I am not sure about Lae'zel but I feel Shadowheart didn't get her "God's favourite princess" for nothing. The one instance that comes to mind because it annoys me is when by resolving her conflict with Lae'zel peacfully, Shart gets the moral highground, despite being the cause of the whole problem.
Shart's sharran wound - you get 5 questions to ask her about it, one of them is neutral and the rest are nice and/or caring. Compare that to asking Gale about his condition. Or asking Astarion about vampiric hunger... oh wait, we can't. She's also the only one who'll show you her memories in an actual animated cutscene.
Lae'zel's writing felt the most "neutral" to me.
The criticism towards Shadowheart not being purely monogamous for some reason garners much greater attention than the fact that two male characters are put into sexual situations that they are not comfortable with or causes trauma and we are supposed to...laugh at it I guess?
She's the most romanced companion, after all. As for Astarion, I think a lot of people who bring him there just don't get what's going on with him in general. I find Halsin's whole thing, not just the orgy, even more uncomfortable than usual when Astarion's involved, because in that case Halsin's trying to insert himself into a relationship where one of the parties is going through all
that and the game never addresses how out of line that is. And the dialogue in the drow scene is so goddamn cringe when Halsin's involved, i have a hard time believing an adult wrote that.
For Gale as shitty as those dialogue options are, at least you shouldn't be surprised at that point, because it's apparently a running theme with him.
