thinking about how lae'zel is literally THE first character you ever see on-screen in bg3 even before getting to make your own tav, and how her story as a young warrior from a race of people who were once enslaved by mind flayers is SO deeply intertwined with the main plot of the game, and how she herself has such awesome character development focused on loyalty and duty and being free to become your own person and make your own path in life and how she's arrogant and aggressive and closed-off and says edgy shit like "i know only blood-red and death-black, my mind is silver and my body steel" but then she also speaks so poetically at times and can be so romantic and compassionate and she gets embarrassed when you tell her it's "tiefling" not "teethling" and she responds to shadowheart saying "have we buried the hatchet?" with "no, why would i bury a weapon, is it broken?". and how she was basically the only origin companion that i knew nothing about before i played bg3 for the first time even though i'd been seeing constant posts about the game for months!! ugh lae'zel i love you so much you deserve so much more appreciation.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
video game challenge: [5/7] female characters – Lae'zel (Baldur's Gate 3)
If Voss speaks true -- if ascension is a lie, if tadpole purification is a fairy tale... Then I have not sinned against Vlaakith. She has sinned against me.
I adore Astarion as a character, much as I adore every companion, but seeing the most toxic and vocal of his fans VEHEMENTLY REFUSE to acknowledge that he can be cruel and sadistic, especially in Act 1, is so annoying. I mean, more fun for me, I like that he has a bloodlust and sadistic side. Especially before he goes through some softening and development as the game goes on. But the way some fans talk down to anyone who thinks Astarion starts out on theevil side of D&D alignment (he is! and that's okay) is really frustrating.
Consistently chooses to deal with his feelings on his own instead of with others; if you tell him the Rite of Thorns has completed, he says he needs to go be alone. In the deleted scene where you could collapse his portal, he would have gone off to be alone before leaving the party. He mentions after the Shadow Curse that he'd became fond of lonely nights alone with honey mead.
Laments his lack of peers, stating that his forced leadership role stole away the few the Shadow Curse didn't kill, and even cites this as part of the reason he began to "gild undeserving memories of his youth" and romanticize being a sex slave as he had been before.
Wants a family, but hasn't had one, and seems to think during the main game that his chance his slipped him by due to how much time he spent as Archdruid; also misses his birth family who died years ago.
Is adored and revered by some of the Druids, but hated by just many, seen as weak, ineffectual, and even the cause of them not being able to fight back the goblin armies.
Is blamed by the Tiefling refugees for what happened, or at least associated with their trauma so much that if you control Halsin in act 2 and attempt to speak with them, they refuse to talk to him.
Has had unique traumas that the other tadfools don't always understand, being frustrated at times with his laser-focus on the Shadow Curse, and sometimes not understanding the significance of him saying he won't drink except on very special occasions anymore (despite being very well-meaning when they suggest breaking his dry streak).
Was lonely enough, and not seen for HIMSELF enough, that just journeying with you is something he cites as one of the happiest, if not the happiest, time of his life (the note he sends you in the epilogue if he's left behind in the Shadow-Cursed Lands; his Speak With Dead dialogue if killed by Orin)
Repeatedly relies on you as the player for physical safety (rescue from the goblins, protection from the portal, potentially rescuing from Orin), emotional intimacy whether romantic or platonic, sexual intimacy if the player is interested, and the ability to be himself and be pulled from what he describes as the "fog" that fell over him with the Shadow Curse (which ftr is absolutely a metaphor for depression, almost all of us who have had it will describe it the same way)
Loves you so much if you pursue a relationship and yet doesn't believe for a moment you'd actually want to go with him to his new commune, to the point of treating it like a forgone conclusion that you won't and being completely taken aback when you say of course you're coming; even after living together for six months, he still believes you don't actually want to stay with him forever, and that the instant seeing your old friends reminds you of your adventuring days, you'll want to run off again and leave him behind. (And yet despite this, despite being in agony about it, he STILL comes without hesitation, both because he wants to see his old friends too and because he knows that even if you do decide you want to leave, he has no right to stop you.)
In short: Halsin has been isolated for so much of his life, and is so used to being left behind (willingly or not) that he just doesn't have a framework for a happy long-term relationship, and is unused to being able to rely on others to fulfill his emotions or social needs until he meets you. You aren't just a lover- you're his family, the first person to show him care in a VERY long time.
