#and like obviously thats not all of wyll. theres so much more to him but like from my basic pitch description like y

[box-dwelling]

For my fellow wyll fans I need you to all experience the psychic damage I took when talking to my dad.

Basically we were having the now semi regular conversation we have now im an adult about a month into my latest hyperfixation where I actually bother to spend some time pitching it to him and explaining why I like it. During this conversation Wyll naturally came up at length. And he said and I quote.

"Oh so he's kinda like mix of Aragorn, Zuko and Dean Winchester "

And the thing that's killing me I see where he's fucking coming from. This is the punishment the universe is taking on me for getting that man to watch supernatural with me when I was 14.

[majorasnightmare]

continuing from my last post about tadpoles and brain damage and disability, and also on that whole "for Development Team reasons the party does not react to dark urge Lore Drops, but im interpreting it as character flaws anyways" dealio

immediately post absolute befuckening its like. the fucking DRAMA

because its a steadily increasing amount of Emergency Crises. like first of all astarion is now subject to vampire rules again and starts burning in the sun, so being the de facto leader dirge obviously rushes to shield him as best he can and drops a darkness cast on top of themselves, except hey. the worm thats been holding your brain together? just dissolved into thin air. fun fact about brain bleeds: it actually starts oozing down your esophagus, and only rarely leaks out from your eyes, and nosebleeds are typically a sinus capillary bursting from stress or irritation. it will on occasion leak from your ears, especially if its alongside a skull fracture (which will leak fluid from your ears first)

so id like to think that even before dirge starts showing symptoms, astarion starts to smell the blood on his breath, and then it just quickly spirals downhill from there as the wound reopens due to not healing properly in the first place. starts trying to find a way to get astarion to safety before trailing off and then gets increasingly heavy on astarion as he struggles to support himself, and it quickly becoming obvious something is Very Wrong. dirges injury not following explicit realism because Bhaalspawn and Drama, so even as it reopens its trying to properly heal, leading to oedema, the inflammation and swelling causing aphasia. so now your stuck about to be burned by the sun as soon as this cast is over, and the partys main crisis solver is now PART of the crisis, and steadily losing the ability to meaningfully communicate and becoming more and more of a dead weight

so now we have TWO crises, and one of them is the guy whos spent the past several months being the Guy Who Plans Our Way Out Of The Crisis. after spending so much time offloading the mental burden of problem solving onto this One Guy Whos Admittedly Pretty Good At It, now we have to handle an exponentially worsening situation. no telepathy cuz the worms are gone, so theres the struggle of trying to communicate whats happening quickly and clearly. no spell slots or resources cuz we just went through a boss rush. wylls all out of warlock juice cuz his pact with mizoras been fulfilled and she dipped. does an abandoned house count as public? run in, claim it, and invite astarion in while you support/drag dirge into the building, whos quickly becoming insensible, and then on top of all that we have to deal with karlachs engine. because anything that can go to shit right now, absolutely will

its like. everything gets offloaded onto him, because he cares and hes capable and hell get it done, so he makes the decisions and he talks to people and haggles with traders and gets them a free inn room and helps all their personal problems and life crises, and everytime he broaches the idea of asking for help for himself, it gets shut down. im having these urges for violence that really scare me, what do i do? its normal its fine it isnt anything to be scared of, everyone experiences this, just focus on killing whats in front of you. and then alfira dies and everyone pulls away, asks whats WRONG with you, and its like. oh. okay. i have to do this by myself. and if i dont, then ill fail, and people will pay the price, and the people i love will rightfully hate me for my lapse of control. and then no one reaches out, about the injury confirmed by omeluum, or about kressas torture, and further still they ask him to face the only two people left who ever knew him before he lost everything, and kill them. and he cant save either of them and has to choose his loved ones NOW over his loved ones THEN, and everyones too embroiled in their own issues to even really fully realize.

and then you cant ignore it anymore. you cant ask him how to handle this, what to do, have him guide your hand or comfort you, because now HES the crisis. the problem, confirmed a hundred times over by a hubdred different people, stares you in the face and refuses to be ignored anymore. the defining injury, the last remaining legacy of a past you never really reckoned with because you sat on the sidelines for it, the last echoing rattle of a ghost you never thought about, is now here to claim the friend who saved your life without asking a single thing in return, and its doing so explicitly because YOU never once thought about it or how to handle it. and now its all coming down around you on what should have been your final victory, but you never tried to tie these threads up!! and if you dont figure something out NOW, your going to lose EVERYTHING

like god. i love it. i think everyone should have to sweat, and try for just a day to handle the sheer load of bullshit dirge had to deal with daily. like it isnt enough to care when he doesnt ask anything of you, now you have to put your money where your mouth is and do it of your own volition cuz now he cant ask for help. and not just him but you have to save your other two friends having their own crises concurrently, all while feeling woefully unequipped and worn down and exhausted, and maybe think about how youve never seen him sleep except in those brief and short rests you take while on the road, and how he has to bury his face in blankets every morning to hide from the sun or else hell vomit, and how much medicine he has to take just to do the same shit you do every day.

