#larian interviews

The interview opens with:

“Stephen, introduce yourself if you can, of course.”

From the perspective of even basic interviewing etiquette, this is a remarkably strange way to greet a guest. “If you can, of course” implies that the guest may not even be capable of introducing himself. Was it supposed to be a joke? If so, it’s one that lands closer to mockery than humor. Even inexperienced interviewers generally avoid opening with remarks that risk putting their guest in an awkward or demeaning position. More than anything, it’s a sign of inexperience—and perhaps of not fully understanding the boundaries of professional courtesy. It gives the impression that the interviewer either doesn’t recognize how disrespectful the phrasing sounds or has become accustomed to a style of content where this kind of tone is considered normal. Other moments stand out as well. Asking about Rooney leaving Larian almost immediately (0:55) Instead of allowing the guest to settle into the conversation with an easy topic, the interviewer immediately pivots to a personal question about his departure from Larian. It’s an unusual choice that skips over the normal rapport-building stage most interviews begin with. Turning the conversation back to herself instead of listening Throughout the interview, she repeatedly redirects the focus to her own experiences:

“I feel you so much… I resonate with you.” (4:41)

“I write the same way.” (6:37)

Rather than encouraging Rooney to elaborate, these moments shift attention away from the guest and toward the interviewer herself. It often feels less like an interview and more like an attempt to relate every answer back to her own perspective. The interview is also filled with awkward attempts at humor. For example:

“Are you a vampire?” (1:26)

This comes immediately after Rooney gives a sincere answer about leaving Larian. Presumably it’s meant as a joke. Instead, it lands as an abrupt tonal shift that undercuts the seriousness of what had just been discussed. Another example comes at 3:29. After Rooney comments that undead characters are often “out of time and out of place,” the interviewer suddenly quotes the Hall & Oates lyric:

“I’m out of touch, I’m out of time, but I’m out of my head.”

She immediately follows it with:

“I’m sorry.”

It’s one of those moments that’s so awkward it almost becomes fascinating in its own right—especially if you’re used to interviews with a more polished or professional style. Perhaps the clearest example comes at 21:47. Rooney jokingly says:

“Maybe I’m just a terrible person.”

The irony is fairly obvious. The interviewer immediately replies:

“No, you’re not a terrible person. I understand you… I like making my characters suffer.”

It’s an exchange that illustrates a recurring problem throughout the interview: instead of engaging with Rooney’s obvious self-deprecating humor, she responds as though he were making a serious confession. The result feels awkward and gives the impression that she isn’t quite following the conversational tone established by her guest.

The overall tone of the interview feels less like a professional conversation and more like listening to two immature friends chatting during a smoke break. The interviewers constantly interrupt Rooney, redirect the conversation back to themselves, and occasionally throw in awkward compliments—such as calling him “flawless” (25:34)—that come across more as flattery than genuine appreciation. For someone like Stephen Rooney, who’s previously spoken with outlets like IGN, PC Gamer, and Eurogamer, this must have felt awkward at best—and, more likely, simply uncomfortable. Throughout the interview, Rooney rarely comes across as someone who’s actually at ease. If you pay attention to his body language and facial expressions, he often appears visibly uncomfortable. The channel itself has virtually no interviewing experience—this is, after all, the only interview they’ve ever published. Unfortunately, that lack of preparation ends up overshadowing Rooney’s own thoughtful answers and even affects the overall presentation of a major AAA title. So let’s move on to the interview’s main talking points. The interviewer (the one in the beanie) (12:01):

“Do you think Ascended Astarion cannot continue the relationship with the player character without turning them into a spawn?”

This question suggests a surprising unfamiliarity with the game’s own story. In Baldur’s Gate 3, Ascended Astarion can continue his romance with the player character without immediately turning them into a vampire spawn. If, after the Ascension, you avoid taking a Long Rest and instead head straight to the final battle, the transformation never occurs, yet the romance still remains intact.

Stephen Rooney has previously stated in another interview that he personally wrote the epilogues. Even so, his answer here includes several lines that have since become favorites among Tumblr’s anti-AA crowd.

(12:12) “Ascended Astarion is very difficult because he has fundamentally made… If Astarion chooses to ascend, he has made the selfish choice, he has made the very evil choice, and he has decided to continue a lot of the darker themes that are in his backstory and in his own story. And so I think it is difficult to imagine having still a very healthy and equal relationship on that path. I do not love that path myself. If I was playing the game, I would not choose that. But when I was writing that, I was thinking a lot about partners in toxic relationships and in bad relationships, and how the power is very rarely balanced. And I think that is why you end up with an imbalance in that relationship, where Astarion needs to be in charge and you need to be somewhere down here.”

