#''ough the spirits and the elves are so fucked up... i can Fix Them...''

[sunlight-shunlight]

I kinda viewed Solas’s “people die, it’s what they do” as: people (specifically elves) die because of Solas. Every ‘natural death’ since the veil came up is Solas’s fault. He ‘murdered’ all those people. With the veil still up, Solas will be an eternal murderer, even after Solas is gone. He will never stop killing in that respect. So it’s kill the people who are already condemned to die by him already, or save people in the future in that they are no longer subject to ‘natural death’. Or maybe I’m way off base 🤷‍♂️.

maybe! but i don't think you ever get to ask him about it... if his motive was "i want to bring back immortality for everyone" then he should be allowed to do like a sales pitch for rook or the inquisitor about it lmao 😭

the bizarre thing is that they started off in trespasser with his plan sounding really ambiguously nostalgia-fueled, with vague hints of a Blight Trolley Problem lurking. so people had all kinds of guesses on whether he was just hung up on arlathan, or thought it was the only way to save the modern elves and spirits, or whether he had an actually objectively necessary reason to cause that much destruction to solve another problem.

and then in veilguard it's like... THE most sympathetic version of the problem he thinks he's solving, in that the blight WILL actually kill everyone without his intervention. so it's a very clear trolley problem. but then they handwave solving that part, and remove the elf and spirit stuff, and then his remaining motives are about mythal and the veil just having general bad vibes i guess(?). and also he went through as many rounds of layoffs as bioware did, so he has no agents who can weigh in on what they think he's doing either...

i just think it's incredibly flop writing for a major antagonist if at the end of the story you're like "wait, why WAS he even doing all that?" haha.

[sunlight-shunlight]

i have spent an inordinate amount of time staring into space on public transit thinking about my fic, bc i started from "teehee wouldn't anders really cause a Thedas Wide Paranoia if there's yet another shady apostate found at a chantry explosion site... lavellan should be a criminal and not a herald of anything at first >:)" and then. i ended up having to think about... the reformation era... bc the logical conclusion is that leliana and cassandra would lose favour for something like that, and leliana is already a bit of a known heretic, so there would have to be a chantry schism if this weird "cult" now has a person who can fix rifts when the regular chantry can't do it.

also i guess solas is in it, and so i have to go full pepe silvia meme to try and decide on the correct balance of "this is a blight trolley problem!! kill half of them to save the rest!!" vs "ough, the elves are in shambles... the spirits are fucked... what have i done to the people... i must restore the balance" in his internal monologue. bc veilguard somehow confirmed the blight trolley problem that trespasser had implied, but also made everything else confusing and borderline incoherent?? solas deserves that eternal jail time purely bc his idea of the regret prison was incredibly dumb. elgar'nan's only regret was not killing his wife sooner, and he can presumably process that in like 5 minutes and leave? what happened to mythal's reckoning? why is solas both arlathan's Most Valuable Special Military Genius who won the entire war for them (despite elgar'nan and andruil having their entire PR based on being good at winning wars), and then getting called a lapdog and bullied 2 minutes later? and so forth 😭.