But he really isn't ab**e. Astarion just reacts to the player/Tav's actions. Tav is the initiator of the conflict, always, Astarion reacts to it, gets angry, offended, etc. Like any other character. He himself is never the first to harm Tav. By the way, if you take spawn and break up with him, especially at the end, he will behave so viciously with Tav. Does this mean that he is ab**e? I don't think so, just like AA. This is just a reaction to the fact that the person he trusted leaves him, condemns him, etc. These are obvious things. Everything else that Astarion is toxic, for example, is on the conscience of headcanons.
Absolutely agree. Astarion is a very lively and reactive character. And he reacts to words and actions the way a living person reacts. Tav is always the initiator of conflict. The line “You're like Cazador” are words fit for a roleplay of an extremely cruel and emotionless character, those words are aimed at hurting him, nothing more. Astarion - a character with PTSD (PTSD survivors can have very aggressive and even lightning fast reactions to such things, tell a soldier who has experienced torture in captivity that he is just like the one who tortured him and no good will come of it). Astarion was a victim of real terrible violence, he's been a victim for 200 years, I don't think headcanon authors on the topic of “toxicity” or anyone in the real world in general, can fully imagine it. Maybe the game's authors went a bit overboard in describing the suffering in Astarion's story, the psyche can't handle something like that, and a personality that has gone through something like that is unlikely to retain integrity. But Astarion has. And he reacts more than adequately to the cruel, insulting, treacherous words from the one person he, unfortunately, has only just begun to trust.
*** 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***
And if Astarion were an abuser, he would have flipped out and shown real violence not in response to a request to kiss him, but in response to those very lines. To think that an “abuser story” is a story about someone who can kiss exclusively by putting his partner on his knees, and needs to have his partner make full horror grimaces and shake like a chicken while doing so, while you can insult him any way you want and he only grumbles, then this “insult story” is critically primitive. Just because Astarion is now forever bound to Tav, and still seems to be emotionally attached to Tav, and “won't let break up” where any self-confident person who thinks he deserves a decent partner would have pointed such a Tav to the door, doesn't make Astarion an abuser. The conversion ritual has no reversal, both characters are then trapped, and so is Astarion. A brutal villain would have killed such a Tav after the adventure was over, simply out of logical calculation and unwillingness to have a traitor behind his back. There would be no epilogue with such a roleplay. Abuser - would have choked and punched properly, in response to the line, “You're like Cazador”. But Astarion's response is anger, hurt and pain, not violence.
Someone's words don't make AA a second Cazador. Spawn and Tav's words say more about their worldview. When Tav is first able to call him Cazador, AA has yet to do anything at all. Karlach says Astarion would have lost his soul. That doesn't mean AA lost his soul. None of the characters have omniscience of the plot. Tav taunts AA, saying that he has no vampiric abilities after the riutal and that he killed all those people for nothing. In the finale, AA summons an undead army for the final battle. Having the dialog option doesn't mean that everything Tav says is true. After all, even the phrase “you became a Cazador” is just moralizing. The developers confirmed that he only became himself. Why take everything so literally?
Words don't do anything at all. Nobody's words do anything. Facts - the only time Astarion hurt Tav was a failed patch 6 fanservice. Karlach and Will, by the way, cannot be called highly intelligent characters. They're both pretty simple and judge solely based on their own ideas of morality. Moralizing is degrading the plot, spoiling the story, and really, as you correctly mentioned before, killing off a complex, interesting, and unique character, and when done in form:
*** 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***
Traumatizing content depicting repeated scenes of sexual violence, without warning, not even matching the rating of the game the player bought, is just plain deception and a violation of consumer rights. It's good that Larian fixed this mistake, it's a shame this lingered in the game for a whole 6 months.
The animations were shot separately, and the words “”scared, sad and pained“” that created Tav's facial expressions in patch 6 are part of the game's program code. There is no confirmation that this was the entire studio's idea. Patch 7 fixed this, and most likely led kissing to the content option that was originally intended as fanservice.
That's great for you *I* care about poorly written abuse. Especially when it clearly wasn't done with any type of care.
Ryzaki, thank you for intelligently laying out the problems of the scenario from the perspective of a player familiar with the topic of “toxic romance”. I found it interesting to read your posts and helped me somewhat understand the topic and what, logically, such stories should look like. For my part, I would add that for a roleplaying character who sincerely loves and understands Astarion, for a player who is a fan of classic romance, the game has an extreme minimum of not only appropriate, but at least more or less acceptable lines. But offensive lines and rails trying to turn RPG into a bad novel - from the heart. It's interesting that in the AA romance, Astarion's own replicas are very good, many of them just very much liked by fans (myself included), but the replicas and choices for Tav are a level below nowhere. This is the first time I've encountered a game where you're not thinking “what's the best choice” but “what's not so bad, and at least somewhat acceptable” to choose that, and in some scenes there isn't even an acceptable option. Unless the epilogue has a normal set of lines, and so, the lion's share of the content is Tav provoking a fight with Astarion, and in my game, even though Astarion never once even raised his voice at me, let alone any “insults”, I end up with a rather reduced and sparse content, because a lot of lines for which interactions are prescribed, I just have to ignore. I just don't wish to play a stupid character, why can't normal lines for roleplay be given? But, no for “roleplay richness”, they need to introduce a selector with terrible, and as you rightly point out, “over exaggerated clown expressions”.
