Aptly Pingouinous

"Don't talk like that to me" said Sam sternly. "If it ain't fair for Ellie and Fro to sit up after supper it ain't fair for them to be born sooner, and it ain't fair that I'm your dad and you're not mine. So no more of that, take your turn and what's due in your time, or I'll tell the King."

- The History of Middle-Earth

That's part of an alternate ending to the Lord of the Rings, with Master Samwise narrating in his own folksy manner to his rodential litter of offspring seventeen years after the ring's destruction. It caught my eye due to Sam extrapolating righteous bed-times from first principles. Unlike SciFi building its justifications from the bottom up, Fantasy's proceed dictatorially from the top down, from the whims of universal custodians. Fantasy fairness is not a matter to be weighed or justified but fitted to ordained precepts of ill-defined specialness, authority and primacy, just like the monarchic right to rule or the license to create. Nevertheless, it is interesting to note the assumption that under predicted parameters (e.g. seniority or anointment) similar pieces will fall into expected relationships. There is a time for everything, and trying to fight the flow gets you washed away faster than Canute's toenail clippings.

Given we don't live in a religious fiction world and events do not require divine license, it was for no good reason that my brain recently dredged up Anatole France's Penguin Island of all things... and for the bad reason that I want to sound interesting on teh internets, I am now bestowing mine brain fart onto thee, fair reader. The book came out when Tolkien was in his mid-teens, and without postulating any direct link between the authors, I have to note in both their writing the intrusion of a sort of anthropological causality upon what had been previous centuries' religious fabulism. The debates over evolution had finally settled into grudging acceptance. Verne and Wells had settled scientific fiction into a more or less modern form. Everyone could increasingly see WW1 looming on the horizon, not by any explicit decree but the implicit consequence of population pressures, expansionist mentalities, antiquated (and exploitable) political alliances and economic surplus stockpiled as military hardware. Though centuries slow in perfusing human irrationality, you can see the fiction of the time adjusting to the notion that the state of the world is neither "Just So" nor part of some master plan but an outgrowth of physical laws and changing conditions.

Think of Penguin Island as an early mockumentary. The titular island's inhabitants, accidentally given souls and reason, end up recapitulating various episodes of mythology and a millennium of French history. Hilarity ensues... if you can ever get the jokes. Let's face it, the book's dependence on historical references and ripped-from-the-headlines-of-1906 courtroom drama make it a hard sell these days. Even reading it decades ago, with both The Three Musketeers and high school history classes fresh in mind, I could not match up most of its allusions to their inspirations.

However, I found much of the story did not require me to "get" the precise context, which is where Tolkien comes back into this page. Since I first read his books in junior high I've kept hearing strained comparisons between his Middle-Earth and our Midgard: was Sauron supposed to be Hitler, was Isengard BMW, that sort of thing. Tolkien's response was no, he was presenting archetypes, which by their very nature apply to many individual examples. Dictators, fortress towns, barbaric swarms and wars over pigheaded pride all feature endlessly throughout history. With France's "penguins" you're better off applying that lesson of applicability, glossing over the precise place and time being lampooned and viewing his vignettes as satire of human behavior writ large, of the conniving of political power via facetious smiles and influence peddling, of sainthood built on successful scams and the worship of bandits, and justice preordained by social acceptability.

 

One thing I liked initially about Penguin Island and still like now skimming through it decades later is how France built up his imaginary nation's culture upon its own fables of the past, with otherwise petty figures and events snowballing into massive institutions over the centuries, flying in the face of heroic epics. Such observations presaged the yet uninvented game theory: events determined not by the pretense of morality but as the result of existing positions of power, not by personified fate but by natural weakness. It's not really the old chestnut about the thousand monkeys at a thousand typewriters, as the process is not truly random but a grim sort of social undertow. The villain and the victim collude against heroism. Pygmalion lusts after his own Galatea. A confidence artist, if successful, somehow cannot help but be canonized by future generations as moral paragon.

