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do you think gale would grow his hair out longer after the end of the game? or made a more full mustache?

An interesting question, lovely anon!!

One of my silly, cracklike hcs is that Gale is practicing to be an Ancient Mage of Awesome Power like Elminster (or Gandalf, Dumbledore, Merlin, etc. etc.), and he's starting to grow out his hair and beard--and practicing his bad jokes, ominous/portentous statements, and nuggets of wisdom--so they're nice and long by the time he greys out and is ready to be recognized as such.

More seriously, I think he might let his hair and beard start growing a little more but still make sure they're well-kept and in good shape! I'd imagine Tara would be quite resigned to the facial hair being permanent. Some of that might depend on Tav and what they like, but I imagine either way one of their little rituals is Tav brushing out his hair in the morning or just before bed and maybe on occasion helping him with his beard oil. They don't do it all the time because that can derail the morning routine ;)))

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Visiting Grymforge

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Gale's Concept Art Armor is out! Hopefully you all have fun with it <3

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Repost of Gale Indiana Jones AU sketches for @sorceresssundries (because that post got marked explicit and I had to delete it. Apparently AU Gale is too sexy?)

Vid and references under cut 👇😬

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Gale

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imagine gale giving you a memory shard to imprint with your memory of you guys having sex from your POV. just so he can study it and take notes on improving his technique.

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One thing I love about Gale is that he'd do the finger wiggle and say "don't mind if I do" to a little treat but he'd also say it to the Necromancy of Thay.

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💜 Gale

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Larion, I'm begging you for the photo mode soon... please...

Fuck, @sorceresssundries I didn't think I liked sweat licking but I'd make an exception for him...

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Oh you know

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QUESTION. This might be a little heavy for a Friday night (or any night), so feel free to ignore.

Do you think human ending Gale would ever get to the point where he lets himself be fully angry about Mystra, what she'd done to him, and what she demanded he do for her? We can get hints of it in-game, but it's more Gale's genteel "I'm rather peeved" sort of anger (e.g. when he tells Elminster he'll be the one to decide his future, not Mystra). If he does allow himself to experience that anger, I wonder what it looks like for him--if there's a slow build up to it, if it's a sudden explosion (or just looks sudden because he gives no sign of it), or what.

I just want Gale to not sweep everything under the rug and to fully recognize what he had to go through was profoundly fucked up and that he can, in fact, be angry about it.

blame the birth chart or the c-ptsd but we love a lil heavy Friday night convo here tbqh!

Here are my two biggest factors in thinking about good ending Gale and his relationship to anger/shame/etc-

When you experience prolonged trauma your brain hides many things from you. I think most people are familiar with bad tv/movie depictions of repressed memory. The reality is your brain as a kind of protective keeper, shoving things into drawers, under beds, filing it away in a cabinet marked "for later." The safer, the more content, the more empowered you feel, the more the keeper goes, "oh, you can finally hold this," because spoilers: the keeper is still you. And you are so tired.

2. If your Gale ending has him as a teacher/professor, oh boy. He is placing himself directly in the path of his own grooming, coercion, and shame. Mystra might be wary of Gale moving forward, but there's nothing to say she will stop doing what she does. How does Gale protect his own students? Does he find that he can't? Does he see how Elminster at a bare minimum enables that dynamic and have to unpack that?

A discussion of that in practice is below the cut.

I think Gale doesn't even think of it as sweeping things under the rug. He's still very much, "I see now that what Mystra did to me was unfair but I too made mistakes," which really doesn't embrace the hurt of that power dynamic. Gale thinks he's healed. Gale thinks he's moving on.

As days go by, he'll remember moments with Mystra, with Elminster, maybe with others who work in that system of academia/religion, and it will be the first time he's healed enough to see those not as Gale of Waterdeep, aged 11, 15, 17, 25, 30, or whatever. He'll see them as Gale now. He'll see them as adult, trauma informed Gale. He'll see them as survivor of the illithid mess Gale. He'll see them as teacher/protector/cool uncle/surrogate father of his students. He'll see them as man who loves and is loved by someone else who ALSO survived trauma (even if just the ilithid incident, obviously Tav backstories and headcanons may vary).

In the duality of religion/academia, emotions are deeply repressed. Anger is very likely presented as the worst emotion you could share. I don't think it's necessary to do the argument of what is a sorcerer, what is a wizard so that's not ever where I'm going with this. But when you have someone like Gale who was magically attuned on his own, outside of familial tradition and was taken into wizard academia BECAUSE of that, I think anger very much feels like a danger to the social order. I don't think that the Orb is the first time Gale has been framed as a danger to Mystra. I don't think it's the first time he's framed as shaming her or hurting her for making a choice or feeling a feeling. He HAS to unlearn all of that.

I think it takes a few big uh-ohs for Gale to start to truly and practically engage with that. I think it takes nightmares, flashbacks, and dark, dark periods where he can't control his rage or his shame. Where he can't tell which is which. I think it takes more cycles of isolation. I think it probably takes lashing out at Tav in that scenario. There's a moment when you do go and read the book of Karsus where if you tell Gale you still hate this and don't want to pursue it, he kind of snaps at you and guilts you a little bit. It's something to the effect of, "don't be a hindrance now when you've been so helpful." And for me... how many times has someone said that to Gale? Where does that idea come from? It's the only moment in the entire game where I had the thought that Macha would possibly leave him or cut him off, had that attitude escalated.

And then I have these questions... does this level of emotional dysregulation touch Gale's relationship to the Weave? what is the DnD equivalent of therapy? is this something he can manage while being at Blackstaff? as he heals can he advocate for the safety of children in that system? Does the system deserve to exist and how does Gale grapple with that?

This is a very long way to say that I don't think it matters if Gale gets to a point where he is ready to feel that anger. The point will get to him.

As much as I love the relative fluff and meaningful sensuality I've dabbled with in my fic so far, for me true romance means trust, it means building a foundation, it means being PARTNERS in every sense of the word. And that involves ugliness, despair, and helping each other through the muck. I think with Gale there will be a lot of that. As someone with C-PTSD who is extremely avoidant attachment it really requires a rich head canon of him being able to do that to keep the fictional interest alive tbqh.

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Fawk.

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sleeping arrangements (not sure tara would ever actually deign to sleep in the same 20ft radius as shovel but who can resist those big shiny insectoid black eyes 🥺)

plus:

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TARA: And I'm yours. A perfect circle of companionship. I don't know about you, but I wouldn't have it any other way.

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Just remembered how, when I was first levelling up Gale, I thought, 'huh, he's got fairly decent Consitution for a wizard. Useful for gameplay purposes, of course, but I wonder if there's a narrative explanation?'

And not an hour or two of play later, learned that the orb - if left untreated too long - causes him constant pain, muscle spasms and disorientation. Gale and Tara did not immediately figure out how to treat his condition, which meant that he likely spent weeks or months in that state - and of course, whenever the orb acts up, he goes through it again. He probably endures it constantly through the end of act 1, after his treatment stops working.

Constitution, of course, is that the stat that represents ability to focus while being hurt. Endurance even after physical distress. Pain tolerance.

Yeah. I think there's a narrative explanation.

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Looks like Sharess Caress has a new Stern Librarian

I'll pay the late fines....with my body heh