Why I Don’t Like Cole’s Quest
Firstly let’s just get out of the way that I don’t like when war table missions are used in companion quests since it feels like that stuff done in those should have been done by the player and would be more interesting than a lot of the side quests within the game.
But now onto what brothers me about Cole’s quest, which honestly sucks that I don’t like since Cole is my fav companion out of all of them (To the point of being the one I want a plush of the most). But I think his quest brings all the worst parts of his writing, so let me break it down.
1. Cole isn’t the main voice in the quest line
So in most of the personal quests you hear a lot about what the companion thinks of things or learn something new about them from them. But this isn’t the case in Cole’s quest, the main voices and Soals’s and Varric’s, with Cole more reacting to them than them reacting to him. I noticed this when I was grabbing screen caps of Cole in this quest just how much these two show up vs how little Cole does.
Shouldn’t a questline about his identity have him being the main voice on the topic? I mean think of what it’d be like if in Iron Bull’s quest it was mostly Dorian and Krem talking about what would be best for Bull without actually asking him or taking into acount his past actions and instead just based it off him being a Quneri or their gut feeling on the matter? Yeah that’s what goes on in Cole’s questline where Solas even tells Cole off for voicing what he wants at the start.
2. The conflict is rather short and isn’t remotely up to Cole how it ends.
Honestly this is a issue I have with all the side quests where it’s mostly “Go to a place, kill a few randos and then tell your companion which route you are taking them on.” but it’s really bad in Cole’s case where the only thing you can really do is support (or not support) one of the two guy arguing about what Cole should do and then watch Cole do whatever the one you sent ahead tells him to do. It’s like no has free will and the fact that it takes more time to do things like recruit random people to work as agents is really annoying.
3. Solas is honestly acting like a autistic parent ™
For those that don’t know what I mean by “autistic parent ™“, I mean a parent that is very controlling of their child and how they act and thinks the way they act on their own isn’t their “Real” self, in the case of a irl autistic parent ™ they think that “autism took their child” or things like that. But in Solas’s case it’s not the fact that Cole acts “weird” that brothers him, it’s that Cole isn’t acting like what Solas (who within canon is not known as a spirit, that’s a theory) thinks a spirit.
The whole story frames Cole becoming more human as him changing but the thing is that what goes down in the human route is what Cole would have done if we hadn’t been there, or well closer, he very well might have actually killed the guy and could became a demon but that’s a topic for another day.
What I’m getting at is that Cole wanted to kill the guy, he wanted to be bound to Solas to protect himself but in both cases Solas tells him that he knows Cole better than Cole does, he says that it’d be abusing Cole to use a bound to protect him, even if Cole, a spirit who likely knows the risks asks him. And then when Cole wishes to kill the man that killed the og Cole, something well within what Cole has been known to do, Solas says that this isn’t really him, that this isn’t something that Compassion would do, ignoring that Cole has been killing those that harmed mages for longer than he has known Solas and that he choice to become Cole and has full free will on this matter, it’s not like Varric is egging him on for murder, he is saying to let Cole decide.
Within the spirit route changes a lot more than he does as a human, sure he talks the same way but how he deals with things, his view on himself, his desire to kill the person that hurt the og Cole and by the end his own identity change, he acts like a very different character and as a whole takes care of himself less .
Meanwhile again the Human route is a lot closer to what would have happened had the group decided to send Cole to deal with the problem on his own, had Solas not been there it would be no question to Cole (the guy who already kills a lot, to the point of being a serial killer) to at least try to kill the dude and end up more human.
4. It’s a part of a bigger issue.
Cole is treated by the writing like both someone can’t really do any harm and as someone who can’t make his own choices, like a child which is a bigger issue for autistic character wrote by people that aren’t autistic.
Cole was based on the writers nephew who is autistic and that view of autism as a young boy thing is pretty clear in Cole’s character whom despite being the same age as Alister in dao is treated a lot younger and has a lot less say in his story where instead of getting to side with him on something or directly tell him what you think it comes down to which of his father like figures gets their way.
