Talk:The Emperor
If You Know, You Know
Please remember to use the SpoilerBox template when talking about certain interactions with The Emperor that other players may not have yet experienced.
Spoiler warning! This section reveals details about the story of Baldur's Gate 3.
Yes, I do mean the fact that he can be romanced.
ArcaneFocus (talk) 22:00, 13 September 2023 (CEST)
Pronouns for The Emperor
Hi all, ArcaneFocus here. I wanted to find some way to codify the discussions we've been having on the Wiki Discord about this topic because as of this moment, we haven't yet decided how we want to add this information to the actual pages for The Emperor.
TLDR: There's conflicting information in-game about what Pronouns belong to The Emperor, and The Emperor never explicitly says "these are my pronouns" to the Player. There are plausible reasons for deniability on multiple fronts of this argument, but you may be able to help if you can find in-game evidence that we don't currently have.
ADDENDUM #1 (ArcaneFocus (talk) 19:00, 3 October 2023 (CEST))-- I have been informed that, prior to my writing of all this, wiki policy had previously reached a decision about what pronouns to use on The Emperor's pages. I want to leave this debate up, in case future contributors wind up in the same situation, but I will also find a way to link directly to the "official" wiki decision on this for people who need a quick answer.
Framing The Topic
- As contributors, and especially among those of us who use the BG3 Wiki Discord, multiple of us seem to have different opinions on whether The Emperor should be referred to as "He", "It", "They/Them", or other options I fail to mention here.
- Having this discussion is still important to the wiki because we do prefer to be consistent with word choice, when possible.
- I, personally, still want to write about The Emperor's character in a way that is "respectful", and as if The Emperor was any other real person, whose personhood deserves to be respected. I also recognize that Baldur's Gate 3 and Forgotten Realms lore have very specific "rules" about Mind Flayers and how they are different from "everyone else" (such as, Withers, in-game calling out the idea that Illithids do not have souls), and that these specific rules come into conflict with the idea of treating The Emperor "like a person."
Framing the "Problem"
The key thing stopping us from having a "correct answer" relevant to the game of Baldur's Gate 3 is that:
- The Emperor never comes out and tells us "I use these pronouns", with explicit enough consistency that we can interpret it as unassailable fact.
- Real people may decide that their personal identity is different than it used to be, and this may cause a real person to decide it's time to choose different pronouns that best reflect their identity.
- Real people can incorrectly refer to another person as pronouns that do not reflect the identity of the person they are referring to. Real people can also disagree on what pronouns are appropriate to call someone else, if they don't have enough information to be "sure" about that -- and this is exactly the problem we're having right now.
- The Emperor's identity within the game also "changes" at different points in the story, and it is exactly that-- a story -- which can be interpreted differently by each individual player in ways that are impossible to sufficiently predict. We don't want the content of this Wiki to "take a stance" in such a way that it negatively impacts or narrows how a potential reader can enjoy and interpret the story of Baldur's Gate 3 for themselves.
The Goal of Having this Debate
We as Wiki Contributors also don't want The Emperor's page to become a debate platform for the real beliefs of the page authors, but because we're all here as volunteers, and we all want to get along so that we can keep volunteering together, we need to reach some kind of compromise or policy that will avoid "edit wars" and let us all feel mostly okay about the state we leave this page in.
Information we do have
- Narrator dialogue lines referring to The Emperor as an "It" -- Which can be seen as "the game" acknowledging this pronoun.
- Forgotten Realms lore on Mind Flayers using "It" -- but this is hard to accept on its own, because of the possibility that Baldur's Gate 3 is trying to treat The Emperor as potentially "different than other Mind Flayers" -- There are millions of examples of "content from a franchise" that creatively disagrees with other established details in the "canon" of its parent franchise.
- Dialogue from Ansur, a separate character, referring to The Emperor as a "Him" -- but this is also hard to accept as fact because Ansur is a "different person" who as a character can have their own beliefs about what pronouns The Emperor uses. For Ansur specifically, there are plausible reasons in the history of his character behind why Ansur believes "Him" is the appropriate option for The Emperor.
How you can help this debate
- The "smoking gun" to answer this question for sure would be The Emperor speaking to the player, saying what pronouns are appropriate to use. This may or may not even exist in the game.
- Screenshots, scenario reproduction steps, etc. All would probably help. Please "link" screenshots instead of actually pasting them into file view format on this talk page, to keep it usable for others.
- On the Discord, we also have an open thread under #bg3-spoilers called "Emperor Pronoun Sleuthing" that I will leave open for the foreseeable future.
ArcaneFocus (talk) 18:39, 3 October 2023 (CEST)
- I scanned through the localization files briefly to track down some pronoun usage in reference to The Emperor. "It" does seem to be certainly the most prevalent. Used in quest objectives which should be non-biased: "The Emperor asked us to check its old hideout"; "We drove the Emperor away - it has joined sides with what we now know to be a Netherbrain."
- Lae'zel has the line: "The Emperor will resist. It will lie, it will cajole - it might even beg. But there is only one answer it deserves: Death." if you talk to her in the Astral Plane just before freeing Orpheus in the endgame. Though she's obviously not the most neutral source when it comes to ghaik...
- If you crush the astral tadpole, Astarion says "At least you showed it what you thought of its offer".