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Motivation
Apr. 23rd, 2025 09:53 pmOne of the frustrating things about Veilguard is how it avoids the weight of Solas' responsibility to his people. By tying his grief and regret primarily to Mythal, it makes his choices about the Veil personal, when it had always been so much more than that, which he expressed himself in the Trespasser DLC (and hints at throughout Inquisition when he talks about what the world has lost, although then he couches it merely as things he's "seen in the Fade").
Solas loved the ancient elves, loved them so much he started a rebellion against would-be gods because he felt so strongly the people deserved freedom and choice. He devoted himself to freeing them from the tyranny and slavery of the Evanuris, but in the end, his leadership and choices cost them almost everything.
Veilguard gives a quick mention of this in Varric's narration at the start, but otherwise throughout the game shockingly little attention is given to Solas' grief for what he sees as the harm he caused his own people, the very ones he was trying to save, compared to the time given to his personal grief for Mythal.
In the rewritten confrontation between Solas and Flemythal after Inquisition, she derides his guilty conscience, but Rook and co, trying to understand him and convince him to change his mind about the Veil, never really acknowledge the weight of the guilt he carries over what became of the elves and the spirits after he constructed the Veil. There isn't even lip service paid to the debt he feels he owes his people or the spirits now trapped almost entirely in the Fade; instead, his desire to remove the Veil often feels framed as the desperate lashing out of a man lost in grief, heedless of the damage he's doing.
But to really examine this might force the game to address what it hinted at about the uthenerai at the end of Trespasser: that there may be ancient elves--perhaps many of them--still alive, waiting for the Veil to come down so they can be woken. It might also be forced to address how spirits have suffered since the Veil went up, and what that means for Solas who was one of them and seems still to identify more with spirits than elves. And that might make the choices in the game actually difficult, because Rook would be asking Solas not just to preserve their world, but to condemn the remnants of his own people and accept the segregation of spirits to the Fade to do it.
Solas' remark about "the world she wanted" in the Veilguard climax make no sense. We have not been given any evidence that Mythal cares about the state of the world, or spirits, or the Veil, except that she thinks Elgar'nan sometimes goes too far, and at present Flemythal has come to feel the mortals deserve to live (certainly, nothing about Mythal in the flashbacks we get suggests she would have any real opinion on the Veil). Solas, on the other hand, is eaten alive with guilt over the harm he inadvertently did to the elves, to the spirits (his original people), to the environment. Those feelings have nothing to do with Mythal: they are a product of his own pain at seeing the damage his Veil caused. But they cannot be truly dealt with in the game, which depends on Mythal's ability to wave her hand and brush away Solas' guilt and desire to repair the damage he did, which means his feelings must be heavily tied to her, not to the spirits or the elves or the world itself
It makes his motivations much weaker, and weakens his character overall.
