I remember Weekes answering about whether Solas is possessed or not. but I don't know how to browse tweets.
Eh, Weekes dodged the question in the interview so I'm guessing we still don't have a consensus as to what the Solas/Fen'Harel relationship actually is. Let's list the possibilities for simplicity's sake:
> Fen'Harel "slept" for a number of years and simply took the new name of "Solas" when he woke
> Fen'Harel put a "soul fragment" into the body of a mage named Solas, à la Flemeth/Mythal
> Fen'Harel met Solas while wandering the fade, and Solas agreed to be a host, à la Anders/Justice
> Solas died, but not before attracting the spirit of Fen'Harel, à la Cole
> Solas is the Maker
Anything else?
<snip>
2. I believe Solas is telling us the truth. If we look at the themes of DA:I a HUGE part of it was the tendency of common people to deify and elevate those they see with power they do not understand. It happens with the Herald/ Inquisitor no matter how hard you deny it with your own mouth. Everyone, literally EVERYONE (with the exception of Solas), is willing to see you as something more until the sequence in the Fade. Even then, people choose to reject the truth. When analyzing myths and tales of origin within religious narratives, more often than not, they were constructed by the people to explain things they couldn't understand. A person walking physically through the fade? A woman guiding her to safety? Gotta be the spirit of Andraste. This person was sent here to save us! The inquisitor is an elf... welllll... I suppose that shows how far the Herald has risen! YEAH, racism being used to explain how divine you are!
I don't know what Solas' plans are. All we know is that he wishes to rectify a mistake of his past, a mistake so scarring to who he is as an individual, he cannot abandon his efforts to fix it. Cole's party banter with Solas post-break up where he's trying to help Lavellan's and Solas' emotional pain tells us the following: 1) Back when things sang the same, Solas felt an emotional pain - either due to the situation of the elves at that time or due to his actions at the time. 2) Clearly something about the Inquisitor, by being real*, could change everything (even Solas admits this in the Haven scene - he feels the whole world change). 3) "They sleep, masked in a mirror, hiding, hurting, and to wake them... (Gasps.) Where did it go?" - those who are sealed behind the Eluvians are in uthenera. They're clearly hiding from something they wish to escape, but in doing so they're experiencing pain. The only way to solve THAT pain, which Solas is quick to tell Cole he can't fix, is to awaken them with some sort of MacGuffin we don't have enough information to name or place.
Another Cole-Solas banter hints that Solas envies Cole because Cole can be happy because he can forget people and events and move on without changing his nature. Cole offers Solas two ways to heal the pain of his memory: 1) Remember them. In remembering them, cherishing them as they remain in his memory. 2) Let them go. This could mean "forgetting" them, but I think it has more to do with moving on. Accepting that they once were, but time requires that his mind move down different paths. It's clear that Solas appreciates these offers of help, but refuses to take either path. He remembers them both as they were and as they now are - at one point great, and now in pain. He can't let them go because of his sense of responsibility for the situation, so he can't move on. These are emotional choices Solas himself has made and rejects Cole's solutions. Cole reminds Solas that he souldn't feel guilty because it wasn't about Solas being right or exerting dominance over them, it was about saving them, which was right.
So TL;DR Solas is consumed by guilt at whatever action he did because he is unwilling to relinquish the memories he has of those he sealed, even though the course of action he took was right and it did save them. Knowing what we know about Solas about free will, maybe he feels guilty about what he did because it robbed them of their choice - even if it was self-destruction. Yes, I think he feels shitty about how things went down for the elves as time progressed - I'm sure he had hoped they would have escaped slavery, ignorance, poverty, and servitude. He knows he can't rewind time (dear god please don't let there be anymore time magic in DA.. it's such a mess and never satisfying), but perhaps by bringing these Gods back, the People can regain what was lost. If these Gods self-destruct, it's by their own choice, the very thing Solas feels he robbed from them.
While Solas idolizes a time when the Fade and the Physical World were one, I am unsure if he actually lived it or has only experienced it via memory in the Fade. We have no way of knowing until more information is given. I just question if that's his actual goal because his conversations with Cole seem to point at something else. The rejoining of the Fade to the Physical World, however, might be the fall out of whatever it is he is planning to do, just not the end goal in and of itself.
I'll continue the rest in another post or else this will be a terrifying wall of text no one will ever read!
EDIT: *REAL: What does that word even MEAN!? Sometimes I feel that "real" means spiritual to Cole because when he talks to a mage Lavellan he mentions her pulling stuff from the fade and in the process making the physical world more "real", but at others I feel like "real" refers to those that are both spiritual and physical - like himself, Solas, Cassandra, and the Inquisitor. They all (by their nature as spirit-human hybrids or power) exist in some way in both places.
<snip>
Huh....that makes sense. I was having trouble reconciling the idea that Solas wanted to "bring them all back". Since he
a. (as Fen'Harel) had a hand in bringing them all down
b. is supposedly their "prison guard" and
c. wouldn't want to be responsible for inflicting that level of violence upon the existing world
But years of feeling responsible for robbing them of their "choice".... yeah I can see him being eaten up by that. Assuming this is his goal of course.
Aha time-travel was totally my first guess! Solas needing to go back and change his "great mistake", creating an alternate timeline where the quiz no longer exists. It would certainly explain him not wanting to see the people he meets as "real", since to him, that timeline shouldn't be real.
But yeah I think there is a general feeling of "ugh, not time travel again". Also I believe there is a codex during the In Hushed Whispers quest - Alexius journal? - which states that time travel is only possible within the time frame of an open breach. Time-magic drawing on the power of the open breach. So, unless Solas has planned super far in advance and opened a breach however many years ago in order to go back there one day....
Retour en haut
instead
