Fenharel frees the elven slaves.
"Cowering, cringing, blinking to the light. Then cold hands, kind voices. Sleep now. You're safe." (Cole's comment on Solas's mosaic)
And this is the same man who said, "I'll kill you all to save you all." :DDD
A list of potential cures for the Calling, that we know about, that BioWare has apparently forgotten
Andraste's grace: it's not specified whether the flower the kennelmaster has you pick in the Korcari Wilds is Andraste's grace or if the game just needed a one-off asset and decided to reuse one they already had. However, in the dark future in DAI, Leliana is found to have unusual tolerance for the taint, and in DAO she talks about her mother pressing her laundry with dried Andraste's grace flowers, so it makes you wonder. Anyway, the flower stops Barkspawn becoming a ghoul and seems to make them immune to the taint from that point on.
Maric's longsword: he finds it in the Deep Roads and is suprised it isn't covered in the same Blight-rot as everything else - until, that is, he touches the sword to a patch of it and sees it wither away. Whether it's the dragonbone the sword is made of or the runes on the blade is difficult to say, though if it was just the dragonbone then it would make sense for that to be a more well-known property of the material (and would have been an interesting reason for why dragons were hunted to extinction). If Alistair carries it with him, doesit slow the progession of the taint through his body? Does he know its effects, and give it to the HoF to help keep them safer on their journey to find a permanent cure?
That obsidian dagger Duncan finds in The Calling: the dagger belonged to First Enchanter Remille - who also gave the expedition members brooches that accelerated the spread of the taint. iirc the both the dagger and the brooches are made by the Architect with Blight magic, which means the darkspawn magisters have more knowledge of how the Blight works than the Chantry attributes to them.
Whatever the fuck is going on with Avernus: he hasn't managed to cure himself yet, but he's managed to make it to 200 and the Warden can let him continue his experiments if they don't kill him - and he'd be a really useful resource if the Warden later wanted to send him other potential cures for testing.
Dragons: they have an ability to isolate the Blight in their bodies by forming crystaline cysts around the initial infection to stop it spreading. Useful if it can be more widely applied. Also, it's implied that Maric's reaver blood, which Calenhad gained by mixing his blood with a dragon's, is what somehow cured Fiona of the taint, kinda like a reverse STI, BUT in the Deep Roads they went through an area where the walls were coated in a pale, chalky substance suspiciously devoid of Blight-rot and she touched it, so I'm a bit suspicious of that.
Blood magic: makes sense since the taint is a problem that starts with infected blood. There are two major instances in DA canon where blood magic has been used to purge the taint from an object or being (both by elves btw). The first is Isseya using it to draw the taint out of a clutch of unhatched griffon eggs, which she says is only possible because the taint hasn't yet taken over the hatchlings' bodies to the same extent that it had with the adult griffons. The second instance is Merrill purging the Blighted eluvian in DA2. It's insane that Anders - who is a reluctant Warden and who possibly knows the HoF seeks a cure - isn't more excited about this. She literally removed the Blight from a fully tainted object. Since Isseya proved the same can be done with living tissue, it's probably the closest we've come to an actual cure, but since it also took years there's no telling if it could be a practicaly solution for all Wardens
Had the pleasure of painting this piece and two others for @dragonageannual 2026 zine! It was so much fun working on this and seeing other people's art and writing!
I'm offering illustration commissions like this now, info here!
Process under the cut
I don't want to go too, too deeply into it, but all day I've been thinking about how blatantly unfair and mean everyone is to Solas in Veilguard. (And we all know why, but I'll let that particular sleeping dog (mostly) lie, I guess.)
(I am increasingly bitter about all of this, and while I genuinely enjoyed Veilguard for what it was, and for the catharsis and closure of the Solavellan ending, on repeat playthroughs I am getting really frustrated by the illogical, unsympathetic, and outright cruel way Solas is treated by the narrative. You don't have to like or romance him to see that none of it lines up properly.)
Solas is not an idiot, he knows people are after him and people don't agree with him. But this particular bit is just mean. It feels like it's meant to read as an understanding nod towards the audience. Like a "Yeah we know you hate this guy, we do, too - everyone does."
