one of the more recent, widely known examples of a people losing their homeland to outside invaders.

AuldWolf, I let your first post go, but since you seem intent on insulting, I’ll respond to you. You claim my info doesn’t exist in any lore, while ignoring the fact that I directly quoted the wiki as to the nature of Charr society and posting nothing that refutes or adds to the info from said wiki. And you kind of make my point for me as well by pointing out the charr fishermen, farmers, etc. According to the wiki, and I again quote “Non-military tasks, such as farming and trade, can be left to the young, retired, and injured” while in game we have healthy adult farmers and scholars. Game and lore contradict each other, leaving a rather confused view of the Charr.
As for the fahrars, again I will quote the wiki “As soon a cub is weaned, around being a year old, they enter a fahrar of one of their parents’ legion. The fahrar is the cubs’ first warband and they are trained as a military unit under supervision of an adult and are considered an adult when the warband no longer needs supervision. The cubs are taught to unify and define their own social structure and the warband shares a root name which they incorporate into their surname. While ancestry is known and acknowledged, the parents have little to do with the raising of the cub, and as such warbands are viewed as a charr’s family and the bonds of loyalty and kinship formed between them are stronger than those of other races’ families.”

Doesn’t exactly sound like a college prep course to me, more like, hmm… perhaps boot camp? And straight from the lore that I haven’t even looked at, mind you.

I think a lot of the misinformation you mention most likely comes from the fact that the lore and game basically contradict each other in places, which is one reason I posted this topic in the first place. Actually look at the entry on the wiki (which I took the vast majority of my Charr view from) instead of just dismissing my post because you don’t agree with it. My original post was the view I took away from reading that information and applying it to a society as a whole. Where your society says you must be a soldier or you are an outcast, where do laboratory scientists and artists fit in? Again, I refer you to the quote above about non-military tasks, from the official lore, and ask you how it matches the fact that there is indeed a scriptorum in the Black Citidel.

Trust me, I have far better ways to spend my time than trolling, I’m actually trying to be convinced or shown how the contradicting facts work out so I can play a Charr properly, because in the wiki at least, they have some bad PR people

First off, I want to thank you guys for informative, well thought out replies, exactly what I was hoping for. Zephire, I’ll be reading through all of those links. One of the reasons I made this post is that I am actually playing a Charr as one of my toons, and kept running into situations where the background and in-game info just didn’t seem to mesh all that well.

/removes unused asbestos suit.

This was a nice change, an actual discussion over a somewhat inflammatory topic. I’m going to like this community.

Ok, this post may get me flamed to a cinder, but I’m interested in other people’s opinions.

A lot of people really like the Charr, but they seem to be filling in some info with things that I don’t see at all.

Bluntly put, I see the Charr as barbarians. Barbarians with guns and tanks perhaps (a point I will discuss in the wall of text), but still barbarians.

Let’s take a look at my reasoning:

1. The Charr fought among themselves until someone was strong enough to unite them. Once that happened, they started looking for other people to fight. They invaded the land south of theirs and conquered it, taking it for themselves. Then the humans and their gods showed up and drove the Charr out of these lands that they had stolen from someone else and settled there. A thousand years later the Charr, saying they are reclaiming their “homeland” (Which as I mentioned, it wasn’t, they just conquered it before the humans showed up) proceed to basically commit genocide on any human kingdom they can get their claws into.

To put it in RL perspective, since most people seem ok with the Charr’s actions in the game world, how morally defensible would you find it if the Native Americans rose up and massacred everyone in the United States because they wanted their homeland back? I don’t think too many people could support that, and they really did lose their homeland, and only a few hundred years ago too.

2. They know nothing but war. That is stated very plainly, in more than one place. Charr are soldiers, nothing else. To quote the Wiki:

The charr are a military culture and their society, technology and relationships are very much focused on supporting war. Society is built around military units which charr become a part of from childhood. Non-military tasks, such as farming and trade, can be left to the young, retired, and injured. But no matter a charr’s vocation they are always viewed as a soldier and view life like a soldier. Weakness and foolishness from individuals is viewed with particular contempt, some of such acts can result in a charr becoming a gladium, or in a worse case, the charr’s name being struck from the race’s history.

So, we have a culture where the only acceptable vocation is war, unless you’re young, too old, or unfit. This is actually one of the places that their status as “most technologically advanced race” really bothers me. Clearly, many advances come from warfare. The problem is that for technology to advance enough to bring new iterations of better weapons though technology, there need to be people studying these advances. That’s kind of a tough one when well, let’s face it, the Charr have no schools, no scientists, no real education of any kind beyond making sure their children are ready to kill or die before they hit puberty. Nothing in their society fosters learning, or for that matter, really allows for it. I dare you, be a Charr who wants to be a scholar instead of a soldier, and see how far you get, you worthless gladium.

So somehow a race with no scholars, schools or education managed to magically advance their technology of war several centuries ahead of everyone else, all of whom actually hold some value to education. I mean, even the Norns have scholars among them, and you don’t build 20 story wooden halls without a darn good knowledge of architecture. Yet the Charr, soldiers to the last, trained only for war, advanced past all the other races. sniff sniff Do I detect the odor of a bull’s potty break? I swear I do all of a sudden.

Remember, a lot of our technology did come from war, but there were educated scientists developing the weapons the military wanted, they weren’t invented by Private Jones and Corporal Smith putting their heads together to invent a machine gun.

3. On top of all this, you have a society with no family bonds, cubs are put in communal homes where they are prepared to be soldiers, nothing more. (Slamming into that education thing again, oops) So in a society where you probably don’t even know who your father was and you are raised to be a soldier of your legion, do the Charr have the slightest idea how to care for someone beyond the concern and loyalty of one soldier to another? And if the answer is yes, then where does it come from?

Let us not forget that everyone being a soldier also means no artists, no entertainers, zilch. The only Charr artwork seems to be statues depicting Charr who were especially good killers, probably created by bored Charr who were crippled in battle and decided to make a statue to pass the time.

Ok, massive wall of text done, for those of you who read it and reply thoughtfully, thank you. I’d really like to know if there is anything that takes the Charr above the level of army ants on a moral or philosophical scale.