every time i see an article or opinion saying balthazar from spn was a villain, i'm like, how? how was he a villain? because he could party? because he was an enabler? because he was always down to support a friend's bad ideas?? grow up.
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Warning ya'll this is gonna be a long post. But please join my descent into insanity, as I deep dive into the vague wormhole that is the durge betrayal pre bg3 timeline.
Before we start, it’ll help if you have context around the faerun calendar. There are twelve months in total, each having exactly 30 days. Additionally, weeks don’t exist in faerun. Rather months get broken down into chunks of time called tendays, which you guessed is literally just ten days. If that was too straight forward for you, don’t worry, they add in five extra days to the calendar that fall outside of the months (ngl I still have no idea where these are located) to make the full year 365 days.
At the beginning of the game, the nautiloid crash occurs at 20 Eleasis. Which means, the game starts in the middle of summer. Obviously, the way you play the game is going to influence the speed of events, but for my playthrough I reached moonrise towers around 12 elient (total time being 22 days). When you get to moonrise, in Bathazar’s chamber you can find his journal that explains that Kressa (the crazy necromancer chick) managed to keep durge alive. This entry is dated “two tenday ago”. But in game, that makes no sense because we know that the nautiloid should have crashed around that point. So either Balthazar doesn’t understand how the Faerun calendar works (I mean same, my guy) or we have to change our frame of reference. I think its more likely that the implied frame of reference is the start of the game, 20 Eleasis (since the developers can’t control how fast the player goes).
If true, durge was saved by Kressa around 1 Eleasis. Her vivisections took place after this in the following days. However, durge is taken away before the end of the following tendays (at least before 10 Eleasis).
Now when you talk to Kressa in the basement of moonrise, she states that she found durge only hours after they had been given the tadpole.
In the fight with Orin, she states that when she attacked durge she carved out a hole for the worm (ignore the Half-Elf part, that's just from the moment Orin turns into durge during the pre-fight convo).
The part that we're missing is when specifically the tadpole was inserted into durge. But given how the game describes just how utterly fucked durge was, there's a high likelyhood that the tadpole was given to durge moments after their fight. Which if true, places Orin's betrayal at 1 Eleasis. Giving us twenty days till the start of the game.
The piece that threw me for a bit was this piece of the narrator's dialogue when durge examines the pod, stating that durge had no idea how much time had passed.
But the blood in the pod is still fresh enough that Astarion is able to ID it as durge & in another dialogue choice if you examine the blood further the narrator states the blood hasn't been there long enough to rot.
I think this dialogue is more explaining that durge is actively being tortured by Kressa so time feels unending (kressa being the one who put them in the pod to begin with).
I've seen in other posts that Gortash's draft memoir explains that Orin's betrayal occurred during or just around the crowning of the brain (I don't have a screenshot of that unfortunately). But we have to take that with a grain of salt because Gortash is the definition of an unreliable narrator.
Personally, I don't think he's lying though. Orin's betrayal occurred in moonrise and there's really no other reason that Orin and durge would be in moonrise that the game has provided. Not to mention, the warden explains the last time that durge was in moonrise, they never left.
I don't think durge came to moonrise more then once given the fact that the warden, who had clearly been there a while, had no clue who they were. I find it hard to believe their identity would be kept under wraps had they been at moonrise multiple times. Employees have to gossip about something.
I think its likely that Ketheric, Gortash, and Durge tamed the brain in the days leading up to 1 Eleasis (like ~20 to 30 Flamerule).
In summary, the dead three had a Phineas and Ferb summer vacation by deciding to create the cult of the absolute.
And yes if you are wondering this is how I look now.
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i've discussed it before but i really need gwyn to befriend balthazar and have a jealousy trope with gwynriel
like maybe at first az doesn't mind, he's happy for gwyn and proud of her for continuing to make new friends! but slowly, over the weeks, he notices how close they are, how engaged she is in their conversations, how easily he makes her laugh...
he'll come over and clap balthazar on the shoulder and laugh too, having caught the tail end of his joke. they stay like this for a few minutes, chatting and enjoying each other's company before gwyn excuses herself. once she's out of earshot az takes on his more cold demeanor, making his own jokes and not exactly being cruel to balthazar but there's always some underlying threat there. bal laughs it off but basically azriel is like this:
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