#I don’t want to talk about bg3 I think that game is shit for reasons I won’t get into lmao

[foofygoldfish]

hi this is idk me being vulnerable or whatever

but uh if anyone ever wants to chat or like… discord or whatever? I’d like that?

[ex-textura]

I have never been into a video game during its hype before bg3, but it showed me it was for a reason. I love the game but hate the way it treats to Gale and its fans. It’s like going back to high school again. This fucking game has love for everyone else but Gale and it fucking shows. We don’t get any closure for his arc, no special scenes, we don’t even know his fucking age. What we got is all the hate, mistreatment and hostility. Tbh, I was in a very bad place when I played this game for the first time and it pulled me off from there, but seeing my fav getting shit treatment not only from fandom but also the game itself was a big revelation for me. Maybe both me and Gale deserve this treatment. And idc if it’s projection or not, like other people don’t put themselves in their favs place.

Exactly! Exactly!!

I usually miss the big game hype too and show up way too late into a fandom so it's been an experience to watch the progression in real time. There's something to be said for joining a dead fandom is all I can say.

To your point about projection, this is exactly what I've been saying. This is the point I'm trying to make with my limited grasp on words. Of course we're projecting a little bit. A well-written, believable character will do that. So many of us see pieces of ourselves in Gale and it's often those pieces that are getting shit on the most. It's the "I know I talk too much, I know I'm over eager, I know I'm a burden I know I know I know!" pieces that endear him to me. The parts of myself that I hate are the parts of him that I love. I could learn to love myself, I think, through loving a character like him. Like me.

Only the other characters, the writers, the fandom remind me again and again that I'm not meant to love those annoying parts. They're meant to be ignored, to be torn away. To be fixed.

He's the annoying guy that redeems himself through his death.

How many times have I thought that about myself?

I always felt like I wanted more insight into Gale, more thoughts from his writer more discussion of the depth of this character but honestly now I'm not so sure lol. Although I'd love to get a word on his age though lmao. (I'm still gonna hc him at least in his late 30s though they can't take that away from me fjshsidjdhsis)

[lemonsrosesandlavender]

Stared at these for a while bc I think I already know how you'd answer a lot of these qlfjakkd so I'll offer you ✨️ 🔥 🌿 (that last one is just an open invitation at all times. Your taste is impeccable and i demand all the recs you are willing to give me lmao)

✨favourite platonic BG3 dynamic and why?

Oooooh. Fascinating. Good question. Ok, it’s SLIGHTLY cheating because of the changeable nature of it but I love Mayrina’s responses to Tav - her initial grief, anger and pushback, and then her trust in them.

Oh also I LOVE Karlach and Lae’zel’s banter about owls. They don’t have chemistry to me, but I enjoy Karlach drawing out Lae’zel’s more low-stakes thoughts, though they’re delivered with the same intensity she gives everything lol.

Also, it’s more implied than shown since they have no screentime together, but I like the professional relationship between Cerys and Zevlor. I think she respected him a lot before the Absolute incident and it makes the whole “betrayal” harder for her to swallow. Or maybe I’m just making shit up here, lol. Anyway, I’m effectively writing her as Zevlor’s right hand woman in Planar Tears, so I suspect she will have FEELINGS that get at least incidentally shown there.

🔥is there an aspect of the game’s story that you think it could have done better?

I think the common answer to this is “Wyll”, and I 100% agree. I’m on team “Ulder was a good dad, but too rigid” and think that Ulder can apologise and make amends. I want to see the Ravenguards happy, despite Ulder’s mistakes. Anyway. In that quest line Wyll says he’s going to throw a celebration dinner, and for some reason I felt the game REALLY cued us up to expect a cutscene there. And it would have been great! Even just a short one with your current party around the fire and Wyll toasting to the memory of Ansur or something?! Come on! This would have been a great place for more Wyll, to really make it HIS storyline instead of Emps. And also to add a bit of platonic bonding. (We need a tiefling party equivalent in Acts 2 and 3, and the High Hall only slightly counts. I will die on this hill!)

Otherwise… I find the handling of Shadowheart’s story a little annoying, honestly. I personally find it hard to want to do a massive “trust fall” when the consequences are possibly killing an innocent woman whom hundreds of lives depend on (and who is a powerful ally). Like, it’s fine, I’m ok with just letting her leave my party over the fact I just straight up am not interested in playing trust games with her at one of the crucial moments in the game, but it does feel like the game believes “trusting her” is the right decision there and… it hasn’t set up enough doubt on Shadowheart’s part to earn that, I don’t think, and if if there were… it’s a fucking person, we’re talking about here. Your beautiful gesture of trusting Shart is playing dice with a tortured, devastated prisoner’s life.

🌿 a recommendation!

