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

[Pokémon level up sound]

 

Happy and slightly belated birthday!

 

Rent went up 30€ from last year. ¬_¬ I really need to lean on J to call maintenance for more stuff; if the city is going to charge us as much as it does for living in a shoebox, we should at least have a doorbell that works consistently and isn't so jarring it takes a year off my life every time it does ring (for example).

 

Spoiler: Picked this WoL Inspo chart up on Twitter and it looked like fun:

Here's one for Iolis:

 

Copied over from the Tumbls:

This was fun to do because originally I could only think of his two most obvious influences (Elric and Celes), but Iolis is one of my oldest OCs (he's usually my go-to for any game with a customizable character, if I can make him at all look like himself); it only makes sense that he'd have more than that in his character DNA.

The uniting factor is people who are Really Going Through It (although Meguet doesn't have the kind of suffering the others do; she handles her burdens with grace and dogged determination). Other uniting factors are light/goodness struggling against darkness, swords, and guilt (again, Meguet is an exception; from her, Iolis gets his stalwart nature and sense of duty that remains even when the guilt -- misplaced or otherwise -- is gone).

I debated putting Aerith on here instead of Meguet as I feel she's probably just as much of an influence; underneath all the struggling and soul muck, he's a lot like her (his house is even 30% garden -- more if you count the yard). I started him as a conjurer/white mage, which has always fit him and still suits him, even if canonically he's been wielding a greatsword since mid-Heavensward.

Obviously, The Dark Urge is a new influence. I had really wanted to play that background in BG3 but I was struggling to think of a character concept, until I thought about it and realized that I had a perfect character for it: my guy who is always Really Going Through It, because in BG3 no custom character will be Going Through It as much as The Dark Urge.

Where Iolis has struggled against his inner darkness, Ios (his name as Durge) struggled against his outer darkness. He fought to regain that spark of light that is his essential self, and it was ironically a severe case of head trauma that gave it a chance to surface again.

In having his situation flipped turnwise, so to speak, it gave me new ideas and insights as to who he is. Iolis has ended up a bit stodgy, heroic and duty-bound as he has been, but Ios had to find his sense of humor if he was to survive the burden of everything he's done. He swung from being too silly and flippant to wracked with (extremely well-earned) guilt. He had to grapple with the fact that while he's inherently kind of a silly weirdo, the outright trickster persona he retreats behind is just as much of a mask as the Serious Hero performance that Iolis puts on.

From either direction, Iolis's story is one of learning that he can't let guilt consume his life and he has to have a backbone, both in the face of other people and in the face of his own worst self.

 

Phae's happy with his new digs on Primal!

Spoiler: More

 

CUUUUTE. I love all the red and green and wood.

 

It's fitting that the weather being particularly Martinaise today, considering I just found out I lost a cousin to a drug overdose. I had a feeling he wouldn't make it to the end of the month considering he was found alone and unresponsive and had to be resuscitated; apparently although his organs were functioning, he suffered brain death.

We weren't close, but I'm feeling some feelings all the same.

 

I got really upset over a dumb fandom take earlier, and while it was very dumb it didn't warrant the level of "you kicked my puppy" gut reaction it gave me.

Then I realized, oh. That's the grief, coming out sideways. I guess I am pretty fucking sad!

 

Now that I'm a few days out from it, my reaction to finding out about my cousin's death care arrangements is kind of funny. He's getting human composting (the memorial site called it 'soil transformation', which I assume is the nice normie word for it), and I was geeking out about how cool that is while also getting re-flattened by awful sadness. Mentally lying facedown in the floor in spirit with a muffled and emphatic but also kind of monotone "Wow, neat!" coming from me.

I let my aunt know that that's a wonderful thing they're doing for him (I knew he worked and her and my uncle's greenhouse for a long time, but I didn't know, as per the memorial site, he was also just really into plants in general) and then wandered off to play Sims and be really sad.