How many “I can change him! Let me change him with my love!” posts am I going to read

he’s old as balls. literally over 2000 years old. stop. this is an awful unhealthy trope. call him grandpa cause he’s set in his ways. there ain’t no changing him.

not to mention he’s literally screwed up every plan he’s put into action and he’s still trying to fix his original mistake? by doing exactly the same thing he did then: fucking off on his own because he thinks he knows best what people want. which results in him killing even more people!

velanna, merrill, calpernia – these are all women that gave up everything to make better lives for their people and they got shat on and ignored for being too this and too that. a dude nearly destroys the world several times, announces his intention to do so again (for everyone’s own good, apparently), and he’s a misunderstood hottie?

it’d be one thing if this was just a fandom notion but that seems to be what the writers are trying to drill into us, which is all the more bewildering.

Before I reply in full to this, let me say that I totally support anyone who sees Solas as irredeemable and not worthy of saving. I’m about to disagree with you on a lot of things, but it’s not my intent to change your mind with regards to that. It’s an entirely valid opinion.

With that out of the way, I find your assertion that Solas is not going to change his mind extremely puzzling. I assume you’ve only done a Trespasser playthrough wherein you had low approval with him because if you have high approval with him he explicitly states that he wants you to prove him wrong. He doesn’t want to do what he’s set out to do.

Of course, if he doesn’t want to do this, then why the hell is he? He can stop any time. It’s hard to say why doesn’t; we’re given very little about Solas’s motives or why he feels so strongly compelled to do this. We could speculate all day, but let’s not. All I can say is that his decision to tell the Inquisitor his plan is deliberate. You’ll notice that he even explains to a low-approval inquisitor what his plans are, even though the option to redeem him may not come up. He could have let you die or healed you without any explanation. Instead, he gives you, at the very least, the cliff notes version of his plan. That’s because he still wants you to stop him. He’s just accepted that you will do so by means of his death. He deliberately tells you just enough of his plan that you become motivated to stop him either through force or persuasion. He wants to give the world a fighting chance.

I hope you’ll forgive me for this, but I can’t help but be amused by your attitude that Solas is horrible for making decisions that will seriously affect the entire world without the consent of the people. Just in Dragon Age alone, you decide who rules Ferelden (and later, Orlais), whether an Old God should be reborn as a human, whether to massacre several groups of elves and mages, whether to dissolve the Circle or keep it, strongly influence who becomes Divine, and whether or not the Inquisition should continue on as a political entity. And that’s just Dragon Age! In other Bioware games you can enjoy a whole host of other decisions, including whether or not to commit genocide multiple times, rewrite the genetic information of every living being in the galaxy, and whether or not to become a god of murder.

Then again, that’s the point of an RPG: to give you choices that matter. It’s your job as the player character to make these decisions. Solas isn’t a player character, you are. Except Solas is a player character, at least thematically. @thefairyknight made an excellent post regarding this, but I’ll recap. Solas is a deconstruction of the video game “every decision you make matters” protagonist archetype that Bioware is so popular for. How many times have we all played a game for the first time, agonizing over our choices and their possible consequences? The first time I played Wicked Eyes and Wicked Hearts, I had such a hard time making a decision, I asked my Skype group who had no understanding of what the game was even about for advice. You act as if Solas just created the Veil on a whim. He did not. He likely fought hard at the side of many friends, doing what he could to stop the Evanuris in a more conventional manner. It’s heavily implied that the Veil was the last resort, that things had gotten so bad, he only had a choice between creating the Veil and all that it implied and something much worse. He had to choose between the bad ending and getting a game over. He chose the bad ending.

The writers are not trying to force you to sympathize with Solas—that’s why you have the low approval option of mocking him and the chance to decide to kill him even with high approval. What they’re doing is creating a reflection of every character you’ve ever played and showing you how it could all go wrong. Just because he has more depth than any other Dragon Age villain so far doesn’t mean that they’re trying to play off his actions as justified—you can’t join his cause, even as a romanced Lavellan. Just because you can sympathize with him doesn’t mean the writers have an agenda. It means that they’ve created a complex character and villain and they want you to form your own opinions about him.

