#ansuran

I have already written two long essays about the Wyrmway quest in Baldur’s Gate 3, its narrative framing, and the relationship between Balduran and Ansur.

This is the third essay in the series, and basically my attempt to tie everything together.

Why does Ansur come across as such a fake best friend?

I am not going to go through all the textual evidence again here. I already covered that in the previous essay. This time, I want to step back and look at why the story was written this way in the first place.

So why does Ansur keep telling us how deeply he loved Balduran, while his actual behavior amounts to little more than finding increasingly elaborate reasons to kill him?

Even Balduran escaping the Elder Brain’s control for the first time has nothing to do with Ansur. The interrogation record and what the brain itself later tells us point elsewhere.

My answer is simple:

Because the game was never really interested in developing Balduran and Ansur’s friendship in the first place.

If the writers never intended to seriously develop that friendship, then of course we were never going to get much actual story about what Ansur did for Balduran.

So why did the writers need Ansur to “love” Balduran at all?

Because Ansur loving Balduran gives him a sympathetic reason to want to kill both the Emperor and the player.

It is there to justify Ansur attacking us.

Yes, really.

Think about what the Wyrmway quest would look like without the premise that Ansur loved Balduran.

The player comes to the Wyrmway seeking help from an ancient dragon. That dragon once promised to help protect Baldur’s Gate. After everything the player goes through to reach him, he not only refuses to help, but also decides to kill us over a centuries old personal grudge that has absolutely nothing to do with us.

Wouldn’t that just make him a villain?

But the narrative clearly does not want Ansur to be a villain.

So he needs a sympathetic reason.

And what reason do the writers give him?

Ansur loved Balduran deeply.

He wanted to kill Balduran because he loved him.

Balduran, instead of appreciating this love and politely lying down to die, had the nerve to defend himself and kill Ansur instead.

Poor Ansur. All that love, completely betrayed.

I know, it sounds ridiculous.

But that really is the logic the game gives us.

At some level, the writing treats love as if it gives you the right to kill the person you love. And if that person does not want to die, then somehow they are the one who has failed to appreciate that love.

So who gets blamed for the player losing the dragon?

Look at it from the player’s perspective.

You go through this whole quest thinking you might finally recruit a legendary dragon and fight the final boss alongside him.

Then you finish the quest and discover that the dragon not only refuses to cooperate, he also wants to kill you.

But at the same time, the game still wants you to sympathize with that dragon.

So who gets blamed for the frustration of losing Ansur as a potential ally?

The Emperor. Balduran.

Ansur tried to kill the Emperor. The Emperor did not want to die. He killed Ansur in self defense.

As a result, the player loses the chance to fight alongside Ansur.

And apparently, this is all the Emperor’s fault.

The game has already made its moral judgment. The Emperor is wrong. He should have just lain down and let Ansur kill him. Come on, player, blame him. Feel sorry for Ansur.

The game literally lets you say this to the Emperor:

You could have done the honourable thing and let him kill you.

And plenty of players really do accept that framing.

Before anyone says that this is just one hostile dialogue option and therefore tells us nothing about the game’s own moral framing, look at the dialogue tree as a whole.

After the Emperor says:

“I had no choice but to kill him first. It was an act of self-preservation.”

the player can respond with:

“Not really.” “Makes sense. I would have done the same.” “I admire your commitment to survival, but your methods are questionable.” “You could have done the honourable thing and let him kill you.” “Is being an illithid really worth the loss of a friend?” “I’m sorry you had to go through that.”

Notice what is missing.

There is no option that simply says: Ansur tried to kill you. You had every right to defend yourself.

The closest thing to an affirmative response is “Makes sense. I would have done the same.” But even that frames the Emperor’s decision as understandable or pragmatic, not morally justified. “I’m sorry you had to go through that” offers sympathy, but again, it stops short of saying that he was right to defend his own life.

Meanwhile, several of the other options actively place the moral burden back on the Emperor. His methods are “questionable.” He could have done the “honourable” thing and accepted death. And “Is being an illithid really worth the loss of a friend?” is especially revealing, because it reframes the situation as though Balduran simply chose being an illithid over his friendship with Ansur, rather than Ansur choosing to kill him and Balduran fighting back in self-defense.

So this is not just one unusually cruel dialogue option sitting in isolation. The entire conversation is structured in a way that makes the Emperor’s decision to survive something that needs to be explained, qualified, sympathized with, or condemned, while never giving the player an equally explicit moral judgment in the other direction:

Ansur tried to murder you. You were right to fight back.

And that framing clearly works. A lot of people genuinely think Ansur loved Balduran so deeply that Balduran’s refusal to die for him somehow amounts to betraying that love.

