God I miss Trahearne

It was the winter of 2017. I wanted to get my girlfriend into GW2, so I decided to give her HoT & PoF as a Christmas present. If she got hooked, we’d have an extra in our raid roster, if not, I’d have one more account. Win-win.

When she got to the character creation screen, I advised her against making an Asura or Sylvari for obvious reasons. After she had a look at the Charr and proclaimed them as “cute”, making a furry joke, I quickly told her that race was kitten as well. She liked the female Norn hairstyles but i told her how huge they were and she finally picked a human.

And hour later, she had created her character. Thus, we started our adventure in Tyria. I tried not to tell her how clumsy she was, but the way she moved her character and the skills she used (frigging Point Blank Shot!!!) screamed “noob”. Under my tutelage, however, she became somewhat competent. The most annoying part was the huge amount of time she took to read everything. It’s not like that she couldn’t read fast. She insisted to read -every- bit of text she stumbled upon. All the options in the chat boxes… All the torn pages and random kitten… Taking five minutes to decide which option to pick whenever the story branched. I had to get the chrono i was leveling ready for raiding and we eventually split up, so I could level faster.

Then, one evening, as I was trying my chrono in T1, it happened. The beginning of the bitter end.

“This guy looks interesting.”

I had to focus on my game, didn’t ask her who she meant, so was pretty disturbed to find her playing a Sylvari a few days later and telling me that… She wanted to play the Sylvari PS in order to learn more about that lousy Twigger! I asked her how she can even stand hearing him speak, his voice being as flat and wooden as a plank. “But it feels just as solid, smooth and… hard.” I rolled my eyes and tried to remedy that by telling her Tybald died because Trahearne was incompetent, and it should have been the twig sacrificing himself instead of our mentor.

“But that was Tybalt’s moment, his chance to make things right and become a hero! He said so himself! And it was that commander Charr’s fault for not listening to the two of us and Traheaaaaarne.”

…

In the following days, I had to endure squeals like “Oh, he’s so shy and embarrassed to talk to the girl, how cute!” and “He’s both so creepy and cute!” Just… writing this hurts almost as much as it hurt hearing it. I found the traitor who had told her she could get more Trahearne if she played sylvari and kicked him from the guild. But worse was yet to come. She got in a horrible mood when she reached HoT, started pulling all-nighters. My girlfriend, who’d barely touched a game before and got grumpy if she missed even a few minutes sleep! I found her asleep on her desk once, her character in fort trinity kneeling before you-know-who, and a fanart of him opened in her browser! Enough was enough! We had to talk!

The next day I asked her where she was in the story, she was nearing the end of HoT. I did my best to be supportive. I consoled her about and even tried to calm her down and told her “It’s going to be fine, the ending is very good” when she started whining about Treehare. She calmed down a bit and a few nights of great sex followed. I’d call it the best sex I’ve ever had, if I know now didn’t make me retch at the mere thought of it.

It was only right that I insisted on us doing “Hearts and Minds” together. I was about to have my revenge, my moment of glory. As I cackled maniacally during the grand finale, I suddenly realized she was gone. She spent three hours crying in the bathroom, and no amount of consoling worked. My claim that my laugh was one of frustration and not of triumph didn’t fly. She was unberable for the next two weeks, puffy-eyed, snotty, messy hair, always whining. The last straw, however, was when I saw her one day lying naked in bed with headphones on in a very compromising position. That’s how I found she had used my credit card to buy all of the kitten novels narrated by Matthew Brenher. I threw her out, naked as she was.

Forget about stealing Saladbowl, personal story and all the glory in GW2. Trahearne stole my girlfriend, stole my car (why did I even buy it under her name?!?) and drained my bank account IRL.

I blocked her number, blocked her on every single social media account I had, on every single forum. I stopped going anywhere near the Mystic Forge in LA, got a panic attack every time i saw that mini and eventually had to uninstall the game. And yet, a few days ago, one final punch in the gut came when i got the message: “Remember the most wonderful sex we had? Do you know why that was? I imagined you were Trahearne.”

let the commander/tag open the doors.

if there’s a tag running on the map you’re on, don’t go opening the doors and ruining it for the squad; join them or find a new map.

don’t use knockback/launch skills*. the key point in lab is to tag as many enemies as possible for the loot and/or exp, and if someone slaps them away, you get less loot/exp.

if you’re leaving your squad, leave the map; let someone else get in, since maps fill up so quickly.

don’t join a squad with specifications you don’t, can’t, or won’t match (ex all thief, no trinkets, etc). pretty common sense, but if you get scolded/kicked/can’t keep up, that’s on you.

Tumblr keeps shadowing any posts I make with links so if this post doesn’t show up in the tags I’m gonna lose my mind