In Defence Of Baldur's Gate's Worst Boyfriend: Anomen

Baldur’s Gate 3 has set a new standard for video game romances. Finally, RPG love stories are more than sex scenes offered as a reward before the final act comes to a close. They’re a deep dive into who your companions are, and even help you explore what kind of character you’re playing. You can challenge them, and the romance stays intact. You can agree with them, and it all falls apart. It’s not so much of a power fantasy anymore and feels unpredictable in ways real love can so often be.

We have BioWare to thank for laying the groundwork here, bringing video game romances to the mainstream. This, of course, led to many studios trying to do it themselves, but some imitators failed to understand what made them work in the first place. It all became gamified. In many instances, it felt like most games only had romance options out of obligation, rather than any particular passion for telling a love story.

Related: I'm Not As Horny As Baldur's Gate 3 Wants Me To Be

It wasn’t always this way. Long before Mass Effect and Dragon Age, BioWare gave us the first two Baldur’s Gate games. They gave the studio the blueprint it would use on its future games, giving us some of the best RPGs ever made at the time. Then, in Baldur’s Gate 2, we got our first-ever taste of BioWare romance.

And, if you were playing as a female character, it was terrible.

Enter Anomen Delryn, the first-ever BioWare boyfriend - and probably the worst of them all. He’s not a bad boy. He’s a bad boy. He isn’t Zevran flirting with you two seconds after he tries to kill you, or Astarion drinking your blood. No, Anomen is the personification of arrogance and ignorance. He negs you, he gaslights you, and he has temper tantrums like nobody else. Worse yet, he reckons that’s what bitches are into.

Well, I’m bitches, and I’m playing through Baldur’s Gate 2 right now. My expectations were high going in, too. Male characters have three lovely ladies to choose from (ignoring new characters added in the 2013 re-release), with the drow Viconia, half-elf harper Jaheria (yes, that Jaheria), and Aerie, an avariel. If we are incredibly reductionist about these wonderful characters, then Viconia and Aerie fit two major BioWare babe archetypes: the hottie and the cutie. So for the most part, BioWare nailed that right out of the gate. So what on earth was it thinking with its male options?

Actually, it’s just… option. Anomen is all you get. No, of course there are no queer romances. It’s 2000, they haven’t been invented yet. Admittedly, a romantic subplot that’s meant to appeal to women hadn’t really been done before either, so BioWare was flying dark. And absolutely not asking ladies what they look for in a guy.

But don’t worry if you don’t love Anomen, he’ll make up for that himself. Not in an endearing way either. He just talks about himself a lot and only sees everything through his very narrow worldview. He’s a squire that’s about to go through a test to see if he is of good character enough to become a knight, and to him, it’s pretty much the most important thing in the world. You can influence the outcome of this test, but all you’re deciding is whether his ego is stroked even further (passing), or he becomes a jaded asshole (fails).

If you’re playing as a woman, you get a bit more sympathy out of him. The main story sees your childhood best friend kidnapped and tortured, and he’s not above admitting that it’s a bit of a bummer. In some moments, he’s even sweet about it, sticking with you to find her no matter what drama he’s got going on in his own life.

But it all feels like part of his act as a holy, devout knight that stands up for the downtrodden. Throughout your journey, he’ll moan whenever you stop to help others. He doesn’t care about the poor in the city, looking down on anyone outside of his immediate circle. If he’s helping anyone, it’s to boost his own ego. Or get in your pants.

He is the absolute worst, which is what makes him so great.

For all of his faults, Anomen has agency. His life certainly doesn’t revolve around you, and he will happily leave to do his own thing if you piss him off. If you’re going around killing innocents, he’ll recognise that he can’t fix you, and either leave or attack you. Similarly, you can’t fix him, only keep his worst elements in check. If he fails his test, he’s prone to becoming so angry that he attacks other teammates. All you can do is try your best to hold him back and listen to him vent. He’d been waiting his whole life to become a knight, of course failure is going to haunt him. Romancing doesn’t make that go away.

BioWare definitely struggled with this kind of writing going forward. Garrus, Thane, Iron Bull, they’re all great. Their romances are sweet, but largely lack any major conflict. They’re just too damn agreeable. Cullen has just spent the better part of a decade locking mages up and even killing them when the need arose. But hook up with him as a mage in Inquisition and he’s over it. You don’t have to sacrifice your principles and agree with Circles as an institution. You can brush that aside, get married and adopt a dog together. Human rights disagreements be damned.

BioWare was absolutely right to make Anomen a prick. He has his own life, his own ideology, and his own way of looking at things. In the romance, you can budge these ever so slightly, but he’s still constricted by his elitist lens on the world that he can never acknowledge is there in the first place. You can disagree with him, and he’ll snap. He’ll then apologise, probably calling you ‘milady’ while he does, but his view is largely unchanged. It’s perfect. People don’t just unlearn all of their prejudice overnight because they got a good lay.

Relationships are messy. You don’t agree on everything, and there aren’t any friendship metres to keep track of. The romance candidates of Baldur’s Gate 3 will still do their own thing if you’re sleeping together. They might find you more persuasive, but that’s it. You have to work around their personalities, not mold them to suit your needs.

None of this was to suggest for a second that the Anomen romance is better than Alistair’s, Garrus’, or anyone else’s for that matter. It’s not. But it has something the others don’t, something we’re only now seeing with Baldur’s Gate 3. The best romances are empowering and disempowering all at once. You’re putting your heart in someone else’s hands - you can’t control what they do with it.

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