#seraphine 🤝 syd (not questioning your feelings because you believe your relationship to be exclusively based on sex

[carriehobbs]

every day i am so grateful that you enable me. ocposting is my favourite hobby in the world

(these are probably not the best screenshots i have of seraphine but they are my favourite screenshots of seraphine. i love her little scooby doo peek-around-from-behind-the-door)

seraphine is (one of) my redemption durge and she's a drow college of lore bard who i have romancing astarion. i said specifically that i wanted to talk about the way that she and astarion are mutually (and, in some cases, not-so-secretly) using each other in their act 1 romance, but to make that make sense, i'll have to explain a little bit about her.

one of the things that (as her player) sets her apart from my other tav/durge runs is that seraphine is really rather pragmatic (and a little ruthless) in her approach to handling problems. she gets off the nautiloid and knows only two things about herself: that she has an illithid tadpole in her head and that she has violent and inexplicable urges. whereas juno (my other redemption durge) immediately responds to her dark urges with revulsion, seraphine compartmentalizes that shit until act 3 (thereafter she handles it so badly she tries (and fails) to break up with astarion). it's not that she likes the urges (and she certainly doesn't like that she has these seemingly external forces trying to make her do things she does not want to do - if she's going to murder her way across the sword coast, it should be because she wants to do it, not some unwanted urge), it's just that she has bigger problems that require more attention than fretting over if she's a bad person. specifically: 1) not becoming a mindflayer, 2) not slaughtering her way through the countryside uncontrollably, and 2.5) in case she does slaughter her way through the countryside, finding a way to make sure her newfound allies with an unfortunate amount of morals do not kill her for it.

see, seraphine recognizes that power doesn't just come from who has the most money or political pull or even physical power. there is power in being liked, and there's power in being owed. and the way she sees it is that, if she fails to resist her urges and does kill someone, if she's built up goodwill with her companions who like her and feel like they owe her for helping each of them with their personal troubles and being an all-around-good person (helping the tieflings in the grove, etc.), they will be more likely to forgive and ignore her own issues (and, to her credit, this does work: she gets caught after she kills alfira and, while they disapprove, no one tries to kick her out of camp or kill her. she just gets the verbal equivalent of a slap on the wrist).

so when astarion approaches her and starts flirting with her and suggests they have a sexual relationship, between him coming on way too strong and the fact that she's actively endearing herself to everyone else in the camp using similar tactics, she can easily spot his attempts to manipulate her. at this point in the game, she's figured out what will make the other companions like her, but she's only just figured out how to handle the issue of astarion (in her playthrough, he propositioned her immediately after handling the gur hunter in the swamp, which is the introduction of the cazador-is-looking-for-astarion plotline). and when astarion propositions her, she realizes that she doesn't need to figure out how to get astarion to like her, or how to make him feel like he owes her. he's handed her on a silver platter a way to manipulate him into needing her, such that he will tie his own fate and his own safety to hers (and, if she goes down, he loses his protector, so he better be inclined to prevent her from going down if need be).

i think it's important to mention that seraphine does actually like astarion (because i definitely just made it sound like she doesn't). they're not super close at this point, but she genuinely enjoys his company. he sees the world in a similar way (not perfectly similarly - she wants to shake sense into him when he disapproves of helping people because she's playing the longest con of her life and he's not getting with her program), at least in terms of wanting power (so that he can have freedom). she also finds him funny and she gets his sense of humor. one of my favourite moments in the earlier stages of their relationship is when astarion runs pickup lines past her and she's having a grand old time giggling like a schoolgirl at the melodrama of it all. so she's using him, but she does also like him. just as he's using her, but (in time) comes to like her too.

(an odd note, as well, that doesn't really fit into this but is tangentially related: seraphine starts helping with the companion's personal quests because she needs them to like her and, over time, helps them because she grows to like them as people. but it always feels like she is helping them with their problems. but with astarion, freeing him from cazador always felt like their problem together. it was something she felt actively and equally involved in, even from the start, even if she didn't understand it. in fact, in astarion's act 2 romance scene where he tells you that he has real feelings for you, seraphine realized in that exact conversation that she had real feelings for him too, and all of her behaviour very quickly made sense.)

so it's in this fashion that seraphine and astarion are both using each other in act 1 (and into parts of act 2). seraphine fully knows that she is trying to manipulate him and that he's trying to manipulate her. astarion, on the other hand, doesn't. (i think that, as a character, he would be socially savvy enough to put together what was going on, but the game itself doesn't seem to anticipate that players might take this approach to his romance. i think that's why, in astarion's act 2 romance scene, you have the option to get mad at him for "revealing" that he began your relationship with the intent to manipulate you, but have no option to tell him that you were manipulating him too. so canonically, astarion didn't know that seraphine had figured out his game. i headcanon that she does eventually tell him this - maybe in act 3?).

of course, as their romance progresses their feelings for each other change and the manipulation tactics disappear and they're just two people who love and care for each other deeply. as i get closer to the end of act 3 in seraphine's playthrough the more i am convinced that they become strangely domestic post-game.