Sceleritas Fel. Your loyal, and ever-adoring, butler.
I love this guy but to me he is one of the scariest part of the Dark Urge story
When I first met him, I thought he was hilarious and silly and that it was cute how much he genuinely loved Durge, and then it hit me just how fucked up the fact that I thought so was.
I find Sceleritas as a concept so interesting! He is there to provide someone for Durge to talk to, someone he can think he can trust - but can he, really? Sceleritas is, in the end, an extension of Bhaal. Everything he does he does in a way that pushes Durge towards Bhaal. The way he babies Durge is funny at first but then it scares me; Durge is not allowed to grow up and mature emotionally so that he has to always stay daddy's special boy. Durge's concerns are brushed off and he's scolded like a child. Slayer form gets called 'jimjams' and even that is babied. Scel compliments him all the time and at the same time never takes his actual words as something serious. Durge isn't even allowed to make up his own mind about anything - i'm thinking back to Sceleritas telling him that his Urges are his true nature, his own thoughts that are trying to claw their way outside, when I'm pretty sure it's canon that the Urge is Bhaal's will that is implanted in Durge's mind.
Another thing is what Scel says when you kill him as a Slayer - every death brings out a smarter, better Sceleritas. No wonder he enjoys you killing him, it literally makes him better!
He's also a pretty shitty butler, as you can tell from the flashback scene where he fucks up and accidentally slices a vein of a victim Durge was dissecting alive. Why? Because he was 'drunk on the job, again'. That kind of goes against everything Scel leads you to believe about himself and is so interesting to me.
Scel exists to make sure Durge doesn't have a need to talk to or trust or be with anyone else, his social and more mortal needs are satisfied in a way that is no risk to bhaal or his dogma. Everything around Scel screams gaslighting and something extremely icky and the worst part is that it is really easy to see how Durge would fall for what Scel appears to be at first glance.
But then again, this is just my interpretation, and I do tend to prefer to look at darker side of things especially when it comes to the Temple of Bhaal, I do want to explore this take on Sceleritas and Durge's relationship more in my fics, just how smothering and toxic it actually is. Again, just my interpretation, but Scel is also part of why Strike is the way he is when it comes to sex, the butler played a big role in normalizing sexual abuse in the temple to the point where Strike isn't even aware of it being abuse in the first place.
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