Well hey! There you go! Someone carried the Midichlorians forward in a story!
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D&D General Baldur's Gate 3 Hates Religion (Spoilers)
- Thread starter Steampunkette
- Start date
Viconia Devir is in BG3 and she leads the Sharran enclave. She is very much alive at the start of act 3 and remains so unless Tav and company kill her.
So the events you posted up there are emphatically not true in the BG3 version of events (unless she was ressurrected).
In either case my point, relative to the original topic, is that she is a loyal Sharran, and remains loyal to Shar from the end of BG2 through the current game.
Also, it appears Faldorn has also remained true to her Shadow Druid religion. Although she does not appear as a character in the game, she is mentioned in the Shadow Druid quest in BG3 and is apparently still alive and trying to spread shadow-druid stuff. This would also mean she was not killed by Charname or Cernd in the Druid Grove near Trademeet in BG2.
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Yes. I'm aware of what BG3's canon is.Viconia Devir is in BG3 and she leads the Sharran enclave. She is very much alive at the start of act 3 and remains so unless Tav and company kill her.
So the events you posted up there are emphatically not true in the BG3 version of events (unless she was ressurrected).
In either case my point, relative to the original topic, is that she is a loyal Sharran, and remains loyal to Shar from the end of BG2 through the current game.
Also, it appears Faldorn has also remained true to her Shadow Druid religion. Although she does not appear as a character in the game, she is mentioned in the Shadow Druid quest in BG3 and is apparently still alive and trying to spread shadow-druid stuff. This would also mean she was not killed by Charname or Cernd in the Druid Grove near Trademeet in BG2.
My point was to touch on the growing disagreement about what was and wasn't canon in FR and stuff and how trying to create and maintain a hierarchy of canonical importance was silly.
That said: Yup. NPCs are totally allowed within BG3 to follow their gods all the way to their deaths without being shown to be in abusive relationship. Once again this thread was about the Origin Characters, I.E. the ones you control as a player and have some kind of narrative input over, all being in fairly toxic or one-sided relationships with their deities and/or religious figures in the case of Vlaakith.
No one cares about random Banite #24's relationship with Bane before you kill them and rush over to stop the device from nuking all the Gondians. Nor Viconia's. Nor Ketheric's. Their relationships being healthy or unhealthy are not important to the story and do not convey significant emotional weight.
... Viconia -could- be argued to have emotional weight since there are players who worked so hard to get her to become True Neutral in the other BG games. BUT. Her relationship with Shar was never central to that conflict or important to that particular story. They are well within their rights, of course, to be angry that they put all that effort into the character only for her to become a generic kidnapping sociopath antagonist in BG3 whose whole purpose is to be a punchable manifestation of Shadowheart's toxic relationship with Shar for a BG3 player's catharsis.
Shardstone
Hero
You know, I never understood the hate towards Midichlorians. I don't think it removes any of the mystery. Cells produce a strange force, and people with more of these special cells are able to better touch the force. I think that tracks very well with mysticism in the real world, where people who are "gifted" or "sensitive" become lightning rods for mysterious things (in folk tales, fiction, religion, etc). If anything, it makes the Force seem more legitimate to me, and I don't understand how this far-futuristic society would fail to do any scientific investigation into this mystical superpower.
MockingBird
Hero
I think it was the readers of the books who didn't particularly like them. I could be wrong because I haven't read any of the books. I know my roommate at the time the prequels came out wasn't a fan, he had read the books several times over.
Incenjucar
Legend
The concept of canon is derived from religious canon which is determined by religious leadership and not by the worshippers, and this transfers over to the other kinds of authorities on the topic, such as author, owner, or - when those are dead - academic researcher.
This is why we have the separate term "fanon" for "fan canon" when fans disagree with the canon or the canon is mute on a given topic.
Your definition of canon is itself fanon.
If you want to nail a declaration to WotC's door remember that you'll need help getting up the elevator.
For me? It's the perennial difference between Star Wars and Star Trek.
Star Trek is science fiction. Star Wars is fantasy in space.
The difference can be subtle for some people. But it's like... in the Orig Trig the Force was practically magic that a religion had been built around. Rogue One carried that forward -really- well. As did the Rey Saga. They don't try to ground the magic in the world it just -is- what you need it to be.
A lot of the books did the same thing. As did the games and comics. The Force worked the way it does because that's the way the Force works.
The prequels coming up with Midichlorians felt like trying to Trek the Wars. Trying to invent a science to explain away the magic and make it less Fantasy and more Sci-Fi. In that regard it was a betrayal not of what had been written... but of Genre.
Midichlorians being the true "Source of the Force" or the way people are able to interact with the Force doesn't change anything Mara Jade did, or invalidate anything. She's still the same character with the same stories and interactions.
So it doesn't erase anything to have Midichlorians. It just feels like an unnecessary touch which tries to make things less magical when the magicalness was part of the appeal.
While I get what you're saying, here, it's perhaps the greatest example of Retconning in the history of the world that we ABSOLUTELY CANNOT DISCUSS on these boards.
So I'll ask we drop the real-world-religious references, please.
Shardstone
Hero
It's just hard for me to understand how this society is so advanced, able to literally control spacetime to jump between stars, but just cannot for any reason come up with a hypothesis on the Force. I get where you're coming from, and I used to feel the same way, but then I realized that science is actually pretty mysterious and we don't understand a lot of things. I see this example as being comparable to Einstein talking about "spooky action at a distance" for quantum physics; something is happening, we observe it, we find some kind of source, but there is so much more we still don't understand. This turns the Force into something that more accurately transcends science IMO -- even though we try to understand it and know it comes from these special cells, at the end of the day, we don't actually understand what's really happening with those cells.
Incenjucar
Legend
Fair. That said, canons get retconned all the time, it's what makes dwelling on them so funny. 
None of this actually matters, it's just whether or not WotC will support it.
None of this actually matters, it's just whether or not WotC will support it.
Which is fine? There's nothing wrong with Midichlorians in that regard. It's not even important to the story it's -in-. Qui-Gon could've just as easily hung out with Anakin and said "The Force is Strong in this one" and that would've been an equally narratively effective way of expressing him being an important character.
But I'd like to remind you that in the exact same movies just two films later, a pregnant woman died right after childbirth not of blood loss or organ failure but a "Broken Heart".
The Force: Figured out.
Pregnancy: Still a mystery never to be understood by the paddle-handed birthing bot created exclusively to deal with pregnancy and it's complications.