According to Rooney, Astarion makes a fundamentally evil and selfish choice. The word fundamentally is worth paying attention to, because Astarion’s desire for power long predates the ritual itself. Even back when he was a magistrate—what Rooney refers to as “his backstory”—he already longed for influence and control. Likewise, throughout “his own story,” once he learns the ritual exists, virtually every line of dialogue points toward a genuine desire to complete it. Even before discovering the ritual, Astarion repeatedly expresses his longing for power. But power isn’t the only thing he wants. He also longs for everything that was taken from him: sunlight, a beating heart, the taste of food and wine, his reflection in a mirror, and freedom from endless hunger. As a player, I genuinely enjoy making that selfish, morally questionable choice alongside him if it means giving him everything he’s been yearning for. Which is why I find myself wondering why Rooney found it so difficult to imagine role-playing a character whose motivation is simply to love Astarion enough to want those things for him as well. After all, Astarion himself says:

“But if they die and I ascend, I won’t have to rely on the parasite to walk in the sun. I’ll be free—truly, completely free. Isn’t that what you want?”

Perhaps Rooney simply wasn’t interested in exploring a role-playing perspective on a route he personally dislikes. And that’s entirely his prerogative as a writer. As he says himself:

“I do not love that path myself. If I was playing the game, I would not choose that.”

A writer is absolutely entitled to their personal opinion. However, a branching path in an RPG isn’t merely the expression of one writer’s personal preferences. It’s the product of an entire team—designers, animators, cinematic artists, voice actors, gameplay developers, and many others. When the lead writer publicly says he dislikes one of the game’s major endings, it inevitably diminishes, at least to some degree, the work of everyone who contributed to making that route a reality. When a creator says, “I wouldn’t choose this path myself,” it can easily come across as, “I created something I wouldn’t personally want to experience.” That inevitably raises questions about the work as a whole—especially in a genre built around player choice. Personally, I value studios whose public-facing creators respect player agency and remain neutral toward the choices their games intentionally allow players to make. That said, I also don’t believe a creator’s personal opinion has the power to invalidate anyone else’s experience. Games are, above all, an invitation to step into another world. They’re meant to immerse us in characters and stories—not reduce them to an exercise in deciphering what the author really meant. When I play Baldur’s Gate 3, I don’t experience Astarion as an abstract narrative concept. I experience him as a person. I respond to his emotions, his fears, his hopes, and his desires as though he were real. And no interview, no matter who gives it, can take that experience away from me.

The fact that Rooney says he “was thinking a lot about partners in toxic relationships and in bad relationships, and how the power is very rarely balanced” may also explain why the preferred route contains role-playing options for a partner who behaves in genuinely unhealthy ways. After all, the supposed “power imbalance” exists there as well. Tav has everything: a full life, freedom, recognition as the celebrated hero. Astarion, meanwhile, remains a vampire spawn. He still suffers from endless hunger. He will never see the sun again. In that route, he also accepts a partner who neglects his needs. Depending on the player’s dialogue choices, he can be treated in ways that many would describe as emotionally unhealthy or even toxic. Ultimately, if Rooney’s goal had truly been to portray a toxic relationship with Ascended Astarion, it would have been remarkably easy to do. All it would have taken was expanding the Ascension scene. Instead of ending everything with the game’s single Wisdom check—which, ultimately, doesn’t unlock any meaningful role-playing possibilities—he could have allowed the player to open their mind to Astarion, just as we do back in Act 2, and choose between several thoughts expressing genuine love and trust. Astarion could then have responded with something like:

“Then don’t mess it up. And obey me.”

Or perhaps something more in keeping with his sense of humor:

“That sounds very sincere. Are you sure the parasite hasn’t chewed through your brain?”

Either version would have immediately established a much clearer dynamic if the intention truly had been to portray emotional manipulation or abuse. But… he didn’t write that. Instead, if you play the romance sincerely and with affection, there is very little in the relationship itself that actually reads as toxic. The romance contains around eighteen separate expressions of love. There’s the playful, affectionate:

“Yes, my treasure?”

And there are moments built entirely on trust.

“You are so beautiful… And you will be beautiful forever. Thank you for trusting me.”

Whatever Rooney’s personal interpretation may be, the text that ultimately made it into the game leaves plenty of room for players to experience this relationship very differently. In the end, it’s the game itself—not an interview—that players spend hundreds of hours with, and it’s those interactions that shape their experience.

…and moments of heartfelt gratitude:

“You have given me everything. Thank you.”

