Viconia de'Vir

Viconia de'Vir is a character from the awesome yet sadly forgotten Advanced Dungeons & Dragons computer game series of Baldur's Gate, which was one of the earliest productions of Black Isle. She is sadly pretty much unknown to modern D&Ders, which is a shame, because she represents an awesome example of a Drow PC who isn't the cliche "whiney, angsty, Rebellious Good Guy following in the mold of Drizzt do'Urden" like most are.

Viconia is a female Drow Cleric, and the last surviving scion of House de'Vir, from the dark elf city of Menzoberranzan in the Underdark of the Forgotten Realms. Ironically, if one compares the lore, this implies she is ultimately responsible for Drizzt surviving instead of being sacrificed for being his mom's third-born son; Drizzt only got to live because his eldest brother was assassinated (by their respective third brother) during House do'Urden's assault on House de'Vir for losing the favor of Lolth, something that was caused by Viconia herself. Rumors that a raven was watching the whole spectacle are ridiculuous, and unfounded.

See, Viconia was a fairly normal Drow female growing up, bar an uncharacteristic loyalty to and affection for her brother, Valas de'Vir. Indeed, she was a devoted worshipper of Lolth... too devoted. Essentially, she attributed her demonic patron with more dignity than she does, in fact, possess, and one day refused to sacrifice an elf baby to Lolth because she didn't see the point of it: this was no fearsome foe, no powerful enemy, what glory was this supposed to bring to her mighty mistress? For her foolish idealism, Viconia was punished, and Lolth demanded that Viconia be sacrificed for her sins.

However, Viconia's brother wouldn't hear of this, and he saved her life - for which Lolth turned him into a Drider. Still, he gave Viconia the chance to flee, and she took it, escaping to the surface and unwittingly leaving her family to die at the hands of House do'Urden. She fled to the surface, meets a fat caravan owner and learns surface customs and languages in exchange for...services. Just when she thought she could manipulate the fat fuck to her will...the merchant croaks due to humping the hottest piece of ass non-stop for months, and she has to run from the caravan guards and hide again.

Viconia's past after that is a mystery to us. All we know is that she abandoned the worship of Lolth and turned instead to worshiping Shar. Ironically, she made the same mistake of developing her faith/loyalty as a result of attributing noble qualities to a deity that doesn't really have them. Viconia basically worships Shar as a gentle protector who gives her succor from loss... as anyone else knows, Shar's doctrine is basically "evil emo-psycho-bitch", with her basically mandating that her followers aren't allowed to be happy or hope for something better and they should destroy hope & joy in others as well.

Eventually, she crossed paths with the Bhaalspawn, the player character of Baldur's Gate. In the first game, she is being pursued by a random Flaming Fist mercenary, and will join the party only if you save her from him. Her stats make her one of the best clerics in the game, except her Strength and Constitution scores are abysmal and she has Magic Resistance 50%... which, since this game is running on the AD&D engine, means there's a 50-50 chance that healing spells and buffs won't work on her either. In the second game, she's got to be rescued again... this time, from a bunch of Beshaba cultists who are about to publicly burn her at the stake for worshiping an evil goddess. Which is fucking ridiculous when you remember that Beshaba herself is an evil-aligned Goddess of Bad Luck. This time, she's lost her Magic Resistance and can become super-tanky by outfitting her with Crom Faeyr, a strength-boosting uber-warhammer.

As mentioned above, Viconia is technically an evil character, in that she's selfish, aggressive, sarcastic, ruthless and enjoys proving her strength... however, she's not stupid or petty, and is in fact probably one of the sanest Evil character in the entire gameline, seeing no reason to murder an innocent light elf slave after a bitchfit with a shota, or slaughtering a random human village, sell survivors to slavery, kill the rescuers and claim it was for honor and her good Goddess after having a lesbian orgy. She also has a point when she points out that, given her people's reputation, a "do unto others before they do unto you" attitude is kind of sensible. Seriously; if you talk to her in the second game, she mentions trying to just settle down and manage a small homestead in one of the towns the Bhaalspawn saved in the first game. That ended when two of her neighbors found out what she was and reacted by tricking her into letting her guard down so they could beat her senseless with a surprise shovel to the head, implicitly rape her, and then bury her alive. She promptly regained consciousness, clawed her way out of her grave, and murdered them both in retaliation, along with their kin, before hitting the road again. Tough bitch is tough. A little heartwarming detail is that after sufficient love and care she can turn to True Neutral, finally making peace with the world's flow. Daww...

Viconia is one of the three romance options for male human/half-elf PCs in the second game, and is pretty much the mold-maker for Bioware's "dark, seductive, nasty-yet-redeemable jerk with a heart of gold" love interest. She wants a strong, aggressive, confident and assertive sort of mate, but she's also what a weeaboo would call a "tsundere"; love is an alien emotion to her, so the closer you get, the more frightened she gets, starting to actively push you away, only to finally give in and come happily running back if you refuse to give up on her. Her fandom Raged when it turned out that her epilogue if your PC romanced her was that she got assassinated by an agent of Lolth after having a son with the Bhaalspawn, whilst otherwise she got to go adventuring with Drizz't and become accepted as another "redeemed Drow".

To explain exactly why this was received so poorly, beyond the obvious Grimdark#grimderp of the idea, there's also the fact it makes very little fucking sense. By the end of Throne of Bhaal, Viconia is not only a 20th-plus level Cleric (and whilst CoDZilla was a 3e thing, they weren't slouches in 2e, either!), but also married to another 20th-plus level character, and on relatively good terms with a band of equally strong adventuring buddies, and decked out with all the protective gear gathered from a lucrative career of looting her way up and down the Sword Coast. The idea that a miserable drow assassin would get near her, or that they wouldn't be able to cure the poison, is ridiculous. Even if you accept that bullshit nonsense about it being uber-venom from Lolth's own fangs that the Ascension version of the epilogue has, the idea that a pissed off Bhaalspawn, armed with enough magic resistance and weapons that would make Tempus go "Hold up, this shit is insane", companions that murdered gods and godlings as well as half of the fucking Realms, wouldn't gather his buddies and go spelunking into the Demonweb Pits and wreck shit until he could take Viconian's soul back to the Material Plane after leaving Lol'th a wreck with spider legs, maybe even absorbing her portfolio is absurd beyond reason, and definitely a dick move to depress players and show helplessness.

Fuck, that would be the perfect excuse for the Bhaalspawn, especially a neutral or evil one, to go kick down the heavenly gates, take back his dad's essence, and then go after Lolth himself, god against god, in one epic tier roaring rampage of revenge and claim her as a concubine.

Ironically, despite this derision, the only mod to have any kind of better alternative ending for her is in the Edwin Romance Mod, which includes it as a separate installable file.