#mursaat

Mabon the Mesmer

Arenanet continues to be excellent at writing social commentary through a fantasy lens.

Repentance is much more subtle than Grothmar Valley about it, but seems to me that several parts of their portrayal of Mursaat society in this patch is as much about the state of things in the real world as Icebrood Saga was at its time. Grothmar Valley shows pretty explicitly how fascist tyrants like Bangar come into power and together with things like Forging Steel show how the youth get radicalized over to extremist stances.

Repentance instead shows us the literal ruins of such a society. Mursaat elders and leaders were obsessed with "returning to Nayos", similar to those "return to the good old days/return to tradition" types. We don't know if any of these elders had actually been in Nayos or were all Tyrian-born themselves, but they were obsessed with this concept of returning to an essentially mythical home to the complete detriment of the society they were meant to uplift.

To the point they were willing to kill their own, using vague language like "dissidents, the insane, and the weak" where the definitions could be easily expanded to mean whoever they wanted to silence and kill.

And Manikaz...notably he was young and regarded himself and his peers as "the future," even disregarding the Seers as insignificant for having lost their war. Manikaz is the sort of youth who looks forward and sees the past as only worth keeping in the past. His entire goal is the survival of his race--this means keeping the Door of Komalie shut while pushing the boundaries of their society to new heights.

Manikaz is the sort who develops tools to advance his society, only for said tools to become a new means of control. And Manikaz, unfortunately for the other Mursaat, was unwilling and unable to take real action against his leaders.

Instead, all he did was lament his own actions, unwilling to recognize he had become part of the system he hoped to advance in a different direction.

Genuinely one of my favorite pieces of writing in this patch was his description of having killed a gildless--a literal child--because it sums up the themes of Manikaz's background.

"I spilled the blood of my kin across the stone the other day, on Mercia's order." and "His blood stains my armor still." There's shame in the actual act, and almost a recognition of his fault here. But ultimately Manikaz shifts the blame onto his elders--"Why wasn't Orestes there to save him? Where did that contemptible old fool flee? Did he know what was about to happen?" Why aren't the elders doing their job of uplifting and protecting our children? instead of I could have stopped this from happening.

Unwilling to recognize his own fault, Manikaz becomes fully part of the system laid down by the elders, just as eager to work on reopening the gate to Nayos to the detriment of everything else.

To the point it kills all Mursaat children

And thus we have a civilization driven to complete death and ruin by: leaders unable to let tradition and the past go, youth unwilling to learn from the past, inaction against tyrants in power, and the complete disregard of the most vulnerable members of their civilization.

With Secrets of the Obscure opening the possibility of us meeting more mursaat, and female mursaat at that, I want to point out a little noticeable fun fact about mursaat in Guild Wars 1.

While there is only one model used for all mursaat, thus leading one to think we only see male mursaat, based on the names of the various bosses it can be concluded that we do see female mursaat as well.

For example:

Willa the Unpleasant

Willem the Demeaning

Male and female form of the same name. Willa and Willem. There are other feminine names seen too, of course. Such as Aily the Innocent and Mercia the Smug.

So what does this mean?

This means mursaat have no notable sexual dimorphism from their models, particularly of note being their chest. Their females' chests look just like their males' chests. This is a female mursaat:

And it is also a male mursaat.

This is NOT accurate female mursaat clothing:

But adapted for the sake of humans and norn to wear (and sylvari just use this because humans and norn get weird seeing nude sylvari).