rocky41_7

This hasn't made it on here yet but I've recruited Minthara for the first time this playthrough and I'm in LOVE she's horrible and I'm in LOVE her puppy dog eyes and desire for bloody vengeance are extremely compelling. She wants to know about githyanki poetry 😍

I said this in the tags of a tumblr post but I'll share it here too: One of the things that took me by surprise with Minthara's character is how openly she talks about her fear. When she talks about being taken captive by Orin, she doesn't try to make it sound like nbd and doesn't even omit how Orin laughed at her apparent fear. It's not something I would have expected from her initially and it's very intriguing.

Turning Minthara down after she was "disappointed" to realize Tav only thought of her as a friend is hands down the hardest thing I've had to do in this game ;A;

But also - the vulnerability!! "Without Lolth, without the Absolute, without my home, I do not know who I am" "show me who I am through your eyes, let me see myself" !!!!!!!!!!!!!! HOW CAN I BE NORMAL ABOUT HER

I'm just losing my mind about Minthara practically begging to share minds with Tav so she can see herself through someone else's eyes because her sense of self is so tenuous and poorly-understood by her that she needs someone else's view of her to try to understand herself. If Tav says she'd rather just say what she thinks of Minthara aloud, Minthara (gently) pushes back, insisting that the only way for her to get the real truth is to see it in Tav's mind. This woman is so lost and desperate to understand herself, but even now with someone she trusts enough to admit this to, she cannot bring herself to trust Tav's word on the matter.

This woman will say things that make Lae'zel look like a bleeding heart empath and then look at you like this

In a grim finale to yesterday evening, Tav helped Astarion complete the ascendance ritual only to hear his unhinged monologue afterwards and then side with the Gur to off him.

Really fascinating to see the cycles at play here: knowing how Cazador abused and tortured Astarion, hearing the memories of how Vellioth abused and tortured Cazador...seeing the horror that Cazador wrought on his spawn, seeing Astarion bend Cazador over and carve the ritual symbols into his back (and they do not skimp on that scene, it goes on a while with Cazador screaming as Astarion does to him what he did to Astarion - I wonder if Cazador's screams sound sweet to Astarion?) I can only assume how this moment with Astarion throws Cazador back to being helpless at Vellioth's hands, and it's easy to imagine even at his age how his pursuit of power felt like a pursuit of control over his own life, of freedom from fear...so to hear Astarion claim as soon as the ritual is over that he'll never have to fear anyone again...boy the cycles do cycle.

Interestingly, Lae'zel opposes this course enough to interrupt the cut scene pleading with Astarion not to do it, and after she seems genuinely sad that he succumbed to desire for personal power (which she contrasts with power for the collective). Minthara, predictably, supports Astsrion's ascension, although she has nothing to say afterwards. After killing him with the Gur, she's frustrated we offed a powerful ally. Lae'zel continues to be disappointed, but seems to believe we had to do it. From a monster-hunter perspective, we aced the day by ending with zero vampires.

I heard murmurs online that ascendant Astarion is just as bad if not worse than Cazador and even the brief glimpse I got of him does resonate with that. Makes me wonder who Cazador was before Vellioth got to him. Someday I'll do a Durge playthrough and let Astarion live out his ascendant vampire dreams.

Astarion was inspired by our betrayal.

Encouraging Shadowheart to defy Shar as a githyanki Tav who defied Vlaakith feels particularly powerful. Shadowheart insists this is her duty, her life's purpose to follow Shar's orders, and Tavarezzyn is like "Like it was my purpose, Lae'zel's purpose, to follow Vlaakith?"

Initially when I started this run I expected Tavarezzyn to support or at least not oppose Shadowheart's goal of becoming a justiciar, just because Tav was so focused on her own goal she wasn't overly concerned with everyone else's, and because morally she's less opposed to the idea of killing than other companions and Tavs, but her experience with her own god-queen radically altered her views on Shadowheart being effectively bound to Shar's will without the chance to really consider what that means. She sees in Shadowheart herself and Lae'zel, giving their loyalty, even their lives, to a ruler who could not care less about them except as they serve her purpose, and she can't support putting Shadowheart in that position.

