Character Analysis: Enver Gortash (Baldur's Gate 3)
Who is Gortash?
Gortash is the Chosen who understands power in its most administrative form; Ketheric carries grief and religious conviction into everything he does, Orin turns violence into spectacle, and Gortash is interested in titles, prisons, factories, guards, coronations, and public order. He thinks like a ruler before he ever officially becomes one. By the time the player reaches Baldur's Gate, he already has the image he wants: controlled, competent, necessary, and fully at ease in the machinery of the city.
That position sets him apart from the other major antagonists; he's not operating from the edge of society or trying to tear it down in open frenzy, he's inserted himself right into its centre and learned how to use its existing structures for his own ends. The Steel Watch, the Foundry, the ceremony at Wyrm's Rock, the way he handles the city's fear, all of it shows someone who understands that domination becomes much easier once it looks official. He wants obedience, but he wants obedience to feel normal.
His background is important here because it explains why control sits so close to the centre of him. He was sold by his parents to Raphael, spent his childhood under that kind of power and abuse, and came out of it with a very clear set of lessons about how the world works: safety belongs to the person who can command, threaten, and stay untouchable, and dependence belongs to everyone else. By adulthood, he's turned that world-view into his politics.
In archetypal terms, he sits somewhere between the authoritarian climber, the polished tyrant, and the abused child who grew into a man determined never to be powerless again. He's at his most convincing when the game lets him speak calmly, negotiate, and present himself as the reasonable one, because that's the version of villainy he understands best: elegant, strategic, and completely willing to grind people down while calling it order.
Psychology
Narcisisstic Personality Disorder/NPD is the strongest diagnosis for Gortash.
Grandiosity runs through almost everything about him. He wants rank, visibility, prestige, and the right to stand above other people while treating that position as a simple recognition of fact. He carries himself like someone who believes his superiority should already be obvious, and most of his interactions depend on that assumption. He expects to be deferred to, listened to, and for his ambitions to sound larger and more serious than anyone else's.
The childhood with Raphael helps explain the shape of that grandiosity; a child who's sold, humiliated, and controlled can build a whole adult identity around making sure it never happens again. With Gortash, that structure has grown into something much harsher than ambition or pride. He doesn't simply enjoy power, he needs it - it protects his self-image, his sense of safety, and lets him reverse the position he once occupied. He can't imagine security without hierarchy, and he can't imagine hierarchy without himself near the top of it.
His emotional range is narrow in a revealing way; he can admire, desire, approve, and respect, but all of those feelings stay tied to power, usefulness, and scale. He's perfectly capable of attachment, but the attachment is filtered through the same logic as everything else; he doesn't approach people as equals in any ordinary emotional sense, but as assets, threates, rare peers, or obstacles. That's part of why the Dark Urge relationship stands out so much - he genuinely values them, but the value still lives inside hierarchy, shared ambition, and mutual monstrosity.
He's also very comfortable with exploitation. The Gondians, Karlach, the Steel Watch, the city, the Brain - his whole life is built around the assumption that other people can be used if he's intelligent enough to manage them. There's no sign that guilt or empathy seriously restrain him - what restrains him is strategy.
Strengths and Flaws
Gortash is intelligent in a practical, structural way. He thinks well beyond the immediate scene in front of him. He understands how to build systems, how to fit people into them, how to make those systems self-reinforcing, and how to hide brutality inside procedure. That's where his danger really sits; plenty of villains can manipulate a room, but Gortash can reshape a city.
He's also socially disciplined. He knows how to control his tone, flatter without sounding desperate, negotiate without looking weak, and threaten without losing his composure. That control carries a lot of weight because it makes him harder to read at a glance; he rarely sounds frantic, and he rarely sounds like he's improvising even when the situation is shifting around him.
