Thread by @Delafina777

Last episode of this season of GW2 launched. I outlined the episode (and the following season, which ended up changing our first conception of the final confrontation), but it's the first one I didn't actually do any direct story editing/writing for.

So, watching it was a really strange experience--I think they brought it in for a landing really well, and that last cutscene was better than anything I imagined for it. Just stunningly beautiful.

SPOILERS:

They played up the idea that Aurene's element as an Elder Dragon is light SO GORGEOUSLY and it's a perfect example of how creative constraints can sometimes lead things to be better than they would have otherwise.

So, the first draft of the rebreaking of the season (I came in with Eps 1, 2, and 3 already in production, but we had to change the story around assets and maps already made), had Aurene's ascension as a much more ambivalent thing, with her first words, "I'm the new god of war."

We backed off on that and decided to play it as an unabashed happy ending, have her ascend to Elder Dragonhood and leave the god thing ambiguous.

Only one problem: we knew we needed a full-scale model of Kralk for the final episode, because you were going to fight him. That was straining overtasked production resources, though, because they were moving people onto the other projects & resources on LW were dwindling.

Because they needed to focus on creating his model for Ep 6, all they could get us for Ep 5 was his head, which is why that battle was staged the way it was.

But cool, we'd have a full model of him for the big battle in Ep 6, that's what was important.

And then someone pointed out that if Aurene was going to ascend, we'd need a model of her, too. *record scratch*

And the poor producer is shaking her head, like, no, there's no way we can do two Elder Dragon full-body models for this episode, it's completely impossible.

And I, feeling the gallows-humor of despair, said jokingly, well, what if when she ascended we just covered it up with a lot of lens flare?

And someone else was like, wait, yes, we've been assuming her element as an Elder Dragon has to be crystal because she's a crystal dragon, but what if it's light?

And that idea ended up stretching backwards--the idea of her functioning as a prism that opens up a spectrum of possibilities, or focuses chaos into a single path--into how we wrote her for Eps 4 and 5.

That moment for me was just a really great encapsulation of the "yes, and..." of a healthy creative process: you're hit with a seemingly insurmountable obstacle, someone makes an offhand comment about it, & someone else takes that comment seriously and builds a solution from it.

That was how a lot of the creative process ended up working. Someone would say, "Okay, I have a really stupid idea," and we'd all be like TELL US, and frequently, A) the idea wasn't actually stupid, and B) it ended up getting fashioned into something usable.

Or even if it didn't get used, it jumped us onto a different problem-solving track and broke us out of a rut. Sometimes it just made us laugh and broke tension/frustration.

Give your "stupid" ideas airtime when you're brainstorming. They can save the day.

I was surprised by the way the final encounter with Kralk ended up playing out. The way I'd outlined it, it was a temptation narrative that mirrored Glint's trials.

Kralk was talking to you both simultaneously, trying to drive a wedge between you, and you were only getting bits of what he was saying to Aurene.

Basically, trying to make you fear that if Aurene killed him and took his power, she'd become just like him, and that you couldn't fully understand her, even though you'd raised her, because she was, after all, a dragon, not a human.

And saying to Aurene, first, that she'd become like him if she took his place, but then also playing on the idea that he was the only actual family she had left, the only one who could understand her, that she could never fully be understood by humans.

And that the answer to that temptation was, on your part, an affirmation that you *don't* need to fully understand her to love her, that you don't need her to be in your image to love her and trust her and be proud of her.

And on her part, that your family is who you *choose,* since that was a major theme of the season, and that she wouldn't become him because she has mortal family that she loves and listens to.

And that his final sally was going to be that reality was too broken to save, that she should let him destroy it, let it pass away. And that her answer to that was going to be that she wasn't going to stop fighting for it.

(Which is something she learned from Blish--you go down fighting. If you surrender, it's only to buy someone you love another chance to continue the fight.)

When we specced out the season, we didn't know if it was going to be the last one, so we had to construct the story in a way that could feel like a satisfying ending, but also leave things open for another season.

So Ep 6 was outlined under that rubric. Then while we were drilling down on details, we got confirmation that there would be another season, which meant saying, okay, Aurene's the *start* of a solution to the magical imbalance, but it's not fixed.

Hence the pivot from "Aurene ascends to Elder Dragonhood AND godhood, uniting those two opposed sets of cosmic forces," to Kralk arguing that the corruption of reality (set off by the introduction of god magic into the system) has gone too far to be stopped.

And the idea that Kralk was being destroyed by all the magic he'd consumed was part of that, but it was very tied up in the Elder Dragons being manifestations of the world itself, so he was corrupted even as the world was corrupted.

The pivot to Kralk recognizing that he was in misery and essentially welcoming the Commander and Aurene putting him out of his misery was new to me. I think it was really poignant.

It's also, knowing how exhausted and desperate and overworked the team was in my last days there, hard not to read that decision as meta-commentary/creative self-insert. :(

Looking forward to seeing how S5 happens. No idea if they're still going with the outline we came up with. I can tell you it was *bonkers* and I had no idea how we could pull it off, and I was excited about doing something that weird and different.

But ultimately, I think the episode stayed true to the themes we'd had guiding the entire season--past mistakes coming home to roost, parenthood and accepting children as who they are, and chosen family--and I'm really happy about it.