The Grouch's Trash Pile [Baldur's Gate 3]

Honestly my fave thing about the kings knight convos is Gladio's way of typing? Other then leet, which, my guy...
But I think its very strong characterization!
Also, there's a masseuse at the Galdin Quay resort- if you examine the poster or go to the table there's a very good conversation and interaction, respectively.
(sorry I am filling up your thread over this; FFXV is, regrettably, a Big Special Interest. don't hesitate to tell me to lay off!)

 

SAME??? I mean, Gladio is my Favorite so I'm biased but that was just. So good. I love that he's happily a nerd! I love that he's absolutely not the stereotypical big bruiser!

GOD, THE SLANG. I actually cringed. It would have sounded outdated and out of touch 15 years ago, so I'm wondering who thought it was a good idea and WHY. It's so bad it's kind of hilarious, but not in the way they were going for XD

OH RIGHT-- hell, I wish I'd remembered that, I would have mentioned it on my post! Gladio's "I've got an open mind" was the thing that made me EXTREMELY :eyes: about headcanoning him as bisexual. And poor Noctis leaping up like a cat that got its tail stepped on is, imo, indicative of both his chronic injury and neurodivergence. (I'd known about the injury thing before because Nael mentioned it when I noticed his unusual gait in the FFXV crossover in FFXIV, and I remembered it seeing it in FFXV, but my very first thought in seeing him leap up and nope out was "There's someone who does not like to be touched.")

PLEASE, CONTINUE. I've kind of missed the fandom boat on this one (when the port came out my computer at the time was too potato to run it decently) so it's EXCITING to have someone to chat at length about it with, in a place that's cozier and easier to keep civil than Tumblr.

Basically, if I'm currently talking about something, or have talked about it before and haven't been like "I don't ever want to talk about this again", I'm more likely than not to be interested in hearing/talking about it even more.

 

Catch me outside at 2 am banging two pots together and screaming "GLADIO IS THE SON AND HEIR OF SEEMINGLY THE SECOND MOST POWERFUL NOBLE FAMILY IN LUCIS!!!" He has an education! He grew up wealthy! His seems to be a military family, so it would have a different flavor to it, but I would be startled if Gladio hadn't gone to at least the equivalent of an officer's academy! There's a silly headcanon, born from iirc a line in the Ultimania that says essentially "Noctis used to talk like his dad, but trained himself to talk more commonly when he went to a public high school". In Japanese that almost definitely means "He used to speak super formally, then more and more informal", but in English the big difference is that his dad has an English accent- so headcanon that Noct was raised speaking with a totally posh accent, then trained himself into a common "American" one- it would follow, then, that Gladio probably did the same thing, or at least has a "Citadel Voice" and a "Normal Voice", and that its less that Ignis is foreign (its a very common headcanon that Ignis is from Tenebrae, which I don't mind except that it's one of those headcanons that has no actual support but the fandom treats as uniformly true) and more that Ignis is the only one keeping up appearances. Which fits!

 

(Really, though, the het stuff in this game is just...its one of those things where despite all evidence to the contrary its hard to believe any of the writers have, like, talked to a woman?? Like...do you guys think ladies like to be called "Greasemonkey Goddess"? Is this supposed to be an intentional character flaw, where Prompto lets his admiration and idolization for someone get in the way of forming a human connection? He's teased a lot in the game for it...but it always seems to be more of a "she's obviously not into you" or a "she's outta your league" thing. I really like your nb Prompto point, that fills in more of the picture but its certainly not authorial intent so. What am I meant to take from this, game? Because face value I don't know if it's supposed to be an "aw look at the cute puppy love thing" or a "yeah he's never spoken to women and it shows" thing, and since there are no major female characters we never get their perspective on any of this! We barely hear from any of them! Ok sorry I'm done I just...man the way women are treated in this game, and especially Cindy and Luna, is one of its absolute weakest parts)

 

!!! THAT explains his accent! I... somehow managed to just not catch that Regis has an English accent and was just kind of like 'ok' about Ignis's but that makes it make sense -- and of course it's that he's the one keeping up appearances, that's him to a T. That fandom headcanon is kind of... at odds with how that works with real people anyway, afaik. He's been taking care of Noctis since he was a small child; if the American accent was THE royal accent, his supposed Tenebrean accent would have been long since smoothed over. But it isn't, it's very precise and refined.

