The thing with Solas is… he woke up from uthenera to a world that he does not recognize, a horrible world where everything is awful, where his people are suffering badly, where everything he knows is gone. To put the cherry on top, it’s a world that he deliberately brought about by his own hands.
It’s exactly the same situation for Solas as it was for the Inquisitor when they time-traveled into the horrible future where Corypheus ruled. The Inquisitor had few qualms about sacrificing people in that future because it “didn’t really matter or exist” – the only thing that mattered was going back to the past to prevent that horrible future from occurring.
The Dalish derided and hated? The city elves in alienages? This is Solas’ Bad End Future. Solas does not consider the world around him to be truly real or right. He doesn’t understand the Dalish, and can hardly recognize them or City Elves as elves. He does not want to understand or even think about modern elves because it’s Solas’ fault that they were killed, that they were enslaved, that they have to live the terrible lives they do. He spends as much time in the Fade as possible because of escapism, frankly. Because some of his oldest friends still live there, and because he can still walk lost Arlathan’s streets in his dreams… he wants to be in the past again, where he didn’t fuck everything up.
He’s very much a lost, isolated character looking for guidance, a true hermit of the tarot. Every conversation he has with the other companions is him desperately sound-boarding off them, “What should I do? What would you do? What can I do?“ His conversations with Varric about the Man On The Island haunt me, especially. (“How can you be happy, surrendering? Knowing it will all end with you? How can you not fight?”)
So yeah, he is a bitter sleepwalker trying not to invest in anything around him… because of self-preservation. Because if he invests emotionally in it, it will make everything harder. If he was truly an asshole, and if people truly didn’t matter to him, this wouldn’t be a problem for him.
The touching part about Lavellan is not that he treats her better than other people, because he doesn’t. It’s that his feelings for her force him to confront the future that he made, and see it as real. (“You’re real, and it means everyone could be real. It changes everything, but it can’t.”) This future is real, and it’s something he made, and its reality matters deeply.
It’s the story of a god who is estranged from his people (literally, statues of Fen’Harel are not allowed inside Dalish camps) and his relationship with Lavellan helps him reconcile the reality of the world and decide what to do about it. It’s a sleeping god finally answering the call of the Dalish, who never expected to be answered. It’s a mortal convincing a god that his people still need protecting.
The story is incredibly touching to me, especially how I experienced it.
I wrote this meta seven months ago and at the time, the fandom raked me over the coals about it and wrote me whole essays about how wrong I was. I just want to reblog it now that it is canon.
This is the first time I felt I have truly understood Solas’ point of view, and it was due to the comparison made between the present day, i.e. the Inquisitor’s world, and the world of In Hushed Whispers. Except that for Solas, he is experiencing In Hushed Whispers with strangers rather than friends and he was solely responsible for it, as you say. Very nicely put, thank you.
I’d like to re-emphasize that everything and everyone he knew and loved was destroyed, by his hand, when he was trying to help… it’s unclear exactly what ‘death’ means to these immortals (he’s super salty about Mythal’s death, but she’s still kicking-ish), but I imagine when you’re part of a society where people are expected to live forever (if time even existed) that finding out they’re all dead and gone would be particularly shocking.
This is post is therapeutic because I’ve been trying to argue these same points for a long time – particularly the “dark future” the Herald and Dorian visit In Hushed Whispers. It’s a future that’s apocalyptic to them because their own people have been imprisoned, enslaved, tortured, and harvested by their enemies. The “bad future” is good to the people who personally benefit from it (Corypheus and his people), but sucks for those who’re being tortured and exploited for it (former Inquisition advisers and companions).
And, yes, the game makes it clear that while you and Dorian don’t consider the future “real,” the others do. As Leliana herself tells Dorian, “To you, this is not real. Just some hypothetical future you hope does not come to pass. But I suffered. The whole world suffered.” By going back to the past, you are effectively erasing them; their lives, their memories, their existence.
But what I find really disingenuous (and a cop-out) on the part of the BioWare writers is, conveniently, everyone is fine with you going back and changing the past. The future to which you have no personal part of is so terrible that everyone in it knows they’ll be wiped out of existence, and are fine with it.
But imagine if the Inquisitor and Dorian jumped forward to the same dark future, only a hundred years into the future rather than one year. Everyone who knew the old world is dead and gone, and only people who’ve been born into the new world are left. They might have heard stories of the old world from their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents, but they just seem like fairy stories that have no basis in their day-to-day lives. They may know this dark future filled with demons and magisters and red lyrium harvesters is terrible, but since they have no basis of comparison it’s all they know, and thus something they feel they can live with.
Then you, some spectre of the past shows up, claims to know how this happened, and explains that you need to find the Elder One’s glowing green necklace so you can go back in time and fix it so this horrible post-apocalyptic world filled with demons and blood mages and red lyrium harvesting and mass torture and possessions and general hell-on-earth never happened.
Can you imagine how they’re react? Probably not well. “But if you go back that means that I (and my family, friends, memories, world) never existed. I can’t let you do that!” You, the viewer, the Herald, know what the old world was like and can see how horrid and post-apocalyptic this new dying world is compared to the old one… but they don’t know, so they don’t care.
Can you imagine how outraged palyers would be if the writers threw all that bullshit in our faces? The story starts off as an idealistic “close the hole in the sky, stop the bad guys, and save the world” plot, then we suddenly get thrown forward in time to a dark future that’s so obviously horrible and post-apocalyptic, and the answer seems simple: go back in time, fix the past so this horrible present never happens, then save the world as originally planned.” But then you get thwarted by the locals everywhere you turn because they’ve never seen this idyllic past you’re from, and they’re not keen to throw away the world they know, nor their very existence, on a past they’ve never seen and have no connection to. They expect you to “just get over the past already; your world is gone; stop being such a sore loser of history who’s unwilling to accept that your world is gone, and just appreciate the good in the present already.” (Even if it’s just a warm fire and a hot meal in a little rat hole in the dirt while demons and slavers look for new victims outside, which seems paltry to you but heavenly to them.)
So, what do you do in that situation? A) Just abandon your quest and get used to a short, difficult, painful life in the dirt until taint exposure drives you into an early grave (compared to the lifespan you’re used to) if demons or slavers don’t kill you first? Or do you B) Keep trying to fix the past (Veil, Chantry, Inquisition, your companions, etc.) with a heavy heart knowing that these people are people, but you feel this future is just too horrible to be allowed to stand anyway?
I suspect, personally, that most players would opt for B.
So, why do we expect Solas to go with option A?
I’m not saying I’m okay with Solas’ plan and actions, but I can understand his feelings. Because from where he’s standing, he is the Herald and Dorian who just woke up in the world of In Hushed Whispers, and is desperate to find a way back to the past to prevent this post-apocalyptic nightmare from ever happening. And we’re all products of this post-apocalyptic future saying, “It’s not that bad. Just get over the past and learn to like this new world.”
This. So much. There’s are my exact same thoughts except actually worded properly. @ladyrex92 @missjinxei
Captain-Radioactive-Mentality 