Of course, it is the 2020s, and plenty of people no longer accept the idea that loving someone gives you the right to kill them.

But even I was taken in by the game’s framing at first.

I never agreed with what Ansur did, but I still assumed that he must have loved Balduran in some twisted way.

Then I actually stopped and asked myself:

What does this deeply loving Ansur ever do for Balduran in the game?

And the more I thought about it, the worse it got.

He rejects and demeans Balduran.

He keeps finding reasons why Balduran needs to die.

And that is basically it.

That is it!!!

Ansur’s “love” never develops into much of an actual relationship because, from beginning to end, it functions primarily as an excuse.

An excuse to justify him killing the Emperor.

An excuse to justify him killing the player.

And the writers never really bothered to develop that “love” beyond its function as a narrative excuse.

“Killing for love is not a crime” and “inferior races should just accept being killed”

The Wyrmway quest does not just contain this idea that killing someone out of love is somehow excusable.

It also contains another narrative logic that I discussed in detail in my other essay, When Fighting Back Becomes a Crime: Ansur, the Emperor, and Fictional Racism in BG3.

The game treats “inferior” or “evil” races as if they should accept society’s judgment that they deserve to die, and then willingly do so.

If someone from a supposedly good, righteous, superior race wants to kill someone from an “inferior” race, then the inferior one is expected to lie down and accept it. If they resist, that resistance itself becomes proof of moral corruption.

Put these two ideas together, “killing for love is not a crime” and “an inferior race is only good if it willingly removes itself from the world,” and the logic becomes very clear.

The noble bronze dragon did not stop loving his friend just because that friend had become a lowly mind flayer.

No, Ansur still loved him.

So he tried to kill him in the name of love.

And if this lowly mind flayer were truly good, righteous, and capable of loving his friend in return, then he should have quietly accepted death.

Resistance itself becomes a moral failure.

And once you resist, well, that just proves you were evil after all.

And if you are evil, then you deserve to die even more.

A surprising number of players really do think this way.

That includes people who describe themselves as Emperor fans.

But unfortunately for this narrative, the Emperor is not some zombie like creature who can only stumble around groaning, “brains... brains...”

He can speak.

He can think.

He can judge situations.

He can make decisions and act on them.

He may not look human, but he is enough of a person that many players naturally empathize with him.

So, inevitably, some players do not accept this logic:

“A noble race loves you so much that he wants to kill you. You are an inferior race. Have you looked in a mirror? Why can’t you just lie down and let him do it? Why are you resisting?”

Madama Butterfly and Miss Saigon

An “inferior” race must give up its life in order to prove that it deserves the love of a superior one.

Does that narrative sound familiar?

Because what I see in it is Madama Butterfly, and its spiritual successor, Miss Saigon.

In Madama Butterfly, Cio Cio San completely transforms her life for Pinkerton. She even breaks with her own community.

Pinkerton, meanwhile, can go back to America, marry someone else, and start over.

The only “dignity” left to Cio Cio San at the end is suicide.

Her death becomes the most elevated and emotionally moving moment of the opera.

In other words:

The American man is allowed to live and make mistakes. The Japanese woman proves that her love was real by dying.

Miss Saigon follows a similar pattern.

Kim falls in love with the American soldier Chris. In the end, she kills herself so that her child can leave with Chris and go to America.

She literally removes herself from the future.

Both works are widely regarded as classics, but both are also repeatedly criticized today through the lenses of colonialism and Orientalism.

And the moral structure of the Wyrmway quest is remarkably similar to this kind of sacrificial narrative:

Ansur’s love is framed through his own words: “I offered you merciful death.”

The Emperor, meanwhile, is expected to prove his love by being willing to accept that “merciful death.”

Ansur gets to remain alive and decide what is best for Balduran.

If Balduran wants to prove that he is still worthy of that “love,” the most honourable thing he can do is die.

The feelings of the more powerful side are treated as inherently meaningful.

The weaker or racialized person has to destroy themselves to prove that their love is real and that they are morally worthy.

This narrative is not limited to racial difference

This kind of story does not only appear between people of different races.

Gender, social class, and almost any unequal relationship can reproduce the same pattern.

There is a very obvious literary example:

Tess of the d’Urbervilles.

Tess is a woman, a poor rural girl, and what we would now call an “imperfect victim.”

Angel is a man. He is educated. He has a respectable social position.

Angel is allowed to make mistakes.

He is allowed to abandon Tess because of his own double standard.

He is even allowed to realize that he was wrong later and come back to love her again.

But Tess?

Tess has to pay a far higher price.

