Remember me before I was a heap of salt,
The laughing child who seldom did
as she was told or came when she was called,
The merry girl who became Lot’s bride,
The happy woman who loved her wicked city.
Do not remember me with pity.
I saw you plodding on ahead
into the desert of your pitiless faith.
Those springs are dry; that earth is dead.
I looked back, not forward, into death.
Forgiving rains dissolve me, and I come
still disobedient, still happy, home.
Márgarét, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
The "you are no true Sharran" line from Aylin reveals such a black and white approach to this world's cosmology. I expect it from Aylin, sure, but it's so clear we're supposed to take it as fact because Shadowheart or the narrative never question it.
It basically states that Shadowheart was only able to save Aylin because Shart was born a Selûnite and thus born "good." It has nothing to do with the influence of others, the lessons she learned during the adventure, or exercising her agency. It's all about her "true" self surfacing during that pivotal moment.
But saying Shart was "no true Sharran" is just... objectively wrong? She was raised in the cloister, she practiced their teachings, she participated in missions, she spread the gospel. You can say Shart is a bad Sharran, but to say that she was never a Sharran at all? Shart was in that cloister for 40 years — much longer than she's ever been a Selûnite as a child. This is like telling a Catholic nun that they're no true Christian because they were born to devoutly Jewish parents.
It makes faith a matter of heritage and bloodline. And sure, I'm not denying that is a factor (a huge factor sometimes) but it's so reductive for an otherwise morally-nuanced game to portray religion/faith as an intrinsic quality instead of an active choice you have to make every day.
I think it's just because she was so deeply bad at it, you can take the girl out of the Selûnite village but you can't take the Selûnite out of the girl. They repeatedly went to great measures (and I don't know why. It's possibly explained, but my only playthrough she died in the shadowfell) to break her and snap her out of it, but any single reminder immediately reflooded her. I think that's why she has the mark, instead of being allowed to ponder her feelings towards things, she gets a rubber band snap distraction.
She did make that choice every day, but she frequently considered her options, it seems.
I'm not a big fan of the "Shadowheart is bad at being a Sharran, therefore she's not really a Sharran" line of thought. I know that's not the argument being made above, but I'm mostly responding to the pervading idea going around the fandom.
I don't like it because it implies that morality, ideology, and religion are inherent rather than taught. It assumes that Shadders had something inside her that made her uniquely resistant against Shar's teachings — that being her Selûnite upbringing.
But we see with the books scattered about, Ketheric, and even Nocturne later on that everyone suffers under Shar and is somewhat resistant to her dogma. Even Viconia had to be mindwiped; her whole plan with the Astral Prism is not Shar-approved. There is no one who fully embodies Sharran doctrine because Sharran doctrine demands emptiness to the point of non-existence.
In other words, they're all bad Sharrans. That doesn't negate the torture, the holy wars, and the brainwashing they did under Shar's name. Viconia is the leader of Shar's church and Ketheric was Shar's Chosen and both of them were so horrendously bad at accepting loss that Shar enacted divine retribution upon them, but their hesitations and regrets don't make them any less agents of Shar when they did those horrible things in her name.
Similarly, Shadowheart still participated in Sharran atrocities. To say that her moments of rebellion were unique and due to her Selûnite upbringing ignores all the other people in the cult who also rebel and get put back in line with various tortures and memory wipes.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that no living person is natural and happy in a cult. Cults need to practice perpetual control in order to sustain itself, because most everyone wants to self-actualize and exercise agency. Even the most weak-willed and submissive person will never be happy being a robot who has no desires outside of taking orders and being someone else's tool.
If Shadowheart, who has the potential to basically become Shar's pope, is "not really a Sharran," then no one is ever truly a Sharran. No one is ever a real cult member unless they are 100% happy and always following cult doctrine — and there's virtually no one like that, not even those atop the hierarchy. Indoctrination happens in degrees and isn't a binary "yes, you're brainwashed" or "no, you're safe from brainwashing because of something inherently moral inside you."
tl;dr: Everyone has light and dark in them. Not just Shadowheart because she was born a Selûnite.
"You're all doing the same thing. Aline wants her son back. Renoir wants you and Aline back. You want Gustave back. The cycle we needed to break wasn't the Gommage; it's your family's cycle of grief."
so i've finished the main game! but i'm very intimidated by the amount of hard fighting i will have to do to get more clea backstory when i am bad at gaming
writing genfics and smaller pairs is fun because i have no expectations. when people read it, it's a pleasant surprise. posting in the larger ship tags is scary
There's this Raymond Chandler quote I think about a lot that goes as follows:
"A long time ago whan I was writing for pulps I put into a story a line like "he got out of the car and walked across the sun-drenched sidewalk until the shadow of the awning over the entrance fell across his face like the touch of cool water." They took it out when they published the story. Their readers didn’t appreciate this sort of thing: just held up the action. And I set out to prove them wrong. My theory was that they just thought they cared nothing about anything but the action; that really, although they didn’t know it, they cared very little about the action. The things they really cared about, and that I cared about, were the creation of emotion through dialogue and description; the things they remembered, that haunted them, were not for example that a man got killed, but that in the moment of his death he was trying to pick a paper clip up off the polished surface of a desk, and it kept slipping away from him, so that there was a look of strain on his face and his mouth was half opened in a kind of tormented grin, and the last thing in the world he thought about was death. He didn’t even hear death knock on the door. That damn little paper clip kept slipping away from his fingers and he just wouldn’t push it to the edge of the desk and catch it as it fell."
This is good writing to me: not necessarily beautiful prose, or tight plotting, or complex worlds and characters, but being able to extract these paper clip moments from existing stories or the experience of life itself. Finding the little contradictions, cruelties, and futilities that underlie both the trajectories of our moments and our lifetimes, and highlighting them through the act of storytelling.