Let's not talk about the fact that his plan was to actually stabilize the Veil by moving Elgar'nan and Ghilan'nain to stronger prisons.
Let's not talk about the fact that Varric bulldozed his way into a magical ritual he didn't fucking understand to pretend he was saving the world (talk about a hero-complex) and distracting the person currently wielding the energy of 8-10 nuclear power plants.
Let's not talk about the fact that Rook and their reckless carelessness are the reason why the ritual failed and Solas threw himself (and the world!!) the only lifeline he could in that moment - a blood magic connection.
No. Let's instead be schoolyard-bully mean to a heavily traumatized man while refusing to hear anything he has to say.
Sure, Rook. You know better than the millennia-old, immortal being trying to sort out your mess.
I bet this line hurt Solas more than he admitted to even himself. Once again willfully misunderstood, misinterpreted, misconstrued, and bitterly reminded of a time when that was his life for centuries.
We continue with this:
Really? Really? Yeah he fucking burned the corrupted lab, Harding. There was and is no cure for the Blight. God-like powers or not ("Come on, be the god she needs." - wtf), he wasn't "too scared of the Blight to do anything" - there literally wasn't anything else he could have done.
This scene makes me so angry. I would pay good money to have access to information what the writers' room looked like on this.
But then again, the whole game is mostly just a complete character assassination of Solas in an effort to a) comfort one man's fragile ego (how ironic, the parallel with Elgar'nan), and b) make the story make sense somehow for people who disliked Solas in DAI.
Sure, let's call Solas a coward for not performing divine miracles on demand. Let's pretend it's willful cruelty or indifference and not a sheer and obvious lack of power.
How fucking cruel to accuse him like this, when this confrontation alone probably ripped his heart to shreds knowing he was responsible for all of it. But instead of empathetic understanding (Rook also caused a cataclysmic event without meaning to and is currently confronted with the consequences of their own actions!), all they do is sneer.
Once again, the game itself is only giving us half the story. On purpose. This "discussion" makes it seem like Solas only wanted to stop Elgar'nan (and only him) because he didn't want to see him in power.
But that's not it. Solas started rebelling and freeing slaves for ideological reasons, yes - but what really pushed him over the edge and towards the creation of the Veil was the Evanuris using the Blight. Something Solas knew would endanger every single living thing in entire world. Not a petty power squabble or a difference in politics - a necessity of raw survival.
The game tries to paint Solas and Elgar'nan as "two politicians", "just like Tevinter nobles", because recognizing that Solas did something necessary nobody else was able and/or willing to do, bloodying his hands and blackening his conscience, and losing his dearest friend and lover over it, would make him sympathetic.
And if there's one thing Solas isn't allowed to be in this game it's sympathetic. Because this is one man's quest for vengeance against a video game character that made him feel a negative emotion once.
(To be Fair And Balanced(tm), you can steer Rook in a sympathetic direction via dialogue - but the companions just always snap back into their default anti-Solas mindset.)
Oh fuck all the way off, Morrigan. Treacherous. Who conned the Warden/Alistair/Loghain into making an Old God Baby for your own ends? Who absconded without a word like a thief in the night, leaving the people you claimed were your only friends behind? Who snuck her way into the fucking Imperial Court of Orlais, only to weasel herself into the Inquisition in hopes of grabbing power and artifacts of a culture that isn't yours?
Oh, what's that? That was necessary? You were protecting yourself and your child?
Hmmmmmh!!!! It's almost as if sometimes, subterfuge is necessary!
I have nothing against Morrigan as a character. I love her. But the way she is wielded in Veilguard is terrible. She's just a vehicle through which the writers (we know who in particular) let the audience know that yes, everyone hates Solas, and the audience's hatred of him is Justified(tm).
Just like her snide little "Speaking from the heart, Inquisitor?" later at the final war council. God, I wanted to punch her. I bet a lot of people felt really vindicated by those lines and Morrigan's behavior, and I bet that was the plan.
(Sometimes I wonder how Trick really, in their heart of hearts, feels about all this. We'll never know, I don't feel I'm entitled to know, I would never ask - but I wonder.)