Tavarezzyn begins Act II with more stable footing in Faerun, in no small part because she's now spent several weeks traveling with locals. Furthermore, as Lae'zel initially derisively points out, she's starting to get into playing the hero. Their successful defeat of the goblins and rescue of the tiefling refugees netted them a fair deal of praise, and this is the first time for Tav that people have ever been glad to see her, as opposed to groaning and cursing and asking if she can be reassigned somewhere else. It's never before been the case that people looked to her for anything or trusted her to solve a problem and if she's honest yes, she is getting into it, enough that she's willing to cooperate with Jaheira and the Harpers even if it doesn't totally serve her own goal of destroying her parasite.

However, it's also a little terrifying to have people whose opinions of her are not baseline in the dirt, because they can actually be let down.

Tavarezzyn's personal journey starts with running away from her platoon. This began as an incredibly half-hearted attempt at suicide, which was over without any real effort when she realized she didn't want to die, just to not be constantly surrounded by people who thought she was worthless. So she high-tails it to Faerun, essentially at random.

She spends a few weeks in Baldur's Gate utterly wracked with guilt, eventually deciding she must return, and it's on this trip to rejoin the other githyanki that she's picked up by the nautiloid. Nevertheless, those few weeks in Faerun is the first time she's ever really experienced foreign cultures. Certainly she offended a couple hundred people in her brief time there, but she was also exposed to ideas and perspectives shed never considered before, and those things are percolating in her mind even before the nautiloid.

This makes her more prone to shifting values throughout the journey of the game and gives her a primer to be a little more tolerant when it comes to picking up her various non-gith companions.

Lae'el is a bitch and a half to Tavarezzyn once she realizes how low on the feeding chain Tav really is among the githyanki (which doesn't take long; the scars her crechemates left her were supposed to show she's a loser who can't hold her own in a fight). Some of the other companions--Wyll, Gale, Karlach--take some issue with this. Unfortunately, faced with the double humiliation of being rejected by her own kind and being pitied (as she sees it) by outsiders, her response is generally "FUCK OFF ISTIK" or perhaps challenging them to a fight, thanks to a heady cocktail of continual rejection by her own society and a lifetime of bullying combined with feverish commitment to the same values and norms over which she was rejected.

loading up a cargo ship for her issues, bad enough to be disdained by the only other gith around, but being comforted by ISTIK?, intolerable, her brief sojourn into Baldur's Gate began to shift her views, but in Act 1 she still has a ways to go

Behold: Tav, short for Tavarezzyn, a pathetic excuse for a githyanki.

Tav is, by githyanki standards, a coward and a dogshit warrior. She managed to survive multiple attempts by crechemates to put her down mainly through a combination of dumb luck and pitying intervention by adults, but she has (not pictured here) about a half a dozen notches in her ears to prove her lost fights and make sure other githyanki know what a loser she is on sight.

Unfortunately this had the impact of making her a perpetual defeatist, convinced at the start of any task that she's definitely going to fuck it up, which inevitably becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, further convincing her of her own uselessness.

Despite utterly failing to achieve any measure of success by githyanki standards, she continues to zealously laud those same values, worshipping Vlaakith and dreaming of ascension, something laughably beyond the realm of possibility for her. However, early in the adventure after escaping the nautiloid, she does consider that actually, removing herself from githyanki society might be best for everyone. (And in fact, she was caught by the nautiloid in the throes of regret over deserting her platoon, trying to make her way back to them.)

Lae'zel begins their acquaintance from a point of total contempt. She is aware very quickly that Tav is a black sheep among their people and has no respect for her. But Tav's quick and surprisingly successful flash of leadership on the nautiloid, allowing both her and Lae'zel to survive, gives her a desperately needed confidence boost, and as the weeks on the road progress, she discovers she is actually, good at maybe a couple of things, or at least she can improve at some things. Maybe.

For her part, Tav is smitten with Lae'zel immediately, but of course aware of Lae'zel's disdain for her (which does nothing to temper her growing loyalty to and affection for Lae'zel) and assumes there is no chance that will ever happen.

Much to Lae'zel's annoyance, she finds her attitude towards Tav shifting as they travel together, until she's surprised to find she cares about this loser. Together, they weather the shock and anger of Vlaakith's betrayal of the githyanki people and vow to carve their own path and take their queen out of power, the keystone cementing their now inseparable bond.