dragonageinsanity

[dragonageinsanity]

[dragonageinsanity]

oh isabela. they could never make me give you to the arishok.

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you are the hero of ferelden. no matter your origin you watch those you love most be ripped from you. death becomes an endless cycle which seems to follow you wherever you go. the fate of the world rests on your shoulders as you know you can never return home. home is gone now. home is buried with your family, jailed with your closest ally, cradled by the ancestors, forgotten like your beloved, lost to time in the murky glass of the eluvian- dead in your arms, killed at your hand. you are the hero of ferelden and it is your destiny to die. when next the world falls apart, you do not come. this world does not deserve your pity.

you are the champion of kirkwall. you are a refugee, cold and hungry and sold into labour. your mother hates you, though she will never say it. it's your fault the ogre killed your sibling, your fault the taint took the other. but you are happy. you have everything, friends and family and status and riches. you defeat the people plaguing your glorious city, you are the people's hero. you will always know even as she came back, isabela left you to die. you are happy but you are alone. you have everything and then you are rocking back and forth begging please please please do not take my mother as well. you have nothing, but you for a single second, you had everything. you are the champion of kirkwall, and your ally has blown up the chantry. where is your home now that everything is your fault?

you are the herald of andraste. and you are so, so scared. these people do not trust you, do not like you, would feed you to the fade if they could. they do not care if you follow another religion, you are their herald. you can never return home because heroes do not have homes. they say home is the people you choose, but you didn't choose these people, did you? every step you take aches. thousands reach out to touch you, for safety. for comfort. you are a black hole close to destruction, and you cannot do this. you are the herald of andraste and you have not been yourself for so long now.

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felassan things that kept me awake last night:

the 4,000 year time span between the veil and the masked empire during which felassan could only ever have spoken to solas in dreams when at all.

the years solas spent in the lighthouse with all those fucking notes from felassan around. "don't cause too much trouble before i get there."

the only time anyone says felassan's name out loud in the video games is when solas says it in an ancient arlathan memory

solas not painting felassan a mural in the lighthouse and only referring to him as "my agent," once, but still regretting what happened with him so much that it's one of the three big revenants powered by his regret, after the titans and mythal???? sir your repression

the ambiguity of "the betrayal of felassan" as the name of that revenant. whose betrayal of whom.

the heart of corruption/revenant dragon residing in the same place felassan used to go to get away from everything.

felassan calling it "our rebellion."

felassan being aware that he would die if he reported back to solas, seeing a plausible way he could run instead, and reporting back anyway.

the tone he takes during his death scene being so friendly and nonchalant, "what's the harm really" and "i suspect you'll hate this," like he's still trying to talk to solas like they are friends and equals even while he is aware solas is about to kill him.

felassan isn't even his real/original name and in one of his veilguard notes he refers to being felassan at all as being "solas's friend felassan" like that identity is inextricably tied to his friendship with solas, he cannot be felassan without also being solas's friend.

"and you are the slow arrow?" / "i hope so."

in conclusion,

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I wonder how many heart-attacks Blackwall and Solas have per day when Cole is around.

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I still can't believe one of the selling points of Veilguard was "no more fetch quests! We moved past that" and then you play it and 50% of the quests are running around doing more or less useless stuff to gain factions strength, it's literally the same boring thing come on now

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all i’m saying is that the dao romanceables are stronger than me bc if i was alistair zevran morrigan or leliana and i had a fearless beautiful dwarven party leader who had been delicately deflecting all flirtations because her heart was elsewhere, and then her face lit up like the sun when she saw some guy in the marketplace, only for that guy to tell her that her father has died, horribly, and then immediately follow that up by revealing he (the guy, not her father) apparently never thought he had a serious future with her and has now knocked up and married some other woman he just met, i would have chosen violence. i would have eaten his heart in the marketplace

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kind of obsessed with this Reddit theory

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I'm not grieving Dragon Age. Dragon Age will survive through the fandom with art and fics and love for the series. It will live on.

I'm grieving the ones who had their livelihoods fucked with because Andrew Wilson thinks $30 MILLION DOLLARS in his pocket isn't enough. The generational video game dev knowledge becomes even more fractured, if not lost if the devs decide to go after other pursuits.

It sucks, man. With each giant layoff gaming as a whole gets worse due to the splintered talent. New devs have trouble flourishing because there is no one to teach them.

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feels like some of you don't get that ea didn't decide to do this to bioware after or because veilguard failed. it failed because they had already decided, and had been making decisions accordingly for years.

they were set up to fail. barring divine intervention, there was no way veilguard was going to satisfy ea's demands. ea just needed the dev cycle to finish (and check that there was in fact no divine intervention) before tearing it down.

be mad, but understand the chain of events isn't "veilguard bad -> ea nukes bioware". it's the other way around.

