#this is just making me think of how little official tav content there is. where is my man valve

[fatale-distraction]

BG3 Companions Social Media Headcanons Part 1

I was bored at work and couldn’t stop. 🤣 I’ll make another post with Halsin, Minthara, Jaheira, Minsc, and some NPCs!

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Astarion - Pre-Tav, Astarion's social media is mostly thirst-traps for some kind of nefarious, Cazador-related money-making plot. They barely scoot past the TOS on lewd content. Very little real personal content, anything that isn't a thirst trap is heavily doctored lifestyle content to make it seem like he's living a much more luxurious life than he actually is.

After meeting Tav and getting rid of Cazador, he deletes all of his old accounts and opens up new ones. They're not exactly private, but he's much more careful about who he follows and who can follow him back. The posts become much more genuine. Still a lot of selfies, but they're sexy in the way of a guy just finally living his truth and being comfortable in his own skin. There's more shots of his daily life; waking up with his partner's obnoxious pets strewn across the bed, morning coffee and his current favorite book, new outfits that make him feel more himself. Tav features heavily in most of his posts, and there are probably as many pictures of them as there are of himself.

Karlach - chaos. No rhyme or reason. Lots of parkour and Jack-ass parodies. Constant flood of pictures of her stuffed animal collection. Stupid filters abound. There's several videos of her just flexing. Lumberjack videos. Seven hundred pictures of Tav, tons of selfies together. Videos of her literally sobbing over some cute stuffy she found or a dog she got to pet. "How many times can I say the fuck word before I get suspended." Memes. Memes everywhere.

Lae'zel - She follows three accounts and never posts anything, but somehow she's constantly scrolling through. What does she even do? Her profile picture is still the default. She doesn't have any profile information filled out. It just says "No." Her screen name is just Lae_zel. Every single item in her favorites is a cat video. She has One photo and its a gym selfie. All of her comments seem really mean at first, but they're all weirdly supportive things along the lines of "your teeth are sharp and your visage terrifying".

Shadowheart - total E-girl influencer vibe. Everything is #nofilter. She doesn't need filters. She's god's most perfect princess. You can't even be mad because it's not vanity its just how she Is. Ends everything with Prayer-hands-emoji hashtag Shar'sblessings or Selune'sblessings depending on where she is in that journey. Hairstyle and makeup tutorials and she makes it look so damn easy. "Dye my hair and cut my bangs with me." "Get ready with me" videos nearly every day. Every picture has a comment from Astarion that just says "oh fuck off" because even he can never hope to be as perfect as she is. Or at least that's what her forty-five thousand followers think.

Wyll - The official Blade of the Frontier social media account(s). Fencing videos and promos. "How to polish your horns for newbies" video that's been taken down twenty-seven times for lewd content even though it's literally for polishing actual horns. Accidental thirst traps because damn. Lots of disability advocacy, especially for visual impairments. Weekly Demon/Devil PSAs. Constantly featured in Karlach's vids and vice-versa. Buddy selfies. Once in a while a pic of him with his dad. Pics with Tav are rare, but when he does post them they're the sweetest pictures and he gushes about them for paragraphs. It's a little gross how gushy they are. Astarion comments with vomit emojis and Wyll just replies with an angry face emoji. The purest content. He's so wholesome. Not a swear to be seen. Lots of gentle hype videos. "You've got this. You can do this. I believe in you."

Gale - oh my god he has the most pretentious social media accounts. He's worse than Astarion. "Well, actually" videos with multiple parts because they're too long. Tea and bookshelves. Tara. So many pics of Tara. Tara napping on a book. Tara swatting a fly. Tara in the window. Tara on the kitchen counter. Tara laying in the sun. Tara doing nothing. He has one of those fancy cat terrarium backpacks. Magic tutorials. Mystra simp. Surprisingly few selfies but the ones he has are IMMACULATE. Pretentious book reviews. His only saving grace is that he is HILARIOUS. He's the only one with a reasonable about of pics with Tav as opposed to almost none or way too many, but the captions are always really sweet.

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Part 2 here!

Part 3 here!

Part 4

[rottenbrainstuff]

BG3 playthrough - Bhaal Temple

Mega mega spoilers:

Wow! So that’s my personal arc complete then. Holy smokes.

Yanno I’ve joked how unfortunate it is that I seem to have picked every best choice (for what I personally like) for my very first run, and now nothing will be as fun for me to try in subsequent playthroughs - picked a drow, picked a bard, and picked dark urge - but like. Honestly, honestly, I don’t know how much time and effort I have in me to invest 200+ hours every time I want to play again, how many more times I’m going to actually do that. I can imagine some nebulous future playthrough where I would have enjoyed all this stuff for the first time after playing the game already but… I don’t know. As much as I joke, I think it’s fine. I know full well that I don’t have the time for unlimited playthroughs to discover new stuff, so I’m glad at the very least I can say I did one big run and saw most of the very best content.

The temple begins with the farslayer fight - what a pain in the goddamned ass. Had to really metagame for that, and sneak someone over to the far side of the area to hide until the fight begins so I can start chipping away at the dude right away.

