Ansur: Balduran’s Fake Best Friend, and One of BG3’s Writing Problems
A lot of Baldur’s Gate 3 players see Ansur as Balduran’s deeply devoted old friend, perhaps even something more than that. And at first glance, it is easy to see why.
Ansur’s voice acting is excellent. His low, mournful delivery carries genuine emotional weight. The entire scene certainly feels emotional.
But if we apply a very simple rule, don’t judge a character by what he says, judge him by what he actually does, the whole thing starts to look a lot stranger.
Because what, exactly, does Ansur do for Balduran in this game?
His most memorable expression of devotion is trying to kill Balduran after Balduran becomes a mind flayer, then treating Balduran’s decision to fight back in self defense as some kind of unforgivable betrayal.
Which leads me to a rather unromantic conclusion:
Ansur is a spectacularly fake best friend.
Don’t believe me? Let’s actually look at what he does.
According to the interrogation records from when Gortash captured the Emperor, Balduran spent more than thirteen years beneath Moonrise Towers after being transformed into a mind flayer. He was later sent to Baldur’s Gate by the Elder Brain, and once he had moved far enough away, he slipped out of its collective control and began to regain his own consciousness.
And this part matters. During that interrogation, the Emperor is still under the Elder Brain’s control.
Gortash explicitly establishes that the conversation is taking place within the Absolute’s psionic ambit. The Emperor’s answers are therefore answers coming from someone currently under the brain’s control.
Even if we assume the Elder Brain had some reason to deceive Gortash, there is no obvious reason for it to lie about a largely irrelevant detail like exactly how many years Balduran spent in the illithid colony.
According to the Emperor’s own answer while under the brain’s control, he spent thirteen and three quarter years there.
So here is the obvious question:
Moonrise Towers is, at most, about half a month’s journey from Baldur’s Gate. Balduran disappears for nearly fourteen years, and his supposedly devoted best friend does not find him, does not rescue him, and apparently does not even manage to discover what happened to him.
Imagine that you are kidnapped and held captive for fourteen years.
You have a “best friend” who has the power to come looking for you and potentially rescue you, but they never do.
Eventually, your captor loosens the leash enough for you to get away on your own.
Would you still think this was a particularly devoted best friend?
Because I would have questions.
Later, during the Wyrmway quest, the Emperor tells us that Ansur found him (near Baldur’s Gate) and helped him escape the Elder Brain’s control.
The problem is that the interrogation record above, together with the Netherbrain’s own admission during the final confrontation, points to only two ways the Emperor escapes the brain’s control: either he moves far enough beyond its reach, or the brain deliberately lets him go.
So even if the Emperor believed Ansur had helped free him, the information we get elsewhere suggests that Ansur was not actually what broke the Elder Brain’s control. In one case, Balduran simply got far enough away; in the other, the brain itself let him go.
So if Ansur did not rescue Balduran from the colony, and did not actually free him from the Elder Brain’s control, what exactly did he do for Balduran?
Or for Baldur’s Gate, for that matter?
Did Ansur ever actually protect Baldur’s Gate?
People talk about Ansur as the great dragon protector of the city.
But where was he during all the other disasters?
He does not appear during the Bhaal crises of Baldur’s Gate or Baldur’s Gate II. And chronologically, Balduran’s transformation into a mind flayer must postdate the construction of Moonrise Towers. Mind flayers only live for roughly 150 years, BG3 takes place in 1492 DR, and the first Baldur’s Gate takes place in 1358 DR.
More importantly, Ansur never actually promises to become Baldur’s Gate’s permanent guardian.
He gives the city one chance.
If someone worthy completes the trials of the Wyrmway, he will help.
Ravengard’s dialogue makes this explicit. Ansur promised to aid Baldur’s Gate “just the once.”
And before the player arrives, apparently no one ever completes the trials and calls upon him.
So Ansur’s total confirmed record of saving Baldur’s Gate is:
Now, obviously, Ansur does not owe Baldur’s Gate free dragon emergency services. He is not obligated to spend his life solving the city’s problems.
But if we are trying to establish him as some extraordinarily devoted friend of Balduran, or as someone to whom Balduran and the city owe some enormous moral debt, the actual record is remarkably thin.
So, by process of elimination, what has Ansur actually done for Balduran?
We are left with roughly three things:
While they were searching for the Great Spire, Ansur did not abandon a seasick Balduran and simply fly away. This is mentioned in Dear Ansur.
After finding Balduran as a mind flayer, Ansur searched for ways to restore him to his old form. When those attempts failed, and Balduran explicitly asked him to stop and leave, Ansur instead decided to kill him in his sleep.
