8 Year timeskip

Well if the inquisitor disbands the inquisiton he could probably go to tevinter as long as he doesn't make himself well known. After all how many people in Tevinter have actually seen the inquistor.

They have already covered themselves with the romance. See my post above. The implication is that the Inquisitor may very occasionally sneak in to see him but not enough that you would expect to see them. Meanwhile Bull never goes to see Dorian in Tevinter. What it does mitigate against is Dorian being a potential romance in DA4 but if they weren't going to include him at all, because of the romance, then why not let him stay in the south instead of always sending him back to Tevinter whether he is in a romance or not?    Instead they have his father murdered and Dorian inheriting his seat on the Magisterium, plus setting up the Lucerni with Maevaris.   As joint head of an important faction in Tevinter politics it does seem they were planning on including him next game.

Some observations not so much about the current line of discussion but impacting earlier ones and the topic as a whole.

1: What Fen'Harel is contemplating is several orders of magnitude BIGGER than what the piker Corypheus wanted to do. Cory was just trying to punch himself through the Veil. The Wolf is taking the whole thing down, completely altering reality. In DA:I, Cory tells the Inquisitor that she/he "interrupted a ritual years in the making'. It's no wonder Fen'Harel was despondent when the Focus was destroyed and was forced to absorb the spirit of Mythal. As the noted magical scholar, Tim "the Staff Man" Taylor, said. "MOAR PWR!" Even with that and other sources he's picked up along the way, is it any wonder that the actual spells to take down the Veil could take a decade or more? Just kind of surprises me how quickly some Players think this will happen.

2: Regardless of what you choose in Tresspasser (or if you don't play Tresspasser at all), the Inquisition is not well-equipped to deal with a threat like Fen'Harel. They are too Southern for an adventure that seems focused in the North. It would be hard for the Big Inquisition (or the smaller one under the Andratean Divine for that matter) to operate in the North without looking like an invasion. The smaller notQuisition doesn't start with the resources or contacts in the North it would need. Further, the Inquisition as it grew, was focused on high levels and on big threat footprints. Corypheus threw around armies of people that made for a big show. Fen'Harel is likely using smaller groups of socially invisible elves and the Eluvian network that would fall below Inquisition detection range. Beyond that, he's been supporting more than a little of the unrest in the North to cover his tracks. Whatever state the Inquisition is in after any ending (and the disbanded Inquisition is actually better equipped than the other two, but not well equipped at all), it's not hard to see why they aren't kicking down the door while Fen'Harel waxes his moustache with Snidely Whiplash brand twirling wax. This challenge is going to require something very different from the Inquisition.

3: The ending of Trespasser was written when DA4 was young and coming soon. We're...a long way from that and trying to force whatever DA4 is going to be to fit whatever was being contemplated back then is an exercise in futility. Its not the writers fault. There was no way anyone then could see what kind of Development Hell awaited the next installment. At the same time, development was early enough where they no doubt had to 'hedge their bets' on what role the Inquisitor would or would not play in the new game. All those plans and contingencies have since been blown away by six years of reboots and resignations. It's not realistic to expect the writing team now to hew to those same plans now.

Thanks for your time.

Whilst I don't subscribe to the notion that a hero can't be from the older generation, I have to admit that most players are likely to see themselves as somewhat younger and our previous PCs are falling outside the age range that most would identify with. Naturally you could play the Inquisitor as any age you wished in your head, but on the whole, given their respective back stories, they were likely older than either the Hero or Hawke when they entered the picture. This seems reinforced by the fact that the majority of our Inner Circle were in the 30-40 bracket +/- a couple of years either way when we meet them. People were in their respective roles because they had experience behind them, even Sera although she was the youngest and to my mind the only one who could conceivably be in her early 20s. (I don't count Cole as although he presents as a young man, he has been in his Cole persona for a number of years and spirits are ageless).  Even 3-4 years after defeating Corypheus (depending on how much time you thought it took) had moved them upwards, often into a different age range to the one they started with.

The Inquisitor by virtue of their age if nothing else would invite questions as to their past life and the suspicion that information was being withheld if they weren't open about it. This would be true of any of their trusted agents from the Inquisition. As has also been pointed out they are not really familiar with the northern culture and so might make mistakes that would draw attention to themselves. So even without the angle that "Solas knows them", it made sense to recruit new, younger agents with a background in the north so they could more easily blend in and stay undetected. I assume once that had been established by the writers, why not the time skip to make a clean break of it?

Funnily enough, I remember several of us commenting on the slide for Dorian at the end of Trespasser seeming to show an older version than we were accustomed to. That would seem to have been anticipating the time skip as Dorian in 9:52 is 41 years of age.