 

Who ratified our bed-times anyway? Maybe you won't get all the obscure century-old French in-jokes, but if you've ever been intrigued by mythopoiesis and the pettiness of grandstanding, do try to thumb through Penguin Island.

Delayed relayed real aid reel latelytigate keeper steady us he goes mad at the world is too much with meat spaced out of bounds and leaps told construction in multiple boundaries search is not four every one one in formation shone shown shorn of your feeling down in the waste dispose all this play's the thing in which you'll catch your death of cold feet ball of the bells bells bells bells keeping time time time in a sort of running rimed winter by winter do not slow with your fleeting glimpse of chances past wasted not so much I couldn't taste it hastened along by each expectation of great cakes and eat it all or no deeds hurt your chances of being odd won out in the ender the see no side flanked bacon saved a bundle of sticks doesn't snap don't snap don't snap don't snap it all up at once you've got lives to throw away still your will and loose your fears hearing dreams scratch behind your ears dogged by years lacking tiers flat a fake tea'll you make it down as you egout along way from home you can't go backing away slow leak memoritual diss plays on woe unheard unhurt unearthed unearned an urn with your name on it.

Baldurdash

"Run from the fate

Curse as they wait

Fly as you're still

Play at your will"

 

Chiasm - Disorder

 

 

I polished off Baldur Gate 3's second act last night, but not before it infuriated me into taking a few days' break to avoid burnout, so I might as well talk about why. The Shadowlands drag a bit, sticking to a central theme better than Act 1, but also burying that theme in a narrower overland map with the dungeons seeming overbuilt to compensate. But that's not really the issue. As Act 2 content was presumably subjected to less "early access" free testing, it is both buggier and its various game mechanics stumble over each other more often.

 

For example, the end-act boss fight's knockdown during phase transition made my screen black out whenever one character was selected (appropriately enough, Shadowheart) and forced me to reaload. The war demon was easily cheesed, partly due to poor add AI and partly to some effects remaining visible on invisible characters. But not even that's my real beef.

 

I had to repeat a whole series of fights because I somehow didn't realize the quest title "Infiltrate Moonrise Towers" meant literally "walk into your enemy's stronghold before you're ready and cause havoc while the organized, fanatical army corps pretend not to notice a group of strangers murdering their allies just a pinewood door away" and that to rescue Minthara I had to sneak/smarm my way through the place before ending the act. Don't look at me like that. I AM NOT A SUBTLE MAN! I don't think in terms of infiltration, but of relative force sizes and attrition. I treated the location for the boss battle as the last location I'd visit and strategically planned my Act2 circuit around weaker locations beforehand. Alright, alright, so that was at least half my fault, and speaks to the fact I'm a TBS gamer at heart more than an adventurer. Fine. Shut up. And stop giggling and pointing at me.

Another big reload came when trying to collect my reward from one homognomo for rescuing the other, except he's too excited by his crush's return to even speak.

Problem: Wulbren is very much not back sitting with the others around the table, so no quest advancement for you!

 

Hey kids, let's play "where's Wulbren?"

Is he one of the endless NPCs patrolling the inn? Nope! Is he on the upper floor? Nope! Is he hiding in the basement? Is he hiding in the barn? Is he hiding on the docks? Is he hiding in a box? Is he hiding 'hind a fox? Or in a tree or on a train, behind the house or with a mouse? He is not hiding, Sam-I-am, he is... choosing to commit a very peculiar manner of suicide by lingering intemperately beyond the protective shimmering dome preventing primordial darkness from consuming all it befouls.

 

Sam you are, Wulbren. Sam. You. Are. Go Bongle yourself, eedjit.