There is also care. A desire to give. A desire to protect. And if Astarion’s love comes through the screen so clearly—through his expressions, his body language, the warmth in his voice, simply on an emotional and empathetic level—then it’s worth remembering that Stephen Rooney approved Neil Newbon’s performance. The recorded dialogue would almost certainly have gone through the writer before release, and evidently Rooney was satisfied with it. Neil has spoken about using Method Acting, an approach that involves fully inhabiting the character. In those scenes, he wasn’t simply reading lines—he became Astarion. He became Ascended Astarion, performing him the way he genuinely understood the character. And what he portrayed wasn’t “toxicity.” Rooney himself also wrote a remarkably strong epilogue for the Ascended route. It’s also worth remembering what happened when the infamous “toxic kisses” update dramatically changed the tone of the romance. Another writer, Baudelaire Welch, received heavy criticism from the community over those changes. Some fans even chased Stephen Rooney across X (formerly Twitter), demanding that he publicly confirm he’d worked on them as well. He never did. His silence was widely interpreted as the silence of a writer watching someone else alter work that had originally been his. If Rooney’s intention had truly been to portray this romance as fundamentally toxic from the beginning, remaining silent while the fandom largely continued to celebrate him would have been… an oddly self-serving decision. Perhaps these kinds of relationships simply aren’t Rooney’s cup of tea. That’s perfectly fair. But does that automatically make his personal preference canon? Canon… in an RPG built around player choice? At most, it’s canon that this is the type of romance Rooney personally prefers. Just as some players may not enjoy the kind of romantic dynamic the writer favors, not everyone enjoys a story where they’re expected to accept becoming the reason the person they love most “loses some of his freedom” or shouldn’t be allowed to be “too happy” by the end of the game. Personally, I don’t think concepts like power balance matter very much in the context of genuine love. Unfortunately, this is also where I think Larian’s romances are often at their weakest: the role-playing they offer rarely allows players to express the kind of unconditional devotion many people are actually trying to role-play. For a deeply loving partner, the relationship isn’t about who has more power. It’s about us. Interestingly, that’s exactly the language Ascended Astarion himself consistently uses throughout the romance. He speaks in terms of “we” and “us.” And allowing the person you love to finally experience what it’s feels like to stand on top, after “two hundred years of shit, pure shit,” isn’t something I find threatening. To me, that’s beautiful romance. It works especially well if you’re role-playing a strong, confident character—because real strength in love isn’t about competing over who holds more power. It’s about protecting. Giving. Wanting your partner to experience joy. Ironically, Rooney himself ultimately acknowledges that what isn’t his cup of tea may still be perfectly valid for someone else. At 14:13, he says:

“If people feel they are able to have a healthy relationship with Astarion, if he ascends, I am fine with that. That is okay.

Everyone can have their own ideas and their own takes on the game, their own interpretation. So, yeah, just because it is not what I choose means that it is ever going to be a bad idea for anyone else to choose that.”

Before Rooney gives this answer, however, the interviewer asks what is essentially a classic leading question. The question is structured in a way that attempts to trap the interviewee into confirming its underlying assumption. At 13:28, she asks:

“So their relationship with Ascended Astarion is pretty much inherently toxic? Or could he love the Tav? Or maybe he thinks that he loves them?”

Notice how the very first clause—

“their relationship with Ascended Astarion is pretty much inherently toxic?”

—already contains the conclusion she’s trying to elicit. It’s a textbook example of framing the discussion around an assumption rather than asking an open question. The final part—

“Or maybe he thinks that he loves them?”

—pushes Rooney toward perhaps the least charitable interpretation possible: one that calls Astarion’s feelings themselves into question. Rooney responds:

“I think he thinks that he loves them.” (13:43)

Importantly, he does not confirm that the relationship is objectively toxic. Instead, he shifts the conversation toward interpretation. And immediately afterward, he explicitly acknowledges that players are entitled to interpret the relationship differently. Ironically, within the game itself, Astarion apparently “thinks he loves” the player so sincerely that his own physiology changes. If we’re taking the game’s lore seriously, the strongest evidence of his love isn’t a line of dialogue at all. It’s biological. An illithid Tav is able to perceive the presence of the hormone associated with love emanating from Ascended Astarion. One has to wonder: can sheer wishful thinking really rewire someone’s endocrine system?

This is not merely a matter of interpretation. It is, at least in part, a fragment of the game’s own internal reality. Ascended Astarion loves Tav. The interpretation held by players who genuinely love Astarion is not based solely on personal preference or emotional projection—it is grounded in the game’s own depiction of basic physiology and brain chemistry. And that’s without even getting into Astarion’s actual dialogue or Neil Newbon’s performance, both of which people will inevitably try to dismiss with some variation of “that’s just how he thinks” or “that’s just what the writer said.” Even Astarion’s own understanding of his freedom of choice has already been reduced to “that’s just what he thinks” by the Persuasion option used to convince him to abandon the ritual:

“I know you think this will set you free, but it won’t…”

