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rauzagel · 7 months

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I want to rant a bit about how the sexual aspect of Act 3 Raphael is handled, so be warned, you know what this is about. Just me whining for a bit.

First of all, it was very clear to me that the game would give us some sexy Raph scenes the moment they let us engage with Mizora because it had been pretty equal up until that point. If the game lets you do the lady devil, they'll undoubtedly let us have some fun with the handsome male one, right? They even gave us some Squid boy action after all. So the moment I got that Mizora scene my main motivation in the game shifted to finish Raphaels quest line as soon as possible to get to that point.

Then we get to the House of Hope and it's just... some random shapeshifting fiend and he's just grinding on my gals stomach, riding air. So from an anatomical standpoint the animation itself only works for male player models to begin with and uh... it was just really awkward, not enjoyable at all and the actual Raphael is just reduced to a joke and then that's it.

To me, a Raphael simp, this was the equivalent of dating Astarion/Shadowheart for three Acts and just when you're about to finalize the romance with some sexy scenes, Dribbles the (shapeshifter) Clown swoops in and takes that romantic interests place instead.

What's the purpose of replacing the actual Raphael with a guy whos sole alure lies within the fact that he copies the voice and looks of Raphael? It's literally him but without any of the charme. It would've been fine if that's all it was, but why ruin the characters sexual appeal on top of it? There were so many other things in the house of hope that could've been used to make fun of him, why not at least leave us the fantasy? I don't accept the "Oh, he's a villain and all villains are secretly pathetic" angle because as others have already mentioned, that is not how Mizora is handled, who is Raphaels female equivalent for those who're attracted to women. I'm not the only one who feels this way considering how many fans interpret the available information so that we can still get something out of it. Which I mean works just fine, but in the end it's all speculation. It's also the only way he'll still keep his appeal for many, myself included.

With the way he conducted himself, controlling and dominant, I don't find it unreasonable to expect any romantic scenes involving him to play out a certain way, it's very much the implication of writing him this way and it's exactly those qualities that people would be drawn to for the first 2 and a half acts in the first place. Raphael had such an intimate and prominent role by directly interacting with the player throughout the game, especially if you sign the contract and was, with his flirting, pretty much perfectly set up for some romance content. Even the locations we meet him at, such as the brothel are teasing the player and pointing towards it. The writers are aware that it was anticipated by many too, you can literally tell Haarlep sleeping with Raphael is what you wanted all along, but then that line is just treated as a joke once again. Raph is the only alternative to the emperor, in the end it's literally him or squid and even the squid gets a scene for those who are into him. Raphaels appeal isn't just the visual, but his charme and personality, the entire package, so to say. A shapeshifter that copies his visuals is just that, a hollow copy with none of those qualities, none of the charme and in the end none of the appeal. I'm still pretty disappointed by it. As it stands I would have preferred no intimate scenes involving him or his clones and keep the fantasy over what we got.

Needed to scream this into the void.

#Raphael baldur's gate 3 #Raphael bg3 #Raphael x Tav #raphael/tav #bg3 #house of hope #raphael #baldur's gate 3 #we got so close #someone tell me it'll be okay #they just need to release the raphael cut right? It'll change everything #Honestly as far as my fantasies of villainy men go he was perfect until Hoh #yes I wanted him to dom me til I see the lights it's true #I have no shame about it it's what we deserved #should've let us have this #male attracted subs need love too

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tciddaemina · 2 years

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on sex, marriage, and family - some headcanons about the Gerudo

so i’ve been writing a lot of fic for LoZ recently, and its got me thinking about the Gerudo, specifically what the impact of being an all female race has on their culture regarding marriage, family, and the bearing of children

already, at a biological level, there’s some interesting implications. since the Gerudo still look like one single uniform race, as far as ethnicity goes, we can assume that their children inherit most of their traits - skin colour, hair colour, features, sex, etc. Gerudo have insanely dominant genes, and no matter who they have a child with, the child always takes entirely after their side of the family. the child of a Gerudo will always be a girl, and will always look like a Gerudo, to the point where the father’s genetic contribution is more or less invisible.

this sort of makes sense, since because theres no male Gerudo (shh, i’m getting to that bit) it means that for a Gerudo to bear a child, she has to go looking outside her own race for a sire. every child a Gerudo bears is by default a cross-race child, born to a father of another race. if the children didn’t take strong after their mothers, the Gerudo race would soon cease to exist because they’d be watered down by half with every generation. for the race to even continue to exist, the sheer dominance of their genes has to be like that.

this establishes two things: a) every Gerudo child takes strongly after her mother and b) that for a Gerudo to have a child she must look outside her own people.

there are Gerudo men, of course, with Ganondorf being an example. they are born extremely rarely, like only once per generation, and are essentially born to be the king. once the old king starts to age and weaken, and new one is born somewhere in the population. however, there is only one of them, and even if they sleep around pretty heavily the majority of the population of would-be Gerudo mothers still has to look elsewhere to find a sire for their child.

