speed paint 

i love writing porn and i wont feel bad about it. understanding the eroticism of a character is character analysis if u are enlightened.

i love you porn i love you smut i love you intricacies of human sexuality i love erotica i love you freak nasty walls of texts i love you analyzing the subconscious through the lens of sexuality i love you bdsm i love you weird fetishes . u move me

Solas 🧡

SALT INCOMING! Scroll on if you don't wanna know.

Something's been bugging me (shocking, right?)....BUT I’ve just recently heard a clearer version of Solas’ and Varric’s conversation at the ritual, and…Varric says stuff like, "The rebellion you led? That was a disaster. Sealing the gods away? That was a disaster. What makes you think this won't be a disaster, too? "

Blinded

Solas repeatedly explains that things are not so black and white and the fandom's response to the nature of his relationships with Mythal and Felassan etc are weirdly reminiscent of what he finds frustrating about modern Thedas.

He explains repeatedly that the distinction between spirit and demon is not that black and white, that there's always an element of choice involved. Likewise, he cannot be so easily defined as wisdom or pride. He is a mix of both and will lean into one or the other depending on how he is perceived. Over and over again he tries to make people see that it's our expectations that create the dynamics of our relationships and therefore how we perceive others. If we respect others in the way they would like to be respected, you can come closer to an authentic and equal partnership.

Likewise, he says that he is not defined by his body, a point Trick said came from their own thoughts around their gender and figuring out that they were nonbinary. Solas chose a male body, seemingly because he had to choose one, not necessarily because he felt like a man. In fact he repeatedly explains that he sees himself as a spirit i.e. genderless

The romance or friendship with the Inquisitor is special because it is the first time that he's branching out of his comfort zone of bonding like a spirit bonds (reflecting) and trying to bond like a person does instead (meeting them on their level, sharing his heart with them and being vulnerable). This is why one of my favourite lines from him is 'You are unique. In all Thedas I never expected to find someone who could draw my attention from the Fade. You have become important to me.' This is the first time he has fallen in love, the first time he has actually relished being a person and not a spirit, because he's able to be with Lavellan this way. He can't fall in love as a spirit as spirits don't bond that way, as is repeatedly stated throughout his story. I personally think the relationships he forged before Inquisition were all done using the attachment style of spirits, which is apparently quite abstract, and not as a man, which is more understandable to mortals and us, the player.

What's especially pertinent about this is that says this line right before he's about to abandon his plan to tear down the Veil by telling the Inquisitor the truth, a plan that symbolises his attachment to his spirit-self and the world he inadvertently destroyed. Once he does that, there's no coming back; likewise, once you take a body, you cannot go back. When you fall in love in a way that makes all the parts of you line up perfectly for the first time, you can't go back.

What is so beautiful to me about Solas's love story with Lavellan is that we witness Solas in a chrysalis state between spirithood and personhood, past and present (and future), on the precipice of metamorphosis. At the very moment he's about to take that final leap like The Fool his romance card is based on, he backs out, because of guilt, trauma, grief, duty and the rest.

Even with a befriended Inquisitor, he bonds with them on their level. He doesn't try to elevate them to his level; he comes to theirs. He is the opposite of Pride in their friendship, which is why he respects them. They allow him to be himself.

It's because of this change in nature that I think Solas and Lavellan's love story is so compelling--Solas's world quite literally changes when he falls in love, as he states multiple times, in various ways. I mean, look at the way he needs time to think about a potential relationship with Lavellan. He probably knows that it's a bad idea, but at this point he has no idea how much of a bad idea it is with respect to his plans because he has no idea that it will make him want to give it up. If he had, he never would've entertained the idea of a relationship. His romance card in Veilguard explains that he didn't know what it would mean to fall in love, because he's never actually been in love. He has loved countless friends and companions, like Mythal and Felassan, but he has not fallen for someone like he falls for a romanced Lavellan; Lavellan, who is deified like he was deified, who sees him for who he is (as much as they can) and doesn't shun him or punish him for not doing as he was told like a good lapdog.

