yrgirlkv

"it's yr girl; you already know!"

—dj who is not yr girl and who you do not know at all

sister @cass | mom @pegasus-poetry | writer/designer @ songs for the dusk, sunblack | asexual @ large

icon by @hedgemice.


three observations about my third crack at bg3:

  1. i've joked that karlach and astarion feel like bait for trans women & men respectively but i think i had a realization the other day: a big part of their appeal in that dimension is that they're presented as the genders they are but their traumatic backstories are associated with the opposite. karlach is a woman but "exploited war machine" is typically a masculine trope, and astarion is a man but "sexually traumatized abuse survivor" is a classically feminine one
  2. larian is bad at game designing their romances in terms of pacing but i think the characters are livelier than in any bioware game
  3. the fact that you can ace romance karlach is genuinely quite sweet. super touching to have her be completely okay with it

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in reply to @yrgirlkv's post:

I’m glad someone else brought up the pacing of the romances! This was a huge issue for me my first time. A lot of them feel so fast and, as a pan who needs time to get to know people before jumping in, it locked me out of many romances I ended up wanting by act 2 and 3. It really felt like they wanted you to romance based on appearance rather than the character’s background, morals, and personality. I had to wait for a second play-through to experience the romance I actually wanted (Karlach is bae 😌). If you treat a character like a friend and flirt with them later, it doesn’t matter because you already friend zoned them. It felt very rigid. In the end, my horny bard who ended up alone.

i've actually seen a number of people say the romances are paced badly -- though i think part of the reason for this is that there's something of a disconnect between in-game days and real-time hours. it feels like a lot of the romances are designed to accelerate quickly because the game can't rely on you passing in-game days at a reliable speed, especially for people who are trying to get as much done in as few rests as possible (which you can do by, say, eating up three party members' resources and then swapping them out to effectively double the time you can go before resting and recharging.) larian making room for that flexibility inevitably leads to less control over the pacing of arcs that develop best in downtime, including romances, so i have more patience for the failures here than i might otherwise. still super weird to experience though