first of all, hello nonny! thank you for a really great question.

i would love nothing better than for bard to fall/be in love and go through that process of developing feelings with him. i do have some of it with shadowofthelonglake, and i used to write romantic, emotional threads with lostladyofesgaroth and mirkwoodscaptain. but since i came back from my hiatus, i will be the first to say that there has not been a lot of shippy type things on this blog. and while it is sometimes frustrating for the mun (i just want bard to be happy!), it is a part of how i play him (how he allows me to play him, really).

he’s not a muse to be pushed into ships, definitely not. in verses where he believes his wife to be dead, he is impossibly loyal to the memory of her. and he will be the first to admit that memory may have gotten somewhat romanticized over the years; it’s not easy to compete with the glorified memory of a dead wife who was deeply loved. moreover, bard is a very, very busy man. all his time goes to earning coin and taking care of his family. the children help out a great deal and are wonderful, but he is still their father, the sole caretaker of the family, and that means a lot of responsibility. i think bard has accepted that he is a father first, and a widower second. the children always come first. he rarely thinks of his own needs, wants, and desires.

aside from all that, i try to play bard as an honorable man. whenever i play him off a female character (and the balance is 80/20 most of the time in terms of whether i thread with a female or male character; idk why that is, it just happens), he’s not sizing them up as wife material. not even as ‘a woman of interest’. he sees them as people with particular strengths and merits of their own, people he grows to respect, and sometimes care for quite deeply. but lord almighty it takes a lot for this oblivious idiot to even realize that there might be the potential for love. but yes, it would be so wonderful to explore that with him. <3

TL;DR I WOULD LOVE THAT BUT MY CHARACTER IS A MORON.