dangerous-animal

[dangerous-animal]

✨Closure✨

[lies down- i finished it but my brain is still whirring I had to draw happy things]

[and now there's more]

[dangerous-animal]

thinking about the potential parallels between the vallaslin removal- the way solas' hands stay so close and slow and gentle without ever touching lavellan's face- and any healing magic she might cast on him after the final battle. how her hands might follow a similar movement, taking care so as not to touch. how his bruises might fade in the same way her markings did. how they could erase the elven gods' cruelty from each other in that way- lavellan's binding and solas' pain- and how they are each the only one who could really do that for the other.

[dangerous-animal]

Before Veilguard's release I was theorizing the Veilguard companion characters might have been designed to be parallels to the known Evanuris, but I couldn't place all of them.

Now that I've played the game (almost twice) I think I've figured them all out.

Rook - Elgar'nan, the leader. Controller of light and dark. The one who influences the others.

Neve - Mythal, who can be a fierce protector or a source of inspiration and hope.

Harding - Andruil, the hunter, who went mad from the Void and had to fight her way back

Bellara - June, the inventor. Master of magical artifact.

Lucanis - Dirthamen, keeper of secrets, who mastered the twin ravens of Fear and Deceit, and returned from death.

Davrin - Ghilan'nain, Master of Monsters, Keeper of Halla.

Emmrich - Falon'Din, the necromancer. Friend of the dead.

Taash - Sylaise, who's fire cannot be quenched.

Which leaves Solas to play the role he always has - Fen'Harel, the trickster and betrayer, who could ally with them, if only they will listen to his advice and try to protect their world as best as they can.

[dangerous-animal]

you remember when lucanis’ ‘mage killer’ title dropped and everyone got all heated discoursing over whether to preemptively hate him because they thought he hated mages when he was just killing rich powerful mages in tevinter and then it literally did not matter at all because the political and social power of magic is nonexistent in veilguard. that’s exactly the issue

[dangerous-animal]

"You have to stop the world just to stop the feeling."

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(print available on my inprnt!)

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[dangerous-animal]

[dangerous-animal]

guys i will never get over the fact that lavellan speaks in iambic pentameter when talking about solas to rook. and then she stuns us again by speaking TO solas in iambic pentameter in the atonement ending.

remember in inquisition when solas says to sera in a banter:

“sometimes our people can feel the rhythm of the language, without knowing what the words mean(?)”

and i fully believe lavellan is one of them. even elgar’nan and ghilan’nain forego the iambic pentameter in veilguard, because they have lost themselves due to the blight. they speak in IP during the regret murals, so we know they used to be able to.

there is hardly anyone left who understands the language. truly understands. not repeating words passed down through generations.

lavellan understands solas. and that’s all he ever wanted. for someone to understand him. see him as wisdom.

when she talks to him in elvhen, her words aren’t the only things that ring true. the way she says them in IP truly conveys lavellan’s love for solas.

[dangerous-animal]

i want to talk about this line because i havent seen anyone talking about it and it feels absolutely essential to me to understanding solas's mindset and motivations in this scene.

"And I will have... She will have died for nothing."

maybe im absolutely delusional but i have always interpreted this as a freudian slip. he is about to say something else. he says "and I" he catches himself. changes course. makes it about mythal. he was about to say something else. he was about to say that HE had done it all for nothing. it immediately made me think of dostoyevsky's:

"Your worst sin is that you have betrayed and destroyed yourself for nothing."

his repeated insistence that he is doing this "for mythal" is a coping mechanism to give his actions meaning. everything he has done so far, he has done for her. it is the paradigm he operates under, to change the world at her request. it is what he did when he sundered the titans. it's what he did when he took a body. he is thus extending this reasoning out to his continued actions, regardless of mythal's actual wishes. it gives his immense guilt and suffering meaning.

it is easier if he makes it about mythal. it gives him a simple, clear reason. it's consistent with his identity as her protector. when its for her, the root of his actions become his devotion to her- something positive, something good. rather than being random, or foolish, or accidental. everything he has done he can say he did it because he had a reason. i dont think he's shirking responsibility or shifting accountability, not at all. he takes full accountability repeatedly. but saying he is doing it for her makes it so that it MEANS something. its not about who he's doing it for, its about it not being for all nothing.

