#nathbryn ; headcanons.

[oflolth]

nathbryn's hair varies depending on context, though her braids do generally suit her status - i'm thinking that on the road to baldur's gate, she has more of a no-nonsense style which is meant to keep her hair out of the way in battle. long braids may be twisted up and kept entirely out of the way - coiled tighter close to her scalp - so that they aren't damaged. there is still evidence of her elitism present in these styles, however. those in the know might be able to identify her as belonging to her house, if they looked closely. at rest, nathbryn's braids get a bit less practical, though they are still in the style of her house. at times, most of her hair may be left loose, but there will still be decorative braids. she does not like it when people forget her status. ( if she is abandoned by lolth, she may cut her hair, but she stubbornly won't stop braiding it. evidence of further reluctance to let go. )

[oflolth]

honestly like nathbryn and shadowheart and their evil goddesses and the need to get very very drunk at times to cope with the things that said goddesses had them doing is. a mood ! nathbryn is trying to talk herself down from proverbial ledges by telling herself that. there would have been no point in defending those who couldn't defend themselves, and the grove were perhaps doomed the moment they. to quote zevlor. ' looked for a [lolth-sworn] drow for help. ' but i think nathbryn is indeed having some trouble with the deaths of the children. and she's like okay, how do i suppress this asap? she's not capable of seeing it as anything other than a weakness.

[oflolth]

sort of obsessed with this point in the journey in act 1 where (at least for nathbryn at the moment) beyond ethel's netherese magic reveal there's not much to indicate yet that there is some grand conspiracy that's going to be nathbryn's problem. as far as she's concerned at this point, she's going to get the tadpoles dealt with and then go on her merry way and never think about false gods infringing on maglubiyet or vampire hunters or the vampire spawn they're hunting or dark justiciars. she's known these people for a little under a week and she doesn't get the sense there's any reason for them to remain together beyond it, even if she does find astarion vaguely funny and appreciates lae'zel's intensity and shadowheart's faith. there have been a number of moments where certain information should have stuck out to her and indicated that there isn't going to be a quick fix, but i think she is at this point stubbornly ignoring them. like, nettie was clearly incompetent and knew nothing, ethel is a hag and they're tricky bastards, raphael is also clearly just toying with her, the druid halsin is probably dead anyway, and of course goblins are afraid of her! goblins should be afraid of her. that's all about to end now that she's finally on her way to the goblin camp, mind you - minthara is on the horizon. but right now this is just an odd little blip in her life. i mean, nathbryn is more than a century old. she's like. look. i've seen weirder. ( she hasn't. it's a cope. ) ( also edit, actually - i think the point at which she realizes she's perhaps a bit doomed and there is far more to this than initially met the eye is just that moment on the bridge entering the goblin camp ).

[oflolth]

22. does your muse tend to take on a more dominant or submissive role in the relationship, or does it vary based on circumstance? Nathbryn

romance & relationship headcanons ; @tadbitfooled .

i think it does vary based on circumstance - she's a bit awkward, and when she genuinely cares for someone she's going to sort of look to them to set the tone. she comes across as being very dominant to everyone but her romantic partners, i think, and she's also a lolth-sworn woman who is used to maybe needing to play social games quite a bit, so this whole respecting autonomy thing is somewhat fresh for her, but she finds she prefers, at least with romantic partners, equal footing. there's perhaps a bit of distance emotionally, at least at first, because she's not used to anything all that tender or sincere - she should be approached with caution. ( wyll managed this, in her first playthrough. ) so, essentially, dominant at first, but as soon as she's relaxed, it's anyone's game.

except on the offchance she were to romance lae'zel or minthara or someone like them, in which case i think it would just be like. an endless power play.

[oflolth]

the likelihood that nathbryn murdered most of her siblings but left istvan alive because she thinks him a bit too useless to be a threat is high, actually

[oflolth]

making this blog was good because it's brought to my attention that nathbryn would rather be eaten by spiders than be forced to engage in public speaking ( at least on the surface, because she absolutely does not understand surfacers, and it scares her a bit. not in combat, but socially? absolutely. )

[oflolth]

in the universe where nathbryn and istvan's mother is alive there is no way in hell istvan is ever EVER introducing any of his friends or romantic partners to her. the main universe equivalent is you get to meet nathbryn but like... nathbryn and istvan are, by the time of the main plot of bg3, ideologically opposed. so even that would maybe end in death lmfao ???

[oflolth]

i've been dragging my feet but i do think it's time to say goodbye to barbarian istvan and hello to oath of vengeance ( or oath of devotion ?? ) paladin istvan ( and i think that the shift happens at some point during the playthrough, not before + i think that previous to becoming a paladin he may have been a fighter, not a barbarian. )

[oflolth]

on tadpole use - istvan absolutely wanted to toss every single one of those tadpoles into the void and would argue against anyone using them, sen went mad with power ( but would let astarion have some from time to time, as a treat, and also because she occasionally got paranoid and started to wonder if anyone would remain on her side if they knew what the inside of her head really looked like but astarion, so i think she was trying to consolidate power for the both of them ), and nathbryn was like. on the fence. but did eventually end up trying the tadpoles just to get an edge. nathbryn is an ends justify the means sort of cleric.

[oflolth]

i am in fact managing a reply ( i started thinking about lolth again ) and . oftentimes nathbryn, even with other people who are arguably exactly as devoted to lolth as she is, and with whom she has no quarrel whatsoever, will think of lolth as her goddess in a manner that implies she is a step above, instead of as their ( plural ) goddess.

