I, too, hesitate to think of ways ASTARION specifically is harmed by the ritual, besides, "vibes." People decry that their sweet man is gone, but I saw a great Reddit comment that pointed out, if you've already been indulging his whims, agreeing with him, or at least not arguing with him that he needs to be a better person, then his personality won't seem to change at all. So, how is he harmed?
There is one interesting point to the answer to your question:
«It was important to us to portray sex as more than a trophy for complying with a companion's quest line. In Baldur’s Gate 3, you are encouraged to navigate your relationship – to argue with your partner and challenge their way of thinking. After all, if you just go along with whatever they want to do, you may find yourself sacrificed in an evil god's sex rite, turned into a vampire, or – worst of all, warns Senior Origin Narrative Designer Baudelaire Welch – you might even end up getting married.»
That is, you are explicitly encouraged to argue with your partner and challenge his way of thinking. And if, heaven forbid, you love him and agree with him, then terrible things will happen to you - you will become a vampire and (oh, the horror!) may even get married. Again the parallel - we are told that Tav is now wearing a "collar", and people who actively oppose the institution of marriage as such call a wedding ring a "collar". And: "Aeterna Amantes. Lovers forever, until the world falls down." Sounds like a marriage vow: "Till Death Do Us Part." So what is the "evil of the game" - a D/s relationship or marriage? If you don't argue with your partner, you will end up married to him? And if you do argue, you're good and no one will marry you?
Originally Posted by starryophonic
And the only reason I say this is precisely because so many of them lash out at AA fans and tell us we made the wrong choice. I have seen this on so many corners of the internet, again and again, the same talking points. Coming onto any pro-AA post to "well actually" completely unprovoked, even ones that don't even mention the spawn path, they're just, "here's a cool video of AA saying AA things" or something like that. Any intense reactions like that usually stem from somewhere, and if they can psychoanalyze us, I can do the same to them and say, I think they're projecting their insecurities about the path they chose. I think they realized that both paths for Astarion release some darker version of himself (either the darker version who gets everything he wants, or the darker version who will always wonder what could have been, and maybe seek out another way to get it), but they have to believe that they made the "right" choice (spoiler: there is no right choice because it's not a win/lose game), so they have to tear down the AA path as much as possible.
That's how I see it, too. Astarion hasn't " fixed" himself, he's laying low. Of course he'll be looking for a new opportunity, and he'll probably do his best to make sure he doesn't miss it this time. Perhaps that's why the game doesn't have a real good ending - an option to heal from vampirism. After all, if there was such an option - it would have been much easier to sell that path as a good one. I, myself, probably would have bought it earlier, and tried to heal him exactly. But it's unknown how Astarion would have behaved in that case. Maybe in this case, when Tav would have stopped being of use to him, he would have said something that would have also shattered the ''cute boy'' image. Maybe he didn't want any healing, but wanted the Ascension.
Originally Posted by jinetemoranco
"These deathless dreams hold memories of a mortal life once-forgotten. Of the boy I was, the man I became, the monster that will not end. I sleep, but cannot rest. I live, but cannot die. I am eternal, and I grieve."
I think what's noteworthy here is that none of his grievances here would actually be solved by the Ascendancy he seeks, unless it does something to his sleep, which doesn't seem to be the point here tbh. These grievances seem to rather be the product of this mindset he's gained after everything he's gone through, and his life has become rather empty and meaningless in turn. He is in a way trapped by what's happened to him, and has to cope however he can manage to. This exploration of his psyche, given the other quite deliberate moments where we're informed this is something that keeps happening and the parallels between Cazador and Astarion, seems to be foreshadowing the mindset AA will eventually be in.
I think Cazador is a broken, deformed person, a "manufactured psychopath" who has had "rules" hammered into him by years of being on the stake. He wasn't that way originally - Veliot broke him. But he was broken before the ritual. Astarion is not broken, Rooney even talked about how he wanted to show Astarion as "unbroken". He has remained himself, unlike Cazador, yes he has an injury, but he has remained himself.
Originally Posted by jinetemoranco
So, AA lives in Cazador's palace, now his, I suppose. It's a very literal way of expressing he's stuck in a traumatic place. He's routinely walking the rooms where he used to be whipped, tortured, sexually and psychologically abused, etc etc. And this is where he chooses to live. That's fascinating to me. Meanwhile, Spawn burns it to the ground, which is pretty straightforward in how these two routes inform each other.
Astarion happily agrees to travel with Tav, and maybe even stay somewhere, if he likes it, for two hundred years. I honestly see Cazador's palace as a trophy. A victor's trophy. When you've completely, truly, destroyed your enemy and tormentor and taken everything that belonged to him, you can have completely different, new associations with it, even if it was formerly a place of torture. But you proved stronger than your tormentor, you destroyed him, erased him, even the purpose of his life became your trophy. The palace can be a very different place for AA than it is for UA. This feeling has ancient roots - when grudges were washed away with blood. But it still means something, including to a person's psyche. Plus, you can always make repairs, or indeed drag Astarion away to travel and live somewhere else if Tav notices he's having a hard time here. (a bit of headcanon )
Originally Posted by jinetemoranco
In regards to the epilogue, AA talks about being lonely (which is another aspect of what I think the ritual does psychologically to him, in how it reinforces his view of trusting no one and having to be on top. Idk if I'm reaching with this one but I also think that here, the previous tadpole dialogue where we're informed his worst fear is "Complete solitude, being voiceless" and similar but less specific cues that he longs for understanding and company are a very cool thing to consider) but, most interestingly to me, he remarks how he's not even out in the sun much, because he'd rather be scheming in the palace. So, despite everything, he's not even truly enjoying arguably the most important boon the ritual gave him, because he'd rather be doing some classic paranoid power-hungry vampire lord stuff. What this means is that either 1. He was lying from the get-go (maybe even to himself) and didn't truly care about the sun that much or 2. What this whole ritual endeavor has meant for him has severely changed his priorities so that specific flavor of freedom he initially sought is kind of secondary now to powerplays in the dark, again, in the palace where he was a slave for 200 years. That kind of pattern, I think, leads to bitterness. Basically, AA lives hedonistically, but psychologically, I don't really think he's happy, besides surface, sensory pleasure. I'd go more into this but I think I'd go even further into my-opinion-territory which is bound to arise some debate and I don't really want to discuss those all that much.
The question then is, is Astarion happy without the ritual? Honestly, I don't see it at all. Even just by feel, by the empathy conveyed through facial expressions, tone of voice, gestures... It's interesting to compare Astarion in the two versions frame by frame, and in the epilogue too. If you look closely at him properly. It seems to me that after the Ascension, Astarion seems to suppress his vulnerable part, he seems to ignore it, he shows only confidence and fearlessness. The vulnerability only shows up in one moment when he looks at Tav, letting them go off to socialize with the others at the party. But it's much worse with UA... Such traumas don't go away so quickly, and even just because Astarion got the power doesn't mean it became a "magic button", I don't think you should hope that you can do something at once and all the things he's been through will be erased, it doesn't work that way. That's also why I dislike the rail plot so much, it doesn't give you the opportunity to show love to Astarion, because he needs it. But I also don't see the ritual as a "magic pill" that solves everything. I just see logically justifiable facts that clearly show me why he chose this path. And the "perfect" option simply does not exist, in my opinion.
P.S. There is a separate video of the lecture on the Nordic Game channel. I can't change the video in the original post, as the time for possible editing of the post has passed, so I'll post it here in case someone hasn't watched it yet. Now you can watch and, if you want, comment on the video instead of searching for it among the recording of the whole broadcast.
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