Wild Mass Guessing

[Thatoneguy]

I've always been interested in the lore aspect of Nexus Clash, but there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of discussion about it on the forums. So i thought I'd create a WMG thread. For those of you who don't know Wild Mass Guessing is a term used by TVTropes It pertains to discussions about works where the Lore is ambiguous and open to interpretation (So like this) So if you have a Theory about the lore post it here.
I'll Go first
Baraas didn't shape this breath, Azazel did.

Reasoning:
Laurentia seems to have had an iffy at best loyalty to the principle of cooperation. Not only was it founded by a guy who may have murdered his sister for leadership, but despite their great wealth they never made much of an effort to help sunrise. Basically the whole cooperation thing seems to be an elaborate ruse. You know whose the Elder Power of elaborate ruses is? Azazel! Not only that but the other planes are both mirror images of each other. To travel between them you just need to ask some guy to "show you things from a different perspective." That also sounds a lot more like Azazel than Baraas. So in conclusion Azazel is not only still alive he/she shaped this breath

[Tathers]

I like that theory.

[Xirvi]

I realize this thread is old but I only peruse these forums once every few months, if ever, and wanted to chime in. I made the Laurentia map and, along with Kandarin, wrote its backstory. Unfortunately, we were never able to really "complete" Laurentia in the way I wanted to. While the missing parts are essentially written, I am not a dev or involved in Clash in any way anymore. Laurentia will always remain unfinished. You, the player, get to fill in the gaps with what you feel is best. That said, I will try to fill in some of the gaps here:

1) Laurentia was technically founded by neither Lucien Moreau nor his son Jacques. The flag has "1832" on it for a good reason — the original settlement predates the Moreau family's presence there. Lucien was its most famous early settler, and Jacques was the one who led it toward unification as a single city. Jacques is complicated — I didn't play up his weird, proto-Marxist political views in the scraps as much as I planned, but that's what he was, though he was a tad insincere since in the end, his talk of empowering the working people ended up creating a new nobility. And no, he didn't kill his sister. The scraps show how Amelie was troubled long before Jacques returned to Laurentia.

2) Any prosperous place in the world comes at the expense of certain segments of the population. Name a prosperous, idyllic country and I will tell you how it has a dark side. Laurentia is no exception. In theory, Laurentia was to perfectly embody all of those "Baraasian" ideals — cooperation, hard work, etc. In practice, it was ruined by human nature. Modern Laurentia was meant to be a story of bad institutions (for example, City Administration) populated by good people (for example, Administrator Kojima), who are nonetheless unable to change those institutions because the institutions have become one of the things Baraas makes best: machines.

3) Cooperation in the modern world often has a seedy undercurrent. Look at most of the western world's major political parties. Some say, "we cooperate or we will suffer," while others say, "you will cooperate with each other, or else." This is a gross oversimplification of it, mind, but that's as succinct as I can put it. It's human nature to not want to cooperate sometimes and Laurentia's institutions had an unfortunately heavy-handed way of fighting that instinct. I was essentially faced with either making Laurentia a flawless, spotless technocratic utopia, or a flawed human city that had lofty, if somewhat contradictory, ambitions. I went with the latter.

---

Laurentia was always meant to be a subtle indictment (by its writer) of modern governments, technocracy, and society in general, but especially the ways that our technology-obsessed society often ignores the ways technology is used against us. In the grand scheme, we 21st century folks have it really good — so did most Laurentians. But that came at the expense of certain people's ability to prosper, since prosperity pretty much always does. Finally, re: Sunrise, if you read the newspaper articles, the city was about to embark on a massive, expensive revitalization project to fix the district (which had been in hard times since before the 1980 Banco de Sunrise heist), but the globe-spanning war tanked Laurentia's economy. Who always pays the price when it's time for austerity? The poor.

As a final note, the winning power from the previous breath only shapes the Valhalla plane: not the aligned planes of Elysium and Stygia. So even if Azazel had shaped this breath, he would not have had a say on the aligned planes. And also, I am really glad you made this post. Thank you.
_________________
"I'm coming up with the 'Anne Frank' scale of prioritization. As in, 'would Anne Frank give a shit about this?'" - jorm

[Thatoneguy]

Wow I never expected anyone to really respond to that. Thanks!
I guess my train of thought was that since everything in Laurentia seemed to have a dualistic element to it. And since Azazel was the EP of both truth and lies. They just sort of meshed. I had actually noticed the 1832 thing on the flag which is what got my gears turning (that an my LIT class got me in an analyzing mood). In a lot of ways everything in the city was based on lies. The son pretended to be a different person to get close to his father. The father built an empire on a false reputation. Some thieves set an explosion to divert attention from the true crime. The city believed in cooperation but refused to cooperate with the outside world. ETC.ETC.

And TV tropes is what got me into this game so I thought I should bring a little trace of TV Tropes to Nexus Clash.

And what the heck I'd like to ask another question. Does Laurentia exist on the same planet as Petra?

[Xirvi]

You're very welcome. I'm just really glad to see someone coming up with their own interpretations of Laurentia's backstory. Maybe 20% of what I wrote actually made it into the game, so it's very much incomplete. I wish it was all in there. But maybe it's better as it is, since it gives players the chance to create their own backstories within Laurentia's setting. I don't know, since I haven't played Clash since before b3 ended.

[Kandarin]

I'm glad this thread got resurrected. Since the Elder Powers got brought up, I ought to explain their role a bit more.

Meropis, a world whose creation was guided by Baraas (a Good power) was governed by systems that had a lot of problems - problems that ultimately destroyed it. That doesn't mean Baraas wasn't good...but while it's really obvious for the Evil ones, all of the Elder Powers have serious flaws in their ideals, flaws that end their worlds (or all civilization in them, which also triggers another Nexal cycle even if the world is still physically there) eventually. If one was able to create a world that sustained itself forever, the cycle of Breaths would end...but that can't happen because all of them have flaws in their ideologies or personalities that they're unable to fix because that would mean compromising things they care deeply about.

This means that as a character in the Nexus, all of your possible choices have serious downsides, including the choice to oppose all the Elder Powers and including the choice to side with no one but yourself. That's tragic, but it's a deliberate world-building design decision - none of your options should be the obvious "right choice", or else the story would be uninteresting.

In Baraas' case, his flaw is that he's unwilling and/or unable to acknowledge the dark side of his ideals of cooperation. He embraces human free will far more than the Alonai or Namm (who would diminish it for the sake of minimizing suffering and punishing the wicked, respectively) but his ideology has far too few checks on the many ways that humans can abuse or exploit cooperation for their own ends. As such, Baraas breaths are unusually vulnerable to harmful forms of collectivism. The end of Meropis demonstrated this - the nuclear war that destroyed civilization there was set off not by warlords or megalomaniacal dictators, but by people following procedure and acting in defense of their allies. Unfortunately, they were utterly unprepared for the magnitude of the consequences of those procedures.

Future Breaths will explore the benefits and flaws of other Elder Powers, though some you can no doubt guess already.

[SkullFace]

[Thatoneguy]

New WMG:

Hashaa destroyed Haldos not because he tried to overthrow her but because she loved him.

As the EP in charge of death and stillness she regarded death as her greatest gift and she couldn't justify denying her blessing to her greatest servant any longer and to show the esteem she held him in she chose to do it in person (an act any hasheen cultist would see as the highest honor). She knew he'd resist, but in her mind this was basically her showing him the final lesson she had for him. The Haldos that appeared as a raid boss way back in the day was the part of him she exorcised so he could move on.

As an extension of this WMG Hashaa gives her gifts to the Liches and Revenants that want immortality even though in theory that contradicts her philosophy, because she wants to help them overcome their fear of death, and she gives them these abilities in order to get closer to them (its sort of how a lot of real world religions have a good god that is identified as a friend of sinners even though ostensibly sinners act against their will).