Act 3 is more spare for lore and set dressing than the previous acts, but the little things that were there in the temple, I liked. The two folks Orin transformed into, whoever those ended up being in your game, are dead on slabs here, and it was very gross to find my old room, and always unsettling to find old things I’ve written. Orin has been kind of just irritating so far - but like a lot of other people, I now find Orin just very sad. She’s everyone’s second choice, desperate to prove herself, and no one cares. Not her mother, not her father, not her spawn sibling, not her god, not her allies. Even the fans don’t like her.

Holy smokes, if you’re a dark urge, she changes into your tav! I had no idea! You can hear your tav actually SPEAKING an entire paragraph of lines! That floored me!

Player characters speaking lines is apparently controversial - many gamer bros feel that having the main character speak is “ruining the immersion”. I mean. My tav is an enormous buff purple guy. We are fighting armies and undead creatures and beholders and driders and evil clowns that want to kill us. You think that hearing my own character talk is going to be the thing that ruins my immersion?...??? So, I’m generally really not on board with this whole player-characters-should-never-speak thing. HOWEVER - however - I do have to say, that fact that your tav doesn’t speak through the game, the fact that you only ever hear them in little bits and pieces of reactions as you click around, the fact that you’re FAMILIAR with your tav’s voice but you never really get to hear it very much - that makes this scene extremely startling! At least for me! I thought it was so cool, so unexpected, this scene is probably going to remain one of the most memorable moments of the game for me. If my tav was always talking in their dialogues, this wouldn’t have been remarkable at all. (I have voice 3 btw: I know voice 5 is the “official” dark urge voice, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ whatever. I like voice 3)

(just as far as it goes logistically - I assume that Larian just physically couldn’t record speaking lines for the player character. They have eight different voice choices, and just THINK of all the extra dialogue there would be to record. They didn’t even record the dialogue for origin characters, and those already have established voice actors, so clearly it’s not a question of immersion. If the choice is between a speaking player character, and more choices in terms of dialogue, I’ll take the larger amount of content and I won’t complain about it)

I got very worried about the duel with Orin - a one-one-one with my squishy little bard? I was having flashbacks to Lae’zel’s second romance where she wiped the floor with my purple ass in one single turn. I was really surprised how easy the fight was though. I don’t think that’s necessarily bad - I think once again it just makes me feel bad for Orin. Even a shitty bard can take her out pretty quickly. The nice ring that I got from dinosaur land lets me cast an enchantment as a bonus action after landing a hit, so it was pretty simple to just keep her contained with fear from dissonant whispers, then chip her down with attacks and with a summons I brought along.

Sceleritas is SO UPSET if you lose the duel. He’s a creepy little creep that likes murder and torture, but he also genuinely really loves the dark urge, too. It’s weirdly sweet. (His welcome to the durge when you reach the temple is adorable as well) I took his body after everything was all done and found a good spot to lay it to rest. Just felt weirdly compelled to do that.

HOLY SHIT what a cool character arc wrap up. How satisfying. Saying my final big fuck you to daddy Bhaal. I’d rather die than continue to be his tool - fine then, die. And Withers steps in to play his uno reverse and brings me back. It felt so satisfying to hear Withers explain that Bhaal had only killed what he knew about and had access to, my dark urge, the murder, the intrusive thoughts. That’s been burned out of me now, and everything that’s left is all me, all free. Your companions add their comments - Astarion says that you are more than what Bhaal made you to be, which of course is literally what he also said to Cazador, when Cazador told him that he was made to be consumed. You guys are giving me the warm fuzzies, knock it off! And now courtesy of Withers, I have more epithets: Challenger of Gods, Child of None.

“Does this mean Withers is my dad now?” -my tav, at some point probably

AMAZING. Holy smokes. Everyone who is a BG3 fan needs to play a resisting durge at least once. It really is so amazing.

(it’s neat trying to reconcile my random choices that I made at the start of the game when I didn’t know anything about what the plot was going to be, with the things I know now. Bard seems, I guess, maybe a bit of an odd class for a dark urge. When would a Bhaal cultist have bothered to learn music and poetry and instruments? I think with my tav, perhaps he was a very theatrical and charismatic cult leader, and that’s where that comes from, with a great big side helping of performing like a funny little trained monkey for Kressa Bonedaughter while I was in her care - that’s where he would have got his silly starting bard clothes from)

That’s my personal quest all wrapped up, then. I actually feel now like I’m getting close to the end of the game, only a few things left to do. Next up is the iron throne bullshit and yikes guys. I tried it twice the other night and failed spectacularly both times. The second time I at least managed to get SOME people back to the sub in time, but I am not satisfied with just some.

[narke]

never really understood where sword/ van came from. its not like tav and mick interact a lot in or out of game. the only thing i can think of is the comics, but while tav is reasonably friendly towards mick (the whole... “mick is a freak who pees in jars” bit aside), mick did uhhhhhh drug and almost kill tav