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outeremissary · 3 months

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break and secret for Balthazar and Kasander?👀

Thanks for the question, and sorry for the delay!! These are things I can go on for ages about for most characters, haha. Personal limits and private experiences are essential in some way to me when thinking through characters. Even though I tried to keep this under control it still got really long... it's under a cut for that and the umm. Content warnings.

CW: mentions of disordered eating, self harm, suicidal ideation, and suicide

[prompt list]

break: What would cause your OC to break down completely? What do they look like when that happens? Has anyone ever seen them at their lowest?

Balthazar

For Balthazar, total breakdown is the result of being completely, inescapably trapped, especially when it shows a harsh limit on what he's able to do or be. As it is, he already sees his bounds in everything. In his mind he's always struggling through them to live the life he wants rather than what he feels the world is fencing him in to. He knows that he's weak and there's a limit to what he can control. He also knows that he's choosing something with his life that destroys his value in the eyes of others. Still, he needs to believe that he can play past the point where he should have to quit, that his cruel and self-isolating exercises in agency will give him control even if there's no other reward.

At his lowest, Balthazar shuts down near completely. He's been shown that there's nothing that can be gained by fighting; thus, the fight leaves him. He's lethargic, unresponsive, and pliant. To point to a specific incident: when his wings developed and shackled him to the inescapable image of his heritage he withdrew into himself for weeks, avoiding being in the public eye and doing nothing more than the minimum to maintain the illusion of control over his domain- and struggling to do even that. But the withdrawal felt like all he could do to assert control over his body and to shield himself from seeing the extent to which the carefully maintained narrative of himself had escaped him. It was a self-pitying, self-punishing period of neglect. He did very little beyond function. Near the beginning he stopped looking after himself more or less completely. He also stopped eating, something common to his deepest lows but made more intense by the awareness of how the wings merely existing had changed his appetite, the way they ate up energy. He interacted with them only to try to find ways to crush them down to be less visible, or to idly pick at neglected feathers. More than anything, he avoided the people who knew and cared for him. It seemed like the ugliest indignity to be seen in that state. The thought of being pitied made him nauseous.

Still, he's never seemed to have the dignity of suffering alone during any breakdown he's had in his life. No matter how he tries to isolate himself his worst moments always seem to be seen, and sometimes they've been taken advantage of as well. There's a nasty spiral to being shown how much further he can fall when he already feels helpless. He was lucky in this one though: for the most part, it was only the concerned and supportive interacting with him (except Lander, as typical for the rat). And Jaethal, who was instrumental in pressing him back into his daily tasks, wasn't one for pity- that abrasive appeal to his pride did a lot to pull him out of the state. Although she did enlist some help in following through on the more menial or overly sensitive tasks: for a time afterwards, Tristian was in charge of making sure he was eating.

Kasander

So: Kasander is an Oath of the Ancients paladin, the oath most focused on love of life and defense of its sanctity. Light, joy, life. Everything that Bhaal exists to destroy, and that Bhaal made them to snuff out. And you have to understand that Kas takes 1) takes this ungodly seriously and 2) has an extremely radical interpretation of what their oath means. Kasander is a reckless savior. Their mercy can easily be as destructive as their violence. Without very immediate threat they hate to destroy even for a greater good, not while there's still some foolish hope that somehow, the situation will turn around. Kasander has lost their oath three times over the course of BG3 and every time it has been because they've strained the concept of mercy to the breaking point: refused to kill what was lethal, refused to destroy what was tormented. And they're not exactly doing a lot of follow-through here. They hate to control others as much as they hate to condemn them. Their mercy is unconditional. They'll turn around and wait until you're gone- do whatever you want after that. To them, this is what it means to shelter life and see value in it. To just keep offering and offering. To hope against hope and against reason. It isn't as if they're naive, not really. But they're stubborn anyway. And on top of that, they don't want to pass judgment that they know would condemn them. Whatever chance they've been given they have no right to withhold.

To me, Kasander is kind of incorruptible, but that's what can destroy them: they're holding themself and the world to a standard that just isn't possible. They believe too fervently, too uncompromisingly. They're trying to be too good for good, too kind to be kind. And when the world pushes back and tells them no, that's not an answer they can accept. It's not about realism. It's about rejection. Breaking their oath over attempted mercy is being told that their best intentions and all their attempts to overcome everything the world has tried to make them still aren't enough. It makes them feel fundamentally broken. Too dirty to be saved. Far too dirty to save others.

Their lowest points are born out of that conflict between their radical idealism and their oath (or reality at large) more than the direct influence of the Urge (or actions of their siblings). In the game itself, their lowest point was probably the first time they lost their oath. In the same short period they'd endured Alfira's death, had accidentally killed innocents for Ethel, had been called a monster by people they wanted to save and accidentally killed some of the victims they tried to rescue, and when they finally thought they could do one good thing for Mayrina by putting control over her future in her hands and letting her choose what to do about her husband, that was the thing that finally shattered their oath. How much crueler could anything get? Even their attempts at atonement were too monstrous to be accepted. And there's no such thing as a private low- not with Bhaal watching, waiting for them to break completely.

