as someone who loves Karlach Id say bittersweet ending is a strong and emotional ending. The only thing Id add is a short stroll of us - player and her - in Avernus or her visiting us as "vacation". But a complete way to save her would feel like we forced developers to bend their vision to our caprice. I prefer to respect the way developers decided to write their story, meanwhile I also dont like how some characters I saved without even trying hard, but the one I cared the most had no way to be saved. I was ready to give up almost anything for her to stay and be happy
I agree with you, and I'm all for tragedies - I love them! The problem here is that Karlach's story just sort of stops being told halfway through the game. There is no big moment where you realize an inevitable outcome. Instead there is just a quest completion marker and a dropoff of any continuity well before the other stories in the game unwrap.
To make an analogy -
It isn't that I don't want sad things to happen to the characters in my book. It's just that I turned the page in the middle of one character talking and there are no more pages. The sentence caught mid-page-turn didn't even punctuate to conclusion. The absence of pages doesn't tell a story, it leaves the reader wondering where the rest of the story is.
