Cole's Spirit Path in Dragon Age: Inquisition - An Accidental Aspec Metaphor

Image description: Dragon Age: Inquisition's unique spirit companion Cole will always have a special place in my heart... but the way he's treated in his personal quest will always give me two diametrically opposed feelings. If you choose to make Cole more human, the storyline takes several tropey turns that I've discussed at length on the blog; but if you choose to make Cole more spirit-like, you actually have a surprisingly aspec metaphor, one that I want to unpack today.

If you’ve been reading the blog for a while, you’ve doubtless heard me talk about Dragon Age: Inquisition’s unique companion character, Cole – a spirit of compassion who left the world of spirits and took on human form. In my opinion, Cole is one of the franchise’s best characters and I adore so many things about him; but beyond that, he also has some very clear aspec vibes which the game really struggles to accurately portray. For those two reasons – and many more besides – I have discussed Cole a lot and will discuss him a great deal more, I’m sure.

In most of the posts where I discuss the game’s handling of Cole’s non-romantic and non-sexual nature, I usually discuss it within the context of his personal quest. As a roleplaying video game, Dragon Age: Inquisition allows players the choice of encouraging Cole to either embrace his spirit nature or become more human, something that is posed as a sort of ethical dilemma related to Cole’s past as a spirit and why he came into the world in the first place. While the idea of choosing between these two branching paths is interesting and certainly works on paper, my main issue with the quest and its choice to make Cole more human lies primarily in the fact that making Cole more human eventually erases his aspec vibes.

However, for as much as I’ve spoken with great disdain for the “human path” of Cole’s quest, I realize I haven’t spoken nearly as much about the “spirit path.” To me, the spirit path is the superior path for several reasons, not the least of which being that it avoids the problematic portrayal that being human means sex and/or romance, of course, but also because it has always felt truer to Cole as a character. But beyond these things, I believe that Cole’s spirit path is actually an unintentionally perfect aspec metaphor, one the game developers did not intend to create, but which I as an aspec fan can certainly see clear parallels in. Therefore, I want to explore that more fully, really diving into and celebrating Cole’s spirit path and finding elements of my own aspec journey within it.

Spoiler warning! 

Dragon Age: Inquisition (particularly Cole's personal quests)

Dragon Age: Trespasser (Cole references only)

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Cole’s Personal Quest

I’d like to begin the discussion by talking about the details of Cole’s personal quest a little. I believe understanding the quest and how it fits into the game – whether you’re familiar with Dragon Age or not – is essential for understanding not only why I believe the spirit path is the more worthwhile path, but why I also believe it speaks to the aspec experience.

As I said in my introduction, Dragon Age: Inquisition is a roleplaying video game, the third in a fantasy series set in the fictional world of Thedas. In this game, you take on the role of the Inquisitor, a regular person who finds themselves suddenly thrust into the role of leader and hero when being in the wrong place at the wrong time finds you as the sole survivor of a calamity. Eventually you are dubbed the person best fit to lead the organization known as the Inquisition, which seeks to put back to rights the world that has been upended by this terrible disaster. As such, it falls to the Inquisitor – you the player – to make important decisions regarding the fate of the world around you and the Inquisition itself, which includes your companions, the characters who accompany you on your journey.

One of these companions is Cole. Up until the point of his personal quest, precious little is actually revealed about Cole; although the character himself is given background through things like tie-in novels, within the framework of the game, it is known only that Cole is a spirit who took human form. Most of what you know about Cole is revealed to you by Solas, another one of your companions who is a self-professed expert on spirits, and it is up to you to decide if you trust Cole to remain in the Inquisition or not.

Eventually, you will find Cole and Solas arguing over a very strange matter – Cole wants Solas to bind him, controlling him so that he can’t ever be forced to hurt innocent people the way too many spirits are; Solas, having too much respect for spirits and especially for Cole, refuses. This kicks off Cole’s personal quest, “Subjected to His Will,” which begins with Solas’s plan to answer Cole’s plea not by binding him, but by instead finding a magic amulet that will protect Cole from such attempts.

