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riddlerosehearts · 1 month

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time for more long-winded bg3 playthrough thoughts! this time with some musings on my tav elenion's backstory/characterization and his irrationally intense hatred of volo. i'm sure this really only matters to me, but: if something i say about elenion's backstory or personality in this post contradicts what i said in the first post where i talked about them, then whatever i'm saying now is what's correct. i didn't have very many fully formed ideas about them when i first started the game so i've been thinking a lot about them and deciding things as i've been going along.

i got spoiled on a lot of stuff about the companions but i know fuck all about the actual plot of this game outside that--like, before i started i honestly didn't even know the most basic plot element of your party coming together because you all have literal brainworms. so this stuff about true souls and cultists is wild to me.

halsin makes it sound like you have to go through either the underdark or the mountain pass, but i really wanna explore both and i've heard that it is possible to do so in one playthrough. if i can think of how to justify that from a roleplay perspective then i might do it.

oh yeah, i guess we have volo in our camp since we saved him from the goblins. elenion really does not like him! they generally try not to show it when they interact with him, but they were having too much trouble hiding it here:

like, the dude just claimed to be an expert on mind flayers because he knows that they have tentacles. sure, and i'm an expert on cats because i know they have whiskers. and after this he offered to give them eye surgery with an ice pick when there is no way he has the qualifications to do that. get out of here with that lmao. i like volo because i think he's funny, though.

but that's not the main reason elenion dislikes volo. it started when they first met him in the grove and were briefly willing to humor him about the goblin attack before they realized that not only would he actually put falsehoods into the story if he wasn't stopped, but that he was only pretending to understand the bear he was speaking with while drawing the poor thing killing tieflings. he's a liar who fancies himself a bard.

i mean, not that elenion thinks there's anything wrong with writing fiction--he himself enjoys folklore and legends--but he's more of a historian and he thinks it's wrong to mess with actual events and blur the lines between fact and fiction the way volo obviously does. it's also wrong to brag about accomplishments and expertise that you do not actually have, especially when you're trying to claim you can get rid of mind flayer parasites. so yeah, volo makes elenion irrationally angry and if he was a little less reserved or cared a little less about trying to seem calm and collected he'd be ranting to the companions about him after every interaction they have. there's a one-sided rivalry between them going on in his head.

the only good thing that volo could do for elenion would've been to sell them a lyre. but alas, this fool only has flutes and hand drums. what is he even in our camp for? 😔

(i still bought the flute and the hand drums just to try them out anyway. and if you play an instrument in camp while volo is around he starts whistling along, so i guess that's what he's good for!)

i do wonder what would happen if i took the eye surgery though. maybe the next character i make will go for it.

anyway, enough about elenion's hatred of volo! was not expecting gale to kneel down in front of them and had them put their hand over his heart the day after he told them his condition was too volatile for him to be with them. and then nobody acknowledges the absolutely insane connotations of doing that. okay.

and then he reveals a ton of other incredibly insane things! i've gotten shadowheart to give me a lot of info about her backstory as well. but unfortunately i already knew about a lot of both their stories because i let myself get spoiled lol. i thought i wouldn't get around to playing this game for months or even years (and would probably forget about most spoilers i'd heard by then) so i let my friend talk to me about whatever and didn't blacklist anything. i'm still enjoying actually seeing how everything plays out, though!

the fact that i waited as long as i did to go out and progress karlach's personal quest just makes the lie that "yesterday she butchered an entire family" hilarious to me, sorry. like she literally spent the entire day yesterday hanging out with the tiefling refugees from the grove. i know because i was there. also, i'm going to need to look up how this quest goes if you actually bring karlach along because i'm guessing you'd get pretty different dialogue... and i did not think of it until after i was already mid-battle, whoops.

