This is Solas's fault.

This essay contains footnotes. You can read them either by hovering over the number or by clicking on it, or simply wait to read them all until the end.
Spoilers for the entire Dragon Age franchise.

One of the most controversial lines in the already controversial Dragon Age: The Veilguard is a line Rook can say when confronted with a blighted halla: “This is Solas’s fault”. The blighted halla is vaguely Solas’s fault - he spent the introduction setting up a big scary ritual, and Rook interrupting that ritual caused it to catastrophically fail and let loose a blight. Solas blames Rook, Rook blames Solas, and the player is free to blame whoever they like. Some people found this line funny - Solas is both literally and metaphorically living rent-free in Rook’s head - but some people took it very seriously, as if the game itself were unfairly bullying Solas for his attempt to save the world.

It’s been a rough time to be a Solas hater. His last-minute romance in Inquisition is very popular, and even if you didn’t slip him Fade tongue, his status as the games’ new big bad¹ means that every pre-game interview about Veilguard was very Solas-centric. Whether or not the game would make good on the promise of Solas as a character was a huge topic of discussion, and whether or not it did is a current matter of debate. However, what is it exactly that Solas’s writing promised? The narrative issues with Veilguard have been spoken about at length, but I haven’t seen anyone address the state that Inquisition left the franchise in, and especially how so many of these issues center around lore reveals and writing choices made in relation to one character. In short: in this essay, I want to argue that it is, in fact, Solas’s fault.

DISCLAIMER

I think lately there’s been a tendency to blame everything that went wrong with Dragon Age on Bioware’s parent company, EA. While I agree that EA did not set the franchise up for success and does not seem to understand what the appeal of Dragon Age is, I invite you to read this essay without this mindset. I do not care if the aspects of this story I critique were part of the original Dragon Age plan or are the result of rapidly changing teams and an unsupportive corporation hovering over their shoulder. If David Gaider came to me and showed me a napkin from a restaurant that closed in 2009 that has Solas’s entire backstory written on it, my mind would not change.

Additionally, we are unfortunately in the midst of a GamerGate resurgence, and that means both Veilguard and Inquisition have come under fire for their inclusion of transgender, nonbinary, and gay characters. Inquisition gave us our first (and only) gay and lesbian companions and our first transgender NPC, and Veilguard is the first to allow the protagonist to be trans, and introduces a wealth of queer NPCs, including our first nonbinary companion. Because of this, there is a narrative that Dragon Age: Origins is the best game due to its lack of “wokeness” or “DEI”. I do think that Dragon Age Origins and Dragon Age 2 are the strongest games in the series, but this has nothing to do with them being less diverse. Diversity - of race, of gender, of sexuality - can only ever serve the Dragon Age setting well, and the series’ shortcomings related to diversity are due to its failure to explore the complexity of those identities, and not the fact that they were included at all.

Finally, this essay uses quotes from multiple Dragon Age games, most of which are sourced from the Dragon Age: Inquisition transcription project and from the Dragon Age wiki. Thank you to the hard work and passion of fans everywhere for making this essay possible.

SOURCE: IT WAS REVEALED TO ME IN A DREAM

Something that delights me about Dragon Age is how we never get an unbiased source of truth. When you open the codex in Origins, every entry is signed by a person, all of whom have a point of view - yes, this codex has information on magic, but it’s written by the anti-mage Templars, so can we trust it? Is this account of Tevinter by a magister an accurate picture of their native country, or nationalist propaganda? We know about spirits and demons, but most of this information comes from the Chantry, which has a documented bias and agenda. The Dalish are built on this premise - they are a group of people whose entire history has been completely forgotten, and who must construct an understanding of that history based on oral histories and half-remembered tradition.