and like. of course all the origin characters are CAPABLE of leading! its just that theyre never made to in the same way they are during an origin playthrough, cuz in those there isnt a tav or a durge to save them for them. they have to do it themselves, and help carry everyone else besides. but that just adds to it for me, like you COULD have done something to help this earlier, but you didnt, because this was easier and didnt seem to have any consequence because.. what exactly?

that he just seemed inhumanly durable? he could handle it, he could do it, hes been doing fine so far, if he needed help hed ask for it (nevermind that youve forgotten that when he did last time, you wrote him off and then didnt connect the dots between a bard dying in camp and the upsetting scary violent urges he asked for help with before. do you ever wonder how scary it might be to wake up having absolutely zero control over your body and the actions it takes and seeing that, without your awareness, you killed someone you wanted to journey with? brutally, violently, sadistically murdered her, all without even a shred of awareness. you cant be trusted to lose control of yourself for even a moment), if he wanted to talk about what happened with kressa hed say so, if there was something to say about his injury it wouldve been said, if he ever reached out to me id have helped him like he helped me, but you didnt and you didnt and you didnt and now everythings going to shit and you dont know what to do because your first instinct is to ask him but you dont even know if hes conscious anymore, laid out on omeluums desk and steadily bleeding where you cant stitch it closed, and you have to make sure astarions okay, that karlachs okay, that your all okay, and he did this every day this whole time.

like personally i really just enjoy putting the party through their paces, JUUUST a lil bit

[old-stoneface]

ive been seeing people claim that different characters are astarion's foil and i dont know why some people have yet to realize that all of the main six companions in bg3 are similar in so many very meaningful ways . you can ostensibly argue (albeit with varying strength and success) that any one of the characters in that party can act as a foil to another. also, im not really sure if most people know what a character foil is......maybe we need to reintroduce the phrase "character parallel" to the online character analysis layman's vocabulary. a "foil" is a character that has traits that contrast the protagonist or simply another character in the story, but it does not stop there. they dont have to be strict opposites. sometimes its just a matter of two characters having traits that accentuate or bring attention to each other's aforementioned traits.

a really good example of this is horatio and hamlet from hamlet, where hamlet is ruled by his emotions and horatio is ruled by rational thinking, a theme repeatedly mentioned throughout the play in the sense that horatio will ask hamlet to be more calculating, and hamlet will implore horatio to be more emotional. an example of a parallel in the same play would be hamlet and laertes (ophelia's brother), where in the end, due to their combined familial losses and the tragedy that befalls them, they are both corrupted by their volatile emotions/madness turning inward and then coming under the influence of other figures in their lives. theres a lot more going on in that play obviously but these are basic good examples of the ideas of foils and parallels.

in the case of astarion and wyll, their motivations and personalities are very good foil material, seeing as right away there is a distinct difference in their opinions on heroism, something that very much defines both of them. astarion is, when glanced over as a whole, a villain, while wyll is clearly a hero, immediately creating a dichotomy tantalizing to both the audience and the characters themselves as seen in their party interactions. with astarion and gale, we see more a foil-ness of their experience with relationships and personalities. gale is not a hero, and astarion's general villainity means nothing to him. they do not clash. its more about how they act in relationship to the player that causes interest between the two of them, how astarion is clearly uninterested in genuine emotions and wants to be manipulative, whereas gale is overly sincere and begs for attention rather desperately. however, when it comes to pointing out parallels that further promote and intrigue the dynamic of foils...we have the constant theme of being under someone else's control in this game and being forced by obligation to follow these rules imposed by someone else. astarion and cazador, wyll and mizora (and his father, in some ways), gale and mystra, shadowheart and shar, lae'zel and vlakiith (and githyanki tradition as a whole), karlach and literally every authority figure that wormed their way into her life but in particular - zariel. as i play more of the game and learn more about each character, im sure ill discover even more stuff that makes various characters into parallels or foils. i know theres stuff w halsin that will be interesting to me.

thats what i mean by there are traits in every character in the main party that both compliment and clash. and this is also a reminder that foils and parallels do not have to be romantic, but they can be. so like..idk. i dont really have a conclusion here. i just wanted to talk about this lmao