#her arc is SO GOOD she is the real main character of bg3

[albaharu]

everyday of my life i think about this moment

[crossdressingdeath]

Thinking about it having taken some time away, a revenge plot like Karlach's was I think one of the worst possible choices for a BG3 companion quest even before we get into what a half-assed fake drama story it is (why isn't her quest finding a damn Wish scroll, Larian, that would actually be fun and wouldn't cut into Wyll's quest or demand the player choose her ending if they want her to live, there are multiple spells that could fix this and we're given exactly zero explanation for why we aren't even trying to get one, you even brought Wish into the plot as a non-standard game over and then didn't bring it up here when it would be an ideal solution), because it really brings the massive double standard the game's got going on into stark relief. It's most obvious in contrast with Astarion. Like, think about it: the Gur's desire for revenge against Astarion is every bit as justified as Karlach's desire for revenge against Gortash; actually it's more so, given they have a real (though faint) reason to hope that they can actually accomplish something outside of his death, namely getting their kids back. But giving him to the Gur kills him and costs you a companion; it's a failure as far as his character arc goes, and in fact happens so early on he doesn't really get a character arc. All of that potential development is cut short and you have to see his corpse in the ritual and it is in general treated as a bad thing. The much better way of handling the Gur situation is to talk to them in act 3 and drag Astarion into atoning for what he did by trying to deal with Cazador and rescue the kids. This is good! Blind revenge solves nothing, having people pay for what they did by atoning and having to help the people they hurt as best they can is a much better solution! We love to see it!

Now you'd think the equivalent to that would be to dissuade Karlach from her revenge and instead get Gortash to fix the heart (either with his knowledge of the tech involved or—my personal favourite—his power and influence being used to acquire the use of one of the spells that could repair it or replace it with a normal heart because again there's more than one of those and it's stupid that none of them are even brought up as potential solutions), but... nope! Revenge is only bad when those outsiders do it, when it's a companion it's the only real solution! Like, yeah, she's got that thing where she complains that it didn't help at all but... we knew killing Gortash wouldn't help from the start. I don't remember if Karlach herself ever brings it up, but it's hard to miss that killing Gortash will not solve anything Karlach's got going on. And if you don't kill him you don't even get that much acknowledgement that revenge isn't a great solution. And also that's the most basic revenge plot outline, "revenge feels empty" is so fucking common as an ending. But it's just a moment that makes it so clear that Larian wasn't really interested in exploring the themes of the cycle of abuse and how aggressors can also be victims and all that with... anyone except the companions (and even then not always; see their complete unwillingness to ever engage with pre-amnesia Durge as anything but a heartless, crazy murderer despite the game itself including plenty of implications that that wasn't the case). It makes it seem less like a discussion on the cycle of abuse and more like good old-fashioned protagonist-centric morality, where the bad things the heroes do are forgivable because they had a hard life but anyone who hurts them is irredeemable no matter how hard their lives were. And it could've been avoided so easily (in a way that also gave Karlach's quest a more satisfying ending) by having a better ending to her quest that focused less on revenge and more on restitution. But no, heaven forbid we be allowed to engage with the act 3 antagonists in any meaningful way outside of killing them or acknowledge that the main thing separating them from the less moral companions is that no one helped them...

[wetcatspellcaster]

🌿 🌞 🌻 🍸

Thank you for asking anon! :)

🌿 who is your favourite character you've ever written?

not really catering to my audience here, but my favourite character I've written is Star!Alina in my shadow and bone stardust au. the conceit behind her was that I was getting sick of immortality being portrayed as depressing, leaving people jaded and disconnected from the world. so I wrote an immortal character who delighted in living, and I don't know, it was just a really fun exercise in imagining ways to rework one of my favourite supernatural tropes!

🌞 favourite character from current wip

I genuinely find Astarion's voice very fun to write from, the good thing about An Honest Lie is it's dual perspective so I still get to dip into his POV after the focalisation of Pieces being solely on Rosalie!

🌻 least favourite character / hardest to write

She's not my least favourite AT ALL, but I find Karlach very hard to write. I've talked about it with a friend, and I think it's because in fic she's often treated as this mixture of emotional support and comic relief, which isn't wrong, but it often feels like there's something more to her character that is occasionally hard to pin down or communicate effectively? As she's a side character in most of my projects, I want to make sure I do her arc and her voice justice, but it's difficult to avoid putting her in this role. Idk, I just worry that she's the voice of the main cast I've really not managed to land!!

🍸 character who inspired your mc

ohhh interesting, Rosalie wasn't really inspired by characters so much as real people in my life! I met two people with agoraphobia during the pandemic and as I was also struggling with being inside during lockdown it became a preoccupation for me.

I guess, if I was to claim character inspiration, I have to be really salty: I'd just played in a D&D game with a bunch of people whose goals weren't aligned and who weren't really interested in playing a good storyline. there is nothing wrong with either of these things, if you've had a good enough session 0 to dissect them in, but we hadn't and i'd only bought good-aligned characters to the table, and it was 2021 and I was feeling drained and in desperate need of optimism! I really wanted to fix the world, even if it was only in my imagination! so when I then played BG3 and everyone was an edgelord (affectionate), I felt trapped again. out of a mixture of spite and wish fulfilment, I tried to create someone Lawful Good. I wanted to prove that Lawful Good was just as interesting, nuanced, and potentially flawed as Morally Grey.

So Rosalie wasn't really inspired by any other characters, she was made in reaction/as a kind of immune response to other characters.

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