When Solas is first presented, he plays at this ambiguity. His understanding of history is based on his explorations of the Fade, and is thus tempered by the feelings and perspectives of the spirits who witnessed them. He specifically brings up the battle of Ostagar, which the player has likely experienced in Dragon Age: Origins, and mentions that some spirits view Loghain’s choice to call his troops back as pragmatic while others view him as traitorous:

Solas: That’s just it. In the Fade, I see reflections created by spirits who react to the emotions of the warriors. One moment, I see heroic Wardens lighting the fire and a power-mad villain sneering as he lets King Cailan fall. The next, I see an army overwhelmed and a veteran commander refusing to let more soldiers die in a lost cause.
PC: And you can’t tell which is real?
Solas: It is the Fade. They are all real.²

This is in line with the Dragon Age franchise’s commitment to centrism - typically, the response to any conflict in this series is to go “maybe both sides have a point”, regardless of what the actual meat of the conflict is. This is to say - regardless of my feelings about centrism³, I’m not mad at Solas for being a centrist. I have no opposition to Solas acting as a scholar with a unique source of study materials - frankly, that’s interesting to me, and the interference of spirits reflecting various points of view allows his studies to retain the lack of absolute truth that I love about Dragon Age lore. Solas having his own point of view is fine to me as well, because that’s his opinion and not a source of truth. The worst thing they could do with Solas, in my opinion, is use him as a way to tell the player unambiguously what happened five thousand years ago.

So you can guess how I feel about the reveal that Solas is an immortal elf who can perfectly recall what happened five thousand years ago and recounts it to the player in a way that is confirmed to be objectively correct.

60 HOURS WITH A FILLER VILLAIN

I think, in general, the idea that the Dragon Age series should ever be concerned with things that did not happen in the Dragon Age is a mistake. I understand that it is exciting and feels important to fight things that are Old, but in the first two games, the real enemies were politically motivated mortals. Loghain, Meredith, the Arishok, and Orsino⁴ did not have to be ancient wizards fixated on ending and/or ruling the world to be compelling; instead, their problems were material and comprehendible, and their solutions brutal and real. Meredith is an exciting villain to me because a militant dictator who is overcome with bigotry towards a vulnerable group feels more grounded in reality, even if she expresses that bigotry and fanaticism through trying to kill everyone with a giant sword. Corypheus, in contrast, falls flat because his problem is he wants to be God. That sounds scary, but it also sounds abstract - it’s hard to hold in your mind, or relate to your personal experiences.

For the record, it’s a coincidence that Corypheus becomes the main villain in the game Solas was introduced in - he’s actually from a DA2 DLC, and if there was any good in the world, he would’ve stayed there.⁵ Where I do think that Solas and Corypheus are intrinsically intertwined is that Corypheus is Solas’s filler villain. Corypheus exists to set up Solas. The reason that people talk far more about the post-credits reveal that Solas is Fen’harel than they talk about Corypheus himself is because Corypheus is an empty, characterless placeholder to buy time while the Solas betrayal is executed. Again, the other games had companions with ulterior motives - Morrigan and Anders, most notably - but this never came at the expense of the main villain of the game. The game ends with Corypheus being defeated in a mechanically uninteresting boss battle, and then we get sent to the credits to set Solas up for the next game - or rather, so his villain arc can be teased again in the Trespasser DLC. First off - I find the concept of having to purchase what is essentially the finale of Inquisition separately from the base game disrespectful to the people who already spent sixty dollars on an unfinished and buggy game, especially because Trespasser was not available for all consoles that DAI launched on, meaning the ending of the game was not available to a large number of its players. ⁶

Secondly, this is a lot of foreplay for the execution of DATV, where Solas is, once again, not the main villain. Why? Why can't Solas ever stand on his own, in his own spotlight, without having a cackling supervillain to contrast against? The games constantly talk around Solas and his motives. He has plans, he took precautions - what are those plans and precautions? Who knows. They're as good or as stupid as you think they ought to be. He wants to tear down the Veil, but what the exact consequences of that might be are vague. It would return magic to the world in a raw, unrestrained state - but the consequences of that aren’t explicitly laid out by anyone. Would it lay the entire world to waste, or would the death toll only be in the thousands? We don’t know.

