Jaheira's questionable neutrality.
iAmGoatBoy
Member Posts: 72
So I'm one of those who goes against the grain in actually liking Jaheira both as a character and as a party member, however for RP purposes, one thing has always bothered me... despite her notional neutrality, she's always seemed to me to behave like a Good aligned character. For example, when your party achieves very high rep for saintly acts of kindness, she may very mildly chastise you about the "need to maintain balance", but if the party is sickeningly evil and drops to very low rep, she gets FURIOUS and even (if I remember right, please correct me if I don't) walks out on the party at the lowest reps. Also, in her character quests in BG2...
So what do you think? Is she really a chaotic good and not a neutral, or am I reading too much into this?
...her actions towards Baron Ployer seem like something a Chaotic Good character would do, overthrowing an evil landowner for the good of the people. When the Harpers turn on Charname, she defies them to defend her friend's liberty - again, going against authority to do the right thing, very much a Chaotic Good approach.
So what do you think? Is she really a chaotic good and not a neutral, or am I reading too much into this?
2
Comments
I generally have a problem with understanding/accepting Neutrality in terms of 'balance', which doesn't really make sense to me philosophically.
Thus I tend to think of Good as a willingness to sacrifice personal interests for others. Evil has taking pleasure in causing unnecessary suffering onto others. And rational behaviour, such as two starving men fighting over limited food, as Neutral.
I also don't see alignments as fixed points, but rather a spectrum from one extreme to another. On the Good to Evil axis, there are fairly arbitary cut-offs where u go from Good to Neutral, and Neutral to Evil.
For example my Charname is a well-intentioned young man who chooses the Good option in almost every situation.
However, the events of Baldur's Gate 1 and the beginning of SoA really destroyed his idealism and optimism, and he is filled with frustration and anger at his comparative weakness in relation to his enemies, and his powerlessness to protect those he cares about.
So although he is still the good-intentioned do-gooder, he can be tempted by the promise of power, which he seeks in an attempt to re-take control of his own destiny, and protect/save his loved ones. He is pragmatic enough to deal with people and organisations he finds deeply disagreeable, and he develops a vengeful streak, where he shows little mercy to those who he feels have committed irredeemable crimes.
Thus even though he has chosen Good options throughout his adventures, and carried out countless acts of heroism, I set his alignment to Lawful Neutral.
That is how I think of Jaheira's Neutrality, even though her script/conversation clearly mentions 'balance'. I kinda dismiss it as a 'druid thing'.
Druids being TN only is another one of those nonsense 2e rules anyways. As if Shadow Druids weren't obviously evil.
I rather like her and the other canon members as well. Minsc is sure my favorite, but at least Jaheira is a romance if I am not a shorty. Just don't think about the lies about her character in some novels that never existed and you will be fine
In AD&D, though, druids had to be TN, so she's, well, TN. I'm pretty sure the BG2 tweak packs has a component to switch her over to NG.
(She has good taste, Halflings are incredibly cute I mean how can't you love them?)
PERSECUTE!!
KILL the unbeliever!!!