talking about my tavs (and durge) because i can...2!
also game spoilers abound
riose. he/him, half-drow, necromancer warlock, acolyte backstory. one level in cleric of eilistraee for roleplaying
riose is a follower of eilistraee and a bleeding heart pacifist, which ties into his necromancy - he sees utilizing the dead, whose souls have since moved on, as a way to preserve the lives of the living by allowing them to replace living fighters in events where combat can't be avoided. he believes strongly in protecting life, no matter how questionable the person is, unless killing is absolutely necessary. which is how he immediately got killed by a mindflayer. and then again by a vampire a few nights later. honestly he's more of an accidental menace to the party than my actual selfish chaotic characters. oops!
his charisma is dogshit, so despite trying so desperately for pacifism he's accidentally caused way more conflict than most of my other tavs. he's really struggling out here. also only being half-drow means he doesn't get the inherent differential treatment characters like xun'e get, which bypasses goblin aggression, but people still give him shit for being half drow
his life fucking sucks
anyway i'm still working on his background - i want to give him a human parent and a drow parent in a way that's potentially actually interesting and not just some stupid or shitty bullshit, and thinking about how he eventually came to the church of eilistraee. i'm having trouble settling on anything, though, especially incorporating the necromancy thing - where does a good character generally even learn necromancy? i don't imagine there are necromantic books just sitting around, so i think a reformed villain parent would be fun...(make it the human parent contrasting to the actually pretty normal drow parent? could be funny)
but anyway everyone except for wyll and karlach hates him. he's off-putting and is trying really hard not to be That Guy but is having a difficult time not bringing up his religion constantly and wanting to pray for people. though it's almost circled around to being sort of endearing and at least he's useful as a ridiculously tall meat shield. with low strength bc he's a wizard
he's romancing wyll. also the church of eilistraee apparently do interpretative dance to their goddess every night so that's gonna be a cute little tie-in. like yes wyll he would LOVE to dance but maybe he's not used to your kind of dancing (he's got some dancing naked in the moonlight hippie shit bc that's how eilistraee is apparently)
on the other end of the spectrum is joy. they/them. some sort of tiefling idr, battle master fighter, haunted one background
so like as a durge they don't have much backstory aside from, y'know, the canon. i have another durge who resists the urge (but he's also pretty boring and has no personality <3 idk i'm not super inspired by durge since the amnesia and canon backstory feels rather restricting. i'll figure it out) but was like ok well i'll make one who indulges the urge and play for as long as i can stand it before being mean in a video game becomes too much for me
the out of universe reason for joy only resisting the urge is that even when doing my best to be mean i don't want to kill any of my companions. the in-universe reason is that they initially just really wanted to see someone turn into a mindflayer bc they thought it sounded cool as hell
though obviously they don't have much of a history of being friends or allies to people, they become rather enamored with having a posse and become very indulgent toward their allies. well, the allies who remained after they slaughtered the grove that is
while they do indulge the urge most times the dialogue options allow me to, they're not necessarily that evil outside of that - if the urge isn't particularly calling for blood they're weirdly capable of being relatively chill, though still an asshole. (they gave the prisoner in the goblin camp and healing potion and let him go. after torturing him a lot first for no reason, of course, but still)
hilariously shadowheart initially HATED them and told them they were only good as a meatshield. eventually she warmed up to them. somehow. lae'zel thinks they're too indulgent and chaotic but minthara thinks they're alright at least
though joy did become besties with astarion, joy was drawn towards gale, who talked a lot of shit when joy killed alfira but then sure was weirdly ok with it when joy thought about kissing him during their moment in the weave (honestly the kissing thought was mostly to avoid projecting the immediately obvious thoughts about dismemberment, and joy is trying not to threaten their friends! honest!)
and he didn't react to torturing that guy. and really didn't seem to mind joy biting another guy's toe straight off. and joy sees that dark streak of ambition and is delighted. and even after the slaughter at the grove, gale stays, and in the shadow-cursed lands he's even made comments about how attractive they look after a battle....they didn't even have to try to manipulate him or anything he's out here happily going down a corruption arc all by himself.
tbh i chickened out and initially decided that they'd resent sceleritas telling them what to do and have them not kill isobel but. well. i think i'm gonna go through and commit and get that slayer form. esp since jaheira kept fucking dying at moonrise no matter how hard i tried to keep her alive. we'll see if i have the willpower to have astarion and shart go down their bad character routes.
(i hate ascension but the dynamic of "exes but still friends" in the supervillain context is really funny. esp considering how dogshit astarion definitely would be at being a vampire lord. sorry no i'm not helping you take over baldur's gate we're not even an item anymore i'm too busy helping my boyfriend defy the gods or w/e he's doing <3 taking over baldur's gate is small potatoes. i'll still come over and we can disembowel ppl together if you want. make an afternoon out of it.)
in the end they'll probably reject bhaal? probably? again i feel like i maybe should just commit to going fully evil route but i kinda like the idea that they do save the city and everyone has to put up with this wretched piece of shit who no one likes being the hero and trying to install their flop boyfriend as the new god of magic or whatever.
joy sucks but i kinda love them it's just hilarious how terrible they are.
