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carriehobbs · 2 months ago

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i would love to talk about juno 💕💕 !!

(these are probably not the best screenshots of juno but they are also my favourites. the first one because it shows the colour of her eyes and her little under-eye mole (the most important thing in the world) and the second one because i like how her armour looks and the shine on her hair)

juno is my other (and first) redemption durge! she's a wood half-elf ranger (hunter subclass, urban tracker/bounty hunter specs) who romanced gale! she fits very well into the selfless hero archetype she gets cast as during the adventure, but her only talking-to-people stat is intimidation, which i choose to represent as her having an off-putting and kind of threatening energy with strangers. anyone who knows her knows that she's a caring person, but she always reads as just a little bit dangerous to others. i miss playing her so much because she was completely unstoppable in combat (with 3 attacks (two main hand and one offhand that dealt almost as much damage), a cape that turns her invisible, 16m/approx 52 feet of movement speed, and an ac of 23).

juno's post-game breakdown (which is what i said i wanted to talk about the other day) is kind of a two-hander. firstly, it lets me play with one of my favourite tropes of all time: when an amnesiac character is immediately given a new (and often important) job upon entering a community, builds their entire identity around being the person who does that job, and then loses the ability to do the job (either permanently or temporarily). imagine that your entire sense of identity, self, value, purpose, etc., was all tied to one particular thing. the only person you have ever known yourself to be is the person who does this thing, but now you don't have that thing anymore. so who the fuck are you?

in juno's case, she doesn't remember her life leading the bhaalist cult. i know in act 3 you get some memories back, but i prefer to think of it more like she is able to remember some key details of her life that were previously lost to her and can remember some things that happened, but not everything, and that those memories don't really feel like they're hers. she knows objectively who she was and what she did, but it feels more like seeing someone else's memories rather than her own. she feels like her life started with the nautiloid crash.

this means that her entire life (that she remembers) involves solving everyone's problems, saving the day, and stopping the cult of the absolute. it's the only purpose she's ever had. it's the only context for her life that she's ever been given. she's always been needed. she doesn't see herself as "a person who happens to be doing this important quest" but as "the person who does this important quest", which is a subtle but significant difference.

and then she achieves her goal. she realizes her life's purpose. and she's still here, existing, except now she's directionless. she leaves one of the only cities she's ever known for a city she's only ever seen part of in one of gale's illusions. all of her friends (the only people she remembers being close to, the only family she remembers having) go their different directions and find new ways to give their lives meaning. and juno goes with gale to waterdeep.

and juno is genuinely thrilled to go to waterdeep and to marry gale. and at first things are going well, when they're in that honeymoon period as they first settle in. i think things start going south after gale starts working at blackstaff. because now she has empty hours to fill with her day while he's at work. she has no purpose anymore, she's in a brand new city, and her social circle has been reduced to her boyfriend, his mom, and his flying cat (who doesn't seem to like her that much). wedding planning can only occupy her so much. she doesn't even have a job to just fill her time. and given that the last two jobs listed on her resume are "ex-bhaalist cult leader" and "saviour of baldur's gate" and her professional skills are "murder", she's not exactly in a great position to get a job at waterdeep's fantasy walmart.

and, as much as i love gale, he gives me the impression of someone who can get a little too absorbed in their work. considering he's just returned from a year-long self-imposed seclusion followed by a quest to stop the illithid grand design, this is the first time he's been back in a wizardly and academic environment in a while. he's also not had a mortal partner for quite some time and thus not had to balance his professional life with his personal life the way he does now. so as much as he loves juno and wants to be a good partner to her, i don't think it's unrealistic to imagine him getting a little too caught up in his work and having some late nights at blackstaff.

which would be fine, except juno's now the partner who waits all day for him to come home, only for him to be late. which isn't a position she could ever be happy being in. she needs something to do, something to drive her. she's never been idle (or relaxed) before.

all of this (the directionlessness, the lack of purpose and meaning, the almost nonexistent social life, the idle time) is compounded by the second major component of juno's post-game breakdown: redemption durge kind of has harm ocd? it's not a perfect 1:1 representation of what ocd is like, but there are enough similarities that i had to stop as i was playing and go, "does durge have harm ocd? why did no one ever mention that durge kind of has harm ocd?"

