The writer behind Shadowheart in Baldur's Gate 3 snuck a line into the RPG's epilogue referencing the real-life relationship between the character's actor and the game's performance director.
Jennifer English, who plays Shadowheart, and Aliona Baranova, performance director on Baldur's Gate 3, recently appeared in a video from Fall Damage, in which they revealed plenty of trivia about God's Favorite Princess - including how English nearly didn't record that now-famous line, and how she recommends respeccing her character away from her standard subclass. But they also revealed that there's a far more adorable detail hiding in the game's epilogue.
English and Baranova, who are partners in real life, met while recording Baldur's Gate 3, and their relationship was eventually referenced in-game by Shadowheart's lead writer, John Corcoran. As well as putting the "God's favorite princess" line into the game's final scene, English explains that Corcoran wrote lines referring to one of Baranova's characters, Corinna the squirrel.
Shadowheart "mentions a squirrel that's too clever for her own good," Baranova explains while pointing to herself, before revealing that "if you romanced her, [your character says] 'I swear sometimes that squirrel is looking at me funny', and that's a reference to 'is she being a bit protective of Shadowheart?'"
English's own line at that point is "she's just a bit protective, I give her a shoulder to perch on and all the nuts she can manage," which the pair say is a specific reference to "our relationship." It's an easy moment to miss - not only do you have to have taken Shadowheart's romance arc to its conclusion and played the epilogue, but you'd need to know the real-life context behind the line to really understand its meaning.
And that's assuming that you've even drawn the connection between Shadowheart and Corinna - there's an awful lot of game-time between meeting Baranova's character near the Druid's Grove and reaching that epilogue at the end of the game. In fact, it's such a subtle detail that it took Baranova herself to point it out to me, even after I'd already watched this video for myself, so I promised to help share it with the world.
This whole thing is super cute, which is probably why English is having such a hard time on her Dark Urge run right now.
