#i honestly don't get folks who don't earn his approval at all

[not-poignant]

@hellish-cleric replied to your post “I think it will come as no surprise to anyone that...”:

Yeah, everyone in my party, plus most of the players in my d&d group *hated* Astarion as soon as they met him. Meanwhile, I'm Team Ride or Die for Astarion. I'm a little confused at all the hate he gets.

​Oh actually I can answer at least some of this!

He's an obviously camp character who was in a gay relationship (a forced gay relationship but w/e) in an AAA game that is mostly going out to dudebros, and frankly the people who overwhelmingly hate him or kill him immediately the most are straight guys. (The biggest complaints for BG3 are not actually the bugs, but the LGBTQIA+ rep, including being able to have a nonbinary character, or trans character). Within that context, there was already latent Astarion hate in the community that was easy for everyone else to pick up on. So some of it is honestly straight up homophobia!

Then on top of that they gave him PTSD over being saved by someone who then tortured him for 200 years and enslaved him in exchange for that rescue, so he reacts badly every time you save someone, because he doesn't trust that.

And then on top of that he's a complete chaos gremlin. After all, he was tortured and forced to torture people for 200 years, and just about no one maintains much of an ethical backbone after that kind of treatment.

And I think the combo of 'so much of the (guy) community hates Astarion so there's already a background vibe that predisposes people to being suspicious of him' and 'he's camp which hooks into the homophobic folks who don't like that' AND 'he keeps disapproving of me when I do heroic things' (which is a lie, he doesn't always disapprove, and sometimes he actually approves, it depends a lot on context) just kind of turns a lot of folks off him.

He's the only character in the whole story who will actually take you aside privately and comfort you if you do a sexual thing with an NPC later in the game and choose dialogue options that say you were disgusted by doing the thing. He literally takes you aside and starts joking and then is like 'actually... I know what that's like, and I'm so so sorry you had to go through that.'

Dude's fun to meme, hilarious to meme, but he's also the only character who comforts you after you get sexually assaulted/harassed, and in an extremely genuine, 'no strings attached' way. I'm ride or die for that fucker, and I laugh at the folks that turfed him because a bunch of dudes laid a path they walked down.

Like don't get me wrong, some folks just hate him because of the way he looks, the constant disapproval if you're playing a Very Good Character is frustrating, or they have no use for a rogue (they hate loot or maybe they're playing a rogue themselves), or because he can be naff in a battle if you spec him badly / don't know how to spec him out, or for a lot of super understandable reasons! Like, if you never talk your way out of situations, hulk smash a lot in battles, and save people, you're going to get his disapproval AND he won't be as useful in those battles. If you don't sneak around picking off folks, and just go in and smash everyone, he's not as useful as Gale and Wyll who have good AoE, or Lae'zel and Karlach who have amazing 'Hulk Smash' abilities.

I'd avoid him too if I was playing a character who couldn't persuade/deceive/intimidate my way out of situations (which is the best and easiest way to earn his approval), and I might be like 'I don't like Astarion' because of it. He doesn't fit my playstyle! I can't stand Lae'zel for example, because I just don't vibe with 'killing the weak and no one is equal' as a political stance!

But some of it re: Astarion is literally 'a lot of folks are implicitly homophobic and he's easy to hate.'

Frankly I think Dorian (from Dragon Age: Inquisition) would have received a lot more of this too if he'd been more morally questionable as a character when you first meet him. But they made him a 'good' queer so he got more conditional acceptance (and even then, he still got a lot of hate initially!!!)

I am very fortunate that everyone I know personally absolutely love him, and I'm surrounded by a lot of Ride or Die Astarion fans in my personal circle/s both offline and irl and that makes me so incredibly happy.

#hellish-cleric #i have a lot of thoughts about this #and i am absolutely turning off reblogs lmao #because i suspect this fandom could easily be a dumpster fire about this #but a lot of astarion hate is just #latent homophobia #HECK IT'S NOT EVEN LATENT #it's on the surface #i honestly don't get folks who don't earn his approval at all #because you don't have to be a bad / unethical / morally questionable person #to keep his approval decent? #i'm saving everyone #and i'm in Act 2 with Good approval with Astarion #but i did trick the Thorm siblings into killing themselves #in the Shadow-Cursed Lands #and that netted like 8+ approvals from Astarion lmao