thepalelawyer

Making a seperate post of this because I don't know how this site works sometimes.

🎉Happy 3rd Anniversary to this legendary game!!🎉

Interview with Astarion's lead writer Stephen Rooney.

Full Transkript:

Baldur's Herald: Two first questions to warm up. We heard that you left Larian to write a novel. Is that true?

Rooney: No, I did not. I did not leave to write a novel, unfortunately. Although the novel has been written which I'm sure we will get to. But no, unfortunately I didn't get to do that.

Baldur's Herald: Thank you. This is still very interesting. So, the second question to warm up is, are you a vampire?

Rooney: Oh, I'm not technically a vampire, although there's a lot of similar kind of things. I'm very pale. I spend a lot of time just wandering around at night, rarely seen during the daylight hours. So, vampire does fit me very well, I think, kind of as a category. I would probably also accept ghoul or occasionally werewolf, although I don't know if I'm hairy enough. 

Baldur's Herald: So technically this is the interview with the vampire.

Rooney: Yeah,[laughter] technically this is an interview with a Vampire. 

Baldur's Herald: So the first serious question. Stephen, you earn quite a reputation as a skeleton and vampire specialist. Both ( Astarion and Fane) are very charismatic, interesting, deep characters. Uh and they both happen to be undead. What is about an undead thing? What compels you? Eternal life? Or from the other sides, that they're like rotting.

Rooney: Yeah, there's maybe a fear of death, maybe my rotting, but there is something very interesting about undead characters and each kind of undead comes with its own different challenges. They're often outside of society. They are unusual. They are often out of time and out of place. Like if you have a zombie who comes back after a hundred years or something and doesn't understand the world. And I feel like there's a lot of things that like neurodegivergent people, people who are not quite normal, can relate to with those kinds of characters. And I always find it very interesting to dig into characters who are other or weird or just a bit outside of normal society. 

Baldur's Herald: [Singing] You're out of touch. I'm out of time, but I'm out of my hands.

Rooney: [Laughing] Exactly that. Yeah.

Baldur's Herald: And one more question about your writing process. Many actors rely on different frameworks or methods developing characters, while others prefer intuition. What's your kind of writing? How do you write?

Rooney: Uhm, by instinct a lot of the time. I don't have a very good structure or plan when I sit down to write characters or when I sit down to develop characters. Normally, I will have an interesting idea for a character or I'll have just an idea that I would like to explore, and I try to sit down and just write a conversation with that character. with as little thinking as possible because I find when I start thinking about something I think way too much and I just get stuck and I get in my own way. So the best thing you…

Baldur’s Herald: Oh, I understand you on so many levels that I resonate with you. Very very kind. So another question about Astarion. You told in your recent interview that he's a more human type of character. He's not like undead, like a predator. He's not an awful creature from the night and he's not like soulless. He's humane. But no, humanity seems to be a part of your writing a lot. Is it true?

Rooney: Yes. Well, I mean with Astarion, it was very important that he wasn't a  monster, that he is still human, still like uh, still capable of love, still capable of vulnerability. But as vampires they are often very human undead compared to say zombies. They're very very charming, they can integrate into society more easily than others. I think finding the human core of any character is very important, because otherwise they feel like a cardboard cutout that you wave around to make a joke or to have a villain or something like that. But it's only when the character starts to react to things like a person would like, feelings and emotions and weaknesses and flaws, that you get characters that are relatable. You get characters that are interesting. So I think that's why humans and  the humanity of a character is so important to me. And more so I write the same way I generally peel with a character. I don't write flat characters. I rather write characters that would be not just compelling for someone else but for me as well.  And more so I don't write myself into the character but I write something that I can connect with.

Baldur’s Herald: So it's a borderline never self insert.

Rooney: Yes, it's only when I think I look back on characters like I never try to put myself into the character, but I always inevitably do a bit. It's only afterwards when I look at the character I can be like, ah okay this thing is what I brought to Fane, this kind of nervousness and standoffishness. And with Astarion, there is some righteous anger at a sense of being wronged and I'm like, I know where that comes from, that's me.

Baldur’s Herald: When you were working on Astarion, were you inspired by existing Forgotten Realms characters? for example Strahd, the elven vampire protagonist of Christy's Golden's novel, Vampire of the Mists, or others maybe?

Rooney: No, I tried to avoid other characters that existed because I was worried I would just start imitating those characters. Like Strahd was one who was very on my radar. As I had friends who are running a curse of Strahd campaign at the time. So, he is a very traditional kind of vampire lord, very Dracula kind of like, and I just wanted to make sure that Astarion felt different from other vampire characters in the world and that if I ended up touching on the same themes or on the same ideas, it was just the natural thing to come up for a story instead of this is something that all vampires in the forgotten realms kind of go through or suffer.I mean

Baldur’s Herald: I do remember that in one of the quotes that Astarion said - I think if you poke him too much- he says Strahd wouldn't put up with this shit.

Rooney: Yes, that was the one he does mention them.That's the one place I was like, "Okay, I'm going to indulge myself and put a silly little joke in here about Strahd. It made me very happy. It still makes me happy to this day. 

Baldur’s Herald: [Laughter] it was adorable. He is adorable.

Rooney: Yeah, but I mean, Neil Newbon is responsible for so much of that. For how adorable and how likable Astarion is. Neil brings a wonderful kind of energy to a Astarion when he's recording the lines

Baldur’s Herald: Maybe he said a few lines himself, or, like wrote them himself a few times? Do you know?

Rooney: Uh no, there were a couple of times where he would slightly tweak a line maybe. but because of the technical process that we had, where I write the line, it goes into the game, he gets the line, he has to record it. If it gives me a different line back, then I have to go back into the game and change it. And that was a little bit awkward. It was something we could do a couple of times but we tried to avoid it as much as we could because it was technically difficult.

Baldur’s Herald: In Baldur's Gate 3 is a growing theme of the influence of dark forces on characters and their subsequent choice of whether to succumb or resist the influence. However, Astarion's story stands out in the climax of his arc. It affects not only him but also his partner if you decide to romance him. If he ascends and you want the romance to continue, the player must also make a choice and become his spawn. Do you think ascend Astarion cannot continue the relationship with the player character without turning them into a spawn?

Rooney: Ascended Astarion is very difficult because he has fundamentally made a choice.

if Astarion chooses to ascend, he has made a selfish choice. He has made a very evil choice and he has decided to continue a lot of the darker themes that are kind of his backstory and in his own story. And so I think it is difficult to imagine having 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 him in an imbalanced relationship where he needs to be in charge and you need to be somewhere down there. 

Baldur’s Herald: So their relationship with ascended Astarion is pretty much inherently toxic or could he love Tav?