Breathe the Top Note

BALDUR'S GATE 3 — tara & gale (3/?)

devnote: Gale has died so she's very sad and nostalgic.

This is from the interview larian did with ign today talking about various characters and their endings but I just wanna say ascended astarion being such a paranoid weirdo is very important to me and I'm glad it was touched on here 🤪👌

there were two more books in the series that my school didn’t have, which is either a blessing or a curse, because the third book in the set is called Man After Man.

which contains this.

There's a difference between abusive (continued and consistent harmful behaviors to exert control over the other person) and unhealthy (sometimes being passive aggressive, communication not being completely open and free). In fact, if I had to guess, he may not even realize that his behaviors are not healthy. His passive aggressiveness or "guilt tripping", I feel, are reactions to his precious relationship with Mystra. When your attachment figure is high and mighty and do not acknowledge or respond to your needs or is very withdrawn or withhold love/praise unless you do something, people are gonna start to develop strategies to get their needs met - pouting, begging, acquiescing, etc etc - this can manifest as such unhealthy behaviors. Similar to how when children have withdrawn parents, they do all sorts of things ranging from making themselves very endearing or acting out to make them pay attention.

Do I think that this is 100% mystra's fault? Not necessarily. After all, she is a god and probably had lots of other things to care for and one mortal man among many other chosens (and who knows, potentially other lovers) likely wasn't on the highest of her priority list. But that doesn't mean the damage wasn't done. And I still believe that as a god Mystra should've known better than to be involved with a mortal romantically with such huge power differential.

Going back to the original point - such unhealthy strategies can absolutely get better and be changed when you do have a partner who responds to your needs, who is engaged, who doesn't withhold love, because that means you no longer have to survive the way you did before. You no longer have to elicit or win love from your partner because that love is already there. Such corrective emotional experiences can lower the defenses and build up healthy communication and relationship. With Tav, and hopefully other supports in his life, I think Gale can do so, too.

ALSO. MILD ACT 3 SPOILER HERE:

The eligible bachelor wizard just happens to have a goddess as an ex-girlfriend, the impediment keeping Gale and Tav apart isn’t some basic society class snubbing but a literal nuclear bomb in Gale’s chest and a gigantic brain monster, Gale’s sweet confessions of love are very romantic, poetic, and classy but also occasionally include things like him telling Tav how much he’d love to smash in the middle of a battlefield.

It’s….perfect.

Classic romance is obviously an incredible genre and I love it, but there’s something that hits different and is infinitely sweeter when it’s not two beautiful well-dressed fancy people proclaiming their love flawlessly to one another, but an imperfect self-loathing man standing in a puddle that he for some reason set his camp up on, telling a scarred, scaled, fanged, sweaty, smelly person with bits of Goblin guts in their hair that he loves them with his whole heart and that the celestial canvas is the only worthy backdrop on which to place their beauty.