This is interesting information for me, it further clarifies the situation with the hype around the Ascended Astarion. It turns out that the image of Astarion was used not only to "show the abuser", it seems that in America and probably some other countries, this is such a hot topic, you wrote in another thread that there are a lot of movies on this topic, as I understand, it is something like a separate genre.
It's interesting to me that these might both be uniquely American things, both the "Lifetime movie" trope we discussed in the other thread, and the idea that if a woman enjoys a story with a darker love interest, there must be something wrong with her. We saw it with Twilight and 50 Shades (and I'm ashamed to say I participated in some of the bashing, though a lot of that was because I thought the writing was embarrassingly bad and the characters ridiculously flat), and we're seeing it again with Astarion, but bonus points because this is a playable story, so there must be something extra wrong with you if you want to act it out.
Originally Posted by starryophonic
Pretty much immediately, I fell as in love with him as I expected to. I've seen a lot of comments that amount to, "If you must romance Ascended Astarion, it's only okay if you're doing a durge or an otherwise evil run."
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Really, after the Ascension I didn't make a particularly evil character, I was too happy, the world was shining in all colors again, I even set myself challenges like "save every single Gondians in the Foundry", and it was the hardest fight in chapter 3, much worse than the battle with Brain, those suicidal guys were dying with a desperate zeal, I spent two weekends to save the lives of those little pixel people.
Those little bastards. I think I was lucky if I was able to keep one or two of them alive at the end. I lost all of them the first time and the blind one was so sad that I reloaded and did the whole dang fight again, even though I didn't have to.
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Yeah, I was both hurt and saddened by that line the first time around too.
That's interesting! The closest thing to a negative emotion I felt for that line was surprise, that the game would so blatantly point out that a player who ascends him might be someone who likes to be dominated. It's not a source of anxiety for me; it's something I've long accepted as something I'm into.
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But the other thing that happened was, "You gave me everything. Thank you." And it felt real, it felt like I really deserved those lines, it felt serious. And his gratitude afterward, his joy, his playfulness, his wonderful "treasure", "Aeterna Amantes". There was no submission. I would never want to part with him, on the contrary, I would not let him go from me myself. All those " angry" lines when he yells aren't for me, they're for someone else, so why should I care about them? I'd probably yell too if he brought some other spawn and wanted a "free relationship" with a threesome. Then poor Lord would probably learn the meaning of the phrase, "Hell hath no fury like an angry woman" and the whole D/s would go down in flames. Only he wouldn't want that, I can really trust him, Astarion would never betray. That's a huge rarity. That's my "gold flag".
I understand the point of view of people who say, "Ascended Astarion is only nice to you as long as you agree with everything he says." But I think that assumes that a Tav who agrees with him is ONLY doing it to not incur his wrath, and not because they genuinely do agree with him. If you break up with him before the endgame, he gets furious. Of course he does! Because where the hell is that coming from after everything you did for him? It would be weird if he didn't get mad. Besides, it's hard to make that argument when there were plenty of lines that weren't straight up agreeing with him, or even disagreeing with him. When he suggests we control the brain and I tell him we can't trust it, he just says, "We'll see." Yeah, I guess that's a good point! Neither of us knew at this point if we could actually trust it. He doesn't even get mad if you refuse to bite the drow twins in the brothel. So cruel, right? I just can't get down with condemning a character simply because of the potential for him to turn into a monster offscreen.
