Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Story & Character Discussion game gaslight on Astarion awful behavior

(I removed the beginning of this sentence so hopefully this is still coherent) I don't think that's necessarily the case for the people who've seen themselves reflected in Astarion's actions. I'd venture to say that they're at a point where they've been working to change themselves for the better for a long time.

I think, reflecting my points made here previously, people are going to project onto Astarion and see his story as more metaphoric, so when they say they feel seen by his anger and his "everyone out for themselves" philosophy I'm pretty sure they don't mean his more heinous acts. There's a difference between being mean to someone and generally lashing out vs the full extent of what Astarion does in the game. Lots of people IRL will be toxic without necessarily having a personality disorder. I don't know if that's what you meant by your last sentence, but I find it especially important to emphasize I don't think anyone who has talked about seeing themselves in Astarion has harmed children, because I think that can be a slippery slope of a claim. I also think OP's claims that Astarion is a child abuser are done in bad faith, and doubt people who see themselves in Astarion do so because of his past treatment of children.
In my case I can at least pretty confidently confirm that while I do have some mental illnesses (Depression, OCD) I don't have any personality disorders. A long time ago, I was just a mean teenager who was plain mean towards other teenagers, and I regret it a lot, but I understand now why I was lashing out like that and I'm glad I eventually had a support system to unlearn those behaviors.

I want to remark that my intentions in this thread were both to answer to the claims that Astarion's selfish victim archetype and severely toxic behavior towards innocents had no possible (loose) real life parallel and precedent, and the idea stories are literal and 1:1 in what they mean vs what they're grabbing from irl.
I think the writing intent points pretty clearly towards more closely mirroring a more blatant and extreme version (as fiction often does) of everyday victims who respond to that kind of trauma by becoming worse, more selfish people that lash out at others.
Something I've seen talked about that I find important is people talking about how "going through trauma doesn't make you a better person", and Astarion is an extremely exaggerated version of that. But the trauma he has gone through is also accordingly exaggerated, because no one has gone through 200 years of torture.

I think Astarion is part of a dichotomy I've seen often in how people can react to trauma, that other part of the dichotomy being someone like Wyll or Karlach. Basically, Astarion represents the people who at at least one point have gone "I've suffered, why shouldn't anyone else?" while Wyll and Karlach go "I've suffered, so I'll try to prevent anyone else from going through that"