Once this amulet is acquired, the quest takes an unexpected turn when Solas attempts to activate the amulet and it doesn’t work. Concerned, another one of your companions – Varric Tethras – comes to check on what’s happened and baulks at the idea of trying to use a spirit tactic when Cole’s experiences in human form have changed his nature. But Cole realizes something more pressing: as a spirit, able to feel and sense emotion, he realizes why the amulet doesn’t work and suggests following the trail. Once you do so, you find a man against whom the normally docile Cole has a violent reaction, practically killing the man before you, Varric, and Solas (who ask to come with you) intervene. In explanation, Cole offers only this cryptic response: “He killed me! He killed me and I have to kill him back!”

Image description: Cole menaces the man who "killed him" during the quest, "Subjected to His Will"

As it turns out, Cole, the spirit that we know and have fought alongside, was called from the world of spirits by the pain and suffering of a dying young man – the “real” Cole. He tried to help the boy, who had been thrown in a dungeon and forgotten by the very man who our Cole is now determined to kill. While the spirit of compassion tried to help, he could do little more than hold the poor boy’s hand and comfort him before he eventually succumbed to starvation and neglect.

Solas explains that the death of the “real” Cole wounded the spirit of compassion deeply; having not been able to help, the spirit became confused and took on the form of the deceased young man. At first, he was so confused that he thought he and the other Cole were one and the same, before eventually realizing his true nature, but still retaining Cole’s appearance and responding to the boy’s name. But now that he’s face-to-face with the man who was responsible for the other Cole’s death, a choice must be made as to how our Cole will deal with the conflict – will he do what a human would do, learning to live with the hurt this man inflicted upon him, or will he do the more spirit thing, learning to forgive the man and, by extension, let the man forgive himself too?

The Spirit Path

With the stage set, the quest allows for a debate between Varric, who advocates for Cole to become more human, and Solas, who believes Cole should be allowed to deal with the issue as a spirit would. The player now chooses who to side with, determining not only how Cole deals with the issue of no longer being susceptible to binding, but deciding how Cole will develop moving forward. As stated earlier, I have talked ad nauseum about the pitfalls and failings of the human path, and while I will likely touch on those issues again later, for now I want to focus on what happens if you choose to make Cole more spirit, my preferred path and the path I believe does the most service to Cole’s character.

Following Cole’s confrontation with the man, Solas and Varric debate the merits of letting Cole work through the emotions he’s feeling the way a person would, thus allowing himself to heal and change from the experience as Varric advocates, or letting him return to what he was before the death of the “real” Cole “perverted him from his purpose,” as Solas himself says. To me, I find this phrasing incredibly striking, because to me it perfectly summarizes why the spirit path works.

Image description: Solas (right) helping Cole with the amulet

If you choose to side with Solas, he and Cole will go to confront the man once more, with Solas encouraging Cole to use his powers to feel the man’s pain. It is here that Cole realizes that most of what the man did was based on his own fear and powerlessness, and that the one awful mistake of forgetting the other Cole in the dungeons has haunted the man for years, the guilt and shame an omnipresent force in his life. Using his spirit powers, Cole erases this memory, allowing the man – and he himself – to go free.

Later, back at your home base, Solas confirms that the amulet now works and Varric laments that Cole is now more spirit-like than ever. But Cole, it seems, is happy and content with the choice. This is something that is further confirmed later when, after the quest, you have another conversation with Cole and encourage him to go out with you to the city. This happens regardless of which path you take, but believe it’s deeply poignant under the spirit path in a way most people probably don’t even realize.

Out in the city, Cole is unseen by everyone except the Inquisitor and goes around encouraging people to let go of their pain – regardless of what it may be – and he says he wouldn’t have been able to hear some of these more minute hurts before but can now because he’s more spirit-like. Having fully embraced himself, he is able to strengthen the happiness of the people he encounters and is in turn able to dull their pain, helping them heal, something which thrills Cole and which he considers an improvement to himself. By embracing what he truly was and had forgotten, he is allowed to grow – perhaps not in the way Varric expected, perhaps not in the way a human might, but in a way that works for him.

