12 Days of Anime 2025, Day 10I’ve poked at this idea a few times before, but people really hate cuckoldry in their anime and manga. In the eyes of the otaku, one of the worst things an author can do is have the protagonist’s affections spurned, or for a love interest to cheat. This is an unspoken inviolable law and will lead to more reader complaints than if the character had suddenly started murdering babies. But why?The baseline (male, heterosexual, reading shounen) weeb tends to identify with the main character of the things they are consuming far more than they care to admit. It’s so obvious when you look at how blatant of the wish fulfillment is when it comes to romance in shounen. Most anime girls here are treated with an air of sexual purity – if they flake on the protagonist, even when it makes the work more narratively compelling, then that ruins the vibe. As I identified in my CCA post, cuck stuff, and even the specter of cuck stuff, surfaces deep shame and insecurity in a lot of men, to the point of causing endless culture wars. And when it happens in their manga, they get mad at the main for being a sexual failure, and dish out virulent madonna-whore shit at the woman. This is an otaku complex as old as otaku themselves – just look at Tomino’s oeuvre! Of course, gay people are smarter than this, and that’s why nobody complains about the air of lesbian ntr anguish in say, Kakegurui or Madoka or Bloom into You. In those, it is treated like a spice.Anyways, I played Baldur’s Gate 3 last year, and Divinity Original Sin 2 earlier this year. I swear this will be relevant.Shadowheart took the world by storm in 2023 because most people are not inoculated against tsunderes. Or elfs, or goth baddies for that matter. Of course, it also helps that she’s God’s favorite princess. Most party members get periodic plot moments in the first two acts followed by a dungeon in the third leading to some major character decision, but Shadowheart additionally gets the entire Temple of Shar in which to play out her struggles with faith and devotion.One of the neat things about BG3 is that the darker and edgier parts of its storytelling are often also the stronger ones. This is not typical! For the bulk of “choices matter” CRPGs, especially in recent memory, evil options mostly just exist as a perfunctory way to let players fuck shit up. In one of his videos, Noah Caldwell-Gervais makes a strong argument that Fallout 3’s evil route is less about roleplaying as a bad guy and more about abstaining from roleplaying, just blowing things up and acting violently towards the characters and the world strictly for sandboxy player enjoyment. Meanwhile, BG3’s Dark Urge option is straight-up the better way to play the game. Baudelaire Welch did an excellent job with letting you jump in to the narrative as an established and thoroughly tortured character who has to proactively rise above their demons to do good in the world. Having this background provides in-universe context for taking the darker routes, making every decision, even the bad ones, a concrete narrative investment, as opposed to a blank slate PC where you have to make all that up whole cloth and just hope it coheres, or not really care in the first place.With all this in mind, Shadowheart’s Dark Justiciar route is really quite excellent. It’s a nasty little tale – a girl plucked from her parents, brought up in a straightforwardly evil cult, given a chance to see the light, rejecting it either out of her own volition or through the player’s corrupting influence, and coming full circle by willingly severing the last ties to her former self. Her parents showing up at the end as one last tie to her past doesn’t really come across as a Christian Baby-type gotcha like it does in her normal route. Here, it’s just one more twist of the knife on the path she’s committed herself to. She says as much.I was not anticipating just how much this would affect the romance.See, romancing Shadowheart when she returns to Selune is mostly a story about being there for your girl as she goes through a total identity upheaval. It’s fine, but ultimately ends up feeling a bit too narratively clean. You helped save the elf, so now she will swear herself to you. Obvious it’s written more cleverly than that, and I’m cutting out a lot of detail (I do like the way that Dame Aylin and Isobel act as her lesbian mentor figures), but it’s still ultimately a bit underwhelming, even if I get that these are all the same reasons that most players really really like her.Romancing Sharran Shadowheart, on the other hand, is properly insane. Act 2 is a whole arc of understandably putting your budding relationship on ice so that she can navigate her test of faith without distraction. Then, roughly 30 seconds after becoming a Dark Justiciar, Shadowheart turns around and essentially tells you “I know we have some sort of thing going on, but I have to dedicate my heart and spirit wholly to my goddess now. Maybe we can still occasionally kiss on the dl though, if you’re okay with coming second to my true obligation.” What follows is the epic highs and lows of Elf Cuckold Simulator, as you desperately try to do anything resembling a normal relationship with her and keep getting swept aside in favor of her Duties. You are led on, practically broken up with, led on some more, until eventually you are granted exactly one crumb of pussy, and promptly informed afterwards that that was an exception. Once the world has been saved from the interdimensional squids, Shadowheart’s ending scene has her leaving you, seemingly for good this time, to pursue her best evil pious life.