I must admit I’m fed up with the constant, facile jokes about Gortash’s appearance.
You can’t share a single illustration of him in the wider BG3 fandom without someone making a comment about the famous ‘handsome younger man with a quick and easy smile’.
To each their own, fair enough. Whether you’re disappointed or surprised by his appearance, that’s fine too – I was also surprised when I first played the game.
Then I asked myself why I was surprised, and I realised that the issue stemmed mainly from the normalisation in pop culture of supermodel-like characters, all absolutely gorgeous and flawless. Every hero, every villain, has to be a Greek sculpture.
What’s the problem with portraying normal people? Older people? (Because I’ve seen similar comments whenever a protagonist is over 35...). Or worst, ugly people?
Do you live in the real world? Do you only consume pretty packaging?
That you don’t like the character for their actions – I agree 100 per cent with that and I understand. Even though I appreciate Gortash from a fictional point of view, I would never defend his actions. I’m really talking here about the comments on physical appearance, or the smell that everyone attributes to him based on his face.
I find it just… a bit tedious in the long run? And not necessarily justified. In my view – and I should point out that, as an asexual person, I’m not physically attracted to Gortash; my interest in him stems from his dynamic with the Dark Urge – he looks like a perfectly normal middle-aged man, and in very good physical health at that? I’d even go so far as to say that if I’m in as good shape as him at 40, then I’m lucky.
I feel that in popular culture, we’ve developed a distorted and not necessarily very healthy view of characters’ physical appearances. Even when I added mods to give my Custom Durge a sickly complexion, a scar and so on (to illustrate the abuse she suffered following Orin’s attack), I couldn’t manage to make her look ‘ordinary’, or more emaciated than attractive, even though that was the aim. We should normalise ordinary, older protagonists, with disabilities and imperfections. And if you fancy playing a character with different characteristics, no problem at all, the whole point of a role-playing game is that you have that option. But - to compare both situations - no one would make a tired joke about Astarion being ‘unrealistically handsome' for a spawn who’s never eaten properly, for example.
It’s certainly more thought than is needed for pixelated characters, that’s for sure. I think I’m just baffled by the judging criteria, as well as the lack of nuance.
