#gale speaks

[emperorsfortune]

remade a classic for you all

[babesareblue]

finally caved and made a collector oc... Meet Verdant Shooting Star! A child collector who likes traveling more than anything!

Seeing so many people have such cool designs and ideas really inspired me a lot. @wake-up-and-face-the-sun​‘s post about how they design theirs really helped!! If you want to check it out it’s here!

[galestral]

she holds my whole heart

[blorbopolis]

starting to understand one another

[heph]

Elvish

[phyronia]

something i appreciate very much about baldur's gate 3 is the way it doesn't try to sand down its characters edges to make them fit into their roles as victims of their past better. it doesn't make them soft and sad and scared at the expense of their other, sometimes less palatable traits. even though the things people have done to them have molded them, they're still full people beyond that, warts and all.

karlach, for example, was an unwilling soldier for ten years. but she still loves fighting. smashing heads is often her first answer to any problem, because it's what she knows, and she's not ashamed of that. she's good at killing, and she's proud of it. ask her about killing devils! she gets so into the details that she forgets what you were even talking about.

astarion's been through two hundred years of hell and barely even knows who he is any more, and he's so terrified of losing his freedom that he's willing to hurt anyone (including himself) to try to protect it, but he's also just genuinely a huge bitch. not even in a 'pushing people away so they can't get close' way, he's just kind of a dick! and that's wonderful.

and gale's the last one i'll talk about for now because this is getting long. he was groomed by the literal goddess of magic and cast out for trying to prove himself to her by helping her, left to slowly and painfully die and endanger all those around him, then told to kill himself for redemption in her eyes, and he was down enough on himself to believe this was fair! but also! he is hubristic and arrogant and absolutely thinks that yeah 'rip to everyone else who reached too far for godhood and doomed themselves and others in the process but i'm different'. he's a disaster.

i'm just go glad larian gave us these characters that aren't just poor little snookumses. they have the range

[galedekarios]

😼🍷

bonus:

[sluttyquarantinetheory]

By the time you actually reach Baldur's Gate it feels like you've domesticated most of your companions. Except Astarion who is much like a feral chihuahua you found in a field and he'll bite your shins if you forget to give him a treat. And then you enter a magic shop and as you're leaving you suddenly learn your wizard has been picking up bad habits from the chihuahua this entire time.

[cowboygenes]

The Life Cycle of A Star

[emperorsfortune]

your honor i appreciate him and care for him so goddamn much

[babesareblue]

Hi guys! A quick update on the Collector OC video project! I am making progress on the video, though I am also currently busy with Midterms... Thank you all for being so patient with me! Here is one part of the video so far as a little teaser for what’s to come! :-) Enjoy! Osmos belongs to @axolotlrain!

[galestral]

bed time I'm sleeping on this slug

snork mimimimi

[midnigtartist]

Mystra is so fucking mid like im sorry but you see Shar and shes the size of a mountain beautiful woman made of obsidian and absolutely terrifying.

The statue of Umberlee in the Water Queen’s House is badass and Mystra looks like the living embodiment of bedazzled jeans

Like yah maybe its bc its easier to take a human lover but Gale is an absolute Freak dont tell me he wouldn’t be into an 80ft tall woman

[necromosss]

as a non-native english speaker i blanked out whenever gale talks sometimes (im sorry baby boo my brain is almond-sized)

[messiahzzz]

thinking abt how gale and wyll are both hopeless/devoted romantics, but with a very different flavor to them

wyll believes in the grand tales of romance, writing your story together and witnessing your very own epic tale, the true power of love, wanting to court you in the traditional way, being your knight in shining armor, making sure you never want for anything — the beauty of an ending through your own making, your happily-ever-after.

while gale is more spiritual in his approach to romance. he believes in the bond between souls, true connection and devotion that defies even physical factors, something otherwordly and magical that solely exists between the two of you, a merging of body and mind, getting lost in one another and choosing you each day anew. — he doesn't believe in fate, but he does believe in serendipity.

what they do have in common, however, is wanting to dedicate themselves to their partner with their whole heart. i just think they're both really neat and deserve to be appreciated more by the fandom as a whole!!

[wolfywolfy]

I love how Astarion quotes The Tell-Tale Heart every once in a while. It's a rarer line, and initially I thought it was out of place (Neil is very well versed in theater, so I assumed it was a riff from him), but since reading an analysis of the work I think it was pretty purposeful.

The piece is all about fear and paranoia, things we know Astarion is plagued by despite how he might act. Similarly, the narrator of the story also tries to convince the reader that they are not as troubled as they seem. In the end, the narrator is consumed by the beating of the heart of the old man he killed and dismembered, the sound growing louder and louder until in a fit of rage he reveals the body to the police to absolve himself from the persistent beating.

Except the police never heard the heart beat, because it wasn't the old man's heart at all. The narrator was consumed by the sound of his own heart beating more and more rapidly in his chest from fear. He was the owner of the thing that forced him to reveal his true nature, he is the owner of the tell-tale heart.

And what happens with Astarion after you romance him? He realizes over time that, while he tried to deny his feelings and was initially only interested in manipulating you for his own means, he actually has grown to care for you. You have done something to his heart that hasn't happened in centuries, you have made it feel as if it has started beating again.

Therefore, his tell-tale heart leads him to admit his transgressions, which were committed out of fear and paranoia for his safety.

So the line is actually very, very apt. His confession during Act 2 is his own version of "Villains! Dissemble no more! I admit the deed! Tear up the planks! Here, here! It is the beating of his hideous heart!" Except, of course, it is his own heart that he is unearthing for us (and it's not so hideous, after all).