I wanted to talk about my doomed yaoi, but it got uncontrollably long and kind of annoying.
Anyway, in both Chinese and English-speaking spaces, I keep seeing this kind of take: "Balduran was always someone who looked forward, never back. By then, he already saw becoming a mind flayer as a rebirth, an evolution. The fact that he was willing to stop and seek a cure for Ansur's sake was precious. Ansur was the one who couldn't keep up with him."
I want to explain why I dislike seeing interpretations like this. I don't know if I can convey it properly in English, but I'll try.
Before I read The Illithiad, I had been reading Lovecraft, so my imagination of mind flayers was operating at the highest possible level of cosmic grandeur. Something like: "We shall meet again—perhaps in the shining mists of Orion's Sword, perhaps in unremembered dreams tonight, perhaps in some other form an eon hence, when the solar system shall have been swept away."
Lords of Madness also frames them in this kind of vast, apocalyptic register: in an unimaginably distant future, when the stars have cooled into red embers over dark and dying worlds, the mind flayers rise from their underground lairs to meet the twilight and rebuild their lost empire—stronger, crueler, hungrier, and with all hope in the world extinguished.
That was what I expected them to be: adventurers of the planes, sailing through realities in nautiloids, vast and magnificent within a horrifying aesthetic. I wanted so badly for my favorite character to become something inhuman, belonging to the far future and the spaces between stars.
But while the outline of the lore is grand, what does their actual society consist of? Appetite. Slavery. Colonization. A collective machine of hive-minded domination. The core of their civilization is using cosmic-scale intelligence to maintain an ancient, extreme relationship of control. Even in their life cycle, the elder brain deceives them into believing they will merge with a greater consciousness after death, when in truth it simply consumes their brains and absorbs their knowledge.
And with that in mind, I look again at what the Emperor calls “evolution.”
Balduran left behind a city named after him, and then sailed away—without even bringing the friend who could have kept him safe.
Judging from his notes and actions, there was arrogance and cruelty in Balduran's character. What he did was not necessarily morally noble. But there was an intense vitality to him: he refused to be fixed in place by what he had already obtained.
The Emperor's narrative is the opposite. It says becoming a mind flayer made it stronger, clearer, superior. But what it actually does is not traverse the world with greater freedom. It hides underground, using manipulation, intelligence networks, and political influence to control Baldur's Gate.
There is something deeply contradictory here. It is proud of being a mind flayer, in a very typically mind flayer way, yet it does not want an elder brain—even though the elder brain is one of the central reasons mind flayers are powerful as a species. It rejects the collective domination of mind flayer society, but it wants the mind flayer's power to dominate others. And by the time it meets you, it is already changing, which complicates this even further.
So no, I do not see it as some “higher form” of mind flayer civilization, or as a straightforward improvement upon mortal life. If you were an elf, becoming a mind flayer would reduce your lifespan to a fraction of what it once was. The Emperor is an individual severed from the elder brain, who has privatized mind flayer power. The fact that it resists being enslaved does not mean it opposes control or respects other people's freedom. Beneath all of this lies one basic principle: I must survive.
If the person Ansur loved was someone who would leave wealth and safety behind in order to seek adventure, then the Emperor Ansur later saw was not merely that same person in a different body. The direction of that person's life had truly changed. He no longer adventures.
That is why, to me, it feels more like someone imprisoned by its own body. The things that are supposedly uniquely superior to humanity are being used to do exactly what an ordinary person who wants power would do. Power has no end point. The range of control is never large enough. The more you control, the more you fear. Across more than a century of life, after you have obtained both life and freedom, what exactly are you going to do with that life?
What frustrates me is that the player does not know either of them. The player was not the one who sailed with him, experienced everything with him, and then searched for him for all those years. The player will never know the full depth of what they shared, how much they loved each other, or how well they understood each other. So what gives anyone the right to say that one of them simply "couldn't keep up"?
The description of the Emperor's staff says: “......you see sea waves foaming into spume, and feel the explorer's exultant joy. Then the image is gone, like so much silken night under a cut-shade sun.”
Now, don't you think that if a person underwent a change that fundamental, the person who loved him would notice, and feel pain and fear because of it?
I think part of the problem is this: we dont realize all the ways in which the Emperor is so unique. A normal mind flayer would not reject the humming of an elder brain. It would not take you to the heart of the hive in order to destroy its own kind, or claim to want "freedom" — although yes, rogue mind flayers are their own category. A normal mind flayer would not treat objects preserved from its former life as its own; it should either be contemptuous of them or consider them dangerous. And then there is the way the Emperor treats you, and the extent to which it seems to enjoy your company.
But Larian does not really show us what "ordinary" mind flayers are like. Instead, they give us Omeluum. So people either assume that it is common for a mind flayer to think of itself as the same person whose body was parasitized, or they assume that without the lingering traces of "Balduran," the Emperor would still be the same person you meet and possibly come to like. They treat those memories and surviving traces as nothing more than a birth defect. But the truth is, those traces are exactly what make it so different.
Another issue is that the ending where you become a mind flayer is written so lightly. It can feel like you merely changed skins. "I can accept this, it's even better. So why couldn't Ansur? Their relationship must have been shallow as hell."
But there is a dead man here. Someone died in his own lair, by the hand of the person he loved. As a dragon, a proud creature, Ansur awoke without accusing the Emperor of foul play. If Ansur had not been weighed down by guilt, why would he have lost?
I don't know how many times I have searched for discussions of them in this fandom, or just had them thrown in front of me, only to find myself caught in arguments attacking one of them. It is honestly incredibly discouraging. I have to admit that this is one of the reasons I stopped drawing this pairing as often as I used to. But then again, who am I to say?
