The Existential Dread of Baldur’s Gate III, Part II: The Curse of Consciousness

This is the 6th article in the Video Game Cosmology series. Read the intro here. If you like my work, consider supporting me on Patreon!

Content note: This article touches on issues like depression, nihilism and self-destructive urges. It also contains major spoilers for Baldur’s Gate III.

In Part I, I illustrated how difficult it is to derive a coherent Sharran world view from their depiction in BGIII. I focused on their apparent hatred of life and tried to understand them for the most part as advocates of death, or more precisely, non-being. But maybe it’s time to take a step back and take a closer look at the assumption that the Sharrans have turned against the very idea of existence itself.

Let’s revisit one of the more puzzling statements from Malus Thorm: "What is the light of eyes but the cancer that causes one to witness the laceration of being?" There’s a curious sense that to him, the real issue is not "the laceration of being," but our ability to bear witness to it. This is further highlighted by the nature of his medical intervention: At first glance, adding more pain by destroying the eyes of the "patient" seems not only paradoxical and unhelpful, but also completely unhinged. And while Malus Thorm certainly is that, there is a logic at work here.

Thorm's language isn't merely poetic, and, despite his use of a clinical vocabulary, obviously doesn't make sense on a literal level: How could the "light of eyes" perceive something as abstract as "the laceration of being"? If the removal of the eyes is a symbolic act to destroy a figurative light, the question is: What does the "light of eyes," the cancer at the root of our being, actually stand for? And if that cancer were to be removed from the existential equation, would the Sharrans approve of the kind of dimmed existence that follows it?

Since the Sharrans do not seem to take offence at the oblivious existence of, say, a piece of furniture, it's probably safe to say that their particular distaste seems to be aimed not at existence per se, but the faculties that make us aware of it. In other words: Their true struggle is with consciousness, and their goal is to numb and destroy it however and wherever they can, as the Teachings of Loss illustrate: "Emptiness is a holy state—one to be pursued and admired. To void oneself of all feeling, all attachment, is to approach the purity of Lady Shar's embrace. We each must struggle in our own way to turn from the temptations of light and life." The promise of Shar is fundamentally one of returning to the state of innocence and wholeness we existed in before consciousness began making us uncomfortably aware of ourselves and our place in the world. Or, in Biblical terms, before we ate the fruit of knowledge:

"What, in the deepest reaches of yourself, do you see? A bright and blinding light? A harsh, exacting sun? Or, instead, do you find a comforting, velvet darkness? A womb-like place where all you are, exactly as you are, can find repose? This is the darkness Shar promises: A darkness free from judgement, free from scrutiny, in which we are invited to exist in our purest essence, our most essential selves."

The Sharrans' beliefs reflect the fear that maybe the light of consciousness was a mistake, a terrible singularity that forever set us apart and alienated us from our home. This is essentially the anti-natalist, pessimist philosophy explored by horror writer Thomas Ligotti in his work The Conspiracy against the Human Race, and whose language often resonates uncannily with the Sharrans' writings: "To salve the pains of consciousness, some people anesthetize themselves with sunny thoughts. But not everyone can follow their lead, above all not those who sneer at the sun and everything upon which it beats down. Their only respite is in the balm of bleakness."

To Ligotti, we are the butt of a cruel cosmic joke, cursed with the awareness that we are puppets labouring under the delusion of having a self, trapped in an existence devoid of meaning: "We are blighted by our knowing what is too much to know and too secret to tell one another if we are to stride along our streets, work at our jobs, and sleep in our beds. It is the knowledge of a race of beings that is only passing through this shoddy cosmos."

There is a distinctly Gnostic slant to this, in the sense that humans are prisoners in a universe that is at best mindlessly hostile, at worst malevolent—or in Ligotti’s words, "malignantly useless". Knowledge is central to both philosophies, the almost mystical spark that makes us aware of the prison around us in the first place. But there is one crucial difference: While in Gnosticism, knowledge is the key to salvation that unlocks the prison, to Ligotti, it is the prison. Since there is no paradise beyond this world, knowledge is more than useless: It makes us not only aware of the cruel predicament we're in, but also of the fact that there is no escape beyond death.