This whole scene is also terrible. Mostly because some people just don't have enough media literacy and sheer reading comprehension to understand that Solas is doing a bit here.
The game plays it off like he's "finally taking off the mask" - but that's not it. He's playing a character (look at those hands behind his back, he does that when he's insecure), he's performing the role of the villain that Rook needs to see to push them deeper into their own regret. They "lost to the villain and failed everyone". It doesn't work if Solas doesn't play the part. It doesn't work if it's a calm discussion.
Look at his fucking face:
That's not a sneering villain. That's sadness. That's pain. That's guilt. Funny how the character artists and mo-cap people knew exactly what they were doing, even as the narrative tries its damndest to work against them.
And the final nail in the coffin:
Yes, let's get this guy's former literal slave owner to talk him down. Let's act like even now, even millennia later, she is who gets to decide his fate.
Fucking look at this final, complete humiliation. In front of everyone - Rook, Morrigan, Lavellan/the Inquisitor, a bunch of other people - he is reliving all his trauma in real time and forced into submission. Because Mythal tells him to leave it.
As if to tell even an adoring Solavellan audience - who this ending was supposed to be for! - "Look how weak and pathetic your guy is, look how your love wasn't enough, watch us kick him in the ribs one last time!"
Don't get me wrong: I love the moments between Lavellan and Solas. I love his breathless little "Vhenan." I love their kiss. I love how she kneels down to him so their faces are level. I love that he's too afraid to take her hand as they walk through the rift. I love this ending.
I just hate that it all came with one last back-handed kick in the shin for Solas and for the Solavellan-minded player.
Okay. I'm done. I just had to word-vomit this somewhere, finally. I'm not trying to make anyone feel bad for enjoying Veilguard. I'm not saying people aren't allowed to enjoy Veilguard. I myself did enjoy Veilguard ffs. I played it twice, back to back, 160 hours. I have 4GB screenshots and a whole notebook with lore notes. My critique is coming from a place of genuine, deep love for the series as a whole and Solas specifically. So I hope people take it that way.
I just wanted to add one little thing to this great post, (and salt to the wound), the way that Rook & Crew treat him is a perfect example of what Solas talked about in Inquisition (dialogue only with Low Approval Inquisitor)
Here's the audio as well (with some bonus Inquisitor snark 'cause I couldn't help myself)
Solas has been treated so poorly for so long and the Inquisitor is essentially the one person (as a friend or Solavellan) that can treat him kindly and with respect.
my copium: pretending Veilguard was Varric's shitty fanfic to cover up what really happened
We understand that Broodmother is a reflection of the brutality of Orzammar and its use of women’s bodies explicitly for breeding, right?
In Orzammar women are always already broodmothers.
Broodmother is a narrative reflection of that use and that reality, a use of women which is justified in Orzammar as having to replenish the Warrior and upper castes due to the constant pressure of Darkspawn, but in the deep roads is stripped away of all its social pretence.
Orzammar’s narratives are entirely about people being used, abused and consumed in the service of caste and necessity, and how this particularly effects people who are assumed to be able to give birth, how it creates not just sex work but pregnancy work, and the coercive ways necessity operates on people.
It’s not at all a subtle parallel. The darkspawn do not defeat House Branka; Branka- Paragon, Noble, highest caste and most powerful woman in Orzammar- feeds her lessers to the darkspawn.
She has all her story reasons for doing it, but at the base and inescapable level, she (like all the other Dwarves of Orzammar) use and discard lower Castes because they can, because they have the power to, because the caste system organises them to be able to.
I honestly absolutely hate with a spitting seething passion the kind of analysis that sees horror, especially horror against women, being committed in a narrative and immediately becomes incapable of saying anything about media other than “it’s just edgy/gritty/grimdark” and dismissing it.
Life is edgy gritty and grimdark for a lot of us. I was a teenage sex worker. My life was edgy gritty and grimdark. I experienced some of the most vulgar expressions of how gender works in my society, and I experienced them bluntly.
