Solas' trickery is worse than people realize...
While talking to Rook in the Fade prison:
'I am not a god! I am as I have always been: a man, all too aware of his failings...'
After being succesfully tricked by Rook with the fake dagger:
'YOU ARE MORTAL! Compared to you - to your infinitesimal existence... I. AM. A GOD!'
Do you know what saddens me about the Solavellans?
They love a man who doesn't even remotely consider their partner to be a person.
The Elven Inquisitor is as interesting to him as a Tranquil would be to your average Thedosian, and Solas hints as much in Trespasser when talking to them.
The modern day Thedosian isn't even a person to him. Anyone who isn't from Arlathan has the same IQ of an ant to him. Unintelligent, uninteresting, deprived of rights and freedoms. They are just beneath him and unworthy of consideration.
To add insult to injury, he doesn't even consider the Elves to be his people. Much like Abelas, he views the modern Elves as shadows of the people of Arlathan. Beings who, in no way, shape or form compare to who Elves were before the Fall of Arlathan.
This detail is important because some Solavellans likely misinterpreted Solas when he tells Mythal that 'The People need him'. He didn't mean modern day Elves. He was talking about the spirits trapped behind the Veil, those that could naturally become Elven should the Veil cease to exist, much like the Ancient Elves came to be when the world was new: they left the Fade and, using lyrium, crafted bodies from the earth for themselves...
THOSE are the People Solas cares about, not the army of malcontent Elves who happened to join him after Trespasser. But sadly, many people must've thought he meant the people in the alienages, the Dalish and anyone else who was discriminated by humans. The truth is, Solas never cared about them and wanted to use them to fuel his ego-driven ambition of bringing down the Veil and remake the world anew. No wonder he's ready to sacrifice even the Elves who follow him if it will help him accomplish his goal.
The proof lies in one of Solas' endings from the scrapped Joplin project. If Solas' plan succeeds, the Veil is undone and new spiritual beings much like the Ancient Elves are born in a new world as the old one collapses. Those are the People Solas is trying to save, not the Dalish, nor the city Elves. But a lot of players seem to have missed that detail and insist Solas is the savior of the Elven People.
The name Solas means Pride. Bioware made it clear Solas had long stopped being a spirit of wisdom and became a Pride Demon at some point. His essence was corrupted by his monstrous ego, most likely when he started playing hero, some time after Mythal's demise.
During his rebellion against the Evanuris, he saw no problem in sacrificing friends and allies alike if it meant confronting Elgar'nan. We see this in one of his memories in the Crossroads, when Felassan confronts him after the spirits of disruption Solas had summoned to the fight were sacrificed just so he could retrieve an artifact from Elgar'nan's citadel. And here is where things become ugly and murky.
Was Solas still fighting for freedom after hundreds of thousands of years? Was his goal STILL to free The People? Or had he developed a personal vendetta against Elgar'nan and the Evanuris and used his allies as cannon fodder just to spite the self-proclaimed gods he despised so much?
If he did, then it's no wonder he can't look Mythal in the eye when they meet in Veilguard's "Best Ending". Remember, one of the characters warns you - not sure if it was Morrigan or Varric - that Solas sees himself as the hero of his own tale in his mind, not as the villain. But the truth is, if his intentions had remained pure ever since the start of the war against the Evanuris, he wouldn't have been ashamed to meet the fragment of Mythal in the Crossroads and to seek her counsel one last time.
(Remember how she criticizes him for not having paid her even one visit when he knew very well where she was?)
If any doubts remain that Solas had prolonged the war against the Evanuris for egotistical reasons, then remember that Solas himself admits that he and Elgar'nan are too much alike during one of his conversations with Rook in the Fade prison: both he and Elgar'nan are too proud, too headstrong, too egotistical, believing themselves to be born to lead.
(The truth is, Mythal likely realized what Solas had become, too. She was the one who knew him best, after all, having recruited him to be her right hand from the very beginning.
But in order to stop Solas, she told him what he wanted to hear, not what he SHOULD have heard. She was a clever woman, and knew chastising him wouldn't help matters. Her goal was the same as Rook's: to stop him, and not prove him wrong.
So, in true Mythal fashion, she chose the wisest course of action and managed to manipulate him into giving up his insane plan.)
Even Felassan turned against Solas after witnessing the truth about him. The Dread Wolf had long stopped fighting for the freedom of the People against their tyrants and turned his rebellion into his private little tug of war against Elgar'nan. Once you realise this, the whole dialog between Elgar'nan and Solas in Rook's mind gains a whole new meaning.
Elgar'nan's disdain for Solas finally makes sense and the player can understand his cynicism toward Solas' claims that he is a tyrant and a false god.
In that scene, Solas accuses Elgar'nan of many wrongdoings, and they are all true. But does Solas have the moral high ground, as he claims? That is what Elga'nan questions repeatedly. Rook doesn't know, but Elgar'nan DOES know Solas, and knows he is not fighting for freedom.
He knows Solas wears The Rebel Leader's disguise well, but that is all it is: a disguise. A fantasy Solas wrapped around himself so he could deceive his followers and justify his spite against the Evanuris. A spite that, as Elgar'nan cleverly points out, has no longer anything to do with Mythal's murder, since, in his words, he murdered her "only the first time." If Solas was indeed fighting to avenge his beloved, he would not have murdered her and stolen her powers.
The truth is, Elgar'nan knows Solas very well, for they are two sides of the same coin. Were Solas sitting on the throne instead of Elgar'nan, he, too would use his personal charm and oratory skills to manipulate crowds to do his bidding.
The main difference between Elgar'nan and Solas is simply that Solas disguises his true agenda behind a veneer of fake humility and charismatic Rebel Leader persona. A disguise which effectively charmed Lavellans and deceived them into believing he is the quiet, unassuming Elven mentor, turned into the heroic liberator of the Elven people, leading to all sorts of fantasies about Solas that are simply not true to his real character.
So there you have it. Solas had stopped waging his war against the Evanuris for noble reasons - freeing the People - and had started enjoying playing the hero and the leader. He had a talent to amass crowds and steer them whenever and wherever he wanted. That's when his corruption began and he became the false leader against which the Evanuris warned the People.
In a way, Elgar'nan and the Evanuris were not wrong about Solas some time after the beginning of the war: he was leading people astray and manipulating them for reasons that had nothing to do with freedom and everything to do with fuelling his insane ego.
Remember how he even admitted he wasn't "preparing Rook" only to lose them? Further evidence of his corruption and deceitful nature, of how he cannot stop using people as if they were cannon fodder at this point.
But people either don't pay attention to details or choose to woefully ignore them.
And that's how you get Inquisitors who, for some reason, are willing to forgive him, even when he himself acted all guilty and remorseful in the Mythal ending, undeserving even of Mythal's gaze...
Kudos to Rook's team for realizing what Solas was from the beginning and coming up with the fake dagger plan. To me, the only ending where you see Solas' TRUE NATURE is the fake dagger one, where he is imprisoned against his will. As Solas himself said, he believed himself to be a god...and the rest were just mortals with an infinitesimally small existence, unworthy of consideration; nothing more than souls to be sacrificed in his little tug of war with the Evanuris.
If you ask me, Ghilan'nain, Elgar'nan and YES, SOLAS, all of them got exactly what they deserved. Thedas is better off without ANY of them.
vaporwave
pixelskylines
blakekathryn
theartofmadeline
turnnoffyourmind