Apparently, what he thinks doesn’t count. Personally, I think Tav can be an absolutely insufferable bitch both on the route - the Spawn or Ascended. And yet, they may very well believe that they loves Astarion too. An interpretation based purely on personal impressions can be anything you want it to be. But an interpretation grounded in physiology—especially when the game itself gives us that information—carries considerably more weight than someone’s subjective assessment of what love is supposed to look like. If Astarion’s hormone levels indicate that he is experiencing love—even toward a creature as physiologically unusual as an illithid—then that biological fact exists independently of anyone’s personal interpretation. The laws of physiology are universal. In the context of the game, that applies to sentient beings with comparable biochemistry as well. Ideas about what constitutes “proper” or “healthy” love, on the other hand, vary across cultures, historical periods, and individual people. Science describes how a system works. It does not prescribe how that system should work according to someone’s personal values. “Power balance” and similar concepts are ultimately value judgments. And then there’s Stephen Rooney:

“Yeah, so Astarion’s backstory is all about a relationship and power dynamics that are unequal, as I say. And I always see the path with spawn Astarion, the relationship path with spawn Astarion, as a choice that Astarion makes to break the cycle, to choose to have a better relationship with people, a healthier relationship, and to not continue what he has been doing. The path with Ascended Astarion is very much the opposite of that.

It is Astarion looking at the unhealthy relationships he’s had in the past and being like, I want to be the person on top. I want to be in charge, I want to have the power, and then that way I make sure that no one else can ever hurt me again. Which is a choice that a lot of people make in real life as well.

It’s not an inherently bad or evil choice, but it’s not the one I would want for my relationships, I think.”

And this is where the distinction between what the game depicts and what the author personally prefers becomes particularly important.

It would be genuinely interesting to ask the writer one very simple question—especially if he’s willing to talk to seemingly anyone without much regard for the context: where, exactly, in the story does Astarion himself make the choice to remain a spawn forever? Because Rooney describes the Spawn route as:

“a choice that Astarion makes to break the cycle, to choose to have a better relationship with people, a healthier relationship, and to not continue what he has been doing.”

So where is that choice actually made? Is it in Astarion’s Origin? In an Astarion Origin solo run, Astarion actually can make this choice independently. During a Long Rest in Act 2, he can recall his scars through an Intelligence check, and during the ritual itself he has to pass another Intelligence check with a DC of 15 to remember them. He doesn’t need anyone else’s help to do it. But in a regular game with Tav/Durge, Astarion doesn’t have that choice. The choice belongs entirely to the player. Astarion cannot independently make the decision because, narratively, he is made dependent on the player’s intervention. For whatever reason, when Astarion is a companion, the game never gives him the hidden checks similar to that exist in his Origin solo route. Those checks were written into his Origin solo run plot —they simply aren’t available when he’s accompanying the player. Instead, everything ultimately comes down to a DC 18 Persuasion check. That’s it. If the player succeeds, Astarion stays with the group and the relationship continues. If they fail and refuse to help him, he leaves the party and tells his former partner to “die screaming.” One Persuasion roll. No meaningful connection to your previous dialogue choices, your relationship with him, or the way you’ve actually treated him throughout the game. The game pretends that Astarion is making a choice, when in practice the choice belongs almost entirely to the player. The underlying logic of the choice is broken. In Origin, Astarion is an autonomous character capable of making decisions for himself. As a companion, he’s reduced to an obstacle for the player’s Persuasion check—and his supposed “choice” becomes the outcome of a dice roll. Tav successfully manipulates him through that Persuasion check. Tav refuses to help him obtain what he wants: Ascension, freedom, the sun. Tav explicitly tells him that what he thinks doesn’t matter, and that his desires are “a trap.” That’s not a choice. That’s control. So when the writer describes this as “Astarion’s choice,” either he has forgotten how this part of the game actually works, or he simply prefers not to acknowledge that the companion version of Astarion has that choice taken away from him. And what is the actual logical reason that this character would suddenly choose a “healthy relationship” with the partner who, depending on one successful Persuasion roll, can go from being someone he loves to someone he tells to die screaming? Especially when that same character can supposedly choose an “unhealthy relationship” with someone who loves him completely, supports his “selfish, evil choice,” and wants nothing more for him than to be:

“free—truly, completely free.”

How exactly is Astarion’s relationship with the world supposed to dictate the nature of his relationship with the one person he is actually intimate with and loves? And this line:

“I want to be the person on top. I want to be in charge, I want to have the power, and then that way I make sure that no one else can ever hurt me again.”

