Did you see Neil Newbon’s take that Ascended Astarion is the real him free to act on cruelty and violence and the spawn is the one with the mask? Yeesh.

Ooooooh, THAT'S the disk horse that's happening right now!! I knew something was happening (I felt a tremor in the waters) but I had no clue what it was lmao, I don't follow cast stuff.

I will try to respond to this in good faith, but I'm not very good at fandom discourse and so I'm afraid it may not be the answer you want.

I can see why that reading might make people angry, but I dont have strong feelings about it. Obviously, it's not my take on Ascension, but from the beginning I've been very upfront that my take is serving the genre I'm writing in and the ship dynamics I find hot. My Tav is lawful good to an unhealthy extreme, and that was how she was conceived in her Early Access bullying phase. And meanwhile, I wanted to be in a Gothic horror where he's obsessed (morality chains will do that to you) and they beat the shit out of each other. I have to make the Ascendent a monster, for that to work, and for people not to feel guilty every time they enjoy watching him getting stepped on lmao.

But I do feel like there is a morality policing around Astarion's ending that I don't want to partake in. This might seem dumb for me to say, given that my Tav is a veritavle walking moral policeman, but that is bc I fucking love Villain/Heroine ships, so I am literally right there, at the Devil's Sacrament with everyone else.

While I like the good ending and prefer it for many reasons, I would agree with a reading of Newbon's words that it could be read as a mask. This might be bc I mask with the best of them, am doing it right now even as I write and edit this ask 20 times. There's masking as an outright lie, and then there's masking as 'gotta get through day to day life as a functional adult without everyone suddenly deciding they hate me'... I personally think its nice that spawn!Astarion cares about other people, and cares about being a functional member of society at all! It shows he's no longer a lonely outcast.

I could also go deeper (the autism really shining through in this reply) and say it's a mask, in the sense that this has been deemed the 'polite' and morally correct ending, that is acceptable to others and enables the player to feel good about themselves. Which is often a way we derive pleasure from media, and not wrong in and of itself! Making Astarion good makes players feel good - that's not wrong, but if we're comparing endings, we have to acknowledge it. An Ascended Ending doesn't really cater to that impulse... unless the player really likes to be dommed (more power to them).

Unfortunately anon, I can't sit here with my most popular fic being an Ascended!Astarion fic, and pretend that there isn't a bunch of fascination or interest surrounding the Ascended version of his character. People clearly want to explore the implications of his evil ending and indulge in the excess of it, but feel bad doing so. People don't ascend him in-game, but they go to my fic and other people's fic because they want to have some space to enjoy the implications - in the sexiness, in the timeline where Astarion has revenge, in a timeline where he is obsessed with Tav etc. I mean, just look at me, I can't sit through the Ascended scene, but I'm here writing a fic about it!!

The fact that it seems to happen more in fic than in playthroughs tells me, if I was to get super deep in a tumblr ask, that people feel guilt about it. Some kind of mask is being employed, by someone, somewhere, in that mix. So I'm not about to add to any of that kind of policing. It would be pretty disingenuous of me to get my most feedback from an Ascendent fic I am writing, and then judge people for liking Ascendency narratives...

So while I don't have much interest in pretending the evil ending isn't the evil ending, that doesn't sound to me (second hand, through you, with my brain seeing 7 or 8 different implications) to be what Newbon is saying. He's just saying that the Ascendent is the less palatable Astarion to other people and that spawn!Astarion still has some kind of mask or a politeness filter on. Which... yeah. Kinda. In my world, I like that Astarion decides its worthwhile to restrain himself, because he has things to care about potentially ruining. But that's still in many ways employing restraint. People don't just stop masking, they learn to care about what others think in a healthy way. They have friendships, relationships, other ties to the world, that make them want to be something other than a cruel or violent or evil version of themselves. I think that's nice, and far less lonely but um... yeah. I can see Newbon's point, even if I don't want to like, live or die by it.