While the problem of consciousness, of being awake to the cruel ironies of life, is most obvious in the teachings of the Sharrans, it suffuses the entirety of BGIII. Every cult, group and philosophy in the game seems to have its own interpretation of the place of pain in life and how to make sense of it—whether by trying to either justify, accept, reject or bargain with it. While the Sharrans seem to aspire to some sort of inner death within life, the Bhaalists, for example, see a much simpler solution, as seen in a verse by Invoker Grimlark:

"Living, a torment of sorrow and strife

We faithful cure mortals of burdensome life

And present it to death-father Bhaal"

Abdirak, the priest of Loviatar, goddess of pain, makes a surprisingly convincing case for his own philosophy, one that does not attempt to rationalise or reject pain, but embraces it as an integral part of life:

"Honesty, love, wrath—many traits are divine. There is only one that we possess and the gods do not: pain. Our most holy mistress invites us to revel in that which makes us mortal. To embrace pain, so she may look upon us and know we are truly living. For what is a life without the sting of agony? Without the anguish of heartbreak? It is a life unlived—a life wasted hiding from the joys of the world."

BGIII shows us several of its characters despairing in the face of existential dread and the realisation of insignificance and powerlessness. There’s Ketheric Thorm, whose tragic backstory we learn from his diaries, turning from one goddess to the next in a futile attempt to come to terms with the death of his daughter. At first, Thorm seeks solace in Shar's darkness: "Forgetting is the only possibility. The embrace of oblivion. The reprieve of nothingness. It would not be possible for a man to survive knowing what he knows. Knowing what can be lost. Shar understands that. Hers is the only mercy I can comprehend."

Unable to forget, Thorm instead reframes his struggle as one against the inevitability of death itself: "If oblivion can fail, what defence have we against death? None except its mastery." By becoming a disciple of Myrkul, Thorm technically succeeds in his ambition, at least for a little while. But it is a hollow victory. His inability to accept and grieve his loss has turned him into a broken, cruel man.

Thorm is not the only one to rage against the dying of the light. After Karlach kills Gortash, the man responsible for her own imminent death, she immediately realises that her attempt at reasserting control neither solved her problem nor relieved her anger and grief at the injustice of her condition:

"Is that it, then? I've killed the bastard who ruined my life, and now I crawl into a corner and die? Am I fucking missing something? What was the point? I'm still dying. I'm dying. I'm going to die! And what then? Off to the City of Judgement to waste into oblivion? Into the dirt to get eaten by maggots?! Is that it for me? Is that fucking all?! It isn't fair. I don’t want it like this."

Her restating in various ways the fact that she's going to die shows a consciousness finally stripped of any and all illusions and distractions, trapped in the gravitational pull of a terrifying conclusion, still desperately circling around it in the hopes of finding a way out, or a more hopeful vantage point. Or in Ligotti's words: "If we must think, it should be done only in circles, outside of which lies the unthinkable."

Since consciousness is both our greatest asset and the source of so much of our pain, it makes sense that much of the game is preoccupied with what is often presumed to be its locus or source: the brain. The mind flayer tadpoles mirror and heighten the game's ambivalence towards consciousness. On the one hand, they harbour the potential of unlocking great power and the promise of dominance over other beings. On the other hand, their presence threatens a premature and gruesome death in the form of ceremorphosis, the transformation into a mind flayer.

But the terror evoked by the tadpoles goes beyond a simple fear of death: they embody the fear of losing control and of losing one's self, of being taken over by an outside force, of facing complete obliteration. Even before the transformation even begins, the mere prospect points towards at a terrifying realisation: if our self can be pinpointed to a squishy, vulnerable lump of tissue, and if it can be manipulated in such a way as to transform, fracture or even destroy our self, our sense of an essentially stable self, of being someone instead of many or no one at all, must be exposed as an illusion, as elaborate shadow puppetry performed by our brains.

Seen from this angle, our own brain becomes an alien force, an ominous puppet master with an impenetrable design, blinding us with comfortable fictions while at the same time equipping us with the faculties to see through its showmanship. It's like being given a flashlight in the void: the very thing that allows us to see also reveals that there is nothing to see. Why this should be, finally, is something we are not equipped by our consciousness to grasp. We are able to recognise our own impenetrable design, but unable to understand it.

In the light of this bleak and slightly paranoid view, the game's main threat, the giant Elder Brain, starts to make sense. It's a terrifying, alien thing, and mortals and gods alike are desperate to harness its powers. But even with the power of a mythical fantasy artefact like the Crown of Karsus, there always remains the danger of it shaking off its yoke and enslaving its former masters, turning their self against itself.

By externalising something inherent to ourselves and turning it into a world-threatening fantasy villain, BGIII gives us an opportunity to face some of our deepest, most abstract anxieties head-on. In the end, we'll have reasserted ourselves in the face of brain parasites and the voices of murderous gods in our heads and reestablished the fragile sense of self and control. Whether you see in this an uplifting confrontation with existential dread or—as Ligotti probably would—merely a colourful band-aid covering the laceration of being depends entirely on your own predisposition towards pessimism.