When that assassination attempt failed because Balduran defended himself, Ansur later treated Balduran’s resistance as a betrayal. Then, when the player comes to ask for his help, he decides to kill both the Emperor and the player.
And this is where Ansur’s claim that he “gave everything” to Balduran starts to become very strange.
Because most of what Ansur counts as his great sacrifice consists of things Balduran either did not ask him to do or explicitly asked him to stop doing.
Balduran did not need Ansur to stay with him while he was seasick.
And after becoming a mind flayer, once it became clear that Ansur could not change him back, Balduran explicitly told him that this was fine.
He was all right as he was.
If somebody repeatedly does something for you that you never asked them to do, especially after you have explicitly told them you do not want it, and later uses that “sacrifice” to demand gratitude, that is no longer ordinary generosity.
That is manufacturing a debt.
At its worst, it becomes emotional blackmail dressed up as devotion.
Dear Ansur is especially important here.
Balduran opens the letter by saying that he has already told Ansur this a thousand times. There is no cure, and that is all right.
He wants Ansur to stop tormenting himself over it.
So Balduran’s position could hardly be clearer:
I do not need to be fixed.
I accept what I am now.
You do not have to keep doing this.
You are free to leave.
Yet Ansur refuses to accept Balduran’s answer.
And Balduran, because he has an enormous emotional blind spot where Ansur is concerned, interprets Ansur’s refusal to let go as proof of how deeply Ansur cares about him.
He tries to release Ansur from that burden.
He tries to end things peacefully.
And then we get the famous Wyrmway scene.
The player arrives with the Emperor. Ansur senses him, wakes up, and immediately decides that the appropriate response is murder.
The performance is incredibly emotional.
The actual argument is much less convincing.
Ansur tells Balduran that he gave him everything.
But what exactly is this “everything”?
He did not rescue Balduran during the nearly fourteen years he was imprisoned and transformed.
He did not save Baldur’s Gate from any of its previous existential crises.
The one genuinely touching thing we are explicitly told he once did was refuse to abandon a seasick Balduran during their travels.
It is not, however, a debt large enough to be repaid with Balduran’s life.
And then we get to the truly disturbing part.
Ansur appears to include his decision to kill Balduran among the things he did for Balduran.
That is apparently part of the “everything.”
Balduran had already told him to stop searching for a cure.
Balduran had told him he was fine.
Balduran had told him he was free to go.
Ansur’s response was to decide that Balduran should die anyway.
And when Balduran refused to lie down and accept being killed, Ansur interpreted that refusal as a betrayal.
The moral logic becomes something like this:
I decided to kill you for your own good.
You were supposed to be grateful.
Instead, you defended yourself.
Therefore, you wronged me.
That is certainly a position.
And before anyone tries to argue that the Emperor attacked Ansur first, no.
Ansur’s own dialogue makes it clear that he tried to kill Balduran, and Balduran fought back.
Ansur frames his attempt to kill Balduran as an act of devotion, and Balduran’s refusal to die as treachery.
That is the logic we are working with here.
Balduran killing Ansur was an obvious act of self preservation. As the Emperor later says, “You left me no choice.”
Ansur, however, deliberately reframes Balduran’s motives in the worst possible way, because doing so allows him to cast himself as the injured party and justify attacking the Emperor again.
And Ansur has read Dear Ansur.
He knows perfectly well that Balduran wanted him to leave.
He knows Balduran did not want to kill him.
He knows Balduran tried to end the relationship without violence.
So Ansur knows that Balduran killing him was an act of self defense. It had nothing whatsoever to do with the supposed “satisfaction” Ansur attributes to him.
Yet he still rewrites the story in a way that places himself on the moral high ground and Balduran in the role of betrayer.
Conveniently, that also gives him a reason to attack him a second time.
So let us summarize Ansur’s great acts of devotion, including the ones he apparently counts himself:
He did not abandon Balduran when Balduran was seasick.
When Balduran decided that there was no cure and that he was perfectly capable of living as he was, Ansur continued treating his existence as a condition that needed to be fixed.
When Balduran begged him to stop and leave, Ansur did not leave. He instead tried to kill Balduran in his sleep.
When Balduran defended himself, Ansur treated that resistance as a moral failure, rewrote himself as the victim, and later tried to kill him again.
Now remove the names “Balduran” and “Ansur” from that story.
Would you describe someone who:
insists that their friend is sick even though the friend says they are fine;
decides to kill that friend;
condemns the friend for not being grateful enough to accept death;
twists the friend’s self defense into proof of betrayal;
and then tries to kill them a second time
Because that sounds much more like an enemy who keeps inventing new justifications for murder.
If we want to get deliberately deconstructive about it, the whole thing becomes almost absurd.