WOW way to perfectly hit elenion with his worst insecurities. like, he has actual backstory reasons to really hate being called all 3 of these things 😭 and then she basically reads him like a book despite him trying so hard to hide all that. this is why he doesn't like her.

it uh, worked out though, i guess! she explained that she was wrong about him and i was so tempted to pick the option to call her a prickly grouch (not because i dislike lae'zel or even because i think my tav would say that out loud, but because it's hilarious). but i did not pick that. instead i had him ask if she was coming onto him and honestly i'm kind of shocked that she is?! i really did not think my approval with her was very high and also... he kind of already turned her down at the tiefling party?? and she said both here and at the tiefling party that she wanted to taste him and that rejecting her was his loss?? seems kind of redundant to get such similar dialogue twice tbh but i guess maybe the game is giving you another chance to be really sure you don't wanna romance lae'zel.

okay, because of this i checked my approval with everyone and somehow it's literally still only on medium with shadowheart but high with lae'zel. that feels backwards to me based on our previous interactions and the types of actions they each approve of so i'm genuinely not sure how that happened? oh well lol.

...well. we've just come across a burning inn with a man shouting for help from the inside! and now i can only imagine elenion freezing up and not knowing wtf to do because, i guess now is as good a time as any to mention what is a significant part of the backstory i imagined for them: their father died when he was performing in a crowded tavern that suddenly caught on fire and elenion tried to use their magic to save him, but they were unable to and now they always blame themself for not acting fast enough, or not being courageous enough or clever enough. so. hm. i guess after the initial shock wears off they're going to be powered by impulse and adrenaline to rush in and try to do something here. i think it's pretty common in general for them to make impulsive decisions in dangerous situations because they don't want a repeat of what happened with their father.

hey what the fuck 😭 why is "pretend the beam is too heavy to lift" an option for bards?!

is it supposed to be like. you're too lazy to do this yourself and you wanna make someone stronger lift the beam for you? or does the man die if you pick that? i might have to go back and check that later just because it's bard-specific.

i picked the investigation option and was so worried about failing the check lol but luckily we succeeded and also saved the counsellor woman, resulting in us getting to learn more about wyll! he's someone whose story i haven't been spoiled on much, so right now he's saying his father made him an exile, and that his pact forbids him to explain why, and i really have no idea what's going on with any of that. i'm so curious about him.

i don't think i like how the saving mayrina quest plays out... i won't go on too much about it but unless i missed something, my only options to complete the quest were to use a wand from ethel's workshop to resurrect her husband, which seems extremely stupid considering everything we just saw that made it way beyond obvious that messing with magic from a hag is going to be a bad idea--or to snap the wand in half right in front of her, which seems pointlessly cruel. i even used speak with dead on ethel's corpse to find out that she was actually going to eat the baby and i have no option to tell mayrina about that, or to just end the quest by comforting her without telling her about the wand. so idk. maybe choosing to bring her husband back will lead to something cool later on.

AND THEN IMMEDIATELY AFTER MAYRINA LEFT I HEARD MY TAV SAY "PERHAPS USING ETHEL'S WAND WASN'T THE BEST IDEA". ALSFDSFJG. NO SHIT. sorry lmao, but i did think that was a really cool and interesting quest for the most part.

anyway--i'm going to go to the mountain pass, even though i've heard people say that's the harder path, because it just makes more sense from a roleplay perspective to me? like i've currently been rejecting nearly every lead on a cure because all of these offers of help are coming from absolutely insane people like volo and auntie ethel and priestess gut. but the githyanki actually know shit about mindflayers and lae'zel seems trustworthy. and if i want to go through it and then double back to the underdark i can say that we were planning to check out the creche based on lae'zel's advice before going and doing what halsin said to do. or if the mountain pass is really too hard i can just ignore the roleplay in this one situation because it's not a real d&d campaign lol.

#nobody cares about these posts except me but i am making them for me anyway #and leaving out a lot of stuff because this game is so huge it's impossible to comment on everything #but i want to have some of my thoughts on my first playthrough documented somewhere!#baldur's gate 3 #star plays bg3

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