Are you becoming what you've always hated?

This is one of those instances where I find some of the criticism towards Veilguard’s or Mythal’s/Solas’ writing genuinely fascinating.

I generally find the way we understand text fascinating. Even with a classic novel, what you take away from it is highly influenced by your background and life experiences, among other things. A classic example would be the Bible, which, you know, I think we all know has been understood differently by different groups of people. That’s basically hermeneutics: the idea that interpretation is never neutral but always shaped by context, history, and the reader’s own position.

But in the case of choice-based RPGs, what you actually experience as the text, and in what order, is highly influenced by your choices and how you play the game.

In this specific example, you only hear one particular line of dialogue if you take two characters out at the same time under very specific circumstances. I’ve played Dragon Age: Inquisition twice, and I never triggered this line. I only became aware of its existence through Tumblr.

Now, this line might be the remains of some creative process before the writers had fully conceptualized the outlines of a possible fourth Dragon Age game, or it could be connected to elven lore that was never really explained further. But we can agree that this line never really went anywhere, and I would even argue that its exact canonical meaning is questionable. We don’t know if Cole was actually right, we don’t know if vallaslins were always only markings of slavery, and we don’t know if Solas wore a vallaslin as a sign of enslavement. We don’t even know if this line was meant to be analyzed in this way at all.

After Inquisition came out, however, the fandom ran with this line and created a very specific narrative around Mythal and Solas’ relationship. In this interpretation, Solas was a slave and Mythal was his master, and every single point of their relationship was conceptualized in terms of abuse because, as a slave, you don’t really have agency. I don’t know if this reading was intended by that line in Inquisition. I don’t know if it was something the writers originally planned. I don’t know if it was something later dropped. But when the fourth game came out, it became clear that this was probably not the relationship they had. Instead, it’s implied that they shared something like a friendship, a parent-figure bond, a creator-and-worshipper dynamic, or maybe even a lovers’ relationship. I think it’s a very fun dynamic, and a compelling one canonically, but a lot of people who had spent years building a fandom interpretation really didn’t take this revelation well.

Now, I want to take a few seconds to say that even in my interpretation of the Solas-Mythal dynamic, it was always a little dark, there’s something uncanny there, not in a sexual assault way but in a different, stranger way. This is the type of dynamic I find interesting but also a little unsettling. And I believe people are allowed to enjoy dynamics that aren’t just, “Oh, we’re a happy couple, the same age, and the purest vanilla romance.” Even in other fictional works, there are abusive or complicated relationships that you can enjoy engaging with as a fan, because fiction isn’t just about finding wholesome mirrors of reality, it’s about exploring narratives that are fascinating, whether they’re comfortable or not. And isn’t Dragon Age generally praised for its dark tone anyway? This is just an aside.