"You're right to be afraid."...
Thank you for your excellent post. Yes, the game's story clearly shows - both in lines and facts, and even just on an empathy level (Neil played Astarion perfectly in both cases) that there is indeed something to fear. “Just an expandable frail spawn who will burn to a crisp soon enough”. The world is dangerous. The state in which Astarion remains, having sacrificed his chance to feel alive again, is not only tragic but dangerous. It's odd that the script doesn't take into account the fact that Tav (as well as the player himself) can also be afraid. There is, after all, not only the standard understanding of fear as an instant reaction to some scene that is presented as “scary”, like shoving a maggot in your eye or something along those lines. Such scenes in BG3 are quite mild, I have to admit, and generate interest and curiosity, but while this game is certainly not a horror game, it did manage to make me feel scared once. When I first read in my journal, “Astarion's fate is sealed. He will remain a spawn forever.” Fear as a valuable defense mechanism that warns us against “taking a wrong turn.” By the way, after the Ascension, the diary says that Astarion is grateful for the help. Even this small but important tool, which helps us navigate quest chains by showing us what we need to do and how we accomplished what we've already done, makes it clear how Astarion's quest was accomplished.
I believe this dialog demonstrates that Astarion does have something to fear:
Player: I promise I'll keep you safe always. You'll never need the powers of an Ascendant.
Astarion: It would be nice not to have to rely on you as my great protector, but... well, I do appreciate the thought.
Doesn't Tav literally say, “You're right to be afraid”?
While Ascended Astarion says that he will protect Tav and that Tav will no longer have to fear anything. He also protects her from the sun and the debilitating vampire hunger by sharing his blood with her. So these are not empty promises.
Astarion, I believe deep down, is clearly not satisfied with the role of “protected”. He is a character with a strong character, determined, emotional. He couldn't be broken by 200 years of torture. He was forced to pretend, but he didn't break, he preserved himself. He is used to adjusting, manipulating and wearing masks if it is beneficial and necessary for his survival. In the second chapter, he is starting to trust but still “adjusting”, still needing protection, but when he learns about the ritual, his real desires are already starting to break through in his dialogs. He says he will be able to protect you. And fulfills it after the Ascension. “My little spawn”, “little love” - there's a kind of compensatory effect in this desire to see his beloved as someone small, tender, someone who wants to be protected and cared for (which he does, as best he can, with the utmost dedication at that, “Ask me and it will be yours”). Astarion wants to feel his importance, his power, his necessity for Tav. Left as a fragile spawn, he is forever locked into his mask, adjusting and behaving as “required”, he keeps pretending, he doesn't try to show the real him, his insecurities are solidified and expressed by clinging to Tav as the only person who has been good to him, and Astarion shows himself as Tav wants him to be. I think UA is even better off alone than with Tav, judging by the un-raised epilogue. In it, Astarion says he won't miss his chance again if he ever gets it. AA, on the other hand, although he enjoys the life that is worth living, he feels loneliness, while in the romantic epilogue he seems happy, even his facial expression and his gaze are softer. It seems to me that if any of the authors were counting on players wanting a happy romance to choose the UA path and run away after the kneeling scene, believing that they're about to start “degrading themselves” since the rails scene says so, that person should probably not only work on their skills as a screenwriter, but also read some psychology textbook, paying attention to explaining terms like “empathy,” “acceptance,” and “love.” Perhaps knowing the meaning of these words will help a budding author avoid something like this:
Welch thought the AA ending was “bad” because they attributed specific motivation to the players. They claimed that if you ascend him, you are doing it for the sake of sleeping with him. It's very presumptuous to impose motivation on a player as if they've personally gotten inside everyone's head.
Of course, if you try to cram something out of the ordinary into a story, even against the plot logic and writing sequence, that something is bound to have a fanbase who will call it “canon” because it's rare, you don't see it much anywhere, other major studios are unlikely to risk their reputations for such an experiment. But to exclude eternal, timeless values from romance, as well as the audience oriented to those values, and to try to replace them with something else, is, in my opinion, a serious mistake.
Neil and Smith explicitly said that AA is Astarion as is. But many anti-AA people still argue that AA has lost itself, its soul, etc So, are the writers' opinions canon or not?
