I don’t like The Mighty Nein animated Essek. I kick him like the football. I’ve been asked why I’m so angry about him, so I wrote a big consolidation of my feelings. Have fun:
IN SHORT: Show!Essek is a total rewrite and an unfamiliar character, and he’s weaker and lamer and significantly less interesting than Campaign!Essek, and there are so many things they could have done to make him stronger, and they didn’t, and I don’t feel like pretending to be happy.
IN LONG: No, Essek’s hard pivot into neutral evil actions last episode did not satisfy me; no, I am not vindicated; no, I’m not suddenly changing my mind about my distaste for the show’s handling of his character arc; no, I am not trusting the process, because the process is already soured for me. Here’s why:
Under most definitions, a Character as a story device is made up of four CORE things: fears, desires, misbeliefs, and wounds.
Wounds are events in a character’s past that caused them to adopt a misbelief about the way the world works. Desires and fears stem from this misbelief. Even if a character in an adaptation is recognizable from their design, their personality, their hobbies, interests, prejudices, specialties, skills, job, whatever, they could still be written with a different core and would therefore be considered a unique version of that character. Comic runs of Batman create different versions of Bruce Wayne when his core is written differently as a result of a different setting or changes to his core wound, causing different misbeliefs, then different desires and fears, and so on. They can still be recognizably Bruce Wayne, but they wouldn’t be fundamentally the same Bruce Wayne as from the Detective Comics ongoing story; that’s why adaptations cause so much friction, because people’s definition of what makes a character a successful adaptation sometimes prioritizes the invention of interesting differences over keeping interesting similarities.
Show!Essek gave us uninteresting differences from Campaign!Essek, sacrificing a world where we kept interesting similarities. And I’m mad! Let’s talk about it.
NEPO BABY CHAD ESSEK CAN'T HURT YOU
There’s some rapid-fire stuff we can review. The show completely changed his motivation for his actions in a way that undercuts the Mighty Nein’s introduction of love, friendship, loyalty to his psychology; the show made his blunders happen as a result of naivety and stupidity rather than the miscalculations of a ruthless spymaster; the show generally made him feel like he isn’t an adult, let alone someone of any qualification to be doing tasks for the Bright Queen or personally negotiating with Ikithon. Without prior knowledge of Campaign!Essek’s character traits and genius, I’d be led to believe that that Show!Essek is just a premiere academic who nepo babied his way into the Bright Queen’s throne room and is way out of his depth in everything he does. This goes against everything that made Essek one of my favorite characters to explore and write about.
MYSTIQUE IS NOT FREE GAME FOR JUST ANYTHING
You might say, “But we don’t know for sure that this isn’t what happened in the campaign.” Sure. But I do not see any evidence to suggest that Matt played Essek with these story beats in mind, even if he says he had them in canon-limbo in his head. Personally, I don’t even care if he did secretly play Essek with these story beats in mind, because in that case, it’d undercut the story that did play out in the campaign. Maybe you like it, so maybe you’re happy to consider this as word of god. I’m not, I think the beginning of Show!Essek’s character arc directly contradicts how his story played out in the campaign, primarily because of changes to his motivation, so I refute that it should be factored into meta for any reason.
SYMPATHY COMES FROM UNDERSTANDING, NOT PITY
Moreover, these changes do not feel as surgical and dynamic as changes made to other main characters. They feel saccharine and weak. I think this happened because the writers:
(a) straight up did not care about research or espionage (we know this is true because Sam said it with his whole chest in the latest Fireside Chat),
(b) were likely concerned about audience sympathy and comprehension, and
(c) probably wanted to make Shadowgast parallels clearer.
What this accomplished was: instead of writing a strong character who stands alone, they wrote a blundering mirror. By his lack of conviction, his childish assumption that other people give a shit about his personal desperation, his confidence that Ikithon of all fucking people will hold true to a promise, and his godawful espionage skills (even though we’re supposed to believe he’s an elite spy, per the episode descriptions, and per the Bright Queen assigning him the task with retrieving the beacon), he comes comes across as annoying and whiny at best, and an incompetent idiot baby-child at worst. And listen. I love me some loser Essek. But I like loser Essek because I’ve seen him be a clever terrifying archmage, and I like taking him down a peg in my whump fanfictions; if we don’t start from a place where we respect him at all, there’s no point in kicking a puppy.