There are two things I could propose as explanations for the frustrating vagueness around Solas. One - Solas is supposed to be intelligent, the kind of intelligence that comes from being alive for thousands of years, and the writers may not feel comfortable enough to write a supergenius. This line of speculation can devolve a little too quickly into calling the writers stupid, and I am genuinely uninterested in doing that. Additionally, Solas is supposed to be an expert on the Fade, which is fictional. The writers should be smarter than Solas about the Fade, because they invented it. Which leads me to my second explanation: magic is not treated as a legitimate field of study. Like I said earlier, the codexes always came from a source of bias, where our sources were often either from the Chantry, which is anti-magic, or the Circle, which is governed by paranoid Templars who are less interested in understanding magic than they are stopping it. But Solas is from an ancient magic society that did not have these restrictions - so he should understand magic as a field of study. He should be able to look at a ritual and tell me what every single component does, but he can’t, because the writers can’t. So instead, we spend 60 hours with a villain with puddle-deep motivations, 10 hours wondering who the mysterious Fen’harel could possibly be (and half an hour getting an infodump that ultimately tells us nothing), and another 60 hours with two Saturday morning cartoons. When Solas sorrowfully says “I had plans,” in Trespasser, I assumed we would understand those plans in Veilguard. When he sorrowfully says that he “took precautions to minimize the damage” in Veilguard, I assumed that at some point we would know what those precautions were. Instead, he comes off as someone who doesn’t care and is willing to handwave concerns with a frown and a promise he’s handling it.

THE ELVEN SUPREMACIST ALLEGATIONS

Let me offer another qualifier here: I don’t think it is morally reprehensible to write a racist character. A character’s racism can be used to inform their worldview, background, to add texture and character, etc etc. Giving a character flaws is not a sin. The issue I have with Solas’s racism is that it is inflexible, reinforced by the mechanics of the game, and that it is not treated like a serious character flaw, as many other characters’ racism is. Dorian comes from a society that has slavery, the majority of whom are elves, and defends this as preferable to poverty - and then can be critiqued by the Inquisitor and half of the companions. I recently replayed Dragon Age: Origins, and braced myself as soon as Leliana talked to my Dalish Warden about how elves are considered prized beauties in Orlais. Instead, I was astonished to have a rather productive conversation with her about how even if well-intended, a race of people being considered exotically beautiful is still racism.

Leliana: Elven servants are well-compensated for their services. Some of them live richer lives than humans.
Leliana: A well-trained elven servant is highly valued in Orlais. They are nimble and dexterous and many people find them pleasing to look at.
Warden: Like a prize-winning animal?
Leliana: No, I did not mean it that way!
Leliana: My words were clumsily chosen. I did not mean to offend. I... I am sorry.
Warden: You may not be cruel, but you still see us differently.
Leliana: I... I did not realize that. It is so strange, how long-held beliefs just seem natural and... right. Like there is no other way to feel.
Leliana: Thank you. You have given me a lot to think about.⁷

I was worried that this game from 2009 would punish me for pushing back against a “good” character, but instead she took the criticism and apologized for causing offense, and the game gave me the freedom to refuse to take a racist compliment.

We can then contrast this with Solas’s well-intentioned racism with an Inquisitor he feels positively about. If you hit high approval with him, he will trigger a conversation where he asks if the Inquisitor feels like the Anchor has affected their spirit.⁸ The Inquisitor can say “no”, “I don’t know”, or “get to the point”, to which Solas clarifies to a Dalish PC:

To clarify: the structure of this conversation is that the Inquisitor can say three incredibly different things (“yes, you are wrong to judge the Dalish”, “no, your bad opinion of the Dalish is correct”, and “the Dalish had no impact on my upbringing”) and Solas responds the exact same way to all three of these assertions. There is no hidden check or variable that is tracked. There is no later conversation where he says “You, a person I respect, have convinced me that the Dalish are worth listening to” or “you, a person I respect, have strengthened my resolve that the Dalish are not worth my time”. The most we get is one additional sentence on option three. Unlike Leliana, whose racism is a footnote in her story, the player, in a scene only unlocked by having very high approval with him, cannot persuade Solas on the topic that he spends so much of the game thinking and talking about. Notably, while I was given the freedom to refuse to take Leliana’s compliment, the Inquisitor cannot tell Solas that he has said something horribly offensive to them, and that they don’t appreciate it.