 

See, Act 2 takes place in a zombie curse wasteland causing most characters constant environmental damage until they die and resurrect as zombies. The non-zombie NPCs mostly stay within safe zones. OK, all good so far. Except... they seem to lack any line of code telling them to get back to safety if they wander outside safe zones, or to resume their normal behavior after healing themselves. Combine that with:

Summoned creatures elicit various responses from various NPCs, depending on their flags. While the harpers here heroically rush to surround my druidic fungal zombies, more civilian types flee in incoherent panic at the sight. In itself, a nice bit of immersive world-building. It's all fun and games until Bongle Sams his Waldo!

(I should not see dead NPCs, I will reload this buggy cheese.)

Bugs like that really seem like they might've been reported in the years' worth of "early access" unpaid bug testing Larian magnanimously bestowed upon its customers, especially given this is not the first friendly NPC I've seen die in the shadowlands for lack of taking one step to the left. Not that I gave a shit about Harper Branthos or his friend Harper Wots'isStrings. Or, wait... is this working as intended? Is this some moralistic punishment for zombification? Are entire quest chains meant to be cancelled out by an NPC's random positioning and pathing?

During my playthrough of Wasteland 3 I remarked on its inexplicable lack of a pause button preventing you from panic-pausing to set up firing angles or use something out of your overloaded inventory, and worst of all allowing enemies to continually path into you in real-time as you're fighting in turn-based combat. At the time I did not even consider the possibility this ommission may be intended, as it's so UTTERLY, RETARDEDLY POINTLESS AND MEANINGLESS as to boil down to the developers just deliberately griefing their audience. BG3 makes a big deal of on-demand turn-based mode as if it's meant to solve all your problems, except... wait for it...

Goblins, cultists, guards, scrying eyes, brains on stilts, BG3's full of monsters patrolling over large distances and stumbling into your combat, which apparently takes place in some sort of Time Stop ignored by the world at large. Never mind the fact that you might sometimes want to look away from the screen for a few seconds without your entire surroundings shifting randomly.

 

While that last one is inexcusable, the icing on the cake for me? Larian choosing to get hyper-realistic about the weirdest shit.

 

Inventory load for instance is a common theme in RPGs, but in BG3 I've routinely found myself surprised by what exactly overencumbers my characters. Heavy armors being truly heavy, eh, ok, I actually like it. Food weighing as much as swords and crossbows? I didn't think I was playing Mount&Blade or Vagrus: The Riven Realms here... but OK, fine... I guess it's more immersive. Yet shifting all the gear and food and potion weight onto the rest of my party and tossing books and keepsakes into the camp chest, I couldn't figure out why my own character still kept getting increasingly weighed down as I advanced through the campaign. Alchemy materials were one issue, but didn't account for the bulk of it, and the only other large quantity in my bag was... oh, WHAT! THE! FUCK!

 

By the end of Act 2, a third of my encumbrance comes from gold coins. Weightless cash is such a standard feature for any RPG that I had not even thought to check gold's weight, had glossed over it even whenever I sorted my inventory by weight, for a hundred hours. It's invisible to me except as an amount, and it seems a weird way of undercutting the booty-hauling kill>loot>vendor core loop.

 

Now, alright, I'm sure lots of GMs do like enforcing the weight of those coins in tabletop D&D campaigns... but why here? Here, in Baldur's Gate 3, where all it means is one more thing to shuffle into your infinite capacity storage chest that travels with you by itself, in a game where level 8 nobodies trounce divine avatars and everybody knows alchemy and a random zombie gives you free resurrection and fighters magically self-heal and you constantly teleport instantly across the map for free and characters willingly stand in death miasmas until they turn into George Romero and everybody can leap tall buildings like Super-Elf and the entire landscape is littered with crates of rotten bananas and nobody questions a voice from beyond claiming to be your savior and only hot-bodied bisexual lovers are allowed to go on adventures and there's an ogre doing calculus and a mind flayer playing Nurse Nightingale and half-demons are all salt-of-the-earth Beaver Cleavers and every issue's simpleminded good vs. evil but we don't call it that and every single one of your companions has daddy issues and you can't pause the damn game to take a leak...

