It's been over a year and a half, and while I dearly love BG3 for introducing my favourite saga to the public at large, I still hate what they did to Sarevok.
Granted in BG1 he looked to be every bit the one-dimensional villain (then of course you have the opportunity to learn what his formative years were like and holy fuck does not even begin to cover it,) but once you get to BG2 TOB you have an actual, tangible chance at redeeming him -not even a baby little redemption, his alignment can straight up change from Chaotic Evil to CHAOTIC GOOD.
And even if BG3 canon didn't heavily imply that the change was the way things were left off (Minsc summarily reprimands Sarevok for backsliding if he's in the party for the Murder Tribunal,) endgame Sarevok in TOB was a man free from cultish thought, who pursued his own wants and purposes.
(oh and another thing: why are Minsc and Jaheira, who leave him at a relatively good place, not saddened and horrified by Sarevok's return to evil, and instead make flippant jokes about kicking his ass? Two of the most empathetic characters of the game being so casually cruel in the face of finding someone who they thought had become a friend in that position is laughable.)
BG3 ignores all of his character development in TOB to make a mindless Bhaalist henchman out of him -him, who tried to take the Throne of Blood for himself and basically called Bhaal a bitch in his pre-battle dialogue in BG1.
And that's not even touching on the circumstances of Orin's birth.
It's such a strong case of he would not fucking do that that it makes me wonder if the person responsible for it was a fanfiction writer off of the "dead dove" tag on AO3.
Like, was he evil and capable of terrible things? Yes.
BUT. There is an important factor that I've seen someone else point out, I can't for the life of me remember their blog's name but I'm gonna borrow the phrasing because it's true: his only positive experiences in life have been with women.
He drank his 'respect women' juice his whole life, while he almost exclusively had negative experiences with men, especially when he was young and vulnerable.
Here's a couple of things, just as an example:
-if we assume that the child!Sarevok apparition in the TOB trials was the accurate age he was when the Temple he was in was raided by Harpers, he was 5-7 years old. So he was old enough to understand what was going on when he watched Gorion choose Charname over him as the one child that was possible to save.
(Side note, when in BG1 he kills Gorion, he is much calmer and more collected than I would have been, in his place, and his "I'm sorry that you feel that way, old man" sounds almost genuinely apologetic.)
-Rieltar Anchev, the adptive father who picked him up and raised him in the Iron Throne after a brief stint of Sarevok living in the streets, had his adoptive mother killed and forced Sarevok to watch as they strangled her with a garrote. Sarevok was still a child during this.
(because of Rieltar, he had no idea of what was happening to him when the old-game equivalent of the Dark Urge started manifesting in horrible dreams and visions, so he had to deal with that alone -he sought out a Bhaalist priest, but they weren't very useful so he lost his patience with them and killed them.)
-his relationship with Tamoko was quite literally the only good thing he had happen in his life, and she even tries to get him to give up the Throne of Blood. But he couldn't -all the shitty stuff that happened in his life would have been "in vain" if he gave up, and he was in too deep to even think about the sunk cost fallacy, man needs ALL the therapy- and he died for it.
Granted, there's potential for "the abused becomes the abuser", but not as much if you consider that BG3 canon decided that Sarevok received a part of Imoen's soul -which makes it a lot easier to redeem him and change his alignment in TOB and then they exchange a banter in which several things get made quite blatant:
1. one of the ways Irenicus tortured Imoen was SA,
2. after receiving the piece of her soul, Sarevok had visions and impressions of her torture as if experiencing it himself.
If at this point Sarevok has been redeemed, he commends Imoen for the strength it takes to go through that and still come out the other way not wanting to hurt others:
Those are the words of a man who would not fucking do that.
Which is why the only thing that makes it likely for him to have backslid THAT badly is that, for one, he was left completely to his own devices after the events of TOB -a man just now relearning how to be alive, nevermind how to be free and how to exist outside of the villain/conqueror mentality- with no direction, no guidance and no purrpose...
And, two, that made him easy prey for Bhaalist cultists, possibly backed by the newly reborn Lord of Murder himself, who had to have assaulted/violated Sarevok's mind so hard that it was akin to brainwashing to put him at that low a point.
If Orin's birth has to have happened the way it did because it's sadly canon, it was a crime with one perpetrator and two victims, because a Sarevok in his right mind would have never consented to it.
tl;dr: Larian I love you but you completely assassinated Sarevok's character and I will not forgive that. Probably not ever.