And to dismiss depictions of sexual, gendered violence as “purely for shock” when they are not, when they have something to say about gender and power and violence in a setting, is to assign stories like my real life as “shock value”.
There is more feminist shit to say about Orzammar alone than anything in Veilguard, because Orzammar is actually interested in gender and in the social roles and violences that create, reinforce and are a consequence of gender systems*.
And personally, I will pick a story that clumsily tries to say something about power and violence and society over a smooth story that says nothing about those things every single time; but that doesn’t mean Broodmother isn’t worthy and deserving of criticism (it is!) but can we please at least start from a place of criticising it for what it actually is and what it is actually doing in the game? The work and text that is the game?
*I am not saying Orzammar is feminist or is doing feminism, but you can analyse it from a feminist standpoint because the cloying weight of Gender and Gender In Society as a faucet of the setting is inescapable.
the “non-sexist Thedas” thing was always kind of insane to me bc i had interpreted the in-world treatment of the broodmothers as something universally viewed as horrible/terrifying vs the acceptance Orzammar’s citizens have of its caste system societal structure as a commentary on how different irl societies often criticize each other for Things (including discrimination/violence against women) while also perpetuating those same Things in different (or even sometimes similar) ways. and idk if they thought that throwing out “sexism doesn’t exist” would make people feel better or what, but if anything it almost had the opposite effect because like, okay then what was all of THAT gesticulates towards Origins’ female city elf prologue and Orzammar’s treatment of women and broodmothers etc. even for???? because i had assumed it was intentional commentary but now y’all got me thinking otherwise which. is perchance. Not A Great Look?
there’s been such a weird shift in media overall where the assumption seems to be that people DON’T want to engage with like, basic statements or ideas that may reflect reality? and it’s really been weirding me out. and people have been using the whole “oh but i don’t like grimdark” thing as an excuse and it’s like???? that’s not what that means???
like sorry not to make everything about Star Wars on main, but take the first film (A New Hope) for example. LITERALLY the word “hope” is in the mf title! i highly doubt that if you asked anyone who’s seen it to describe the film they’d say it’s grimdark or depressing. but you know what it has?
among other things:
oppressive authoritarian fascist government
a scene in which the main character’s parental figures are burned alive in their own home
a scene in which a captive character is heavily implied to be tortured
a cybernetic death samurai who kills people with his evil-colored laser sword for Breathing At Him Wrong
and if you took any one of those things out of the narrative it wouldn’t hit the same. they’re important to the narrative at least in part because even though they’re negative or uncomfortable, they’re reflections of things that are real, and the narrative takes those reflections and holds them up in front of you and says “i think we should talk about what America is doing in Vietnam” (George Lucas was hugely anti-Vietnam war and it shows in his depiction of a fascist government fighting to exterminate a rag-tag group of Rebels) or “i think we should talk about how Western society’s idea of love is actually kind of possessive, and sometimes love is about letting go and moving on and that’s ok” (George Lucas is Buddhist and again it comes across in his depiction of the Jedi and their philosophy). and while i personally think he was extremely valid for saying those things, whether or not George Lucas was correct or even if he made those points well is not the point, the point is that he was willing to engage in the discussions in the first place.
you can have discussions about things that are sometimes hard to have discussions about without dismissing them as “edgy”/“grimdark.” that is a thing that you can do. i can’t help but feel as though we’ve gotten to a very strange point in time where so many creators and consumers are just fully unwilling to do that (op’s initial point about Broodmothers being an excellent example of that imho) and it sucks.
ppl talk about cousland having a degenerative arc, but honestly cousland can't beat out aeducan in terms of going from high to low
aeducan was literally royalty, meaning they lived even more lavishly than cousland, so it was an even bigger adjustment to being poor
they weren't just betrayed by a family friend they were betrayed by their OWN BROTHER, and then they have to decide whether to put their fratricidal brother on the throne over harrowmont
they can't even marry alistair in order to regain their royalty status like cousland can
in addition to being poor for the first time, they also have to adjust to an entirely differently environment. imagine living underground your whole life only to come to the surface and find out you're allergic to grass
they ALSO have to adjust to being a minority. they went from people bowing to them to being called racial slurs for the first time
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