#gale not exploding. wyll dealing with his demon change and looking for his father. karlach and her heart.

[savingthrcw]

open: main companions getting Lex's support and help even if she doesn't support their religion/attempts to get infinite power/bloodlust

"I hope you know I'm not going to let you deal with this alone," Lex tossed Scratch's ball, and the dog ran to get it back. "I also hope you know I'm not letting you risk your life, if you die I'll kill you."

[the-magpie-collective]

The Absolute is Baldur Gate 3's A-plot villain. The plot revolves around the Absolute, and in the end Players must decided either to work with it or destroy it. And for every origin character, it also has a B-plot villain to drive their personal story arc. For Astarion it's Cazador, for Shadowheart it's Shar/Lady Viconia, for Lae'zel it's Vlaakith, for Karlach it's Gortash and Zariel. Gale's villian is a bit more abstract, but I would argue Lorroakan acts as a narrative foil/mirror to Gale, though Gale's hubris is his true "antagonist".

And then there's Mizora.

Look, I will say, Mizora's initial introduction does a good job of setting her up as a villain. She swoops into camp and either gloats about succeeding in fooling Wyll into killing an ally (Karlach) or punishes his insubordination by dragging Wyll through the hells. Most Players will have already received warnings about devils well before they meet Mizora (vis a vis Raphael) and here they are faced with the consequences of what it means to try to cross a devil. Wyll is irreparably changed into the visage of a monster, or he feels himself a monster for having killed someone who didn't deserve it. Mizora comes off as clever*, powerful, and an unapologetic antagonist. This Mizora is actually kind of terrifying.

*(Taken on its own, using the "heartless, demonic, infernal, and soulless" language in the Pact feels clever. In light of all the other Pact bullshit it feels shoe-horned in for plot purposes only and like lazy writing to me)

It goes downhill from here.

In the next scene featuring Mizora, she begs Wyll for help. I might have had more grace for this, but all the Player needs is to pass an extremely low perception check of 5 to determine that Mizora is desperate. This both immediately undermines Mizora as a credible threat, and takes control of his story away from Wyll as the Player negotiates with Mizora to release him from the pact on Wyll's behalf. How does a devil, one who is supposedly one of Zariel's most competent, get captured by the Absolute cultists? We don't know. It's never explained, but given the fact that Raphael is traipsing around there without a care and even Yurgir is giving the Absolute cultists trouble it's not exactly a ringing endorsement of Mizora's abilities.

(I'm not going to get into the Pact again. I think it's incredibly stupid and the story never bothers to clarify whether or not Wyll is actually freed from his Pact at this point or not. But let's just say he is freed from his pact by Mizora when he rescues her from the illithid pod for the sake of my sanity.)

Now we come to Act III, where Mizora offers Wyll a deal: his father's life for his soul.

Let's ignore how dumb the Iron Throne is and how it railroads the player. Let's ignore the Pact and how apparently devils can just force anyone's death to happen so long as it's written into a Pact, even if they weren't the one to sign over their soul. Let's just focus on the fight.

Because if the Player (not Wyll, because we can't give him autonomy in his own narrative arc) chooses Wyll's soul over his father's life, there is a confrontation with Mizora in the Iron Throne. She appears, commands his father to kneel (how is she able to do this?), and then sicks a dozen exploding spiders on him. Except the spiders can be entirely avoided by a single level four spell slot (Dimension Door). One, single, level four spell slot, to completely evade Wyll's main antagonist. In Act III. That's it.

And we're supposed to respect her as the villain of Wyll's story?

Once this is over, you'll find Mizora back at camp, just hanging around. While she doesn't make another attempt at Ulder Ravengard's life, she is now, inexplicably, untouchable. She apparently has unlimited magic to teleport back and forth between camp and the hells when before she tripped herself straight into an illithid pod and the best she could come up with to kill Ulder was a few exploding spiders. That's totally makes sense /sarcasm

A protagonist is defined, in large part, by their antagonist. We know that if the antagonist is clever, the protagonist must be more clever to beat them. If an antagonist is powerful, the protagonist seems stronger by comparison. So what happens when the antagonist is written into an incompetent nitwit halfway through Act II? The protagonist looks stupid by comparison.

And it's blatantly obvious why Mizora is written the way she is. Somewhere along the way instead of Mizora being an actual villain for Wyll, she just becomes a sex object for the Player. She could have been a terrifying, competent villain AND still propositioned the character, but I guess that was just too much character depth to give her. And I think that's really, really sad. Mizora could have been a fascinating villain, but they chickened out and didn't even so much as give her the cool claws and fangs from the concept art.

Is Wyll boring or does Mizora's writing just suck, actually?