#like what does that MEAN gale

[warlordfelwinter]

i like the idea of rain romancing gale bc rain has an 8 intelligence so it's just going to be gale saying weird shit like "a lost soul spelunking through the darkness that is me" and rain's just going to stare at him

[mujinzzzzz]

UM NO WAIT HOLD ON

okay so patch 6 is now live and I was reading through what it changes and whatnot and i see THIS???? HELLO?2!;_(28&)3-"(28_

larian is tempting me fr

[tomurakii]

I like bloodweave. Okay. But I DON'T like the version of them in fanfic where Astarion is a dick and Gale is like. Whining and pleading for him to be emotionally vulnerable (or just. Nice to him) prior to the relationship being established. Because that is just not accurate. Gale needs the player to express interest in him during his weave-teaching scene before he even considers hitting on them properly. Gale is entirely resigned to his fate and needs someone else to pull him away from it. Gale only starts being sweet and romantic and devoted after you accept his love confession and give him hope for the future. Gale says fuck all and then slinks away to cry privately if you break up with him.

Like he isn't chasing after people lmao. He isn't dropping to his knees and crying about anything much less this dickhead he met a week ago. He is overwhelmingly passive about literally everything personal to him up to and including his own death (provided there are no casualties/there is a good reason) until after the player expresses that they care about him. Astarion is not doing that in any of these fics.

Like Gale is friendly and a dork and doesn't wanna get murdered but he fully has a suicide plan. He thought the artefacts would help him survive but he didn't believe he'd ever truly live again. If Gale confessed and Astarion said/did like one (1) mean thing afterward Gale's romance is closed off forever. He's wandering into the forest to cry. He's killing himself immediately. His fragile ego and self worth can't take it. You have to understand that when we joke about him being pathetic it's not bc he's like. Sopping wet and chasing people down and begging for a scrap of attention. It's because he craves affection but would literally rather die than ask or even hope for it until someone else forces that hope back into his serotonin-deficient tadpole brain.

[potatowithahat]

I know absolutely no one asked for this but just because here's my Tav Vesa:

He does romance gale every time, just so you know 😚

[pinacoladamatata]

Hurts hurts hurts me how other companions will be like "yeah you must choose one of us. Choose me though, the obvious choice. I love you."

And Astarion will be genuinely confused and surprised by Tav choosing him every time 🥺 his whole reaction is like "you chose me? But...WHY?"

[wildmelon]

i don't understand the urge to write hate think pieces about video game characters/their writing on here like at all

[ella-and-her-art]

Vague doodles of Gale and Mystra. I’ve been thinking a lot about what it might have been like back when it was good. I think maybe he loved her because he thought he could make her human

[forcedhesitation]

man people REALLY can't tell when larian is full on joking in their patch notes, huh? the gale thing was a legitimate bug and people are crying that they changed him as they did lae'zel. reading comprehension these days is abysmal.

I can't be surprised, though, because back when astarion's kiss animation was bugged, I saw discussions that it was "suspicious" that his kiss animation wasn't bugged for the default guy body, but was bugged for the default gal body. you know, as if larian somehow fucked up their own game's code on purpose, specifically to slight women who want to romance a canonically bisexual man that has flirtatious dialogue with the lady companions regardless of your tav's interest in him. totally checks out.

the complaints about changing lae'zel are entirely valid and I agree that her personality should not be toned down to appeal to the delicate sensibilities of the heterosexual man. I'm fairly certain that lae'zel's change was actually the only one that intentionally altered a companion's dialogue to be less abrasive. the alleged change to shart was also a bug fix, not an attempt to alter her character, if I remember correctly.

but by all means, let's accuse the devs of "ruining the game" every time they improve it. even better, let's all campaign for the addition of another romance! solely so that we can have sex with a popular NPC! rather than, oh I don't know, putting more pressure on them to add more material to the stories of wyll & karlach!

I swear, some people really do NOT know what it feels like to play a game where the devs truly and honestly are not listening to the playerbase...or where it takes literal YEARS for them to respond to even a fraction of the players' reasonable concerns & feedback.

[rowan-guerrins]

people on tiktok well on all social media sites actually will loudly critique the fact some people (especially those who only watched the movies) “didn’t get the point of the hunger games” and then turn around and say gale is the worst person in the universe and treat him like he’s a monster, and that all these traits are innate characteristics completely isolated from the circumstances in which he lived and the people around him. like girlie i think maybe YOU didn’t get the point here either.

[a-small-writer-in-a-big-world]

My personal hot take for BG3 is that I see the appeal that Astarion has but personally he’s far too mean for me to get into him and the fan base surrounding him makes turns me off from him so much.

[just1gnome]

"that sounds tediously boring"

gnome beat the game

here they are on the boat

[the0verboss]

"Hshar'lak"

Its been years since I loved an OC as much as I love Iss'tav'in but I am obsessed with this wizard loving githyanki cinnamon roll.

He just wants to go kill Vlaakith however he would never leave Gale so instead they live quietly in Waterdeep.

Although honestly I think his actual ending will be Elysium with a cocky God of Ambition.

[tomurakii]

Dude I know I'm deep into my Gale obsession when seeing people's dumbshit takes actually makes me angry. Someone on instagram called him easy and a gold digger??? How do you live with yourself.

[trevisos]

sorry i have vampire the masquerade brain worms u can ignore this.

astarion is Obviously ventrue and as someone who grew up in a banite church i feel like xarrai should Also be ventrue but i feel like it would be insane to make them anything but toreador. but then i thought. maybe they are both ventrue trying to come off as toreador. absolutely the funniest shit on earth to imagine two different ventrue trying very hard to make everyone think they’re toreadors for two different reasons. LOL yep definitely here in the pursuit of beauty don’t mind me… :)

[buzzcat]

today's wordcount brought to you by: there is no way on this green earth that Gale Dekarios doesn't have a good relationship with his mother, and i'm going to write nice cozy friends-and-family fic about it

[vulpiximisa]

I think I’d always seen it as “revali was created as a rival for link” but reading the actual words in creating a champion, he was created “as a rival to link”. (Someone who won’t easily like Link like everyone else, etc) So it’s more like Revali sees them as rivals, but we don’t know what Link thinks. I mean, I guess it was obvious that way but I guess I’d been hoping for “word of god” that revali is something special 😞