The Blanketfort (crying and throwing up) - The Official Solas Thread [Spoilers]

That's no excuse. They could've created something that he wants do good for his people, but first he has to look at his mistakes and learn from them so he could forgive himself if he wants to start over. But it's like they want to make another villan and "saving the day" cliche, like they are running out of ideas or just don't want to write a better story.

Why do you not think cutting magic was connected to the way Evanuris are trapped? Why can't these things be connected? We can even ask Solas whether getting rid of the Veil means that Evanuris will be free, and he doesn't deny that. And the Veil IS what is preventing magic from flowing back as it was, before its creation.

midnight tea & gervaise21

I don't think Solas would respond tearfully to "What's Cole talking about?" as "A mistake. One of many made by a much younger elf who was certain he knew everything." regarding the veil, if he had planned out all the consequences and expected what happened to the elves to happen. I think Gervaise is right about the tunnel vision he had back then, and this banter seems to back it up.

Solas art break!

Wolf in Love by Felix Fellow


By BbbAaaRrrKkk


Solas and Nalia wedding doodle by Nipuni

Solas was always meant to be the villain. He's a complicated one though because he thinks he's doing the right thing and we as players can see his pov and even sympathize with it. I can't say I cried tears of sorrow when I killed the Archdemon or watched Meredith turn into a statue, but if I am forced to face a man that I spent a year bonding with as my Inquisitor, he definitely isn't a typical villain in my books.

Good point!

Yeah we were given the option to try and redeem him. I can't see that being completed ignored just to make him the final villain. Solas wants us to prove him wrong. Solas wishes there was another way. He even saved us and tried to stop a war for us. Watching the Qunari slaughter everyone would have been a typical villain move, but he started to see the people of this world as real and it changed him.

You do need to draw a distinction here between his actions if he admired the Inquisitor and his actions if he did not. To the latter he makes it quite clear that he is saving them to prevent further chaos and for all we know that chaos could have interfered with his own plans. The reason he stops the Qunari is because "they offend me". That is more the speech of a "god" who wants a world he approves of. To be honest that version of Solas is not so very different from Corypheus. That version of Solas doesn't want to be stopped or proven wrong because the Inquisitor is the embodiment of everything he dislikes about the modern world. However, just because it hates the Inquisitor, does that really give him the right to destroy everything? Surely that is more the actions of a typical villain.



Look I know there has been a lot of debate about this but to my mind it is unequivocal that he thinks what he will do is going to end the lives of the people the Inquisitor knows. The Inquisitor can also challenged him on the morality of his actions that will destroy countless lives and he challenges "wouldn't you do the same to save your own". Also, as I have frequently argued, you don't release magic back into the world wholesale and not affect the creatures and plants there that have grown up in a magically supressed environment. The major difference is that you admit the Evanuris would have done this "inadvertently" whereas Solas seems fully aware of the likely results of his action. He is not simply destroying a civilisation this time round.

As for the Veil not being something physical, that is what Circle mages taught not knowing exactly what anything really is. Really now we know that the Veil is a created thing, it does become something material, tangible, even if it is largely an energy force field. There is a here and a there and we cannot simply cross over, which is how it was before Solas raised it, nor can you see the Fade from this side. So whilst calling it physical may not be the best description, it is the nearest you can get to the reality of how it prevents passage.

In fact going by your argument that he took his previous action knowing it would destroy "the world of the elves", he should also be aware that he might well not like what he gets after dropping the Veil, based off his reaction to raising it. Yet he is still carrying on regardless.



It is easy enough to figure something out in hindsight. The elves at the time were totally taken by surprise when their world literally dropped out from under them. They were not expecting it. If they knew he was going to raised the Veil and this would be the consequence, wouldn't they have got out. It is one of the things that doesn't make sense for me about their reaction that they knew Fen'Harel was responsible for their predicament. Why would they know this? If they were his enemies, why warn them? If they were his friends and he did have even the slightest inkling what the Veil would do, why didn't he tell them to get the hell out of there? The only conclusion I can come up with is that the dire consequences of his action even took him by surprise.