Honestly? Great. If I were role-playing Tav, that is exactly what I would want for Astarion: for him to finally be on top, to achieve everything he has spent centuries wanting, and for me to make sure nobody ever gets the chance to hurt him again. But why, exactly, should Astarion assume that his consort is one of the people capable of hurting him? Is it because the role-playing possibilities in the post-Ascension dialogue were essentially cut down to the bare minimum? As for the cycle of violence: yes, it is a very real historical and social phenomenon. Take the Spartacus revolt, for example. If I started describing in historically accurate detail what the Romans did to enslaved people, no amount of content warnings would probably be enough. The same would apply to describing what the rebelling slaves did to Romans in the cities they captured. Conquerors brutally killed and enslaved the people they conquered. Revolutionaries executed tyrants. Revolutionaries sometimes became tyrants themselves and executed those who opposed their new regime. Violence creates cycles of violence. But none of that means that a person’s relationship with their lover automatically becomes toxic because their relationship with the outside world has changed. When enslaved people seized a Roman city, their relationships with their romantic partners did not suddenly become “toxic” simply because they had gained power. Throughout human history, one of the most fundamental distinctions has always been between us and them—between one’s own people and outsiders. And the person you love was never supposed to be the outsider.

Cazador kept Astarion enslaved for two hundred years. He tortured him, starved him, humiliated him, and treated him as property. That is abuse. Astarion carving the scars into Cazador, using him as a sacrifice for his own ritual, and taking everything from him in return is violence against an enemy. So where, exactly, does the lover enter this supposed cycle? Tav willingly agrees to become a vampire. Tav loves Astarion and actively wants to remain by his side. Tav supports his path and chooses to share his new existence with him. So in what possible sense is Tav the victim of abuse in this scenario? Tav is his companion, his ally, his right hand:

“My dark consort. My right hand.”

Is the mere fact that Astarion is the one standing at the top supposed to automatically turn Tav into a victim? If Rooney genuinely believes that Spawn Astarion represents “a choice that Astarion makes to break the cycle, to choose to have a better relationship with people, a healthier relationship, and to not continue what he has been doing,” while the Ascended route is “very much the opposite of that,” then why was Astarion denied the ability to make that choice consciously? Why is the only way for him to “break the cycle” to submit to a manipulative Persuasion check? Why can Astarion remember his scars when he is the protagonist, but not when he is the player’s companion? The way the game is structured, it almost looks as though the choice was never meant to belong to Astarion in the first place. The player is the one who is supposed to decide for him. But if Astarion cannot independently choose to “break the cycle,” then he isn’t actually breaking it. He’s submitting to someone else’s decision. And that submission isn’t necessarily a “healthy relationship.” It’s simply another form of control. There is another rather inconvenient detail in the script as well: Unascended Astarion - the leader of the spawns, supposedly the character who has chosen “to break the cycle, to choose to have a better relationship with people, a healthier relationship, and to not continue what he has been doing.” Except the script itself gives us lines like:

“And if they do step out of line, it just takes one or two brutal examples to remind everyone else of their place.”

“I’m not a tyrant, I do care for their well-being, I just can’t afford to show weakness.”

“Oh no, people can be quite meek after seeing you murder their former master.”

“If I get back and they’ve killed another gnome, I swear—someone’s getting impaled.”

Those are not interpretations. They’re simply lines from the script. The one place where I think a more convincing explanation for the changed relationship dynamic can actually be found is in research and clinical discussions surrounding sexual trauma, agency, power, and consensual relationship dynamics.

For example, this study is worth looking at:

For many survivors of sexual abuse, taking on a dominant role in intimate relationships can genuinely become a way of reclaiming a sense of control and safety. This is, of course, not a universal rule, and it does not work for everyone or in every situation. For someone who has experienced sexual abuse, the trauma is fundamentally tied to the loss of control. Their body and boundaries were violated. Rebuilding a sense of safety can therefore involve rebuilding a sense of agency and power over one’s own life. The same can apply to intimacy: taking on a dominant role can give a survivor the ability to establish the rules, the pace, and the boundaries. It is the direct opposite of the situation they experienced during the abuse, when they had no control at all. In a safe environment, this can allow someone to gradually relearn how to trust their body and their own desires. Research suggests that one of the central traumatic factors in abuse is the experience of helplessness. When a person feels that they have a choice, that their yes and no actually matter, it can help restore the sense of agency that was taken from them. So, hypothetically, if I were in a relationship with someone who had experienced that kind of trauma, I could absolutely imagine choosing a dynamic that allowed them to feel safe and in control. But here’s the thing… We were supposed to be playing an RPG about a fictional vampire. Nobody signed up for a lecture about how relationships are supposed to work in real life. People play fantasy RPGs for escapism. “Our reality” and “realism” are two completely different things. If you want to have a discussion about what constitutes a healthy relationship in real life, then perhaps start with a game set in a world that actually resembles modern reality. Realism in fantasy does not mean forcing real-world relationship norms onto a fictional setting. It means understanding the reality of that world—its lore, its rules, its circumstances, and the way its characters experience them. In ordinary real life, if someone offered me a blood ritual while insisting it would solve all my problems, I’d be calling the police. I don’t believe an author’s personal opinions about relationships in the real world should automatically be projected onto a fantasy narrative. At 16:28, the interviewer says:

“So basically the continuation of the cycle of violence.”