[oflolth]

nathbryn keeping these is so . hm ( thinking about this dichotomy btwn pro forgetting and anti forgetting moments underlined in this video in a series of video essays on better call saul / breaking bad at the moment. nathbryn is aligned to lolth in part because of the, to quote kim wexler of better call saul actually lmfao, the "fallacy of sunk costs," but the idea of keeping trinkets from the dead have a lot of possible interpretations? including some which are a bit more sinister and that's been sort of needling at my brain so i'm going to ramble and unpack it.

she did genuinely find this brief sense of community with the tieflings, and admired how cutthroat some of the tiefling children were. she was honestly expecting - and this is a little pro forgetting moment, maybe - that they would manage to escape, and when she found their bodies she did fly into a bit of a rage at the goblins who'd killed them, but i think that nathbryn was actually angry at the children, and at lolth, and at herself. none of which are things that nathbryn can process well, so the rage got redirected to these goblins. who, to be fair, were literally the ones who killed alfira and the children, but nathbryn was the one who orchestrated this and infiltrated the grove for lolth. so like. hm. compartmentalization.

i had initially headcanoned that nathbryn likely had keepsakes from the siblings she's killed ( and all of nathbryn's siblings who died at her hand essentially died because of nathbryn killing her sister for blaspheming; the assumption that nathbryn had not truly been motivated to act by faith, but rather was motivated by ??? familial politics was what ended up spurring further violence ) but now i'm realizing i don't think that nathbryn does. she did not let herself keep anything that had belonged to her deceased sisters and brothers ( may have mentioned that she did in threads before but i think i'm retconning that if so ) because in order to move on, she needed to sort of declare them forgone conclusions. there can't have been any possible timelines in which she did not kill her sister, and her brother did not try for vengeance. there can't have been any choice. and part of believing there was no choice requires stripping, in hindsight, all aspects of those siblings who died at her hands that would have stood in opposition to her sorting them neatly into a blasphemous little box. they can't really be people to her. people who stand against lolth, no matter how close to nathbryn they may be, cannot be people to her.

but she can't do that with the tieflings quite so easily. she watched arka take her vengeance - encouraged it, even - and she saw her brother in arka, and in seeing her brother in arka she came to see her sister in kanon, even if she never met him. she sees herself and her siblings in the tiefling children too - and in this case i think that it's really about survival instincts, given how cutthroat everyone in her branch of the house had been, under their mother's tutelage. ( istvan is an outlier and has not been counted. )

nathbryn would prefer that her keeping this handkerchief and ring be interpreted in a way that she would consider more generous: that this is the cold accounting of a conquering general. that these are trophies taken in lolth's name. and, given little evidence to the contrary, it's possible that her companions may dismiss her keeping these items as such. but the items she keeps and the moments in which nathbryn reaches for them - moments of uncertainty, particularly with regard to her faith - are a bit of a clue.

[oflolth]

Nathbryn 🤝 Shadowheart; instructions unclear we are getting worse to cope.

LMFAO REAL !!! nathbryn processed this all on a delay so at the goblin party she did come at shadowheart with the ' why are you upset? we won. ' dialogue options. she offered to talk but was understandably refused. and then nathbryn was possessed for whatever reason to go into the area of the grove where alfira and the children had been hiding, maybe assuming that the more resourceful ones had lived. and. nope ! so yeah, it's time to completely surrender to lolth's machinations. to cope.

aylin is extremely doomed. and i don't know that nathbryn will want to keep minthara around given that minthara's thoughts on lolth aren't entirely positive. nathbryn says religious fanatics ONLY in MY camp.

this dialogue option i got when speaking to minthara feels like a grim portent of things to come:

like. it's not looking good

( and i am spending a lot of this playthrough just thinking about shadowheart and nathbryn existing side by side, with neither of them /really/ being capable of talking about this with each other, but taking some solace in each others' presence, maybe. nathbryn's goddess is possessive, and she's never going to be a sharran obv, but she's probably taking a little bit of - guilty - comfort in shar's teachings whenever shadowheart shares fragments of them. it's about the Loss ™ )

[oflolth]

especially in act one, nathbryn is inclined to kill people who kill spiders ( or, at the very least, seriously wound them )

[oflolth]

nathbryn and sen both ending up with auntie ethel's eye replacement because nathbryn would never EVER have let a bard with an ice pick anywhere near her + by the time she got to ethel she was already a bit desperate. i imagine she spent about an hour post gandrel murder just pacing around outside trying to figure out if this was worth it, and then giving up and letting it happen. and sen was already blind in one eye ( she cheated ) but istvan? istvan is like. you. bard. come here. i trust you completely. i am sure this will go brilliantly. REMOVE THE TADPOLE. ( everyone disapproves )

[oflolth]

27. is your muse more confident or shy when it comes to approaching someone they like? for nathryn

romance & relationship headcanons ; @darkdabbling .

in menzoberranzan, she's extremely confident! on the surface, however, nathbryn would rather die. she thinks this is insane, of course, but that doesn't really help her in getting over it.

she's a fish out of water. or a... spider out of water? a water spider. araquanid. an araquanid out of water. she will probably confess, but it's just as likely that she'll leave it forever - which she can also justify quite easily by pointing out to herself that romantic relationships will not actually get the tadpole removed faster. she is focused on the mission.

[oflolth]

16. what is/are your muse's love language, Nathbryn

romance & relationship headcanons ; @spiderwarden .

she will lay waste to their enemies, and give them expensive things. weapons, mostly. does this qualify as acts of service and gift giving? maybe.

and she herself isn't really conscious of this one, but quality time as well ! or even just any time. she finds herself seeking out her partner ( or partners, as is the case in one playthrough ) somewhat constantly, especially at camp. she's been known at times to keep to herself, so this is particularly noteworthy. she'll buy some wine and ask them to come ' discuss strategy, ' which she sincerely believes is what they're about to do, because nathbryn intends, at all times, to focus on the mission, but then she'll spend the night with them. talking, among other things, if they're into that.