#but alas the game praised for countless polyamory options was too cowardly to include anything from the ace/aro spectrum

[thebearemoji]

My thoughts on the astarion romance (spoiler: they're not good)

Hoo boy going right from the wonderful bliss of karlach's romance to this.... dark mess of despair was a hell of a whiplash.

So I'm gonna assume if you clicked on that read more that you don't care about spoilers. If that's not true then dont read this. To be clear we're on the same page, astarion has two potential outcomes. You let him complete cazador's ritual and ascend to big boy vampire or you stop him from completing it.

The game made the choice to make a statement with the outcome of astarion's quest. If you don't break the cycle of abuse, then you're perpetuating it. Astarion after completing the ritual is much more cazador than himself. The romance takes this one step further, the only way to continue it if the ritual is completed is to willingly become astarion's spawn. The game implies in no uncertain terms that you will meet the same terrible fate he was so recently trapped in. Cazador's master tortured him. Cazador tortured astarion. One way or another Astarion will torture you.

He even has a line of dialogue after you reject him along the lines of "Of course I'm familiar with love. I would've tormented it out of you until you had nothing left if you'd let me." That's just the start. Just about every line to come out of a romanced evil astarion is stunningly toxic, he pretends to love you, threatens to leave you, all to get you to agree to become his spawn. You can even read his mind to find out he thinks you're degrading yourself by staying with him. It's stunningly dark, and part of me respects the writing for sticking so hard to their guns.

Speaking as a fan of roleplay focused games, this did take me off guard. I'm accustomed to games treating evil choices as options to explore your characters and develop a sense of gray morality. Because... it's a video game for fun and sometimes its fun to do silly pretend evil things and twirl my pretend evil mustache. But bg3 will occasionally treat evil choices as sins that the narrative will punish you for, sometimes immediately, sometimes later down the line. And astarion is undeniably one of these choices. A non romanced evil astarion is fine, i guess. but i know i'm not the only one out there who fell into the trap of thinking astarion could be the other half of my evil power couple.

I don't think this is necessarily inherently bad on its own. It severely reduces any desire I have to ever play an evil character again in this game, which sucks because I love minthara. HOWEVER

I got a bone to pick with the good boy astarion romance too.

So of course after the gut punch of evil astarion romance, I reloaded and made him the same good boy i did on my first play through. The subsequent romance scene is nice, and he gets the same beautiful heart-wrenching catharsis that made me sure he was the one I wanted to romance second in the first place.

But throughout all the later conversations, he keeps returning to this idea that he "seduced" my tav. ??? Where. From where I was standing, act 1 he propositions me for casual sex, my tav says yes. Afterwards he proposes continuing to have casual sex, my tav says yes.

And yet he keeps saying these words "I seduced you, manipulated you, used you." And the fact that he's admitting it is meant to show character growth.

But why is the game so determined to make my tav his victim??? Why are those my only two options? The dialogue choices didn't give me a way to say "you didn't manipulate me, I chose to be with you of my own free will, knowing what you are." There's nothing i can do to flip this narrative that my character was used and wronged, even though i dont believe she was. And that left the romance feeling very polarized, like there are only two lenses with which to view romancing astarion.

You are either his victim that he lies to for a grand majority of the game. he doesn't even like by his own admission, he claims he used you for protection. But he grows to appreciate all you did for him and even love you.

Or his helpless thrall, equal parts a victim but hell at least at that point you're embracing the kink of the whole thing.

Tbh, neither of those really do it for me.

In conclusion, astarion is an amazing character, I'm never romancing him again, and finally,

that is all