#bigotes

I believe every woman in the 20s need a healthy dose of cynicism. especially those venturing the dating pool. that's the only way you are going to survive men with your sanity still intact.

I am very obviously one of those people who are way too much into Enver Gortash, given that for the last half year I have written way too much about this trashpanda of a man. But I kinda want to make one thing clear: Gortash, as he is presented in the game, is very much a fascist, using fascists tactics to uphold his power.

In fact, I would argue that in a lot of ways Bane is the god of fascism more than anything. Which makes sense, given that fascism comes along with both tyranny and fear.

But the thing I find interesting about Gortash is, that he kinda shows an aspect of this we see way too rarely in media. We see it from time to time, but not very often.

See, most of the time we have fascist or quasi fascist villains, they are either the evily chuckling variation, who will often use the aesthetics of fascisms, and mainly are very "evil for the sake of evil" sort of villains. Or they are simply raging bigots, who genuinely hate a minority. At times because of their backstory, at times just because. But generally speaking fascism usually tends to get used as a simple villain, because media assumes that if they dress a villain in the aesthetics of fascism we as an audience will understand they are just that. (I will not go into how a lot of people fail this test. *looking at the Star Wars fandom*)

Just to note how Gortash is using fascist tactics: I wrote last year on what is up with the exploding toys. I will once more go into it: It is a tactic he wants to use to stocke hostility between the refugees and the locals of Baldur's Gate. No matter who got hurt with the toys, he would stoke the idea that the other group was responsible for it, to make the people hostile to each other.

And we see that a lot with his political tactics. Of course he does use the tadpoles to literally brainwash people into supporting him, but he also uses a lot of propaganda to get people hostile towards one another - and especially to rile them up again minorities. Most notably of course the tieflings, who canonically are one of the very suppressed minorities on the Sword Coast.

The irony is that he will basically just use any minorities and outgroups in this. The main group of slaves he uses in the plan are gnomes - because gnomes in this world are famously easy to enslave. And at the same time he pushes the goblins and drow again the other groups. I think this is one of those aspects that to not get appreciated enough: Why does the plan involve the plan of goblins and such marching on Baldur's Gate? Does he want to destroy the city?

No, he wants to create an emergency dire enough to a) push for martial law and give himself the full authority (literally Fascist Dictator 101), and b) then also come in there to have the Steel Watch save everyone so he will be seen as the strongman who has saved everyone.

Literally all his moves can be found in basically any fascist government you can look at. (Including the current Trump government in the US.)

Admittedly, in this context I also do not quite get the idea of Jergal's monologue in the ending. Sure, the souls of those turned Mindflayer might be lost for the gods. But had the plan succeeded there would have been martial law with Gortash as the dictator, who then could just randomly have people executed for Bane. That definitely would have benefited the Dead Three. (If anything, I still feel the entire "but a crown on an elderbrain to then mind control people" plan was maybe a bit too complicated. This would have probably worked better without that many extra steps. But then again, fascists tend to be cowards who like to have backup plans to their backup plans.)

The thing that I find mostly interesting about Gortash and the three chosen in general is, that they are not really bigotted. They just use the general bigotry in their advantage. From all we can take out of the writings of them we find over the course of the game, none of them has really beef with a specific class of people. The main reason they do push mainly for some anti-tiefling, and some anti-gnome idea, is the good old fascist creed, that there always needs to be an out-group.

To quote from the Wicked movie: "The easiest way to get people together is to create a common enemy." That is all this is about. And the flexibility of fascist leaders lies in the fact that they will readily take whatever outgroup they find.

Don't get me wrong: I absolutely do believe that some fascists in history very honestly bigotted. But the sad truth is, that I do not believe this is true for the majority. Because most will have realized that they would always need an outgroup. So if they eliminate most of Group A, they would need to find a new outgroup, and after that another one.

You know: "First they came for the communists, and I said nothing, because I was no communist. Then they came for the unionmen, and I said nothing..." There always needs to be an "enemy to the people" that the people can rage against to distract from whatever the fascists are actually doing (mainly enriching themselves, and terrorizing their own people).

Had the plan succeeded, they might have killed and exiled every tiefling, but then they would have gone onto some other group. Maybe orcs, maybe drows, maybe someone else. Just make sure there is always someone to rile people up against.

Personally I find it interesting to see this in the game, because - as I said - it is normally not how it gets portrayed. Usually media tends to show it as something only uniquely evil people would ever do. But the truth is, that it is fairly easy for a lot of people to fall into that. All you need is someone with a fragile ego, who for one reason or another really wants power and is willing to do anything to get it.

Ironically, though, I also think it is what makes it fairly hard to pull of the entire redemption story for someone like Gortash. Because if he was honestly bigoted, it would be a lot simpler: Put him together with somone from the groups he is bigoted against, and let him experience their humanity. Yes, it is cliché and shitty as a trope, but we see again and again in real life that this absolutely does happen.

But Gortash? He undoubtedly mainly wants power because he felt disempowered when he got sold as a child. While we do not know exactly how the entire thing with Bane came to be, it is fairly easy to understand why he is doing what he is doing. But the thing is of course, that every person wants to be the hero in their own story. Which, given there does not be any active malice in him against tieflings and such, means he must at some point have actively reasoned himself into frame of thought that would make it "okay" to act like that. But that means he has spent at least 10 years telling himself stories in which he is the tragic hero. In which it was completely alright for him to allow so many people to die for his plans. How it would have made the city overall probably a better place in the end. (Again, all lies, but he would have had to push himself into believing this.) And breaking through that tends to be a whole lot harder than breaking through honest-to-god bigotry. Because for that to happen, he has to admit that he has done wrong, and that he is the villain of the story. And mind you, not just one villain, but the villain of it all.

As I said, he very probably is very much rationalizing everything he does. And breaking through rationalized thought it so much harder than breaking through pure emotions.

It is in fact this that makes me think he is harder to convince to redeem himself than technically Ketheric or Orin would have been. Ketheric - as we know - is actually fairly easy. Given what already is in the game, it is easy to rewrite the scenes to have him live. He already knows that what he is doing is wrong.

Orin is harder, because she basically grew up in a cult and is Bhaalspawn. But a lot of people who grew up in a cult will do better once they will be taken out of the cult. It is painful, sure, but there is a lot of studies on it out there.

But the people who fully rationalized themselves into doing this shit? Heck, we barely even have any data IRL, given that most of those people - if they are not outright killed, tend to just commit suicide. The highest ranking people of such regimes will just come out of it and say: "Well, I was just following orders." But the head? The head of it all will usually be dead once such an organization got killed.

This is also why I in the entire redemption stuff tend to lean so very heavily on one specific fact about the world of the game: the afterlife is not a question of believe but a certainty. And Gortash is aware of two things: 1) Either his soul will get grabbed by Bane or by a devil, 2) Bane is very disappointed in him failing. So, the one reason for him to not commit suicide once he is defeated, is that he knows what will wait for him in the afterlife.

Of course you could ask, why the hell I would even be interested in redeeming someone like him? Well, because I am happen to be a sucker for redemption stories - and I very rarely have seen stories where someone like Gortash got redeemed.