*Patiently Waiting For People To Realize This Is A Fantasy Game, Not A Therapist's Office And Nothing

*Patiently waiting for people to realize this is a fantasy game, not a therapist's office and nothing terrible will happen if the character chooses chaos instead cemetery therapy.*

Yes

(source)

It'd be great if this could magically put an end to the idiotic spawn vs ascended Astarion discourse because people think that choosing one or the other puts them on a moral high ground, but alas...

I dared to dream of the life we might make and the children she would give me… but she was a daughter of Riverrun, and Hoster Tully. Family, Duty, Honor, Sansa. Family, Duty, Honor meant I could never have her hand. — Petyr Baelish

A Song of Ice and Fire A Storm of Swords George R. R. Martin

This man. He's kinda gonna let us bite him wherever we want. aUGh

BALDUR'S GATE 3 - Ascendant Vampire Astarion

I liked reading your analysis about Astarion. Now that the full game is out, we’re there some opinions you had on him that changed or still the same? Tbh the whole reason I got into BG3 was because of Astarion but I’m now kinda put off since he’s a toxic bastard. I mean this guy could (and would) walk into an orphanage and kill all the kids in cold blood and people would still love him.

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In general my opinion about the whole game is massive disappointment. Astarion is also a disappointment because he was hinted in EA as a extremelly complex concept among the evilness, but ended up being dumbed down and simplified like 90% of the game. Even when he was Larian's fave char since the begining.

He was changed in the release game, and went from the potential and interesting topic "Evil finding justice in Evil hands", with a lot of grey morallity questions about justice in the process, to full victim without a clear background since there is nothing said about his past as a magistrate, when Sven had explained in some EPAX events and for german magazines of videogames what I wrote in this blog's analysis. That's why in the release game you feel a lot of strange gaps, like "why the gur would attack a magistrate in a city where they dont belong/live?" The explanation "they dont like his rules" is so cheap and bad, coming from Larian. Gur are not an agressive culture in Faerum even though they are perceived and stereotyped as savages, they are like the Rashemen, more shamanistic ones. And it makes even less sense when Gur can't care less about Baldur's Gate since it's not their city (they are nomads, so why would they care about any city's ruling?). Like this, there are a lot of horrible lore/plot gaps that were left not even resolved or more or less arranged to look like consistent in the overall plot. No. They were simply left forgotten.

Let's not even speak about Cazador and how the datamining bits suggested a more complex participation in the plot, and therefore, with Astarion in a potential and very interesting exploration of evilness. No, we obtained a woobyfied Astarion, removing a lot of his original aprovals to reduce his evilness, and a Cazador who is a stupid cartoonish evil bad guy that makes no sense in the plot and cares nothing about the Absolute when we read in his lair that he is very interested in power and controlling the Sword Coast. Again, disappointment. My opinions changed from an interest in a curious exploration of Evilness to massive disappointment.