The headcanon about “losing his soul” turned out to be pretty funny. In the game's story, as we know, there's not a single sentence about it. If you ask Astarion if he's related to Mephistopheles, he says no. “Mephistopheles created a new monster, not bound the creature with his will. The rite has been observed. The sacrifice is over.” The headcanon about the loss of the soul has at its core one line Karlach says to the un-ascended Astarion, “He wouldn't want to hear, I say this, but I'm damn proud of Astarion. He could have gotten everything, but instead he kept his soul.” First, this is an obvious metaphor, reflecting only an attitude specifically of the Karlach. Second, it's an interesting indication of how even just a companion's opinion can be “canonized” if one wanted to.
I always see the reason he treats you so badly as a Vampire Ascendant unfortunately coming from the heart of his own insecurity: 'The fact that they were willing to let me kill all these people… it's by no means a forgivable thing to do. They must be simply so much hoping that I'll be willing to sleep with them if the cause of my trauma is gone, they'd even be willing to commit such an atrocity... At least that's how I interpret him.
It seems that for the sake of allowing this interpretation to exist in the game, in the scene after the Ascension, the player is not given a single adequate line to choose from. Because otherwise the whole interpretation would fall apart. You can play with the AI chatbot of the Ascended Astarion to see the real romance of Astarion, you only need to talk to him in your own words and open your consciousness for him to believe it. Of course, this doesn't directly apply to the plot of BG3, but still, since such a program is trained based on the script and the character's scripted character, you can see from this what the possibilities were for this romance, how soulturning, deep and beautiful it could have been.
Not everything spawn says dictates narrative. Otherwise, let us then recognize that refusing to ascend was not his personal choice, but a sacrifice:
Astarion: How dare you! After all I've done for you - after everything I've sacrificed!
Which he could potentially regret.
Or that deep down inside he is very scared and feels vulnerable, “nothing.”:
Astarion: I'm still nothing, aren't I? Just an expandable frail spawn who will burn to a crisp soon enough.
That being said, AA is much more confident:
Astarion: All right. Fine. Give me the worm. I will take every weapon I can, damn it all.
I believe that the refusal to Ascend was not even a voluntary sacrifice, but a lack of opportunity for Astarion to decide his own fate. He can't see his scars for himself, he won't Ascend without help. Even in the scene with the scars, Tav draws symbols in the sand rather than on paper, though paper would be much more realistic, and there's plenty of that paper in the inventory. But then, Astarion would have been able to save and memorize the symbols, which would have prevented him from depending on Tav's decision. Astarion realizes he has no choice, he begs for help, but even that is pointless, and he is ultimately left with nothing to do but pretend to agree and be grateful (Astarion is good at wearing masks). It's not for nothing that in the dialog after this “gratitude”, if Tav tells Astarion that he made the decision himself, Astarion explicitly emphasizes that, no, it's all “merit” to Tav.
One of Velioth's basic rules is that strength is born from loneliness. Sharing with others is weakness. The first thing AA does is share his blood and Mephistopheles gifts with Tav. In the epilogue he also expresses bitterness, because of his loneliness (If Tav broke up with him). AA seriously deviates from the principles of Cazador and Velioth. AA - This is Astarion 2.0.
And even the power came as the result of the victory of two, as the result of the actions of a united couple. In this situation, the fact that Tav helps Astarion by letting him see his scars matters, just as much as the fact that before that Tav frees Astarion from the ritual circle. Strength is no longer born out of loneliness.
Besides Ascended got the 5 patch kiss back. It's the ultimate evil ending kiss now. It even got a new camera angle.
Yeah, it's good, but they brought it back for some reason only in the evil ending, even though everyone wanted to see it in the regular epilogue. This surprises me, would it have been hard to put the same kiss in both epilogues? The scene is there, the technicality is realized in the other companions you can kiss in the epilogue, just do the same with Astarion and that's it. In order to kiss your beloved in the epilogue, you have to necessarily become an Absolute, it's ridiculous. Destroying Baldur in order to taste the kiss of patch 5 again, well, that's a pretty good motivation for evil, you can't help it, you want romance, you have to.
