#bc Astarion doesn't agree with most of the shit Zephyr does but he still sees and appreciates how she cares for him and other people

[sun-marie]

Okay okay okay. So I'm insane about this game and I need somewhere to just. sort my thoughts

So, I am on my second playthrough, and I am definitely the kind of player that likes to replay the story and make the same choices, just exploring extra stuff I missed the first time. For example, my first pt I skipped the Gith Creche and missed a big chunk of Lae'zel's character quest, so this playthrough I did it. But I didn't like kill the tieflings when I sided with them in my first playthrough or something like that.

I bring this up because it's made for a very interesting situation regarding Astarion. See, the first time I played through the game, I considered Zephyr and Astarion to be pretty good friends in the end who butted heads a lot due to their conflicted moral compasses. He never got more than like mid-level approval of her, and his dialogue reflected that.

This playthrough has been different though, after a certain point he started calling her "my dear" and his "favorite traveling companion" in a sort of... heartbreakingly unnerving way? Imo, at least, but its beside the point. And then, when his siblings try to kidnap him at the Elfsong, when Zephyr asks if he has sympathy for them, he says "No one said a kind word word to me, you're the only one. Not everyone can be like you, you're special." (paraphrasing) Which is WILDLY different from how he reacted in my first pt, where he disapproved and basically said "Everything's different now, Cazador's going to be so mad once I kill him" (paraphrasing). And checking at this scene, his approval of Zephyr was, unexpectedly, mid-level. Around the same it would have been in my first playthrough.

And so I theorize that it must stem from the only extra thing I did this pt and not last pt regarding Astarion: I encountered the drow who wants him to bite her and I did not pressure him to do it. My first pt I just completely missed her, but in my current, we had kind of a sweet heart-to-heart afterward, and that's when the "my dear"s started.

If I'm correct, that's extremely cool to me, because it means that the drow encounter specifically meant something to him. Apart from the gameplay mechanic of "approval", he remembers this specific time Zephyr treated him like a person and not a tool and it left an impact on him and changed how he sees her. That is such organic character writing and the definition of companion reactivity, and is another example of how much care went into this game.