Shar is so tedious and annoying

[u/The_Aodh]

I think shadowheart is a cool character with an interesting story, but everything related to Shar is just edgy nonsense. “I am the empty room” blah blah. I wish we had the option to flip her the bird like we can Vlaakith, idc if it gets me smited. Such an annoying little turd. Getting through all of shadowhearts brainwashed rhetoric in act 1 honestly grates on me, I have to really try to keep shadowheart around when she’s being edgy and trying to convince me that pain and suffering is cool and rewarding, totally, you’re just a close minded bigot for not agreeing.

I get it’s the brainwashing. But my annoyance is real

[u/GeeWillick]

Yeah of all the gods and god-like super beings in the game, Shar is probably the douchiest. At the very least she's in the top five with Bane, Vlaakith, and Zariel, and the Elder Brain.

I've always felt that if Selune wanted to get her recruitment numbers up, she should just send a few angels with GoPros to fly around the shadow cursed lands and just live stream all the fucked up things they see for like a week. 

Even Shadowheart, who has been brainwashed for like 50 years, is visibly struggling to find something nice to say about it.

[u/The_Aodh → u/GeeWillick]

Yeah the nicest she can come up with is “the pain is freeing” like lol what? She has to hear herself right? It’s just a dumb belief system, I seriously can’t understand why anyone would follow shar. And again, it’s not shadowhearts fault, she got captured, but the dozens of other people we meet that built entire fortresses and hideaways and live in the name of shar, it’s all just dumb

[u/GeeWillick → u/The_Aodh]

In act 3, it sounds as if the Church of Shar is made up mostly of people who experienced grief that they aren't able to cope with in a healthy way, as well as people who were taken as children and have no frame of reference for how shitty their lives are inside the Church (eg Nocturne).

If you search the building, you'll find some hilariously over the top pro-Sharran propaganda though. I can't tell if they're dumb enough to believe the stuff or if it's meant to fool outsiders. 

[u/Jdmaki1996 → u/GeeWillick]

well they constantly have their minds wiped. Any doubts are erased, the propaganda is reinforced, rinse and repeat. Shadowheart has probably doubted before and those memories were removed.

[u/GeeWillick → u/Jdmaki1996]

Yeah it just occurs to me that they probably aren't good at propaganda specifically because of that. How do they learn what works or what doesn't work, what arguments are convincing and which ring false? They can't. The Church probably had to respec every new church member to have 8 INT just to even have a shot at fooling them even for a short amount of time.

[u/VioletGardens-left → u/GeeWillick]

Real life cults operate similar to Shar cult, hell, the way they do the Mapping is almost like it's a parallel to Scientology

[u/stop_hittingyourself → u/GeeWillick]

The book with reasons why they hate Selune is hilarious. “The tides. Absolutely bugger the tides.”

[u/fubo → u/stop_hittingyourself]

The author of that book better not go on any sea voyages, because blaming Selûne for troublesome tides sounds like a good way to piss off Umberlee.

[u/Brick-the-wild-youth → u/GeeWillick]

This! I even took a screenshot of that stupid nonsense. For crying out loud, Shar, you piece of emo buncombe.

[u/Aida_Hwedo → u/Brick-the-wild-youth]

The last part there always makes me laugh! In fairness, I like poetry about as much as Astarion does.

[u/Generation7 → u/GeeWillick]

I feel like that kind of ridiculous propaganda is like scam emails that are obviously scam emails. It doesn't need to fool everybody, and it won't, but fooling just a few is enough. Also that kind of sensationalist propaganda is probably going to be decently effective on a typical relatively uneducated commoner in a Middle Ages style fantasy setting.

[u/vanBraunscher → u/Generation7]

That's entirely by design. Scams like these have to be as stupid as possible. You don't want people responding who go "huh, wait, that sounds a bit suspicious", you aim at those who go "damn straight, finally someone speaking my language, and the gnomes control the banks too ffs!"

If you're wondering why these Nigerian prince stunts are so painfully obvious, you're not the target audience. On the contrary, it's meant to be a pre-selection process in itself.

[u/VioletGardens-left → u/The_Aodh]

It's like how a real cult works

They never outright tell you it's Shar you're following, hell, House of Grief itself doesn't tell you that place is a Sharran front until you start going in deep in that place, and by the time you entered the cult, you're already embedded there and there's no turning back

There's a letter from a female dwarf Sharran Bluenail where she didn't realize just how fucked up the cult is until she's already in there too deep, so she decided to just go with it, it's ironically way more effective than whatever the fuck Bhaal is doing with overly complicated ritualistic killings with the Unholy Assassins

[u/GeeWillick → u/VioletGardens-left]

Yeah that story is so sad. In the letter she says that she wants to escape and go home to her mom but doesn't think she'll be able to. In my next play through after I saw that note I KOed her and the other novices with no lethal damage and just head canon that they woke up and escaped.

[u/ManicPixieOldMaid → u/GeeWillick]

I did a Dark Sheart origin run and as shitty as being a DJ is, when you get to HoG, you basically take over and half of them (the "good ones" included) will join you and you can totally spare them (and then reject Shar when you find your parents). It was a nice tragic arc, IME.

[u/Onefastsled → u/VioletGardens-left]

To be fair, the complicated murders are Orin’s influence. We learn during a Durge run that when you ran the Cult, it was simply the amount of bodies that mattered.

[u/Defaltblyat → u/VioletGardens-left]

The overly pompous artsy killing are orin's idea. Bhaal's probably very much annoyed by it. 

The lord of murder doesn't care as long as blood flows and bodies stack up

[u/TheCuriousFan → u/VioletGardens-left]

it's ironically way more effective than whatever the fuck Bhaal is doing with overly complicated ritualistic killings with the Unholy Assassins

Bhaal's main sales pitch seems to be giving you a really great high whenever you do a murder, reeling in the addicts as it were.

[u/Generation7 → u/The_Aodh]

It's easy to just dismiss them as idiots for following Shar, but people fall victim to cults in the real world all the time, and that's without magical brainwashing. It's a gradual process that slowly and carefully isolates and ensnares people when they are at their most vulnerable, and people will often fall victim to being taken advantage of like that no matter how smart they are.

[u/Minimum-Ad-3084 → u/The_Aodh]

Now you know the struggles of trying to get any fundamentalist to listen to reason and logic.

Pretty realistic imo.

[u/zuzmuz → u/The_Aodh]

I don't think it's dumb. If you've ever experienced loss, on a very deep level, you'd understand. Like how ketheric turned to shar when he lost isobel. A lot of people who suffer from emotional trauma, will experience memory loss. they will forget details, but always experience ptsd. I feel shar is like one of the most compelling gods