#kaede's dream guardian probably should've been him

[cherryronpa]

finished one of my bg3 files where i just shamelessly recreated a danganronpa character and started drawing this around early december to celebrate but didn't finish until mid-january lmao

here's my first non-EA tav, kaede! she's a half-elf bard with autistic rizz off the charts, but like most of the men in the game could be outmuscled by boo. i imagined her being a baldurian travelling musician who while she still very much prefers the various pianos lying around the game world has a modified lyre that plays like one for when she's on the road to perform elsewhere, and had come back to baldur's gate to visit a close friend (shuichi) when she got abducted.

(how it ended under the cut because spoilers for the game)

her story didn't exactly end 'happy' - her autistic rizz pulled karlach and gale and she ultimately chose karlach (it also pulled wyll but she was well into karlach territory when it happened), and she did defeat raphael who was probably closer to her actual final boss than the netherbrain was (someone pointed out that raphael is mostly a bard but also Raphael's Final Act contains many instruments, but a piano is not among them).

unfortunately when it came for netherbrain fighting time, kaede was invested in githyanki liberation that was not at all influenced by lae'zel threatening to kill her if she didn't. the gang freed orpheus instead and while unsure at first, kaede eventually chose to make the sacrifice herself and become a mindflayer despite abstaining hard from tadpole usage. (honestly with her stubbornness i feel like it would be a VERY long time and a LOT of brains eaten before it even makes a dent in how she behaves)

lae'zel went on with orpheus to topple the rule of vlaakith, wyll wasn't the blade of avernus so he just kind of stayed in baldur's gate (we did save his dad but never found the dragon), gale returned the crown of karsus to mystra, astarion didn't ascend because of course kaede would be able to talk him out of doing so, shadowheart turned her back on shar and was reunited with her parents.

and as for karlach, kaede kind of couldn't stay in faerun very easily being a squid now (especially after what just happened) and had very little left, and karlach was obviously about to die and was about all she had left, so kaede made a split-second decision to convince karlach that they could both return to avernus and kick the shit out of zariel together. and then they did. shuichi gets a postcard commemorating the time his best friend (now a squid) and her girlfriend kicked the shit out of an archdevil

also i imagine she was extremely devastated about it until she found out that she specifically gets four fingers and a thumb with the mindflayer form and then was only mildly devastated because she could still shred on a piano