Bg3 Origins Character - Tumblr Posts

Metaphor by the Crane Wives= Astarion

"I've gotten good at making up metaphors, I've gotten good at stretching the truth out of shape"

"Don't look too hard cause you won't like the scars he left in me"

"And all these words are sweet and meaningless, you can't trust a single thing I say"

It's literally him.

Made this a while ago back when i first finished the game. I got a quick recording of astarion and my dark urge kissing and karlach in the background killed me.

I've been thinking about Astarion's weird obsession with virgins. He makes several references to them throughout the game, and it always caught my attention as being a bit odd and have since come to 3 possible conclusions:

1. Virgins, assuming they were eager to not be virgins anymore, would have made for easy targets. Their lack of experience (sexually speaking) would have made them easy to manipulate and lure back to the palace. Also, they probably would have been gentler than he says some of his other targets were and it would have been unlikely that they would hurt him.

2. Sebastian was a virgin when they met. There is no doubt in my mind that Astarion truly cared for Sebastian, and perhaps he left such a lasting impression that it made Astarion more inclined to virgins as a whole.

3. On the flip side of point 1, virgins, if they were content to remain virgins, would have been the only ones not to expect anything from him. Perhaps he dreams of a virgin romantic partner because he imagines they would not pressure him into doing anything sexual. My thinking about this stems from his line if you try to sacrifice him to BOOAL in act 1 where he says "and I want to wake up beside a handsome virgin every morning". If he were waking up beside this hypothetical individual in the morning and they were still a virgin, that would mean that they'd gone to bed together but didn't have sex. He really wants to have someone who is content to simply sleep beside him, and nothing more.

Idk these are just my thoughts about these lines, since I couldn't stop thinking about them.

me on my way to do another playthrough where i make all the same choices and play the same class and romance the same character but my tav looks different so it's different i swear

***spoilers for the end of the good place despite this being a bg3 post***

i've seen a few people mention and have myself been thinking about the way astarion describes how very long the 200 years he was a spawn felt. i always thought it was a bit odd the way he talks about the time despite ~250 years (including the 40-something years prior to turning) not even being a full third of an elf's life span (~900 years). but then i remembered the finale of the good place.

in the finale of the good place, the main characters finally make their way to the actual good place, where they discover that everyone there is practically catatonic because they've been given everything they could ever want and experienced everything they ever wished to experience and now have nothing to look forward to. it's not until they're given the ability to end their afterlives that afterlife becomes worth afterliving (?) again.

hear me out because i promise it connects.

as a vampire spawn, astarion has "eternal life". he won't age or get sick or die from any natural causes. if he stays out of trouble, he could live literally forever. eternal life, even if he were free, would be a daunting reality. forever is an unfathomable amount of time. those 200 years probably felt like a small eternity not just because he lived them in complete an utter torment, but because it's only the tiniest fraction of the life he would have to continue to live. so even to someone with an elf's perspective of time, someone who had from the beginning of his life expected to live far longer than just 2 centuries, 200 years would feel like forever because there would be nothing more to look forward to. there's obviously a lot more to it than that, but these are just (some) of my thoughts on the matter.

to put it in the words of the incredible eleanor shellstrop herself:

"every human is a little bit sad all the time because you know you're going to die. but that knowledge is what gives life meaning"

i like to imagine that since vampires can't generate their own body heat that they can still feel the cold so they end up like those hairless cats that love cuddles bc they're always cold so i can't stop thinking about astarion constantly pulling tav in for cuddles because he's cold and tav is very warm

i love playing a class that has the guidance cantrip and then using it on astarion instead of having shadowheart do it like yes bby u can have all the help you need

okay but imagine if you will: durge still struggles with chronic migraines even after being cleansed of the urge because of all the, yknow, head trauma and post-game is finally able to take care of themself a little bit so when they get a migraine/headache the big scary bhaalspawn needs to go lie down for a bit and close their eyes. and their romanced partner (could be any of them) makes them some tea or strokes their back or something.

when do we think astarion realized his "nice simple plan" was starting to fall apart? personally i think it was when tav draws/translates his scars. his face when you tell him you want to help and as he's turning around is just so confused and wary because he's so unused to kindness.

I think it's interesting how Astarion only calls tav/durge "dear" or "dearest" when he's upset with them. If you kill Isobel as the dark urge, he gets annoyed and says "sometimes we need to think with our heads before our knives, dear." There are other examples, I just can't think of them right now.

It may or may not mean anything, I just think it's an interesting bit of characterization and I fully imagine this tendency continuing.

"You were supposed to wash the dishes last night, dear."

I've seen a lot of people point out that while Astarion's whole "thing" in act 1 is that he's this sexy sweet talking savant, he only has 10 charisma and actually isn't all that good at it.

He practices cheesy pickup lines within earshot of the person he's going to say them to, and every single time he flirts with tav it's extremely heavy-handed and almost cringeworthy. It's pretty obvious that he's trying to manipulate tav, even if the reason doesn't become clear until his act 2 confession.

But here's the thing: Astarion never actually needed to be all that good at flirting.

He says himself that the vast majority of his "targets" were drunks and brothel-goers. People who never actually saw him as anything other than an object for their pleasure. They were going to go home with him no matter what he said. A few pretty words and his physical beauty would do the rest.

But Tav is the first person to actually view him as a real person, which is why it becomes so glaringly obvious that he's not nearly as charming as he thinks he is. Astarion tells them at the tiefling party that "every part of their body screams temptation" and their response is that he's "sweet" and "silly". They're not buying it for second, because they don't need to be told pretty lies to like him. They like him because of who he really is as a person. They fall in love with him not because he's good in bed or has pretty eyes or a sexy body. They fall in love with him because he's sweet and secretly very kind. Because there is so much pain and sadness and fear in him, and he truly cannot see how amazing he really is. That his goodness never really went away, it just got hidden for a while.

hey can we stop with the whole "astarion walking into the sunlight after tav dies" thing? did you miss the whole "astarion wants to be independent and self-sufficient" thing? the whole point of his storyline is him learning to live as a free man, to not tie his identity or life to that of another. yes astarion would grieve tav after they've passed, and if you want to write/draw that wonderful angst go for it. but for the love of god, please consider that astarion is not only a vampire but an elf. outliving the people he loves was a given from the very beginning. he would not kill himself because tav died.

i need an artist to draw astarion with neil newbon's tattoos. i just think it would be neat.

LOVE LOVE LOVE

i need an artist to draw astarion with neil newbon's tattoos. i just think it would be neat.