#sol post

HELLO we would like 2 TALK ABOUT THIS?????

ANYWAYS. HELL FUCKING SHIT YES WE LOVE THAT BRAWL STARS DID THIS

ANYWAYS. OUR FESTA JUNINA/ARRAIÁ IS ALSO THIS WEEK AND THIS MADE US REALLY EXCITED FOR THAT :P

ANYWAYS BULL AS THE BULL, BROCK JUMPING THE CAMPFIRE, THE TRADITIONAL FOOD AND DECORATIONS, THEIR OUTFITS, THIS IS AWESOME!!!!!

What else from the comic is going into “my” Sol?

- He mentally sort of shifts between “being” 18 and “being” 45/an adult. This is based on: Plenty of examples in the comic of him behaving like he’s still 18; inhabitants of Die also generally see him as a boy; at other times he feels rather more mature, e.g. his philosophical “It was a half-life but it was all I had, and I filled the hours. Did you really do any better, Izzy?”

- Has the worst imaginable sense of humour/conversational instincts/will say extremely off-putting things without warning, sometimes genuinely to shock people, sometimes because he genuinely thinks it’s funny, sometimes because his filters are broken and he really doesn’t notice what he’s saying, sometimes because his reality just is that harsh and he doesn’t see why he should protect people’s feelings. - Based on: Him joking about his insides decomposing; him answering a question of “how are you doing” with “I want to murder and eat you”. And some other weird things he says in canon.

- Oddly, even ruthlessly, pragmatic. - Based on: Him suggesting they kill Molly to “extract” the gold; him killing and eating (a bit of) Chuck, and then closing the loop, and agreeing to go home with the group. (My fic doesn’t give him any opportunity to make that kind of extreme decision. But I’ve decided that the general trait of “will do what it takes to achieve a thing, regardless of anyone’s feelings, including his own” is transferrable.)

- I also think he may be at least mildly sociopathic to begin with? Not much actual undeniable evidence of that, admittedly. Just a vague but pervasive vibe I’m getting when reading the comic.

- This.

I've talked about why "my" Sophie is the way she is, but I also need to talk about the same for "my" Sol. I wrote a little about the act of extrapolation involved a while ago, but I want to to sum up the “pre-canon-change”, post-original-series version of Sol that’s been living in my mind all this time, and which bits of canon he is derived from exactly.

I‘ve jokingly tagged my fic “zombie rehabilitation“, which is doubly inaccurate, because Sol is no longer undead, and he‘s not really getting all that rehabilitated either. I don‘t think there‘s a way to “really recover“, for him, and I‘m not even talking about PTSD, or the hints we get of him having perhaps had a somewhat “difficult“ personality even before Die happened to him (anybody else getting a real “devil child” vibe off young Sol?) What I’m talking about is, the game has had its claws in his brain for decades. Is he even still a person, in the conventional sense?

Die leaves us with some subtly conflicting information on Sol, on the last few pages. The last two pages are entirely Sol's: on the next-to-last page we see him in his room in his mother's house, and the colours give no cause for optimism: it's a dark page, a strong visual cue for “things are not okay”.

Sol sits in the dark at his desk, sort of curled up around a pulled-up knee (to some degree recalling his crouching Gollum poses). His mum comes in and hugs him, then leaves, forcing a pained smile. Nearly everything about this page says "this is sad, this is a dead-end, this is a person who is lost/stuck/hopeless..." - the dark colours, the lack of light in the room, Sol's pose, his mum's sadness; the fact that he lives with his mum in the first place.

At the end of the page, Sol starts taking off his blind-person-cliché sunglasses… We turn the page, and we get a full-page close-up of his face. The D20 in his eye socket is glowing an evil red. The page is telling us, in effect: Sol is still part of the game.

That’s probably not a good thing. Although Die is also very clear on it not being exactly a bad thing. The game is amoral, not evil. It can be what you make it; it can be just what you need.

Still. Reading these last two pages primarily for hints of what Sol’s future may hold, it’s hard not to feel concerned.

Let’s go back to that next-to-last page. The darkened room reads as “this person is depressed” – but… why would Sol switch on the light? He can’t see. (Unless that die still works. But if it does, then I doubt it works the way an eye does. Is light even required?) So, what really is the emotional message of a dark room, if the person in it is blind? Should we really read it primarily as a sign of depression?

(ETA, on rereading a few days later: admittedly, comics being a visual medium and the creators being in control of what they depict, they could have chosen to portray a daylight scene if they did not want us to read the scene as "dark" in the metaphorical sense. Then again, the actual words of the last few pages suggest something more ambiguous than purely "dark".)

And then there’s the thing on Sol’s desk. As I found out while researching stuff for the fic, it’s a Braille keyboard.

Braille is more than just an alphabet, it’s a whole writing system, quite different from the alphabet most of us are used to – not to mention used via a sense that most of us don’t practice much. It’s difficult to learn. Most people who go blind later in life don’t bother, because text-to-speech and speech-to-text technologies are advanced enough now. Even your phone can do this stuff.

So, provided Gillen and Hans knew this when they made this page, the Braille keyboard may be telling us something important about Sol and where he is mentally, some time after the return but probably no more than a year later (=still before the new series). Whatever else is going on with him, he’s had the motivation and commitment to start tackling the hard task of learning Braille. Which means that he wants to read, write – reach out, beyond his immediate sphere.

And, don’t get me wrong: Sol’s desire to reach out could absolutely be a sinister thing, here. He could be doing all that with the purpose of luring people to Die. It may very well be that that’s what drives him, now.

But there is another detail about Sol after the return from Die, a couple of pages earlier. Ash's narration says:

“Here’s a thing I picked up from Sol since we got back. There’s a bit of RPG theory about what a game is. ‘Role-playing games are a conversation.’”

There’s quite a lot we can extrapolate from this:

1.) Ash and Sol have been/are in contact and have been having conversations about RPG meta.

2.) Sol is (probably?) reading up on the last 30 years of RPG theory.

3.) Sol – who used to be a railroading GM – may be changing his view of what RPGs are or should be, possibly adopting a more cooperative and pro-social view?

These things sound... hopeful, to me. (Though the fact that Sol's diving right back into RPG obsession, after all that's happened to him, is perhaps slightly worrying....)

All of the above is the foundation to how I’m writing Sol in my fic. I’m still writing him as pretty depressed, he’s not thrilled to be alive, because that seems in keeping with things he says towards the end of volume four; but that’s also because I’m writing about just the first few days after the return. I don’t think he’ll be stuck in that state forever, or even all that long. Which isn’t to say that I think he’ll be happy or positive in his general outlook on life; I think he’s pretty fundamentally damaged and will have serious mental health issues for life. I also do think Die still has its claws in him and may still be acting through him, rendering him something less of a person at least at times, and perhaps even in general.

They whisper what no tongue can tell

He who drinks from the deep water