brucoenthusiast

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The herald with her elven servingman <3

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Soulmates

Art by sugardells

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Here’s a sketch I comm’d of Solas and my Inky Karhará:se from the amazing @miithriilart (tysm again!! 💗)

Casual intimacy, my beloved 💗💗

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The other thing I love about the romance route for Solas is that it's the one which shows you most clearly that he's really not in control and is just desperately playing it by ear.

On either the friendship or low approval route, he ultimately stays in his comfort zone: he gets in, uses the Inquisition in accordance with his plan, and gets out. A lot of his relationship-building can be thought of as him just testing people or concealing who he is. He does still undergo significant changes in his worldview in response to his connection with the Inquisitor, but this version is largely consistent with the picture of him as an elite, prideful trickster figure.

But on the romance route it's very different. Falling in love with the Inquisitor is a monumental fuck up and it is also a very deeply human one. You get a much clearer sense of him just trying to figure everything out and stumbling and losing control of his plans. At Crestwood you can see him realise in real time that there's no graceful way out of the situation he's created and he handles it very poorly and it's all just extremely realistic and sympathetic to me.

It also makes for a delicious contrast in Trespasser because there he's trying to present himself once again as detached and completely in control, but if you romanced him you know perfectly well that this is an act and sure enough he quickly crumbles and goes back to 'vhenan' and 'my love' and the fragility of his whole facade is so achingly clear.

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solavellan + being a person

What is so essential to me about the Solas romance route specifically is that it is the only time in the whole series that you will clearly see him want something for himself. Everything else he does is so driven by his sense of duty and what he thinks he owes to others; you do get a lot of very interesting insight into him from the low approval and friendship routes, but the romance is special to me because it is, as he puts it, 'selfish,' and I think allowing himself to be selfish is actually a really important part of his character development.

The reason this matters so much is because personhood is such a big theme of Solas' whole story. The point of his arc in Inquisition is that he initially does not appreciate the personhood of the modern residents of Thedas, and through his relationship with the Inquisitor and Inquisition he learns that he was wrong; and on the flip side, one of his big motivations for effecting change is the fact that very few people in modern Thedas recognise the personhood of spirits as he does, and thus he feels it is his responsibility to defend them from these abuses. 

But lying behind all this is the fact that Solas is very insistent on denying his own personhood as well. He consistently refuses to admit that he has wants and needs; when Cole asks about his pain he quickly minimizes it, when Felassan observes that he's wounded he insists it's not important. From the flashbacks in Veilguard we see a life spent in service to others, with little sign of him ever pursuing his own desires. Solas gets criticized for using people, but it's essential to realise that he does exactly the same to himself; he sees himself primarily as a tool in service to higher purposes, he does not want to let himself be a person with genuinely personal, selfish desires. 

The romance is the only time in the series - perhaps the only time in his whole (embodied) life - when he loses his focus and allows himself to actually be a person; to pursue something just because he wants it, and not because it is his duty. For me that's such a fascinating complement to the journey he goes on in Inquisition with regard to his understanding of the worth and value of people as individuals. It's this tantalizing glimpse of who Solas could be if he would let himself exist outside of service to others, and that's one reason why the heartbreak goes beyond just the sadness of a simple breakup; when he leaves he isn't just turning his back on the Inquisitor, he's turning his back on himself and his own personhood.  

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oh no it was booty-trapped :)

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"Does it not count if it's only fade tongue?"™️

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Trespasser

"When your gaze became so cold and distant"

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still waiting for s2

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I finally got around to finish this.

I have been a bit obsessed with the way Dragon Age has examined the theme of history and how it is mis-remembered or altered over time.

Even though my Lavellan happily went into the Fade with the love of her life, enjoying the bliss of married life with Solas, I just know this act of love will be told as a tradegy later in Thedas history. Over time it will turn into the story of how the treacherous Dreadwolf tricked and trapped the brave Inquisitor.

So of course some sculptor will be making the "Abduction of Lavellan" statue a few decades after the events in Veilguard.

This piece came to be after goshing over sculptor Bernini with fellow art nerd @opal-apparition 🩷

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alt designs of Strange Magic (2015) characters Bog King and Marianne

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I've been thinking, and I've come to the conclusion that one of the reasons why Veilguard feels so hollow is because it makes an attempt to reckon with Solas’s fatal flaw, but completely fails at actually doing so.

