The moral of the story is ...
A few days have passed now since things escalated a bit in the comments of @marielle555’s post. I have thought about it for a while, because these discussions have been escalating immediately for years now. What I have always noticed is that the opposing side approaches these discussions through the moral judgment of evil = bad, whereas we do not.
For us, Astarion has always been evil and will always remain so. I have not yet met a single AA fan who denies this fact. We love him from the very first moment precisely because he is morally questionable and because he deals with that fact with a humor that feels completely natural to him.
However, if I follow this moral judgment, then Astarion is dead the moment he holds a dagger to my player character’s throat, wants to drink my blood, or I find out that he is a vampire. Maybe I have even already found the book about how the inhabitants of this world view vampires. So why don’t they kill him immediately if evil = bad is the logical conclusion that everyone must reach?
Astarion in Act 1 is clearly evil, so evil that some people directly compare him to Ascended Astarion and reject him for that reason. And yet they make the decision to allow themselves to be manipulated by him and, despite their own judgment of evil = bad, they willingly have sex with this character. They ignore every red flag and their own moral judgment. They ignore his greed and his hunger for power, are fully aware of his plans to take Cazador’s place in the ritual, and still enter into a romance with this man who openly sees himself as a potential Vampire king. If AA fans were to do this, they would call us completely delulu, claiming we were disrespecting the writer's work and twisting the narrative.
Suddenly, they take his words seriously when he delivers his love confession in such a sweet way. This continues until they decide for him that he must reject the ritual and give up all his wishes and dreams so that he can suddenly fit into their moral system.
From this point onward, the moral judgment suddenly becomes active. Anyone who continues to support Astarion as an openly evil character on the evil path from this point on has not understood the game, the story or the character.
It is no longer an RPG with 17,000 possible endings, but a tunnel where there are no longer any individual interpretations and choices. The people who spent the entire game ignoring their own moral judgment and red flags suddenly demand from others that these are logical consequences and that the story and character must be interpreted on that basis. Gracious as they are, others are of course allowed to play the game however they want, but they must admit that it is morally wrong.
I then wonder who is actually delulu and who is trying to force their morality onto others in order to distract from their own weaknesses. I wonder what kind of mental gymnastics they themselves have to perform to remain consistent with their own value system. What kind of headcanons they suddenly create for their own Tav, while for others it would be “twisting the narrative.”
I’ll quote Oscar Wilde here: “Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people we personally dislike.”
Thank you for your attention. I will gather my thoughts and continue this topic further. 🌹