(Subsequent patches added an epilogue cast party to the game, and if you reconnect with her there she compares your situationship as a fine wine, to be savored and drunken sparingly, and teases that she’d like to invite you to her cellar down the line. There is no escape. You will be doing this song and dance and never getting enough of what you want for the rest of your life.)This is why I play video games. To get divorced by women. Dating sim wish fulfillment is so passe. Guaranteeing that your player character can get everything whatever they want within the established narrative boundaries leads to far worse writing in general. Having someone push back and downright toy with your emotions under the just-barely plausibly deniable guise of religious dedication is so much more memorable. I love the bizarro alternate version of Baldur’s Gate 3 I played compared to everyone else, and I wish more people got to experience it.While Baldur’s Gate 3 can’t be beaten when it comes to the depth of its party members, the studio’s previous mouthful, Divinity Original Sin 2, is easily the better game in combat and worldbuilding. I’m glad Larian is returning to their bespoke setting going forward, because I had a great time with this game. For the expected playing-a-high-quality-CRPG reasons, and because it happened again.Choosing to romantically pursue Shadowheart, you could be forgiven for not seeing all of that stuff coming. With the Red Prince, it’s on you.The Red Prince is a lizard man and a right proper royal bastard who is traveling the land in search of his betrothed. With their blessed bloodlines combined, she will birth the first true dragons in centuries and he will Restore The Lizard Empire to its Former Glory. A total pompous fuck, but in a way that I found charming compared to say, Astarion. The Red Prince is taken. He’s the most conceptually taken guy in the world, and he makes that very clear from the get-go. And yet, if you want it badly enough, he will entertain your romantic fancies and deign to have sex with you, you guessed it, exactly once. All of your romantic conversation choices with him come off as needy and jealous and sad, trying and failing to find a way to coexist with his literal platonic ideal of a lover. Then once he reunites with his princess, he’ll cut things off for good, informing you that this was always just a relationship of convenience and now he has to Step Up. All that, and you still gotta help keep the dragon eggs safe afterwards.This one’s just plain emotional masochism, making it sufficiently more challenging for me to beat the allegations. But I really do think it’s great that Larian includes these weird-ass routes alongside the more conventional party member romances, because there are more important things than just straightforward player fulfillment. This, too, is a fine vintage. Plus I like lizards.Larian is still a relatively small studio compared to the triple-As, with the writer’s room is roughly a baker’s dozen. This means you can pretty easily map out who wrote which characters in each game, and what sort of themes they like to dabble in. Believe it or not, the BG3 elf cuckoldry and the DOS2 lizard cuckoldry were written by two completely separate writers! That’s so much funnier than the alternative, because it means that this is just part of the Larian House Style.Announcing a new Divinity game should have been a grand slam for the company, but Larian’s been finding themselves in hot water because the CEO keeps making stupid claims about how generative AI will be used throughout the development process and how everyone is totally on-board with this. I’m of the mind that his proclamations could have been much worse, that he intended to find a middle ground on AI and ended up pretty out of touch because, like, he’s a CEO. If this is the case, most of the creatives will be politely ignoring him, minority owners Tencent will be pleased enough by the appeal to AI in the first place, and the writers and designers will continue to do their stuff largely unfettered. Hopefully.And said stuff better include more insane relationship melodrama where the player character’s wants are actively toyed with. This is a competitive advantage!wrapping this up with one of my favorite BG3 bugs because when else am I gonna get to share this
Dec 23, 2025 • Subscribe
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