Maybe I’m wrong, but I think that Larian isn’t trying to push the narrative about abuse as some people think.
Otherwise, it means that Larian used the abuse as bait for fans… which doesn't look good, to be honest. If they really wanted to reinforce the idea that AA is an abuser, then it wasn’t really great of them to post that video with the kneeling kiss on the February of 14th (especially when they had as many as 24 animations in stock), and release 3 new kiss animations for AA. If anyone is romanticizing abuse, it's Larian in this hypothetical situation.
More realistically, they probably didn't understand the target audience of AA and decided that they needed to add spices (for marketing reasons, just like with the bear sex). Given the horny comments under the Twitter post, they more or less succeeded (many people thought that was UA’s kiss btw).
It also seems that we shouldn't expect them to take firm position regarding narrative. They remade all the characters after EA. They also changed the situation with Minthara. I'm sure they can correct Astarion's kisses.
But again maybe I’m wrong.
Personally I don’t like both version of Astarion after the new patch. UA and AA were just perfect in the patch 5, I don’t know why they decided to bring such changes when there are a lot of other companions who need more content and love (they overthinking imho cause Astarion is popular). Also right before the new patch, the UA vs AA discourse was calming down (as it should), but now an immature anti-AA wave is huge, with bad trolling and bulling, that isn’t really cool.
