A commonality of these haiku is that they’re often about autumn. It seems I have frequently given this lesson in October or November, and reached for the nature right in front of me to make my example for the students.
You know what Veilguard does sincerely very well? Theme.
Veilguard has such a consistent theme: regret, and the related concepts of self-blame and self-forgiveness. It asks: how does someone live knowing that the blood on their hands cannot be undone? Can that ever be set right? And it delivers the fascinating message that refusal to forgive oneself can be selfish.
Solas is the biggest vessel for this. Solas is, of course, so mired in regret that he has a whole subplot dedicated to learning and unpacking all his regrets. He is so trapped in them that he cannot escape in a year a regret-sealed prison that Rook leaves in three weeks. (Disclaimer: this post is not anti-Solas; I really enjoy him, but I enjoy him because he has done some terrible things and is dealing with it in the worst possible way.)
Some of his regrets, he justifies, desperately trying to wring the blood off his hands – insisting to Neve in the endgame that killing Varric was ‘an accident’, telling Felassan that it’s not really bad that he manipulated the Disruption spirits into dying for him, because ‘they died doing what they loved and look, it was worth it!’
And at the same time, he copes by trying to find a Fix It button. Waking up to a world where the elves have lost everything, instead of committing to the long, difficult work of trying to help them reclaim their culture, language and history… he instead seizes upon the quick fix of destroying the Veil. ‘I caused all this,’ he says to himself, ‘and rather than living with the consequences, and helping others live with them, I will undo the Bad Thing.’ The elves potentially get their magic and immortality back. He’ll have done One Big Thing to address what he did, and now he’s done (because he cannot bear to face how endless and painful the work to really help the elves would be.)
He is also neck deep in sunk cost fallacy. He has to keep going, he has to tear down the Veil, because if he doesn’t, he makes everything pointless. It was pointless that he killed Mythal and Felassan; it was pointless to give his orb to Corypheus; it was pointless to deceive the Inquisitor and betray his friend/lover. If he commits to living in a world with the Veil intact, then he was wrong to kill Felassan and he cannot take it back.
Solas cannot wrap his head around the concept that it was pointless anyway. It was all done in the name of erasing his guilt, making it easier to live with (oh, he tells himself it was for the elves, but if he really wanted to help them, he’d be out there learning about who they are now.) He cannot make the awful things he’s done less awful by doing more awful things.
Solas is stuck in a conviction that he needs to do some big, huge thing to atone. And then… then Rook comes along.
Rook, right from the beginning, is given things to regret. Right out of the gate, they are blaming themselves for the Evanuris’s escape, and others are blaming them too. Solas, who only knows the language of blame, is accusing them from the start. Rook, on some level, knows that Varric is dead, but Solas’s manipulation works so well because Rook can’t face the reality that they might have failed Varric. Let him go to his death. Didn’t stop him and didn’t save him.
And then they’re forced to choose between Minrathous and Treviso, and the consequences of that never leave them. You are forced to confront what you did every time you visit either city. Fail to save Treviso, and you see it devoured by Blight; you see Jacobus, who was young and scared and angry, Blighted. You have to kill him, a child, because of a choice you made. Fail to save Minrathous, and the Venatori seize power, posting corrupt Templars at every street corner. You see Ashur, a good and selfless man, Blighted, and have to face Tarquin’s devastated accusations that you should have been there. The Shadow Dragons are half destroyed.
And Neve and Lucanis – one of them is damaged forever. Each of them automatically selects the ‘darker’ option at the end of their character paths; an entire potential life path is closed down to them. Neve struggles to trust Rook again. Lucanis becomes convinced he has to do everything himself. You did the thing that hurt them.
Meanwhile, your companions are all struggling with regrets of their own. Bellara blames herself for Cyrian’s death, even when she is so clearly not at fault. She craves his forgiveness, and is unable to forgive herself. Neve still blames herself for Brom’s death and Aelia’s last escape from her. Lucanis and Davrin leave Weisshaupt drowning in self-blame and self-hatred – how could I have missed? How dare I survive, when so many of my comrades have fallen? How do I live with knowing that innocents might die because I didn’t do better?