During this same scene, he also explains a little bit about his past, referring to the plot of the pre-game tie-in novel, Asunder. The book shows us that strange period of confusion that Cole suffered after the death of the other Cole but before he himself realized he was a spirit. During that time, he believed himself to be human but couldn’t figure out why he was different from everyone else, relying on the sympathy and kindness of a few friends. The way Cole describes this period of time to the Inquisitor is heartbreaking, but it contains a deeply poignant message that I think makes the spirit path all the more fitting.

“There was someone, before,” Cole tells the Inquisitor, referring to the character of Rhys from the novel, who befriended Cole and was convinced he was a real person in need of help. “He was my friend, but he didn’t know what I was. When he found out, he changed. I lost him. You found out, but you didn’t change. [You] didn’t make me change. You let me be this – be more. Thank you for helping me find this again, for believing in me.”

That line alone gives me all the aspec parallels I could possibly need from this quest: “You didn’t make me change.” As I’ve said countless times on the blog, I consider myself very lucky to have family, friends, coworkers, and everything in between who support me and love me as I am, not demanding that I change to better suit them. But the outside world is rarely so kind, and I live in a society that highly values romantic and sexual metrics of “normalcy,” often demanding that people change their lives and value systems to adhere to these arbitrary definitions. In a world like that, watching Cole get to be his true self isn’t just a no-brainer choice for me, but also the most heady and indulgent form of fantasy I can imagine. But if the spirit path has these amazing elements, why is it often considered by people to be the worse of the two paths to take?

Why Is the Spirit Path Ignored?

Something that I think is incredibly powerful about Cole’s quest, regardless of outcome, is the intense variety of emotions it makes people feel. While that has long been a hallmark of Dragon Age and of good roleplaying games as a whole, “Subjected to His Will” seems to really strike a cord with people in a way that I think should be admired, regardless of my feelings about the human path. The thoughtful consideration that many people put into their decision is refreshing, and I only wish that the game respected their thoughtfulness more.

This is something that I think was perfectly summed up in a conversation I had with my best friend years ago when discussing the quest with her during her first playthrough of the game. As we talked, I mentioned that there was absolutely no reason for the human path to eventually feature Cole getting a girlfriend, to which she added that technically this quest didn’t even need to divide the choice into “more human” or “more spirit” and could have easily kept the choice as simply “forgive the man” or “work through the emotions.” And honestly, she’s right.

I believe forcing the choice into two diametrically opposed extremes like human and spirit actually kind of diminishes the quest a little. As mentioned before, while it’s true that this quest resonates deeply with people because of this choice, I believe that taking the complicated emotions of this choice and distilling them down into “human” or “spirit” is incredibly reductive in a way that unnecessarily scares people away from the spirit path.

Image description: Varric (left) and Solas during the early debate portion of the quest

It’s not uncommon to see people who view the spirit path as a bad choice or a choice they could “never bring themselves to make,” ostensibly because they feel it limits Cole. While of course each player is free to bring their own emotions to the choice and play however they see fit, I do believe the game steers them in this direction unfairly through various writing choices that obfuscate the actual material of the questline.

For instance, while Varric insists that Cole changed his own essence when he made himself human and he’s just helping him survive the change, I’d argue that Cole did not actually choose to do anything, but rather ended up presenting himself as human solely through pain, confusion, and fear. He is not supposed to be human, and being human is actually something that’s keeping him trapped in these emotions. Can he work through them the way people can? Yes, the human path proves that he is capable of this; but I believe Solas is correct and having Cole make that change is a severe alteration to who and what he’s supposed to be.

Having a general fan-favorite character like Varric be the one to advocate for Cole being more human makes it all too easy to ignore the truth. As I believe I have mentioned before on the blog, Varric has good intentions, but his reasoning is faulty on a few levels. I’m not sure if the writers deliberately had Varric come to the “wrong” conclusions because they make sense as something his character would feel and advocate for, or if they felt it was okay for this wrong assumption to be made early in the quest because we didn’t know the full story yet, but Varric’s insistence that Cole came into the world to become human is not true. Cole came into the world for one reason only: to help the “real” Cole, finding himself trapped and confused when he was unable to do so.