...why is the fantasy credit card your sole anal retentive sticking point?!?!?!?!!?!????!?!?!?

Look, I'm all for science, but I still think it's silly whenever I hear psychologists designing complicated studies to discern men's attraction to breasts. I mean... you could've just asked. I don't know if you've noticed, but men are far from disinterested in closer examination and fleshing out all the variables. Given half a chance we will eagerly expound our love of the topic in ample, well-rounded and perky detail.

The greatest show repeatedly unearthed

Does nobody embezzle on tv shows anymore? Or drive drunk? Or shoplift? Or smuggle? Or mug?

Netflix offers Batman Begins at the moment, so I took the chance to re-watch it. Damn fine cinema, but I couldn't put my finger on just why the famous backstory of his parents' deaths looks odd these days. What... just a mugging? Without even an attempted rape? Or wife battery? Or battery of rapes? Thou'st much to learn about inciting thine audience!

While visiting family over the summer I caught a crime/detective show medley. Inspector Gently was inspecting raped prostitutes. Rizzoli and Isles were helping a woman righteously smite rapists from the past. Endeavor gave me brief hope with an episode where he discovers that not everything is about pedophiles... only to double back and reaffirm that yes, on second thought everything is absolutely about pedophiles. So I tried a newer show, True Detective (with an ear-catching opening sequence scored by some Leonard Cohen impersonator) which seemed at first to be about land deals with the mafia... until every single plot thread gets worked back towards poor downtrodden working girls. And where all three protagonists are initially presented as grittily imperfect, the episode tidily fell back on the woman having been abducted as a teenager presumably to be raped, so that all her faults are the fault of men.

 

I'm aware that shows like Gently or Morse do offer other plots... occasionally... and others like Vera do a much better job of mixing things up. But I don't think I've ever seen a crime show marathon dedicated to, say, labor union corruption or corporations cheating their employees our of their shares or pensions, or poisoning innocents by skirting environmental regulations. Or men being murdered or abused by women, at least not without those women being painted as plucky heroines striking back against cackling brutish men. (Hell, the last time I saw Misery make the rerun circuit, I think Dubbya was still in office.) If mentioned, any other crimes merely serve as segue to MALES ARE FILTHY PIGS. The only crime in the world really worth mentioning is the existence of men. The root of all evil. The original sinners. Bogey fever incarnate.

Pay no attention to the woman behind the curtain.

 

But maybe do note the choked, misty-eyed, ponderous air with which every show flourishes its latest rapist of the week, as if it's sighted a new continent with every single repurposed Snidely Whiplash, music scores swelling with soulful strings as the heroine finds her strength within - no matter what any MAN has to say! You can practically see the writers gasp in revelation at the shock and awe they expect to inspire, puffing themselves up with the flatfootedly rebellious attitude of third graders who've just discovered curse words.

 

This despite the fact Law and Order: Special Victims Unit is on track to become the longest-running series on television, outlasting the original despite severly limiting its source material. The more cynical among us might even spot a political platform that's been built up by network owners, to be cashed in at election time by promises of supplying a fabricated demand. In that respect, really, the hot topic could be everything... but one motivation never suffers from viewer fatigue, one justification for retribution never ceases to inflame audiences, from Helen of Troy to the Lifetime Channel. Evil men threaten women. We never get tired of hearing about it: those other men out there are always looking to besmirch The Lady's honor. Kill them for it or die trying. Prove your worth.

You'd think at some point, after a certain number of episodes, of series, of decades, of Lifetimes, the sheer obsessive weight of demonization of men and glorification of women, going uncontested generation after generation, might throw some doubt as to its own verisimilitude or necessity.

And hey, I won't deny some of these propaganda pieces can even be good work within their field. Blade Runner 2049 or Fury Road provided some quality cinematography. Then again, by all accounts so did Leni Riefenstahl.

