it’s super important to me that The Adventure Zone ended with everything…good. Our heroes are flawed people - Merle, who treated his wife like shit and abandoned his kids, Magnus - a good person who is, despite himself, bitterly waiting to die, and Taako - an inherently selfish person prone to making bad choices.
But none of them are punished for it. None of them suffer for it. None of them die. No one dies to be support for their narrative pain(unless we count Julia, a piece of backstory pre-established to this story). They all fought for the world, saved the world, and get the ending they “earned” - where they are happy, and safe, and everyone they love is, too.
Hell, every one of our villains get a redemption. First Kravitz - the grim reaper who takes Merle’s arm, someone actively trying to kill them - becomes loved, and loves, and fights alongside his boyfriend against the force destroying a world he doesn’t even live in.
Lucretia, who started a good person and ended a good person, who did more damage to our heroes than anything else in the story - is the one who gets to stop the Hunger once and for all. It is her intelligence, and her strength, that defeats the threat. She gets to achieve the one thing she always wanted - she protects her friends. Moreover, they all forgive her for what she’s done. She is the strongest person this world has ever known, and she is so loved.
John, a motivational speaker who literally became the over-arching villain of the story - a huge, planar eating mass with no conscious thought or remorse gets to be human. It is through friendship, through kindness, that he is reminded of his own humanity. Yes, he is the Hunger, but he is also a man. He’s the one who risks everything to tell Merle how to defeat him, so that the world may survive. His final scene is just him, how he was before, what he chose to be at the end - a person.
And all of it, all of it so important. Because it proves that no matter what you do, what you’ve done, there’s always a way back. You can still choose to do the right thing, and more importantly, you can be loved. It shows that if you work hard, and fight for what you believe in, you deserve happiness.
It might be popular to be gritty in media now. It might be trendy to be dark - it might even be considered a hallmark of good storytelling. The Adventure Zone proves that you can create an engaging, fulfilling, totally satisfying story by being positive. By letting your characters win. By allowing them to be happy. And I am so thankful.
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