On that subject -- might Gladio's more 'common' accent might be in large part because of the military thing, considering Cor also has an American accent?

YEP.

When this game recently went on sale and I asked around one of the Discords I'm on for opinions, one of them started, "It's a very enjoyable game so long as you don't expect anything from the female characters." And, so far, that has very much proven to be the case, as they're barely more than set dressing, and I get the distinct and depressing impression that it didn't even occur to the decision makers that that's a problem. It's so frustrating, not just for the obvious reasons but because some of the major female characters have so much potential to be as interesting and nuanced as the boys, it's obviously there -- but it never happens. And then Lunafreya is straight up a MacGuffin more than she is a person, and when that's your main female protagonist, that's really bad. (And lets not talk about Monica, who manages to be an important minor character who looks like a generic npc and has worse voice acting than any of the other voice acted npc... seriously, how do you fuck up THAT BADLY?)

It's the kind of misogyny that's especially frustrating because it's not obviously cruel or oppressive. It's not overtly claiming that women's lives aren't worth examining, it's assuming they don't really have lives outside of men to delve into... and not because of any particular reason. It doesn't even think to consider women's lives outside of their connections to men and what men think about them. It just doesn't occur to dudes in this mindset. It's like the kind of guy who says with complete sincerity he loves his wife and daughters and he does, he doesn't treat them badly, but you can tell he sees them as add-ons to his own life. He'd be baffled and upset if someone told him he wasn't treating them like they were real, full people -- it's just the way things are that he's the sun which they orbit around.

Yeah. Like, I think that's what they were going for... kind of? But they lean too heavily on making fun of him about it, and honestly? I fucking hate that trope, I've had to suffer through decades worth of media using that trope rather than really saying anything interesting, so I found what gap I could and shoved a big old wedge of queer headcanon into it.

Ok I could try to go on but I'm fading fast and should have been in bed an hour ago so pchooooo~

 

I'll be honest I had a brief crisis and had to triple check that Sean Bean is English;;;

Yeah exactly! It seems people just base it off Luna and Ravus's voices but the divide seems to be commoner (or military, you're right; I think Gladio's dad also has a more American accent) vrs nobility, not any sort of nationality thing

^^^^^^

^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Fun fact: around the time the press cycle for the game's actual release was getting started people were criticizing the lack of female party members, and Tabata said something like "Well, we wanted a game about friendship, and we felt having women there would get in the way of the dynamic"
Yeah.

 

Oh wow, that was Sean Bean? ... So the old saw about how every character he plays dies still holds, then? XD

GOD that explains... a whole lot. A WHOLE LOT. The development female characters are given in that game is so shallow that they didn't even notice when they contradicted themselves with worldbuilding with their weird-ass "women do the dangerous physical jobs and are independent" thing they had for Lestallum, even though... there's no indication that women working dangerous physical jobs is at all comment worthy. Many Hunters are women, the head of the Hunters is a woman, and (extremely tokenized, but still) women serve in military positions.

I'm still becroggled that they had to add more scenes of Luna in to the Windows/Royal edition and she still has hardly any screentime. (I'm going to be real mad when I get to Episode Ardyn that they made DLC for him and not Luna or Aranea, aren't I?)

 

The game was also in like pre-production for seven years and got a very, very short three years to try and get almost a decade's worth of abandoned ideas and an ambitious scope into a playable form. Luna seems like she is the result of trying to figure out what to do with the central female character from earlier versions of the game. I think her name was Stella? She seemed to have a more major role and it seemed like a rival one. The title card is one of the thing's to have lasted so it seems like that lady was originally meant to be this more involved Stella character but then we had three years to get the game going and playable.

 

Yeah, it sounds like it was an absolute mess. In one interview Roberto Ferarri said the story changed every three months while he was there.

Luna being a nonentity is a pretty strange choice for a major character at all, but I'd side-eyeing her being a nonentity as an artifact of rushed development a lot less if it weren't for the women-are-accessories-to-men attitude rife throughout the rest of the game. (... does that make sense? I'm having a really hard time wordsing right now.)

 

i just try not to think about the accents too hard

 

skdjflsjfkldf OKAY SO

I loaded up the game and where I last saved was Cape Caem. I'm running down the Regalia when Noctis complains about how windy it is. Prompto wails, "NOOOOOO, my perfectly coiffed hair!" to which Noctis responds, "You think you have it bad, take a look at Ignis!"

