Most of my GW2 Pact Commander headcanons and fic revolve around my main, Althea Fairchild, a noble origin human from an Ascalonian family. However! I made a new character (...also a human Ascalonian, as usual :P) and it’s been fun to think about her, too.

In my Althea fic, she is at all times firmly Ascalonian in her identity and sympathies, but gradually comes to realize that her experiences as a member of the Ascalonian diaspora who is also a wealthy aristocrat of Divinity’s Reach don’t represent the normative Ascalonian experience. She does have common experiences and causes for frustration (and rage!) with other Ascalonians, but most are not rich nobles with ties to the Ministry.

So I thought it’d be interesting for this new Ascalonian character to represent a different experience in Kryta than Althea, even while having certain areas of overlap. That meant the commoner or street origin, and since I’ve done commoner more often, I went with street. My achievements say I’ve done this before but I have no memory of the arc at all, and it is wildly different than the noble and common ones despite hitting similar beats of “long time friend gets into trouble in ways that ultimately enmesh you in Krytan political intrigue.”

Like, as a noble, your friend is a very stupid and self-absorbed fop/flirt, Lord Faren, who nevertheless rushes to see you when you’re hospitalized after saving a village and who later gets captured by bandits, which is how you get involved in the banditry plot at all.

As a commoner, your friends are Andrew the tavern-keeper and his sturdy daughter Petra, who are definitely the most wholesome of the potential friends, and don’t take well to bandits being obnoxious in their tavern and things spiral out from there.

If you’re from the streets, you are strongly implied to be a former bandit yourself who had aspirations to a better life, decided you could take care of yourself, ditched your gang, and realized that while you can take care of yourself, there are a lot of helpless people who can’t. Meanwhile, your old fellows see you as a sell-out who abandoned your old friends and left them to be exploited by various awful people while cozying up the Seraph. You try to help your closest friend from those days, Quinn, who never left the gang/bandit crew/whatever and thus far seems on an intellectual level with Faren, but stands up to the gang now and then with your support.

You also seem the most overtly pious of the human origins, which is really interesting.

Also part of the perception of you as a sell-out is your involvement with the Seraph, but since I also chose the “your sister was a Seraph whose body was never recovered from a centaur attack” background, the story I’m constructing in my head around that is more complicated. Like, if Deborah (your sister) went missing as a Seraph while you were in the street bandit gang (possibly implied to be leading them), then that seems like a whole story of its own, and how this is impacted by coming from a diaspora that the people in your country tend to look down on ... damn, there is so much more going on in this version of the arc. o_O