Honestly, I think part of the reason why I’m so fascinated with Solas is that Solas reminds me so hard of all the potential disasters I’ve ever worried about with my own video game protagonists.
Like, so often in games (especially Bioware games) you get asked to make these world-shattering decisions. Your characters go on these quests to stop a great evil, to battle gods, to bring order, or sow chaos, and at the end you’re left with the power to utterly change the world. And that’s not really a power that should ever rest with just one person, but in these narratives, it so often does.
And afterwards, I usually find myself wondering about all the worst case scenarios. Sometimes I get a bad ending and it’s just like ‘well I guess I’ll start over and try again…?’ But even when it’s a good ending, all too often it’s ambiguous enough that it still seems like a lot could go wrong further down the road.
To me, this is Solas. This is what happened to Solas. He is one of those video game protagonists. He got to the end of the adventure and he had to decide to separate Magic from Reality in order to seal the gods away, and he had no real idea what would happen afterwards except that the gods wouldn’t be able to destroy the world. I’ve freaking done that. Anyone who has played Final Fantasy VI has done that.
And then he woke up in motherfucking Thedas aka Apocalypse Tuesday and found out that everything was a disaster.
At which point his first thought was ‘okay, I’ll start over and try again’ because the world was approximately as real to him as a video game, so why the heck wouldn’t that be his first impulse?
But then - then he screwed himself over. Then he went on an adventure in Thedas. Then he made friends. Now he can’t start a New Game Plus and try for a different ending without erasing all of that. The man is fucking boned. It’s like all the things I ever worried about for my Charnames and Knight Captains and Revans and Exiles and Shepards and Wardens and Nerevarines and Dragonborns all comes crashing down around Solas, this poor sap who was just trying to save his stupid people from their own stupid selves.
I have just… I have walked too many miles in those shoes, at the mercy of a game writer’s narrative whims, to not feel for him. To not want to help save him from this goddamn mess. Every choice-based RPG I have ever played has trained me to empathize with Solas.
And I just wish my Inquisitor could take him by the shoulders and look him in the eye and go:
“You must gather your party before venturing forth.”
THIS.