he is stuck in this sort of twisted inertia, because if he stops, what was the point? he's gone too far. he has to see it through. or else, he killed felassan for nothing. he killed varric for nothing. he killed mythal for nothing. he broke the inquisitor's heart for nothing. if he takes down the veil, it means something. they were casualties in the pursuit for a greater good. their sacrifice has meaning. their sacrifices were not in vain.

he needs this reason, some sort of meaning other than "i made mistakes and i keep making them". one, because hes literally a manifestation of pride, but also just literally to keep him going, to allow him to get to the next goal post, to literally stay alive under the weight of his immense guilt. but he cannot admit this; or he must admit there was no point to any of it. so he makes it about mythal.

maybe im being too generous to the writing here, but i do think it was intentional. solas does not mention doing this for mythal up until this final breaking point, with the inquisitior in front of him, in a vulnerable moment where he slips up. every other time he talks about his goals, he repeats similar refrains of "this world is a mistake and i have to fix it". until he says:

but we know this is not true, according to the same game (not to suggest that veilguard doesnt have any internal inconsistencies LOL but i dont think this is one of them). fragment mythal does not give a fuck. we have literally never heard her mention anything regarding the veil. meanwhile flemythal literally tells him not to do it:

and he literally says "too bad" and kills her

he is very clearly not doing this for her; her opinion on the state of the veil and the modern elves is irrelevant, or at least secondary to his need to fix his mistake and alleviate his own guilt.

you could argue that he doesnt see flemythal as the same mythal he's doing this for. its possible. but we do see them interact as old friends, NUZZLE FOREHEADS, and we know that he "wept" after killing her (according to fragment mythal), so its clear he considers her to be mythal on some level. i do think fragment mythal feels more "real" to him than flemythal, considering he is able to face willingly face her meanwhile he never goes to see fragment mythal, and considering his body language and general reactions to being near them in the inquisition end credits scene vs. the veilguard finale. theres definitely something about the freshness, anger and authenticity of fragment mythal, as the exact spirit that he pulled out of the dagger that killed her and locked away, that is uniquely painful and real to him. but anyway. there is nothing to suggest mythal wants him to do this. he is literally making things up.

and this is why it is fragment mythal who has to be the one to break the spell. he says "i am doing this for you, just like i did everything for you" and she says "no. you no longer have to" and the cognitive illusion he has been operating under has shattered. and it is literally, physically, crushing. to accept that it was all for nothing. he killed his friends. he destroyed the world. no reason, no command, just a series of unfortunate mistakes and poor choices. as varric said, it was no longer a choice, he's no longer the intentional villain, he is no longer in charge of fate. he is a victim of circumstance and other people's manipulations and bad luck and his own foolish miscalculations. no higher power, no reason.

if i'm wrong, i have to face what i have done. i have to face what has been done to me. yeah.

i am not sure what i think would have happened to him here if the inquisitor did not offer him a path forward, romanced or not (i dont have a screenshot of a friendly inquisitor's line, but its wonderful and something the lines of "you are free to find new path"), but i am not sure that he would have been able to stand up if it werent for the atonement offered to him in exchange for his now-shattered purpose. spirits are, fundamentally, beings of pure purpose made manifest.

though he may be embodied for thousands of years now, solas is no different. his purpose in taking a body was to follow mythal, it is congruent with his nature that he would frame everything in the context of that purpose, and do everything in its power to fufill it whether or not that conception was based in reality. or at least, that is the familiar pattern that he would fall into. it was a desperate clinging on to a comforting echo of his past self. when mythal releases him from her service, that purpose is shattered. he must accept that he has betrayed and destroyed himself for nothing. the inquisitor then offers him a new purpose, and it is only then that he can stand up and bind himself to his new purpose of guarding the veil and healing the blight.

i think this line is so, so telling. solas rarely stutters, rarely misspeaks. and to have misspoken about this? he does think of himself first. i do genuinely believe he fears that he may have betrayed and destroyed himself for nothing. he is pride, after all, and he must embody that, the same way he embodies devotion to mythal. his assertion that he is bringing the veil down for mythal is an attempt to give meaning to the suffering he has caused and the suffering he has experienced. it is a last ditch effort, after already wavering (as we see him do after rook hands him the dagger), to remind himself of this. he is trying to convince himself here as much as he is trying to convince the inquisitor that there is a reason. his true reason is his guilt. he does want to restore the elven people. he does want to fix this broken world. he does want to save the spirits (even if veilguard forgot about them). he does want flowers to grow again. but he also is being drowned by a truly unimaginable amount of shame and regret, and framing it all as a necessary sacrifice for her, the same way the titans souls were, allows him to assert control over his experience and make sense of it.

if i am wrong i have to face what i have done. i have to face what has been done to me.

should the veil have come down anyway? yeah. but this one little line makes up for like 1.2% of my anger about that.

