#who are those people even sarevok is on my side

[wilchur]

I'm sorry but the second Durge turns into the Slayer when fighting any Bhaal cultists they should all immediately go "aw shit nevermind". I don't care that Orin supposedly has them in her pocket, you can't convince me that people that fanatical about their worship can see the avatar of their god manifest before them and still try to beat the shit out of it lmao

[asharaks]

it is, i think, symptomatic of the way larian has built this brand: bg3 was always marketed as being mature (read: sexual), and that was one of the big draws for players - myself included! especially as media pulls more towards extremes, with mainstream video games starting to get increasingly graphically sexual, graphically violent, and the vogue for 'grey morality' becomes the norm, those boundaries get pushed, and it becomes more and more of a selling point.

larian obviously focused on this, along with the How Do You Do, Fellow Kids brand, the increased accessibility of game devs on twitter, and adopted it heavily into their marketing strategy, and are now pretty reliant on the horny gamer crowd for a lot of their audience, and more importantly, they're doing this on purpose.

which is how you end up in situations like this.

characters (white men) the players want to fuck get centred: they get updates, they get more content, they get favoured. halsin's gone from a side character in EA to a half-fledged romance option, to a full romance option: he shows up in the promotional material, is larian's poster boy for the sex scenes, he gets more content with every update.

now gortash gets more heavily implied situationship lines with the dark urge, because players are horny for him. nevermind that some people aren't playing that way, or that he was originally set up to be a lower-level antagonist; nevermind that if the durge's storyline needed expansion, it should've been with orin and sarevok and bhaal, or that it muddies the writing for the rest of gortash's arc + characterisation: people want to fuck him, so it gets put in the game. it's not even to do with karlach, whose quest so desperately needs expansion! it's specifically catering to the people who want their character to have a Relationship with the slaver, because they're either not interested in or not able to focus on strengthening the weak spots in the narrative: they're just doing things that will net the 'my favourite dating sim' people lmfao.

meanwhile, literal main character wyll gets his quest demoted to a subquest, doesn't get bugfixes, doesn't get a single unique romance greeting after 6 patches and months of requests. he's not a Horny character, so he doesn't get the focus: he's not a player favourite, so he gets nothing. it's just... so unbelievably, indisputably racist, and it's incredibly grim and disappointing to watch it happen in real-time.

[mightymizora]

Feel free to ignore but: do you feel that gortash is - I guess the word I'd use is "good" - at sex? By whatever metric you'd judge that?

Hey anon I LOVE THIS QUESTION and I can't be normal about it!

So I have to dive into it a bit into sections because there's a lot going on here for me and obviously the caveat here is this is my opinion, this is my opinion from inferences from the text, this is my opinion.

So in order to do this we need to cover a few sections: sexual education, sexual agency, sex as tool and sex as desire.

All of this is going under the cut for discussions of childhood abuse, canon inferences, decisions he makes in game, and some headcanons around agency and dub/non-con that readers may find uncomfortable.

so, let's start at the very beginning with:

Sexual Education

There are two things we know about young Enver Flymm. One is that he was raised in a small cobblers workshop where he shared a single room with his parents. The other is that at some point, he was taken to the literal hells where he suffered an incredibly physically abusive situation.

We don't know for sure the exact age he was taken, but I think it's easy to infer that he was prepubescent when he was taken from the way he is spoken about as a snot, a boy etc. by Nubaldin. Even if he was a little older, it's safe to infer that he didn't have a particularly healthy environment to learn about sex and sexuality either at home or in literal hell.

If we assume Enver was in hell, we know that the sex he would have potential been aware of was largely non-consensual. There's references all over the place about his fellow detainee Hope being sexually and physically assaulted as well as psychologically manipulated. We don't know with Enver if he ages in the hells (I assume he does, and that it is only those who sell their souls and end up there after death that do not age) but if he does, he goes from childhood to early adulthood, ten years, in this space (mirrored in Karlach spending ten years there as well, interestingly.)

We also don't actually know how he escaped the hells, and it is a niche headcanon (which I have also put into my works) that he as a young adult learned about sex and traded with Haarlep to find his route out (in my stories, this directly feeds into Mephistopheles being interested in the potential of this boy, and letting him steal the crown.) There's no text basis for this, it just neatly ties up some thematic threads and I think can be put aside and it still doesn't change the core that:

Enver Gortash had no way of having a healthy understanding of sex as a teenager. There isn't really any way that he could have! Either he's living in a one-bed apartment with abusive parents who hate his existence, or he's learning from Raphael's example in literal hell.