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They will volunteer.

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it’s been two months and some change and I still dont get what da:tv was trying to do with mythal and solas’ relationship.

that dude is a spirit of wisdom, of knowing things. not loyalty, or love, or devotion, or faith, or anything else that would explain (to me) why he says “this is the worst idea of all time. I will follow wherever you go.”

what has she done that was deserving of such devotion. how strong was their worm love that he would override his very beings purpose for her hubristic quest for power.

show me the mythal solas sees when he calls her the best of them. the one who cared for and protected her people with the loving hand of a mother and the fury of a high dragon. show me the goddess of terrible bargains, who clawed her way through history to offer flemeth a Faustian deal.

show me the mythal that saw the path before her, who saw elgar’nan and the evanuris and the destruction that they had already wrought upon the world and thought she could gentle their hand. she could not change tyranny but she could guide his rage.

show me the mythal that knew how delicate this dance was. who saw the volatility of the first born, who could feel the temptation, the corruption always simmering beneath the surface of her best intentions. who knew she would need wisdom to keep from falling completely to the corruption of her new power.

show me the mythal that failed. show me how benevolence becomes retribution, and how wisdom becomes pride.

maybe this is just my disappointment with da:tv as a whole talking, but veilgaurd mythal is just so flat and lacking in any motivation beyond being solas’ tragic backstory that it undercuts the emotional payoff of his redemption ending for me.

sorry for the incoherent ramble, i just hate this game so much.

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the ambiguity of solas's ending actually really does piss me off so bad. like i dont know why they think they were cooking by being vague about where exactly he ends up and whether or not he is trapped or able to leave, especially if your own player character ends up there with him, whether thats rook or lavellan. the imagery in the epilogue slides and implication in the "atoning for the blight" ending is clear but only if you're well versed in lore that veilguard does not really explore, and thats only for the atonement endings where he leaves to heal the blight willingly. where does he end up in the other endings? where did the rift behind him lead to? is it just the fade? do all the rifts lead to the black city even if he doesnt intentionally leave to go heal the blight??? if so why??? the rift opened naturally, solas didnt open it. is it just luck that it leads to exactly where we need hin to be?????? does rook even know where it leads???? do they even think before shoving him into it?????? does it even matter if he has the fucking dagger anyway????? if so whats the point of any of it??????????? WHAT THE FUCK???????

if that was just the game's refusal to employ it's own vocabulary that would be one thing, because its a larger issue in the game overall. the black city/golden city is not mentioned to my knowledge, though perhaps it is in codex entries, and so to use that terminology in the end would be confusing to the incompetent and stupid "new players" the game was written for who apparently cannot be trusted to absorb worldbuilding information on their own. but the fact that several people have asked for clarification from the devs and we have gotten more ambiguous, unsatisfying answers or straight up refusals to elaborate is so ridiculous to me. why? spoilers? for the game you are never actually going to get to make? even if it was a spoiler who fucking cares? an ending that leaves you unsatisfied because you are CONFUSED is not a well-written one. when i first finished i genuinely felt PANICKED because it was over and i didnt understand how it ended. i felt so desperate to know where exactly they were. the way the ending feels completely different if they are in the black city versus the regret prison is HUGE. those are two completely different endings. whether or not he has agency and is able to leave makes a HUGE difference in the overall messaging of his character. it makes a HUGE impact on lavellan's willingness to join him. i guarantee that like half of the people who hate the solavellan ending and were really upset by it would have felt far better about it if it was just explained where the fuck they were. like what is the point. how does it serve the narrative for the audience to leave the epilogue unsure of what just happened? and the worst part is that, while i am a full 99.9% sure that they are in the black city rather than regret jail, because thats where the blight is and thats the visual imagery used in the epilogue slides, that 0.1% uncertainty exists not because i just dont know the lore well enough or didnt understand the ending, but because i no longer have faith in bioware to stick to their own writing.