So this is a really long-winded way of saying that if I'm in your AO3 comment section telling you I love your super obvious plot elements and symbolism, what I'm really trying to say is I see what you're doing here with the paper clip.
Because your hands are too close together and your stance is too wide and your palms are too slick with sweat and blood. Because your body knows the spear, distantly, falsely, but your mind doesn't. But it's what you have. It's what you were given. It's a pointed stick, meant for common folk in dire circumstances, and your target is chained, so really, it takes no training at all. Just will.
---
Because it is Shar who saved you. It is your venerated Lady of Darkness that saved you from that horrid wolf, from that dark forest. You were a child alone in the woods. Who else could you turn to?
It is Lady Shar, who knows you, knows you better than anyone else. Under her safekeeping, there's no need to contort yourself into the imprecision of language. No need to shape the marrow of you into something intelligible.
But Gale asks, and he's been kind about everything else so far, and you may as well make something of that damn tadpole in your brain, anyway, so you show him. Here is the fourteenth bit of blasphemous truth you've come to learn: there are wolves in the woods, and they are always hungry.
A moonstone? Isn't that commonly worn by Selunites?
It is Gale, who always thinks he knows more than he does. He's simply thinking out loud. He doesn't mean too much by it. He constructs a list of the most likely scenarios, which requires the consideration of improbable ones in the process.
But the possibility of it takes root; another bit of blasphemy.
---
Because Wyll watches you set your teeth in line and suffer through another one of your episodes of pain. Another reminder of your misdeeds. Another reassurance that the act of memory is painful, so why bother?
Your wound is causing you too much pain, Shadowheart. There must be a way to heal it. says Wyll, who is not a cleric and knows absolutely nothing of healing.
He knows nothing of righteous pain, nothing of your Lady's will. He just wants you to stop hurting, which is worse.
You should not have to suffer in order to be true to your faith.
But that's how it is. Everyone suffers, one way or another, especially those who are most faithful. Wyll, Saint Wyll, O Blade of the Frontiers, O Savior of the City, should know this better than anyone. Under her Lady's guidance, she at least learns from her missteps.
---
Because after you save that addled man in the Underdark, Astarion, who loots every area explored as quickly as he can before others can see, holds out the noblestalk.
To him, this is an act of magnanimity, more opportunism than anything else. You refuse, of course. All that's willed will come to pass, in due time. You must only be patient.
Just eat the damn mushroom! he says.
You can afford a little selfishness, he means.
You do. You choke down the damp fungus, its gills flattening against your tongue, its flesh squeaking against your teeth and cough up some piece of a memory. Solace, in the face of teasing. A source of comfort. Something harmless, that was taken from you nonetheless.
But it is Lady Shar who loves you, who protects you in the Shadowlands from the darkness that tears into everyone else. She promises much, can deliver more. And isn't this what you always wanted? To be Chosen, to be seen?
---
Because Karlach finds an night orchid, somehow, here in this desolate land. She asks about you (floral preferences, major incompetencies, anything other than about Shar, et cetera et cetera), and remembers what you divulged. You're unsure if she just happened upon the flower, or spent the effort looking.
It's sweet of her, to take what broken shards she knows of you and make something of it. It's more than memory has ever done for you.
They are pretty, she says, twisting the stalk of it between her fingers.
They are ephemeral things, night orchids. They are symbolic of the night and of the brief and tortuous moments of beauty that manifest themselves, on rare occasion, in one's life. They mean something else too, but that memory eludes you.
They're lovely, you say, and take the gift you're given.
---
But the Shadowlands call. The engorged man in the tavern, the golden lady of the tolls, the church's surgeon, sing the praises of Lady Shar, and that adulation resounds across the choked dark vines of this place, across the broken buildings and clawed trees.
And you do go to the mausoleum, in the end. You go because the traitor Ketheric Thorm asks you to locate his necromancer, because Astarion has a deal to settle with Raphael. Guided only by a series of coincidences, but you are here, and you can become who you are meant to be.
Because Lae'zel, despite opposing you at every other opportunity, scowls and promises you her blade for the trials ahead.
She keeps her promises. She is a woman of her word, Lae'zel. When you outstretch your palm over that first stone bowl, Lae'zel is the one to hand you a knife.
---
Because these friends of yours, these previously inconceivable companions who have borne you thus far, leave the decision to you. It is you, your ill-wielded spear, and your own judgement. It is you, alone.
Because this woman; this woman with a knight's build and a preacher's tongue, this Selunite, who you don't know (who you can't recall meeting), says she sees you. Says she knows you.
To Bloom in Darkest Night - my farmer'zel stardew valley au ft bing bong and some big bad wolves. this was the first time i'd attempted and completed a project over 20k words. i think you can watch me learn to write over the course of this story. (chapter 6 is probably one of the best things i've ever written!)
An Acquired Taste - a kind of love story told over one night ft shadowheart and her complicated relationship with the city of baldur's gate. this is probably my best structured/layered/technically written story and my own personal favorite.
Through the Deepest Gloom - my post-canon shadowheart haunted house genfic. probably my most personal story? really leaned into the existentialist shadowheart on this one. not sure if anyone else interprets her this way but consider this story my argument
overall thoughts: this year was very rough for me haha. but i started writing again for the first time in years and i feel like i improved a lot! i didn't really interact with people and fandom like i wanted but i sure was vulnerable on the internet and active in ao3 comment sections. going to get through next year day by day. new writing coming soon hopefully. thank you for reading my work and being here!
turnnoffyourmind
prguitarman
theartofmadeline
izzy806
gummygunk
baratheonpilled
