#aka much of the ''old'' Aurora is still in there when it's no longer suppressed by the Urge to such a degree that she can't fight it

[undead-potatoes]

I've been trying to figure out just who Aurora is, or rather why she is the way she is and why she fights the Urge the way she does.

I think she was always going to be a resist Durge, both bc of the way I make characters, but also bc of my own issues with intrusive thoughts. Like it have gotten so bad at times that it have brought on borderline suicidal thoughts for me, and playing a resist Durge has been strangely cathartic while still having fun with it bc it's taken to such silly extremes (and it's fun to be unhinged about shit sometimes). To fight the demons in your mind with everything you've got, and fucking win? Because at the very core of you there's a good person? That's the real power fantasy right there.

The basic idea is that getting non-consensual brain surgery and tadpoled caused a sort of factory reset in her brain, reverting her back to a version of herself similar to the time before the Urge.

I need to write a post about her background and all, but tl;dr: she grew up in a small, but close knit community in the poorer areas of Baldur's Gate, consisting mostly of other dwarves. So much of her upbringing was about the love and joy forged in human? dwarven? connections, and in looking out for one another. Her adoptive mother was also of the altruistic sort, which might be where some of Aurora's more self sacrificing tendencies stem from.

It's a funny little case of nature vs nurture. On one hand she's a child of Bhaal, his literal flesh and blood, with death and murder at the very core of her being. On the other there's years and years of learned empathy and kindness, genuinely felt and displayed, and it has wrapped itself so tightly around that bloodstained core that it can't simply be cut away.

She've also been fighting the Urge for a long time, I think, since before she was an adult. This has no real base in canon, but I love the idea of it starting small when she's a little kid, and her having to learn to live with it, to suppress it the best she can. That she would work so hard to be so good, in opposition to the depravity boiling hot in the back of her mind, which is partly why she's so good at resisting later on; it's second nature to her, as natural as breathing.

When she wakes up on that beach it's just her again, a ghost of her former self, but it's her nonetheless. The Urge is there too, trapped among the threads of her former life once again, and held in check for just a little bit longer.

This feels like a lot of words saying a whole lot of nothing, like there's about 19 layers of further explanation and nuance that naturally connects to all of this but is hard to explain simply. Reading through all of this feels so fucking cringe, but I'm trying to be sincere here so I'm just pushing through it. It doesn't have to be good, it just have to make me feel good (and a little insane).

Kinda unrelated, but it's also important to me that Aurora just has all the weird little tics, like doing the etch-a-sketch head shake, loudly telling her Urges to shut up, or doing a bunch of weird fidgeting when she's especially stressed out. And then ofc doing her very best to hide or mask that when other people are around and can see/hear her. Baby girl I'm giving you so much of my mental baggage, I'm so sorry and I love you.