Several weeks ago, my retirement-age mother requested that I play Baldur’s Gate 3 for her because she has trouble with controllers/keyboards and wanted “to see what all the fuss is about with that cute wizard boy.” For context, my mother and I have done this sort of thing in the past with certain RPGs (dragon age, mass effect, etc.), but it’s been a few years since she’s personally requested a game like this. Basically, I control her Tav but let her make all the choices so she can determine how the story plays out without worrying about mechanics. She treats it like a choose-your-own-adventure book.
Anyway, here is a list of some of the things my mother has said and/or chosen to do throughout the course of BG3 in no particular order:
She is (obviously) romancing Gale. She is quite smitten with him and his passion for books and learning; she also thinks he’s polite and qualifies as “relationship material.” She also REALLY likes the things he’s said about his cat so far (my mom is a cat lady), so I know she’s gonna flip shit when we meet Tara in Act III.
She’s playing a normal druid Tav with a generally good alignment. Her favorite spell is Spike Growth because she thinks it’s hilarious whenever enemies walk into the AOE and die. I usually end up having to cast it at least once per battle per her request. Sometimes twice.
Contrary to her alignment, my mother tasks me with robbing every single chest, crate, barrel, and burlap sack we come across; this also includes people and their pockets. The party is always at max carrying capacity. ALWAYS. She doesn’t like selling things because “what if I need them.” The camp stash is in literal shambles. There is no hope of organizing it. She’s got like fifty seven sets of rags and a billion pieces of random silverware.
She MUST talk to every animal and corpse in the game. I think five hours of her total playtime so far (47ish) has been spent speaking to animals as many times as humanly possible. Like, I was thorough in my own playthroughs, but this is on a whole other level.
She did NOT get Volo’s lobotomy, but she did let Auntie Ethel take her eye in hopes of a cure for the tadpole. I did not understand the logic then. I still do not understand it now.
She is far more interested in fashion than equipment stats. Do you have any idea how much gold I’ve had to spend on dyes just to make things match? SO much. Same vibe as that “please someone help me balance my finances my family is starving” tweet but instead of candles it’s thirty thousand fucking bottles of black and furnace red dye.
We broke the prisoners out of Moonrise, but they got on the boat too early and bugged the fight by leaving Astarion and Karlach behind. Wulbren Bongle somehow got stuck in combat mode even after engaging the cutscene on the docks below Last Light; he he kept trying to run ALL THE WAY BACK TO MOONRISE nine fucking meters at a time while I frantically tried to finish the fight with the Warden, otherwise Wulbren would have run straight into the shadow curse. (I would’ve let him go; fuck Wulbren Bongle, all my homies hate Wulbren Bongle. But my mom didn’t know that, and she wanted to keep him safe. So.)
She had me reload a save like eighteen times to save the giant eagles on top of Rosymorn Monastery. Wouldn’t even let me do non-lethal damage just to get past things. I think getting that warhammer for the dawnmaster puzzle took us like an hour and a half alone. (Yes, I know you can use any warhammer, but SHE didn’t.)
She’s started keeping an irl notebook to keep track of her quests between play sessions. She writes down ideas and strategies when she thinks of them during the week, then brings them to her next game session at my house. I think she wrote about three pages on possible approaches to the goblin fortress alone.
She insists that I pet Scratch and the owlbear cub before every single long rest, no exceptions. Sometimes I have to do it multiple times until she is absolutely sure that the animals know exactly how much she loves and cherishes them. She has also commissioned a crocheted owlbear plush from a friend of hers and is very excited.
I’m sure there’s a bunch of stuff I’m forgetting, but those are some fun things I thought of. She’s enjoying the game and is telling all of her retired friends to get it and play it for themselves. She asked me “what is Discord” yesterday and I think my life flashed before my eyes.
now that I'm done with grad school and the holidays, my brain has had some time to process Veilguard and... I think I'm going to bust out my laptop and try to write a little something for Lucanis and Rook. something long, angsty, and with some major canon divergence throughout. also something very sexy. because of course.
i realized 97 hours into my good!Durge/spawn!Astarion playthrough that Durge DOESN'T GET THE PATCH 5 EPILOGUE?? All I get to do is kms on the pier and talk to Withers in the void. i cry 😭
durge and astarion definitely make each other worse before they make each other better btw. and im about to make it everyone's problem.
I sometimes send my mother screenshots of the nice tags that people put under her bg3 adventure posts and it is beyond fun to watch her try to decipher some of the usernames and tumblr language that we all use here ("What is op? Am I op? Like... operation? Operative?")
she also says she unfortunately cannot adopt all of you and she is very sorry but she does appreciate everyone's shared taste in bookish wizards, cats, and crime. so that's something.
every so often i download my latest ao3 bookmarks into iBooks and spend an obscene amount of time making unique covers for each of them in InDesign and i think it's the best possible application of my graphic design degree, thank u professors
omg I really didn’t think too many people would notice that post about my mom’s BG3 playthrough. hello there. welcome to my blog.
my mother is coming over tomorrow morning so we can get into Act III. I’ll be sure to take some detailed notes for this next leg of the journey and report them here!
just wrote like 3k words of a new thing but ive been drinking nyquil bc i have the flu and LET ME TELL YOU. this prose is deranged. incoherent. it’s riveting beyond all human comprehension. it is basically just random hieroglyphics on a page and I will delete all of it in the morning gnight friends
Regarding the future of Roots: (important, please read)
As all of you know, 2020 has been full of justified anti-law enforcement protests since late May. If it hasn’t already been made clear by my likes and retweets over the last few months, I am in full support of BLM and abolishing the police. Just want to state that before I lay all this out for you.
I planted the first seed for anti-hero/anti-law enforcement protests way back in chapter ten of Roots, which was published in summer of 2018. Since then, tensions have been building in my story, and I planned on constructing the final arc’s climax around these anti-hero protests, which would ultimately end with the hero system getting dismantled and restructured to be fairer and not as celebrity-based as it is in the source material of BNHA. That’s what my story has always been about, first and foremost; the romance of the two characters was always secondary to the main overarching plot.
However, I am not blind to the parallels between my fanfiction and what’s happening in the world right now. With tensions rightfully rising and the unjustness of the system being more apparent than ever, I’ve decided I can’t continue Roots like nothing has happened. It’d be disrespectful, and I wouldn’t be comfortable with it. Some of you might roll your eyes and say “it’s just a fanfiction, it’s not that big of a deal,” but I’m here to tell you that you are wrong. Even if my plot points for anti-hero protests and uprisings were laid out a while ago, I cannot in good conscience continue my story as if the world hasn’t changed. Fiction influences reality whether you believe that or not, and I have to consider the effect my writing will have on those reading it during these times.
To that end, I have narrowed down my options to the following three:
Option One
I continue Roots from its current chapter, but I only continue the love story and leave out all mentions of the anti-hero protests out of respect for the events of 2020 and the victims of an unjust system. I would instead focus on the romance between Shouto and Izuku and Shouto’s reinstatement as a hero at his agency. I would also edit the last ten/twenty chapters to minimize the references to anti-hero protests so the change wouldn’t be as noticeable for new readers. I would, however, have to leave the apartment bombing in the story since it affects Shouto’s arm and his living arrangement with Izuku. Anything after that point would be fair game for removal and editing.
Option Two
I do NOT continue the story at all, and instead I leave it where it ends right now. I would add an epilogue instead of chapter 47, and that would be the end of Roots as we know it. Short but clean, and I could do a few spin-off one shots about their relationship to fill in some of the blanks leftover by the end of the story if anyone actually wants those. None of these stories would feature protests or anything relating to them.
Option Three
I remove the story altogether from AO3 and instead make it downloadable as a PDF for those who would want to keep a copy, but no further chapters would be updated, and prior chapters would remain unaltered. All translations would be taken down on their host sites at my request. The story would no longer be publicly available.
Regardless of what happens to my story, I will not be resuming normal updates because doing so feels very wrong to me. Please know that I’m not trying to draw attention to myself or my fic with this post. My only goal here is to be as understanding, respectful, and considerate as possible in regards to the people reading my stories at home. At the end of the day my story is simply fanfiction, and it pales in comparison to anything else currently happening right now. I hope you all understand.
Thank you for your time.
—Laq
EDIT: I would like to clarify that by calling them "anti-law enforcement" protests, I was attempting to draw a more direct parallels to my fic in relation to current events. I have been informed that this is trivializing the actual purpose of the protests, which I am truly sorry for. Specifically, the protests are about combating white supremacy and/or fascism. I shouldn't have attempted to narrow them down to something more specific in relation to my writing. I'm very sorry for the mistake, and I'm thankful to the person who reached out to inform me of this!