Later in the quest, Varric – and everyone involved in the quest, admittedly – become focused on the idea that the man Cole attacks is the one who “killed him” and the impossibility of forgiving that. While Solas insists that a spirit is perfectly capable of forgiving such a thing, the writing of the quest sort of conveniently forgets that our Cole and the “real” Cole, although virtually one and the same now, did not start off that way. While the spirit of compassion becoming the poor deceased boy is a heartbreaking backstory for how we got our Cole and our Cole’s intense emotion makes sense – of course he would feel like he himself was killed, since he took on so much of the boy – it doesn’t change the fact that the man inadvertently killed the other Cole, not our Cole. This renders Varric’s insistence that “you don’t just forgive someone killing you” to be inaccurate for the situation at hand.

As I said, it makes sense that Varric would advocate letting Cole grow into something “more” and it makes sense that he would believe these facts about Cole so early in the quest, but at the same time, having this philosophy be the thing that underpins the “make Cole more human” argument doesn’t work because it’s literally the opposite of what the story actually tells us. Perhaps the writers themselves didn’t see this plothole or perhaps they tried to couch the human path in this fallacy to disguise what it actually is at its core – changing Cole into something more recognizable, and thus more palatable, to the player.

Once I might have given the Dragon Age developers a pass on this. Inquisition came out over a decade ago and the subtle intricacies about how to portray Cole as a non-human character might have been lost on them, especially amid a game otherwise chock-full of characters struggling with their identity. However, in the aftermath of the final game in the series and how terribly this game bungled its potential aspec representation – a topic I started exploring with my previous post about Lucanis and will be continuing to unpack throughout the year – I can’t help but wonder if this was a mistake, a blindspot, or a deliberate choice to make a commentary on what the writers’ felt Cole should be. If it’s any of these latter options, that makes it all the more ironic that they accidentally crafted a pretty fitting aspec metaphor in the spirit path.

Image description: An image of Cole at your home base

Cole’s quest – as is true of many of the companion quests in Dragon Age – is about figuring out how to be his true self, escaping from the things that would make him into someone or something else. In fact, this is the entire reason why Cole longs for the amulet to protect him in the first place, as he lives in fear that someone with nefarious intentions could “put walls around what [he] wants” by making him do things he doesn’t want to do. To me, making Cole more human is no better than him being transformed into something else against his will, but of course, the game chooses not to see it like that.

As I’ve discussed in previous posts about non-human characters, the idea of thrusting humanity on the unwilling is actually all too common in sci-fi and fantasy media. While this can sometimes work out and a character’s adaptation can even, at times, be inspiring, more often these changes are about forcing these non-human characters into moulds that we as humans can understand. To the game’s credit, you can choose responses for your player character that take a hardline stance that Cole is not human and thus human whims should not apply to him, but the fact that it later seems to forget these responses is somewhat frustrating. Even the very name of the quest, “Subjected to His Will,” shows how much Cole’s existence has been at the mercy of the emotions related to this event, and I believe shoving him into the mould of humanity is further subjecting him to someone else’s will, even if it is well-intentioned.

But Cole himself shows us that growing into something “more” doesn’t only happen if he’s human, and for that reason, I actually view the two quest paths less as “more spirit” or “more human” and instead view them as “Cole becomes something different” or “Cole is allowed to be himself.” While I think the game makes it so that choosing either path feels valid on the surface, to me, the spirit path is the only path that actually respects Cole as a character.

The game tries to tempt the player to the human path by making Varric its spokesperson and relying on well-known tropes about non-human characters, simultaneously making the spirit path be sad by trying to frame it as a dramatic change for Cole or casting it as a tragedy that he forgets his connection to the “real” Cole, but that doesn’t change the fact that being a spirit is Cole’s identity. For that reason, I believe choosing to alter his identity is a mistake, and one that feels all too familiar from an aspec lens.