Sexual Agency

This is where a lot of people feel differently, but again, we can look at things as they are and then make some inferences.

Enver Gortash does not have a named spouse, or any named mistresses/side pieces/conquests. Anything. There is no evidence of anything (we will come to Durge later.) Compare this to Sarevok, who has two named partners and is inferred to have had others, and it is an interesting choice to have zero ties. It's particularly interesting because as a Lord, he would be expected to be thinking of siring a house, and as a man in power, the narrative expectation would be to find evidence of sex as a benefit of his position. We don't see any evidence of that.

There is a read that many, including me, bring to the fondness that The Dark Urge and Gortash have for each other, but again, there is no evidence that this is sexual or if it is, that it was ever something than a mutual pining. That's the joy of fanworks, you can grow on what's there, but it's not explicit that it's anything more than mutual admiration.

So for me? I think that there is significant evidence that he doesn't prioritise sexual attraction and fulfilment over other areas of reward.

Sex as a Tool

What we do know though is that he has used his body to get things he wants. The Jannath letter, which I love, makes it clear that he had sex with her for financial favours and clout, and that she indulged him in this. He's also more than happy to trade on his image in every way he can. I think it's easy to infer from this that he is, at least in one setting, able to give people what they want out of sex. Whether that means he's technically good OR he's good at constructing and fulfilling the fantasy, I think that's up to interpretation, but I think he knows what to do when it is a performance, and if there's something he can tangibly get out of it like money, power, the ability to blackmail somebody later, then that is the element that is getting him off, not the sex itself. Sex for gain is just another part of his arsenal, to be refined and researched like anything else, and picked up and put down as useful to him.

Sex as Desire

And this is --and it is completely up to interpretation here, I'm just rolling with the other things I see -- where it can potentially all fall apart for Gortash. If he actually likes somebody, if there is a desire or an affection or anything like that, and if he is able to even feel emotions like that, what does he do with them? It's not useful, it's not contained, it's not part of the punishment he learned in the hells or the seduction he learned in the patriars. If he does find himself genuinely fond of another person, how can that fit in his ideas of sex? Personally, I don't think it can do, and there's lots of ways to play with that. In my own stories, the sexual contact he has with Manva is brief, quite one-sided, and quite regressive. He is no charming seducer, but instead taken back to something much simpler that he likely didn't have space for when he was young. He has other encounters where he can't get it up, or can't climax, because the circumstances aren't quite right, the promise of power is not enough, or the partner is too willing (not like he has learned of in the hells at all.)

I think personally that if he does seek out recreational sex, then it is primarily going to be motivated by power play. And I don't think this is well negotiated kink territory. He plays with the player character constantly, testing them, destroying their reputation in the press quest, always vying for more power even when you are apparently allies. This is a man who always, always needs to know he can change the tide.

I think of the woman whose voice was used in the necrotic laboratory, who was stolen away with a promise of a better life. I think of Fariza Linnacker. There's no evidence either were sexual, but we do know that he took great pleasure in manipulating and destroying their lives.

Gortash has so much going on around sex as a tool, as a weapon even, that when it comes to a genuine connection, there's every possibility that he cannot perform at all.

And would that make him embarrassed? Angry? Would he blame? Lash out? Would he seek out professionals to replay old traumas as a "safe space"? Would he avoid all intimacy because he sees it as weak and disgusting? I think there's a lot of scope within this.

So the short version is... I think he's able to be good at sex when it's FOR something. But I don't know if he's even interested when it's not, and if he is, I think he has a long way to go to actively want to seek it out. And is he good in the way that it is connected, intimate? Probably not.

[loquaciousquark]

I finished my Durge run! Got that Tactician achievement too, hoorah. Lots of thoughts about the Dark Urge/Astarion romance under the cut.

