Halsin Facelift

Say goodbye to pudgy jowls and droopy eyelids - this used to be the brief description of the mod, but people got insulted by it. Make of that what you will.

Apparently it's necessary to have a DISCLAIMER about my mod. Not for my sake, mind you; it's for your own peace of mind.

If you feel adverse towards this mod in any way, please review the contents of the Spoiler below before you bear down on the comment section 😉

Halsin is a Wood Elf. Not only is he a fictional character, but he also belongs to a fictional, long-lived race, and this race is depicted in the lore of Forgotten Realms universe.

Every fictional character is susceptible to individual interpretation of character features, including physical. So if one person experiences a fictional character in one way, the other can experience that same character entirely differently. They are both right in their impressions because it's individual experience.

All forms of fiction exist to entertain. If you find a form of fiction relatable, inspiring and/or enlightening in some way, it means that it's successfully doing its job. But your own experience is not uniform for everyone, and that is normal.

Fictional characters should not serve as an example for a real-life person, issue or group. They are a product of imagination, and as such cannot set a standard for elements of real life. If you have real-life issues and feel strongly about some things in real-life society, using fiction as a weapon to beat the problem does not have any merit - because the example you're using comes from an imaginary setting.

Modifying a fantasy character to personal taste and imagination by using any form of art is perfectly fine, and even expected. If people never allowed themselves to imagine things in their own way, often differently than many others do, then we wouldn't have any artistic expressions at all.

If a person (in this case, a modder) wishes to share their vision with others, they are doing so for the sake of other people who share the same view, and perhaps lack the ability and/or time to make the same type of mod for themselves. It is essentially a generous, friendly act (at least for me it is). It does not mean that the modder, or people who like the mod, are making a statement about something in real life and trying to push it onto everyone.

In my personal canon, all Elven subraces (in all fictional lore universes, not just Forgotten Realms) don't visually age over 40s, no matter how old they are. This is why it bothered me that Halsin looks like a 50+ year old human - and only in facial features, while his body is perfectly youthful. On the other hand (for the sake of comparison), Minthara who is also an Elf and claims to also be very old, looks barely thirty.

How developers visualize characters in their games is, again, personal taste o