The author claimed in one of the threads on this forum that these kisses “romanticize abuse”. If we are talking about “romanticization”, then the fantasy “I can fix him” is no less destructive and dangerous, and it is better not to transfer it to real life. Victims of abuse stay in relationships with their abusers often because of similar fantasies and the belief that the person will reform if they receive enough support and love. The very idea that Astarion is not evil at heart, that everything evil in him is the result of fears and trauma, is romanticization. But few people think about the spawn's ending in that context, but AA fans are constantly reminded of it.

I suppose if we get involved with a guy who lunges at us with a knife the first time we meet him, we're all well aware that in real life such people are best avoided rather than trying to make sense of his traumas. I also assume that all Astarion fans romanticize him to one degree or another. Some people have a hard time recognizing him as an “evil character” at all, because they prefer to write off his evil motives as trauma. But if you transfer that kind of thinking to real life, it doesn't look so harmless anymore. But I don't see why you would do that when it comes to a computer game, and that goes for the AA route too.

As for kissing, Tav's scared faces are OOC for AA. It's not a matter of player choice or roleplaying, it's a matter of rewriting an AA character who wasn't someone who would enjoy Tav's fear BEFORE patch 6. The relationship was of a completely different nature. And it's unfair to change the character so drastically six months after the game's release. This is the very thing people were primarily outraged about in February. This issue is already more than “give me back control of my character”, this topic is already venturing into the territory of the player-independent character, the Ascended Astarion. And I think that's given too little attention here.

The creator of this thread can roleplay that her Tav has acted foolishly and is afraid to part with him for fear that AA will take revenge on her once the tadpole in their heads is destroyed. Tav's scared faces contradict AA's script and character. If Tav is afraid of revenge, AA doesn't retaliate anyway. What is the point of the request? The point is to make AA a rapist for no reason because, again, Tav's fears of AA's revenge are a figment of her imagination because it's not in canon. The “trap” is only slammed shut in the very finale, and that, there's no talk of punishments or anything like that. Your Tav's fears don't make AA a rapist.

So it would be fair to either remove these kisses altogether, which everyone can't perceive unambiguously, or to give the option to choose between the standard kisses from before patch 6 and the new ones that will appear in patch 7. I don't think AA would have refused Tav a vanilla kiss if Tav wanted it, just like he didn't refuse to “be gentle” when Tav asked for it in the transformation scene. After all, he always had a tender kiss until patch 6. The problem with kisses is that we ask for them ourselves, no one forcibly forces us, but everything looks like violence. It's just animation after all, so the player kind of loses control of their Tav during the kiss. If my Tav didn't like it, she would have said so, not been horrified. Furthermore, I'm sure AA himself would hardly kiss Tav if he saw a face like that, it's just not in his character. This character was feeling sorry for Tav about the deal with Haarlep, and suddenly he's almost committing sexual violence?

I know what it's like to lose control over your own body. It's a wretched thing.

As far as I remember, those dialogs for AA and spawn are the same, except for this one:

Gods, though I've become untouchable, my precious treasure has been violated still.

It feels like wild OOC.

So the most adequate option I see is just giving players a choice between the standard kiss and the ones coming in patch 7. And I agree that it is in the transformation scene that this choice should be made, depending on which dialog you choose.

Do people here really want compromise for their roleplay, or do they only want AA to be a rapist because the “cycle of abuse” is all they see that route?