Dragon Age: Inquisition is the first game in the series to offer race-locked romance, which - again, I think it’s not a crime to make a character racist, but the game is unwilling to acknowledge racial preferences as racist. The real-world reasoning for this is that Solas and Cullen (the two race-locked characters) were late additions in terms of romance,⁹ and thus their animations couldn’t accommodate for the irregularly tall Qunari or the irregularly short dwarves. I personally think that it would’ve been better to just not include the romances rather than canonizing these two characters having an unsurpassable racial preference, but it’s not my game. However, Solas’s racial bias is particularly fraught in a way I find interesting. Cullen can romance either elves or humans, which makes sense because their models are about the same size. Solas can only romance female elves.

Solas’s romance arc involves him developing an unexpected respect for the Inquisitor - very similarly to his platonic route. Solas awakens in a world full of people he doesn’t consider people, and the Inquisitor convinces him otherwise (regardless, again, of if they told him that they’re just like everyone else or nothing like everyone else). But only a female elf can turn this respect into love. Male and/or non-elf Inquisitors are not given the option to flirt with him at all, which is interesting in a game where other gender-locked companions can be flirted with by an Inquisitor of incompatible gender - they’ll just be met with rejection. Because we don’t have rejection dialogue from him, we have to extrapolate why, all other factors being the same, he’s incapable of falling in love with a non-elf. If Sera, the only other elven companion, romances an elven Inquisitor, we get this:

Solas: I am not surprised you were drawn to the Inquisitor, Sera.
Sera: Why? You fancy her too?
Solas: I meant that it seems natural that you would desire another elf.

Now, Solas’s whole bit with Sera is that he keeps encouraging her to be more elf-like. This might be a reaction to her internalized elf hatred, or he might’ve started it - we don’t know, since their banter doesn’t have a set order and companions don’t speak to each other otherwise. Sera levels him with the same accusation - that he’s only dating an elven Inquisitor because he’s obsessed with rebuilding the Elvhen empire (“The elf always takes the elf so that banging bits will mean something.”) - but Solas does not respond affirmatively or negatively, instead (understandably) getting upset that Sera would be so crass about his and the Inquisitor’s sex life. Given that he makes the “desire another elf” comment about Sera, who is a cis woman dating another cis woman¹⁰, restoring the Elvhen empire does not seem to be a reason he’s dating the Inquisitor. So what is “natural” about two elves wanting to date? Who knows.

Here are the charitable things I can say about Solas being race locked: Solas being exclusive to elves means that his romance route is allowed to have a degree of specificity that others cannot. Solas and the Inquisitor can speak in Elvhen to each other, can reference specific Dalish lore, and the apex of his romance is based around him revealing Elven lore exclusively to his girlfriend before he dumps her. However, it also means he’s never beating the Elven Supremacist Allegations. His relationship with the Inquisitor also involves him telling her that she’s the only thing the Dalish got right and whenever he’s interrogated about Elven culture he maintains that both the city elves and Dalish elves have no clue what they’re doing and aren’t worthy of respect - again, even an Inquisitor he likes is viewed as an exception to the rule, not proof that the rule is wrong.

Let’s go back to Solas’s high approval scene. Here’s what he has to say to a non-elf Inquisitor:

Dwarf PC
Solas: Dwarves are practical. They do not dream. They cannot even imagine a world beyond the physical. But you have shown subtlety in your actions. A wisdom that goes against everything I know of your people.
Qunari PC
Solas: Qunari are savage creatures, their ferocity held in check only by the rigid teachings of the Qun. But you have shown subtlety in your actions. A wisdom that goes against everything I know of your people.
Human PC
Solas: Humans are shortsighted, brutish. Blind to the beauty of the Fade, their minds cast in a duality of black and white. But you have shown subtlety in your actions. A wisdom that goes against everything I know of your people.

