durge loves murder this, durge is obsessed with death that
but the game also lets you play durge as a person who was pretty deeply unhappy as Bhaal’s chosen. just a deeply, deeply unhappy person who was not enjoying their life. which is a funny way for someone who supposedly loves death and murder so much to feel about a life that was brimful of both of their favorite things, yeah?
anyway. this is why I think durge who never had a choice in becoming durge doesn’t necessarily have to be quite so delighted by murder per se.
I think Tavia is fascinated by transformation. I think this is also what Orin is obsessed with, fwiw, which would go a lot further towards explaining her obsession with remaking her victims into new creations after they die. I don’t think where she gets off is the killing and the butchering in and of itself — Tavia doesn’t, I mean, although I suspect it is also true of Orin.
All that violence? All that butchery? I think that’s something that a bhaalspawn is going to sucked into no matter what they want, since Bhaal uses his offspring as puppets. I think every bhaalspawn has to find some way to cope with that. Saarevok, for example, seems to cope via the Cold Professionalism route. He understands that there is no freedom from the death father. There is only the possibility of surviving what the lord of murder requires of his children by submitting yourself to his requirements with cool determination. What is thrust upon you may destroy you no matter what, but it will without question destroy you should you try to resist. So why resist?
Orin copes by making her murders into art, literally. Her victims aren’t victims, they’re material, raw clay that can be glorified through transformation, rude matter that can be shaped into something greater, something more.
Tavia — canon durge, really — becomes the dark urge as a result of a process of transformation that happens to her. Durge canonically starts having murder sprees during blackouts. They do not have any control. They do not have a choice. Transformation is a brutality that comes over you from the outside. It knocks you flat and turns you into something else, no matter if you want it or not. The experience of change, of becoming, is itself traumatic. I think at a very fundamental level what Tavia is doing when she kills and even more importantly when she engages in freakish, perverted indulgences with dead bodies — from the almost normal like autopsy to the fully bizarre like necrophilia and cannibalism — is recreating in some semi-controllable way the model of transformation she experienced herself. I think she’s trying to understand it.
Which, to return to an earlier point, is also very much what I think Orin is doing when she makes corpses into art projects. Orin’s most important art project is herself. She labors under the comforting delusion that if she finally perfects making the piece of art that she herself is supposed to be, all the suffering of her existence will end. Her father(s) will love her. She will be a perfect creature, and she will be rewarded with praise and acknowledgment and love. The murders are a means to an end, and the end she’s seeking is to be treated with the kind of care and appreciation she never had as a small child. What’s tragic about her is she still believes that the father(s) she wants to please would ever have any desire to give her what she wants.
I don’t think Tavia is operating under the misapprehension that Bhaal would ever see her as anything other than a tool to be used until it’s used up. I do, however, think that she chooses to continue to believe that she can find answers outside herself that will alleviate the pain of having been remade into something monstrous… because choosing to willfully believe that there are answers out there, which is at bottom a belief that there might be a way out somewhere out there for her, is maybe the only thing that keeps her going. (Which, really, actually is the exact same thing that is going on with Orin — they just conceive of a way out in very different ways. For Orin, the way out is finally feeling like daddy loves her. For Tavia, the way out is finally feeling like everything that she is and that she’s experienced make sense and she doesn’t have to be bothered by any of it anymore.)
And I think that even after she wakes up after the nautiloid, even after she gets the opportunity to become something she’s choosing to become, even when she starts to feel free to resist what Bhaal wants her to be… she still has a very similar to corpses as she had while she was the head of the temple. Death is still the ultimate transformation. Dead bodies are the site of the most fundamental, most totalizing, most fascinating transformation possible. The answers, all the answers, are in there somewhere. How strange. How hideous. How beautiful. How romantic. The way out is somewhere in there.
So even as a resist durge… she is definitely still getting way too intimate with carrion, particularly when she’s feeling emotionally wounded.
Which is why when Astarion and Shadowheart are flirting like crazy on the risen road even though she thought she was his special snack pack, she goes and sits down with a corpse pile and starts draping herself in viscera and chewing on a severed foot. Absolutely baby-with-a-pacifier behavior.