Is the soul loss thing one of the companion lines? I just want to understand where this headcanon got its legs from. Maybe I just missed it, or more likely didn't pay attention to someone's judgmental yakking and they made a whole slogan out of it.
I looked, the game really doesn’t talk about the loss of the soul, only Karlach says that she thinks that Astarion has changed, he is no longer the same. But I definitely remember the words about the soul, and then I thought, maybe I’m looking in the wrong place, I loaded into UAstarion, and there I discovered it, it’s Karlach again and she says: "He’d hate to hear me say this, but l'm so fucking proud of Astarion. He could've had it all, but he kept his soul instead". That's where it came from. The players who abandoned the ritual heard these words from Karlach, and decided, probably, UA saved his soul, which means AA did not. But this is disinformation. And just the opinion of one companion, who generally does not know and understand Astarion as well as Tav knows Astarion. And I also think Karlach is not talking about the soul in the literally.