i know that it only makes sense for solas to be in the black city if his goal is healing the blight, but what if epler decides he wants solas to be in the regret prison instead being psychologically tortured because he thinks hes annoying and deserves it? what if some other dev who has a bone to pick with bald guys gets hired and pushes for it really hard in meetings for 5 years? will what they established for the ending actually matter, then? or will they do a complete 180 from what was set up and retcon the ending? and i get it- they have always done this on some level. corypheus returning after da2 to be inquisition's antagonist, for example, though i'd counter that argument with there being clear foreshadowing that he body hopped so that seed was indeed planted. or killing flemeth with morrigan in origins only to find out in da2 that she gave her soul to hawke just in time to survive. but these things have an internal consistency with the world-building that i have lost faith in the writers to continue. corypheus survives because he uses blight body hopping, an established ability that we already knew archdemons had, then elaborated on when he returns in inquisition. flemeth is an ancient unknowable legendary swamp witch who is suggested to be playing 4d mind chess with the characters even before you know about her own body-snatching, so finding out she was able to cheat death like that isn't unfounded or far fetched. but veilguard so gleefully tramples over its own world's rules and established stories, whether its stupid small mechanical gripes like rook wading through "blight pools" and exploding "blight cysts" all over themselves with no explanation meanwhile we know that felix alexius died of blight from just coming into contact with hurlock blood when attacked, and that ferelden mabari biting darkspawn was a death sentence for them unless they could be cured with a rare herb. or larger things, like.... idk. solas's characterization, motivations, and massive network of agents and supporters. or slavery existing in tevinter. or the existence of the titan's heart orbs that each evanuris has? or um. RED LYRIUM. and so much more.

i think thats why the vagueness of this game bothers me in a way it did not previously. granted, i do not think inquisition is NEARLY as vague with its lore reveals and character epilogues. its actually very straight forward and explains everything sufficiently. theres more of an argument for da2 being very vague. but previously, i would have trusted that it would be taken care of in a way that made sense, or at least was internally consistent with the world. i have completely lost that faith. instead, after playing the rest of veilguard and seeing how little respect the game has for it's own world and story and characters, the ambiguity of solas's ending is nothing but anxiety-inducing and unsatisfying. i cant even clearly analyze his character arc if i dont truly know the implications of the ending. and on top of that, what reason do i have to believe the writers will respect their own writing going forward?

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The lore drop that bothers me the most with how it's glossed over is that ancient elves were actually spirits and how, without delving more into what spirits actually are, it ends up diminishing them as a people & undercutting their complexity. Even Solas says they reflect the world, a pure embodiment of an emotion, but then what does that say of their society, of their goals and aspirations, hell, even of their war crimes? I'm not trying to argue they're not people, it's just sad that the best exploration of it remains in Awakening with Justice and the only one who argues for their personhood is this game's chosen antagonist. That this is the direction they chose for the people they heavily coded as indigenous makes it all the more egregious that they're relegated to set-dressing (Crossroads, Hall of Valor) or a couple of examples to show some of them are Good (I miss how in Inq, Compassion is said to be a rare spirit and easy to corrupt, Cole is terrified by what he almost became and could become, and in VG u find 2 who are mostly fine, if a bit rattled. Harding even compares them to a mabari puppy??but I digress). Ofc they couldn't humanize the spirits more bc then we'd have to contend with how we're supposed to want them to stay fenced in for all eternity for the safety of the status quo. All the while, their earthly descendants have been invisibilised or killed off-screen, with the exception of a small group u can save and that's used as an opportunity to showcase Solas's growth and how bad the Venatori are. Ancient elves don't exist, city elves are functionally the same as any other npc, and the Dalish have been replaced by the Veil Jumpers, who are totally cool with anyone plundering - I mean, exploring their ruins and seem mostly concerned with isolating dangerous artifacts and shoving them in a museum, hmm... Honestly, I gave up when Irelin said it was easy to forget about the halla. Thank fuck Merrill isn't in this cus she'd be Cyrian. Others have pointed out how nonsensical it is they're all fine with their gods being fake, but also real and evil (yet still invoke the Creators & Mythal and wear vallaslin), so I'll move on to the real horror for me: that none of them knew. There's a banter between Bellara & Emmrich that turned my stomach where he says that elves originally being spirits was a working theory some of them had (oh, to be a fly on the wall during THAT racist debate!), once again placing humans as the natural custodians of elven history and it's all so cruel that it's world-breaking for me. It's awful that elves were abandoned not only by their 'gods', but by what it turns out are their brethren. Am I supposed to believe that for millennia they prayed to their gods, but they only ever spoke to Tevinter magisters? That spirits never shared anything about their common past with the elves? Why did Mythal keep them in the dark? The Dalish have taken great pains to ensure every scrap of history is preserved and shared, despite the genocides, but I guess oral history doesn't count (and they never thought to use spirits? ig they weren't interesting enough to be reflected by spirits either, otherwise they could've found out even more from that) and most of their books and artifacts got stolen/destroyed by humans, too bad the ancient elves never felt any kinship to them, they could've used the lore boost.

1/2

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Hahahaha, of course I get my queer comfort character.

so i did this quiz and-

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I’ve seen a lot of posts discussing whether Solas and Mythal’s relationship was romantic in nature, or it was some kind of mother/son deal, but I think the answer is a lot simpler and staring us all in the face: Solas was Mythal’s dog.