I think what makes discussing their relationship to difficult, at least in the way you describe, is that the "starting point" of the discussion is usually anger at the Emperor for having slain Ansur, which then prompts people who see it differently to come to his defense. So all discussions are eventually boiled down to a question of "who shot first" and not "what was their relationship actually like". I don't really like the framing of "Ansur couldn't keep up" either, but I do think that Ansur could not accept his partner for what he had become, while at the same time refusing to let go. And so, tragedy unfolded.
I think places that explored their dynamics more in-depth (and often in a more respectful manner towards the both of them) is fanfiction, and I suspect you'd have more rewarding conversations with people who portray their dynamic in a way that matches your vision (that's how I would go about it, in any case!)
And this is a bit of a tangent, but I feel this one:
But Larian does not really show us what "ordinary" mind flayers are like.
We only get a few brief interactions with typical mind flayers at the start of the game, like the mind flayer who tries to mind control you into kissing it so it can eat your brain. (The windmill mind flayer counts too I guess.) We enter a whole damn mind flayer colony and of all the NPC's we can speak to - which are quite a lot of them! - none of them are mind flayers, and aside from Us none are even really mind flayer adjacent. If we had more mind flayers in the game ostensibly about mind flayers maybe I could stop seeing the lukewarm take that the Emperor is "a typical mind flayer" who goes about things in a "typical mind flayer-y way" like he isn't really fucking weird and doesn't do things the way a typical mind flayer would which is: he talks to you and tries to reason with you, instead of just brute-forcing his way via mind control.
Well, I completely understand your summary. In fact, that's how I would describe it too, in the fewest words possible. If someone says, “Ansur started the final violence, so didn’t he get what was coming to him?” I can agree with that. My feelings about this relationship were pretty vague at first. If I make everything that explicit, what am I even drawing for and where's the fun? but clearly, I do have preferences when it comes to what these barely described characters were like.
so much of the argument is about taking sides, I feel like the core of everyone's point eventually becomes "Do I like the Emperor or not?"
I think the reason I wrote that post in the first place was that I don't hang out with Emperor haters, and I genuinely don't care what they say. But I keep seeing fellow fans around me say things like Ansur was an abuser, a crazy ex, that their relationship was unhealthy from the start, and so on. This even happens with people who reblog my art. It really makes me sad, because if that's how it is, then everything I make feels meaningless. I don't want to watch people turn what should have been a great, heartbreaking story into something less interesting, and more petty and sordid. All I can do is look away, but I'm in this fandom, so I'm going to see it no matter what.
And even if I turn to fanfiction, I still end up running into so many portrayals of Ansur as some wildly controlling lunatic. I'm not trying to convince anyone. Maybe I'm just trying to comfort myself, and to find out whether I can still be moved by this story in my own heart.
As for Larian, I really do still have quite a few complaints. I very much agree with "he is really fucking weird." I keep thinking that if they had described this species a little more clearly, I wouldn't have to see so many completely off-base character interpretations. These things should be really basic, but I guess people who hate mind flayers won't bother to know them anyway.
"Much has been said about how Wyll's romance better fits what Astarion seems to truly want in a relationship, that Wyll is happy with a more chaste relationship, etc etc. But what's often missed is that Astarion is actually a fantastic match for Wyll! Wyll is self-sacrificing to an unhealthy degree, and often minimizes the abuse and trauma he's been through. Astarion, meanwhile, is much more open-eyed to what he's experienced. He's happy to choose himself when needed and pushes those he cares about to do the same. And if you play as Astarion, you're given unique dialogue options to compare Mizora and Cazador and urge Wyll away from being passive in response of how she abuses him. Astarion needs someone to teach him how to empathize with others, and Wyll needs someone to teach him to fight for himself as much as he does for others. They complete each other!"
vs. Ansur/Emperor
"THE doomed exes ship. ansur loved balduran enough to search for him, shelter him, try to save him, and then couldn’t accept what he’d become. the emperor loved him enough that killing him is still framed as this huge buried wound centuries later, even through all the mind flayer emotional repression and manipulation. it’s horrible because neither of them is uncomplicatedly “wrong” in the emotional sense? ansur sees the person he loves transformed into something he believes is a monster. the emperor sees the person he trusts most deciding that mercy means killing him. they loved each other and it still ended under the city with a dragon’s corpse and a sword in the dark. what the fuck man."
"sometimes romance is a dragon looking at the illithid wearing your lover’s memories and going “i can’t live with this” and the illithid going “i am alive, why is that not enough”"
"Is the Emperor still Balduran? Is Ansur loving him, mourning him, or rejecting him? Is the Emperor’s anger betrayal trauma or the cold self-preservation of a mind flayer? It’s messy and awful and romantic in the gothic “this ends with both of us ruined” way. Exactly what I want from a dragon and his fucked up squid ex."
I like the idea in fantasy that humans are better at maintaining things long term because they set up societies or professions to do it whereas dwarves and elves and stuff are like “just get bob to do it he’s got a good few hundred years left” and then bob doesn’t teach anyone else how to do it
Human: Wait that’s why there’s ruins of elven cities even though you live for so long? You just keep not asking people how to do things? How do you learn anything?
Elf: There’s a lot of “you’ve got time to figure it out on your own” attitudes floating around in our society that I’m starting to question somewhat.
William II, Prince of Orange, and his Bride, Mary Stuart, (Detail), (1641), by Anthony van Dyck (Flemish, 1599 – 1641), oil on canvas, 182.5 cm (71.8 in) x 142 cm (55.9 in), Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
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