And Rooney responds:

“Yes, exactly.”

This is another textbook example of putting words in someone’s mouth. In rhetoric and communication, this kind of framing can be described as a leading question with a substituted premise. If this were a courtroom examination, an attorney would probably object immediately. Once the interviewer has already supplied the conclusion, saying “no” forces the guest to actively argue against the premise they’ve just been presented with. Saying “yes”, meanwhile, confirms the simplified and negatively charged interpretation. It’s a binary trap. The purpose isn’t really to understand what the speaker means. It’s to take control of the interpretation and steer their words toward a predetermined narrative. She presents her own conclusion as an established fact, then receives what amounts to a mechanical confirmation from the author. And that confirmation can subsequently be presented as though it were his own independent, carefully considered statement—the “official position”—rather than the result of a heavily leading line of questioning. Now let’s look at another Spawn Astarion line:

“Someone who could break the cycle of power and terror… that started centuries ago.”

There’s an interesting detail here. During the pause, Astarion makes a small gesture with his hand, almost as though he’s searching for the right words—trying to figure out exactly how he wants to phrase what comes next. That moment is worth paying attention to, because it doesn’t feel like a character simply repeating a predetermined ideological statement. It feels like someone thinking through what he’s saying in real time. And that matters when we’re discussing what “breaking the cycle” actually means within Astarion’s own understanding of his story.

To avoid being accused of bias, let’s try to find some thoughtful discussions from people who aren’t fans of Ascension and see how other players view the writing of the AA path. These discussions are old, of course. For example:

The main post is, once again, a load of nonsense, but I highly recommend reading Separate-Cake-2584’s comments, as well as their discussion with Purplestarlight321 in the replies. Neither of them are AA fans, like me, and I’ll take the liberty of quoting their assessment of the UA path—the route they actually chose. Separate-Cake-2584:

“I can speak better for the path in which he remains a spawn. The scene the morning after he kills Cazador is so different from the writing before then. It’s pure exposition. The same thing happens in the graveyard scene. Nothing but a monologue from Astarion, which doesn’t sound like Astarion at all, but rather like he becomes the writer’s mouthpiece for those scenes. It struck me as the opposite to the realistic talks we had until then, where it felt like an organic conversation.”

“From the way he talks (the words “break the cycle of terror and power”, in spawn’s ‘morning after Cazador’ talk comes to mind as a choice of words that is very unlike Astarion’s usual way of speaking, it almost sounds like pseudo-therapy lingo), to the dialogue options given to the player (restricted to positive on romance scene if Ascension is denied, or negative if Ascension is completed), you can see that it is not consistent with the previous writing (which is all the more strange when considering the Act 2 post-Yurgir romantic scene is spectacularly done both from a character dialogue perspective as from player choices perspective, and it was written by Welch too.)”*

(This discussion took place two years ago, when nobody knew that Stephen Rooney had written the UA romance or personally preferred that route.) Purplestarlight321:

“Most importantly though, if all it takes is a writer (or an actor) to give their opinion in order to settle a debate or to really get the point across that look, this is bad/good/whatever then the writing isn’t that strong to begin with.”

“You correctly stated that Astarion becomes a mouthpiece for the writer. Why do you have Astarion outright telling Tav about “breaking the cycle of power and terror that started centuries ago?” that’s so immersion breaking and in my opinion, it shows how the writer didn’t have any faith in the players since they tried to spoon-fed them with “you did the right thing!”.”

“I brought this point up to highlight how these debates have one thing in common: bad writing that can truly have more than one valid interpretation, but because a writer/dev (un)officially stated “actually, this is the case”, every other interpretation gets dismissed or belittled. To me, it’s absolutely NOT a coincidence that most, if not all, popular topics of discourse are mostly caused by poor writing.”

Separate-Cake-2584:

“The fact that you have to preface your comment with “I am not an AA apologist” says everything about the general experience of being in the Astarion fandom. “Oh, no, even if I say this I still love and respect the regimen. I don’t have anything against the system and would never consider the government or its leaders to be wrong.” “Of course the head of our religious organization know better, I would never presume to criticize them, I was just saying, you know.” Smells like totalitarianism to me. Acknowledge the one truth, shame the heretics, spread the propaganda.”

And this raises a rather important question: would a vampire from Faerûn actually speak like this? Would Astarion naturally say “break the cycle of power and terror”? At that point, the character stops feeling like a character and starts functioning as a mouthpiece for the writer. It’s almost as though he is looking directly into the camera and saying: “This was about the cycle of violence.” It’s a very familiar kind of modern writing where a character suddenly starts using contemporary psychological terminology instead of language that feels natural to their setting, personality, and worldview. The writer has a central theme they want the audience to understand, so instead of allowing that theme to emerge organically through the character’s actions and dialogue, they simply have the character state the thesis out loud. And that’s exactly where the subtlety disappears. The character is pulled out of his own context and turned into a vehicle for the author’s ideas. Instead of allowing the player to interpret what happened, the script tells them what it means. Instead of letting the audience arrive at the conclusion themselves, it spells out the moral. The result is dialogue that feels less like Astarion speaking and more like the writer stepping through him to explain the intended message. And ironically, that kind of writing is exactly what creates the endless fandom arguments we’re having now: when the text itself is strong enough, it doesn’t need the author to come out years later and tell everyone what they were supposed to understand.

