Okay whew finally had time to mull over this a bit more for fanfic purposes. I am a glutton and cannot help myself. Many thoughts below the cut.
In this case hurt = anger. But why is that? Anger is not always hurt. We see his anger prominent in the romanced version, leading me to the conclusion that he is angry (bitter?) about Lavellan, specifically. She is the independent variable here.
Anger is often a secondary emotion that occurs when someone refuses to or is incapable of showing vulnerability. For Solas this makes enormous sense as he is a man who has spent thousands of years emotionally isolated, caarries guilt on a civilizational scale, and is deeply committed to a course of action he believes wholly necessary and unchangeable, albeit not necessarily right. Grief and longing threaten his duty. Anger is safer because it creates distance and allows him to maintain control. I wonder if it isn’t like rationalizing away pain to keep from crying when you’ve started to tear up. It's not that he isn’t sad or guilty or heartbroken, it's that those feelings would paralyze him.
So who is he angry at? This is where it gets really interesting, I think. Almost certainly himself, primarily, but Lavellan becomes the focal point of that self-directed anger because she is the physical manifestation of what he's chosen to sacrifice. Does is it even feel like a choice at all? Does he pity himself for having to make it, then hate himself when he relizes he's doing it? We know he's adpet at brooding. And allthewhile she’s standing there, making it harder for him to carry on in that moment.
His anger at her, if you choose to interpret it as such, is more complicated and perhaps more real than his deflected self-blame. He tried to end things with her, he took distance from her, and he gave her every reason to move on. For a Lavellan that chose to “lock-in” and affirm the romance in Trespasser, she's still there. Worst of all, she is still the person he fell in love with. And it isn’t as though she’s done somehting wrong in that moment to actively work against his resolve. He can't be angry at his plan, because he believes it is nescessary. He can't be angry at the world, because the world is the reason the plan exists. But he can be angry at her for making this specific moment harder. She is physically present and his plan is abstract. Anger follows.
Being seen when you are doing something you know is monstrous is excruciating. Her love doesn't feel like a comfort to him in that moment, it must be more like an indictment. Because she loves someone she believes is good, even still, and she believes in him.
“I never thought of you as someone who could do that, Solas.”“...Thank you.”
So her love becomes evidence of his failure to do the right thing within the wrong thing. It is a record of every moment he didn't stop sooner. Every conversation he let go too long, every wall he let down, every moment he chose being with her instead of ending it eariler. She loved him because he let her. And he let her because he wanted her to love him back. He can frame his actions as necessary, but he cannot justify allowing her fall in love with him too as anything other than selfish, knowing what the ending would have be. Her continued love in Trespasser is the consequence of that selfishness, to which he responds with anger and frustration.
She makes the cost of his plan real and personal in a way that friendship doesn't. A befriended Inquisitor is someone he respects and must oppose. A romanced Lavellan is someone he adores and is actively choosing to destroy (insofar as we know at the time of Trespasser). She would grieve him, maybe even fight to stop him (depending on your choices). That's pretty fucking unbearable. Lavellan represents, then, the specific things that make his plan feel like a betrayal. Is this why she becomes the independent variable that intensifies the anger? She trusted him completely. That intimacy now makes him a liar in a more personal, devastating way. It makes him sick, I imagine, especially because she loves an idea of him that isn't wrong, exactly, but is incomplete.
Part of what continues to lead me back to Solavellan year after year is the grand, mythic scale of their romance. It’s tragic and star-crossed and fated and impossible and necessary all at the same time. It’s messy in a way that real life cannot be, and indulgent in a way that I crave from literature. I remember playing Inquisition at 15(?) when it first came out and being heartbroken over Solavellan for MONTHS because it’s just so captivating. The reveal added so much pain and greif to the relationship, becuase we don't truly understand why he leaves until the scene with Flemeth.
So what does it even mean?
It means that Lavellan mattered in a way nothing else did. She saw something more unguarded, more real. and his anger at her is really the shape of You made me want something I cannot have, and I cannot even fully blame you for it, and I hate that, and I hate myself. But not you.
It's also possibly tinged with something close to resentment that she even exists, the fact that the consequences of his own mistakes handed him something of a double-edged sword pointed directly at his heart. His anger is love with no expression, no resolution. With a friend, he can be cold and resolved. With Lavellan, his composure keeps almost slipping, and anger is how he keeps it in place. I wonder what might have happened if it had slipped farther down?
The rare thing I think Solavellan does is give us more interiority of the person leaving. We get to know Solas through his romance, his banter, his personal quests, his conversations, and we understand, to an extent, why he is who he is before we know he is Fen'Harel. We understand this before we learn what he's going to do. It is the specific agony of almost.
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