He has also ended the world as he knew it at a time of Elvenhan - he even downright says that he destroyed it - yet he saved the world thanks to his actions too. It's the thing that makes him as his actions complex.
Well, hang on... you're saying that he's not destroying civilization this time around because it will affect creatures and plants that have grown up in a magically suppressed environment.

If the magical suppression affected animals and plants, didn't the same thing happen before but the other way around???

I think the answer is obvious. The major difference between Evanuris and Solas is that after Solas's actions life will change, drastically even, but will continue... and it will not be as tortured of existence as, say, one we saw a glimpse of in future Redcliffe. To quote Solas - there is still hope for restoration. He clearly thinks that whatever Evanuris were about to unleash would prevent even that; everything would be destroyed or corrupted if 'old dreams' returned, whatever they are.

Why does it matter that they know who lifted the Veil after it was done?

Nevermind that the elves didn't seem to get out alive or killed Fen'Harel - that was just helpless thrashing of trapped ancient elves. At that point, nobody could do nothing and everybody could know, because Solas has succeeded in what he attempted to do: had dealt with Evanuris and the potential threat of whatever they were to unleash (likely: the Blight).

I don't know... I can't shake the feeling that - while people forgetting about stuff like Veil or Fen'Harel may have been due to complacency, nevermind the Blight and tempestuous history and whatever - something or someone may have helped people to forget about this stuff. We do know that memories can be tampered with, or even gobbled by gluttonous spirits.
Given that I've been the one to suggest it, I thought that I... do get it? I was careful with language there because what we're talking about is still mostly guesswork.
The whole thing might as well have happened in the Fade (which is where the myths suggest it happened) and Solas has somehow managed to get them to dream and then severed souls from their bodies by dampening the connection with the Fade wholesale.
But we don't really know what the general population knew. There's Fen'Harel propaganda, by no mention in vir Dirthara that something has happened to Mythal. Is it possible that only her people knew, while the rest was kept in the dark? It's also not something mentioned in the myths. If that information can be kept away from people, what else potentially was?
But then wouldn't Mythal's domain fall apart after her death? Her temple in Arbor Wilds didn't just disintegrate after she was slain. Even if her people felt her demise, Abelas tells us that the temple was attacked and then destroyed. Not fully though, given that its center and the Well (and the giant tree above it) seemed mostly intact.

That doesn't exclude the possibility that each Evanuris had some sort of effect on their realm or in fact HAD their own realms/domains which they then ruled. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if that was the case. (*dons a tinfoil hat*) The major effect of the Veil might have been that it has suddenly connected the realms into a single whole - which would explain why the elvhen ruins sometimes seem like they were chopped up, with large chunks misplaced or just showing up in weird places, like that giant hand near Ghilan'nain's grove.

Yes, you are quite correct, I was misremembering that bit. However, I know when I listened it through for the second time (having not really paid it a great deal of attention the first) it did make me feel like something more was implied. May be it was simply that so long as her Temple endures then she does as well but I got the sense that it made him realise or confirmed in his mind in some way that Mythal was not truly gone. After all, in Trespasser he does say that he knew it might be difficult to truly kill the "First of my People", which is why he had to settle for banishment of the other Evanuris.

Now Mythal was still living on in the Fade even before she found a host, plus the Well seemed to have an element of her in it as well - the water spirit that rose up to defy Corypheus - so that allowed her structure to survive, particularly if the death of her physical body somehow allowed something of her spirit to travel to these things or energise the part of her that was already there (Flemeth already showed in DA2 that you can be split between multiple locations). If the other Evanuris were physically banished beyond the Fade, that put them one step further removed from their creations and since they hadn't actually died, the bits of them embodied in their creations were not energised but rather the opposite. It's a theory anyway, among the many others that have been put forward.