The Accidentally Aspec Commentary of the Spirit Path

The obvious argument for why the spirit path is more aspec-friendly or aspec-adjacent than the human path is, of course, that the spirit path doesn’t eventually end with Cole getting a girlfriend. However, I believe there is a lot more about the spirit path that has aspec vibes than just the fact that Cole retains his own aspec vibes, although that is of course important. Rather, the spirit path – and Cole’s reaction to being more spirit – poignantly remind me of my own aspec struggles.

Earlier in the post, I mentioned the conversation Cole and the Inquisitor have after he’s been made more spirit, and how it feels to see a character who is not forced to change to conform, but is rather encouraged to get more in touch with himself. After that conversation, the Inquisitor can ask Cole a few questions about how he feels now that he’s more spirit-like, to which Cole once again affirms “I’m me – more me than I was.” His previous in-between state of being is something that he repeatedly refers to as being “shackled” and describes being more spirit-like almost as a sort of long-awaited freedom.

While I know the quest writers didn’t intend for this, I feel the same language could apply to my journey of aspec discovery, and I imagine the same could be said for many people who identify as queer identities. To me, not knowing “what I was” felt a little like what Cole describes earlier in the quest. I too was confused, apart from myself and my true nature, trying to figure out where I fit. Figuring out my identity was every bit as affirming as Cole himself describes when he’s finally allowed to be more spirit, and not being forced to change feels every bit as wonderful.

To that end, I will probably always think about Solas’s line after Varric laments that Cole could have been a person: “Would that have made him happier?” I don’t think it’s a stretch to reimagine Varric’s line in a different context as being “He could have been normal,” which makes it all the more powerful to ask if that would have made Cole happier and to know that there’s no guarantee that a stereotypical normal life is a happier one. This is a lesson that I believe is vitally important for people to learn. Not all happiness looks the same. Not all life looks the same. Not everyone is sustained by the same forces, nor should they be defined by the same terms.

Real life is of course not a fantasy setting and we don’t have the challenge of mingling together disparate groups like humans, elves, dwarves, and spirits like in Dragon Age; however, we do have our own forms of diversity and, like in Dragon Age, sometimes people have as much trouble accepting this diversity as the people of the game’s universe do. While the game’s characters struggle to reconcile Cole for what he is as he straddles both the human world and the world of spirits, I see this in my own life as people struggle to reconcile minority identities such as my own. And just like there is a longing to change Cole’s nature to better fit into the world they know, I see people do the same thing to aspec identities.

But when Cole becomes more spirit-like, we can see glimpses of a better path. Regardless of what the game intended or what the human path tries to tell us, I believe Cole teaches us that we don’t have to drastically alter ourselves in order to grow and that we don’t need to reject our true selves to unlock our full potential. Rather, sometimes the best way to grow is to embrace who and what we are, and the best way to become more is to truly be ourselves. That might not always be the easiest path to take, and like Cole, we might lose people along the way, but Cole proves there can be better things and greater happiness if we choose to be ourselves.

Image description: Another picture of Cole

Years ago, I gave a live presentation about characters that I feel have aspec vibes, and when I discussed Cole, it was with the deepest love – even going so far as to refer to him as “my sweet spirit son.” As mentioned earlier in the post, I love Cole so much and find so much of his character both precious and heartbreaking, both adorable and intense, both fascinating and deeply relatable. For years, I’ve been extremely passionate about his storyline and his personal quest for this reason, as you can see through the dozens of posts in which I reference him.

While it’s frustrating to see what the game doesn’t do in the human path, it makes it that much more amazing to see what the game did in the spirit path – even accidentally. Despite the other shortcomings of his personal quest, I will always believe that the spirit path is a perfect aspec metaphor and it will always mean a great deal to me because of that. I think there is so much that can be learned from Cole’s spirit path, and it’s my sincere hope that maybe fans can come to recognize that as we look back on the series.

Dragon Age has had a rocky road over the past several years of its lifespan, but if anything can be said about the strange Dragon Age-less middle ground we now find ourselves in as fans, it’s the assurance that we now get to call the shots on what our world of Thedas looks like. In my own personal game canon, Cole will always be more spirit, and thus he will always be allowed to be himself. And, by extension, I too will always get to live out the fantasy of being allowed to be myself and, as Cole says, will get to be more me because of it.