Ignis huffs, "It's rude to stare." and I started cackling.

 

Costlemark completed! I had a feeling that the combination of overleveled (if only slightly for that dungeon) + easy mode would make it doable, and it did. The worst parts of it were that both ally and enemy AI can't deal with the layout and won't aggro when it should, the camera flips around like crazy, and it's got that ENDLESS. FUCKING. PUZZLE. It takes soooo loooong and it's soooo boooooring. It's barely even a maze.

I used guides but they were mostly useless -- even guides from big gaming sites tend to be written really unclearly, mentioning details before they're relevant and including a bunch of extraneous dithering. What ever happened to using clearly labeled maps? =_=

Anyway, I pretty much just have the garrison left and maybe trying to get the last upgrade item I need for the Engine Blade... and then it's finally off to chapter 9.

 

Formouth Garrison was an absolute pushover due to a combination of me being now hilariously overleveled (60) and having had a good meal beforehand. I also abused the heck out of those big guns you can man.

I also turned in the gemstones to Dino and it's only from him that I hear that the nights are getting longer. He says "I'm sure you've heard on the news" but no -- I'd stopped bothering to listen to the radios when they seemed to be playing the same news every single time. I should give them another go I guess -- the one in Lestallum by the hotel did talk about Ravus's magitek arm and how he got it after an injury he sustained at the signing. Considering (as per some ambient dialogue) he took Regis's sword and is swanning around with it on his hip, I'm guessing he deserved losing that arm. :|

 

Well, I went and checked a bunch of radios and I got two advertisements I hadn't heard before (for the Coernix stations and Meldacio HQ), a news alert about how the people behind the infiltration of Imperial bases are thought to be the ones behind the violence at the peace treaty signing (loooooooooool), the one about Ravus's arm again, and then it was just stuff I'd already heard over and over (other advertisements, the propagandaish 'news' about the civilian death in Lestallum, news about Noctis being spotted).

 

Knocked over a full glass of water onto my keyboard today. Had reached for something else, but when I drew my hand back it jerked at exactly the right point to smack into my glass, hard. Gave my desk a good dousing. The keyboard was the only real casualty -- well, that and my self-esteem. Clumsy, stupid, wasteful!

The keyboard is currently turned upside down over a towel to dry, but since that was its second dousing (last one was a year? or more ago and due to Gordon charging across my desk) and it hadn't been quite right after the first one, I went out and bought a new one. Even though I still feel kind of bad, it's also kind of worth it -- after the first spill, the old one's key action felt mushy and weird even after I got keys to stop sticking. This one otoh is properly clicky and responsive. This should help me sort out a problem I've had for a while in FFXIV where some of my skills don't fire consistently, since the problem could be the keyboard not registering keystrokes, latency eating inputs, or me literally not pressing hard enough on a key. It's probably the keyboard; if it's not, I really hope it isn't me not pressing hard enough on keys, since that's never been a problem before and would imply something's gone wrong with my left hand.

Honestly though it's probably the keyboard.

 

Finished upgrading all but one of the special weapons (apparently the part for the Noiseblaster isn't acquirable until way later), and am closing in on the home stretch with the tour quests. The flowers for Iris one was cute, but I was especially charmed by the little one where Ignis asks you to stir breakfast. Noctis held an actual part time job at one point! I get the impression he ended up spending his teen years living a normal person life, for whatever reason.

I also like the little bit of banter:
Noctis: All these years, you've never stopped worrying about me.
Ignis: My royal duty, as per His Majesty.
Noctis: Your hobby.

Ignis, you are Dad Friend, you aren't fooling anyone. :3

 

FTR, exactly what happened to Ravus' arm (and indeed the assault on Insomnia in general) is explained in the Kingsglaive movie, which is really worth the watch if you can find it somewhere easily. It's honestly the most well-put-together piece of XV media.

 

Things that make me ridiculously happy: finding Earthbound shoutouts where I didn't expect them. Prompto telling Noct "say fuzzy pickles!" in his photoshoot tour was a delight. :3

 

HE SAYS WHAT NOW?!

 

Prompto has a tour quest down at that beach haven near to Cape Caem, where he wants Noctis to pose for him, right? And one of the things he says to prompt the player to do a pose is "Say fuzzy pickles!" It's super cute.

Hm, does this imply an AU version of Earthbound exists in the FFXV universe?