omg talk to me about Solas

[astolat]

I just finished my first Inquisition playthrough (as a female elven mage, romancing Solas). I love how this plays out with a Solas/Lavellan romance going (although I'm even more super mad about the party banter bug, however, because it's clear that I would have gotten so much more depth about Solas if I'd been hearing all his commentary. :'( I

Comments

[nausicaa83]

I literally just finished it, and oh my god. My brain still has to process everything. I'm so, so glad I decided to romance Solas on my first playthrough, it made the ending even more powerful to me. Also I loved their dynamic so much

[nausicaa83]

Oh, and I just found this article that's pretty critical of the ending, and I must say it does raise some good points.

[astolat]

Yes, I completely agree -- the battle with Corypheus was totally uninteresting and didn't feel right at all. The whole "boss fight" mechanic is tired anyway and here was exceptionally so. I read that article too, that's the one that says that Corypheus should have attacked Skyhold itself, which is absolutely right

[nausicaa83]

Wow, those are all amazing ideas. I can picture that final battle so clearly in my head, it would have been mindblowing. Me, I was shocked when we didn't get to fight him in the Fade. That seemed the only logical setting, and I thought it was implied all along. While I really liked The Last Piece, I think we should have kept that stage for Corypheus instead. All that talk of him hating the Inquisitor for stealing from him, all that personal hate, surely it should have led to some one-on-one stage of the final battle, with the party members rejoining you one after the other! And he should have had multiple forms too. The Fear Demon was a much better final boss!

I agree, though, that last bit with Solas was what made the ending for me. While the credits were rolling I was feeling so detached I actually checked my phone! I remember my first time with the DAO credits, two lines of This Is War in and I was sobbing. Big tears of happiness for having saved Ferelden and having done that wonderful journey. I felt nothing like that this time.

[astolat]

Yeah, it's really not good that the ending -- the whole endgame -- just doesn't change at all.

And my Inquisitor kept her vallaslin because in the end what mattered to her more was what it meant NOW, to her and her people, which was actually a symbol of community and adulthood and resistance to oppression. I was really happy with that choice afterward, too, because it fits with my feeling that she's breaking away from Solas's path -- that she's looking forward where he's looking back. :D

[nausicaa83]

Contrary to how I usually play Hawke, I roleplayed Lavellan a lot as if she were me (what would I have done in that situation?), and I remembered how, a few weeks ago, when I found out what kind of a person Marion Zimmer Bradley was, I had to throw away all her books. If I could, I would have burned them. And I loved those books. And yet, a couple of friends of mine didn't, saying they recognized the horror of what she had done, but that the books meant something to them, and they were able to separate those two things in their minds. Even if I respected that point of view, I couldn't truly understand it. So I realized that if it were me, I would have burned off the vallaslin from my face myself. And thus off it went