Ahahaha THE PRESSURE ;) jk

I don’t know how you feel about modern AUs, but @ra-scheln recommended me this amazing Gale/Karlach fic where she’s the piercer he’s booked to get a Prince Albert. It radiates Karlach’s warmth and Gale’s endearing slight-awkwardness (and it’s hot lol). I hadn’t thought about the pairing before this fic but DAMN.

[jackdawsfavorite]

Your player character being the center of the wheel that the spokes of your companions rotate around is so strange in BG3. I’ve been pulling up memories of comparable RPGs trying to figure out what’s bugging me, and I think it’s as simple as: in Mass Effect and Tides of Numenara and Tyranny*, you got something special going on that motivates people to tag along even if that’s all they’re doing, trailing in your gravity. In BG3 some NPC is like, “We’ve been waiting for someone like You, who has a brain worm but isn’t horny for its associated god-thing,” and I’m like, there are four of us. And I got more back home! And while you can technically enter any conversation with a non-companion as another party member, and get their specialty dialogue options and everything, you can’t effectively roleplay as them in those convos without everyone still reacting as if your player character was the one who made those choices, so it doesn’t seem like you’re supposed to play as companions interchangeably like in Divinity 2 even though the mechanics for it are kind of still there. So it’s just my semigeneric ass in the driver’s seat making all these fuck-off huge calls. Even if I was playing a premade character instead of custom i bet it would feel weird.****

There’s an option with shadowheart to straight up say, “You don’t make the decisions, I do,” and maybe I should have picked it to see if she’d had something to say about nobody having ever agreed to that and there being no reason for that to be the case.

*Dragon Age 1 isn’t included because I don’t remember it well enough to say. Dragon Age 2 isn’t included because it did a good job of making you just a bunch of people who lived in the same city and got involved in each other’s business all the time. Or didn’t get involved! You could just ignore whoever and it wasn’t weird because you weren’t camping together. Dragon Age 3 isn’t included because the amount of power you’re abruptly given in that game is ridiculous. Divinity: Original Sin 2 isn’t included because it did a good job at giving everyone their own shit to deal with and reason to be traveling together, and those reasons could break down.** **I straight up turned on and killed half my party partway through my first playthrough because There Can Only Be One Victor is a big part of the plot and we hadn’t come to an agreement on who’d get to be big cheese. I probably didn’t have to turn on them right then, but I chose to and I felt good about it because one of them had a demon attached to her who couldn’t be allowed access to power and the other one I didn’t fucking like. Meanwhile in BG3 I’m like, by all rights I should leave Astarion to fend for himself on this beach. By all rights I should kick him out of the group when he literally fucking kills you if you don’t stop him and makes me reload because I’m not gonna spend resources patching up from 1 hp immediately after a long rest, and then makes me regret the reload later because even though the narrative triggers and small choices in this game have been unnuanced and mechanically fickle maybe the scene where he wants to talk about what eating other companions would be like would’ve included a line where I point out it’s not funny because I know he can’t control himself because last time he had the opportunity he fucking killed me to death.*** Obviously I’m glad I kept him around because I’m engaging in his story, but it’s less fun to break roleplay to make very specifically unwise decisions to do that. Feels like hopping on a rail. Which is another post altogether. …What was I talking about?

***I think I literally said, “At least he’s sexy,” out loud at some point, and how do you think I feel about that now??

****Except maybe the githyanki. I don’t know much about her because I just didn’t find her before moving on from the first map and figure I’ll catch her on a replay, but she seems very domineering.

[lairofsentinel]

I love your BG3 analysis posts and wanted to get your insight into one of Gale's lines. On point 21 you discuss his 'doubt' lines. There's another line that I find similar / fitting: if the main char tells Gale they think their night together was a mistake then he says something like "Let me clear your mind of doubts: it absolutely wasn't." He doesn't discuss the 'why' of it - or express he's disappointed but accepts their choice. He tries to discourage that line of thinking outright. Thoughts?

Hey, hello! Thanks for reading those big posts. :D

[Baldur’s Gate 3 Early Access Spoilers]

For those who don't know what those numbers mean: [Gale in 27 points or more]

Yeah, in (21) I found curious that he just says "doubt is a spoilsport" in another desperate attempt to make the MC stop thinking about it, and go for him already. Yes, you are right. The other line afterwards, when the MC shows doubts again about the whole night, he desperately tries to cast them aside. Again! They are like attempts of "no, no, dear, stop thinking right there. We are not a mistake, we are just we. Stop thinking. I don't care if I encourage questioning in general. On this matter, question not" XD

Which I found hilarious in comparison with his personality which is ALL the time in his mode "we need to doubt about everything", because well, that's a scholar. Scholars tend to be better at questioning than knowing things most of the time. This shows once more that he is desperate to stay with the MC, so far. I want to believe that there are not more hidden secrets, or ill-intended motives coming from him.