At the end of the novel, she kills Alec and briefly reunites with Angel. Then she calmly waits to be caught and for death to follow.

Her loyalty, goodness, and love ultimately have to be proven through self destruction.

It is the same logic again:

The weaker person must suffer, sacrifice themselves, or even die in order to prove that they deserve love and moral recognition.

The more privileged person gets to make mistakes, leave, regret their choices, and start over.

Balduran is not Cio Cio San, and he is not Tess

The Wyrmway quest ultimately reenacts this old hierarchical logic:

The more powerful person’s love is treated as valuable in itself. The weaker person has to prove they deserve that love through sacrifice, even death.

The difference is that Balduran, the Emperor, is not Cio Cio San.

He is not Tess.

He is a male mind flayer, and he has no intention of giving up his life to prove that he deserves Ansur’s love.

Ansur wants to kill him.

He does not want to die.

So he fights back.

He chooses to live.

And his refusal to play out that expected story of self sacrifice has earned him a huge amount of resentment from players who are used to exactly this kind of narrative.

Balduran is the one Ansur attacked.

His response was, first and foremost, self defense.

And yet he is the one who gets endlessly accused of being cold, soulless, and of betraying Ansur.

He refuses to play the role this kind of story traditionally assigns to the weaker party.

He does not prove his goodness through death.

He does not prove himself worthy of Ansur’s love through self sacrifice.

He simply says:

I do not want to die.

And somehow, that becomes a moral failing.

As a member of a racial minority, I personally cannot accept this kind of narrative:

the idea that a weaker or racialized Other must sacrifice their life for the more powerful in order to prove their humanity, goodness, and moral worth.

Baldur’s Gate 3 contains a great deal of LGBT representation, and its representation of gender and sexuality is often strikingly modern and progressive.

But a work can be progressive at the level of representation while still reproducing deeply traditional, even premodern hierarchies in its underlying moral logic.

because there's something to once being a hero so renowned that a home to thousands is in your name. and having a companion so dear that they'd kill you to preserve You, but also having changed so much against your will from that hero and that friend they knew and having to come to terms with it (maybe also against your will).

and being a survivor in the long run and being saved time and time again and being used and using back. of coming back home and infiltrating and taking power and being captured and used to hurt when you used to help. of running and manipulating and attempting to do the same trust-build-seduction method you once used with someone new, and trying to convince this person to become like you. because at this point you've lost the ability to feel your feelings

we obviously by nature of its character cant tell when the emperor is lying, telling the truth, or being sincere but i also like really don't like the idea of intrinsic evilness so sometimes i want to take him at face value. we have examples of a mind flayer having genuine companionship (omeluum) alongside having a purpose that lets them live a life separate from the grand design, and i fear having ansur was perhaps the only reason the emperor ever got to be free. not just physically but mentally.

because balduran went sailing one day because he missed it and never came home. ansur fought to find him and was too late. y'know. and like. how heartbreaking is that? that ansur who loved and protected and promised to keep balduran's city safe… made a promise that became a prison. to love so wholly that he wanted to preserve his partner even when his partner gave up and told him to leave and keep his memory as the thing that mattered. how heartbreaking for balduran to have killed him in self defense and then built him a tomb where he could rest? that no one would disturb him? how famous the love was that his promise to protect became legend? the last wish he ever had? that the only way to wake him was to pass a gauntlet to prove your worth? while recording praises for their partnership?

like forgive me but i don't think creating an elaborate tomb to protect ansur's final resting place is a lack of feeling. ansur made a promise that became a prison that became a legend. his legacy was love. and he recognized balduran from feeling alone and got to see him again, for what its worth. the emperor will always be ansur's balduran.

also we see ansur in his dragonborn form. not controversial i hope but they were more than friends! ansur i'm sorry king. your husband became calamari and unrecognizable. and when he accuses balduran of thralling the player, which we can refute, and ansur just stops to Look only for balduran to break the silence by RECITING THE LETTER? DEAR ANSUR? AND THAT'S WHAT DRIVES ANSUR TO ATTACK?

nevermind the fact that you can't make the dream guardian a dragonborn. and the armor it wears is awfully similar to ansur's in his humanoid form. balduran never forgot ansur. i think balduran-as-the-emperor in dream guardian form not taking a form like ansurs but still keeping that armor, still speaking ansur's words and acting out his intents when promising the player protection and care, is evidence that ansur lived in him still. even through the layers of the loss of identity that was him becoming a mind flayer.

ansur was the heart of the gate. and it's baldur's gate. he's balduran's heart. his heart. ansur lived in him. it was a promise that became a prison that became a legend. his legacy was love