A ban report posted to the Nexus Mods forum on Dec. 4 announced the removal of a Baldur’s Gate 3 mod known to be part of a larger anti-LGBTQ+ modpack.
“We are for inclusivity, we are for diversity,” the report reads. “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.”
The mod in question, dubbed “Ser Aylin” by its uploader, was billed as a “fully immersive male version of Dame Aylin,” complete with a new, more masculine body for the immortal demigoddess and over 850 voice lines altered with the help of AI to account for the changes. While this may sound like a simple gender-swap mod on paper, it only survived on Nexus Mods for a day before being removed for its prejudiced origins.
Ser Aylin is part of the larger “No Alphabets” modpack, which claims to “match medieval status quo” by eliminating all LGBTQ+ content from Baldur’s Gate 3. In other words, Dame Aylin wasn’t turned into a dude as a fun experiment, but to transform her romantic relationship with Isobel — a female half-elf cleric of Selûne — from homosexual to heterosexual. Another part of the modpack similarly changes a character named Sebastian from male to female so that his romantic history with potential party member Astarion isn’t gay.
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Image: Larian Studios via Polygon
“No Alphabets” also ruins Baldur’s Gate 3’s most prominent example of trans representation by changing in-game backstory details about tiefling merchant Nocturne — who is a trans woman — so that she will instead be a cis man. The mod, again, alters her model and voice while also giving her a bogus new diary entry about detransitioning after being unhappy with the results of drinking “an Elixir of Sex Shifting.” The voice change is particularly insidious seeing as Nocturne is played by Abigail Thorn, a trans woman known as Philosophy Tube on YouTube.
Since its debut on Oct. 14, “No Alphabets” has been updated several times based on suggestions from users of a niche RPG forum. Apart from apparently taking issue with the game’s LGBTQ+ content, several comments have also asked creator orinEsque to modify characters with vitiligo. I don’t know why a skin pigment-eliminating auto-immune disorder is the new front in bigoted gamer resentment, but I guess reasonable people should prepare to count on that being an issue du jour with the fans of “No Alphabets.”
Nexus Mods previously gave the boot to mods for Starfield and Marvel’s Spider-Man that removed pronouns and pride flags respectively.
