How I thought Astarion's quest would've gone, back in EA
Before we start, bear in mind this post is going to be extremely subjective. It is the product of my mind, a mind that isn't a professional or even amateur writer, wandering and wondering for 3 years.
I am not saying this is the way it should've gone, either, though there are things that I like better about my predictions (and there are things I like better about the finished product...)
This post is long. The most important part is my act 3 section, so please feel free to find the BIG RED TITLE below to know when it starts and skip the rest.
Some of the story I put together here might also be influenced by me retroactively making some of the puzzle pieces revealed in FR work with what I was imagining during EA. I'll let you know if that's the case, just to keep the experience of hearing out what an EA player predicted as pure as possible, even after the game of telephone that is recalling said memories 3 years down the line.
Important context is that, back in the day, datamines painted Cazador and Astarion's relationship a bit differently, with Astarion pretty much forced to be by his side at all times unless instructed otherwise (mirroring, perhaps, an abusive romantic relationship rather than a father/son relationship.)
The other spawn were also seemingly kind of okay with Cazador as their master, though it is unclear whether or not they were being compelled to say that. It seemed to indicate that Astarion was Cazador's personal slave to torture, specifically, instead of more or less sharing the burden with the others. I think changing this was a good thing too, narratively speaking, and it has influenced my "alternative EA version" of act 3 in turn.
RWTV's version of Astarion's quest
Act 1 is basically the same because that is what existed during EA as well. The only new Astarion content in FR is the new option/scene to unlock the act 1 romance scene. OTOH a lot of Daisy-related content was removed, but it is not particularly relevant to the rest of this post (I'll say, though, I believe at some point I thought Astarion would have a game-over where he sides with the Absolute. At the time, I wasn't sure if Daisy was the Absolute.)
We will take notes wrt Gandrel, though. That, and the Necromancy of Thay. I believed both to be important back then.
Gandrel himself isn't that important, though I thought it might be an important choice to let him live for Astarion's good-er endings. The important part for the questline was a woman he mentioned named Madame Fel.
I have no idea why, back in the day, I imagined her to be a supernatural entity of some sort (maybe a Hag that was good and righteous somehow?) that was long-lived enough to know Astarion from before vampirism. To me, I imagined her to be holding some sort of old grudge and, knowing of his freedom, wanting to punish him. I suppose that's not too far from what we got? I didn't think far ahead enough to develop this further, though - just that she would be an issue, and potentially a lore dump regarding Astarion's backstory in-game. I could say that it might develop in act 2, but I knew act 2 wasn't Baldur's Gate, so no.
The Necromancy of Thay I thought would be vital for Astarion's "best" cured ending, even if I thought I would dislike it. Actually - I think I might have just thought it was vital for one of the endings, not necessarily the cured one, for containing very important information. It might've taken a more important role in Act 2, as Astarion tries to decipher/investigate it.
I don't have a very defined vision for Act 2. There used to be a datamine about a monster hunter Astarion would align with called... Spencer, of all things. All I thought of Act 2 would be that this would be an act where Astarion starts deconstructing his view of the world, leading him to do something as unthinkable as allying himself with uh... Spencer.
Back in the day, Cazador and the Szarr family (I assumed there'd be more than one guy) were supposed to live by the Graveyard (I really looked for them there when I first played FR...). I thought there'd be more of a quest in exploring the graveyard and making it inside the Palace. I also half-hoped (though not necessarily expected) some sort of Masquerade Ball quest. Maybe tied to Gortash, instead...? I was also wondering if Gortash (he was revealed a few months before FR) would be the guy Cazador was enemies with (discarded thread in FR, potentially was actually Orin or Mystic Carrion).
The important part is that, once we meet Cazador with plans to finish him, Cazador would instead try to convince us to be on his side by revealing the circumstances that got Astarion killed.
I wasn't sure whether or not they would actually do the whole "sold prisoners as slaves" thing, as it had been implied in 2022 during an SR interview that the backstory had been potentially changed and there wasn't any indication of, specifically, the prisoner trafficking thing in EA. We're going to run with this idea, though, even if the ideas I'm going to be elaborating on don't NECESSARILY need him to have been selling people.
Cazador explains that Astarion wasn't exactly a saint before he died. That, in fact, he got killed for a very racist ruling, maybe after having sold Gur people (this is potentially explained by "Madame Fel" at a different point and setting, as well). Maybe it was him selling prisoners to the Szarrs and then, somehow, trying to play them for fools (scamming them? selling prisoners to other people?) that made him meet his death, and his punishment.