Which means the median is around 30 and on the whole I would say they would be mid-twenties onwards in the majority of cases. I would suggest the human noble background probably leave greatest amount of wiggle room for being younger.

Where did I say that? I was pointing out that overall the cultures up north are going to be different to what we have been accustomed to down south. The differences between Orlais and Ferelden aren't as great as between those nations and, say, Tevinter. Now I thought it odd that a Dalish elf could gain admittance to the Conclave, let alone get anywhere near the Divine, so clearly logic doesn't always play a part in the writers' thinking on these matters. However, there are problems that certain races are going to encounter up north which I hope they don't just hand wave away. On the other hand, being a mage in Tevinter will be a totally different experience from down south.

So to give an example, if you are a mage the general expectation will be that you received an education in a Circle (unless like Calpernia you were a slave). The next obvious question would be which Circle or who was your sponsor? Despite being the dominant factor in Tevinter mages are not as numerous as the Soporati by quite a long way, and the Circles do seem to be restricted to the main cities, meaning the options are limited, so you would have to be careful about what you claim for yourself and your cover story might get very complicated very quickly. That is all I was suggesting.

A Soporati would probably not have quite the same level of problem but a local would still have grown up there and be totally immersed in the culture, so answering questions would come naturally in a way that would not be the case with a southerner and if you make even a small slip up, it could arouse suspicion. There is also the matter of accent. Naturally you could change your accent but local people will often spot if it is fake. The Inquisitor did not have this problem in the south because all of them came from the Freemarches, which is basically an offshoot of the nations to the south, with a corresponding mix of accents, and everyone knew you were an outsider (to Ferelden and Orlais) so it wasn't an issue. Luckily Tevinter is very large and cosmopolitan, so apparently someone with an Antivan accent (as we must assume is the case with the various Crows in the stories and comics) doesn't really stick out that much, although to be honest you would think the two in the Wigmaker Job would, particularly if you are expecting to be attacked by Crows. 

Still, to return to my original point, whilst we learned about various southern cultures whilst we were Inquisitor, it wasn't vital to our role, because we were already known to be an outsider. After the Conclave our presence was not exactly a secret. Trying to go under the radar in Tevinter (or Antiva or the Anderfels for that matter) is a completely different challenge where they don't want people to suspect their identity or even their origins. A Dalish Inquisitor for example, unless they romanced Solas and let him remove their vallaslin, would stick out immediately. The fact that if you romance Dorian, you are rumoured to be sneaking into Minrathous, suggests that despite their efforts to stay incognito, someone spotted them and realised who they were. That doesn't bode well for concealing one's movements.

Yes, and of course they have had 8 years in which to get up to speed, so I see your point.

I thought someone might point out the big drawback to my argument, which is that as players we don't know any more than a southerner would in world. Of course, that is why I suggested that having a slave background could work best because you could be in Tevinter and yet not completely familiar with it, particularly if you had been captured from somewhere down south instead of born and raised as a slave in Tevinter.

My only counter is that I was talking about the Inquisitor standing out because of their age in connection with their unfamiliarity. People would expect them to know things through lived experience that they might excuse in a younger person. Nevertheless, ignorance of the culture of their country of origin, whatever that might be, is going to be a problem when writing the new PC. I'm hoping they give us some sort of origin story prologue, like DAO, or at the very least some sort of lead in story to ease us into the role and the setting, rather than just plonk us down in the middle of the action, like in DAI. However, I suppose they could keep just chucking codices at us and then give us a few option for conversation that lead us in the right direction so don't appear totally ignorant, a bit like when Josephine discusses our background with us.

Even with age, I don’t see unfamiliarity with the culture as an issue. People immigrate at all ages. Plus let’s be honest, there are a lot of outsiders who know more about a country than people who have lived there their entire lives.
As for origins, personally I hope they don’t. Ironically they were my least favorite part of Dragon Age: Origins. I could see them doing some sort of lead in, though being dropped into the action might fit with the themes.

It could be possible that our new protagonist is some kind of mercenary. Just some anonymous sellsword (possibly from the south) who got swept up in important events because they just so happen to take a job that put them at the right place at the right time (not so different from Hawke). It might fit with the idea of our character being someone that people “wouldn’t see coming” since most mercenaries are written off as just hired muscle to be used as pawns in the grand schemes of “more important” people.

I was just suggesting an idea to add to the conversation; don’t need to get all sour over it.

Also, whether or not a mercenary is willing to do anything for money is up to them. They usually get to pick and choose what jobs they are willing to take. Plus, this would just be a starting point for the character, in theory.

Wouldn’t that be a problem regardless of the set up for our character?
This a video game with limits to its programming, not a tabletop game like D&D where you can pretty much do anything.
There’s always gonna be some element of railroading and limits to the choices we can make.