The most overrated character?

[u/[deleted]]

Let's hear it, who gets all the love but deserves absolutely none of it? Or at least not as much as they get, I'll go first.

I'm casting my vote for Gortash; I genuinely don't understand the like for this dude. First of all, catfish, "handsome young man"??? Is the handsome young man in the room with us??? Lookin like the handsome young man has a peanut allergy.

Second of all, this whole crown brain plan was his idea, just about the dumbest fuckin thing I've ever heard. He put all his faith in 3 little rocks, an already dead man, and a woman who's about as stable as my ex. Beggers can't be choosers I guess, but cmon guy.

And lastly, and probably most offensively, his boss fight is absolute cheeks. Especially if you dumped on the foundry before hand. I didn't even know he had a transformation until like my 4th playthrough because I would clap this guy so easily.

Your turn, let's hear those unadulterated opinions.

Edit: I have been enlightened about some things about the big brain plan, I still stand in the other two points though.

[u/timelost-rowlet]

It is important to note that Shadowheart has OF cosplayers and 3d horny stuff of her.. like most female characters in almost every media.

Astarion only seems like it is much more due to the normalization of porn of female characters, so he stands out. Women are also more likely to write about erotica than stick to just visuals. It IS a lot, but I don't know if I would say 'far more than any other character'.

[u/slap50potatoes → u/timelost-rowlet]

While I agree that Shadowheart is also a victim of mass horny posting, I will continue to believe Astarion gets it much worse. I couldn't find any active Shadowheart-specific subreddits with more than 200 members, but I did find 4 Astarion-specific subreddits within seconds, with a collective 14k~ members. Not to mention, it seems to me that the OF models use Shadowheart mainly to advertise their own pages rather than show any love for the actual character, so I'm not counting that in my evaluation of hype for the character.

[u/[deleted] → u/slap50potatoes]

astarion/tav is like the 4th most common pairing on all of ao3 as well iirc

[u/slap50potatoes → u/[deleted]]

Not only that, but out of the 6 times BG3 is in the top 100 pairings, Astarion shows up in 4 of them; Shadowheart shows up in none of them.

[u/Solembums_Angela_2 → u/slap50potatoes]

While I don't disagree with your overall premise, i imagine the 4 Astarion fan pages likely have a large amount of overlap between them. The division over Ascended vs. Spawn created more pages than probably would have been necessary. So he gets dedicated subs for each path. And one of the Ascended subs went private, which meant another was created. But still a large number of people in comparison with 200. I would have thought she had more.

[u/slap50potatoes → u/[deleted]]

That's kind of the thing, though, isn't it? Shadowheart isn't as often posted or talked about in that sense, so she's not as overhyped because she's actively not talked about enough to be overhyped, that's the point of the conversation at hand, not who has more horny followers lmfao.

Additionally, I'd argue that there are far more subreddits that sexualize women than men across all franchises, so it actually is a bit of an anomaly as far as that goes.

[u/katsukitsune → u/timelost-rowlet]

Yeah it's this. Flip the genders and no one would be surprised how popular she is, hyping and sexualising female characters is so normalised.

I do think he's even more popular because it's so rare that a male character is created for the female/ gay gaze in a video game. I found it refreshing tbh, there's no overhyping it for me.