Please have a moment of silence for the people who were killed instead of freed when news of emancipation finally reached the furthest corners of the american south.

have another moment for the ledgers, catalogs, and records that were burned and the homes that were destroyed to hide the presence of very much alive and still enslaved people on dozens of plantations and homesteads across the south for decades after emancipation.

and have a third moment for those who were hunted and killed while fleeing the south to find safety across the border, overseas, in the north and to the west.

black people. light a candle, write a note to those who have passed telling them what you have achieved in spite of the racist and intolerant conditions of this world, feel the warmth of the flame under your hand, say a prayer of rememberance if you are religious, place the note under the candle, and then blow it out.

if you have children, sit them down and tell them anything you know about the life of oldest black person you've ever met. it doesn't have to be your own family. tell them what you know about what life was like for us in the days, years, decades after emancipation. if you don't know much, look it up and learn about it together.

This is Juneteenth.

the inquisitor is basically solas, a rebellion leader that is revered as a god, where their title swallows their name. they even have his power, part of his orb seared into their palm.

they fight against corypheus, a powerful mage who calls himself a god, and primarily uses the bLIGHT and slave armies, like the evanuris.

spirits and elves may have once flocked to skyhold in refuge and then organized as an army, like inquisition volunteers. the rotunda he stays in may have been a lighthouse!! rotunda + library + rookery look very lighthouse shaped.

solas holds the memories of how skyhold was used thousands of years ago and then he watches the inquisitor walk exactly in his footsteps. the only difference is this time, the inquisitor wins and saves the world. and they primarily do this by sealing up the breach and tears in the veil, the opposite of tearing it down.

and solas is nothing but the guy who caused all of this in the first place. where he failed over and over again, the inquisitor succeeds. they save the world that is a remnant of his failure but one that he must destroy again. it must’ve haunted him the entire way, knowing he will be seen as another villain, trying to destroy heroes and what they worked so hard to save, in order to fix his failure at being a hero himself.

But my question is who do you think started that belief? Because it really does benefit both the evanauris and Solas's followers.

Since there apparently were more evanuris than just eight, and Solas successfully killed some of them, it really doesn't make the survivors look very godly if one of their number got taken out by some average Joe with a grudge. So they deify him, hope to kill him, and nobody else will be able to take his place because they're clearly not a god. It's sort of a last ditch attempt to control the narrative once they realize they can no longer just brush him off.

But Solas's followers also definitely benefit from that narrative because it's so difficult to take beings worshiped as gods and humanize them (if you'll forgive that term). That can give them hope that their struggling isn't pointless, that they aren't raging helplessly against these cruel gods, because they have a god on their side as well.

This is something that plays out during Inquisition as well. While technically none of their followers are calling the Inquisitor a god, people definitely believe Inky is more than just a simple person and you can't convince me that in another century or so a break-off group starts worshiping them (probably started by that cult in the Hinterlands). And on the other hand, Corypheus repeatedly talks about Inky like they're also trying to become a god, like he is. And it doesn't matter how much the Inquisitor may try to protest, everyone is trying to elevate them to be more than human (elf/dwarf/qunari).

Skyhold.

The Sentinel of the Frostback Mountains.