(this entire description is going to be somewhat of an oversimplification of what ocd is like but) as redemption durge, you experience intense, ego-dystonic and unwanted thoughts (and sometimes images) that urge you to harm others throughout your daily life. furthermore, you literally have a guy (sceleritas fel) who follows you around, deliberately voicing these unwanted thoughts and trying to convince you that they are real and inevitable (a physical manifestation of intrusive thoughts). these thoughts may target the people or things you care about most, such as your friends or your partner. you may find yourself confessing these thoughts to people around you and seeking reassurance that these thoughts are not real, have not really happened, or that you are a good person.

the only place where this doesn't really fit is in the compulsions themselves: (again, this is an oversimplification, but) with ocd, your intrusive thoughts say "xyz thing is happening/is going to happen" and, in response, you perform a compulsion that ocd says will prevent the intrusive thought from coming true (ex. ocd tells you that, if you handle knives while cooking, you will use those knives to hurt someone in your home. the compulsion could be something like avoiding using knives or performing a particular ritual/habitual behaviour before or after you use knives. ocd tells you that in some way this repetitive, compulsive behaviour prevents your fear/intrusive thoughts (that you could hurt someone) from being realized). in the case of redemption durge, the compulsion kind of is the fear? you fear that you will hurt someone as a result of your urges, and so the compulsive behaviour that results is... for you to hurt people? it kind of falls apart here.

but after juno rejects bhaal and has her dark urges taken from her, there's so much space left over for actual ocd. a lot of her intrusive thoughts involve her urges coming back and causing her to hurt people. she avoids cooking (especially meats) because she fears working with meat will cause her urges to rise again (flesh is flesh, after all). she's terrified that she will kill gale without noticing it, particularly during the night (after all, she killed alfira in her sleep, and tried to kill gale in her sleep once), and so she compulsively checks on gale when he's home with her (things like leaving a room, having an intrusive thought about having killed him while she was in the room with him and having forgotten that she did it, and having to go back into the room she's just left to see that he's safe). things like that. and the thing about ocd is that it can get worse when you're idle, and so juno's empty time during the day exacerbates the symptoms of her ocd, making them much more acute.

but juno doesn't tell gale about these struggles (both to find a sense of purpose and a reason for her own existence after the defeat of the absolute and a resurgence of fears around her dark urges) because she doesn't want him to think she's not happy with him in waterdeep. she's decidedly not happy there (she's lonely, scared, aimless), but she wants to be happy there, and she hates the idea that she could ever make gale think she regrets coming to waterdeep with him or agreeing to marry him (which she doesn't, she does want those things, it's just hard right now). and she feels shame, too, i think, for struggling. everyone else seems to have settled so easily either back into their old lives or into new lives, and she seems to be the only one having trouble.

and so i think she kind of carries on with things getting progressively worse until everything becomes so unmanageable that it comes to a head. i don't know specifically the catalyst for it, but eventually juno has to tell gale about all of the things she's been struggling with. it's explosive, there are a lot of tears (and at least one wail about how tara doesn't even like her. juno has not been taking this well), and ultimately their relationship comes out stronger for having weathered this storm together. because now juno has expressed her needs and, while gale can't fix either of these problems for her, he can support her as her partner when he didn't know she needed his support before.

and eventually juno does find a new purpose: she decides to start doing whatever research she can into bhaal and bhaalspawn. she seeks to understand the information about herself and her legacy that she's been missing since the amnesia, and to be prepared in case bhaal or his other spawn rear their ugly heads again (and, though she and gale are not decided on if they want children, she has determined that she would not have biological children before she knows what happens to the children of bhaalspawn who have been disowned and stripped of their urges - she wouldn't want to pass her urges on, or give bhaal the chance to turn a child of hers into his new chosen).

but it makes the 6 month reunion in the epilogue very bittersweet for juno. though she's doing better by then than she was, she still feels delayed compared to everyone else, and she still feels a lot of shame and embarrassment over the ways she struggled to adjust to life after the absolute when everyone else seemed to manage so easily (especially since everyone keeps asking her what she's been doing and how she is). and just because she's doing better doesn't mean that the spectre of those hard times doesn't linger. at this point, she and gale aren't even married - the game gives you the option to reference your wedding day, but i never choose it because, in my mind, after juno has her big breakdown, she and gale decide to delay the wedding. they've not called off the engagement, but just decided to leave wedding planning until she's feeling better and more settled in their new lives together.

time (and a new direction) helps juno settle in waterdeep. eventually she and gale do marry and she gets used to the city and starts to make friends (and makes regular trips to see the other companions, no matter how far and wide they're spread now). she grows closer with gale's mother morena and finds more family in her. she and tara form an uneasy truce that grows into mutual respect and eventually affection (though juno knows her friendship with tara will never touch what tara has with gale). so, while things are rough for a while, they do get better :)

#tw for discussion of ocd #bg3 tag #other fun juno facts: she fucking hates elminster and mystra but takes it out on elminster bc he's not a goddess #juno's in waterdeep when gale's at work like 'hey tara play girlfriend by avril lavigne'#she also drives gale crazy because she is not at all interested in magic (outside of the fact that it's important to him) and openly admits #that she thinks that people should have stopped making spells after speak with animals (the only spell anyone ever needs)

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