For a year now since release, it has always been possible to play Tav as scared, unsure, or feeling trapped in their relationship with Ascended Astarion.
“My Tav is afraid of him,” so she asks AA to kiss her. This is the first thing you do when you are afraid of your abuser. You walk up and say, “I want to kiss you.” Obviously you want to say, “I'm leaving you,” but you're afraid to, so a “kiss me” comes off your lips. Larian, please, you can see the obvious flaws in this logic. Kissing is not what these Tavs need.
I'm so afraid of AA that I can't walk away from him even though I want to, but I need the frightened faces of fear before I ask for a kiss myself.I was going for a tragic romance, like my Tav noticed this change, but it's far too late.
Your Tav has plenty of time to break up with AA before it's too late in the very finals. And after the finale, there's no kissing at all.
They feel like cheap fan-service.
The kisses that appeared in the game on Valentine's Day are fanservice. All players got their fanservice with happy faces, and only AA fans should have gotten the cautionary narrative, of course. For February 14, AA fans should get a personalized cautionary narrative about the cycle of violence. Evil Shadowheart killed her parents - her fans don't need moral lessons, only AA fans. Minthara is obsessed with power and can't be fixed? Her fans don't need moral lessons.
Only. AA. Fans. Except the frightened expressions are what cheap fanservice is, taken from
fanfics and headcanons. And as long as it is kept on topic and doesn’t result in repetitive posts from the same users flooding the forum
This is the third time this thread has been created, and its creators write literally the same thing in each of their posts. The same talking points over and over again, despite having been challenged a thousand times in previous threads, are now right there in the thread header.
