aliens

Before I read The Illithiad, I had been reading Lovecraft, so my imagination of mind flayers was operating at the highest possible level of cosmic grandeur. Something like: "We shall meet again—perhaps in the shining mists of Orion's Sword, perhaps in unremembered dreams tonight, perhaps in some other form an eon hence, when the solar system shall have been swept away."

Lords of Madness also frames them in this kind of vast, apocalyptic register: in an unimaginably distant future, when the stars have cooled into red embers over dark and dying worlds, the mind flayers rise from their underground lairs to meet the twilight and rebuild their lost empire—stronger, crueler, hungrier, and with all hope in the world extinguished.

That was what I expected them to be: adventurers of the planes, sailing through realities in nautiloids, vast and magnificent within a horrifying aesthetic. I wanted so badly for my favorite character to become something inhuman, belonging to the far future and the spaces between stars.

But while the outline of the lore is grand, what does their actual society consist of? Appetite. Slavery. Colonization. A collective machine of hive-minded domination. The core of their civilization is using cosmic-scale intelligence to maintain an ancient, extreme relationship of control. Even in their life cycle, the elder brain deceives them into believing they will merge with a greater consciousness after death, when in truth it simply consumes their brains and absorbs their knowledge.

And with that in mind, I look again at what the Emperor calls “evolution.”

Balduran left behind a city named after him, and then sailed away—without even bringing the friend who could have kept him safe.

Judging from his notes and actions, there was arrogance and cruelty in Balduran's character. What he did was not necessarily morally noble. But there was an intense vitality to him: he refused to be fixed in place by what he had already obtained.

The Emperor's narrative is the opposite. It says becoming a mind flayer made it stronger, clearer, superior. But what it actually does is not traverse the world with greater freedom. It hides underground, using manipulation, intelligence networks, and political influence to control Baldur's Gate.

There is something deeply contradictory here. It is proud of being a mind flayer, in a very typically mind flayer way, yet it does not want an elder brain—even though the elder brain is one of the central reasons mind flayers are powerful as a species. It rejects the collective domination of mind flayer society, but it wants the mind flayer's power to dominate others. And by the time it meets you, it is already changing, which complicates this even further.

So no, I do not see it as some “higher form” of mind flayer civilization, or as a straightforward improvement upon mortal life. If you were an elf, becoming a mind flayer would reduce your lifespan to a fraction of what it once was. The Emperor is an individual severed from the elder brain, who has privatized mind flayer power. The fact that it resists being enslaved does not mean it opposes control or respects other people's freedom. Beneath all of this lies one basic principle: I must survive.

If the person Ansur loved was someone who would leave wealth and safety behind in order to seek adventure, then the Emperor Ansur later saw was not merely that same person in a different body. The direction of that person's life had truly changed. He no longer adventures.

That is why, to me, it feels more like someone imprisoned by its own body. The things that are supposedly uniquely superior to humanity are being used to do exactly what an ordinary person who wants power would do. Power has no end point. The range of control is never large enough. The more you control, the more you fear. Across more than a century of life, after you have obtained both life and freedom, what exactly are you going to do with that life?

What frustrates me is that the player does not know either of them. The player was not the one who sailed with him, experienced everything with him, and then searched for him for all those years. The player will never know the full depth of what they shared, how much they loved each other, or how well they understood each other. So what gives anyone the right to say that one of them simply "couldn't keep up"?

The description of the Emperor's staff says: “......you see sea waves foaming into spume, and feel the explorer's exultant joy. Then the image is gone, like so much silken night under a cut-shade sun.”

Now, don't you think that if a person underwent a change that fundamental, the person who loved him would notice, and feel pain and fear because of it?

I think part of the problem is this: we dont realize all the ways in which the Emperor is so unique. A normal mind flayer would not reject the humming of an elder brain. It would not take you to the heart of the hive in order to destroy its own kind, or claim to want "freedom" — although yes, rogue mind flayers are their own category. A normal mind flayer would not treat objects preserved from its former life as its own; it should either be contemptuous of them or consider them dangerous. And then there is the way the Emperor treats you, and the extent to which it seems to enjoy your company.

But Larian does not really show us what "ordinary" mind flayers are like. Instead, they give us Omeluum. So people either assume that it is common for a mind flayer to think of itself as the same person whose body was parasitized, or they assume that without the lingering traces of "Balduran," the Emperor would still be the same person you meet and possibly come to like. They treat those memories and surviving traces as nothing more than a birth defect. But the truth is, those traces are exactly what make it so different.

Another issue is that the ending where you become a mind flayer is written so lightly. It can feel like you merely changed skins. "I can accept this, it's even better. So why couldn't Ansur? Their relationship must have been shallow as hell."

But there is a dead man here. Someone died in his own lair, by the hand of the person he loved. As a dragon, a proud creature, Ansur awoke without accusing the Emperor of foul play. If Ansur had not been weighed down by guilt, why would he have lost?