This essay is a bit older - according to Google Docs, the last edit I made on it was June 9, 2024, and I did the majority of the writing in February 2024. I'll be honest, this essay isn't particularly academic or structured - I never really intended to post this, and wrote it for an audience of my friends. Halsin is a character I personally find boring but inoffensive, but then he became a fan favorite and I had to read 5000 posts about a boring but inoffensive guy and became the Joker. I titled this essay the way I did to emphasize that Halsin is a funny guy to throw darts at because he literally doesn't *do* anything, I am absolutely the asshole here, etc etc. However, I do think there's plenty in this essay that still rings true re: how I feel about games writing and rpgs. So, I'd like to post it anyways. Take it as you will.
BECAUSE HALSIN KILLED MY GRANDMA, OKAY?
Halsin is a character1 from the award-winning, highly anticipated CRPG Baldur’s Gate 3. He’s a druid whose favored wild shape is a bear, and whose elven form is remarkably huge for a game that contains two-to-four body types per race.2 He likes to whittle and his favorite animal is a duck.
I can’t fucking stand this dude.
Now okay: let me be direct and honest. I understand it’s rude to post character hate, and if Halsin is your comfort character or blorbo or meow meow or whatever the kids are calling it: go with God, be at peace, I am but a rando on the internet. I will not come into your house and smash your computer or game console with a hammer. Go kiss Halsin. Go write your Halsin/Tav fic. Have a beautiful time. If this guy is super relatable to you: please know, this essay is about a fictional man, created by a team of writers, and what, in my opinion, Halsin represents in Baldur’s Gate 3. It is not about you. It is about Halsin.
Here’s Halsin’s role in the story:
After crashing an airship into a beach, waking up with a tadpole in your brain and a hastily assembled party of fellow tadpoleheads, the player character stumbles upon a group of tieflings who are holed up in a grove with a coven of druids. The druids want the tieflings out, the tieflings want safe passage to Baldur’s Gate, but in case you don’t care about any of that: there’s a healer in the grove as well. She informs you she can’t get the worm out of your brain, but she thinks her mentor, Halsin, might be able to - too bad he’s been taken prisoner by some goblins. This itself is plenty motivation to go rescue this guy, but also, if you get Halsin back, he might have an easier time convincing the druids to stop committing hate crimes against the tieflings. So you head over to the goblin camp, find Halsin (he’s in bear form, being tortured by some goblin children), either break him out3 or kill him, and take care of the goblin encampment one way or another. If he dies, or if you decide to enlist the goblins to kill all the tieflings, his involvement in the story pretty much ends, so let’s focus on the other route. If Halsin survives, he returns to the druid grove and tells off the head druid for racially-motivated attempted child murder.4 To you, he says your tadpole situation is pretty scary, but there’s probably a solution at Moonrise Towers.
This could be the end of Halsin’s involvement in the story - could probably stand to stick around in the grove and clean up the mess with the head druid and all that - but he offers to guide you to Moonrise, and that’s fine too. You have a party with all the tieflings5 you rescued and you get to spend the night with one of the six hot young companions the game provides for you - or you can hit on Halsin! Nothing happens, but you can chat him up, and he seems flattered. In the morning, you head over to Moonrise. While exploring the surrounding area, you discover that the land is cursed as fuck, and Halsin, being a druid uniquely in tune with nature, can help direct you on how to heal the blighted land. Thanks Halsin! Under his guidance, you rid the Shadowlands of their curse. 6 This could also be the end of Halsin’s involvement in the story - could help the people in the cursed Shadowlands rebuild, perhaps? - but you’re going to Baldur’s Gate, and he’s coming with you. Okay Halsin!
In Baldur’s Gate, Halsin is miserable. He hates the big city. He has nothing to do. He sits around your camp. He might get kidnapped, based on semi-random chance, but if you rescue him, he gratefully resumes standing around your camp doing nothing. If you ask him why he's there, he says he has to see this fight through. Okay, sure. You can take him along on quests, but he doesn't have any quests of his own, and space in your party is limited and valuable - there's even another druid, Jaheira, who has an entire to-do list in the city, so there's no real mechanical or narrative reason to bring him along. After the big boss is defeated, he invites himself along to drinks, and I remember thinking “oh, I guess he's coming too?” I kind of thought he might go do something else. He's a little sad, honestly. I’m not sure he has many friends.