My final thoughts now that I've finished it - it's fine. Honestly? It's fine. I think there are some interesting parallels drawn specifically for his backstory with Cazador compared to the Dark Urge trying to resist the urges, but I didn't come out of the romance feeling like it was the end-all be-all One True Romance version for the character. I think there are some interesting dialogue lines ("is today a 'wed you with a delicate veil of blood staining your white curls' kind of day?" made me laugh every time), and it's definitely fun to see some major hurt/comfort vibes play out on screen in the attack-the-romance scene, for sure. That said, I didn't feel like there wasn't anything in that romance I couldn't get for myself with a dominate spell and 4k words of fic with a Tav I like much more.

And like, there's nothing at all wrong with the Dark Urge background! I think it's really interesting to have that internal struggle kind of flavoring the run, and of course it makes sense to have strong Bhaalspawn ties in this particular canon. I think the stuff that's added with Isobel and Scleritas and Orin is very interesting and it definitely added depth to to the Sarevok interactions, and even the conversations with Withers had a lot more nuance! I can definitely see why some people call it Tav+, because it is a customizable character with a lot of extra dialogue options that a regular Tav doesn't get.

That said, the particular type of character that Dark Urge is is one that's not as compelling to me, and setting that up against Astarion's arc felt correspondingly less compelling than the Tav arc I made on my first rogue run. I've played amnesiac characters with a twist before (KOTOR) and in that game I found myself similarly uninvested in the character to the point that I went full Dark Side with her very early in the narrative. To date, she's the only evil main character I've ever intentionally played! There's just something about that blank slate background that doesn't appeal - I find that my characters are generally very strongly shaped by their histories and backstories, even if the details of those backstories develop over the course of the game. They make choices because of who they are and what they've experienced and who they've lost and loved, and I find it hard to create a character with a consistent internal moral needle when there's no backstory to guide it.

And I guess that's part of why the Resist path for the Durge just makes me internally go ???? Because realistically, if I've spent my entire formative life being excitedly murderous, ritually necrophiliac, gleefully cannibalistic, and generally not very nice, why does the amnesia change that? Why would that character want to become something else? How do I internally justify a character making that sort of MASSIVE ethical and moral shift just because of a brainworm and a knock on the noggin? I get that it's fun as a player to try to play a good character with these unexplained evil urges, and I totally get why it's narratively satisfying to see good arise from the ashes of corruption, but I just can't find a way to make the character want to be good in the first place! I had this problem with Revan and I've had it again with the Durge, and that foundational schism was just something I could never really overcome enough to buy into the immersive fiction of the character.

Plus, as far as the Astarion romance goes, I think the Durge arc generally pushes into that similar need to resist the uncontrollable commands given to you by an outsider. It's very much the same space. The thing is, Astarion tells you he knows how important it is to resist those compulsions in the night attack scene, but--we KNOW he couldn't! We know he tried for two hundred years and never once could defy Cazador, and it broke him so badly he gave up resisting at all. And there's some interesting parallels there maybe, that he wants so badly for you to succeed that he's willing to ignore two hundred years of his own personal history, but it puts a pretty despairing tinge to the whole first half of the romance arc. And honestly, that makes me very sad for him.

I think it's just again a less riveting pairing. The Durge/Astarion romance is about both of them overcoming external compulsion through inner will and good choices and white-knuckled defiance, except the timescales of those compulsions are vastly different. And maybe there's a little bit of needing to depend on each other's support to do that, but it's not really so for Durge; you can do the entire Bhaalspawn questline without having Astarion in your party once and you only lose out on a few lines of dialogue. He definitely cares about you, sure, and he can talk to you about how worried he is for you, and that's nice--but there aren't a lot of times where his emotional support is directly critical for you to overcome your urges. On the other hand, I think it's arguable that your friendship (and relationship) with Astarion are directly responsible for his success against Cazador with that last persuasion/insight check combo. If you could have his emotional support be more directly impactful in terms of your ability to resist the urges or Bhaal in Orin's temple, I think I'd be more on board.

In addition, I find two characters going through the exact same narrative arc at the same time not as interesting. Like, if Astarion already had beaten Cazador before the Durge stuff happened and he could directly talk about what was successful for him and help you along the way, I think that might honestly have interested me a bit more. The mirrored arcs we have instead are a little less fascinating than complementary ones. And honestly, there's something about Durge trying to relate to Astarion's centuries of struggle with their own, like, two days of fighting that compulsion, that feels just a little pfeh to me.

