Rats in the Flour
I do miss how that whole bit set up an element of unease. When the first thing the flayer says to us on the bridge is "Thrall..." it's like 'oh shit, hopefully we don't end up like those other peeps who got enthralled!' The fishermen got nixed too, so it's a little more confusing now I think, since the first we encounter is probably Brynna. So we only hear secondhand about how everyone has been losing their minds. I thought the first rendition rattled the nerves a bit more, cause all the npcs we meet initially (excepting the origins) are all pretty much off the deep end. I thought it would have been a cool set up for some more surrealist interludes where it's just not clear whether what we're experiencing is real or not, but that element is sorta lost by staging scenes in environments that announce what's going on and telegraph it way in advance. Pretty hard to confuse anything going on inside the Astral prism with a dream reality delusion being imposed on us from outside, cause the environment is all lit up in the rainbow hues and even if we don't understand where we are, it's not like we're getting gored by bulls instead of Gith monks or anything of that sort.
I thought that if we indulged the tadpole overmuch we might lose control, if not of our specific actions or choices, that what we'd see/experience as one thing initially might actually prove to be another thing entirely. So for example, thinking we're killing assassins of Bhaal, but where it's in fact some Flaming fists who were just trying to help us, or vice versa. Though I guess that might have been too punishing. I thought for Durge that the haunted one background could key off that too, so that we're haunted by the things we did in-game in a more pronounced way. I don't mean that we suddenly see that it's been a mind flayer all along, I mean where the reality itself breaks down and we begin to question whether anything that we've done since hitting the beach is truly real, or if still trapped in the pod, or any of those riffs on the solipsistic nightmares. You know, where we start to wonder, ok if the Dream visitor isn't what they seem, is Shadowheart also maybe just another trick of the mind worm? That might be too convoluted to work all that well for straight forward adventure narrative, but it would have allowed for some flexibility in other areas. Orin does pull some nightmare tricks out of her pocket, but we never really question whether it's a dream or if the visions are reliable. Whereas with the first nautiloid prologue that would kinda stick with me, like flour on the rats I guess lol.
Cliffnotes, I thought they'd go more Total Recall with it at the end, or 1899 for a more recent example, that sorta deal. Walls of reality crashing down, script gets flipped on its head etc.
ps. I think it would be cool if the narrative of the game folded this concept into it...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_return because then you'd get a oblique on the story structure justification, just for the mechanical reality of replaying it endlessly, but only in slight variations. In such stories the protagonist always has the goal to break the loop somehow, to get outside of it, even if it's just in the small ways. Or just to reconcile that whole idea, that if you love it in part, you also kinda have to acquiesce to loving the whole too, cause the return is eternal like that. No backsies hehe. I just think it sounds like a cool theme for an expansion campaign too. Like it just has that ring to it, that could maybe lean into where the whole thing started out. Like as the literal first thing to flash across the screen in BG1, gazing into the abyss lol