Lastly—and this is the part that truly made me respond—your condescending tone toward Solavellan shippers needs to stop. You seem to be under the impression that we’re all silly school girls with no understanding of what Solas is doing or that there’s anything messed up in the romance and can’t see beyond him being a ‘hottie’. We’re not. Case in point: I’m a twenty-five year old lesbian and I think that Solas is kind of weird-looking. He certainly does not light my loins aflame, nor am I interested in having my Lavellan ‘fix him’ with his love. Women and girls are not stupid. We’re fully capable of recognizing messed up and unhealthy romances. We’re fully capable of discussing the unhealthy aspects of a relationship while still enjoying it as a story. We’re even capable of recognizing that sometimes relationships should be broken off (hence your option to do so upon confronting Solas) and sometimes a relationship can be salvaged if both parties are willing to put in the time and effort to do so. If people are daydreaming about talking down Solas and rebuilding their relationship into something better, that’s not automatically unhealthy. Yes, not every relationship is worthy of being salvaged, but the worthiness of such a pursuit—especially in fiction that’s meant to entertain—is not for you to judge. Heck, even if they’re not interested in rebuilding the relationship into something healthy, it’s still not your place to judge because what people do with their own characters for their own amusement isn’t your concern. Despite your claim that Solavellan shippers are dreamy and obsessed with using love to save Solas, there are plenty of Solavellan shippers who acknowledge that there are circumstances where their Lavellan would be willing to kill Solas. There are also plenty of inquisitors with entirely platonic reasons for wanting to save Solas. Don’t make concern-trolling generalizations about a ship just because you don’t like it.

I will, however, agree that the way Merrill, Velanna, and Calpernia are sometimes treated is shit.

I would also mention that Solas has shown he’s capable of changing his mind several times within the narrative in regards to certain things. In his banters with Sera, he concedes that she’s right about the goal of the Jennies, for example. You can also convince him to stop seeing the people of the modern world as a passing dream without personhood and get him to admit that his view of the Dalish is wrong because HE expects too much from them. Solas isn’t a “grandpa”, he’s very old, yes, but he’s not set in his ways and is more than willing to change, if better alternatives are given to him.

If Solas had shown he wasn’t capable of change, there wouldn’t be so many people trying to save him. And though he was written to have a sympathetic side, there’s nothing saying you have to sympathize with and save him.The game openly acknowledges that his plan is terrible by forcing you to choose to work against him. In no way do the writers condone his actions, and though many Solavellan fans approve of tearing down the Veil, I have not met a single fan who approves of him destroying the world and all the people in it.

I myself want to redeem Solas, and personally believe the Solavellan romance is going to give the best redemption ending (though not the only redemption ending), and I happen to be neither female nor attracted to Solas. Solavellan fans have agency, and though there are many who do think he’s hot, and there are many problems within the fandom, the people who want to save him are often the people most upset by his plans. We constantly discuss his flaws and the seeming contradiction between his morals and plans amongst ourselves and only so zealously defend Solas to outsiders because so many of us feel like we have to or nothing good will ever be said about him (or us) at all. We feel attacked by so called “criticisms” that a) assume we are all straight, female, and younger than 25 and b) completely ignore all the very critical things we DO say about the romance and his plans that people seem to ignore. It’s hard to like Solas when everyone assumes you’re either irrational and obsessed with egg dick or a completely morally reprehensible person.

Iif he cannot be redeemed, I would prefer him to die and have my Lavellan be the one to do it. Many other Solavellan fans feel the same, and most of us think he is being very stupid.

We just happen to sympathize with him and, just as there is nothing wrong with you thinking he is beyond redemption, there is nothing wrong with us seeing the good in him and wanting to pull him back from the brink, if we are able.