So, consistently, Solas is surprised by the Inquisitor being a kind and reasonable person, because he assumed people of their race were not capable of being kind and reasonable. Again, keeping in mind that it is not a crime for Solas to be racist: this seems like an easy turning point for him, right? The Inquisitor can gently guide him towards realizing that the world he has awoken in is a world full of people worthy of respect. Instead, if the Inquisitor pushes back:

PC: It seems everything you’ve been taught by your people has some holes in it.
Solas: I have seen enough of the world to know I was not misinformed. Most people are small… petty. But not you.

Solas says no and assumes he knows better. He does not take the Inquisitor as proof that people are worth saving, even when they say it outright. If I wanted to be charitable, I could chalk his inflexibility up to the fact that the story has to conclude with him deciding to move forward with his “destroy the world” plan, which means he can’t be allowed to change his mind about the people that plan might affect. But with all due respect, this feels like a lack of imagination. Solas could easily reach the conclusion that because the world contains good people in unjust circumstances, he has to tear down the Veil to create a world those people deserve. You could even have him conclude that those people would be more capable of surviving the apocalypse that tearing down the Veil would cause. It’s already canon that he found friends in the Inquisition, even if he doesn’t get along with the Inquisitor, so is it really such a stretch that learning his view of an entire race was misinformed would simply change his motive, and not his actions?

At the beginning of this essay, I said that I would use Solas as a microcosm of everything wrong with Dragon Age from Inquisition onwards. Solas being an inflexible racist is a character flaw, not a series flaw - but remember what I said earlier, about Solas being also treated as a source of truth. When every other thing he says is presented as true, shouldn’t the game push back on the things he says that are unambiguously false? Or has Dragon Age morphed into a franchise where broad racial generalizations are, in fact, true?

Additionally, Solas’s view of elves is rooted in mysticism. He has no interest in the plight of the city elves or the Dalish elves, and instead prioritizes a past that’s long gone. If you call him out for not doing anything material to help elves, he protests that elves aren’t his people, and that any material things he or the Inquisitor could do - killing slavers, ordering Halamshiral returned to the elves, educating the elven population about their real history - are ultimately futile and not good enough. He doesn’t act - he just lists pros and cons, and then explains why the cons justify inaction. He gets treated like a revolutionary because forever ago he led a slave rebellion - but where are those leadership skills now? Can he just not cope with a solution more complex than “kill the evil emperors”? His solution is not to move forward, but to return to a mythologized past without modern-day baggage, and the real-world implications of this are never properly dealt with by the text. If fantasy is meant to help us engage with the world we live in, how are we meant to engage with Solas being so desperate to return to the past that he would destroy the present? We don’t get to actually explain why this villain is wrong, we just tell him it’s wrong to kill people. What’s the point of an unrelatable villain? Especially one with such an easy real-world parallel?

WHAT THE HELL IS A SPIRIT OF WISDOM?

Solas Dragonage has fucked up spirits. Spirits are cool as fuck and Solas made them lame. I’m shooting the messenger here, I guess, because Solas is simply the conduit for what Dragon Age has decided spirits’ new canon is, but I don’t care. The new canon for spirits as established in Dragon Age Inquisition is Big Stupid and I hate it and let me explain why.

So in Origins, spirits are established as beings in a between-place that view the mortal plane from the Fade, and copy what they see there. We have spirits of Courage springing up around battlefields, spirits of Wisdom helping scholars, etc etc. The way spirits and demons are named slots very easily into real-world Christian sins and virtues, but this can be handwaved as the in-universe Chantry naming the spirits and demons. These names might not be an actual reflection of how the spirits or demons would understand themselves; instead, they may be mortals imposing their own biased belief system onto a natural phenomenon.

Let's do an analysis of my favorite Dragon Age spirit: Justice¹¹. Justice is introduced in the Awakening DLC, which is essentially Dragon Age 1.5, and then becomes a full character in Dragon Age 2 (though he shares a body with Anders). Justice treats his commitment to Justice not as an ideal he effortlessly embodies, but instead, as the ideal he values above all else. We can see this in his idle banter with Velanna. He critiques her for carelessly murdering humans, specifically due to her reflexive bias against them. When Velanna responds that the situation is more complex than he thinks, he responds like this:

Justice: You are correct that I do not understand, Velanna. Help me to understand.
Velanna: (Sigh) There is... so much history between my kind and humans, Justice. Where would I begin?
Justice: You can only be responsible for your actions, your judgment. Does the same not apply to them?
Velanna: You may be right. I don't know.
Justice: And the atonement?
Velanna: I will atone when they do.