And maybe that's why I liked my original Tav so much? As I developed the romance with Astarion, I could shape elements from her backstory (and the way she changed and grew from those events) to make a character that I felt resonated complementarily with Astarion's arc and emotional needs. I could create a character whose defining trait was hope and had always been hope her whole life, because I feel like that's a useful trait to have against an LI who explicitly lost all hope in any rescue. A character who has stubbornly clung to hope throughout a miserable broken life and a miserable broken family paired against a character with a similar background who's lost that hope and has to relearn it--I like that! I like that the characters can teach each other things and can learn from each other. I like that they can make each other better by sharing aspects of themselves that the other person doesn't have.

Having a hopeful Durge doesn't feel the same, because first, that hope is incredibly recent and only comes out over the course of the game because right before the game started, they were still full murderbaby. It's not as longstandingly stubborn despite setback after setback over many many years the way I can have Tav be. And second, again, I can't figure out why an otherwise perfectly content murderous bastard would ever want to hope for anything else after taking a fall off a skyship. I guess that's my biggest problem, that I can't get into the fiction of the character at its baseline well enough to build anything of substance on top of it.

So now, having gone through both the Tav/Astarion romance and the Dark Urge/Astarion romance, I can definitively say I prefer the Tav version. I think the extra stuff you get in the Durge run is fun, and I think the Durge material itself is great and wonderfully tied to the lore outside of the romance, but in terms of the Astarion romance itself, it's just not as captivating. Too similar in the wrong ways and too disjointed in the ways that matter most, and I'd rather have a Tav I can build to fit what I want, someone I can shape to draw out the elements of his character I'm most interested in exploring.

I will say that at one point my Durge sorcerer did roll a 44 on a persuasion check at one point, which was extremely exciting. But I think I'll be going back to my "canon" rogue Tav on my next game to figure out that exact story now that I know her much better, and that'll almost certainly be the one I stick with for future fics.

[wickedbaggins]

2016 In Review - Games

Wow did I not finish much. But here they are!

Ladykiller in a Bind - This here visual novel is probably game of the year for me. This would mean more in a year where I hadn’t failed to finish nearly everything I started, but still. It’s funny and dirty and drawn with skillful personality (for those who dislike dirty, there’s now a Christmas sweater mode, although I’m not sure how much that’s really going to help). What makes it especially memorable is the hard-dropped relationship insights and the neat-o conversation systems. I love that you can hold out for a better option, I love that you have to negotiate suspicion. Christine Love is a game designer I admire, but I’ve found her work a little heavy and strident in the past. This mingles a few difficult themes with a lighter touch and also jokes. And, y’know, sex. I enjoy the side stories more than the main romances, but good stuff all around. Just don’t expect a treatise on consent or anything as carefully lecture-like as Hate Story. It’s a sex comedy first.

Undertale - Maybe should be my game of the year, it’s something, it really is, this beautiful, surreal, unnerving little game with skeletons and cow-dudes and jokes, jokes!! But I am really bad at bullet hell and my frustration with the mechanics made it a very nearly miserable experience for me. Still worth it, though. When it goes all late-stage what-the-hell Earthbound, totally worth it.

Solstice - Another runner-up for game of the year. Moacube’s latest is beautiful and fascinating, a lovingly nuanced and complex murder mystery with a whole lot of character-driven philosophy stuff. It’s a little short and opaque, but every moment is wonderful.

Tyranny - Half of it threatens to be Obsidian’s most interesting game (and that’s saying something). The other half is tediously under-developed. The good stuff is wonderful, though. Your party may not have any quest lines to follow, but they, like most of the characters, are fascinatingly awful people, except when they’re not, and then it’s even sadder. The dialog ranges toward the rich, dense. I could’ve personally gone without the combat and just wandered around talking to people and hovering over the green footnotes. Next time, Obsidian, next time.

Baldur’s Gate Enhanced Edition - I finally dragged all the way through it. The high points are really high, as in Sarevok’s got some actual depths, Durlag’s Tower is a great dungeon, and it was terrific to pretend to be a cat while robbing that one guy. The rest of it is fine, but maybe I’ve played one too many games with real time with pause. I just couldn’t get into the combat, and if you’re story-moding your way through that, it is an awful large part of the game to be disengaged by.

