#baldursgate3

[aliny-ssuu]

Hood

[tokamiart]

A sentence which got stuck in my head💔

So I decided to sketch something for it

(I still need to post my older artworks here, or some of them. So don’t be surprised that it’s not in the right order! And sorry for the wait!🫠)

No text version below!

[nata-natfan]

Mr smugnificent bastard 😼

[pauvre-lola]

daughter of darkness

[tigrecotone]

[artgrossman]

[floadwarf1]

[bonemanprovisionco]

Wyll often falls into a pattern of black and white thinking where the sentient beings of Faerun can be sorted into one of two basic categories: monster (bad) and person (good). Monsters are acceptable to kill and in some cases, their death is morally necessary. People on the other hand, may be flawed but are ultimately valuable beings worth protecting at all costs (at least, at all cost to Very Heroic Wyll). This is a theme bg3 plays with more generally. We see it in the discourse around Astarion (“Can a vampire demonstrate empathy?” “Can a vampire love?”) as well as Minsc (“if minsc can be evil, and Nine Fingers Keene can be good… what then?”). Many more such examples!

Ulder Ravengard thinks in a similar way, and we have to imagine that Wyll learned much of this thought patterning from him. What’s so interesting about Wyll’s story in particular is that he must bear the repercussions of his father’s moral categorizing. When Wyll takes Mizora’s deal, he gets shunted straight into his father’s Bad Category. In Wyll’s own words, “He thought I was a fool or a traitor, and Duke Ravengard suffers neither.” Notice it’s “Duke Ravengard” and not “My Father”, but I can’t explore that rn.

Though Wyll gets redeemed in his father’s eyes depending on the players choices, we fall short of seeing Ulder acknowledge that his way of looking at the world is fundamentally cruel. Instead of fully confronting that the world is complex, Ulder simply shifts Wyll back into the Good Category. Wyll is reframed as Good, and thus worthy of love again. Nothing has really ontologically changed for Ulder Ravengard. Love from Ulder Ravengard was conditional and remains conditional.

What I find compelling and relatable in Wyll is that he wants to be Good. And not only that, he wants the people he loves to think he is Good, too. Though Wyll can read as very confident and generally happy on the surface, there’s an undercurrent that doesn’t get totally probed in the writing: if I am not Good, then what is left?