From that ask meme, this probably doesn't count as 500 words but I would love to hear any commentary you have about scene where Wyll duels Lord Andoril from NLTS!
The duel itself, from the moment Wyll tells Lord Andoril to draw to the moment where Andoril yields, actually is about 500 words! So I'll break that down a bit.
"Wyll duels an asshole noble at a fancy ball over Astarion's honor" was one of the very first plot beats I came up with for NLTS, right after I got the idea for the premise, and I shaped a lot of the first half of the story around it. It’s a full-on romance novel hero moment, it’s exactly how seventeen-year-old Wyll would try to right an injustice, and it arguably created more problems than it solved. Good stuff. The duel was originally even more of a setpiece, with Wyll pulling out some real Errol Flynn shit, but while Wyll at 24 could disarm Lord Andoril in three moves and slash a Z into his clothes for good measure, Wyll at seventeen doesn’t have that level of skill or confidence. I reminded myself that Wyll could do plenty of swashbuckling in Part 2, and that said swashbuckling would be even more fun if readers could see how much he’d grown. And even though I knew Wyll was going to win, I didn’t want the duel itself to feel like a foregone conclusion, with Wyll clearly outclassing Lord Andoril from the very start. And, you know, it’s another fun opportunity for Wyll to compare himself to his father and feel, once again, like he’s fallen short of where he should be.
I mentioned in an earlier post that I based Wyll’s fighting style on destreza, a form of early modern Spanish fencing that focuses on mobility. It felt right both in terms of Wyll’s general toreador aesthetic and influence (which I believe is mentioned in the BG3 artbook) and in terms of his skill as a dancer. Lord Andoril fights more like an Italian fencer, with a heavy focus on lunges. I’m not super familiar with fencing texts and styles from that period, so I hunted down some exhibition matches on YouTube and used them as references when I essentially blocked out the fight. (Like I’ve mentioned before, the way I write is heavily theatrical. Heavily.)
Oh, and you gotta love Wyll ultimately gaining the upper hand because of how dang sincere he is. Lord Andoril isn’t prepared for Wyll to actually be angry on Astarion’s behalf. He’s caught off-guard when Wyll makes it clear that he is taking this seriously, and that this isn’t about soothing his own injured pride, as a lot of duels among the nobility tend to be. Wyll’s keeping to a code of honor here, but not in the way that’s expected of him. And there are consequences to that.
