I hate, hate, hate that people are using the word 'grooming' to talk about a silly RPG story. Like you I'm not happy with the way Mystra is portrayed but I am even more upset with the fandom for using word with the moral weight of 'grooming' to talk about the story. It minimizes and trivializes a very serious issue.
Not only that it feed into the current political panic in the US. Right now bad actors are describing drag queens, trans people, sex educator and host of others as 'groomers'. This is a time to very careful about our word choices not a time to a throw around explosive words with abandon.
The word has been so degraded that the very existence of drag is taken to be a form of grooming. You probably don't want to click on this:
This IS having a 'cry wolf' effect and will only get worse. School districts are that much less likely to investigate claims of grooming because these bad actors - and parts of the BG3 fanbase - have so degraded the term that is now all but meaningless.
Well meaning school principal: "Allegations of grooming? No, I'm not investigating that. We get complaints every month and have just concluded that the term is some right wing chew-toy"
Now having vented my spleen at some parts of the fanbase let me turn my ire to Larian.
Like much of BG3 Larian's attention for forgotten realms lore wanders in chapter 3 and we are back to the DoS2 model. In DoS2 the gods are the real villains of the story. To lesser extent the same is true of the world of PoE. But is absolutely not true of the Forgotten Realms. "are the gods really this petty"? No Shadowheart,
Shar is that petty, Mystra and Selune are pretty great, actually.
No, the gods don't unravel the skein we good mortals weave and, no, they are not responsible for all of Faerun's ills. Do the people who wrote those lines know that most of the fallen empires of Faerun - Ramuthar, Narfel, Netheril - fell because they rejected the gods? It's one of the many ways that chapter 3 is off - which is strange because they nailed the Selune-Shar conflict in chapter.
So you're right, the depiction of Mystra is off. I didn't really notice how off it was until I romanced Gale. I liked Gale in previous, non romanced playthrough. Gale, the loyal cleric of Mystra, sacrificed his life to kill the Elder Brain. He conquered his own hubris and became the real hero of Sword Coast.
Sadly I liked Gale so much that romanced him on my subsequent run and I made the mistake of asking if he still had feelings for Mystra and I got a pretty toxic reply. Gale, it's my fault for asking but few things look as unattractive as man complaining about his crazy ex. You weren't her plaything, she made you into a living saint and you fucked up. You figured this out when we were friends why did romancing you make you so awful? Look, the sex in a magic boat was great and, until a few minutes ago, you seemed sort of adorkable but its over now. Looks like you messed up another relationship. Let's hope the third is the charm.