Neil essentially saves the line through his performance — the way he delivers it, his facial expressions, the little hand gesture. Astarion almost seems to put his mask back on, searching for the right words and, at the same time, seeming to recognize how unnatural his own phrasing sounds. During the actual game, the millennial writing doesn’t really jump out at you. Instead, it comes across as Astarion genuinely speaking in the moment: adapting to the person in front of him, saying what he thinks the “good hero” wants to hear, and almost making it up as he goes, pausing and correcting himself as he searches for the right words. Stephen Rooney later confirmed that the Dark Kiss ritual was discussed during the writing process. (16:57)

“The Dark Kiss thing, it was something I think that was there in conversations around that we were having. It wasn’t something I was particularly thinking of at the time. There was another writer that did some writing on those scenes, and then I came in because I was away for a while.”

So, it turns out many of us were simply working with incomplete information when we assumed that everything bad in Astarion’s writing came from Welch, while everything good was written by Stephen Rooney. Of course, it would be difficult to dismiss the Dark Kiss parallels as merely a “fan theory” when they line up so closely with an established ritual from the D&D vampire lore. The ritual is described in RR3 Ravenloft: Van Richten’s Guide to Vampires (2e) for D&D by Wizards of the Coast, and the rules surrounding the creation of a vampire Bride have remained consistent since then. Now that we know the Dark Kiss was actually discussed during development, this makes a lot more sense. Coincidences this specific are rare. It would be pretty strange if nobody at Larian knew the relevant vampire lore and they had simply managed to stumble into these details by accident. Otherwise, the game’s vampire lore would be an absolute mess: you’d have spawn being able to drink their master’s blood, while the actual process of creating a spawn could apparently work however the writer felt like — completely according to established lore in Astarion’s case, but completely differently in the “Tav-spawn” version, with no burial and none of the agonizing transformation described in the source material. As an Easter egg for players who know the vampire lore, it was honestly a great writing choice. I can imagine Rooney simply didn’t dive quite as deeply into D&D’s vampire lore while working on Astarion, because there are moments in interviews where he seems unsure about certain details regarding vampire souls. In an earlier interview, he said:

“I’m actually not sure whether or not DND vampires have souls or not.”

But in 3.5e D&D, sentient undead do have souls, including vampires, and neither 4e nor 5e introduced anything that would contradict that.

“Undead creatures are powered by negative energy. Only sentient undead creatures have, or are, souls.” — Player’s Handbook v3.5

So yes: sentient undead have souls in D&D. Wizards of the Coast later reinforced the existence of vampire souls in Astarion’s Book of Hungers as well. So, credit where it’s due — thank you to Baudelaire Welch for actually digging into the lore. Rooney also talked about an earlier idea he had for giving Astarion a happier ending without Ascension: (18:16)

“Oh, this was an idea very early on that I had for Astarion that I would have liked to maybe try and bring through the game, but it didn’t work out, and I think it’s better that it’s not there. But the idea was basically that the Necromancy of Thay, the book that you get, would maybe unlock a wish spell, and then Astarion could use that wish to become mortal or to not be a vampire spawn anymore anyway, to try and reclaim his soul a little bit more.”

As for “reclaim his soul” — yeah, that part would technically be a mistake, since there was never any soul to reclaim in the first place. But the “not be a vampire spawn anymore” part? As a player, I’m genuinely sorry we lost that possibility. It could have been such a beautiful way to give the “good” path a genuinely happy ending for players who wanted that. Astarion didn’t necessarily want to stop being a vampire. But becoming something other than a spawn — finally getting that “chance to become more than some wretched spawn” — is something he very clearly wanted. And honestly, I can think of few characters who deserved a Wish spell more.

But Stephen Rooney also explicitly said that Astarion never actually wanted to give up immortality and become mortal again. And the game itself supports this: there isn’t a single line from Astarion suggesting that he ever wanted to get rid of vampirism altogether. What he wanted was to get rid of the downsides of vampirism — the hunger, the inability to walk in the sun — and, at the same time, become more powerful. Rooney himself explains this:

(19:07) “I don’t think that is what he would want, having kind of gone the whole way through the game. This was in the very, very early days, where I didn’t understand the character myself very well. I was still figuring him out, but I think I had the idea that it is kind of a trope with vampires that they want their mortality back, or they want their souls back. They don’t want to suffer from the hunger. They don’t want to suffer from being creatures of the night. They want to be able to walk in the sun again. But I think if we had gone with that ending, it would have been too happy of an ending, kind of, in some ways. And like you say, I don’t think that is what Astarion is searching for the whole way through the game, so it doesn’t make sense for the story to build to that. No, but I was very happy with the endings that we did get, that I did end up kind of writing.”