Balduran disappears into an illithid colony for nearly fourteen years. Ansur does nothing we know of.
Balduran comes back as a mind flayer. Suddenly Ansur discovers an apparently inexhaustible supply of reasons why Balduran needs to die.
At a certain point you could almost ask whether Ansur had never had good intentions toward him in the first place.
Maybe he had wanted Balduran dead all along, and Balduran becoming a mind flayer finally gave him a socially acceptable excuse.
The noble bronze dragon Ansur, legendary protector of Baldur’s Gate, does absolutely nothing during Bhaal, Sarevok, the Dead Three, the Netherbrain, or any number of other threats.
The one person he is extremely motivated to kill is Balduran.
Ansur’s great demonstrations of devotion include emotional blackmail, imposing unwanted “help,” reframing an attempted murder as a favour, and distorting Balduran’s self defense in order to justify trying to kill him again.
Calling him a fake best friend is honestly being generous.
Remove the names, remove the tragic music, remove the magnificent voice acting, and he starts looking less like Balduran’s devoted friend and more like someone who has a personal vendetta against him.
Which raises the more interesting question:
What exactly happened in the writing room?
Did the writers intentionally mean to create a character who constantly invents new emotional justifications for killing his supposed best friend?
Or did the writing simply fail to hold together, with different parts of the story never being properly reconciled, leaving us with a character who is presented as profoundly devoted but whose actual actions do not support that presentation?
Or did the writers genuinely believe that Ansur killing Balduran was an act of love, and that Balduran’s refusal to passively accept his own execution reflects badly on Balduran?
I think the first possibility is extremely unlikely.
The game clearly does not intend Ansur to come across as a fake friend.
Which leaves us with possibilities two and three:
2. The writing was underdeveloped, and perhaps not properly coordinated between different writers, leaving us with a “devoted friend” whose actions fail to match the role the story assigns him.
3. The writers genuinely buy into the idea that killing Balduran was an act of mercy and devotion, and that there is something morally suspect about Balduran refusing to accept it.
I actually think both problems are present.
Let’s start with number three.
After the Wyrmway quest, the player can literally say to the Emperor:
“You could have done the honourable thing and let him kill you.”
Think about what that means.
The Emperor was the person Ansur tried to murder.
Yet one of the clearest moral judgments the player is allowed to make is not “Ansur had no right to kill you,” but:
You should have done the honourable thing and allowed yourself to be killed.
Meanwhile, the dialogue choices that defend the Emperor’s decision to fight back are comparatively muted.
That tells us something about the moral framing the writers were willing to place into the scene.
I have already discussed this problem in more detail in another essay, “When Fighting Back Becomes a Crime: Ansur, the Emperor, and Fictional Racism in BG3,” so I will not repeat the whole argument here.
Now let’s look at number two.
Why does Ansur end up feeling so much like a fake friend who says one thing and does another?
Because the game does not really treat “Ansur deeply loved Balduran” as a relationship that needs to be demonstrated through action.
Instead, Ansur’s devotion is treated more like a narrative justification for why he should be allowed to kill the Emperor while still being framed sympathetically.
The story needs us to understand his attempted murder as tragic rather than hateful.
But the writers never really explore what Ansur actually did for Balduran in any meaningful detail.
In some ways, the structure of the Wyrmway quest actively works against that.
The entire point of the quest is that seeking Ansur’s help is a unique, legendary last resort. The player has to be the one person who finally reaches him.
That means Ansur cannot have spent the previous century repeatedly flying out to rescue Baldur’s Gate from every major threat, because doing so would undermine the entire premise of the quest.
And when it comes to Balduran himself, the game simply does not devote enough time to their past relationship to establish a long history of concrete acts of care.
So when you actually inspect the story closely, you get this:
When Ansur needs to kill Balduran:
He loved Balduran deeply, therefore this is tragic.
What did Ansur actually do that demonstrates this extraordinary love?
The text suddenly has very little to say.
And that is the real mismatch.
Act Three of Baldur’s Gate 3 is full of storylines that feel like they needed another editing pass, and the Balduran and Ansur storyline is no exception.
Whatever the reason, the final result is a very strange character.
The game presents Ansur as profoundly devoted, helped enormously by a fantastic voice performance that sells every ounce of grief in the scene.
But if you strip away that presentation and look only at what he actually does, you are left with someone who fails to find his missing friend for nearly fourteen years, barely has any demonstrated history of helping either Balduran or Baldur’s Gate, disregards Balduran’s stated wishes, treats unwanted intervention as sacrifice, attempts to kill him, reframes his self defense as betrayal, and then tries to kill him again.
The game keeps telling us that Ansur loved Balduran.
It simply forgot to give Ansur enough actions that actually show it.
