Everyone’s favorite vampire from Baldur’s Gate 3 is inspiring other curly-haired silver foxes to embrace their unique ‘do.
Plenty of us have video characters that we closely identify or are inspired by. Whether you seek to emulate their heroic actions or just want to look as cool as they do, a part of them follows you into your real life. Baldur’s Gate 3 is filled with figures like this. Both the game’s companions and quest NPCs have complex personalities and gorgeous character designs. Like, who doesn’t want to be Shadowheart when they grow up?
Sometimes video game characters wind up affirming traits we already have. One Baldur’s Gate 3 player took to Reddit to share their example of this. For them, the Origin character, Astarion served as a positive representation of a character with curls and grey/white hair.
The user, who is in their fifties, explained that due to social stigma around the supposedly “untidy” look of curly hair, they had spent their life with their hair tied back to minimize the texture. Additionally, they felt pressure to tend to their greying hair using dye, as they had been instilled with the belief that “nobody thinks white/grey looks good”.
Baldur’s Gate 3 fan learns to love their locks thanks to one “wildly attractive” character
Thankfully, the pressure to perform these grooming practices came to an abrupt end for them after witnessing the community-wide thirst for Astarion. The poster explained their confidence was helped by seeing “hordes of horny people” lust after the character not despite, but because of, his distinctive curly white/grey mane.
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As another user pointed out, Astarion is just one part of an overarching curly hair renaissance or “curleissance” happening in popular culture. Embracing ringlets like Astarion’s is the just tip of the iceberg when it comes to tackling the issue of texturism. Still, stories like this show that the representation offered by Baldur’s Gate 3 is a valuable step in the right direction.
Of course, Astarion’s locks aren’t just supernaturally silver; he shows other signs of aging too. As one commenter put it, “The sexiest characters in this game imo have wrinkles and sun spots and greying hair and that is so cool”. Users decried ‘de-ageing’ mods that seek to remove these details, with one even referring to them “blasphemy”.
Who knew fans being so down-bad could make someone feel so good?