Halsin can do one unique thing in Baldur's Gate (the city), which is: at one point, a little exclamation point will appear above his head. You can go speak to him, and he will tell you that his heart does not stir lightly, but it does now. He's in love with you, and it's serious, and he thinks you might return his affections. “But it's Act III, Halsin,” you protest. “I’m already pretty serious with another romance who let me kiss them in Act I.” Halsin says hey, no problem - he's ok with sharing, if you wanna go ask your partner if they'd be alright with adding a third. 7 Two of your companions, Shadowheart (a goth cleric undergoing a crisis of faith) and Astarion (a vampire rogue with a complex relationship to agency), are cool with that - the others will either say no or tell you they can't stop you, but would prefer you didn't. If you get permission, you can return to Halsin and fuck, leading to the infamous bear sex cutscene if you're particularly brave (he's also fine with having sex in his elf form, for what it's worth). Cool! You have two love interests now! Polyamory win!8
A lot of people hate this shit. Halsin’s romance is more of an “opt out” than an “opt in”, and he pretty consistently will confess his love for anyone who says one nice thing to him. I’ve played Act III twice and he's hit on me both times, even though I barely ever speak to him about anything not plot related. He’ll also imply you've led him on if you reject him, which is wild considering, again, you don't have to talk to him much to trigger his romance.
For the record: yeah, this kind of bothers me, but not uniquely. Baldur's Gate 3 has a kind of hair-trigger horniness, and it's pretty common for a ton of different characters to hit on your character with varying levels of seriousness. My last playthrough claimed I was in a love triangle with Karlach and Gale, even though I hadn't done anything with Gale other than be nice to him and was pretty seriously pursuing Karlach. I actually like NPCs hitting on my PC more than most do, because it makes them feel more autonomous as characters, and I don't mind having to endure awkwardly turning down Gale or Wyll or Lae’zel in exchange. It doesn't bother me that Halsin hits on you unprompted; it bothers me that this just... doesn't make any sense?
He makes a big damn deal about how this is real shit, about how he's not the kind of guy who falls in love easily, but again, I've said two words to the guy! He doesn't know me, and what I know of him feels insubstantial - every time I talk to him, he doesn't really have thoughts about anything that isn't nature. He's a druid, he likes nature, he enjoys ducks, which are part of nature, he likes whittling wood, from trees, he doesn't like the city because it's far away from nature. When you go to Astarion and tell him Halsin confessed to you, he jokes that of course Halsin is into free love, because he loves “enjoying the freedom of nature's gifts”.9 If he were a real person, I’d assume he’s just got a favorite subject, but as a fictional character he stretches the limits of my suspension of disbelief - it’s like I can hear the writers struggling to think of topics of interest to him. He feels repetitive and one note. 10 He’s the worst thing a fictional character can be: he’s boring.
There's a disconnect between how seriously Halsin takes our relationship and how he's presented as a character. Someone like Gale falling in love with you because you were nice to him makes perfect sense - Gale is lonely, awkward, and hurting from a recent messy breakup. When I look at Halsin’s actions, I get why he insists he’s in love from one conversation, because he comes off as the kind of guy who has to invite himself places because he’s too socially anxious to trust his friends to invite him on their own. But when I look at the way Halsin sees himself, and how others treat and see him, I don't get it! When he tells me his heart doesn't stir lightly, I have no choice but to not believe him because apparently it's stirring for a character he barely knows. The narrative treats him like a wise, reasonable, and easygoing person. So why the hell is he getting passive aggressive because I don't return his feelings when we’ve barely spoken to each other? When we’ve never had a deeper conversation than his love of nature - you know, the thing everyone knows about him?
I was not here during early access - naively, I thought the game would be done when it launched and I could enjoy the full experience then. My understanding is this: Halsin was a minor character during early access, he proved to be popular with fans, a lot of said fans found him sexy, and thus he became a romance option in the full game. In an interview for Gayming Mag, senior writer John Corcoran says:
"Halsin was long an important figure in the game’s narrative, but more as a traditional mentor figure. With iteration he gained a more active role, and much more presence thanks to the art team’s design, and Dave Jones’ performance. It’s absolutely true that the desire (ahem) among the fanbase to expand his role was a huge influence, but it wouldn’t have happened had we not settled on a way to give him real purpose and impact in the game."
If I had to guess, I would assume Larian Studios either received feedback or correctly predicted that said fans would want to romance Halsin, rather than have a no-strings-attached fling. So now he's the designated fanservice character. The bear sex scene is a topic of discourse before the game even comes out. You can hit on him at the party, and infamously the option to apologize for getting too handsy the next morning appears even if you didn't say anything of the sort to him. And now, in Act III, he hovers around acting like a seventh main companion despite having nothing to do. In D&D terms, he feels like a character the players fell in love with that the DM has no clue how to expand on. His personality doesn't expand beyond druid because that's all he needed to be for both his quests. This is a quest relevant NPC. He has enough characterization to make the lore he gives you engaging to listen to. He’s big so the grove NPCs can say, “You’ll know Halsin when you see him - he's a huge elf” and the goblin NPCs can say, “we’ve got a huge elf in the dungeon”. The bear theming serves the same purpose - you know his preferred wild shape so you can put two and two together when enemies start wondering what to do with the bear they caught. Halsin, specifically, is not an interesting character beyond his initial gimmick - which is fine for what he is, but can't withstand the kind of scrutiny required by a full written romance.
I think about this whenever I see petitions or posts or letters begging Larian to make a new character romanceable. What does a He Who Was romance arc look like? He’s a guy you find in the middle of the woods and two out of three of the endings to his quest kill him. He fulfills his role beautifully, but why does he need to expand beyond that? Dammon is a blacksmith who is another popular romance request, but aside from giving Karlach a life-prolonging heart surgery he's no different from any other blacksmith. His appearance isn't even unique - you can make him in BG3’s character creator without mods. He’s handsome and nice, which is fine in real life, but in fiction, there's nothing to latch on to, no plot thread to make the story of your romance worth telling. On the other side of the spectrum, we have the popular villains: Gortash and Raphael, who both have large fanbases that would love to kiss them in game. This makes more sense to me, since they are major characters with compelling and dynamic personalities, but the inclusion of a romance arc for either character would include such intensive rewrites that I’m baffled anyone feels comfortable asking for one. With Gortash: how would Karlach react to the player dating the man who ruined her life? How would Wyll feel about the man who enslaved and then tried to kill his father joining the party? Does the fight with Orin the Red change if she knows the relationship between Gortash and you goes beyond professional? Does the game need yet another ending to account for whether you're in bed with the archduke or not? Raphael has something close to a sex scene - you can sleep with an incubus who takes on his form - but fans who want a romance route are obviously interested in him beyond sex. The petition to make him romanceable asks for options to flirt with him, the option to spare him after his boss battle, adding him as a permanent member of the group (“like Halsin”), a dinner together, among other things.11
As someone who likes making games and thinking about games, these fan requests bother me. I’m not opposed to people fixating on their favorite side characters and villains, and fully endorse fanfic, fan games, fan art, speculation, meta, etc etc. I love that shit. But as much as I joke about a Sceleritas Fel redemption arc, I can admit he’d have nothing to do divorced from his role as Bhaal’s specialest little guy. I love Orin the Red, and if someone has fic where she turns her life around they should send it to me, but part of what's so compelling to me is the fact that there's no “good” route for her and her story will always end in tragedy. I don't want that to be taken from me.
