Do I Still Need To Tag Spoilers For A Show That Ended Nearly 4 Years Ago? - Tumblr Posts

***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"