Been thinking about Astarion and his disapprovals when you help people. I think that yes, it's partly about envy that no-one was there to help him, but also about choice and control. (BG3 is always a game about autonomy, after all.)
So hear me out: back in the pre-turn days, Astarion was a magistrate. And if Baldur's Gate is anything like our medieval and Renaissance eras? He would've had to sign off on some pretty damn awful punishments. (Look at how he talks in the Justice test about how one has to punish thieves, and the Early Access bit where he talks about how killing Arabella would be too harsh for her stealing... they should've cut off her hand instead, the "proper" punishment for thieves and what he would've sentenced her to. He handed down an edict bad enough on a Gur tribe that he was essentially murdered in revenge.)
So how do you justify this to yourself? Well. He had money, societal power, and pretty privilege - this is almost certainly why Cazador chose him, too - and was kind of crap at empathy. And we know he likes seeing people get their comeuppance, likes seeing them taken down a peg. So he carefully ignores all the ways he's been lucky, all his privilege, and pretends he got there all by himself. He goes, "They had a choice. There's always a choice. They weren't helpless. They should have got a job, not begged, or stolen. They earned this. They brought it upon themselves. I'm simply serving them the consequences. Don't look at me like that." (I think this also ties into that later-retconned part about him giving prisoners to vampires. They're just criminals, after all, the same way the Gur are cutthroats and goblins are trash. They chose this life. They chose not to matter.)
So then he falls painfully from privilege, and gets the full horrible buffet of helplessness at Cazador's hands. He "resisted least" - see, surely there's a way to be punished less if you just do the right things, if you say the right things. The spawn who resist are doing it wrong. They made their choice. (He ignores that he's never the favoured spawn, ignores the pliers coming out again, and tells himself this.) If he can say that, he can pretend he still has control - and he so desperately wants control. His old self-justification has been turned up to eleven by the trauma of Cazador.
And suddenly... tadpole. He's free. He's also, as said, traumatised. He tells himself he's never going back to Cazador - look, Cazador can't compel him, look, he can walk in the sun, look, he's seducing Tav. He knows what he's doing! He's in control! The tadpole just being luck? He can't afford to think about that. Luck can change. Which means Cazador, and everything else, no matter what Astarion does or prepares or succeeds at, can happen again. He's helpless. But no. No. He's not some helpless damsel in distress - his first meeting with you was mocking the very thought!
But look. These people are showcasing their helplessness, almost proudly. And it's horrifying. And they keep saying familiar things - they're saying things he's said, in his more vulnerable moments. And Tav keeps saying things like, "They had no choice - we have to help them." But of course these people did. They got themselves into this situation, they can damn well help themselves out of it.
Because if they didn't have a choice... then neither did all the poor bastards he sent to their deaths or horrendous punishments over the years. Neither did those he brought to Cazador. Neither will all the spawn he's going to sacrifice in the ritual. Neither did he. All that separates them from him is luck, and luck can change. He's not in control. The thought is horrifying, so he pushes back against it. "They're weak, pathetic [...] We are better." Even as he approves of getting Wyll out of the pact and getting Mayrina away from the hag, even as he wants Lae'zel to "break her chains", because he feels a kinship with them. Even as, in a rawer moment, he tells the story about being locked in a crypt and tells Tav not to judge him for what he had to do for Cazador. If he stops to examine that too much, he'll panic. Cognitive dissonance is a hell of a drug. So move on, keep desperately snobbing.
He keeps trying that even when Tav meets his siblings and treats them with empathy (empathy that confuses and horrifies him). "They lured thousands to their deaths," he tells Tav. "I doubt Baldur's Gate will miss them." Or him. If they had control, he had control too. Life before turning taught him that if you're punished for what you've done, with cruelty or with death in a ritual, the punishment implies you still had a choice. He vacillates wildly between victim-blaming and talking about them as helpless unfortunate sacrifices while he tries to get his head round this. Even while, as Tav insists on saying, all that separates him from them is a tadpole. His victims are "criminals and brothel-goers," he tries desperately to tell Tav later - look, they deserved it!
The breakthrough is when he finally admits that the spawn are "the innocent, idiots, and the unlucky." Just like the others whose chains you've helped break, through the acts (his approval slowly starting to turn round on some of them, as this realisation creeps up on him and gains speed). Just like him - he was unlucky. (Which means he didn't deserve two hundred years of enslaved misery, and the people on this journey didn't deserve what happened to them, either. Which means he deserves to be treated with kindness, and so do others.) He can turn from that, and keep desperately scrabbling for control with the ritual (he can command others! He'll "never have to be afraid of anyone, ever again"), or he can stay a spawn, and accept that.
The kind of control he wants is an illusion. You can never truly control others without losing yourself in the process. All you can do to change people is decide whether to help - to reach out and hope they reach back. He's seen this time and time again with Tav, saw it even before he woke up in the ground. It's just that finally, he's stopped outrunning the thought and accepted it. Sometimes he still backslides, sometimes he still sees those who hurt him in the ones Tav wants to help, sometimes he's still rather an arse... but he's starting to see it now.
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