Originally Posted by Leucrotta
The deliberateness of it particularly gets my goat too. I have read/watched enough media to recognize the little tricks being used to elicit desired emotional reactions from players, and I have played the earlier games enough that I can pretty readily recognize Larian's deviations from those games. It really bothers the hell out of me knowing that their depictions weren't accidental or the result of the team not being familiar with the source material, there would have had to be actual discussions taking place about how to make the characters produce such a visceral dislike in the playerbase that they'd *want* to kill them, so that they'd have a feeling of cathartic triumph after finally vanquishing them.

You can see similar writing/acting tricks used with other antagonists like Cazador and Lorroakan in the game, the difference being that those aren't existing beloved characters from a franchise that the game is purportedly paying homage to.
Thank you, couldn't agree more. Honestly, some parts reminded me of how Neil Druckmann wrote characters in TLOU2. For example, to prove Ellie and Joel are "evil" and deserve to suffer plus his new characters are better, Druckmann would put lengthy scenes of Abby's father saving an animal, Abby playing catch with a dog, and a pregnant woman having an adventure in zombie post-apocalyptic warzones, etc. Then later he would let Ellie kill all of them and scream: "You see? You see? Ellie is evil! Now watch Abby beat the shit out of her."

BG3's portrayal of old characters is a bit less clumsy than that (it's Neil Druckmann after all), but has similar manipulative energy and intentions. The writers even let Shadowheart say "nobody will remember you" to Viconia, well pardon my language, but fuck off.