Baldur’s Gate Siege of Dragonspear - The new expansion! There’s more line-by-line writing than in Baldur’s Gate and it really ain’t bad, but the story bothered me a lot from a thematic perspective (our opponents had perfectly good points and were needlessly villainized) and was railroaded in such an obvious way as to be frustrating. I don’t expect a lot of choice and consequence in a Baldur’s Gate, and the game as a whole was fine, but I wish the greater amount of text had done it more favors.

Pillars of Eternity - White March - Pillaaars. White March is neat. A little more polished than Tyranny, if not quite as compelling. The new companions were good (up golems, man) and the worldbuilding exquisite as always. I think a lot of folk didn’t get around to playing it, though, as I still have achievements on my showcase everyone should’ve gotten by now.

Witcher 3 - Heart of Stone - I think I finished it this year. I think! Neat expansion, more focused and interesting for my tastes than the bigger Blood and Wine (which I still haven’t finished). Terrific villain, a lot of great weirdness, the guy I was supposed to redeem (and I guess did) was a loser, though, and his wife needed a little more— something.

The Shivah - Early Wadjet Eye game. The first? Very short, but good. Depressed rabbi solves a murder. Includes conversational boss battles with rabbinical answers and some theology. One of those things where I don’t agree with the protagonist’s perspective (we don’t need to), but he’s presented with a lot of nuance and personality. 

It’s Spring Again - You can finish it in ten minutes and it’s only challenging if you’re two, but beautiful. Everything’s done up in dense patterns. Sun, tree, dirt. Snow is beautiful, fall is beautiful, it’s all beautiful.

12 Labours of Hercules - A click-click-click time management game with a tiny touch of opacity, but mostly just nice, colorful fun, not too taxing. Prettily designed. I enjoy that Hercules doesn’t do squat 90 percent of the time.

Sorcery, Part 1 and 2 - I had a hard time with these games, which is sad, because they seemed up my alley. They’re nifty, the writing is good, the art is charming, but some of the gamebookiness in 2 I found frustrating and arbitrary. Missing one piece early on was enough to make the game unfinishable at the very end, or near enough. I have 3 and 4 left to play, which everyone is very glowing about, but I’m hoping for less old school “guess what, you never looked in the right place at the right time and now you don’t have that telescope!!” Rewinding can only help so much.

OZMAFIA!! (one route) - I got so excited by the art and the premise, but this was just dire. Maybe dire’s too strong a word, maybe, but all I can remember of it is a staccato, confusing sense of time, thinly drawn characters and— that’s it. The big sin is that it’s dull.

Little Lily Princess (two routes) - The crime is I’ve only done two routes. Hanako’s work is always very solid, and this light yuri take on A Little Princess is immensely charming. My problems with it are the problems inherent in the source material, but the game manages to wring some legitimate pathos from these relationships without feeling quite too sweet.

Psycho Pass Mandatory Happiness (one route) - Man, I know I need to get more than one of at least a half-score of endings here, but I found this really disappointing. Can I really expect too much of the creator of Madoka? Can I? The premise (your ability to exist in society is predicated upon your ability to perform mental health) is killer, but, man, I just didn’t care about anyone. I know from personal experience that writing a purely thinky narrative risks turning all your characters into cyphers, and Psycho Pass suffers hugely from this. I’m not sure the pleasures of the thinky bits are worth it.

One Way Heroics (bad end) - Cute little harried-retro thing where you have to outrun the Nothing— well, the darkness, anyway. You outrun the darkness to kill the dark lord. I’ve finished, but I haven’t won. Premise prompts some lovely bleakness. If you do defeat the Dark Lord, is there even anything left to save, or has it all been devoured behind you?

Epistory - Typing Chronicles - You’re a cool gal who rides on a cooler fox. You, the player, get to type a lot for the sake of murdering murderous insects. It’s appealingly designed and fun, even if the story is a bit of a nothing. It’s a typing game, y’know?

Planetarian - the reverie of a little planet - Short little weeper from Key. A good test of whether you dig their style or not. I do, if not passionately. Post-apocalypse thing about dude rediscovering wonder after finding a still-functional robot in a planetarium. The star bits are pretty darn effective.

This Book is a Dungeon - Cool, if cludgy game book with some entertaining bad endings. It’s cludgy because it has no real save system and making a mistake means replaying, replaying, replaying.