🌿 Oak Father preserve you 🌿

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, There is a rapture on the lonely shore, There is society, where none intrudes, By the deep sea, and music in its roar: I love not man the less, but Nature more

🌿 🐻 indie rp blog for halsin silverbough of baldur's gate 3. 18+ only. semi-sel. crossover friendly. 🐻 🌿

The Turning off of all the Lights

You are life's on/off switch. One day humanity will be in full throttle, the next the engine is cut. Short circuited. Kaput. And not only did no one see it coming, but no one saw the aftermath. First they were there, and then they weren't. At least it was merciful, no one got to say their goodbyes, but no one knew that. Peace at last.

too lazy to find the meme :'3

Halsin glanced up from the book in his lap, blinking and head canted to one side in curiosity at Jack's announcement.

[Honestly? I don't think it ever struck him to explore his gender as he's never questioned being called a male or how his physical body fits with his interpretation of his gender. His ideas of gender are very fluid and don't really matter much to him, whether that be for himself or others, so it's just not something that he ever felt the need to question or explore. I won't pretend to be an expert on all the gender markers out there, but I think he is just a cis man and has always been comfortable with his gender identity as a man.

I don't think gender roles came up for him much in his life, at least not in the spaces he occupied most. He's aware of the phenomenon, but it doesn't come up much for him specifically. Growing up, his parents split the work and they never made any kind of separation between women's and men's work, or even women's and men's dress, demeanor, or the like (I also feel like gender roles aren't really a surface elf thing based on vibes? I could be very wrong about that though lol, but I imagine it depends on maybe the type of elf? Like maybe high elves would be more prone to it than say wood elves? Anyway, I digress). He didn't really grow up learning any kind of structural binary when it came to gender, and studying nature and becoming a druid further cemented that even just saying there are two physical sexes is more complex than a binary anyway, and that even going off of a binary male and female system, what one species considered a "female" role was a "male" role to another, so he was pretty largely unaffected by it growing up. Studying medicine in general probably helped as well.

Among the druids, I also imagine that there weren't gender roles. Everyone worked for the betterment and protection of the Grove more or less, and it didn't matter if you were a male or female or somewhere in between. People just...didn't care. Nature itself does not work on a binary, so I imagine druids are pretty chill about gender in general (unless they're some kind of conservative nut druid that wants to pretend there are only male and female animals that can mate so only two genders or some bs).

He's more likely to see these things out in the world at large, but he pretty much ignores and even questions them outright. Basically, if anyone came up to him and said, "But you're the man so you should X", he's just going to look at them and ask them why they think that way, basically.

Broke: Halsin calling all of his partners "My heart" or something equally generic

[I've talked about his parents a few times already (there might be more posts idk lol), but I suppose not in depth. I still don't have the spoons to figure out names (Nadeine popped into my mind for his mom while I was writing this? maybe?), but I can probably come up with some mini HCs for them.

As mentioned in the links, both of them were traditional healers by trade. While both were knowledgeable in every facet of their business, his dad was more about the herblore and medicine while his mom was more the expert with mending and treating wounds. Still, they both tended to work together when they were called to heal.

I use trade loosely because I imagine they tended to work for free. They went where they were called and helped how they could.

Neither were druids or any other type of magical healer. Their healing methods were all mundane, from the salves and medicines they made how the mended and healed wounds.

Though both of them were more poly earlier in their lives like many elves, they were actually monogamous after meeting each other. It was never something they really discussed, though. Never a point of contention or something they felt the need to dwell on. They sort of naturally decided they were each others' people and, while it wouldn't have been a problem to either of them, they never felt the desire to take other partners.

Halsin was their only child. I'm on the fence if they had children through other partners, but, if so, I imagine they were much older than Halsin, and by the time he was born, they probably weren't involved in his or his parents' lives by that point. So, he's not particularly familiar with them/isn't sure if they're still alive if they exist at all.

I don't remember if this was canon or a fanon blurb I read once, but either way, Halsin does look more like his father in my estimation. His build is uniquely his because both parents were average for elves, but he did get his mother's eyes and hair color.

I think they both just died naturally of old age? Though going off the scraps he gets in canon isn't the best idea since his development did not seem to be a priority in any regard, but when he talks about it, it doesn't seem traumatic or out of the ordinary (but we also know he's a druid and cycles of life and death and all that AND that he is a master (sadly) of morphing his trauma into positives or just...tucking it away forever, so maybe this is worth revisiting? but at the same time, I generally like his parents and his relationship to them just being...normal in all regards so we'll see lol).

Mint

The world is a puzzle, so complex and multifaceted that you long to run your hands through the tapestry of its wonders and stay there forever, lost in the threads and colors and stories. You wish to stay there forever and you tell yourself it's to know the world but maybe it's not, maybe it's a fear that you're not enough, that you're so fragile and helpless in a world that moves too fast, to sharply, too many bright, painful colors that you stay locked inside your mind and thoughts, where you decide the tempo of your world, where you can grow and be as competent, as capable as you want, where the world is as wide as you can imagine it and never out of control unless you want it to be. Your shield is your knowledge, your mind, and you never feel ready enough for the world around you, never feel prepared enough, never safe, and you wonder if things could have been different, if you could have been better, happier, more like everyone else if you'd just known what you know now.