When Internet People Are Like I Love Gothic Literature But I Hate Anything That Discusses Incest, Sexual

when internet people are like “i love gothic literature but i hate anything that discusses incest, sexual violence, oppression, misogyny, abuse, torture, gore, murder, or death”

Vampire buffet. Featuring Vampire Gale, Ascended Astarion and Halsin.

Full version on X.

But he's my man...

Lord Astarion and Larians original vision

Thankfully with patch 7, the AA kisses got fixed. However, it has definitely created a wave of people complaining about Larian not sticking to their original vision.

So what is Larians vision? Many people believe that Larians intention was to write a story about the "cycle of abuse", with Astarion being abusive towards the romanced player. However, I feel like there are so many examples in the game that suggest a happy narrative, not one of abuse.

First of all, we have the cut epilogue cards. Whilst they may have not made it in the game, they were written and voiced by Withers and can be found here.

At 52:32 in the video you get what I believe are the epilogue cards for a Durge that embraced Bhaal but destroyed the brain. The cards suggest a really horrible ending so if they wanted the AA romance to have some horrible outcome then they absolutely could have wrote cards reflecting that.

Secondly, we have this prophecy about how you will die if romanced with AA (if playing as Dark Urge).

Nothing about this supports an abusive narrative, if anything, it supports two vampires that are still in love until the end of the universe. It just feels weird to add this into the game if they wanted this path to be about abuse.

Thirdly, we have the dialogue tree of all the dialogue options in the inn post-brain and during the epilogue party. The majority of player responses are positive, with a few negative ones. If Larian intended for this to be a “bad” path to take and that it’s supposed to showcase abuse, wouldn’t it make more sense for the majority of player dialogue responses to be negative? Especially during the party. After all, the party takes place six months after the events of the game, this would be the perfect opportunity to show an abusive narrative, would it not? 

Photo credit: Lesfir Another thing about the romance dialogues is Astarion says things such as "us, we, yours and mine". We even have this devnote on one of Astarions dialogue lines during the inn.

Stress on 'us'

Devnotes are mostly there as little notes from the writers for the voice actors as directions on how they want certain lines to be delivered. They wanted emphasis on the word "us" which I think says a lot on how the writers saw the relationship dynamic.

Last of all, we have the kisses. Although the kisses themselves are a common argument people have about Larian intending to show an abusive narrative, I feel like many people ignore the original purpose of the kisses update.

The kisses were added during a patch update for Valentines Day. The kisses were added for fanservice, not for story-telling purposes. 

One of the AA kisses was used to promote the patch update on Twitter with the caption “on your knees”. If a company made those animations to show abuse, why promote it in such a way? The tweet can be found here.

If Larian really wanted to show an abusive storyline as some sort of "message", they could have done a much better job in the writing department. Personally, I don't think the game is as deep as people make it out to be. Yes, it shows a lot of heavy themes in the stories but the overall game itself is about having fun and crafting our own stories.

I hope my post was easy to understand, I'm not too familiar with writing blogs but I wanted to express some thoughts that were running in my head. Thank you for reading. <3

😔 There, there, my lord (He was told his party is lame)

Commission~