The argument that they made changes in the name of (c) also confuses me, because, what? There were already Caleb and Essek parallels in the campaign. That’s why we ship Shadowgast. It was not necessary to rewrite things to make Shadowgast even more telegraphed. I would understand the plight of trying to redistribute parallels across a new, ultra-consolidated story, but this is not how I think it should have been done. I’m not even that mad that there are new parallels re: Essek’s ritual killing of Dierta and so on, but I don’t enjoy that I can see the wires moving the puppets around. That’s just me. This is the least offensive factor, though.
Basically--if they really wanted to make him sympathetic in a gripping, elevated way, they would have spent time establishing his position in Dynasty society, his world view, his wound, his misbeliefs, and how those informed his desires and fears. Understanding, not pity, is what allows you to truly sympathize for a character.
I credit the lion’s share of my frustration to the terrible writing in the Essek and Ikithon scenes. I assume nobody had the patience or confidence to try actually making the dialogue seem smart and restrained, or do even a second of research into how spies work, or think to reference genre conventions for espionage fiction, which would have done 90% of the legwork for adapting spy shenanigans to fiction anyways. I am not a spy or a TV writer, but I own a fucking library card, bro.
SURPRISED PIKACHU ESSEK MAKES NO SENSE
There’s also the matter of Essek’s relationship to war. Show!Essek gasps and protests and fights back when the Bright Queen threatens to go to war; he obviously made the deal with Ikithon with the understanding that it would risk escalation, but he’s suddenly overcome with concern that the worst-case scenario is happening and tries to mitigate it. In contrast, Campaign!Essek did not care that the war was a consequence of his deal with Ludinus. In his NPC statblock from the Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount, Essek is excited at the prospect of war because it means he’s given additional resources to develop spells and instruments to be tested in battle. His ruthlessness is an essential part of his character across multiple adaptations prior to the animated show. His hunger for research and for any excuse to have limitations lifted on his research is his core desire, which was changed, as emphasized in every scene where he frames his deal with Ikithon as an exchange where he gets a cure for Typhros while Ikithon is the one who gets research.
Show!Essek also adds the fear of war and death on his conscience, which Campaign!Essek never had, because Campaign!Essek did not have a conscience to begin with. This is maybe the most brutal offense IMO. I get that wider audiences would not read between the lines or suck on the meat of subtext, but that’s a skill issue, and if the compromise is writing a guy who is blandly wimpy, I’d rather people universally hate Essek for what he did with conviction than hate Essek for what he did and then immediately regretted, like a dumb of ass. It's agonizingly painful to see show-only viewers calling Essek all sorts of insults over bad writing that I know for a fact could have made him a fan-favorite instead.
By changing both his desires and his fears, Show!Essek is fundamentally a different guy, and thus, I am not interested in exploring Show!Essek as a new perspective into Campaign!Essek. Even if Show!Essek is recognizable from his design and selfishness and interest in dunamancy, he still has different motivations for doing what he does, less agency in his actions, and gets bullied and juggled by Ikithon and the Volstrucker in a way that is straight up ridiculous.
In the campaign, Caleb said, “I think your intentions are good, but I think, perhaps, your vision has been clouded,” and Campaign!Essek replied, “My intentions were never good, they were important”. How does his new Deirta Typhros motivation not completely kneecap this? How does his fear of war and death and instant regret not kneecap this? How does his comical immaturity and insipidity not kneecap this? What da hell is going onnnnnnnnn?????
He's a little ugly. But that’s subjective.
I SWEAR I LOVE THIS SHOW THOUGH
I will be less cranky when we’re full-steam-ahead into hypercompetent and ruthless and conniving Neutral Evil Essek in TM9 Season 2. Doesn’t change how disappointed I am in how they handled nearly everything else about him. And for the love of god don’t tell me some variation of “I told you so” or “Trust the process” or I am going to turn everyone in the state of California into a chair
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