When I’m writing about our attempts to get Wyll out of the picture, I’m writing from an imaginary perspective as a “Wyll-hater”, as I was when I role-played the character of Wicked Sandalwood.
If Karlach likes you, you can’t be all bad.
In reality, I have no antipathy for the character. I have great respect for the most visible member of the team who brought the character to life, Theo Solomon, who provided the character’s voice and motion capture. The same goes for the rest of the team who developed him: the writers, directors, animators, actors, audio engineers, and so forth.
Those creators did right by the character of Wyll. We’re making up a story with Wyll as the obstacle, something that no one envisioned that anyone would want to do.
When Real Angela joined 8’/2.5 as Mor’lith, she went along with that fiction. The practical reality was that Wyll as a Hexblade Warlock was as effective a character as anyone could ask for. But in our agreed-upon story, Wyll was someone we needed to get out of the way so that Galaxy Angela could shine.
“Wyll, just sit there. We’ll take care of things.”
How to do this? The most practical answer was to kill the character. Then he couldn’t show up in the cutscenes.
“Ra’stil, I believe we have a plan to eliminate the k’chakhi she’lak.” “What does that mean?” “We’re going to kill your boss.”
My goal shifted a bit. While I’d still prefer for Galaxy Angela to be the protagonist of the game, I would be content if Mor’lith, as a player character, would show up in the cutscenes instead. At least an Angela would be involved
I would have been fine if Mor’lith had been the Hero.
The plan failed. In the end, even death didn’t stop Wyll from showing up.
Before we entered this cutscene, Wyll met with an unfortunate accident; he accidentally impaled himself on Galaxy Angela’s staffs multiple times. His body was lying on the opposite side of the zone. And yet here he is, striding forward to fail at the task before him.
I half-suspected that this wouldn’t work. It hadn’t worked with Doomed Laurelin in playthrough 9.
Karlach tried to warn him. He didn’t listen. Then again, as we found out, he didn’t need to.
Before we get to the reason why it was never reasonable to expect this plan to work, let’s deal with a different issue:
Psychodrama? Or Barbie’s Dream House?
I’ve obviously developed this whole fictional universe, a fiction within the fiction of Baldur’s Gate 3, about a digital creation that was never intended to have any agency.
Druid Angela’s crack team of accomplished minions. And Wyll, yeah, he’s there too.
Have I gone crazy? Or have I become obsessed with playing with my toys?
As Real Angela has said, “Why not both?”
Gloating does not become you Raphael… even though you’re right.
In a way, my desire to see Druid Angela triumphant came less from a place of obsession (though I must leave that diagnosis to others) and more from a desire to play with my dolls in the way I wanted to play with them.
Here the Druid Angela doll poses with the Wood Woad doll and the Dryad doll. I used photo mode to pose them all, the way one does with dolls.
I’m going to make an analogy with Barbie, the well-known doll. In defense of the Barbie fans out there, I know nothing about the character of Barbie, nor of Barbie fandom, apart from a few quick web searches. It is not my intent to insult or diminish either. My apologies if I accidentally malign Barbie or her legion of fans.
Having said that…
Imagine that I’m playing with my collection of Barbie toys. There’s Barbie Dream House, and Barbie’s car, and other Barbie accessories.
Logically I should put pictures of Barbie dolls at this point in the essay. Since I don’t have any, at least I can do “Barbie dress-up” with Druid Angela. This is called the “Angelic Scion Outfit”, which seems appropriate for a character named “Angela” to wear.
Then I decide that I want the focus of my playtime storytelling to be on one of Barbie’s friends, Christie, instead of Barbie. I want Christie to be the one in the Dream House, in the car, at the beach, and so forth. I want my storytime adventures to be about her, and let Barbie fade from my internal monologue.
More “Barbie dress-up”. Druid Angela is wearing a re-dyed version of Karlach’s camp clothes.
With physical toys, this is no problem. Well, it would be if Mattel designed the toys in such a way that only a Barbie doll could fit into the car, but Christie could not. Fortunately for me and my newly-envisioned story in the Barbieverse, that’s not the case. Christie can have a story woven about her if that’s what I choose to do.
If Barbie fans can dress her up in a bikini for a beach trip, I feel I can dress Druid Angela in one of Figaro Pennygood’s fancy designs.
I’m sure you can connect the dots for the rest of my argument, but since my nick-name is Captain Obvious:
… and Karlach’s nick-name is “Looks amazing in a red dress” …
That’s what I wanted to do with Druid Angela. In the fantasy story I built up during playthrough 8, starting from Druid Angela’s first amazing battle success, I wanted her to become the Hero of the Story.
An example of Heroism: Galaxy Angela rushes forward and saves Volo by casting the spell Create Water, putting out the fire that threatened to set off the barrels of smokepowder.
To a large extent, the game supported this. Generally speaking, the lead role in a cutscene is assigned to:
… the character who initiated a conversation.
For example, after the above rescue, Galaxy Angela could initiate a conversation with Volo. He’s appropriately grateful that she saved his life.
Outside of camp, in the game world, this was no problem.
The playable characters in the camp would not talk with Druid Angela, but that was related to how the multi-player mechanics of the game worked. When I played Bellandria in 1/14 or Tavelle in 2/14.5, and when Real Angela played Mor’lith in 8’/2.5, we couldn’t talk to characters who were not assigned to our team.
Gale refuses to speak with Galaxy Angela. But this is the same thing he would have said if he were in Mor’lith’s party, and Wyll tried to speak with him. Or if he and Karlach were in Wyll’s party, and Karlach tried to speak with him.
Druid Angela could still pet Scratch, or interact with other characters who could never be assigned to an adventuring team. In that respect she was no different from any other member of the team.
… the character who was in closest proximity to the lead speaking character when a cutscene required it.
This most often happened when it was a story character who initiated a conversation. For example, if you rescue someone, they’re likely to start talking to you without you initiating the scene. If Druid Angela was the frontmost character in the group, the cutscene would feature her.
Another example: Dribbles started speaking to Angela when she got up on stage with him.
Druid Angela wasn’t always featured in such cutscenes, but when she wasn’t it was understandable given the notion of “proximity”. There were times in 1/14 and 2/14.5 when either Real Angela or I would say, “I’m sorry, but I was too close to the Pack Leader and the conversation’s started! Get over here if you want to see it!”
While this was sometimes annoying, again it was no different than playing any other member of the team.
… the game’s host’s character, no matter what the state of that character was.
When Wyll was dead, Galaxy Angela was permitted to row the boat that led to the confrontation with the Ultimate Evil.
It got to be ridiculous. We’d kill Wyll, and he’d still show up in cutscenes. We tried to leave him or his corpse behind, but the game would not allow us to progress unless all the members of the party were alive and present.
Finally, at the end of the game, we just got tired of looking at Wyll’s stupid face. We made a character choice so that we wouldn’t have to. From that point forward, we called him Squyll. (If you haven’t played the game yet, you have no idea what that means. Consider it more for you to discover when you play BG3!)
To avoid a spoiler, instead I’ll show you a picture of Wyll just sitting there, the way we asked him to. It didn’t do much good; he was thrust into critical cutscenes anyway.
I have to acknowledge that this gave us a chance to look at a sequence of cutscenes that Real Angela would not have otherwise seen. Given the goals for 8’/2.5, that felt fitting.
This is a multi-part essay. Here are links to all the parts:
