Bigoted Baldur's Gate 3 mod booted from the Nexus following community backlash
“We are for inclusivity, we are for diversity.”
Warning: Spoilers for Baldur's Gate 3 may lie ahead.
A Baldur's Gate 3 mod that gender-swapped Dame Aylin has been taken down from Nexus Mods after its creator was ruled to have violated the site’s community rules.
The mod in question, dubbed ‘Ser Aylin’, was originally uploaded to the platform on December 3, with its takedown coming not long after this point. According to a post on the Baldur’s Gate 3 subreddit that attempted to warn people not to support the mod, it was part of a group of works designed to “remove every single queer character and every single reference to any queer identity from the entire game”.
In a notice about the takedown of the mod and the banning of its creator from the site, Nexus Mods stated: “This appears to be a throwaway account created to upload a mod that attempts to skirt our community guidelines.
“The mod in question appears to reduce diversity in Baldur's Gate 3 by taking a same-sex couple and swapping the gender of one of the partners to make them heterosexual,” it continued. “We are for inclusivity, we are for diversity. If we think someone is uploading a mod on our site with the intent to deliberately be against inclusivity and/or diversity then we will take action against it. The same goes for people attempting to troll other users with mods deliberately to cause a rise.”
If you’re unfamiliar, in the base game, Dame Aylin is in a same-sex relationship with Isobel, the Selunite cleric who’s protecting the Last Light Inn from the shadow curse when you first rock up there in Act 2.
The aforementioned Reddit post identified Ser Aylin as belonging to an anti-LGBTQ+ modding project called “no alphabets”, which reportedly aims to make the game resemble a “medieval status quo”. Basically, that meaningless phrase seems to be a way of saying ‘100% straight white people running around this fantasy world’, which, you know, also boasts weird alien parasites and magic that can do all kinds of bizarre stuff.
In short, if it’s sober medieval realism you’re after, I think Baldur’s Gate 3 might be the wrong place to look. And that’s without even getting into the fact that a lot of the diverse sexual and personal identities the mod pack apparently takes aim at date all the way back to classical history, long before the Middle Ages.
Luckily, it seems like Nexus Mods is adopting the same stance with these kinds of mods for BG3 as it did with works like the Starfield mod that removed the option to choose your pronouns from that game’s character creator.
In lighter Baldur’s Gate 3 news, the game’s latest update added in an uber-difficult Honour Mode that’s already been beaten in less than 40 minutes.