Whatever the context was, Cazador is basically saying that Astarion deserved what he got and that Cazador personally delivered justice. He expects Tav to turn on him, hand him over, betray him - what have you. And yeah, that'd definitely be a choice in this version of the story.
I personally think that it'd be quite important that Cazador was extremely fixated on punishment and justice - seeing himself as the justiciar, of course. It's obviously meant as a foil to Astarion himself. In fact, I think the reason Cazador tortures Astarion this badly is because Astarion reminds Cazador of himself (this is an idea that applies to my perception of the FR characters, though in a slightly different way).
Now, here is where I think that the right response, and sort of one of the main themes of this version of the story, is that, in fact, no one deserves this, regardless of what they've done. That Cazador is wrong.
A lot of people are very apprehensive about the idea of the prisoner trafficking backstory ever being canon, thinking it would "justify Astarion's 200 years of torture". I think that's precisely why the story is important, interesting and unique, compared to the "perfect victim" angle, personally... To disprove such a way of thinking. Of course, there'd be a ton of people who do feel that way, but you cannot dumb down a story just to accommodate the audience, in my opinion (assuming we're in a timeline where they wanted to tell the story I hallucinated, and that they changed it for the reasons mentioned).
I think it's more nuanced than people give it credit for - to me, the fault lies in an idea I take a lot of issue with, the very binary good vs evil idea that "some people are just inherently, immutably evil and must be punished, and some people are inherently, immutably good" though I might be projecting said ideas onto people here. I think this way of thinking leads, in fact, to a lot of cruelty, even in real life. When you dehumanize and alienate evil, you're going to fail to recognise it in yourself, because you've distanced yourself from the idea that you could ever do wrong. No, for better or for worse, people who do very evil things are still humans, who love, laugh, and might do some very contradicting things in their personal life, even great deeds... And, I might lose some of you here, but I think believing in an immutable morality or moral history, "permanent sins", so to speak, and in the idea that change isn't possible, is fascist in spirit/rationale.
With that pretentious tangent out of the way...
Now, here we are going to incorporate the spawn prisoners from FR, because as it so happens, it fits really well...
I am not sure whether the Spawn prisoners here are all exclusively from Cazador's spawn hunting them, or if some of them would, in fact, be some of the prisoners Astarion sold. It doesn't really matter - it works really well regardless, in the sense that Astarion already describes them in FR as largely containing criminals.
Now, the question is, do they deserve this because of said crimes? In the same way Astarion "deserves" this?
You guessed it. Just like Cazador is a foil to Astarion, so are the spawn prisoners. Astarion might try to justify it the way Cazador justifies Astarion's torture, but it's important that he can come to realize the hypocrisy here. This version of the story reflects a lot on the nature of delivering justice, examining the often very flawed idea of punishment to "obtain" said justice.
An important part of this version of the story is Astarion's change in perspective throughout his life, unlife, and what comes after. He goes from being very privileged and not really caring about what happens to those he hurts, to actually being put in his victims' circumstances, of becoming a slave. I think this might give him some perspective on how much evil he had done, but I think that, pre-BG3, it also mostly just gave him a lot of resentment and hatred for the world. But now he potentially has quite a unique perspective, in having been in all of these shoes, and finally being able to reflect on said journey and the role he had each time.
It does give more of a sense of "redemption" if they wanted to go for that, because Astarion can then choose to do what he didn't do back in the day, and to legitimately have changed his worldview throughout this lengthy journey.
From here on, the resulting paths are quite similar.
Assuming Tav sided with Astarion instead of Cazador and defeats him, we now see him choose to either:
Further embrace the idea that he had been right all along before his death, to sort of be consumed by the resentment I mentioned and conclude that the problem was that he wasn't powerful enough and that everyone's out for themselves in this world (so a vampire lord route, or as it so happens in FR and what we'll be going with here, an ascended vampire) It sort of follows a lot of what he brings up during that drunk convo in Act 1.
Or to instead try to make amends for his past and choose forgiveness (maybe not the best word for it) by freeing the other Spawn. Here he not only realizes his own place in the world, but that of others. It's, and it sounds cringe to say this nowadays, about the possibility of change and redemption.
Ideally, there would've been plenty of chances to influence which one happens by exploring it via different conversations, instead of leaving it to a single check.
Anyways - I don't have anything to nicely conclude this, other than to say that that's it. Would love to hear your thoughts! I know my way of seeing it isn't necessarily popular, but what can I say... it's mine!
