She’s excitable, but I just tie that into finally being free of Hell after being stuck fighting there for years.
Okay, this is another problem with the writing. Here's the thing: you didn't figure this out yourself. Not
you personally, mind you, but players in general are not necessarily allowed to come to those conclusions themselves. The writing is terrible because they're constantly trying to push you into
that specific perspective. So you remarking on it here is the game doing your own thinking for you.
I've played the game enough to realize a combination of characters dialogue and narration constantly spell things out for you. Online, you often see people talking about this game as if they cracked thr code on some character's evolution. But they're reallt just going by what the game literally told them. Might as well just read Wikipedia at that point.
I particularly hate many Insight or Wisdom checks for this reason because there are times the narrator just outright tells you what's motivating the actions of whatever characters. Complex characters are the kinds that exhibit behaviors that warrant your own knowledge and experience to extrapolate why they are the way they are. This is why Karlach is badly written but Lae'zel is....better written...
As I said above, Lae'zel has
some complexity in that she's extremely pretentious. An example of this is how she talks about purification. If the PC is not Githyanki, she says, "By covenant, I can say no more." However, if the PC
is Githyanki, she admits, "By covenant, I know little else." The fact is that Lae'zel is far from as intelligent as she likes to promote herself as being. Hell, she pretty much says it like it is during one of the initial interactions. You ask why she's so prickly and she all but tells you it's an act she puts on to look tough. In hindsight, it's a shame the writers added that part of the dialogue because it basically ruins any depth that quirk might have.
Karlach's issue is that
everyone likes her from the start and that never changes.
Karlach is not bound by honor or duty, which would seem to make for huge conflict with Lae'zel. Karlach also holds nothing back, no secrets, which would probably irk a Cleric of Shar. But the writers never let her runaway optimism pose the kinds of problems that attitude might in cases where things need to be more serious. Her excitability could have been written as being a mask for how sad and depressed she actually is but, no, the writers don't even resort to that. Karlach is and remains a one dimensional character through and through. If you kill Gortash, she seems pensive for a moment, she goes for a walk, and then comes back and tells you she's okay. Just like that. It's just sooo fucking boring.
But here's the kicker: this is all
purposeful. The writers wrote her badly
on purpose. She wears who she is on her sleeve and the game expects you to just go with it like there's something enlightening about it (especially given how your other companions remark on it).
Karlach has no depth because that's
intentional. No effort required on the part of the writers to make sense of the
why. Just set things as is and tell the player, "She's like this because of X. End of story."
Your companions continually affirm this through dialogue and even Karlach herself pushes that narrative. She even seems to use it as justification for going all million dollar baby on you when she says she wants to die rather than go back to Avernus. She is wholly a meme character and experiences no growth, no evolution, nothing.
