Originally Posted by LittleMonday
So, I would love to see a deeper romance option for The Emperor. You’ll have to forgive that I haven’t read everything on this forum as there’s sixteen pages and my browser has a lot of trouble loading them for some reason. Having now played through the entire game, I have to commend the developers, writers, actors, everyone who worked on this game. It’s a remarkable achievement. The biggest addition I would like to see if there is ever an expansion pack, or something like that in the future, would be a fully fleshed out romance with The Emperor.

I didn’t play early access with Daisy, so I’m not going to comment on her except to say that I’m looking at this character without any attachments to earlier conceptions that didn’t make it into the final product. BIG SPOILERS AHEAD. Please only read further if you have beaten the game and are familiar with The Emperor’s storyline and history.

I love this character, and he is by far my favorite. He touches a nerve for a lot of people, and I was genuinely surprised to find so many people online hate him, believing him to be the most evil character in the game, and often get in-game lore about him wrong when trying to articulate why he’s the worst of the worst. I personally find the reveal
that our knight-in-shining-armor is an alien monster with understandable and sympathetic motivations, but who’s also an unreliable narrator, and whose morality and humanity are messy and complex to be fascinating and filled with potential - particularly if you pursue a romance with him. After all, Larian already turned the trope of a monster turning into a handsome prince on its head, then made him into an antihero on top of that. That alone seems, to me at least, to indicate that maybe there was supposed to be more to this romance than what we get because they laid the groundwork all the way in act I.


Beyond the reveal, there’s a lot of subtext and mystery to The Emperor that is worth exploring through building a closer or intimate relationship with him. We get to see glimpses of his vulnerability and get to offer him comfort. The romance scene gives us insight into his feelings, including learning that he cares about the player character when he begins to commune with them. We see that care with how he engages with the player character throughout the scene. Through one of the dialogue options he refers to that communion as a bond of love. There’s little reason to believe this isn’t true as he expresses a similar sentiment if you decide to transform into an illithid and defeat the Elderbrain. He genuinely wants your companionship. Building a close relationship with him would allow the player character to delve deeper into this character, his trust issues and loneliness, especially after learning about how he was betrayed by his friend and lover, Ansur.

Also, we could finally learn the full truth of his relationship with Stelmane. I know a lot of people who antagonize him and get that disturbing cut scene think that this is his “mask off” moment where he finally reveals the truth, but I doubt it’s anything more than a partial truth, just as his sanitized version of their relationship is a partial truth. For one, it makes little sense to reveal that to someone who has trouble trusting you. In the cutscene he’s also very obvious about enthralling Stelmane in front of someone, which seems very suspicious. To me this reads like an intimidation tactic from someone who requires your full cooperation because literally everything is on the line. It’s a threat, and ultimately an empty one. There’s evidence in the game that she was likely his thrall, at least at times. We get this information from Wyll and supporting documents. There’s also some evidence from the document “The Shield Steward Interrogation Log” that he may have been disguising himself and impersonating her, and we have evidence from doctor’s notes that when her condition had greatly deteriorated, he would visit her and ease her condition and discomfort. I can’t know this for sure, but my theory is that they were partners and allies, but given the nature of the business they were involved in while in the Knights of Shield, their relationship fractured. Seeing her as once an ally and now a potential threat, possibly to his life, he either tried to control her in an attempt to protect himself, or force his way into her mind for information, and in doing so caused the seizure that disabled her. However, I do believe he feels remorse for having caused her condition. I believe that’s why he keeps a portrait of her in his old home, why he cares for her condition as it worsens through the years, and why he never does anything similar to the player character. I think he doesn’t want to repeat what he did to Stelmane. That’s my theory anyway. There are other possibilities, of course.

Lastly, building a deeper relationship with The Emperor would allow the player character to help The Emperor better understand the humanity he still has and appreciate the humanity of the player character, especially if they choose not to turn into an illithid at the end. This goes both ways as the player character learns to understand the world through his perspective, and if they choose to romance him in the Guardian form, there could be a moment later on where he asks them if they can accept his illithid form. Lastly, lastly, that deep bond of trust could allow for a new option when it comes to retrieving the Orphic Hammer. You could secure it, then entrust it to the Emperor, and even have a new option to convince Orpheus and The Emperor to work together. This would also help to, at least partially, resolve the issue of The Emperor so quickly abandoning the player character to join the Netherbrain.