(on a side note, this leads to them having a very egalitarian society. since the next king is never the child of the previous king, its not a hereditary title, and the next king could be born in any subset of the population. while there are nobles who have more money, and farmers who have more modest livings, there is no true poverty or squalor in the Gerudo desert. this is because the king can be born from anywhere, including very poor families, and whenever one is they have the background and incentive to make sure that there is a healthy and equitable wealth distribution and services for the population as a whole, even their poorest people. not really relevant to the family headcanon thread here, but still an interesting thought all the same.)

so the Gerudo desert is all women, and they don’t allow men to travel freely through their lands, which means that there is not an abundant supply of potential sires just wandering by. if they want to have a child, they have to find a stud, and that means travelling outside the Gerudo lands more or less exactly for that purpose.

the Gerudo are a warrior culture who live in a harsh environment, and prize strength and skill and martial might. they’re often called ‘thieves’ or ‘raiders’, and yes part of their raiding over the borders into the neighboring kingdom might be bands of Gerudo after goods and grain and stuff, but i think part of it is that you get these bands of Gerudo who have decided they want to have a child, band together, and go off on a journey to find some sire. they’re warriors, and they want their daughters to be strong warriors too, and so they want to find studs that will give their children strong genes.

ie. they rove around challenging people to fights, and when they find someone who meets their criteria of being strong enough, or cunning enough, or maybe even just charming and sweet enough, they offer them a tumble in bed, fuck their brains out, and then continue on their way whistling merrily. they don’t do this to fall in love, they don’t want to marry these men, they purely want a roll in the hay so they can pop a bun in the oven, before wandering back to the desert to have the child and rear them themselves. (and yes, if they see a woman who is a good fighter, or even simply just very charming, they will 100% also roll in the hay with her, and also be way more likely to maybe invite her back home to get married if they end up really really gone on her).

Gerudo don’t have any possessiveness over these studs, since they’re usually only after them for one night, and so have no problem sharing. Which gets to fun things like a) a band of Gerudo deciding they all want one guy and (if willing) just passing him around and then moving on and b) some warrior getting a reputation among Gerudo for being strong and also honorable (and maybe also a good lay) and so getting tracked down specifically by questing Gerudo so they can use him as a stud, after challenging him to a fight so he can prove his mettle of course. fun times.

all Gerudo are, by default, lesbians, with the vast majority being bisexual. there are some Gerudo who might decide men hold no appeal, at which point they’ll just decide they’d rather help raise someone else’s kids, and happily spend their entire lives in a lesbian relationship without even ever having to leave the desert or see a dick. there is no “straight” since men are not a norm in the culture, with the default instead being lesbians, with most Gerudo happy to also sleep with men for the purpose of bearing kids. some may also just, shrug, like sleeping with men, but it’s nearly always on a, yeah thats a bit of fun on the side kind of way.

this whole system makes their concepts of marriage really interesting, tbh. like, of course Gerudo fall in love and get married, but they do that with other Gerudo. when Gerudo get married, they do it as a pair of wives, for love. after all, together they can’t have kids, so there’s not really a point to arranged marriages to tie together families. two Gerudo will fall in love, get married, and when they decide to have a child, they will maybe one or both wander off with a roving band to go fight and find a stud.

this has interesting implications for Gerudo attitudes towards sex as well. as sex between Gerudo is by necessity solely for pleasure, since they can’t get each other pregnant. which means that they have very liberal views towards it, in regards to it being seen as a very normal and natural thing, done primarily for the enjoyment of the act itself, rather than as a means of only having kids. similarly, sex with men, or outsiders, while fun, is largely a functional thing, done for the specific purpose of trying to get pregnant, and is a ‘no strings attached’ kind of deal.

so ‘marriage’ = ‘Gerudo marrying Gerudo’, ‘studding’ = ‘going and finding a man to sleep with so that you can have a child’. aka ‘women = love’, ‘men = no strings attached sex’.