My favorite thing about Halsin is that he unabashedly CARES and refuses to stop caring. No matter what he goes through. No matter how hopeless he feels. He refuses to stop caring, to the point that it causes him pain more often than not.
He refuses to stop caring about refugees. He refuses to accept Baldur's Gate's status quo. He refuses to stop fighting the Shadow Curse that everyone else wrote off as unbreakable. Even when captured by goblins, he tried to cure them of their tadpoles and only gave up on them when they started torturing him and threatening his Grove instead.
He refuses to stop caring about the state of the world, and the struggle between his duties as a Druid and his own desire for a family (because he also refuses to stop caring for the then-hypothetical children he dreamed of). He refuses to stop caring about the balance between humanity and nature. He refuses to stop caring about his devotion to Silvanus and he refuses to stop caring about his friends, even when one of them, as an undead, is the embodiment of everything Druids are supposed to hate as the summation of everything "unnatural."
He refuses to stop caring about the family he lost years ago. He refuses to stop caring about those under his watch, to the point that if the Druids die in the Druid vs Tiefling fight, Halsin blames himself instead of them.
He CARES. In a world that- very similar to ours- tries to punish and beat down people who care, that tries to wear them into a state of numb apathy, Halsin continues to love, and care, and want better for those who need it. He refuses to stop being the voice for the voiceless.
Every world needs a Halsin, or ideally many Halsins.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
DO YOU ever just. Think about Halsin. Halsin, "I outgrew cynicism around the age of 200" Silverbough. Halsin, who constantly encourages you not to give in to despair, especially when others need you.
THAT Halsin, who himself becomes so overwhelmed with pain and helplessness when he sees the pain others experience in Baldur's Gate that he considers that the Shadow Druids might have a point, and needs you to remind him he's better than that.
THAT Halsin, who, in the deleted morphic pool scenes where each character would have been tormented by the brain, would have been shown a vision of himself saying everything was hopeless and meaningless and it would have been better to let it all burn.
THAT Halsin. The Halsin who is so kind and cares so much for others that being unable to help their pain makes him nearly surrender to despair himself, even after fighting so hard to overcome it. The Halsin who just wants to help and protect others, especially children. The Halsin who, if he dies to Orin, says his purpose was to help his friends as they'd helped him (to help others). The Halsin who fights every minute of every day to make the world " a place worth saving", who will make his own meaning in the world, in life, if he can't find one, because he REFUSES, as much as he struggles with it, to accept a reality where there is no point, where everything IS helpless. Because as much as he struggles, as much as he fears it's so, he WON'T let that be true- so he'll make his own purpose if he has to.
Halsin is such a fucking beautiful character I can't stand it!!!!
Wyll Ravengard is the very first time I have genuinely enjoyed a “classical prince” archetype in media since childhood (at least. possibly since forever though, idr.) being romantically-challenged (aroace) myself I just tend to find the trope mildly annoying lol and not terribly engaging much of the time.
but Wyll is special because it’s his fantasy. he holds himself to the image of the archetypical “hero” in fairytales the same way I might hold myself to the image of a benevolent creature in fairytales, to draw strength from in order to be kind and brave. that’s authentic and so very real. he’s not “pretending” because that is who he is inside, but he is, like so many of us, leaning on the values of his beloved stories to guide him. both in striving for good and also in simply having fun.
Preface: this is a long ass post that I wrote some many weeks ago, and that because of some stuff I've seen, I'm compelled to finally post it. It's very like a spurn of the moment thing, not extremely well thoght out but I still think it's relevant.
.
Recently, a few people have posted some, in my opinion, really insightful infographics showing the difference in content to how many works (in AO3) there are to the female characters vs the male characters of BG3 and I've been thinking about how it relates to fandom in general, but also...everything.
As a quick rundown, what happens is: almost all of the female characters have a lot less content when compared to their male counterparts (at least writing wise). And I think this is a great moment to stop and think on why is that.
There's a lot of point to begin with but I want to begin with something larger and that is the society most of us are raised in. Obviously, I can't speak for everyone, but I think it's fair to say that most people grew up in places that had its fair share of sexism and give it or take, that does shape how we view the world.
I'll speak from my own experience. Even thought I had a mostly liberal upbriging, I went to a very conservative school and when I was growing up, I saw a lot of videos on youtube that anaylized media in what i can only describe as "god forbid women do anything". Video after video, I saw people commenting on how x female character was a mary sue, how she made no sense and ruined the plot, so many video essays on the """strong female character trope"""" that would end up just enforcing gender roles again. And I'll be honest, this DID affect how viewed female characters.
