I don't write the fics my cats do :/

because. so. both of them are faced with choices that are not really choices, horrific choices where there's a shitty option and an option that is just a game over. astarion chooses vampirism over imminent death in a situation where he is just not told the full ramifications of this choice, that he will be enslaved and exploited and abused; wyll chooses his pact with mizora with his city, his home and everyone in it held hostage when the alternative is its horrific destruction (now on his conscience) and is immediately forcibly prevented from telling anyone while mizora wipes away all evidence of his reasons for agreeing to this, without any way of knowing in advance how badly it will derail his life.

but consummate survivor astarion frames this as having not had any choice at all; death is not even a potential option, not even an awful one — whereas hero wyll, who always wants more than anything to Do Good, immediately seeks to take full responsibility and frame his pact as a choice made freely, the consequences as ones he accepted when he made that choice, even though he could not Possibly have seen his disownment coming

& i think that speaks to the way they want to view the world and themselves as actors In It and. the ways in which they want to control their narratives both in terms of how others see them and how they see themselves?

like, astarion needs to have never had a choice because he needs to justify all the shitty things he's done, is doing, will (if left to his own devices) continue to do for his own survival to himself. he needs the world to be cruel and people to be selfish at heart and "every man for himself"/"survival of the fittest" to be true and value-neutral edicts. because he HAS had to do horrific things both as a Choice to Survive and because his master can literally take control of his body and Force Him, and because for him the world Has been cruel and brutal and if it Isn't then he needs to reckon with. the unfairness of his having been abandoned to suffer for 200 years in a world where heroes Do exist and good things Can just happen. but also the idea that he actually could have chosen differently, that dying was an option, that his one thousand victims Are his victims in some way no matter how helpless he was or felt to do anything differently, that he is in some small way responsible for the suffering he caused while under cazador's thumb and in a greater way responsible for what he does now that he's out from under it. which is elaborated on in the conversations you can have with him about the spawn in cazador's dungeons

whereas wyll needs to believe that he's had agency and that he HAS agency, that he made the choice to enter into an abusive and exploitative pact with a fiend and accepted his exile from the city willingly for the greater good because that makes the pact, and the pain he has suffered as a result of it, in some way worth it — he isn't a victim being helplessly tossed around and cast out, he's doing the right thing, he has control of this situation and he chose to be here. because if he is a victim then it in some way negates his sacrifice and means everything he's suffered is senseless and pointless and he has to reevaluate the framework he's built his life around — including the mythos of his father! including his ability to endure becoming a lemure, having his body violated and changed painfully against his will, the inability to trust his own perception of the world because mizora can just lie to him and twist the terms of the pact and and and and and... he's seeking some semblance of control over his life and his ability to do the things he set out to do! he needs the world to be one in which good people make hard choices and hard sacrifices and it's Worth It! he has to believe he's here on purpose and For a purpose, because the alternative is that he's some fiend's plaything cast out senselessly by his father whom he idolised, and that's just. too unfair too pointless

& their opposing reactions and the way their personal narratives diverge is so interesting because... theyre kind of both right And Both Wrong, right

wyll needs to come to terms with the fact that he Was victimised and he Is being abused and when, at seventeen, a fiend manipulated him into an unwinnable bind and made him unable to talk about his pact and wiped all evidence of his motivations from the world, and his father cast him out, that was incredibly cruel and there were no choices he could make that would not result in incredible suffering and pain — for him and others. which means that Now he can recognise the coercion and the entrapment for what it is and demand back & retake the agency and autonomy that was Taken from him!

and astarion does need to face the fact that while what happened to him was not his fault and he was only doing what he had to to survive... those were still choices — albeit made under coercive conditions — which impacted real people, and there Were at least at one point alternatives— it's just that the alternatives were Not Acceptable To Him. which is completely understandable! nobody wants to Die! but he Does have agency, especially now that he is not under cazador's control, which he Can exercise, and he Does have choices and the choices he makes have costs and consequences. and that can be empowering! because yeah he has to reckon with his part in the atrocities that cazador had his spawn commit and his responsibility to the people who he hurt, unwillingly or no, but like... he isn't a cornered animal who can do nothing but react; he has options now, if he's able to face up to the idea of each option having costs and owning that if he deems a price unacceptable to him he is exercising his own will

wyll is Right to recognise that he has made his own choices and is still doing so, and he is Wrong to minimise the coercive manipulative situations under which he's made them and try to take responsibility for things that rightly lie with the people who held all the cards and pushed him and manipulated his situation to pen him in

astarion is Right to point out that the options he was offered were all bad, that his decisions were made under abusive pressure in an inescapable situation where resistance was often futile and only led to more pain, and he is Wrong to conclude that that's just the way of the world and that this justifies his exploit-or-be-exploited mentality, wherein acting only in your own interest is inevitable because that's all anyone is doing