So a lot has been said about how toxic Mythal and Solas’ relationship was, and I’m not gonna get into all that. What I will say, is that I believe the relationship’s power imbalance may have become gradually bigger after Solas took physical form at Mythal’s behest.

When Solas said: “I will always follow where you go”, we should take note of the word “follow”. Solas did not lead with the other Evanuris; he followed Mythal and had her markings on his face. Much like how Ghilan’nain followed Andruil, yet their relationship was romantic, and Ghilan’nain quickly agreed to take on a leadership role when offered. Solas did not. We don’t know whether he was never offered one or that he simply had no desire to lead (both might be true), but the disparity between Mythal and Solas’ positions were noted by those around them, and was interpreted (we hear it from Elgar’nan) as Solas being Mythal’s “lapdog”. This interpretation seemed to be the general consensus- proven by the many dog-like statues in Mythal’s temple, and Solas symbolically becoming known as a canine.

We don’t know how Solas felt being compared to a dog - perhaps the comparison seemed flattering/ less condescending in the beginning: we know that there are strong bonds between people and their animals in dragon age: Davrin and Assan, Kell and Hafter, and the general lore about Marbari dogs. “Turlum” is a powerful thing (as we see with Davrin and Assan) and may have been exactly how they felt about each other.

When we explore the lighthouse we come across a piano and a codex entry called “memories of a duet”:

the relief of private achievement, away from well-meant misunderstanding and mindless worship; an unspoken joy in the center of rising, perfect echoes.

Finally, a beloved memory surfaces. A smiling glance, meeting at a crescendo; a shared moment of understanding; seeing completely, and being wholly seen.

This entry seems to sum up their relationship quite well: “away from well-meant misunderstanding” (could refer to a romantic interpretation of their relationship), and “seeing completely, and being wholly seen.” (Turlum)

Whatever the relationship had started as, the power imbalance seems to have reached a peak around the time the Evanuris decided they wanted to lead their people as gods. We don’t know whether there actually was a power difference between the Evanuris and the rest of the elves when they were all spirits: my guess is there was one, but not a huge one: perhaps the difference between a normal person and a mage. When the Evanuris decided they were gods, they made a hard line in the sand: separating themselves from their people, and separating Mythal from Solas. This is also where the “lapdog” comment from Elgar’nan seems incredibly condescending.

The markings on his face no longer symbolize devotion, but ownership. He burns them off and instead of a dog becomes a wolf (using the allegory of Elgar’nan). An obvious metaphor here is that the markings symbolize a dog collar.

He frees the elves but becomes an unwilling symbol himself, thus separating him from his people after already having been separated from the Evanuris. The man literally becomes a lone wolf.

However, Mythal and Solas’ love for each other continues, and is obviously still strong when Solas asks Mythal to run away with him (at this point he must feel desperately lonely). What happens to Solas when Mythal dies can only be imagined: there’s a reason why Assan follows Davrin in death.

For the first time in his physical life he is truly alone and has to figure out who he is without Mythal. The only role he has ever known away from her, is the rebel leader. He doubles down on his efforts to stop the Evanuris and destroys the world of the elves in the process. His grief and regret over Mythal and the home of the elves chart his course from when he wakes up until inquisition.

With a friendly inquisitor and especially a romanced Lavellan he finds a new role, or rather, he rediscovers himself before Mythal: a spirit of wisdom. For the first time in a long time he also finds a companion: someone he can rely on. Someone who eases that lonely ache he must have felt for millennia.

There are many cool aspects of the Crestwood scene (romanced Lavellan), but the one I want to highlight is Solas’ reaction to the vallaslin: when he decides to tell her the truth of who he was/is, but chickens out the last second. He panics and the fact that he immediately jumps to the vallaslin says something about how tied it is to him psychologically. He doesn’t force Lavellan to get rid of it, but he certainly does his very best to convince her. It is the moment Solas truly sees Lavellan as his mirror image and his equal. She is another lone wolf, mindlessly worshipped and ostracized, but she still wears that damn collar.

I am convinced Solas knows rationally that the vallaslin no longer means what it once meant - Lavellan can even insist the Dalish have reclaimed it, and he still tries to convince her to get rid of it, because to HIM it symbolizes enslavement and it is a painful reminder of his own ties to Mythal (it is an even stronger parallel if the inquisitor drinks from the well and has Mythal’s markings).

This is also the difference between Mythal and Lavellan: one is the master (with every connotation) the other another wolf.

In conclusion: Mythal and Solas had the relationship of a master and their dog: a relationship that many with pets themselves can relate to, both in the aspect of devotion, companionship, and in the power imbalance. In a way the “mother” interpretation isn’t far off - it just so happens that Solas is a fur baby.

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Emmrich: Oh my goodness, Harding, how did you find out about me and Rook?

Emmrich during combat: