thinking about how gale's love language is acts of service.
people have talked at length about how he cooks for everyone at camp.
"the hand that feeds is the hand that's loved. it'll never leave your side now."
but that's not all of it, and it's a red thread that weaves itself through almost all his interactions throughout the game.
"magic is... my life. i've been in touch with the weave for as long as I can remember. would you like to experience this?"
gale shows the protag his world, his life, trying to connect them to the weave as he had once been, when he was still a chosen, still an archmage. it's not quite the same, it doesn't come quite as easy. still.
"i'm so very glad you came. to share this with me. i know this is all unreal, but i created it for you. you must know that you're... that you're very special to me. if things were different, if we were home, i'd have taken time to do things properly. to say it all better. but time is short. i'm in love with you."
gale knew he was living on borrowed, he knew it would run out eventually, even well before elminster came to deliver mystra's instructions.
he can't give the protag something different and they aren't home and they're not going to go home at the end of this. he knows this. time that once seemed so infinite when he was young is now whittled down to a single last night.
a last night that he uses to turn a dark and cursed land into a beautiful forest, northern lights dancing across a starry sky. he can't go home, he can't take the protag home, but he can give them an illusion of the centre of his universe, with all the well-loved things in it. there's no pretention here. books strewn across the floor, across the desk. sculptures, paintings, music. a view of home. the smell of the sea breeze.
baring his heart as well his soul in the little time he still has left to use how he sees fit.
"let me show you more. when you wake, it will be back in our small, dirty, bloody patch of existence. but stay with me now. there are endless worlds out there. countless ways to declare love. infinite ways to express it. too much for one night... but we shall try."
let me show you waterdeep, let me show you my home, my universe. let me show you how it would have been, could have been, if i did have time. let me show you more. let me show you how much i love you in the one night we may have left together.
let me give my soul to you, in confidence.
"i'd actually been thinking of introducing the two of you anyway. over a sumptuous home-cooked meal, if that sounds at all to your taste? i make it to my mother's recipe."
he wants to give the protag a chance to get to know tara, the one constant in his life, the one who became his only friend, his safe haven in the storm, the one that bore witness to his greatest triumphs and most abject failures. he wants to cook for them. he wants to take them home so very badly—
and yet he knows he won't make the date.
"then have me, but have the best possible version of me. [...] think of what i offer: the vastness of eternity to explore, the weave at our fingertips... you would really prefer me as i am?"
he could be more for the protag, if they wish him to be. could be more, could be better.
without all the flaws, without all the things that make gale only who he is. the things that sometimes simply aren't enough. he could be everything that plain old gale dekarios, that even the wizarding prodigy gale of waterdeep, could never be.
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I actually think this Dark Knights of Steel twist-reveal with Alfred as martian manhunter was a really fascinating one (I genuinely loved it).
An Elseworlds continuity which really took advantage of being able to take different interpretations of a character, by the writer of the Nightwing series where the presence of Alfred is felt throughout, despite his pre-series death
Here we have him as the last survivor of a genocide, who lost absolutely everything. Felt he failed in the worst possible way, as his fatally wounded child died in his arms - unable to even offer him any comfort, with both being telepaths.
He flees a dead world. Gets to try again. Martha and Thomas Wayne know what he is, but conceal the secret. Have him as one of their most trusted retainers, friends.
He gets to try again.
A smile on his face, he gets to see another boy grow.
Even as Martha and Thomas are murdered, he stays with their son, looking after him no matter what. Having faith in him. Loving him. To the point where a man who had his adored son brutally murdered in the dark, able to do nothing but watch him die, looks at this orphaned alien child and says -
-as he holds the lasso of truth.
It adds an additional, really interesting factor to the paternal relationship he has with Bruce in this particular setting. I wish we got to see more of it. Perhaps if they ever do more "Tales of the Kingdom", we may get to see it in a prologue manner.
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I was thinking about something, Transformers, Cybertronians... their "God" Primus is underground and their "Satan" Unicron lives in the sky, somewhere in space...
Like imagine they're talking and saying something along the lines of "Primus give me the patience-" and they look down.
I imagine the cultural shock they experienced with humans (most of them at least) instead like "wait you're referring to your God, why are you looking up- what do you mean your God is not the center of your planet????"
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