There's two main reasons I dislike the urge to request new romances from Larian. First of all, I resent the idea that fans need permission from the media they're fans of to see or think about characters a certain way. If someone wants to kiss Rolan on his grumpy mouth, I think that's their right, and I think they should publish that fic and draw that art and not give a damn about if Larian Studios will “let” them or not. The benefit of fan content is that it's non-canonicity means that fans can be choosy - if you don't like how one writer or artist interprets your favorite character, you can move along to someone else with a more favorable interpretation.
My other reason is that I find it insanely disrespectful to game developers as artists.12 Video games can serve a multitude of purposes, just as any artistic medium can. I find it especially limiting to pretend games are only “allowed” to be wish fulfillment or fun. I often see the sentiment expressed that because Baldur's Gate 3 is a game with multiple choices, the player’s will is the most significant force in the world of the game, and any scenario that limits the player’s agency cannot be a deliberate artistic choice, but must instead simply be oversight. I find this erasure of the game developers as artists with intent incredibly frustrating. For example, when Larian writer Baudelaire Welch disclosed their intent in writing Astarion’s Ascended Vampire path - where he sacrifices the lives of seven thousand people for his own peace of mind - as an exercise in objectification and refusing to see him beyond his archetype, fan backlash positioned Welch as judgemental and preachy. The mentality seemed to be that if a route was included in the game, then it must be considered equally as “valid” as any other path, even though plenty of players chose that path because they enjoyed the tragedy of Astarion becoming his worst self. The concept of a writer having something to say when they wrote a story was twisted into a writer judging players for interacting with the story they wrote, which is a standard rarely applied to other mediums.13 Similarly, the idea that the game won’t “let” players romance certain characters relies on the idea that Larian’s role as a studio is to provide a nonjudgemental sandbox, rather than provide a story that responds to the players.
As much as BG3 is attempting to imitate a Dungeons and Dragons campaign, it cannot adopt the party/DM relationship key to those games. In an actual campaign, the DM can adapt to the wishes of the players to make them thematically relevant. For instance, if I were a DM, and one of my players said they'd like to initiate a romance with Enver Gortash, I would immediately open my messages with Karlach’s player and discuss - would that make Karlach leave the party? Should I start looking into PC vs PC mechanics? Instruct the players to prepare backup characters should one of them die or leave? What does it mean for the party, for the themes of the game, that so many characters’ stories center around being abused or manipulated by people in power, and yet here one of the players is, romancing the corrupt Archduke? The villain of another character’s story?
But in a video game, we run into two problems. First of all, Larian is not DMing a table of six, they are DMing a table of hundreds of thousands. If they accounted for every single thing every single player wanted to do, the game would be in early access until the end of time. Secondly, the structure of a video game and the structure of a tabletop campaign are two different things. A tabletop campaign might have different routes planned, but ultimately, only one route is “canon”, and the DM can prep accordingly. Do your players really love an NPC you meant to be a one-off questgiver? Okay, time to expand that character and give them more depth and personality. Do your players not care about an NPC you intended to be pivotal to the plot? Either make them care, or reduce the NPC’s role. However, in a video game, the developer can’t just eliminate characters the player doesn’t care about, because someone else playing the game might adore those characters, and just because a handful of players love your one-off questgiver NPC doesn’t mean the time and effort spent giving them a full arc will be worth it, rather than developing aspects of the game that more players would benefit from.
Additionally, players have expectations for what elements in game “should” look like - which is how we get to romance arcs. Romanceable NPCs have been a staple of computer-based roleplaying games for years now, and many people who played Baldur’s Gate 3 have previous experience with other games that feature romantic arcs. Even if this is the first exposure a player has to romanceable characters, they can easily compare the content of one path to another. The players who begged for Halsin to be romanceable in EA, or even who fell in love with him after the game’s official release, are expecting a full arc on par with other characters, despite the fact that he is not one of the six main companions of the game. I personally think the problems I have with Halsin’s arc could be fully fixed by moving his sex scene to Act II, not having him in Act III until the final battle, and changing his declaration of love into a suggestion for a no-strings-attached hookup.14 But if the developers have promised players a Halsin romance, they, of course, expect content on par with the other characters, regardless of the role Halsin actually plays in the story, so he’s stuck in Act III even though he doesn’t want to be there and he has to fall in love with you even if you barely talk to him. 15
So yeah that’s why I can’t fucking stand Halsin. He’s a character with no depth, no swag, no juice, inconsistent characterization, and every update he gets is time that could be spent on characters I actually care about. Did you know I still have no fucking clue who Balduran and Ansur are? Wyll’s final quest just never triggers for me. I’ve beat this game twice and Halsin keeps hitting on me and then I go to Wyll and he just says “well met” and I’m like Wyll baby light of my life can you acknowledge that it’s fucked up your dad exiled you from the city as a seventeen year old and he says “well met” and I scream and scream and scream and scream and then Halsin invites himself to post-fight drinks.