This relationship would, in some ways, work similarly to how we build relationships with the other companions, but there’s also plenty of room to develop new dynamics because he can't be recruited into the party, and we don’t get to see our approval rating with him. It’s also one that happens away from the other companions, and could be discrete for quite some time before the rest of the camp finds out.

I know this is a long post, and I don’t normally post to forums, but I just think there’s so much potential here that I wanted to share my thoughts. I don’t know exactly why the romance with him isn’t further developed. It may have been due to time and late stage rewrites. It’s also possible that a smaller minority of players romance the character. I don’t think the latter one is as important as it may seem. Monster romances have two target audiences: women and lgbtq people. They make up a minority of players, not everyone in those groups would be interested anyway, and it’s a romance that develops later, likely when a player is already romancing another character. However, the potential for a compelling and nuanced twist on an old theme, I believe, is worth it. As I said earlier, if there’s ever an expansion pack in the future, I would love to see this. BG3 is such a great game, and I think this would elevate it even more.

The mix of reactions to the Emperor has been interesting to me, too. I notice some people seem to hate him for being villainous and manipulative, but I honestly feel like with what we see in the game, he isn't able to deliver on that. On the other hand, I also feel like there isn't much payoff for trying to build a relationship with him. As you described, it feels a little like they wanted to make him work a bit more like a companion, but he really doesn't.

And I agree with you on
his relationship to Stelmane. I really wish there was more opportunity to engage with this storyline, both discussing it with the Emperor without having to be so hostile towards him, as well as maybe being able to talk to others to fact-check him. This frustrated me with Ansur, as well, where I felt like neither party was giving me a full account of what went down between them, but there was nothing to be done about it. I also personally took the interpretation that Stelmane and the Emperor were once on friendlier terms and the Emperor may even miss those days, but that something caused a rift between them, he responded by trying to control her, and it caused irreversible damage both to her health and their friendship. Given that he only tells you this after you've angered him, I don't take his attitude about it there as his "true feelings" so much as him lashing out at you. That's why I wish that finding some of those documents would present the option to confront him in a more even-handed conversation, where you could ask him how he really feels about how things went. Even in his outburst, he makes a comment along the lines of "Aren't you glad I've finessed my methods?" which in context is definitely a threat, but stepping back, the fact that he's clearly been putting in the effort to NOT have to mind-control his allies this time does seem to imply that he isn't all that happy about how things with Stelmane went, or else he might as well just repeat that. And what happened with Stelmane already seems like an attempt at a less violent outcome than with Ansur, where he was "forced" to directly kill his friend (do I trust either of them on this being necessary? No, but I have no evidence to go on). It seemed like the Stelmane murder "plot" (if it can even be called that, with how little we get to do with it) could have been an entry point to a story exploring Stelmane, the Emperor, and their connection to the early days of Gortash's / the Absolute's plot, but instead we just get some breadcrumbs and a weird trip into his basement. I personally envisioned a situation where the Emperor and Stelmane were in an argument over how to deal with the rising threat of Gortash, and given the Emperor's strong inclination towards his own survival, he tried to force Stelmane to go along with whatever measures he thought would be necessary, only for his methods to eventually be what gave him away as a mindflayer (this fits with some of the hints about how he manipulated their business partners).

There's another thread on the idea of getting him to team up with Orpheus that might interest you. A lot of similar thoughts to what you've expressed are there, too.

Personally, I would like to see a more fleshed out storyline including both the chance for a more hate-worthy version of the Emperor with a real fight at the end (the way siding against him goes now is... not exactly a satisfying experience) and one where you feel like your efforts to reach out to him are actually rewarded in the end. Right now, it feels to me like he's just caught in the middle of trying to be multiple things at once, but without the branching storylines to back up any of them.