However not every story needs, or should have the wines and roses happy endings.
Karlach going back to Avernus with Wyll and Tav seems actually happy to be there. The cigar scene to me is awesome. She can stay in the Realms but would have to accept being a Mind Flayer. While this might not be the life she desires it is a choice to live and then of course she can choose death.
I get that everyone wants every ending to be all smiles and giggles but the ending for Karlach, to me is not nearly as bad as people are making it. She has the chance to have two dear companions adventure with her and help her enjoy sweet revenge on those that hurt her. That seems a pretty good way to go forward in life to me.
It seems like you want to make it sound like all of us here are constantly whining because our favourite character doesn't have an ending where everything is resolved with no downsides, but this isn't the case at all. These 89 pages of discussion were never, are not, and will never be about "Why can't we go to disneyland instead of avernus with Karlach?", they always were about the lack of cohesion between gameplay elements presented to the player and the questlog and narrative themselves. There's not a single ending in the game that is all "smiles and giggles", every single narrative thread ends on a bittersweet note.
To gain something, you must sacrifice something else.
That's what we can personally do for every single origin, should we choose to nudge them in that direction, our choices and actions matter. Your actions can influence the hand of fate in a pretty significant way (for some more, for others less) in every origin story.
Ça va sans dire, the vast majority of us here are not whining for an ending where everything is gained and nothing is lost (Although if there was a character deserving of such an ending, it would be Karlach.)
We are advocating for the same exact thing every other origin has: Player agency. We want Karlach questlog to look like a questlog. We would like if our choices mattered in the same way that they matter for every other origin. If Karlach had exploded/turned into a mind flayer/went back to avernus/repaired her engine (at some cost) at the end of a varied and challenging questlog with significant crossroads where your decision shaped the fate of the character, i pretty much guarantee that this thread would simply not exist. Not in this capacity anyway, have you seen the amount of views and replies?
Any ending can be a fitting ending, if done properly. We do not believe this is the case. There are characters with entire areas and narrative thread present solely to solidify their place in the world and give us the background necessary to take our own decisions in shaping their fate to come. Karlach has a fetch quest.
And you know what? Fetch quests can be interesting too, when there's something at stake. If we ignore Karlach's log completely, it doesn't matter in the slightest. Every other character has consequences for doing so. We have the illusion of having progressed something. If you ignore gale he outright leaves (just to bring up an example). It's simply not satisfying when we consider how the narrative is entangled with gameplay in this game, we have reactivity everywhere else but not with Karlach, where it seems that it should matter a lot (Narrative-wise, it would make sense to have her die at the beginning of act 2/3 if you are actively ignoring her).
It seems to me that you are also quick to dismiss the elements that are present in game that all hint at an engine-fix being possible, or at least something close to it. It's no surprise that players are vocal about Karlach, this isn't a simple case of falling in love with a character doomed by the narrative, it is, as i said multiple times in prior posts, a classic Chekhov's gun situation, one that was expected by every player (experienced or not) to be a classic Occam's razor: We have the iron, we have the gondians, we have the forge, "LET'S DO THIS THING!". The reason this is brought up time and time again by people is not because we all came up with the same headcanon, it's because the game itself NUDGES us in that direction, in a pretty blatant way, straight up pointing us towards the steel foundry. I am keen on describing it as a Chekhov's gun situation for that very reason. If it was done in any other media it would've been even more apparent, this doesn't get a pass in a videogame, if anything it's accentuated even more by the added power of player agency to go and seek out stuff.
It's your prerogative to ignore the narrative and gameplay shortcomings and still appreciate the current Karlach's endings as if we were judging them in a vacuum, i'm not trying to take that away from you. But we are not in a vacuum. these aren't a series of short stories published on their own. these are narrative threads that should all come together naturally in the braid that we call baldur's gate 3, the game they are a part of. A game built on an overarching narrative with many subplots that we are able to influence (MOST of them i guess).
In conclusion, no, we do not want every ending to be good and problem-free. We want to fight tooth and nail, we want to try everything in our arsenal, we want to face the problem head-on.
If we make it? Fuck yeah.
if we fail? Then so be it.
But at least we will not feel our stomachs churn when we read "We did everything we could for Karlach". Because this time around it's gonna be true.