Once again there's more of the irony that pervades Solas's story at every turn. It's in falling for a mortal that Solas becomes a more complete person, more of the man he says he is and not the god others have revered him as. That is the deepest change of all and the one that reflects his earlier statements on the delineation between spirit and demon not being so black and white, and involving a level of choice. Solas chooses to be more of a man in a similar way to how Cole chooses to become more human. He knows deep down that he's already in too deep to stop, and this is why, despite knowing he has a job to do and a duty to fulfil, he leaves clues for the Inquisition to follow him. Because he's already gone too far, and now he can't go back, and deep down he wants to be stopped, like Varric said. Solas, as a former spirit, doesn't simply feel love, he embodies it, and so he is helpless to that emotion. Of course he left clues.

Because that is what falling in love meant for Solas. It meant going into that chrysalis state and emerging as a totally new being with an experience that is quite far removed from his spirit self and all the limitations that come with that. Mythal and Felassan etc predate this experience, they're intrinsically tied to his nature as a spirit and then as a manifested spirit. While he loved them, that love was tangled up with a simpler nature, and the love he shares with Lavellan is coming from a totally new place. For that reason, the two can't really be compared.

˗ˏˋ ꜰᴇɴ'ʜᴀʀᴇʟ ˎˊ˗

I would not have you see what I become

I haven’t made any little comics in a long time! I enjoy making them, but I am not good at writing dialogue so I’m using in game dialogue for this one! These conversations stuck with me 😭

I imagine confusion is a common occurrence whenever Edali tries out her Elvhen since she's far from fluent

testin brushes

the most tragic egg of all videogames 😔

The reciprocity of Solas and Lavellan

It's easy to read the Solavellan ending as Lavellan stepping in to save Solas and deliver him a happy ending. But the thing I really love about it is that to me, they save each other. Neither one could have a happy ending without the other. 

Lavellan had an incredibly lonely journey in which she was elevated against her will into a religious figure of a religion she probably doesn't even believe in. Even when she tried to move past that, it kept calling her back. She may have disbanded the Inquisition, but eight years later when Thedas was in crisis everyone still looked to the Herald of Andraste to save them, and what choice did she have? 

Even eight years on, everyone refers to her as 'The Inquisitor,' instead of her name.

Lavellan needs Solas because he's the only person who can really know what that feels like. He too was unwillingly deified, his myth swallowing the truth of who he really was. Ironically, only two years after their relationship ended, when she learns the truth about his past, does Lavellan come to know why he was able to see her and empathize with her very specific situation in a way that no one else did. 

Lavellan is clearly a strong and dynamic person. She hasn't been moping all this time; she's moved on, made a life, no doubt achieved more amazing things in the intervening time. And yet - for eight years she's carried this piercing, bone-deep loneliness. Though she has close friends who love her, like maybe Dorian and Cassandra, they still can't really understand. The secret, painful longing in her to be witnessed; to be known.

The relief she must feel, after everything, when Solas finally lays down his plans. She doesn't have to be alone any longer. He's the one person who can still see her for what she really is, and he's finally ready to come back to her. It doesn't matter to her what he's done, because she knows his heart in a way that no one else does, just as he knows her in a way that no one else does. They speak elvhen to each other, echoing one another's cadence, because they are bound in a very deep way that no one else can really understand. 

When she says 'We'll make this journey together, forever,' she's not simply offering herself to him. She's acknowledging that they need each other. 'There is no fate but the love we share' - because it is fate, in a way. They're incredibly lucky that they were brought together in this way, because no one else could have known them in the way they know each other. And I think that's one of the things that really draws people to their story - it's this beautiful dream about finding a person who truly understands and sees everything that you truly are.

THE DREAD WOLF ↳ Dragon Age: The Veilguard (2024)