Val! As a professed solavellan shipper I need your help. Because I've... been underwhelmed. I played through the game (though not Trespasser yet) and all I got was two measly smooches and a breakup date? That's it? Good thing I love my Lavellan because damn, why do I have to do the legwork on a canon romance?? So if you feel like it, would you mind telling me some of the things that made you go 'FRICK, I LOVE THAT EGG! That's the romance for me!' Because I'd love to get some of the appreciation!
DEA!!! I feel like I’m the wrong person to ask this question because I genuinely had no interest in Solas until the end of Inquisition (A LACK OF INTEREST THAT MADE ME OVERLOOK SO MANY HINTS, OMG—may my biases never make me miss so many things again) and then after Inquisition I was like “SIGN ME THE FUCK UP!!” and jumped with both feet into suffering, already prepared to headcanon into the next dimension.
Speaking of—to me the romance is 90% in your head, imagining things from Solas’s PoV. You imagine him keeping a careful distance from the characters in the story cause he knows they’re not long for this world, then utterly failing at maintaining that distance because of his innate curiosity. I didn’t mind the romance being thin because before that I’d romanced Josie and Solas actually seemed to have more content than Josie did—or at least you got to travel with him/have some party banter re: the relationship there. STILL! Highlights:
How quickly he goes from “this is a bad idea” to calling you his heart & shit (high tier melodrama), AGE DIFFERENCE (from Lavellan’s PoV—thinking she’s romancing this weird older guy who’s good at a lot of niche things), how starved for company he seems while trying to be careful (and failing), and then just… I guess just imagining everything after the game, haha. So yeah you are absolutely the one doing the legwork. I love the thought of this quiet relationship (WOUND BANDAGING! looking at stars! talking late into the night! disagreeing passionately!) that must be a comfort to Lavellan during tumultuous times turning into something sharp and painful she must remember with a mix of grief and anger. I love the thought of her questioning every moment she had with him as a moment when he might have been trying to steer her in some direction that was useful to him, her not knowing what was real and what wasn’t. I especially love imagining it ALL having been real (and in Solas’s opinion a bad idea, a weakness in him) but there’s no way for her to know.
This still isn’t part of the canon, is it? I guess one moment that really makes me melty is early on, in the Haven-dream, when you stand in the cell where you were kept and a comment about Cassandra makes him chuckle. He just seems so delighted with Lavellan as a person. If there’s attraction there you can imagine that delight making everything worse—opening a door that shouldn’t be opened.