My Life as a Drowid, 2: Uninformed Decisions

(BG3 playthrough; some pre-Moonrise spoilers inevitable)

________________________________________

 

The hours drag into miserably bright days with not even a pall of rain to liven the glare. Our meager band's trail coils over itself across these wounded lands unto ophidian infinity, yet fate's fangs have as yet but grazed me. My eyes had barely steeled against the impious sun when my ill-conceived survey of surface flora was cut short by the mind flayers. From then on, it was an aimless scramble for answers, for a way of cutting this voracious venom incarnate, this threat of life in death, from my skull... none forthcoming.

 

The darthiir-led circle, for all their bluster, for all their conceit, warded no more hieratic leechcraft than my own. The thing, the filth, the unnatural wizened, withered, weathered, wretched slab of leather holding court over life and death in my very camp, refuses all questions beyond its admittedly indispensible duty of last resort. The hag... the hag... perhaps I should not have been so hasty, perhaps she might indeed have wheedled answers, worm to worm, in counsel with the thing nesting in my sulci. But her kind's treachery rang all too familiarly hollow against my memories of great families' promises. Her den, warded not only against the outside as any beast's right, but against escape, spoke all too eloquently of the regal claim she holds to others' very being. And if there is one crime I cannot... but still your thoughts. She's listening. Did the hag think she failed my trust? No, old girl, I trusted your nature completely, one lurking fear to another, one rapacious wildling to another, and so you had to die.

The goblins! I nearly broke into laughter when they bowed and scraped and invited me into their celebrations. Crass little vermin, but I find their gambols refreshingly indulgent. I readied myself to congratulate whomever of my kind had tamed them. I thought a trade envoy, some ranger far from the dubious comforts of home, an enterprising independent like myself perhaps. But a highborn fallen so low, and fallen from Lolth's gaze... I nearly slew her then and there. Was she not everything I had fled to prove myself in the wilds so long ago? But old habits die hard. "Jabbress" formed upon my lips, bitterly bitten back, and ultimately I obeyed. For was she not in the right to oppose an enclave of our foes? Traitor or not, does this not serve Lolth's purpose? Were these thoughts even my - no, silence the fear. The criminal is listening.

They died. And we celebrated. And if Sylvanus would reckon with my deed let him not count the loss of his lesser servants above my own stewardship of his domain.

At last I found my way back to familiar dangers. Give me bulettes and fulminant flora over the treacherous promises of daylight. Nere! Nere, oh the look in your eye, the wounded hauteur, the foolhardy faith in such paltry distance as you'd put between yourself and the goddess' webs. Apostate I name you, and execution your sentence, may Her venom find you in death as my headswoman's blade did in life, may She accept your agony in trade for Minthara's. Lae'zel says you whimpered then, on your knees in the cave, in the poisoned air, alone, hemmed in and cornered against stronger wills, sad fool, as she struck you down. It was worth the expense of runepowder only for that. Count yourself lucky to have been freed from a crime far worse than murder.

But she is listening, the criminal. What use to deny it. The gith's mad supplication before her false goddess at last won me a chance to meet my intruder face to face. She speaks of trust, my new would-be mistress, the latest of many, and if not for my revulsion at bowing before the lich-queen's demands, I should have needed no blade but my scorn to sever her lying head. Trust? You cannot be on my side and inside my skull at the same time, deceiver, nor can you speak of freedom while transgressing the one sacrosanct boundary. Hear me now, as you are always listening, you perpetrator of the one unforgivable crime, you self-righteous invader upon territory I once safeguarded by abandoning all for the wilderness. You appear to be correct in one respect: we need each other. But we below are all too familiar with alliances of convenience. There shall come a time when you are longer convenient to me.

Thus I challenge. I await answer. None forthcoming, I thread my way further through fate's fangs.

____________________________________________________

 

Le *siiigh*...

I've been enjoying my stint as anti-absolutist more than I care to admit.

na-chared palan-diriel o galadhremmin ennorath

While much of the main plot is pretty cheesy, BG3 grates less if you just treat it as random adventuring. Avoiding fire and light (aside from the Blood of Lathander which I conferred upon Shadowheart as her rightful Sharran spoil) I've somehow fallen into the role of frost mage:

- in a vain attempt to impose some reasonable measure of crowd control over Larian's obsession with handing out teleports and super-jumps to absolutely everything. But alright. I am the drowid of winter, apparently. If only I hadn't forgotten to actually craft my signature weapon for two levels' worth of backpack clutter.

I was gonna clean my inventory later, mom!

(It's not frostmourne, it's the mourning of the frost; totes original I.P., do not steal.)

As characters go, at least they're less infuriatingly infantile than Wrath of the Righteous' (think ninth grade instead of sixth grade) but I find Lae'zel the only palatable one so far, largely for stopping every so often to actually consider things:

(calling out pointless suicide runs)

Even her fanatically gullible quest for a cure is played more as a fact-finding mission with herself as guinea-pig instead of the writing pushing you as player to make the obviously stupid choice of getting into THAT contraption:

 

OK, we've got a mad scientist with an evil eye, a brain clamp physically built of your worst nightmares, mood lighting straight outta the sixth circle... and the phrase "end your suffering" - how many literally red flags can you miss?!

(And convincing her to get out of it cost me all my inspirations, damnit, even save-scumming the crap out of the convo. Damn my dump stats.)

But somehow even that comes across as more rational (or at least rationalized, in-character) than some of your other dialogues.

My biggest complaint is the very heroine of our story, the dream visitor. You have a dozen chances to ask perfectly reasonable questions about its origin, nature, proof of its claims, or to demand it STEP OFF, YA BITCH, yet your character almost never does. Moreover, Larian utterly fails to address the inherent wrongness of telepathic intrusion itself, or the hypocrisy of being spied on and puppeted around by an omniscient space ghost whose good intentions and beneficent action you're expected to believe on its word ("this rock keeps tigers away") despite this being exactly how a brainwashed puppet of a brain parasite would act! (If this actually becomes a plot point later on, I'll applaud it, but I'd also be surprised.)

Other scenes don't play out much better, with decisions like attacking the hag or not attacking a tiefling barbarian needing to be taken before relevant evidence has been presented. Minthara's acquisition alone will be worth dissecting separately for repeated irrationality. It's not that work wasn't put into these encounters, but more that Larian operates on the presumption that players should make decisons on blind faith and vague impressions (basically the antithesis of a Blue Tide path in T:ToN.) Take meeting Jaheira, when the scene treats it as your default choice to instantly, absolutely trust her and tell her all your secrets:

It runs on an out-of-character assumption that duh, it's Jaheira, everyone knows she's a heroine... except all my drowid knows about her so far is that she's a presumptuous leader from a powerful, secretive and intrusive organization which has historically sabotaged my own society rather consistently!

 

Worst of all so far, the Last Light defense combat, defending Is0bel Ne'er-Do-Well from big bad Marcus. Not only is the utterly game-changing fight triggered merely by walking into a cutscene while exploring an otherwise safe location, but despite failure being technically an option, only foreknowledge of the campaign can possibly tell you whether to take that chance. I did actually fail the fight on a first attempt (Izzy rolled low on initiative and ate three crits in the first round; escort missions, go figure) and not only is the ensuing fight both dramatic and tactically interesting (vs. a firing squad of crossbow-armed harpers)

 

- but I very much would've accepted the loss of the safe location and only shop for RP purposes. Nice, tidy way of letting the goody-goodies die without it technically being my fault, and I can always stockpile loot at camp until the next town. Problem: it instantly cancels out other unrelated quests just for being in the same location, with no alternate path. Bigger problem: if you lose your lynchpin, the villain instantly escapes with his hostage VIA CUTSCENE regardless of how the fight would actually play out, which changes your main quest in ways you could only predict, once again, by foreknowledge of the campaign. Which all left me with no real choice but to reload and play the hero. At least the developers had some smidge of self-awareness about how ridiculously this straightjackets you:

 

 

- but not nearly enough to make it work.