Justice does not assume that his vision of justice is absolute - he understands that there is a potential gap in his knowledge, and asks the appropriate questions to attempt to fill those gaps. This comes up again when Anders asks him if he could ever become a demon and Justice immediately gets defensive and upset. Justice later admits that he doesn’t have a good understanding of the process of becoming a demon, he simply views demons as evil, and thus reacts with rage at being called one. This shows a degree of self-awareness that doesn’t feel like someone who believes that he has the exclusive right to justice - he understands that snapping at Anders was an unfair reaction based on his own insecurity, and makes amends by apologizing and acknowledging what he did wrong. Additionally, because his justice exists in its purest form, without thought for scale or rationality, he does things like lecture Anders that having a pet cat is the same as slavery - because sentient beings are sentient beings, and he can’t fathom the very human distinction between an animal and a person. Justice the character is used to examine justice as a concept - what does it look like when pushed to its most extreme form? What does it do when isolated from everything else? How does a being made of ideals struggle in a world that is more nuanced?¹²

So, with that in mind:

Solas: I have built many lasting friendships. Spirits of wisdom, possessed of ancient knowledge, happy to share what they had seen. Spirits of purpose helped me search. Even wisps, curious and playful, would point out treasures I might have missed.

What the hell is a spirit of purpose? How is “purpose” an ideal that someone might dedicate their life to studying? Spirits gain their ideal by observing the real world and focusing on one aspect - so how does a spirit of “purpose” discover its favorite virtue? We have both spirits of wisdom and of curiosity - what is the difference between those two things, actionably? Does a spirit of wisdom just know things, and a spirit of curiosity attempts to know things? But if, as earlier established, spirits do not inherently embody their value, but instead attempt to have an in-depth understanding of it - again, what’s the difference? Wisdom spirits can’t just be born knowing everything, so how does their drive to learn differ from the drive of spirits of curiosity?

Here’s another bit of Solas dialogue that fucks with me:

PC: I don’t know of any spirits by those names.
Solas: They rarely seek this world. When they do, their natures do not often survive exposure to the people they encounter. Wisdom and purpose are too easily twisted to pride and desire.

Okay, so remember what I said earlier about how the spirit and demon names are very clearly the Chantry attempting to assign values to natural phenomena? That is no longer true. The spirits themselves think of demons as the “evil” versions of them, and assign the same label to those “evil” versions. One: I hate the Pokémon-ass “wisdom evolves into pride” shit - in my opinion, if you’re going to make spirits hulk out into their evil version, it should be conditional. For instance, I could see how “wisdom” could morph into believing that you know better than everyone else - “pride” - but couldn’t it also morph into believing you should know instead of doing - “inaction”? “Complacency”? Two: so “desire” is a sin as confirmed by the natural world? Solas doesn’t work within the Chantry. Most of his conversations with spirits were five thousand years ago. You’re telling me the ancient elves also considered “pride” to be an inherently negative trait, confirmed by nature itself? It takes away the subjectivity and mystery surrounding spirits and canonizes them as so inflexible that in order to change they must become evil. Spirits can only ever change for the worse.

I’ll end this section with a minor quibble: I just straight up don’t like the way Solas talks about or to spirits. He’s got a weird inconsistency in his dialogue, where when he argues for the merits of a world without the Veil, he says this:

Solas: Imagine if spirits were not a rarity but a part of our natural world like… a fast-flowing river. Yes, it can drown careless children, but it can also carry a merchant’s goods or grind a miller’s flour. That is what the world could be, if the Veil were not present. For better or worse.¹³

Okay, so spirits are a natural phenomenon, like the wind or a river. But… Solas’s entire thing is that spirits are people¹⁴:

PC: When I asked if you were with anyone, I meant other people.
Solas: Ah. “People,” as opposed to spirits. We are flesh and blood, so we are real.