Another strength is his eye for talent; Gortash can recognise ability and scale in other people very quickly, and he responds to it with real interest. The Dark Urge is the clearest case, but even beyond that, his whole rise depends on his ability to see who's useful, who's dangerous, who can be contained, and who deserves a different level of attention. He doesn't waste much time underestimating people in the simple, foolish way more impulsive villains do.
His biggest weakness is overconfidence. He trusts his own systems too much. He trusts the Steel Watch, the Foundry, the shape of his alliance, and the image he's built in Baldur's Gate. He believes his control is broader and more durable than it really is, and once things begin breaking apart, he has far less flexibility than his calm exterior suggests.
There's also a deep narrowness in how he relates to other people. He can value them, but the value is almost always tied to power, usefulness, or admiration. He has very little room in him for vulnerability, reciprocity, or ordinary care. Even at his most personally open, he still sounds like a man who wants the relationship arranged on terms that keep him safe and superior.
Relationships
THE DARK URGE
This is the most revealing relationship in his story. Gortash speaks to the Dark Urge with a level of familiarity, warmth, and genuine regard that he doesn't give anyone else. He remembers their old partnership with obvious pleasure, sounds genuinely relieved if they return to him, and treats them like someone whose absence he's actually felt. That already places the relationship in a different category from ordinary alliance.
The romantic undertone is strong because the game writes their backstory with much more charge than a simple former co-conspirators dynamic would need. He likes their mind, their control, their ambition, their capacity for violence, and the fact that they understood the plan on the same scale he did. There's admiration in the way he speaks to them, but there's also possessiveness and a kind of pleased recognition that he's finally found someone who speaks the same political and moral language he does.
Their shared history deepens that further. They weren't just uesful to each other, they were building the whole scheme together, shaping the Absolute plot together, and acting as intellectual equals inside one of the largest atrocities in the game. That sort of history carries intimacy whether the text names it outright or not. Gortash is at his most personally animated around the Dark Urge, and that says a lot about him; the person he seems to come closest to loving is the one who understood ambition, cruelty, and power in the same terms he does.
KARLACH
Karlach gives the clearest view of Gortash as an abuser. He did exactly what was done to him - he recruited her, used her, and sold her into the Hells, where her body was remade into something built for war and suffering. There's nothing abstract about the damage; Karlach carries it physically, emotionally, and morally, and her hatred of him feels so sharp because it's tied to lived experience rather than indeology.
Their relationahip strips away his polish very quickly. Around the city, Gortash can present himself as a statesman, but in Karlach's history, he's simply the man who looked at another person's life and decided he could profit from destroying it. She knew him before the coronation, before the respectable image had fully settled into place, and what she remembers is exactly the person that image is designed to hide.
RAPHAEL
Raphael belongs to Gortash's story as the original source of so much of his world-view. Being sold to him and raised in that environment left a permanent mark; Gortash learned very early what it meant to be long to someone stronger, and he learned just as early that power was the only reliable protection against becoming property.
That history is all over the adult version of him. Raphael didn't make him into the man he became by himself, but he set the conditions. Gortash takes the logic of infernal hierarchy - coercion, leverage, dependence, punishment - and rebuilds it in political form. He leaves Hell behind, but he doesn't leave its lessons behind with it.
ORIN
Orin shows what Gortash can't stand in an ally. He can work alongside murder, sadism, and monstrosity with no trouble at all, but what he can't respect is instability without discipline. Orin is too volatile, too impulsive, too chaotic in ways that threaten planning. Their alliance exists because it has to, not because he values her.
That contrast helps define his relationship with the Dark Urge, too. He respected the Dark Urge because they had control and scale. Orin has violence, but not the kind of violence he admires.
BANE
Bane doesn't distort Gortash away from his nature, he formalises it. Tyranny, hierarchy, fear, and rule through domination already fit the way Gortash thinks. Becoming Bane's Chosen gives his existing world-view divine legitimacy and a larger structure to place himself inside.
That's why his faith feels so natural to him. He's not forcing himself into Bane's shape, he already fits there.