And this is actually an important distinction. Astarion absolutely wanted to stop suffering from the hunger and to walk in the sun again. But “having kind of gone the whole way through the game,” he also consistently wants Ascension once he learns that it is possible. The problem is that Rooney personally prefers an ending where Astarion loses the ability to walk in the sun. At 20:27, he says:

“I like the ending of him still being a vampire and losing his ability to walk in the sun and going back to the person that he was kind of physically, going back to the person that he was with the restraints that he has, all the normal vampire spawn stuff. But personally, he has developed so much, he has come so far. He is not the same person, even though it feels like he is going back a little bit.”

The interviewer immediately interrupts:

“He does not go back, I don’t think so.”

Rooney continues:

“No, no, no, yeah, but because he goes back in that he can no longer walk in the sun, for example, so he loses that freedom. But personally, he has developed kind of a lot more. So, I don’t know, I think there is something very bittersweet about that, about achieving so much, but also feeling like you lose a lot because you have won. He wins the battle, but he loses some of his freedom. I like that.”

And that first part is particularly telling:

“it feels like he is going back a little bit.”

Because that is precisely what is happening physically. Rooney himself describes the ending as Astarion going back to the physical limitations he had before: the hunger, the inability to walk in sunlight, all the ordinary restrictions of being a spawn. The difference, according to him, is that Astarion has supposedly changed internally. And this is where the author’s personal preference becomes very obvious. He doesn’t simply acknowledge that the Spawn ending is bittersweet — he explicitly says that he likes the fact that Astarion wins the battle but loses part of his freedom. Which is a rather strange preference when you consider that freedom is one of the central things Astarion has been pursuing throughout the entire game.

In Astarion Origin, Spawn Astarion has a beautiful final scene where he dances, smiling predatorily as he approaches his prey.

“So, I don’t know, I think there is something very bittersweet about that, about achieving so much, but also feeling like you lose a lot because you have won.”

Perhaps that works well for Astarion Origin. But based on what actually happens in the game when Astarion is a companion… it simply doesn’t work. At all. “Losing a lot because you have won” makes it sound as though that loss was a necessary condition of victory. As if there was no other way: you lost something, but you still managed to win. It brings to mind the image of a climber trapped in the mountains who has to cut off their own arm to escape. They survived because they were strong enough to make that sacrifice; otherwise, they would have died. But after Ascension, Astarion wins. And he doesn’t lose anything. He gets everything he wanted. Losing his freedom, losing sunlight and the pleasures of ordinary life — none of that is a necessary condition for his victory. Those things aren’t the price he has to pay to defeat Cazador. And when Spawn Astarion is a companion, the ending looks almost exclusively like Tav and their friends winning, rather than Astarion winning.

“I felt… ashamed. Like I’d lost everything, just as you claimed your victory.”

That’s Spawn Astarion describing how he feels about it. He feels like he lost at the very moment of victory. Because it wasn’t his victory. There is no mechanic in the game that requires Astarion to sacrifice the sun in order to kill Cazador. That’s a decision Tav makes, not Astarion. And that decision doesn’t make the victory more “honest” or “meaningful.” It simply makes it less joyful for Astarion. I think Rooney likes this ending conceptually, rather than from the character’s perspective. It’s almost impossible to imagine the Astarion we actually see throughout the game — if we treat him as a living character with his own desires — agreeing that this is what he would want for himself. That he would actually choose a “bittersweet” ending. And, most importantly, an RPG isn’t a book or a movie, where the audience is simply a passive observer of the author’s vision. We were never told that we’d be playing an RPG where we’re supposed to enjoy a “bittersweet” ending by deliberately preventing the character we love most from getting everything he wanted — taking away his sunlight and freedom — just so he can fit someone else’s idea of what a “healthy relationship” should look like. Honestly, if the choice were between giving up RPGs altogether and accepting that kind of romance, I’d probably choose to give up games entirely. Because the whole point of an RPG is the ability to make choices and participate in the story. That’s what makes the genre so much more compelling than simply reading a book, watching a movie, or playing through a completely linear narrative. If those choices ultimately have to conform to the author’s preferred interpretation, then that entire premise falls apart. The idea of “canon” in its most rigid, authoritarian sense is fundamentally at odds with the nature of an RPG. It turns what should be a space for escapism, exploration, and personal enjoyment into something that feels completely pointless.

The interview itself is here: