Sun comin' up on a dream come 'round
One hundred years from the empire now
Martyrs of our revolution
Their spinning caused the earth to shake
The problem brought its own solution
They power now the world we've made
After all, darlin', I wouldn't sell the world
For all the gold or sterling
If it falls, I would hold on for all it's worth
The future's so bright it's burnin'
If I had to pick one idea and one idea only from the artbook cut materials to be realized in the end product, I would choose Reva, Solas's "bad cop" right hand. I had to sketch them, I love the idea of Reva literally burning away their vallaslin with flame so much.
Reva's backstory:
Reva with the wolf:
Reva's robe/design (I think the one we get in-game can still be a reference to them):
... Solas, why are your right hands so hot, I hate it here.
Now I want Reva and Felassan to meet, and Rook, of course.
I saw a post a while ago talking about how Varric ended up "winning" against Solas, and really liked it. I've been revisiting a lot of Inquisition dialogue lately and found perhaps my favorite conversation between the two when it comes to highlighting their ideological differences. It also foreshadows why Varric "wins" at the end of Veilguard (within the confines of the endgame choices we're given) even in death.
The crux of it: Varric lives in a world in which his very existence is an act of resistance, while Solas sees resistance as a trial that must be endured to get desired results.
As always, once I get started I'm sure this will be very long, but I love that we got the chance to see a very rare instance in which Solas concedes a point to one of his companions.
Solas: Once, in the Fade, I saw the memory of a man who lived alone on an island. Most of his tribe had fallen to beasts or disease. His wife had died in childbirth. He was the only one left. He could have struck out on his own to find a new land, new people. But he stayed. He spent every day catching fish in a little boat, every night drinking fermented fruit juice and watching the stars.
Varric: I can think of worse lives.
Solas: How can you be happy surrendering, knowing it will all end with you? How can you not fight?
Varric: I suppose it depends on the quality of the fermented fruit juice.
As always with Inquisition dialogue, I am obsessed. But this moment does such a great job of laying out the fundamental building blocks of each character.
Solas comes right out of the gate and lets us know who he is. He is united with the man living in the ruin of all that his life used to be.
Solas, too, is living alone in a world where all he once knew has been taken from him. Before his sleep he had a master to serve, and then a rebellion to lead. He fought, he was relentless; his people were suffering but they were whole. There were opportunities to find comfort, familiarity, or even just a new normal amongst new lands and people, but he rejected them (I think perhaps this is best shown through the murder of Felassan/the plot of the Masked Empire). Now, he lives as much as he possibly can in the fade and waits for his opportunity to restore the world he believes he ruined in his quest to save it (imprisoning the Evanuris through the creation of the veil).
Varric, conversely, has been tearing his way through this (to Solas) new world his entire life. I also think it's worth noting that his attitude is probably an absolute smack in the face to Solas, who knows what the dwarves once were and is responsible for the loss of their dreams and the ruination of the titans. But Varric doesn't need to know what was lost in order to know what an uphill battle he faces in Thedas as a dwarf. And fuck, he's from Kirkwall, he knows exactly how much worse life can get than a quiet existence with food, drink, and the stars for company.
But because these two have such a cool dynamic of agree-to-disagree/mutual admiration for each other, Varric thinks the story over and renews the discussion.
Varric: What's with you and the doom stuff? Are you always this cheery or is the hole in the sky getting to you?
Solas: I've no idea what you mean.
Varric: All the "fallen empire" crap you go on about. What's so great about empires anyway?
Varric: So we lost the Deep Roads, and Orzammar's too proud to ask for help. So what? We're not Orzammar and we're not our empire.
Varric: There are tens of thousands of us living up here in the sunlight now, and it's not that bad.
Varric: Life goes on. It's just different than it used to be.
Solas: And you have no concept of what that difference cost you.
Varric: I know what it didn't cost me. I'm still here, even after all those thaigs fell.
God I love what the dialogue in these games used to be. There's so much I could talk about, but I think what I want to focus on is the idea of empire being so smoothly fitted in to the discussion.
Varric, knowing Solas isn't fully satisfied with his answer, ruminates and comes back swinging. This is also where I'll add that part of the reason I think Varric throws Solas so badly is because he's what Felassan could have been with more time to form his arguments. When Solas made the choice to take Felassan's game piece off the board, our favorite slow arrow was just coming to terms with the idea that there is beauty in taking what an imperfect world offers you and making the best of it. Varric is comfortable in this viewpoint, and Solas can't just kill him on a mission or at Skyhold. He has no choice but to hear the argument he fights to ensure he doesn't have to hear.
And damn, what an argument. Without meaning to, Varric cuts to the quick of what has been haunting Solas. You cannot snap your fingers and re-establish Empire as it once was. Orzammar has cordoned itself off from the rest of the world, does not ask for help, and clings to an ever-crumbling old order. Even if you tried, too much has changed. Dwarves are not what they once were, and more and more have returned to the surface. Life goes on. It's just different than it used to be. And Solas has never been able to confront that possibility.
True to form, he pushes back. But why not give it a try? Why take what you've been given when you could wrest what you've been denied from the hand that holds it? How can you do nothing?
Solas: You truly are content to sit in the sun, never wondering what you could’ve been, never fighting back?
Varric: Ha, you’ve got it all wrong, Chuckles. This is fighting back.
Solas: How does passively accepting your fate constitute a fight?
Varric: In that story of yours—the fisherman watching the stars, dying alone—you thought he gave up right?
Solas: Yes.
Varric: But he went on living. He lost everyone, but he still got up every morning. He made a life, even if it was alone.
Varric: That’s the world. Everything you build, it tears down. Everything you’ve got, it takes—and it’s gone forever. The only choices you get are to lie down and die or keep going. He kept going. That’s as close to beating the world as anyone gets.
Solas: Well said. Perhaps I was mistaken
And then Varric hits him with it: a life alone is still a life. There is nothing that time will not take from us. What Solas fails to understand (and we can blame this on his pride, on his crusade he cannot lay down until he is free of his duty to Mythal, or his straight-up sentimentality) is that if Elvhenan hadn't fallen through the actions of the Evanuris and those he took to stop them, it would have been something else. Life is a wailing gnashing unrelenting song that will never be satisfied and can never cease dragging all that falls before it into its maw in the hopes that finally something will be enough. When it tears something down, your only choices are to "lie down and die or keep going." And again, as a Kirkwall survivor, Varric knows this. An occupying force remove your political leader? Quell the violence and try again. The chantry explodes? Save the city's mages from their bloodthirsty jailer and make sure there's a tomorrow where you can fight to fix it.
We know this doesn't dissuade Solas, the burden he's placed upon himself it too great, the ways that war has shaped him have scarred deep. Part of the tragedy of Solas is how he's been walking the dinan'shiral so long that he is incapable of turning around. Every step he takes has sent sharp rocks cutting into his feet, and it would kill him to turn around and see just how little of a distance he's covered. He cannot let go of resistance as a concentrated action, as fighting until there's nothing left but ruination.
But it is no small feat on Varric's part to get the Dread Wolf himself to concede a point. And a step further than that, Solas respects his friend, and respects the life he's built amongst the scraps of what once was. I don't doubt for a minute that Varric was a key part of why Solas was able to start seeing the world around him as a little more real.
And then of course we get Veilguard.
It is here that Solas dooms himself.
"You came a long way and made a valiant effort, Varric, but this story does not end with my downfall."
But it does. Because even if Varric, like Felassan, is taken off the table, Rook endures. And what is Rook in this game if not the very continuation of Varric's fighting spirit: an absolutely untested newbie who through miracle after miracle (regardless of the issues I may take with that) is the very portrait of "But he went on living" ?
Varric may not get to be the one to talk Solas down at the very end of the game after Mythal waves her hand and unleashes her second-in-command, but by delaying long enough to stop the ritual, by refusing to give up on his friend that stares at the stars every night with nothing but his fermented fruit juice for company, he ensured someone would be around who could.
In one of the less kind endings that person is Rook, dragging themselves into the fade with Solas out of sheer spite or sending him there against his will. In the kinder endings, it is the Inquisitor, letting their friend/heart know that at last, merely surviving another day is enough. And I like to think that it is within those kinder endings that Solas thinks of Varric each time he works to soothe the titan's dreams and make life just a little better for the tens of thousands living in the sunlight. Perhaps, in this world where he is finally free, he appreciates the gravity of ensuring others have a chance to keep living in a world that is hell-bent on taking. Maybe he even finds a cup of that fermented fruit juice in the fade, sits with his feet dangling over an endless abyss, and drinks to his friend's honor.
I'll leave y'all with a final bit of dialogue I love.
Solas: Do you ever miss life beneath the earth? The call of the Stone?
Varric: Nah. Whatever the Stone - capital S - is, it was gone by the time my parents had me.
Solas: But… do you miss it?
Varric: How could I miss what I never had?
Varric: But say I did have that sense, that connection to the Stone. What would it cost me?
Varric: Would I lose my friends up here? Would I stop telling stories?
Varric: I like who I am. If I want to hear songs, I'll go to a tavern.
Solas: You are wiser than most.
RIP Varric Tethras, an absolute fucking baddie who forced Fen'harel himself to part with just a smidge of his pride and recognize someone that reminded him of what he once was--wiser than most--and in the subtext of this conversation, wiser than a pining spirit of wisdom himself.
Thank you for this article! This is my favorite reading on the two characters now!!!
DAI was a long time ago, I almost forgot about their conversations. Now that I've been reminded so beautifully by your article, everything hurts a whole lot better!
My take on the whole "his back, turned" ending for Felassan in the Masked Empire: he apparently knew he would die from his last attempt to persuade his friend, he did it anyway, like Varric. Solas killing Felassan mid-sentence, in my opinion, is because he simply couldn't risk actually being persuaded, he dared not to listen to another word of Felassan's speech, or everything they had done, the loss of everyone who had ever mattered to him, would be in vain.
I don't think he was so furious that he must kill the betrayer to their cause on the spot, not to mention Felassan was among his oldest friends and comrades if not his most valued one. But I think he was afraid.
Remember what Emmerich said before Rook's final battle? Solas is essentially a spirit, and a spirit can't resist the yearning for reflection. Rook in one (my favorite) ending was able to outwit Solas, leading Solas to admit that he was not above-it-all, not a god, but a fool who finally met his match, his reflection. (This paragraph is also my answer to the "how did Emmerich helped by being a fade expert" question I've seen among datv discussions, I would say he helped greatly simply by caring the spirits and understanding them.)
And the last thing Felassan was about to say was how Briala reminds him of Solas. Should the mirror be shattered, the reflections will be no more.
(too many grammatical errors, too drained to edit. wip)
I commissioned this one a while ago, the artist is 常摸鱼 on 米画师.
I'm really late to the fandom, my first time watch-through (and later read-through) of the story was when I was 24. So I never really had an innocent child's take on the whole story, I just see metaphors mashed up together. In the end, I associate him with Judas a lot. For the time being, I can only record some fragments as to why I have such association. This post is WIP.
In one version of the Bible's translation, after Judas returned the 30 silver pieces to the chief priests and elders out of regret, the chief priests used the silver to buy the potter’s field for burying strangers. And in another version, Judas bought the potter’s field himself, and instead of hanging, which is the most common-known version of his suicide, he basically dropped dead on the field, guts bursting out.
I don't think I'm trying to prove that there are direct Biblical inspiration for the characters, I'm sure someone has done better work on that. But the "would you feed my lamb/sheep" question that Jesus asks Peter 3 times when he reinstates Peter just really bugs me this whole time whenever I remembered Sev said "Now you tell me you have been raising him like a pig for slaughter...". To me the obvious metaphor here is a lamb (for sacrifice and salvation), even though he didn't choose the more suitable word to represent Harry because he was bitter and didn't know the whole plan.
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