#i dont ship them but i do Think about them

[mythalism]

You seem to be both a solavellan and mythal fan so maybe I won’t get shot for this question lol

Veilguard was my first game. I kept default settings, which meant solavellan world state.

I genuinely wonder: what makes people think Solas loves Lavellan? Or that if being with Mythal possible, he still would choose Lavellan?

He is so clearly not over Mythal. Last game is filled with references to their connection, she herself confirms that both still love each other. He is very protective of her while arguing with Elgarnan. Statues of them everywhere, him painting and playing songs about her, his very own room having statues of Mythal… In the end he discloses he does it all for her, refuses to stop after Lavellan’s appeals, and only does so after Mythal shows up.

In comparison, Solas describes what he had with Lavellan as “entanglement he selfishly grow close to” he both regrets and cherishes. Most of the romance is carried on Inquisitor’s shoulders, as she both explicitly tells what he means to her, reaches out to him and ultimately shares his burden of atonement.

I couldn’t understand why this ship was so popular, so I watched solavellan romance in DAI. And while it was beautifully done, having the context of Veilguard, I just keep seeing Mythal in every “we shouldn’t”/his face after balcony kiss/ultimately abandoning her in the end. It feels almost unfair and cruel for him to enter another relationship while his heart isn’t free. And to visit Lavellan’s dreams afterwards

What am I missing?

a lot of people would shoot you for this. but dont worry i am not one of them. be careful out there tho

i think the first thing i would say is that instead of watching a video, you would need to do play a full solavellan playthrough of the game if you do want to genuinely understand the relationship and why it is so beloved. im not sure which compilation you watched, but even one that includes all their conversations (rather than just the cutscenes, of which there are very few) cannot do the relationship justice. so much of understanding solas as a character and how he loves people, by extension, is wrapped up in how he reacts to the world at large, its people, its history, its institutions, and its metaphysics. assuming you're new to DA and wouldn't know this, solas's romance in inquisition is the shortest, most sparse romance in the game, and was added later in development. as a result, much of his essential characterization happens outside the bounds of romance content, but still adds deeper meaning, context, and depth to the relationship. even in terms of romance specific content, some of my favorite content occurs in banter that probably was not included in the video you watched. the solas romance is less a standalone love story, in the way many of the romances are, and more of a big juicy delicious cherry on top that helps you better understand the overall dragon age solas plot/cake you're eating.

theres a couple non-romance specific scenes that shed significant light on solas & mythal's dynamic from his perspective that i am not sure if you have seen and honestly i wouldnt recommend watching them because, again, i think you should just play inquisition and experience them in the proper context. but solas's companion personal quest is directly about his corruption at the hands of mythal, though we didn't know that until veilguard came out and contextualized it. and this quest pretty explicitly demonstrates how he feels about what she did to him: rage, beyond forgiveness, deserving of death. he also comments on her at the temple of mythal, and his comments are mostly neutral but verging on judgemental, and do illuminate that while he may have loved her, he certainly did not trust her. it is he who first clarifies that she was a goddess of vengeance, rather than justice. which i cant think about too long or else i'll get angry that they ret-conned it to benevolence -> retribution or whatever the fuck and erased the anders/justice/vengeance parallel... anyway

but i think more telling is his absolute refusal to drink from the well if asked, and most telling; how he fears for an inquisitor who drank.

he specifically calls mythal dangerous, arrogant, and fickle, absolutely refuses to submit to her will once again via the drinking of the well, and begs an inquisitor he loves not to do the same lest she suffer the same fate. he loves mythal, of course, but he also fears her. he is critical of her behavior and wary of her motivations. his love for her exists alongside his recognition of what she was.

another fairly vital bit of information is how according to trespasser (cole banter), solas used to wear mythal vallaslin until he burnt it off his own face when he developed his vallaslin removal spell. its how he got the little scar above his eyebrow. meaning, if vallaslin were slave markings, that solas was effectively enslaved to her. this is... pretty important context, obviously. but we never find out what it might have been like for him. veilguard.... didnt forget but rather deliberately ignored this because it wasnt willing to interrogate the issue of slavery which had been vital to solas as the leader of a slave rebellion. ugh. anyway.

this leads into my next point which is that veilguard really drastically changes solas's motivations to be far more mythal-centric than what was set up in inquisition/trespasser. we always knew something was up with them, and people always wondered if they might have been lovers, but veilguard goes in on this idea in a way that many people would actually call out-of-character compared to how he behaves in inquisition. veilguard itself though does present their relationship as rather complex though, in my opinion its one of the best parts of the game. the two moments that i chew on most frequently are the letter from felassan in mythal's weird little dragon pit that reveals how he made that island for her but locked it away when she was killed. and my ultimate fave is how she reveals that in the literal thousands of years she has been sitting there alone since her murder, many of which he was alive and fighting a rebellion partly in her name, and in the 12 years since he woke up from uthenera, he never went to visit her. not once. its giving jane eyre and i fucking love it. in this same conversation, she also says that when he killed flemeth, he wept. this, i think, is the crux of how he feels about her. he can barely look at her. he resents her. he will use her like he did anyone else. he loves her. he feels lost without her. he will never forgive her. he misses her. all of these things are true at once, and mythal seems to feel similarly; she loathes him. she understands him better than anyone. she resents him for betraying her and abandoning her. she calls him a pathetic little crybaby pussy ass bitch. she loves him.

i dont think anything you said in your message is necessarily wrong. i do think he loves mythal still. i think he always will. i think mythal is valid when she says that they have a bond that no one will ever understand. i agree he is protective over her. i also interpret their relationship as romantic though a lot of people do not. i just love drama. but i think you are misinterpreting his reluctance to be with lavellan as coming from his attachment to mythal as a person, rather than his attachment to his duty to what mythal represents - the world he ruined, everything he's ever done wrong. to say that solas would actually consciously choose mythal over lavellan if they were the final two contestants on the bachelorette is honestly, absurd. sorry. because actually he would choose neither, he would dramatically let the rose fall to the ground and run off to restore the elven people while chris hansen (felassan) dramatically runs after him. both women are secondary to him when it comes to the good of the entire world, and fixing what he broke. he has had plenty of moments to choose mythal and run away with her if he wanted. he has literally had her bertha-ing out in his crossroads attic for 10 years. he also literally does kill her via flemeth. which isnt to say that he wouldn't kill lavellan if forced to, i think he would. but the point here is that its not mythal vs. lavellan. its mythal vs. the world, and lavellan vs. the world. he should have chosen the world over mythal. he didnt. he created the blight instead. he destroyed everything. he cannot make the same mistake again, so he will choose the world every. single. time.

regardless, every time solas turns away from lavellan in the romance, he is not thinking "i wish you were her". he is thinking "if i do this to you, i have become her". prioritizing his own desires over the good of the world, stringing her along, using her as a tool to do his bidding (getting the orb back), are all things mythal did to him. he told her he would follow her anywhere. and when he begins to realize that lavellan would follow him anywhere (as she says in veilguard), he freaks out and has to end it. he knows he will have to continue to kill and cause destruction to bring his world back, so if he did allow her to join him in walking the dinan'shiral, or did anything other than break her heart and leave her, he would be corrupting her the way mythal corrupted him; a weapon to achieve his goal. but he refuses. in his mind, he already destroyed the world for love once; at mythal's behest. if he abandons the world for lavellan, he is destroying the world for love again, and making her an accomplice. so, every time he leaves her it is an act of love.

the way the inquisitor is the driving force of their romance is partly just... gameplay lol but its also consistent with the overarching theme of consent in a relationship that is fundamentally unethical and unequal. lavellan has to be the initiator or else solas becomes a predator. some would say he is anyway lol, but its clear much of the writing was designed to avoid this with the way he is constantly denying himself, backing away, trying not to give in. it might have been juicy, but for him to knowingly romantically and sexually pursue a young woman 10,000 years younger while lying to her about his identity and using her for his plans would make him an entirely different character. a character that would be a hit on romantasy booktok, but not solas. consent and ethics are so central to not only the relationship thematically, but to solas himself, and some of that is because of mythal and the inequality of their own past dynamic. solas is so passive in the romance not because he doesnt like this weird clingy bitch who wont leave him alone, but because he does not want to recreate the same dynamic that corrupted him into pride and uhhhh literally destroyed the world. i'll leave you with another essential quote that you may not have encountered yet:

Cole: It isn’t abuse if I ask! Solas: Not always true.

in trespasser, solas's duty to bring down the veil was more unambiguously to the elven people and the alleviation of his own crushing guilt, while mythal was collateral damage in his way and he used her like he would use anyone else (including lavellan loool) as a tool to achieve his goals. we see this when he kills flemeth and takes mythal's power. in veilguard they had to obscure this slightly to make him "less sympathetic", to use the devs own words. and they did this by shifting the crux of his motivations to mythal. i dont think his lap dog devotion is out of character, i adore it, but i hate that it came at the expense of his more complex and sympathetic motivations of saving the elven people and spirits from the damage of the veil. as a result, when looking at his behavior in the context of inquisition + trespasser + veilguard, i interpret it as mythal being symbolic of the destruction of the world at his hands. and not to toot my own horn but trick's interpretation that they shared on bluesky does support this, when they said that to solas, mythal represents the past and lavellan represents the future. ive written about his statement that it was all for mythal, and the tldr is that i think it is also supposed to be interpreted as symbolic and reflective of his psyche. but even if he did do it all for her, i dont think that necessarily negates his relationship with lavellan. he needs mythal to break the cognitive dissonance, alleviate his guilt, and release him, because she is the source of all of those things in the first place. lavellan could never break them because she is frankly irrelevant to those things. he is so caught up in his sunk-cost fallacy that he feels the only way is through. lavellan may not be able to break the hold the past has on him because she is separate from it, but she can offer him another path once it has been broken, a fork in the road he thought was straight; her, their future.

i think to say solas's heart is not free is a misunderstanding. he denies his heart's desire over and over, we see this clearly in the letter he sends to lavellan in veilguard that expresses how badly he wanted to put down his burden and stay with her. in his expressed reluctance to leave her in crestwood, how he refuses to lie and tell her it meant nothing. in "no matter what happens, i want you to know that what we had was real". his indulgent final kiss in trespasser. in "i will never forget you". its especially apt that you worded it this way and that vhenan means "my heart". if anything, his heart is the most free part of him. it is everything else that belongs to mythal: his body, created at her command. his path of destruction and ruin, which she set him on. his purpose, which she distorted from wisdom to pride. she, then, is the only one who can give it all back to him. and as soon as she does, he is free to prioritize his heart. and he quite literally does.

tldr; play inquisition <3

[tannieastrology]

Composite Observations

💔 Ive noticed that alot of long term couples have asteroid briede conjunct the sun which makes sense because its literally the asteroid of marriage and union.

💔 Cancer rising couples will find it very hard to leave each other even when they arent good for each other. From the moment these two meet they feel so comfortable with each other and will feel like "home". They are each others comfort people but ive often noticed that these relationships tend to stagnate especially if the rest of the chart has complicated placements. They are also very moody around each other lmfao. The fights get intense and almost "domestic" which is why its important to be careful w cancer placements because codependancy can become an issue.

💔Gemini Rising couples are so cute and fun omg. So flirty and when youre near them you wont even feel like youre third wheeling. The fun couple.

💔 Libra Rising/ Venus in 1st house omg literally everybody shipped us together. Everyone always assumed we liked each other(which i did but he didnt) and told us we had such good chemistry. We looked really good next to each other but it was hard getting close to him beyond that. Our Venus was in libra first house but it squared our 7th house ruler mars in the 10th house, so we argued alot since the day we met. Our arguements were public and everyone had an opinion but they also all shipped us at the same time lmfao. If you do tarot you would know that justice is represented by Libra so our entire friendship had themes of "justice" in it. Our disagreements sometimes became very bitter.

💔 About 10th house mars, im starting to not like this placement ngl. I definitely feel like in this house it acts more as a malefic. There will be power struggles and difficulties seeing eye to eye if AFFLICTED. I think if its not afflicted then maybe you can push each other to grow together in yalls career but for the person I had this with it was our 7th house ruler and made multiple squares in the chart. Literally everybody had an opinion in our business and also like i said the fights were intense. The thing is we were immature kids. Im sure if we were adults it wouldnt have been that bad and we wouldnt have acted out of ego but it was hard seeing beyond it sometimes. Now as im older I feel like im starting to really admire how talented he is( I always have) but in a way now where I want to support him instead of trying to piss him off lol. Another thing is when Mars transited over our composite 10th house we had a huge fight and everyone at school knew it. I cut him off.

💔 Speaking of transits yall pleaseee look at them for the composite chart they are so so so accurate. They have predicted almost every issue I had with him. Another thing I noticed was if you set the transit for January 1st of that year it will predict the themes between u and that person off the composite transits. Every year this had been so accurate as to what happened and its worked for multiple couples I observed. For example when venus and mars was transit on the 5th house during new years the couple started dating that year. It acts as a solar return.

💔 Alot of long term couples have sun in 4th house composite and they are actually healthy.

💔 I love 11th house placements in the composite like yall will just naturally get along so well. This is the true "crush" feeling you would get sometimes more so than the 5th house but instead yall will have a friend dynamic. Just be careful not to get friendzoned LMFAO

💔 8th house placements are not for the weak and having it in the composite can be more complicated than having it in synastry. You were meant to meet this person because both of yall need to go through a psychological change through a partnership of some kind. I dont think 8th house placements are toxic if people are self aware but theres not a lot of people out there who are mature like that at a young age.

💔 Good luck if you have saturn in 12th house with someone. Yall will constantly have issues that neither of yall will understand how to fix. Boundries will be nonexistant and honestly it will be hard to form a partnership. This is IF yall hide from each other and do not communicate. You need to be vulnerable with each other. This is one of the biggest indicaters of a karmic partnership and its painful. Theres always this feeling of something feeling off and hurt in the back of your mind even when something isnt wrong. Ive seen from astrologers that saturn feels comfortable in this house and saturn here represents longevity but the benefits of this placement will not come through until yall go through some serious struggle.

💔 Chiron conjunct the mc will expose all of yalls pain to the public. A couple that had this through aries chiron transit the MC made it known eventually that they become toxic and everyone just thought of them as the couple that fights and hurts each other alot. They also broke up near this time.

💔 Ive noticed that the MC represents the status of the relationship. Having jupiter transit the MC made the couple have good luck and were trying to get together romantically. They also had asteroid anteros(god of requited/mutual love) conjunct jupiter in 10th house as a transit and EVERYONE was talking about them at school and were trying to get the two together.

💔 Lowkey I feel like davison charts(which can be read exactly like a composite) are even more accurate than composite charts. Not to say composites arent accurate but when it comes down to showing the overall long term duration of the couple I found that davisons are more accurate.

💔 If yall have venus square saturn just pack it up lmfao the universe do NOT want yall together and I often see couples trying to work it out but in the long term they often arent compatible. They force it and try to go against the grain and it never works out.

💔 I hate seeing jupiter squares in composites yalls values will be so difficult to align

💔 Jupiter in the 5th house is such a good place for romance. Ive also heard of couples doing "it" very early on in the relationship and most of them had this placement.

Hope Yall Enjoyed

-Simmi K💋

[elainsgirl]

The fandom hasn’t been this much of a mess since 2021. I’m still here mostly because I feel like the announcement is coming soon and at this point I’ve been around too long to just dip.

But man, seeing gwynriels mock the elriels who left actually has me seething. Acting like they’re just too sensitive for fandoms or scared their ship is sinking. Like, really? People can’t even leave without getting dragged? It’s like they can’t turn off the ship war mindset for five seconds and realize that real people were actually hurt. Instead they just make fun of them on their way out. It’s messed up. And the worst part is that the wrong people are leaving. Like I get why, but it’s always the kind ones who go. How many times is this gonna happen? I’ve seen so many good people leave over the years and many never came back.

This week sucked ass. Easily one of the worst since the 2021 chaos. So many who joined the fandom after silver flames just have no decency. I just feel weirdly empty now. We really need that announcement.

A fandom is meant to be a space of fun. A space where you can shut off from real life issues & problems - and simply enjoy, stressfree for a while whether that’s through creating content or simply consuming it. Obviously it will be inevitable that some real life issues filter through into fandoms, however it should always be talked about with empathy, caution and care - so those that are affected or going through these issues aren’t so triggered.

That side were simply not mature enough to handle such heavy topics. Their posts were careless and triggering. Any sane, normal person would be able to understand why people are upset and leaving. I think lately, I’ve really come to the realisation that antis do not see elriels as real life people who are going through our own struggles. As you perfectly put it -(and a phrase I will now be using so thanks anon) it seems as though most antis cannot turn off their shipwar mindsets for a minute to look past and understand how these sort of heavy topics are very disturbing. Each post they made this past week about the issue/article basically went

“Yh no sure the article was wrong…but like, its just an opinion and tbf the author did write it as such where people would y’know bring up Elain not having the right anatomy…so blame Sjm and not the readers/journalist and…like, its not a big thing - elriels have said so much worse! And honestly…they’re just mad bcs the point make sense and they can’t deal with that. It was nothing to make such a big deal about”

I know this might come across as mean but, you know when a young teenager or even child enter spaces meant for more mature adults - they dont understand or grasp on how to communicate with the conversations going on in that space. They just end up blabbering and saying dumb stuff, missing the point. THAT is how antis have acted this past week.

You know, Im going to be real with you. Everytime I think antis can’t go any lower then they already have - every time they prove me wrong. Who and why is anyone creating posts & making fun about those leaving due to feeling triggered? Its just immature and pathetic. People have a life outside of the shipwars, something most antis won’t know about. I feel like most of them are consumed within the shipwars and its the centre of their lives.

You’re so right anon. The wrong people are leaving. The people that make the fandom a better, brighter place that have put nothing out but positivity. Its sad to see them go but hopefully they’ll be back once we finally get something about the next book.

Im convinced most who joined after SF - its either their first fandom experience or most of them are just attention seekers. At this point, I simply have stopped caring about anything fandom related, you’re right. I also feel empty and tired - just done with this fandom but Im just praying we get an announcement soon. Match preferably - we need something new to create a positive buzz again.

[hamsterdads]

i love how you draw john and dirk sooooooo so so so much they are so cute thank you 💙💙💙

im so sorry theyre not cute here but me and a friend where talking abt what kind of dirk and john i should draw and all i could think of was how john would body him in a fight

[umblrspectrum]

happy solvermas

[tumatawa]

I wish she had more scenes... Whateva

[stiffyck]

I WISH ARO HEADCANONS WERE MORE POPULAR IN FANDOMS

[churchyaoi]

been thinking about these two a lot lately

[vbrosclips]

s5e8 - The Devil's Grip

[lefthandarm-man]

Steve Rogers & Natasha Romanoff The Avengers (2012)

matching each others freak

[aroaceleovaldez]

I was reading a post about CoTG and I realized: Rick has seemingly started to write every character pairing with the exact same dynamic, and he's not good at writing that dynamic and it doesn't make sense for 90% of the characters he writes it for.

It's that very specific dynamic of one half of the pair who is almost aggressive to the other party - "teasing" them constantly/insulting them, affectionately punching/judo flipping/maiming/etc, seemingly almost always exasperated with the other - and said other party usually just accepts this treatment or blanketly views it fondly, and may generally be framed as more incompetent than their partner and a little bit of a doormat (particularly relating to being insulted/teased/etc by their partner).

We start seeing this dynamic in HoO with Percy and Annabeth, as a sort of semi-inconsistent twist on their rivals-to-friends-to-lovers dynamic from the first series. Then the dynamic pattern develops further with Leo and Calypso. Then Magnus and Alex. Then Nico and Will, particularly in TSATS. And now in CoTG, it's Percy and Annabeth again but even more in this direction.

I know people have talked about Nico and Will's relationship over the series rapidly being shoehorned into Percabeth Two™, and it's extremely apparent in TSATS that Rick's doing it on purpose (including directly quoting Percabeth scenes but minorly tweaking them to be Solangelo). But recognizing it as an overarching trend in Rick's later books honestly reminds me a lot of how Rick started trying to apply the "Percy Formula" so-to-speak to nearly every protagonist in HoO (and then try to replicate similar character archetypes with Magnus and Apollo's narrations - moreso Magnus in being jaded and sarcastic, very much trying to be first series Percy. He only sounds unique because Rick failed at making him Percy 2. Apollo is more akin to later-series Percy characterization of being goofy and incompetent. Apollo [and Zeus] even got retconned to give Apollo a more similar backstory to Percy's). Rick seems to have decided that he thinks the audience wants this specific dynamic but 10 times over, except he's not good at writing it the first time because it's a bastardization of the time he did a different thing okay.

And Rick also seems aware of that too! Because he retconned Calypso and Leo at the end of TOA, probably because he realized how absolutely awful it was reading when they were written with that dynamic of Calypso just functionally hating Leo and constantly being aggressive towards him! The only time Rick's actually made the dynamic even semi-successful was with Magnus and Alex, because it actually fits within their characters, their dynamics with each other, and their environment. Alex beheading Magnus on the regular works out fine because there are no repercussions to that in Valhalla, Magnus will be fine, so it does genuinely come off as humorous. And Alex has been effectively established to be abrasive at times but have her genuine feelings shine through regularly, and that meshes well with Magnus' jaded-and-aloof-but-quietly-very-empathetic character. And Magnus has been established to, yes, not be great at combat, particularly compared to Alex. They are the only time that flavor of dynamic in that form was effective and cohesive.

Percabeth is no longer rivals-to-friends-to-lovers badasses on equal levels with shaky pasts who finally found some form of permanence with one another. Now it's super smart doting and affectionately aggressive girlfriend and her silly goofy 50%-of-the-time incompetent boyfriend who she judo flips/pushes off cliffs/etc - but affectionately~! Solangelo is trying to riff off of the early series "Poseidon & Athena are enemies" dynamic that Percabeth had but with Apollo & Hades being "opposites" but learning to accept each other, except it ends up with Will just coming off as a huge asshole and Nico being retconned to a complete doormat about it - when prior to that those characterizations would be completely contrary to their established characters (even just from TOA!). Calypso in HoO gets retconned from her PJO characterization to being snooty and aggressive, and Leo's false persona gets merged into his just normal personality except he just also becomes a doormat but more goofy than Nico with occasional haha-dark/depression-humor! Which Nico also got. Which was also a bastardized Percy trait that got redistributed.

It's exhausting. Rick write more than one relationship dynamic you can do it I promise

[daysofnights]

mary being popular and pretty as a defense mechanism to stop anyone from looking too closely and pandora that fully accepted her own weirdness and was mostly an outcast for it

[serotonin-dose]

AsaDen x Metaphor Re:Fantazio

[hyakunana]

Episode 41: The Jet-Black Shogun

[rainesjupiter]

Beneath the veil of the Moon, another pair of vows was made. Here we sow the catalyst for a mother's grief. For the Will's rage. For the Queen's madness. Now cometh the Age of the Stars.

[oceanwithouthermoon]

can i just say. i find it a bit odd that people, even people who dont dislike teruhashi, want her to not end up with saiki because "itd teach her not everyone will love her"

like... half the point of her character is that... NOBODY loves her. nobody knows her and sees her and genuinely likes her, they just like the crafted self she projects outwardly... except for saiki. saiki is the only person who actually likes TERUHASHI, and you guys dont want that??

this scene is literally her realizing "these guys didnt even notice or care about my exhaustion and only cared about me continuing to make them feel good about themselves even after i passed out, but SAIKI noticed and cared"