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#solas was the real villain of dai and not in the way you think – @monabee-draws on Tumblr
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MonaBee.Draws

@monabee-draws / monabee-draws.tumblr.com

Commissions CLOSED🌻 Fandom stuff awaits! I do a lot of fanart in my spare time. Shipper goggles are always firmly on. [@monabee.draws on Instagram and Twitter]
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i can 100% understand loving solas for the complex character he is but i just cannot understand i CANNOT understand people seeing him go "hmmmm... dwarves are just severed limbs imitating life without a purpose... hmmm... qunari are savage barbarians... hmmmm... the modern elf might as well be stupid uneducated tranquils... and that's why i justify genociding them!!"

and be like

"omg you guys what if solas is right??? food for thought teehee."

think about what you are sayiinnngggggg.

Solas' real fatal flaw is that he is blind to his own bias and lack of information.

He is so buried in the worldview of the ancient elves and it is coloured heavily by his love for Mythal. Mythal's vallaslin originated from the past same as each of the others, which implies that she too had slaves (the practice of keeping them being something Solas abhors) but was 'benevolent and kind' to them and also 'wise enough' to lead them to a better path. The altercation at the Well is proof of Mythal's association with careful thought and information - the Well itself stores memories passed through generations. Many of her myths show her as a masterful judge of situations, able to see both sides of a conflict and determine a path with least bloodshed.

It is Mythal's wisdom (and the loss thereof leading to his own haste and the downfall of the elves) that likely influences Solas' attachment to knowledge, but it also blinds him to nuance. He respects wise leadership greatly, and faults those who act on false information (the wardens.) But what he fails to understand is that he doesn't actually understand or have all the answers about the world in its present state, at least not to the level where he can claim his wisdom leads him to the best possible path forward (if such a thing can actually exist.)

Solas knows one kind of world and exactly how it worked before the Veil destroyed it. The dwarves existed before the fall of Elvhenan, but that society's persistence through the Veil and subsequent destruction to some other catastrophe (the Blight) millenia later does not make him stop and recall that All Empires Eventually Fall. He does not take the time to understand qunari culture and existence. Nor to understand who the elves are now in the fullness of their circumstances, cultural shifts and new and layered practices. Because it is not Familiar it is not Correct. He does not understand how anyone can live Like That, and experience both sorrow and joy. Some of this is of course because of the large timeskip between his world ending and him waking up in the Thedosian present (this world feels like a dream) but instead of actually doing what makes people wise - that is, collecting both information AND experience on the ground, he assumes he already knows enough, knows BETTER, and that if everyone else did too, then of course they would choose his path/agree with him.

I think this is made most obvious in his scene with a romanced Lavellan where he tells of her the markings original meanings and in her shocked moment before she can process things offers to remove them. But Solas... its been 5000 years??? If not more?????? Symbols change! People in Thedas don't live forever anymore! Their lives are short, and the meanings assigned to things WILL change naturally over time. Language, for example, progress in Thedas: Dorian can no more read ancient Tevene than the elven inquisitors can read ancient elven. This is not an indictment of the knowledge held by those in the present, it is merely the nature of the progression of time.

It's unfortunate that the best analogue for Solas in the game is in fact Corypheus. As Dorian says, "the Imperium he remembers doesn't exist anymore" and it is the same for the rest of Thedas. The Veil may have accelerated the shift, but realistically, Arlathan took another 1000 years to fall to the humans. The elves might have lost power in some other way even if all he'd done was kill the Evanuris and freed everyone else. But, because he believes he has knowledge above all others, and that his knowledge is more complete than anyone else, he cannot possibly entertain the idea that he is wrong. His name being 'Pride' suits him well.

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