The argument for taking down the Veil should be similar to the argument for abolishing Circles - both spirits and mages have unique abilities, but their ability to cause harm is no greater than any other person’s, and thus, they deserve the same rights and freedoms as all other people. But instead, he argues for spirits in terms of their usefulness to mortals¹⁵ and not in terms of their rights as sentient beings - a class of people whose main utility is to serve. Which hey, fits with how he talks about spirits in Veilguard:

Felassan: You knowingly sent all those spirits to their deaths? Solas… we’re supposed to be better than that.
Solas: They died true to their nature, doing what they loved, Felassan. Let that be a comfort, that this war did not corrupt them into something different from what they were supposed to be.

THE END OF DRAGON AGE

I make it a matter of principle to not feel pity for big games studios, but there is part of this article that feels like kicking someone while they’re down. As of this writing, the entire Dragon Age writing team has been laid off, including Trick Weekes, who is the writer behind a lot of the choices I critique in this article. As I said at the beginning, EA has not treated Bioware well, and seemingly has no interest in Dragon Age as a series of single-player RPGs. Whether or not there will ever be another Dragon Age game is completely up in the air. So why write this at all?

Ultimately, I want there to be a record. The narrative around Dragon Age has overwhelmingly been that the first three games are good, and that the series only got bad at Veilguard. But the frustrating choices started in Inquisition. Inquisition started refusing to take racism seriously. Inquisition started dialogue trees that don’t allow for meaningful conversation. Inquisition started the flattening of the magic world. Inquisition started big stupid world-ending stakes with a lack of personal investment. And so many of those choices are due to the narrative deciding that it was going to revolve around the Dread Wolf, and what he did five thousand years ago.

Dragon Age Origins introduces us to a world in which many typical elements of high fantasy are either long past - the Grey Wardens used to be a noble order of knights with flying steeds, the elves used to be a proud empire - or subverted - wizards study in towers, but only because they are imprisoned; there is a rightful bastard heir to the throne but the lack of political training makes him genuinely ill-suited for it. Solas’s desire to return to that high fantasy past can also be viewed in a meta sense: how does Dragon Age view itself in relation to the tropes of its genre? And the answer is: it doesn't. It isn't interested in itself nor in the real world it might reflect.

The first two Dragon Age games have themes - Origins deals with duty and sacrifice, Dragon Age 2 is a game about oppression and loss. Inquisition plays with themes of faith, obligation, and corruption, but the lack of mechanical support for that theme renders it a seasoning when it ought to be meat. I’m told that pardoning Blackwall - a companion who is guilty of both murder and identity theft - may make my Inquisitor appear corrupt, but that doesn't happen so who cares. I’m told that siding with the Qun over the Chargers - making the political choice over the right choice - would give me massive benefits, but the reward for completing the quest is the same regardless of what I choose, so who cares. Veilguard was criticized for being a game about regret where Rook was never allowed to do anything truly regret-worthy, but Inquisition is a game about the corruptive influence of power where the Inquisitor can never use their power for anything truly corrupt, and a game about questioning faith where an indigenous faith is revealed to be unambiguously false while the Christianity equivalent is never meaningfully contested.

If Dragon Age was going to follow through on the themes established by Solas’s plan - that, in a world based on subversions of or denial of fantasy tropes, he would like to return to a fantasy past in which all of those tropes were correct - then either the series needed to deny him this return to the past, or subvert his idealization of it. But the game never copes with the way Solas’s racism intersects with his desire to return to the past. Solas openly thinks that the way elves are portrayed in high fantasy media is superior to their portrayal in Dragon Age. He expects dwarves, humans, and Qunari to behave in the way they might be described in the first two sentences of their Player’s Handbook description. To deny Solas his perfect world should be a declaration of Dragon Age’s unique identity as a series, but the game never makes the connection - because Solas is allowed to lose, but he’s never allowed to be wrong.