The best example I can give of this is with bg3 itself. There was one day that I stopped and realized that Minthara was the first time I ever obsessed over a fem character as much as any male character. And the second thought I had after this was 'oh my god why???'
Why did I always cater more to the male characters than I did to the female ones, when most of the times, I liked a lot as well?
I'd like to point out that I've seen the topic of "Most fic authors are cis straight women" being brought up a lot and frankly, I'm not the biggest fan of it. First, because I think it's overall a very...heteronormative way of seeing stuff and it's assuming a lot of stuff that puts a sour taste on my mouth (as a queer woman myself, I really don't like that implication but that's on me). Second, because saying that 'obviously women are going to write more about men' feels very...weird. Third, I just think that this argument fails to really question the why of it all and gives too simple an answer to something is anything but.
One can make the argument that these female characters are written differently than the men, and yes that is true and it's even historical (I wrote a whole project on the invisibility of women in theater through the ages and a lot of it has to do with how women were written, but that's a story for another time).
But I don't think that's true for all cases. It's easy to blame an imaginary writer's room than question that you might have internal biases.
Because at least it's what happened to me. I grew up hearing how female characters were inferior to the male characters and it affected how I viewed them. It's something I had to stop and reevalute and it led me to appreciate characters I once loathed.
And it sucks to realize that. It sucks to realize that even as a woman myself, I was not immune to commiting sexism, that I hadn't fully outgrown the shit I saw as a kid. Does that make me a bad person? No. You're not to blame for being raised in a way that leads you to have certain prejudices.
But it doesn't mean you can't do anything about it.
And no, the solution is not to suddenly go write a bunch of femslash. Because no one is saying that you should feel ashamed for writing more for men, or forcing you to like female characters. But, I ask you to do something much simpler.
Think on the why. Why, even when we love female characters, we don't show them as much love as we do to the male ones. Why we might feel more compelled to write for the men than for the women. Because sometimes it's questioning ourselves that we can find something about us we didn't know and change how we engage with media.
And you can brush this off as just fandom stuff, but I think it does, in some ways, also reflect a bit on how we act as whole as a society. Hell, writing this whole thing made me think of how the way I was raised still interferes with my own sexuality (which is a very personal topic for me to get on here but it was worth mentioning). What I'm trying to say is that sometimes something small is an easier way for us to understand the bigger, systemic issues around us.
I know that it sounds like there's nothing to be done cause fandoms have always been like this. But, personally, this sort of conformity to the norm causes more harm then good. Things won't change unless you decide to do something about it. And the good thing about fandom is that it's small enough that doing literally anything can create some impact than, I don't know, trying to solve big, real life societal issues.
This is getting long so I'm gonna try to wrap this up quickly. No one is shaming you if you write or obsesses more or even care more about male characters than you do female ones. I just ask you to think about it and be honest with yourself. Because then maybe, just maybe, next time you engage with another media, you might end up enjoying a female character much more and obsessing over them just as much.
I played Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic way back in the day, and I remember feeling disappointed that the novels made Revan canonically male. A powerful, charismatic Sith leader and mechanical genius, a man again? Of course. I personally find Revan more interesting as a woman, and I feel similarly about Durge. There aren't many female characters in fiction who are charismatic, genuinely threatening cult leaders with power and influence, who are not overly sexualized or deemed insane (Azula from Avatar: The Last Airbender, Harley Quinn, and Orin from BG3 come to mind). One of the few examples I can think of is Edelgard from Fire Emblem: Three Houses, who is written with so much depth and nuance that I practically wept when I found out she existed. I also really appreciate Kreia from KOTOR II and Ethel from BG3.
Let fictional women be written as villains: powerful, charismatic, fun, sexy without being sexualized, irredeemable, and violent. Let fictional women be rogues, tricksters, devils, cult leaders, corrupt politicians. Heck, let fictional women be older and all of the above things.
My Revan and Durge are women because there are too few female examples of those kinds of characters. People love villains, and villains are usually wildly popular, but so few of the villains who are beloved for being so charismatic, powerful, and accomplished are women.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
I can't believe I feel like I need to say this, but Wyll's writer doesn't deserve as much hate as they've been getting.
They're not in charge of making literally every single creative decision for Wyll.
