@jinetemoranco - Thank you so much for taking the time to write down all of this info! I didn't know about most of the datamined things you mentioned. I definitely never heard about Spencer the monster hunter and the scene with the siblings playing cards, or that he may have been a Tiefling in early stages. Very interesting.
And about Idle Champions: my bad. His age there was never 239, I'm just tired and didn't get it right. They changed it to 263 indeed, and that age is a band-aid to try to fix the tombstone inconsistencies, except it doesn't deal with all of them. IIRC (might be wrong, I'm so sleepy!) what they did to get that age was add a 1 in front of both the year he was born and the year he died, and changed the current year to 1492, which is the correct date but not the one he writes down on his tombstone ingame, he puts a date that's like 25 years before the events of the game but acts like it's the current year. Thus the fix 263 is born.
No problem
That makes sense for them to change it to 263, if the current date on the tombstone wasn't correct. I've seen some other sources that have him at different ages like 350, and I would believe that a lot more. 63 would still be very young for an elf, but slightly better than 39. And looking at his pics in the artbook, I think he may look even older there on that artwork than he does in the game.
Astarion's only mention of his elven heritage ingame are him talking about his pointy ears, the vague sense of high-elf superiority syndrome trope, and that one Durge conversation where he mentions Evereska, if that's even considered addressing his elvishness. They really do treat him as a human, in a way they don't do for the other elf companions. It's a bit jarring when the story treats him as extraordinarily ancient at times, because there are 2 characters older than him that you can recruit. I guess immortal vampires and how they clash with mortals' lifespans doesn't gel well with worlds where people can naturally live 750 years. (Don't take my nitpickiness as me hating on the game, these are all extremely minor and trivial complaints and I do love BG3)
Off the top of my head, the only other times I remember him specifically indicating something about his elven heritage is when he looks at the portraits in Ketheric's tomb. "A big painting of a sad elf, heartbreaking" / "Now that's what I like to see: An Elf at the head of an army."
During one of the conversations with Dark Urge, he says, "Although I don't look a day over 100 (years old)"... why would he say that if he was only 39 when he died / got turned into a spawn? I think there was definitely something that went wrong here behind the scenes when they put his age on the tombstone. If they had him say it out loud, like literally saying "I was 39 when this happened," rather than just having it on a texture on the tombstone, then maybe it wouldn't seem so much like it was a mistake to me.
EDIT: Re: Spencer the monster hunter, I wanted to say I looked for my source because it was an interesting thing but the tumblr who datamined all that recently deactivated. That's such a shame because they datamined a lot of stuff that most people don't know about. The only other mention I've found online of that guy's existence is this VK post, although there's some issues with what seems to be the automatic translation?
https://m.vk.com/wall-178381386_183365?lang=en.I'm skimming over, but it's missing other parts of that datamine about how a bunch of Astarion's siblings were (at Moonrise Towers?) playing cards or something and then saw him and cheerfully asked him to join them at the table or something, to which he got mad and started bragging about how he's now free and doesn't have to do a damn thing, something like that. And Spencer comes in, and he prefers to side with him. In this version of the story, act 3 datamines had the spawn seemingly be happy about Cazador's treatment of them, saying he was a strict boss but that he still fed them well. Could've been them being compelled to say so, I guess, but also could imply that Astarion was extremely punished in comparison, which was something heavily implied in EA (that he was "Cazador's personal slave, never to leave his side unless instructed to") and taken out when they changed how Daisy/The Emperor works. Honestly, back in EA everyone seemed to conceive Astarion and Cazador's relationship not like that of an abusive father and his son, but of like, an extremely abusive """romantic""" relationship.
That's also interesting, that Astarion in EA was never allowed to leave Cazador's side and was implied to be more like his personal slave. In the current game it seems that what they've left in is that he would get treated badly (or worse than the others) because his screams sounded sweetest to him or something along those lines, and maybe because of his overall strong personality, but I think it's not really explained why Cazador gives him special attention.