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do you have any particular thoughts regarding marcille being a half-elf? its interesting to me considering the fact that she seems self-conscious about being a half-elf, but denies it when its brought up
i remember marcille looking visibly uncomfortable over laios simply asking her how old she is, which i think the only reason she might feel nervous about this is because it might reveal her as a half-elf to him.
she's never corrected anybody whose called her an elf either.
never mind the circumstances of the reveal, in which thistle goes on about how half-elves are inferior and accusing her of wanting to become full blooded elf, she seemed particularly upset like he struck a nerve-
i wish the half-elf thing was built upon more. also, underrated marcille line:
okay so i revisited this sequence just to make sure I could back myself up and it's just... man. there's a lot going on.
the first reaction we get from Marcille is this huge panel that takes up half of the page
she is viscerally affected. flushing to the tips of her ears with the intensity of it. and we see it again, a few pages later
so it might seem like she's embarrassed about it and lying to herself, but... I really think it's just that Thistle is accidentally hitting sore spots. If you really look at what he says to get these reactions
"you'll live out your entire life [...] and die that way too"
"a hundred years from now, nobody will be there"
Hear me out. I think, if he stuck to harping on about her inferiority without bringing up how terrifyingly long-lived she is, she wouldn't have been as bothered. But right now, Thistle is accidentally hitting all the marks on Marcille's deepest fears-- and this is after the Winged Lion promised her that her dreams could come true in an extremely vulnerable moment, so it also hits her slightly guilty conscience as well.
I do truly believe that Marcille isn't bothered about being a half-elf the way that people assume she'd be bothered by it. To her, the biggest problem with being a half-elf is that it's isolating.
On one hand, it's not hard to imagine why she'd distance herself from elves in the west. A lot of them can clock her as a half-elf on sight, unlike other races, and therefore she's always branded with this weird stigma of being Othered -- I would even say that she considers herself lucky for being born outside of elven culture instead of having to grow up in it. I mean, just... look at the way elves talk about her.
Skipping past the uncomfortable implication of what 'not tolerating the existence' of half-elves would actually entail, this is incredibly fucking annoying. You can see why she wouldn't want to be around elves much. You see a lot of Marcille reacting badly here, but honestly, almost all of it can be attributed to her freaking out that her bluff completely failed. She's honestly more paying attention to Izutsumi's footsteps and trying to coordinate an opportunity to escape.
And in the end, you see her built-up frustration at being asked if she wants to be a full-blooded elf like 2-3 times in a row.
Yeah, yeah, "the lady doth protest too much," and all. But we know Marcille. We know that she's a lot more embarrassed and horrendously unconvincing when she's being prodded about something she's actually self-conscious about.
Moving onto the flipside of things, it might seem weird that she "pretends" to be a full elf around other races, but it's not really that strange if you think about it. Again, people are weird about her being infertile or whatever, and a lots of them don't even know much about what sets half-elves apart from everyone else. I mean, look at how uncomfortable Laios is just asking her about it
and look at how exasperated and resigned she looks
And like... she's right. Where would that come up in normal conversation? Why would she go out of her way to tell them? She's functionally a normal elf to other races anyway -- got the ears, the abnormally long "childhood", and the huge mana capacity. Unless it's directly relevant or important for people to know, I don't think it's all that strange or indicative of insecurity that she prefers not to bother with it.
(This combined with her sense of being an "outsider" to elf culture also explains why she thinks elf superiority is embarrassing. She sees the way elves treat short-lived races from the "outsider" perspective nonetheless, and thinks it's obnoxious; especially more so because she usually has to play the elf around short-lived races and deal with the reputation of arrogance that elves have built up.)
The sad thing is, this all means that... she doesn't actually fit in anywhere. She doesn't like going out West much because of how elves treat her. But she's also an outsider in the continents she was born in, treated like this exotic long-lived alien choosing to live among short-lived races for some reason. She is always an outsider, the Other, no matter where she goes. Add in the fact that she'll live longer than literally anyone she knows, and it's honestly kind of heartbreaking.
And I think that's the crux of it. Marcille really doesn't act like she's at all self-conscious about being a half-elf because of any feelings of inferiority or being half-made or whatever. She considers herself a perfectly legitimate being and might even, in some ways, consider herself superior to normal elves because she's not blind with elf supremacy or whatever. (And whatever "elven biases" she displays, all of them are born more out of the fact that she's kind of bad at conceptualizing how other races age and mature compared to herself, not that she actually considers herself better or more mature simply for being an elf.)
I think that whatever self-consciousness Marcille has about being a half-elf is, instead, related to terror and loneliness. The reminder that it ensures she'll never truly belong anywhere for the rest of her very long life. The reminder that, in truth, even she's not actually sure how old she is by other races' standards (hence the discomfort when asked how old she is). She doesn't want to not be a half elf, or be a full elf or full tall-man-- in her ideal world, she's still a half-elf. She just gets to live out her life at the same pace with the people she loves and doesn't have to say goodbye again and again and again until she dies.
and one last very important panel, right after Mithrun tells her that all her desires would be devoured
In her ideal world, she's still a half-elf and reality magically starts marching at her pace. But failing that, the second best thing is that she's still a half-elf-- but one who is able to accept reality and let go of her fear.
(But the rest of the story pans out the way it does because, to Marcille, taking reality apart and reshaping it was less scary than simply and fully reconciling with it.)
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