It was not just Wyll's writer who decided to rewrite Wyll from the Early Access Wyll Eltan into Wyll Ravengard.
It's not Wyll's writer who gave Wyll the standard Warlock outfit instead of a custom starting outfit like every other origin character gets.
It's not Wyll's writer who gave Wyll one of the standard hairstyles, instead of a custom one. And it's not Wyll's writer who made Wyll's hair with that very poorly done and inaccurate hair texture.
It's not Wyll's writer who decided to barely put Wyll in the art book.
It's not just Wyll's writer who decided he wasn't getting a sex scene like every other origin character gets.
It's not Wyll's writer who cut the Upper city, where (allegedly) a lot of Wyll's arc was supposed to happen, causing Wyll to (allegedly) be hastily heavily rewritten again.
Wyll was not written in a vacuum. A video game is not made by just one person calling the shots—these decisions would have been made by the creative team at large. As a whole Larian Studios did not put as much time/money/effort into Wyll as they put into the other Origin characters.
And look, I know this is purely conjecture, but if I were Wyll's writer and had an entire story planned and already largely written and ready to go (e.g. EA Wyll) only to be told that I needed go back and entirely rewrite that character, I would lose a lot of love for that character. If I were then told I needed to go back again, and hastily re-write that character's main Arc so it could fit into a different area of the story, I'd be fucking livid (e.g. cutting the Upper City). This doesn't excuse Wyll's writer, but it does explain.
All I'm saying is, if you're going to blame Wyll's writer, blame them for the thing they actually had control over: Wyll's writing!
And guys, c'mon, at least act better than crabs in a bucket. Stop saying that Character X's content should be cut because it's unfair that Wyll got so little. Stop attacking fans of other characters. Dragging other people down isn't going to help any of us get out of this bucket.
"Astarion can be vulnerable and tender, namely when he's exploring the concept of non-sexual intimacy."
and
"Astarion is a selfish and hedonistic vampire who has a penchant for evil."
are all statements that are true at the same time. Get you a man who can do it all.
I don't understand this black and white, flat way of interpreting Astarion's personality. He can be selfish and vulnerable. He can be hedonistic and do good deeds. He can be loving and cruel. All at once. All in different situations and in different ways. For different reasons and different people. Just like all the other characters in the game, Astarion isn't locked into one list of personality traits that follow strict rules based on which ending you choose. I'm so confused by players who praise the game for its depth in narrative and emotional response from characters YET also treat Astarion's endings as if they're just:
Hidden Heart of Gold trope guy VS a mustache twirling villain in an 80's cartoon. Or Zuko VS Christian Gray.
Viewing his endings that way just completely flattens out his entire canon personality in ALL routes.
Astarion isn't as different in his endings as some seem to think. It's just really baffling to me to ignore entire parts of his background and personality for more "favorable" ones. It's always fine for roleplay, but to say those things were never there canonly or can't be there for other players is the most bizarre behavior to me.
This fandom can be exhausting. People can be so rude about how they interpret characters or taking other people's opinions personally. Not everyone needs to love the character or ship you love. Just... play in your own corner? I saw Shadowheart being called a "mainstream waifu" again and nearly burst a blood vessel. Why is it always Astarion vs. Lae'zel/Minthara/Shadowheart in some kind of morality Olympics? Can we all just admit they're flawed and even cruel/sadistic at times and love them for their growth (or in Minthara's case, simply because she is evil and hot??)
Do the kids these days not think it's okay to like morally problematic characters, so they need to argue that they're better than they are written, or what?
Signed,
An unconcerned villain and evil character lover without guilt
In my BG3 save files there are two paths. One is the angel path (a goody two shoes Druid who will romance Halsin and Shadowheart). One is the devil path (a Warlock with Raphael as her patron [in my head/with equipment mods] Dark Urge romancing Astarion but sighing after the Cambion who is such a fan of her work).
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
I love warlock Durge forgetting their patron/contract, but imagine if they had some contract with Raphael, which they didn't remember, so when he gets them to sign the new contract, he makes sure there's a clause that will violate the old one
No matter what Durge does, they'll be liable to the consequences of violating at least one of the contracts — and who knows what the consequences are of that mystery contract; Durge might have been one of Raphael's favourites 😏
These unused crystal ball dialogs remind me of a narrative horror game called Fallen London that I enjoy. The erotic horror potential and the implications that Raphael is obsessed with Tav/Durge are quite fun to consider.
