Ah, also, for your interest, the artbook also seems to have been made at an earlier stage in development and they also talk a bit about Astarion's background there, that he was part of the corrupt elite and "looking for immortality". Despite being part of the full release artbook, this seems to be old and scrapped judging by the game.
I'm genuinely curious – how do we know that this backstory (written in the artbook) has been scrapped? Or rather, what parts of the game imply/indicate that this was scrapped? I am just curious because I also don't really know. I assumed he was actually a corrupt magistrate, since he does tell you he's a magistrate when you first meet him, and at another point he says that he made a ruling that upset the Gur. I think it's a shame that his background (before he became a vampire spawn) is mainly left unexplored in the game.
That's a good point about Cazador's extended family. It implies that there are more Szarrs out there who had power over Astarion, but you never see or hear about them after you deal with Cazador.
Another interesting thing however is that there is this pseudo-canon mobile game called "Idle Champions" where they established they had worked with his main writer for his bio sheet in that game and there his age at death was established to be 150, IIRC. It was still not old enough in my opinion, but a lot more apt. It was changed to 39 ingame a couple of months later in a silent patch, and I'm not sure if it was because of the writer notifying that mistake, or because of fans noting it, and in the latter case, if the writer was asked for permission to change it. To this day, however, their blog's bio that was in collaboration with his writer has his age as 350, so I haven't got a clue.
It seems that his age in Idle Champions is now 263? I wonder why they keep messing with his age and can't stick to one. I agree with your own thoughts on it, that he looks about 39 in human years imo. And it seems most likely to me that this was probably a mistake (them not taking into account that he's an elf).
