Friends, this may be the last you hear from me. As I speak, I suspect PC Gamer's IT department is drafting an email to PC Gamer's HR department. The subject? "A list of websites visited by Joshua Wolens, on his work browser, between 15:00 and 16:00 on October 10, 2024."
And fair enough, frankly, because I have absolutely visited an above-standard number of custom sex doll sites in the last hour or so. The reason? A retweet from Larian CEO Swen Vincke, calling attention to what is—for the life of me—100% a custom sex doll of Baldur's Gate 3's Astarion.
👀 https://t.co/IGqKYozoqjOctober 9, 2024
Or, well, let's be specific: It's a retweet of a screenshot of another screenshot of a review of a custom Astarion sex doll by one satisfied customer. "This is [an] amazing doll. Very well made, details are phenomenal!" says our Astarion fan.
The only problem is the makers didn't quite capture his likeness properly. He's got the wan skin colour and the pointy ears, sure, but he's a little more heavyset and less long of face than everyone's favourite BG3 vampire boy. The buyer "wasn’t completely satisfied with the custom head sadly," they say, which wasn't quite in line with the 3D file they'd given to the doll's maker. A 3D file perhaps taken from, you know, a videogame.
Still, they gave the whole thing four out of five stars overall, so I guess the doll was ultimately fit for purpose. What interested me (honest) was the cost. How much does a life-size, fully actuated vampire set you back these days? The retweet suggested it cost $20K, but I couldn't take that as gospel. I'm a hard-bitten investigative journalist, a real Woodward and Bernstein type. I needed to verify the info for myself.
Alas, the site the post came from made it hard to say. The original post even tells readers not to ask where the screenshot came from, adding to its aura of mystery. After some digging, and a lot of visiting websites that someone senior is definitely going to have a word with me about, I found the source: The review was of a custom doll from a site called (the following link is profoundly, radically NSFW) Spartan Lover.
The price of such a doll? $10,498 minimum ordinarily, though it's currently on sale for $3,499 off. Once you've gone through all the, ahem, accoutrements (you can customise every inch, including the actuation, body hair, and, well, size) you can easily double that price. It wouldn't surprise me if Tiffany's Astarion really did cost $20K or more once all was said and done.
And you know what? Good for them. Far be it from me to judge anyone for how they spend their money or what they do to and with the fictional vampires they love in the privacy of their own home. After all, Tiffany's not alone. My sojourn through the seedier side of BG3 fandom also introduced me to other posable Astarions.
Honestly? This one from a creator called Namihu BJD (which, I stress, does not market itself as a sex doll like the Spartan Lover one does) actually captures the real vamp's appearance a lot more accurately than the one Tiffany got. To be fair, I think it was made quite a lot later, so I imagine it's taken advantage of developments in silicone Astarion tech. And if you're curious but don't want to take the $20K plunge? You can just dip in a, uh, toe by picking up Astarion's terrifying, eyeless head for a fraction of the cost.