Taash? They watch their mother die, and – just like Solas, who as Taash points out, never got to talk things over with Mythal before she died – never gets closure. They can never ‘yell it out’ with Shathann; their mother never got a chance to know them as their real self. Emmrich? Still clearly blames himself on some level for what Johanna has become – ‘I would have helped you!’ he tells her. He has to either let go of Manfred or lichdom, and make his peace with the decision.
Harding is an interesting one, because while she doesn’t have any huge regret herself, she serves to illustrate the selfishness of Solas’s attitude. Solas is fixated on assuaging his own guilt – undo the bad thing he did, make it all worth it – and he has never given a thought to trying to do anything for the dwarves, whose ancestors he mutilated. He has never done anything to honour the Titans.
Self-blame in general can feel so… vindicating. ‘I feel bad about the bad thing I did, so you see, I am not callous, I am suffering for my sins!’ And Harding really proves how much of a lie this is. Solas suffering emotionally as a consequence does not do anything to help the dwarves, who have lost the connection of isatunoll that their ancestors had. It doesn’t do anything to help Harding connect with her history and heritage.
And all of this leads us to Tearstone Island, where Rook is faced with sending either Neve or Bellara into a position that gets them captured. They choose either Harding or Davrin for a responsibility that gets them killed. And right them, when they are most vulnerable, Solas shows them Varric’s corpse. Reveals that all along, by nudging them into making these decisions, taking on the leadership of their team and the responsibility for their team’s pain, he has been shaping them into a reflection of himself. He switches their places. And Rook, devastated, buckling under the weight of regret, is pulled into the Fade.
But then. Rook refuses to fall into unproductive self-blame. They acknowledge ‘yes, I made these decisions, but I will honour those I lost, and live as they would have wanted.’ They acknowledge the agency of their loved ones, understanding that everyone who was hurt – Bellara or Neve, Harding or Davrin, Varric – made their own free-willed decisions. And then they allow others to help them, as their friends reach out to them to pull them home.
Solas was fixed on the idea that Only He knew how to fix everything and Only He could make it right. He could never have let anyone reach down to help him, because he still held himself above them.
Solas’s attempts to atone were ultimately self-interested. He wanted to vindicate himself, and to free himself from self-blame. By fixating on his idea of atonement, he was unable to look at any productive way to move forward.
But Rook is able to understand that what they need is not to atone. It is to forgive themself.
And the final quest’s outcome depends on the question: does Rook choose to help Solas understand that too? Does Solas listen to the person who most understands the only way Solas could possibly move forward?
(I do think Elgarn’nan and Ghilan’nain could have benefited from having been brought into the theme of regret more – not that I think they should have got redemption or anything, but at the very least, held up as more of a ‘look what happens when people refuse to regret at all’. Anyway I’m getting sidetracked.)
I’ve seen a lot of criticism of Veilguard failing to tie Rook into the plot. And on one hand, I get where this is coming from – they don’t have as much of a practical tie into the story as, say, Hawke being involved in the mage rebellion through their family, or the Inquisitor being forced into their role by the Mark. But… I have to say, I disagree with the idea that Rook has no tie to the plot. Rook’s tie to the plot is thematic. Could there have been more – more decisions like Minrathous/Treviso, for instance, that mirror Solas’s choices? Probably, and I would have appreciated that a lot.
But I’ve got to say it: I prefer this thematic tether to the plot far, far more than the ‘chosen one’ aspect of the Inquisitor being tethered to the story by having happened to pick up a glowing orb. I actually think Rook is much more tied, in a thematic and narrative sense, to the events going on around them than the Inquisitor ever was.
TL;dr: I do think the theme of regret could have been enforced more often and been given some more personal relevance to Rook. But I love what we have. I genuinely appreciate that the devs had a theme, carried it through, and tied almost all the major characters into it. Imo, this aspect is just straight-up very good writing.
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