[dangerous-animal]

*clears throat*

If Mythal called Solas to form a body, binding himself to it and under her service--because he used to have her vallaslin, as well--then have any with the thought, "The Mythal angle should never have worked," not remembered the spirit of Wisdom from Inquisition that only returned to itself after it was freed from the service of those that summoned it for the wrong purpose?

There is a very good reason, "I free you from my service," works, actually.

[dangerous-animal]

while on the topic of solas having the entire randy dowager series in the lighthouse, isn’t it mentioned that things will just manifest there if someone purposefully or not wills it? are you telling me it’s possible that the fade took one look at solas and was like, “ya know what bud, here’s some porn of your estranged wife. i think you need it.”

[dangerous-animal]

i love them so much

[dangerous-animal]

So we all know about Solas taking Lavellan straight to thigh ride town when he first kisses her back (yeah, yeah his time knife, we've all seen it)

But did we also know that Lavellan fully has him by the collar, leg lifted, and is pulling him down herself? She probably would have gotten even further if he hadn't pulled back so quickly...

It's even funnier when you can see his hands that they didn't animate, so he looks fully taken by surprise and like he doesn't know what to do with himself.

[dangerous-animal]

I mean, if you think about it, Felassan's slow arrow worked. By refusing to get the Eluvian key, he bought just enough time for Solas to grow attached to the world, just attached enough that he could be either saved or stopped.

[dangerous-animal]

"Is Solas capable of killing Lavellan?"

This question has kept me UP. DRAGON AGE VEILGUARD SPOILERS

I have to admit. I think the very CORE of why Solas won't let Lavellan join him in Trespasser is because...he could kill her. He has the capacity. But he doesn't want to give himself the chance.

He's killed Felassan. He's killed Mythal. He's killed Varric. He's not above killing those he holds dear if he views them as an obstacle to soothing his conscious.

While I think it would be AGONY, and he'd literally do everything he could to avoid that outcome, I do think he's capable. He'd restrain her, try to move her, probably even trick her so she'd get out the way. But I think if there was no other choice...

And in that final act of killing her, the very source of his newfound respect for the world. The very last of the man we knew as 'Solas' would be gone. I think the regret of killing Lavellan would kill something inside of him. Something integral to ever talking him down. It's a regret he would not ever recover from.

I know this has been exhausted. But Mythal is his past. Lavellan is his FUTURE and in directly killing that potential future for the sake of the past. Solas would lose himself more to his cause than he ever did before. In ways not even Felassan could have imagined. He'd have no hope, no reason, to ever silently want someone to stop him.

So yeah. I think part of the reason WHY he refuses to let her join him, and also probably why it's Varric talking him down initially and not Lavellan. Is because he could. And if he did, there would be no more hope for Solas in everyone's eyes. Including in Solas's.

[dangerous-animal]

I do think the idea of Solas having the Randy Dowager 'Inquisition Exposed' book is incredibly funny if Lavellan romanced him, bc it basically means he reads porn of them, good for him, but I would also like to put forward the idea of Solas, who was not romanced, buying that book because it is the closest thing he has to seeing his friends again

[dangerous-animal]

His love could burn against me like a bonfire

[dangerous-animal]

solas telling emmrich he is a manifested spirit of "wisdom" instead of "pride" has me in an absolute fucking chokehold. what do you mean you want your old name back despite not being a spirit anymore? what do you mean the name you took, 'solas' (pride), doesn't apply any longer? what do you mean you still think you are Wisdom™️ The Thing when you walked away from the finest, most understanding woman in the entire world? what do you MEAN you're REBRANDING after causing the first apocalypse and trying your damndest to start another? what!! do!! you!! mean!!!!!!!!!!