I also think it's significant that the narrator states that the ballroom (and I would assume the entire castle) has been renovated, and is being used to throw lavish parties. I don't think living in the castle is in itself a sign that he's in a bad place. I think *how* he lives in the castle provides more insight into his mindset. In real life, it's not uncommon to see places which hold bad memories for people (either individuals or communities) destroyed, but it's also not uncommon to see them repurposed and reclaimed as part of a healing process. Astarion doesn't brood by himself in his palace, at least not with Tav. He remakes it to his liking, reclaims it, and uses it as a place of joy. I don't get the impression that Cazador threw many parties, after all.
I think on the other points we just fundamentally disagree so I don't think we'd reach an "accord" so to speak, but here I thought I'd like to explain that, amongst the (all valid) ways you can choose to analyse media, in my case I prefer to conceive Astarion as a character that's part of a story that's trying to say something (and thus, he is a tool for it). While it's true that /real/ people can very much reclaim places, I try not to apply real person logic/1:1 psychology to characters, opting for more, say, "poetic" readings, I suppose. The way the contrast between what he does in each route is set up and the lack of exploration of him reclaiming the palace (and by this I don't mean the mention of renovations but exploring the concept of what it'd be like character-wise for him to reclaim something like that) reads more to me as commentary on him not moving on, and the renovations, which I found to be expected, don't really change my perspective on it, if anything it makes it more poetic/narratively meaningful like I said earlier. It'd be, I guess, "the same thing with a new coat of paint".
To me, the fact that it's not a requirement that an ascended Astarion even stays in the palace, makes the argument that the staying in the castle is symbolic that the ritual made him unable to move on from Cazador hold fundamentally less water.
I agree that you can't always ascribe what happens in real life to what happens in a fantasy game, but I'll point out that there are plenty of stories where renovating a space holds symbolic meaning for a character's moving on, just as there are stories where destroying that space does the same thing. So it's not just a real life thing to me.
We can definitely agree to disagree on this and any other point. I don't know what you're looking for in terms of a good faith discussion, but hopefully this falls in that category.