His mental state by the time he meets the MC is quite a mess. If you think that since too young he was abandoned by Mystra with that orb of Netherese devastation stuck in his chest... we can assume that there is a high chance for him to have been alone ever since. The quest in saving himself from that bomb probably prevented him to use time and energy in relationships (like I say in (15)), and by (12) we know he feels deadly alone. Especially if we take his description of how the bomb makes him feel, which is an increasing terror the longer he stays without consuming artefacts.

If you fail in that conversation of the Loss scene, when you insist about what he lost, he will push the MC away and will say something like "I'm strong enough to keep on". But we know that by the end of that night (or after the party in case MC did not romance him), he will say it anyway. He will talk about Mystra abandonment.  He can't hold it anymore. He needs to share the burden and find someone to trust. Which will be the MC, as a friend or a lover.

I still think about the mind-shocking impact that the Weave scene caused him. It's not only what he states, his mindset has been focused on solving his bomb condition for too long. Relationships have been out of question for a while (15).  And then, he has this Weave moment with the MC showing him their romantic interest; it not only took him by surprise, it caught him quite vulnerable too (too much feeling of loneliness and fear and despair plus the tadpoles looming danger), so the event had a stronger effect than he lets show in that moment. We know he thinks about that event the following days in between the Weave scene and the party, and apparently, that makes a click in him.

As I said, he is desperate for the MC who shared that magic moment of the Weave. Magic is his life, as he said, and sharing it with someone who has supported him and giving him their trust, it moves the ground he is walking on.

He is a char that, when a chance appears, he doesn't want to let is waste. And that romantic scene in the weave was a completely unexpected chance happening in front of him. Serendipity, as he said. (I don't know if by choosing the last option, the one in which you imagine nothing, Gale will want something anyway. I have to explore that.) (** I already explored this [here] **)

In sum, the concept here is that, as a scholar, he is into doubts and questioning all what you want. He will encourage such attitude in the MC. Except when it comes to question his emotions for the MC and their night together. Because questioning them, may cause abandon him. We also need to remember he was abandoned. Abandonment issues must to be added to his psychological profile. It was probably this issue the one that made him wait to the last moment before saying the truth. Because he is all about consent and let people know the truth, but he freaked out at the thought that maybe that truth could mean a second abandonment. That fear is there even if the MC did not romance him. He reached to a point in his life where loneliness, the bomb, and the tadpole became too heavy to deal with alone anymore. He needs the MC. And needs to be sure that they won't abandon him. That's why Gale ends up doing that rotten move of saying the truth only after sleeping with the romanced MC and after all that speech of the book of Anm: through intimacy he wanted to have a deeper link with the MC in order to prevent the abandonment. This is why he says “after all what we passed through, after the night we spent together”. He wants the MC baaaadly. And he  wants not to be abandoned again. You see him bending and breaking his usual philosophy just to avoid abandonment. That's... a bit dangerous.

Once more it gives me the feeling that Gale is a nice mature character, who knows where he walks as long as we are not in the emotional ground. Emotional-wise... seems that Gale has pretty bad experiences, filled with over-idealised situations (Mystra) or over-darkened by misery (his bomb condition and now the tadpole) and in the back of all that there is a constant abandonment issue that may make some situations quite... complicated.

Asking for middle reactions to Gale on these matters seems to be a bit too much for his char. XD This is why I like to joke that he is basically proposing the MC right there... I mean, the book of Anm speech? If you choose “hey Gale, we are not newlywed (stressing that fact), but newly acquainted”, he gives a shit to the definitions of the words (the scholar, uh), he says “let's write the prequel”. One can interpret it like... he is assuming he and the MC are walking that path through and through. He is riiight heading into marriage. Lol. I personally would not like this kind of chars, but I make my exception here because, at least, Gale has a solid reason to be this way: he may die at any moment.

This kind of soft emotional instability char may be a dangerous compound in Larian's hands. You see, Larian in DOS2 offered romances that clearly were not going to last after the ending of the game; and you had hints of that pretty early in the game: one companion was married looking for their spouse, and another was betrothed, and had a fling with the MC meanwhile, if you want to. Another companion you can romance, simply disappears later by the end of the game. So... Larian... is not Bioware. Having a man like Gale that can break or bend his usual philosophy and his morals to a certain degree when it comes to matters of the heart.... well... it's dangerous, to say the least.

I fear Mystra appearing, and telling him that she abandoned him not because she wanted to, but because the netherese orb put her in danger (a logical reason that Gale could accept without problems no matter how much he suffered because of it, check (4),(14) and (20) ). And if Gale gets rid of that orb, and Mystra asks him to be his Chosen One “with benefits” once more (lol)... I'm not so sure if he will not abandon the MC. Unless the MC accepts a polyamory relationship (with a goddess? XD), because I totally see Gale has no issues with Mystra or MC having lovers besides him. 

Magic is his life, and he longs a lot the powers granted by the title of the Chosen One. And Mystra's affections are where the true magical power lays (Gale's own words). So.... yes. Dangerous.

Ah, damn... I derailed again. Sorry.

More content of bg3 in general [here]