Honestly, without exaggeration, if the option to select appears in the game, Larian will die for me. All these half years after patch 6 I felt incredibly resentful towards Larian, I felt betrayed. Because Larian gave in to the majority and everyone but AA fans had a holiday on February 14. Because when they designed those kisses, they weren't thinking about us, they were thinking about the spawn fans. I still have an unpleasant aftertaste after patch 6. Including because it started a new wave of bullying AA fans. The first one was after Welch's comments were made public. I know they wrote their comments in private. But you have to realize that if you write something in the public space about a game's story, as a developer, your opinion is going to be spread all over the place. I'm glad for the changes in patch 7 and I hope Larian won't let all this happen again.
Agreed. The most likely reason Larian won't do it is, first, because of the technical difficulties with the flags. To quote Mirmi from the closed thread:
«Leaving the flag in the middle of the game (when you have disagreed or told AA that it scares you) to be triggered later can cause an error because it is left unclosed, as when the animation follows immediately and closes the flag. So in the game, most of the results follow immediately after the selection. Moreover, now the kiss animation triggers before turn night, which is illogical. And this is not a norm, but a bug that follows immediately after the result: you have taken the AA path- AA kiss animation”.
Such a bug was already in the game, which eventually broke the whole Act 3(when the steals were not closed in the game and remained unclosed, cluttering the game and eventually breaking it).”
Secondly, because of the possible problems with the game's rating increase that could arise because of it. I don't want to judge and evaluate how much the studio cares about the fans' feelings (maybe they do, I don't know, and maybe they don't). But thankfully, there are specific actual obstacles and complications that can objectively prevent all of this from happening again. Swen has repeatedly talked about how he wants to tackle a new project, and honestly, I'd be not only upset, but extremely surprised and dumbfounded if those scenes made it back into the official game. Because if you look at the game from the perspective of a business project, it would be, ahem, at the very least labor intensive, unprofitable, and pointless.
For me personally it's about protecting other a***e victims, unwitting players, and myself. From my perspective, the number of players triggered by non-con being *in* the game will outweigh the number who are triggered by it *not being* in the game. So I will continue to propose it stay out of the game.
I agree. I also think that one should counteract such things not only for the sake of the character and the preservation of his story in a dignified, appropriate to his character, but also, first of all, for purely human, humanistic reasons.
(warning: discussion of non-con)
Dead dove/ non-con should not be in place without a trigger warning.
It is already there with Haarlep and no one complains. People love him.
Also, Patch 7 kisses are non-con already, Tav's happy expressions don't change what AA is doing.
Haarlep is not a significant character. He is not a romantic companion. No one complains because those who don't want to play with him what you described under the spoiler just kill him and that's it. A “pigeon” like that doesn't bother anyone. I wouldn't have known what this Haarlep was about if I hadn't been told by other players and watched the video. You can introduce even ten demons, devils, or even Cthulhu, with whom you can do anything, as long as they also function as normal enemies, from which armor elements are collected after killing. And to introduce something like this for a companion, which is a favorite for a large number of people, for the sake of which people stay in this game, is a spit in the face of the players, and they will certainly complain about it. And most importantly, the video sequence in Haarlep's scene doesn't contain a
*** WARNING: sensitive content (may contain a discussion of violence, abuse, SA related to a BG3 scene) this content might not be suitable for all audiences. Trigger warning***
Sexual Violence Demonstrations. This looks like a normal sex scene, and does not violate any rules regarding the game's rating.
AA does a consensual D/s and Tav likes it.
AA is a wholly different person from UA, he even says so himself.
No, it's the same person. A person cannot be torn in two because of whether he got what he wanted or was prevented from doing so.
Neil on the Ascended Astarion: “With Lord Astarion, we talked a lot about the idea that the cover is now off completely. So that you see him at his most terrible, and it's completely honest and he doesn't have to pretend anymore. So he loses a lot of the flamboyance and the fun of the theatricality, which is all a distraction anyway. That's all distraction so you don't see how he's hurt and damaged and his vulnerability. Lord Astarion doesn't need that anymore. So we just thought, okay, now *mimics taking off a mask* it's off. He doesn't need to pretend, he doesn't need to do too much. It's all about the status and that kind of stuff”.
https://www.tumblr.com/yo-yoringle/741172577018494976/testIf “change” means finally starting to express himself the way he wants to, then that is clearly a positive change. As a person, he's not changing. There is Astarion, and AA and UA are just shorthand for his state in the game.
