Dragon Age The Joyguard (formerly Hype Train) [Spoilers]

Interest for Solas is a 0/10 now (was formerly at similar levels to you). I’m fully with those who want him killed off before the game starts or during the opening and have the rest of the game deal with something else.

But in this case, it does. Otherwise again it’s just a repeat of the last villain.

Not at all true. People who are too damaged or stunted to even begin to care whether or not they could be called a hero in any sense whatsoever are definitely real, both in stories and in the world we live in. I'd put Corypheous in that category at the extreme end of the scale along with Voldemort and Emperor Palpatine. Anything he offers to anyone is entirely to ease his own quest for power. 'Salvation' is his sales pitch, it's not his motivation. 

Villains who could creditably be considered heroes of their own story, like you're referring to, are usually considered anti-villains when done right. And I wouldn't even say that Solas conforms to that.

He obviously feels terrible about what he's done, doing and going to do, and is just trying to make the best of a terrible situation because he's the only one with the power and knowledge to do so. If he gives up then he's personally responsible for the extinction of his people. There's no-one else to pass the buck to. And if he goes ahead then the blood of our people are on his hands, and he has to deal with that. He has to choose between one genocide or another, and there's no possible third option.

You don't want anyone ordinary to get it into their heads that they can start taking those kinds of decisions into their own hands, but if a human being is someday put in a position of being forced to choose between several potentially terrible outcomes for humanity as well as other species, a la Shepard in ME3, I'd want that person to have the spine and sense to get the least bad deal for us even if it still involves a lot of suffering. Rather than taking the route that seems most like inaction to keep their conscience as clean as possible. 

I don't see him seeing himself as a hero at all, and I don't see him having any delusions about what he's doing. Which makes him my very favorite kind of villain. He knows exactly how much damage he's causing, and he hates it, but he also has very real reason to think that it's better than the alternative.

I'd compare him to Infinity War Thanos, except that while Thanos' heart was in the right place his logic was fundamentally totally warped and insane. In contrast, Solas knows way more about the bigger picture than we do, and so far as we know he's undertaking his quest with a clear view of what's at stake. 

And if considering human lives more important than chimps' isn't racist then favoring Solas' era of immortal superpowered elves intrinsically over modern humans, dwarves and elves isn't either. Calling him that just because that's what he'd be if he was a real human person favoring one human race over another for made-up reasons doesn't make it true. They're two completely different things. No matter how much you understandably don't like racists.

yeah the Thanos connection is very apt. As is your comment on even Solas does not see himself as a hero. ...and I agree with you about how that makes him compelling as hell.

Doesn't sound sympathetic from gervaise21 explanation. 

I rest my case, Your Honor.

Besides even if Solas was a racist...he isn't now.

I honestly think it's a silly comparison to make.

Solas believes that his people trump ours (if necessary) because:

*They potentially live forever vs. a hundred years and change at most. That's potentially an infinity more of sentient, sapient living per life.

*They all have power over the laws of nature far beyond what modern mages know, and their civilizations reached advancement and sophistication far beyond ours because of it.

*They're all attuned and awake to and capable of appreciating the magical nature of everything around them. Not unlike the difference between sapience and non-sapience, at least the way Solas describes it.

*They were here first, and we only came about in the first place because a catastrophic mistake winked them out of existence for a while.


In contrast, a true, diehard racist believes that one race is favorable to another because:

*They have a slightly different skin pigmentation.

... That's it.

Calling Solas' dilemma racism is reductive as fuck. The two can't be compared at all.

from here

Saying that he's awful because he's murdering families is a completely superficial observation. You can truthfully say that about almost any man or woman who has ever made anything significant happen at all. It's just not a meaningful or useful statement, either for judging him as a fictional villain or figuring out how to gauge and minimize evil and suffering in the real world. Nobody is out there killing families just to kill families.

Yes, you are. If you knew for a fact that you could save them then you chose between a world where you did so, and a world where you didn't, and they died because you chose the latter. Functionally, you're exactly as responsible for their death as if you'd cut their throat or drowned them in a river. The only reasons you wouldn't be held legally responsible for it are because there's no possible way to enforce such a thing without an omniscient judicial system, and because people are cowards and don't want to be made to feel bad about their general tendencies towards inaction.

Solas has to choose between a world where his people live and a lot of ours die because of it, and a world where his people are dead and ours aren't. That's it. No matter which he chooses, he functionally has oceans of blood on his hands. Your own preferred narrative about his situation simply doesn't change that.

There could absolutely be a situation that extreme someday. In 1944, a Norwegian resistance soldier named Knut Haukelid and his men blew up a civilian ferry carrying the materials necessary for Nazi Germany to start their nuclear weapons program. ...With ten innocent bystanders onboard, the warning of whom would have endangered the mission and risked Hitler gaining access to nukes. Terrible choices definitely exist, and if you're unfortunate enough to be forced to make one someday then you better be on the ball. Saying "I don't want to be responsible for making this choice" doesn't keep nuclear weapons out of Nazi hands, and it doesn't save anyone who's going to die while you stand there whining about how wrong and unfair the situation is.

Nobody said that the chimps should be murdered. We're just comparing their intrinsic value to ours.  If someone put a gun to your head and ordered you to choose between the deaths of five young chimps and the deaths of five human babies you'd never met, with all of them dying if you refused to make a choice at all, I'd wager that you would most likely save the babies, because unless you've gotten your wires crossed we're intrinsically more valuable than the demonstratively less evolved and aware chimps who individually have a fraction of our potential.

Likewise, Solas is choosing to save the people he knows have the higher intrinsic value because they individually have more potential than modern humans, dwarves and elves do. 

If you insist on comparing it with contemporary real-world mindsets then at least call it speciesism, which might actually be superficially accurate.

I don't think Solas main concern is practical but sentimental...at least when it comes to restoring his people. He does not want to elevate them again because it would be better for Thedas...just that they are *his people* and on top of that he's the reason they fell in the first place.