Just for Fun / Typology
MBTI - ENTJ
The strongest part of the read is Te. He thinks in systems, command structures, infrastructure, visible authority, and practical control. He doesn't just want influence over individuals, he wants mechanisms that keep exerting influence after he's left the room. He organises, delegates, builds, and rules in a very external, structural way.
Ni also fits him well because his ambition is focused rather than scattered. He keeps working toward one large design and folds other people into it according to their usefulness. He doesn't read as someone constantly chasing new possibilities or improvising for the thrill of it. He has a plan, and he wants the world arranged correctly around that plan.
I could see some logic in thinking INTJ because he's cold, strategic, and perfectly capable of distance, but ENTJ feels more accurate because he wants power in public. Rank, office, recognition, and visible control are all deeply important to him. He doesn't want to remain behind the scenes if he can help it.
MORAL ALIGNMENT - Lawful Evil
Gortash believes in hierarchy, institution, power made formal, and violence made routine. He wants obedience stabilised into governance. He likes systems because systems make domination durable. There's nothing chaotic about the way he thinks. He wants order, but he wants an order built entirely around fear, exploitation, and control from above.
The Evil side is obvious in the slavery, coercion, torture, dehumanisation, and total indifference to what his plans cost other people. The Lawful side is just as strong because none of that is random; he wants it embedded in civic life, defended by policy, and accepted as necessity.
Conclusion
Gortash works because he feels plausible in a way many fantasy tyrants don't. He understands institutions, public fear, class aspiration, and the ways people will accept cruelty if it arrives in the right language. The NPD read fits because grandiosity, entitlement, superiority, and the need for status are built into everything about him, from his public image to his private relationships. The Dark Urge history gives him extra depth by showing the one bond in the game where admiration, desire, and ambition all seem to overlap. He never stops being monstrous there, but he does become more specific, and much more recognisably human in the worst possible way.
At some point I got curious and tried turning down every single one of Gortash's offers - and he somehow had a counterargument for all of them, which honestly cracked me up.
This man does not know how to give up xD
The other day, I saw a non-fandom text post along the lines of:
“What we had was so special you’ll look for me in every new person” (sorry I haven’t been able to find it again)
And I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.
Because to me this perfectly describes Durgetash + romancing your companions.
I can’t help thinking about amnesiac Durge missing something, always searching, but can’t remember what.
They find echoes of it in Gale’s intelligence, his enthusiasm and knowledge when he speaks about magic. And yet, it doesn’t fit entirely.
They find it in Lae’zel’s easy superiority, her ruthlessness and determination. And yet, it’s not quite enough.
They find it in Astarion’s deception and easy charm, the way he manipulates a situation to his advantage, the way he doesn’t need magic to have people literally bare their necks to him.
They find it in Shadowheart’s snark, her secrecy, her dark goddess. They find it in Karlach’s rage (though she burns hot instead of cold which is odd..), in the smell of sulphur and hellfire that clings to her. They especially find it in her mechanical heart, that makes them want to reach out, bury their hands in it, just to see if it feels as familiar as it seems. If maybe owning her heart will fill the hole in their memories, their chest even.
And yet, surprisingly, they find it in Wyll’s pact, Wyll’s past, but also Wyll’s manners and they way he dances, his stories, that make them feel closer to a city they don’t much care about otherwise.
They find it in the deep possessiveness, maybe even hatred, when Raphael first comes to camp.
And yet none of it is enough, none of it fits quite right, and while maybe eventually they manage to look past that familiar feeling and find new things to admire about their chosen partner…deep in their heart they know.
In the end, they’ll always look for something none of them can give them.
Not until they first encounter that handsome young man with an easy smile, and all the jagged broken edges click together like horrible little puzzle pieces.
dededos
areudirty
jbbartram-illu
turnnoffyourmind
tangentwithtanner
izzy806
ellievsbear