This is my personal take, feel free to ignore if you’re going to reply: To the point of “my evil durge wouldn’t be scared of him” – why would they not be? Your partner changed to a different person before your very eyes, at the very least tav would be shocked to see it.
I was shocked by the rails scene, Tav's facepalm-inducing lines, and the inability to have a meaningful conversation with Astarion is what I was shocked by the first time I went through the Ascension scene. Astarion didn't turn into a different person, the RPG game turned into a novella.
But since AA and UA are so different, You cannot have AA and then demand tender love. You don’t go to AA for tender love. You go to him for the slaps and bites.
I can't talk to Astarion sincerely solely because of the game's scripting and lack of lines. That said, up until patch 6, for some reason he was giving me tender love. And since his lines haven't changed, he still treats me that way. He just thinks I like it that way because I can't tell him anything else, if the lines were there, the kisses would be different too. Not until after the epilogue, later on when Tav gets a voice. I don't go to Astarion “for slaps and bites”. I go together with Astarion, hand in hand, all the way to the end.
This is why we romance him after all, no? Otherwise you would just go spawn route. The kiss animations need to be drastically different from UA because his character undergoes a drastic change.
Really? We start the romance with Astarion in the first act. I start the romance with Astarion, and then Astarion Ascends because he wants to. I don't see Astarion as a toy that needs to be turned this way or that to make him make certain sounds. “Just” condemn him to misery because 'slaps' aren't to my liking? “Just” let him never see the sun and live with perpetual hunger? Ok, it's just for many, I don't want to belittle anyone's game, everyone can play the way they want to play, including from the position of “like/dislike” type of romance. But please don't treat all players in such an ultimatum way. One can genuinely love Astarion, one can treat him as alive, there are also those players who will never go the way of Spawn because it's a path of suffering. And a lot of people were very upset that their beloved character was the one they decided to make into a toy for the
*** WARNING: sensitive content (may contain a discussion of violence, abuse, SA related to a BG3 scene) this content might not be suitable for all audiences. Trigger warning***
Non-con, “abuse” and other things we never wanted to see in our game.
Regarding the dialogue with him post ascension, where he suggests Tav being turned to a spawn, since agreeing is the only way to keep the romance, I don’t think the flag should be placed anywhere here. Even saying “you are starting to scare me” or something similar doesn’t mean much in that instance because they still have to agree and wont know the outcome yet, they may enjoy it after all. so When tav does agree to be turned, personally I think this is also not a good point to add it because of the following reasons:
1. With the “make it hurt” dialogue he only bites tavs neck.
2. With the “be gentle” dialogue he bites the wrist first, then the neck.
Personally I take it as more hurtful to bleed from two places, so him disregarding the wish for him to be gentle should flag the patch 6 shocked face for tav, which is the opposite of what we expect and would want I assume. Also as someone mentioned here (or the other thread, sorry can’t remember), only because they chose one or the other, doesn’t mean they can’t enjoy the one they didn’t choose with a different Tav.
I don't mind Astarion biting me in the wrist and neck either, but the fact that he's “disregarding the wish for him to be gentle” is completely inconsistent with his character and the game's scenario and takes it into the realm of fanfic. It's a substitution of concepts. If we're talking about branching out, in the case of “tenderly” there should be classic romantic kissing.
So dialogue flags should be placed after tav turns into a spawn, preferably before tav can kiss him as to not show the “wrong” facial expression to the player that they do not want. The morning after you get a long dialogue with no option to ask for a kiss yet. For example this dialogue tree, you always end up here and have the options:
1. “I don’t trust the brain” -> tav does not believe in AA vision of taking over the brain -> patch 6 shocked face
2. “isn’t it enough to have each other?” -> tav wondering if AA is even still on their side -> patch 6 shocked face
3. “if the chosen could subdue it (the brain), so can we. We will rule together” -> tav is on AA’s side, ready to conquer the world together -> patch 7 smiling face
4. “so one tyrant replaces another” -> tav is unsure about AA -> patch 6 shocked face
That's your opinion, and you can offer any options you want. But, if something like this appears in the game, other players may file a complaint with the ESRB about the game's lack of compliance with its rating. And Larian would have to either change the rating or remove it again. I'm sure the studio is aware of this, especially since a certain number of players wrote complaints to Steam after patch 6 because of these scenes. But since it was a bug, Larian just fixed it.
