#also also so many Inquisitor Lavellans whose spirit is represented as hope
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I’m just tearing my hair thinking about shit. Let me just write shit down before I go nuts.
Solas is of course eons old and in his slumber has basically doubled down on restoring the world to what it once was. Yeah yeah yeah okay, get that out of the way. He is literally an old soul. You know there are just some people walking around that seem to be so much older than their mortal age? That’s him times a million. Of course before I knew who he was I thought “I really like this guy. I liked his mage guru ‘be skeptical of everything’ and ‘nothing is sacred or absolute’ sort of deal because that’s honestly how I think. I click with that, I clicked with it immediately.
 It was actually not that hard for  me to choose answers that aligned with what he wanted to hear because for the most part they were things I believed and agreed with myself  so it was like “Um, are we actually actual soul mates? Is this real life?”
Of course his personality being so alluring and his personal conduct of being polite and like a grandpa-oak-tree-father-shaman to everyone and never losing his temper (except once or twice) and being courteous to everyone on a basic level just resounded with me and so having my character fall in love with him was my priority. 
So like I said in a previous post, the romance that unfolded felt so sweet and gradual and gentle. It was like souls were bonding. Lavellan thought she was courting a quiet, perhaps asexual mage whose head was more in the Fade than on planet Earth, but with the little flirting she was allowed to send his way, he responded knowingly but innocently, or I guess intellectually. It was her spirit and intellect that attracted him to her, and eventually her conduct and choices -- choices that abstained from selfishness, unnecessary violence or cruelty, disrespect, or corruption -- that further solidified his feelings for her. 
Of course every time he looked at her face he saw that persistent blemish upon her face inflicted upon his people from days of old, only the bitter irony was that the collapse of the Elvehn society led to a cultural, intellectual, and political Dark Age spanning all the way to the present and in turn the tiny vestigial pieces of heritage that the Dalish managed to somehow remember included a mark of their ancestors’ enslavement.
Stoic as he was, unflappable as he was, his parting of the truth to Lavellan of what her marks actually represented was, to me, one of the greatest gestures of love, greatest gestures of involvement, that he had given her up until that point.
When he removed her marks, he saw her untouched and free, as she should be. Her skin now reflected who she was on the inside (yes, really lame of me to say but roll with it, fam).
The fact that Lavellan was able to romance Solas at all says a lot about him. Perhaps it speaks to the fact that he is indeed wrong about humanity and his quest to resurrect ancient elves.
At the end of Trespasser, when he explained his plan, and Lavellan quipped, sadly, “We [modern elves? Humanity as a whole?] aren’t even people to you, are we?” or something to that effect, and his apologetic but firm dance-around answer that all but confirmed it was like a knife in my chest.
It would be ludicrous to picture Solas waking from his long slumber and failing to see the humanity and good that people still possessed after all this time. The problem was that they were lesser beings, burdened and worn by tragedy, chaos, blight, misfortune, and personal vices. Dark Ages, indeed, especially for the derivative group of people that were called “elves”.
 But until he met the Inquisitor, a person whom he had not intended to ever factor in his plans, he possessed a solemn resolve to enact his grand scheme. 
But he met her, and what became a kink in his plan 
became a tool to fix that kink, 
became a person who held a wide-eyed fascination with his descriptions of the Fade, 
became a comrade who hauled him all over Thedas solving peoples’ problems in a prompt and direct fashion, 
became a fellow mage who looked to him for advice and consolation and insight and quiet moments of reflection about magic and spirits and levied him a great level of respect and courtesy in every conversation, never once falling to pride or selfishness or willful ignorance, 
became a compatriot that operated on some level of commanality due to being elves, even if Solas eschewed the idea at every other turn
became a shining light for so many people not just because she was the only person who could close rifts but because she acted decisively and chivalrously,
became a hero that the people needed, humbly, a  shining example of what effective leadership could do, how it could change so many things for the better.
I would not say that he ever faltered in his plan. I do not think his romance with Lavellan shook his convictions, but it certainly encouraged him to indulge in the fantasy for a brief moment, to pretend that they ever had a chance to be together in the way they both wanted. He loves, loved, will love her, but even love must be sacrificed for the greater good. Personal happiness cannot deter one from what needs to be done. As he said, it was selfish of him to lead her on.
“But Solas,” I screamed at my laptop screen, “it’s not ‘leading her on’ if you have feelings for her as well!”
Still, I played my Lavellan as never giving up on him. I hoped that by the end of the Trespasser DLC there would be some resolution to their relationship.
Well, I got a giant-ass cavern between them that Solas himself created, one where he kept his emotional distance from Lavellan, likely because he wanted to detach himself from her, but also, I think, because he didn’t want to risk having his heart sway him over to whatever argument she may have had to get him to come home. Smart move, elf man, smart move.
And I guess that distance that Solas put up between them from the very beginning of that final encounter made me feel frustration and despair. I didn’t fucking care if Solas wouldn’t leave with Lavellan, I WANTED WANTED WANTED to have Lavellan tell him she loved him. She wouldn’t condone his plan, but she was adamant about her love for him. 
Of course I grew more and more disheartened as the conversation played out and I exhausted all my dialogue options. Solas showed remorse and true sorrow of how things were, that someone he had grown to love was inevitably going to be in his big Elf Earth 2.0 World Update plans, but what pained me was that he was not allowing himself to give in to those emotions. Trying to detach yourself from what you truly feel, stuffing all that down because of your self-proscribed duty to your dead-and-gone people...it’s just disrespectful to you and to Lavellan. Yes, I know where he’s coming from. Emotion and passion and the like are the source of many problems, Buddha has spoken a lot about it, in fact. 
But at the same time... Why won’t you allow yourself to be happy, Solas? For once in how many life times?
That’s really all I got..
I would also like to state the following:
The phrase “I will always love you”, said remorsefully by a lover before leaving someone ‘forever’, should be banned from all future media because it’s too goddamn painful.
I fucking cried, you guys. I actually fucking cried. And let me tell you, I don’t cry over video games. I just don’t. 
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