This may be a controversial opinion, but I don't think pride is Solas’s fatal flaw. It's a symptom, not the origin point. Solas’s fatal flaw is his inability to trust others. It's a threadline all the way through Inquisition, from the things he says to you (I know that mistake well enough to carve the angles of her face from memory) to the very structure of his personal quest (which does not trigger if you're on low approval with him). He's tragic (in the literary sense) because even in the case of a high approval Inquisitor, the person most likely to listen to him and capable of acting upon it, he doesn't ask them for help. Hell, we know he was planning to tell a romancing Inquisitor, but chickened out at literally the last possible second, that's how deep it runs. That's why it's Tragic.

And I think Veilguard tries to contrast this with the Team™. Which is fine, I guess, until you realise that Solas’s original Team was the Evanuris. None of Rook’s Team™ can betray them. If they don't do the companions personal quests they die, rather than become disloyal in some way. They're all 100% in accord about their politics and what is Right, without real argument. Which is nice, but if your advice to someone with severe trust issues is 'skill issue' that's...unhelpful.

And yeah, Solas did have his rebellion, but he had the rebellion in the sense that the Inquisitor had the Inquisition, not in the sense that Rook has the Team™. And as he says, any powerful organisation inevitably falls to betrayal and corruption.

And he had Felassan, but Felassan also betrayed him (with good reason, but he did actively undermine an operation he was on on behalf of Solas. That is a betrayal), which can only have cemented the inherent trust issues.

But, thinking about it, there is actually a paralell with some of the companions having experienced some kind of betrayal. Lucanis and Illario, Bellara and Cyrion, Davrin and Isseya/the Wardens, Taash and Shathann. And pretty much all of these experience a last minute change of heart, or otherwise come to the companion's POV if allowed to. Is this what they were going for with Mythal in the Atonement ending? I can kind of see the logic.

The problem is, I don't really see why this suddenly turns Solas around. He doesn't overcome his fatal flaw in order to avoid his tragedy. It always comes down to the fact that Solas’s actual reasons for bringing down the Veil are never truly addressed, and likely changed at some point in production between Trespasser and Veilguard. The political and systemic issues of the setting are pushed aside by Veilguard's narrative for individual and personal issues, even well established issues like systemic racism and slavery. It's incoherent to say 'Solas was destroying the Veil because he couldn't trust people, so fixing the trust means he doesn't want the veil to come down', when the issue was 'Solas can't trust anyone else to help solve the harm caused by the Veil because of the betrayal'. The harm doesn't go away because the betrayal did, you know what I mean? And Rook, and by extention the entire narrative, never displays willingness to even acknowledge those issues as existing in the first place, let alone needing addressing in some way. Rook interrupts Solas when he tries to talk about the suffering of the Spirits. So why does he suddenly hand over the dagger, symbolically handing the matter over to Rook?

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Sharing a tent with the inquisitor goes about how you would expect, Lets hope he has the will to stop things before things get out of hand,,,

The Prophecy is Fulfilled! This is the first time I've ever drawn a full kiss! Guys! Its my first kiss! If only my real one went this well lol

Your bonus:

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I think inquisition does such a good job at paralleling them and showing why they could fall in love because of it.

Every time I see a take on the solavellan relationship in Veilguard that boils down to “he’s just an ex she dated for a year about a decade why does she even still care” I die a little inside.

This so fundamentally misses the point of their relationship in Inquisition. It’s not an everyday type of experience. This isn’t your ex from uni you’re still hung up on well after graduation.

The Inquisitor was thrust into becoming an icon for a religion she doesn’t even follow. She became the leader of a religious military organization. With every day that passes, she is increasingly removed from being a regular person. Even if she doesn’t like nor want that, it’s now her reality.

But throughout this experience, she has someone who’s by her side. Who can advise her. Whom she can confide in. He shares dreams with her.

They fall in love. He breaks her heart. He abandons her. He was a god and responsible for everything that happened to her in the first place.

This is an epic and mythical romance. It’s not supposed to be grounded nor healthy and placing constraints on it as if it were doesn’t make sense.

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This is always why I thought he was bald and I will continue to pretend the canon reason doesn't exist LOL.

more domestic bliss solas