<sup>1. If your kneejerk reaction to reading this was "hold on, Solas is never the big bad in these games" - I agree. Put in a pin in it.↩
2. Solas has different dialogue based on if Loghain or Alistair have been recruited yet, but it is not a notable enough change to invalidate his point of view here.↩
3. I don't like it.↩
4. I know Orsino’s position as a villain is contentious, but for the purposes of this article I will be counting him. ↩
5. I’m gonna say this here: I hate Corypheus. I hate Corypheus. I think he is genuinely the worst villain in the entirety of the Dragon Age franchise. I’m about to complain about the Evanuris, but I like the Evanuris more than I like Corypheus. Corypheus shows up, says one (1) kind of hard line, and then takes L after L for the rest of the game. I never once felt threatened by this guy. Stop aura farming and start fucking doing something.↩
6. I’ll allow an exception to my disclaimer at the beginning and mention that this is, in fact, EA’s fault. The Inquisition team has been very vocal about the fact that they did not want to launch on older consoles and that EA forced them to make the game playable on both previous-gen and next-gen consoles because they were getting worried that mobile gaming would render game consoles irrelevant. My point still stands that I don’t think consequences for choices like Iron Bull’s allegiances or your relationship with Solas should’ve been exclusive to DLC, but it would be cruel to place the blame solely on the shoulders of a team that also did not want to be in this position.↩
7. Dragon Age Origins transcripts are surprisingly hard to find, so this quote is sourced from this tumblr post.↩
8. The exact wording of this is if the Anchor has affected “your mind, your morals, your… spirit?” Mind and morals make sense, but it’s strange Solas would refer to a mortal character as having a spirit in the same way that someone in the real world might refer to a soul. Given the revelations in Veilguard, that ancient elves are spirits who took bodies (and that Solas is one of these elves), I’m willing to write this off as Solas slipping up and forgetting not everyone works the way he does, but I have no clue if that’s the intended read.↩
9. Both of them are heterosexual as well, which in Solas’s case is because he betrays the player and Trick wanted to avoid the evil bisexual trope. As far as I can tell there’s never been a statement on why Cullen’s is straight, other than him being established as attracted to women in DAO.↩
10. Unlike Veilguard, Inquisition does not offer options to create a trans Inquisitor and, in dialogue with the series’ first transgender character, assumes the Inquisitor is cis. Obviously people can headcanon as they please, but I am analyzing the text as written.↩
11. To my friends and peers this may come as a shock because I am a Cole stan. If you didn’t know I was a Cole stan before reading this essay: think of this essay like House of Leaves and just skip this particular footnote. I love Cole, but I think he’s messily written as a spirit. Justice is one of my faves, but he also exemplifies what I want from Dragon Age spirits, so I’m using him as a case study. Cole is my favorite character, Justice is my favorite spirit.↩
12. As much as I really would love to write analysis on how Justice changes after he fuses with Anders (how his black-and-white thinking interacts poorly with Anders’ self-centered nature, how the futile struggle in Kirkwall radicalizes him further), it is unfortunately off topic for how spirits got fucked up in DAI. Abominations are always a little tricky because you have to worry about how the human host makes things more complicated, so Justice in DAA is our best case study for a pure spirit pre-DAI.↩
13. There are a few different versions of this dialogue based on the player’s input, but the gist of it is about the same. ↩
14. There’s a weird inconsistency with the way Solas speaks about spirits in Cole’s quest as well; if Cole is made to embrace being a spirit, Varric laments that “he could’ve been a person”. Solas does not respond “he already is”, which from what I can tell is what Solas theoretically believes, but instead just says being a person wouldn’t have made Cole happy. Given that Cole and Solas were written by the same person, I have no clue why Solas suddenly forgets that spirits are people in Cole’s quest. I also don’t really like the way Solas talks about Cole in general, since he seems to value Cole’s chosen ideal more than he values anything Cole does or says, but this essay is already too long.↩
15. I’m using “mortals” here to differentiate them from spirits, who are immortal, though I understand the distinction is tricky. Dragon Age doesn’t really have a word that encapsulates “humans, elves, dwarves, and Qunari”. Normally I’d use the word “people”, but I’m keeping them distinct from spirits, who are also people.↩</sup>