kids raised in the Gerudo lands are raised communally by the mother and her family. like many cultures, they live in large multi-generational families, in which many people live together or are in the vicinity, sharing close ties. grandmothers, aunts, cousins, sisters, they all help out in the raising of the child. a child is a big ordeal, and tiring, so everyone helps out, and the child is essentially considered the child of the family. this is reinforced by the fact that because going and getting pregnant is such an effort, theres not a lot of women who have babies at the same time, meaning that by and large most family members and friends are available to lend a hand at any given time. after all, most of them want kids, but just haven’t had the chance themselves yet, or can’t be bothered having to go on a whole long quest for it.

this is where things start to get interesting in terms of relationships with the fathers. by and large, Gerudo don’t even really consider men an option for marriage, it just doesn’t occur to them. part of this is that ‘marriage = wife’ according to their culture, so the norms regarding marriage is for lesbian couples who will raise their kids together. but part of it is also the effect of what would happen if you did decide to marry a man from an outside culture.

see, in most cultures marriage exists as a way of tying men and women together. each man has his wife, that no one else can touch, as a way of ensuring that all her kids are his and that his family line is being continued. a woman takes her husbands name, and her kids belong to his family, taking their fathers name as well.

and this causes enormous strife when it comes to the Gerudo, because they’re matrilineal. all children belong to the mother, and are from her line, and are raised by her family. to marry a man and let him claim the children is essentially to steal the right to those children away from the mother’s family, robbing the rest of her sisters and aunts, etc, of the chance to know and help raise the child. no men live in the Gerudo desert, so any Gerudo who married would have to stay with the husbands family - never mind the fact that is is also how marriage traditionally works historically irl - and so any children would, in addition to being claimed by his name, be literally so far away that the theft is very much a physical one as well as a spiritual one.

to chose to marry a man of another culture, staying with him, is essentially choosing cultural exile and robbing your daughters of the chance to be raised with the love and support of her aunts, grandmothers, sisters, etc. for anyone, but especially for a Gerudo, that’s pretty devastating, and so even if some of them were inclined to be like ‘yeah that guy is sort of nice' the cons just so far outweigh the pros that they’d never consider it.

if anything, if they saw a man they like and were like ‘yeah actually, i’d like to keep him around’, they wouldn't marry him, but rather bring him back as a stud. essentially a lover on the side, who would (if willing) also be shared with the Gerudo’s wife and sister warriors. even this is exceptionally rare, and is done with the understanding that all of the kids born by that father are the mother’s first, taking her name, since the concept of ‘fatherhood’ doesn’t really exist to the Gerudo. at best, the man would take the place of an uncle, same as all the aunts, helping in the communal raising of the child but without any special distinction placed on his role, since the gendered role of ‘father’ within the family simply doesn’t exist in Gerudo culture.

this cultural clash between children belonging to the mother and children belonging to the father is part of the reason that men are more or less forbidden in the desert. like, if a man was willing to marry a Gerudo and travel back with her, there’s still those cultural norms and assumptions about how the family should work and who is the head of it, which just simply don’t gel with the Gerudo’s more communal matrilineal approach. it’s not so much an ‘ew you have a dick go away’ kind of motive, but rather a means of protecting their culture and way of life, to avoid men marrying Gerudo, settling in her homeland, and causing conflict as his way of life comes at odds with her’s and their norms of how a family is run clash. marrying men isn’t how its done, and only causes problems, so men are not allowed in the Gerudo homeland.

tldr; the Gerudo are an amazonian culture of lesbians who marry each other, have matrilineal families, and wander out of the desert to go fight men and sleep with them, using them as studs, before waving goodbye and wandering back home, leaving the men slightly stunned and wide eyed in their wake.

#note in a box #actually just gonna shove a whole book in there #headcanons #Legend of Zelda #LoZ #Gerudo #Gerudo Desert #some genetics and culture born lol #i could go into Gerudo concepts of gender and stuff as well and how thats impacted by them being a single sex race #but honestly this was already getting a little long #worldbuilding #culture #none of this is a criticism of men or meant to be commentary on real life btw #its just speculation about how an amazonian race would actually function genetically and culturally #just going to state that here because i know people like to purposefully misinterpret things on the internet #lesbians are not inherently superior to het couples or vise versa #love is what matters #and men and women are both equally deserving of love and desire and affection #okay? got that?#cool #goodbye

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