It's entirely possible I've taught you a new word with the title of the strip, Gabriel certainly hadn't heard of it. I don't know why I know this word, which sounds like something a person would say when they do know it, and know it very well, and are a paypig. But I really don't remember! I just like words, specifically what might be called jargon: language internal to a given context. The need for specific language leads to words with an incredible amount of conceptual freight. I used to have one of the "apps" installed, not to interact, but because a person's bio on a dating app has so much data encoded into it that it compares favorably with holographic storage.
I just realized that explaining it in this level of detail just makes me seem more like a paypig. And it's supposed to be private! The Serpent Queen's gonna be on my fucking ass.
But the romance stuff in Baldur's Gate 3 is an array of opportunities I might already have missed out on, and I'm like seventy fucking hours into that thing. Gale tried to show me some magic - literal magic, not euphemistic magic, but he tried to show me that later too. I ended up in some kind of fireside dance-off with Wyll, and things were going to some other arena, so I had to dip out at the end of that dialogue chain. They recorded an animation for Wyll walking away from you, heartbroken, confused, and I'm sure the animation is four or five seconds but it felt like it took around three days.
I'm not out here trying to hurt these motherfuckers. I don't even know what signal I'm giving them! That's what makes this the most realistic romance engine ever devised. I've had this exact problem in real life, where I'm genuinely interested in someone, I'm unironically down to platonically clown, and they've confected a version of me where what I consider a baseline level of enthusiasm is construed as a romantic campaign.
It seems like a significant amount of the discussion around Baldur's Gate 3 is about these romance things, they're deeply meme-able, from kawaii takes on characters to guttural, alley cat howlings of erotic servitude. My character in the game barely has time for any of this shit. And maybe I personally would like to enroll Astarion in some kind of, I don't know, sex curriculum(?), there's no universe in which I let my character fuck with that. Girl! He's a fucking vampire.
(CW)TB out.