1. You might ask - main character? Side character? Supporting character? We’ll get there.↩
2. Each race has a form with pecs and a form with tits (the genitals are swappable, and there are a handful of variations, though it’s mostly just bush or no bush, dick or no dick).
Some races also have a buff version and a skinny version of each form. Among NPCs, most of them stick to these premade body types, though some notable villains and one morally ambiguous ringmaster are fat.↩
3. If you do this, there is a high chance he will maul the goblin children to death, but the game doesn’t really treat this like it’s a big deal, because goblins are just kind of built to be evil little guys
you can murder without worrying about it. They are sentient, and have societies and families and feelings and all that, but it is ok to murder them even if they are children, because they are goblins.↩
4. I personally think she gets off way too easy for attempting racially-motivated child murder but maybe that’s why he’s head druid and I’m not. ↩
5. There’s an alternate goblin party, but again, we’re focusing on the tiefling route. ↩
6. If you don’t complete this quest, he’ll stick around in the Shadowlands to do what he can, and you’ll lose him as a companion. If he died in Act I, the Shadowlands cannot be cured.↩
7. I think the relationship dynamic he’s going for is a V with the PC in the middle, but given he mentions he might like their participation (sex-wise) someday it’s unclear if he’s also interested in your partner romantically or just thinks a threesome sounds like a good time. ↩
8. You can also romance him as a single person, but given that his romance only begins in Act III, most people encounter his romance after they’re established with someone else. You can also dump your current love interest for Halsin if you just really need all that but Karlach is too busy dying to give you permission for a third. ↩
9. For the record, between this and some other comments he makes, I don’t love the framing of Halsin as one of those “monogamy is unnatural” guys, but he’s otherwise pretty ethical about the way he approaches nonmonogamy so I’ll give him a pass. ↩
10. If you participate in group sex with Halsin, a pair of drow twins, and possibly another companion, he does reveal that he spent some time as a sex slave,
but the game doesn’t really treat this with any kind of gravity and it is locked behind an incredibly specific path that only people who already like Halsin would go down.
It does mean all the male companions other than Minsc have some element of eroticized distress, if not specifically rape, in their backstory,
which I’m not sure what to do with, frankly.↩
11. The petition does, for the record, also ask for at least one sex scene, though it does not reckon with if this would decanonize the joke where Raphael’s incubus confirms he’s a pillow princess who climaxes in two minutes.↩
12. I’m using “game developers” here to refer to everyone involved in the narrative process of making games - writers, narrative designers, directors, etc.↩
13. There is the occasional, say, true crime documentary that will tell the viewer that by watching it, they’re part of the problem, but because video games are a uniquely interactive medium, they have a uniquely fraught relationship with challenging the viewer/player. Spec Ops: The Line is a famous example - it riffed off of the prevalence of war-based shooters to tell a story about the horrors of war, which is a theme well-explored in films and novels but faced backlash when adapted to the medium of video games. ↩
14. I also think he could benefit from a beard and a bit more fat but that’s fully a matter of personal preference. ↩
15. It’s worth noting - the Patch 6 notes include a point that they’ve patched in a platonic route for Halsin, which has the incredible buried lede that Halsin didn’t have a platonic route until months after the game was released! If that doesn’t solidify him as a fanservice character I don’t know what does!↩