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.
That's the point
Originally Posted by mirami
Personally I don’t like both version of Astarion after the new patch
Given the climate in the fandom where AA fans are the adopted children of goblins *sad violin playing* these kisses with a frightened Tav-face maximize the AA audience's lack of understanding (reminder this is a fanservice kiss for February 14, if I want to trigger Lord Astarion, I'll press the "yo, let's break up" line his evil is shown by this, kiss for balance)
And when someone strangles Tav (while Tav's face is horrified) and says "that's bad, enjoy how wrong this is or look, over there is good" - what the fandom has been doing nonstop, you're never going to choose "good". You're more likely to just choose nothing, which is what happened to some people. Literally the reason some people give up on church and faith is they were taken to church too often in childhood, and forced, at a time when they wanted to play.
I think someone said "he approached abruptly, Tav got scared " when you first watch it seems logical, but still… it out of context. In context, Tav has step to the dark side and knows Astarion, not afraid. (the night before, Astarion: doing the Devil-thing non-stop) It doesn't seem logical when you study the novel in depth and don't split Astarion into two halves. He doesn't split what's canonically confirmed.
I'll leave the continuation of my reasoning in another thread. here Larian has lost balance - the tower is collapsing.