Why did I construct a cosmological model with a disk-shaped sky?

Because imitation is the highest form of flat-Earthery.

JayBait

Bluejays:

 

Bluejays!

 

BLUEJAYS!

 

- are absolute cloacas who never pose for a proper picture.

Fun fact: as bluejays, like the majority of birds, lack a penis or any other sort of intromittent mechanism, they mate via what we monkeys sometimes term a 'cloacal kiss'; thus 'pricks' does not transfer well as an insult. Well, not unless you're referring to male sparrows pecking at females' cloacas to get them to disgorge the sperm of previous males, in which case we might well assume our blue friend above is speciesist not just against eagles, but sparrows as well.

This has been another: Useless Fact.

BG3: Smells Like Teen Spirit

"What they want I don't know

They're all revved up and ready to go"

The Ramones - Blitzkrieg Bop

 

I'd been toying with the notion of a companion run-down for Baldur's Gate 3 like I'd done for Wrath of the Righteous, but now that I'm polishing off Act 1, I doubt I'll bother. For BG3's roster, it's less their individual qualities which warrant comment than Larian's design priority across the board, focusing intently on a teen audience via a mix of random monster-slaying and the hefty dose of sex always associated with pulp sword-and-sorcery stories. But hey, it worked for The Witcher, right? Who needs coherent construction when you've got tits?

(They're piling in the back seat / They're generating Steam hits)

You might notice something glancing around camp: no uggoes. No dwarves, half-orcs, gnomes or a single wrinkle in sight. Only young, flawless, sexy humanoids allowed. And if their actions and rationalizations in the main plot seem at times forced or flimsy, it's because the effort instead sank into building each one from the ground up as romance options instead of adventurers. (Lovers? Like Illithids and megalomaniacal cults weren't bad enough, how many more damn controllers do you need staking claim to your mind?) My complaint on this topic remains valid: it's bad art, and it's resulted in a roster of swashbucklers more interested in pouting and strutting than tackling existential threats.

 

But for an even funnier angle on the same marketing philosophy, I can't help but note that EVERY SINGLE ONE of your core companions is presented engaged in some sort of individuation conflict against a designated authority figure:

- Lae'Zel: dragon cowboy daddy can't tell ME what to do

- Shadowheart: mother superior can't tell ME what to do

- Gale: mana banker mommy can't tell ME what to do

- Wyll: devil sugar mommy can't tell ME what to do

- Astarion: vampire daddy can't tell ME what to do

- Karlach: mother inferior can't tell ME what to do

 

Don't get me wrong, I do acknowledge the importance of adolescent rebellion as personal growth, but there is such a thing as laying it on too thick! Devote at least some script space to portraying oppressive control that doesn't come conveniently embodied in one preordained social superior. Freedom must be more often than not won from nebulous, dilute folkways and mores, and is as much a freedom from our own impulses, fantasies and weaknesses as anything else. If you'd like a wonderful in-game portrayal, try Durance from Pillars of Eternity 1, or the several memorable companions from Planescape: Torment trapped as much by their own self-torment, by their own psychological dependence, as by the machinations of another. Or Mask of the Betrayer's rebellions both cosmic and individual. Even Pathfinder: Kingmaker's ex-paladin and former slaves managed more nuanced approaches.

Maybe BG3's crew will gain such depth along the campaign, but I very much doubt it. Larian saw too tempting a power vacuum on the RPG market (and too profitable a license) and invested too much to chance drifting away from shallow appeal.