In their total breakdown, they backslide more or less completely into despair. They succumb to self-destructive behavior without the hope of repairing a situation, and they're often driven by the influence, passive or active, of parts of their internal system which are already inclined to shame and self-punishment. Bride in particular holds sway in these moments: though Bride doesn't mean it with any ill will, they see suffering in everything, and they want to find accountability through self-harm and release through death. For Bride, hope is unreliable, and the hard reality is that only extreme solutions can work. It was somewhere in the halfway point between Kasander drowning in their own misery and Bride's desires to save them all from pain that they committed suicide by goading Astarion into killing them while feeding. Their death didn't stick- Shadowheart "rescued" them immediately after finding out, and they wallowed in the guilt of knowing that Astarion almost paid the price for their choices.

Though not characteristic of that particular incident, it's also not uncommon for them to withdraw very quickly and instinctually inside themself, causing someone else to switch to front. In response to distress this is usually Bride, who resolves the situation through self-punishment, or Asperia, who resolves it by lashing out. The things that cause Kasander pain don't often get to Asperia. Asperia is good at going beyond Kasander's limits. Whatever the results, withdrawing gives Kas time to calm down and return to something different.

secret: What's one secret your OC never wants anyone to know about them?

Balthazar

There are a lot of things Balthazar hates to have people know about him, but some of his worst moments and deepest weaknesses have been ripped from him against his will and laid bare to the world. It gives him a strange relationship with personal secrets- most of what he doesn't want known is already out there somewhere. He's used to living in a constant state of damage control. Leaving Absalom gave him a blank slate though, and in many ways he doesn't want others to know anything at all about who he was or what his life was like before he crossed the Inner Sea and went north. As much as it makes him feel cut off from a past he mourns, he feels it's best to hide as much of it as possible through avoidance, vague answers, and lies.

In terms of more specific things though... one thing that he managed to keep from spreading too outside his immediate home neighborhood was information about his mother and about his father's relationship with her. Even before his aasimar heritage had manifested, he knew what it was like to have people look right through him, searching for someone else. He never knew much about her himself because of the way she disappeared, but speculation about her hung over his early childhood and haunted his relationship with his father. He never discusses her willingly. When people ask about his mother he tends to say that she died in childbirth, elaborating occasionally some sickly sweet additional details. His father's fiance, you see. She was young and frail, but they were in love, you understand. A beloved presence and a dearly missed one. All lies, but what a wonder a banal family sob story does for shutting down questions. Anything to stop people seizing on the knowledge she could be alive out there somewhere and thinking she ought to be found. There's no one he has less desire to know more about.

But if there was one thing he wishes he could turn into a secret that he'll never be able to, it would be his aasimar heritage.

Kasander

Despite the fact that Kasander is a painfully honest person and a chronic oversharer, there are still many things they don't want anyone to ever know about them, or to not know the extent of. It's the burden of being a Bhaalspawn: the visions, the acts, the private battles, the lapses... And more than anything, I think that Kasander doesn't ever want anyone to know how much they have suffered over the course of their life. Even Kas can't truly grasp it- like Asperia, they had very few memories before around age 9 even prior to the Tadpole Incident. And after that point there were still always long periods of patchiness. Sometimes scraps from those periods drift through when they trance, and there are dark memories they understand are bound up in the others and can't be accessed by them.

What they remember they still don't want to share. They hate for their pain, past or present, to be a burden on others and find the reactions other people have to it distressing. They know that they've experienced terrible things and that few people can understand that, and they don't want to be hurt again by others denying their experiences, downplaying them, or misinterpreting them. With most of the party members distress and pushback seem to be the norm- it's made them reluctant to confide in anyone outside themself. It also feels like they've failed other people when just talking about their past with others seems to hurt them. Jaheira is the only consistently safe person, and they're thankful beyond words for her, especially after many of their memories were restored. It's hard to imagine continuing to just push through without processing, but they couldn't process all of that alone.

There's another element to past hurt as well though: not all of it belongs to them, and that vulnerable part of the other alters is too sacred to violate by sharing even through implication. Concealing their past- their shared past- is an act of protection so natural they don't even think about it.

#this got WAY too long. it's like 2000 fucking words. and then after revising it I got nervous and held on to reread again ahaaa...#ask me emithing #ask game #balthazar lucienne #kasander #bride #asperia #balthazar is a man of many secrets and half concealed truths so there's just an infinite well of things to talk about there haha #I tried to pick something that he has managed to conceal fairly effectively for a long time.#a lot of the concepts that the first kas answer are based in came from trying to imagine an oathbreaker kas haha #kas lives to protect- both to protect others and (more importantly) to protect the other parts of the system

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