alsonotlichenthis

cr sideblog | physically i'm here existentially i'm still thinking abt the mighty nein

[redjennies]

I was thinking about this over the weekend and the Braius cameo reminded me of it, but I think if/when they do a Bell's Hells show I do think it'll probably be good. like I didn't like the campaign but the majority of my major issues boil down to some variation of "this is doesn't work well with d&d as the medium." it'll probably fuck as a show, particularly if they take the Nein route of fleshing out things that are happening in the background/elsewhere, if I'm being honest.

[stickandthorn]

Brennan’s depiction of the fair folk was designed for me specifically, cause I’ve literally always thought most modern fairy stories lack the sauce. I grew up on traditional fairy stories, that was the first genre that I genuinely loved. I was bumping my CDs of fairy folklore and celtic mythology every night when I was 5 years old. My first idea of what en elf was wasn’t an Tolkien elf, it was a beautiful lady who’s gonna trick you into going to Fairy forever and all your family would die and you’d never see them again. I was 7 years old considering wearing my clothes inside out and hanging a nail on my door so the fair folk wouldn’t replace me with a changeling. I would walk around anything vaguely circular in the woods, in case it was a fairy ring. I was fucking obsessed with fairies, that was my shit.

And I wanted to consume as much fairy content as I could, but every time I’d read a modern fairy book I’d sigh and go “this lacks the sauce :(.” Someone would give me a flower fairy book and it just wouldn’t fucking hit. There was no trickery or name stealing or cold iron or shape changing creatures or mortal peril. There wasn’t even any kidnapping for crying out loud. And naively, I assumed this would get better as I got older, but no. Fantasy for adults also thinks fairies are just pretty people with wings, except in adult fantasy sometimes they’re sexy. So thank you Brennan for fixing my childhood wound about the lack of Kelpies and Selkies and Grigs.

[viewfindercomics]

help, it's again

[neria-rt]

guy who is more concerned about not using the scientific method than the actual killing people part (aka fanart of this post that made me laugh earlier)

[acepalindrome]

I bet Azune thinks he can schedule his grief for when it’s convenient (read: doesn’t inconvenience anyone around him.) He’s too much in shock up on the scaffold to feel much, so he can keep his expression appropriately blank while he cuts Thjazi down and lowers him to the ground. The shock starts to wear off, but he can’t fall apart and potentially reveal the plot to save Thjazi with his grief. So he shoves it all down. He focuses on the mundanity of what needs to be done, until he can transport the body to the funeral. Straighten his clothes, arrange his limbs, wipe the expression of fear off Thjazi’s face, all to spare Hal and everyone else mourning any more pain.

And so he can’t go to pieces at the funeral either. There is still work to be done, and he has no right to put any more burdens onto Hal’s shoulders. However much Azune wished it, he wasn’t family. His grief matters less here. So he tucks it away, forces it down, avoids looking at Thjazi’s body or letting his thoughts drift to anything that might break his composure. There will be time for that later. Later, when there is no one else around. When there isn’t any work he needs to do. Then he can grieve.

It’s many, many hours later when he finally returns to his chambers at the Brethren Hall, exhausted from all that has transpired. He’s alone in his room when he takes off his armor and sits on his bed. This is finally a good time to let himself cry, but sitting alone is his empty room, he just feels hollow. He could have broken down at many points today, if he had allowed himself to, but there are no tears now. He wants to cry, wants to do something with this huge, chasmous loss inside him, but after forcing down his grief all day, he’s just numb.

So he goes to bed. He has work in the morning.

[lostsometime]

very effective btw to have "here's how you make your victims not afraid if you need them to stop screaming" the very first thing we see trent teaching his students

so that every single time after that, when you see him working on people whose screaming is simply muffled by a gag or muzzle you remember that he's doing that on purpose

that he fully knows how to make this, if not painless, at least non-frightening

but he likes it when people are afraid and in pain, so he keeps it like that on purpose

every time

[utilitycaster]

man what is House Tachonis's endgame. What's House Halovar's endgame for that matter. Like, what do you need in Timmony - is this just endless expansionism and megalomania or are you specifically trying to do something, because the behavior of House Tachonis indicates they've got something specific and magical going on but frankly House Halovar might just be trying to become emperor for the hell of it given Yanessa's obsession with the glory days of Obridimia.

[cadwhatalad]

I'm having a Feeling (positive) about Hal as a character in terms of this thing a few others have pointed out, that he's this nexus of inspiration for the people around him who were raised in/literally built for violence, how he represents this ideal of life and art and home, all the things they fight and die to protect embodied in this one person.... Because that type of character is usually a woman? And that sense of her embodying an ideal is often used as an excuse for why she, as a character in a patriarchal fantasy/historical setting, doesn't really get to do anything. or at least it's a way to give her character worth even when conforming to certain elements of genre/setting that place huge limits on how she can reasonably impact the story. like if she can't wield power through violence or political sway then it's like well fuck we've gotta give her SOMETHING. So I like that we're getting this in not just a male character but an OLDER male character, someone who can use violence and has in the past, a father, a pillar of his community, someone with the potential to wield physical or social authority, but who has chosen not to, and who everyone agrees should not need to. it establishes these traits as something positive and worth preserving even when the person could be doing/embodying something else, makes them feel less like a consolation prize for physical/economic/social limitations and more like something worthy of admiration in and of itself. Other stories would play the moment of hal coming downstairs wearing the sword as a moment of triumph, the culmination of a character arc, yay he's finally embracing his violent masculine destiny. here it's an early signal of imminent doom, the final line in the first verse of a tragedy.

I'd maybe consider being annoyed that it takes a man embodying these traits to demonstrate this so clearly, that misogyny remains such a pervasive cloud on our ability to communicate this type of nuance around female characters, but a) celebrating men who embrace gender nonconformity (crucially, here, in terms of social power and interpersonal relationships, often overlooked in favour of elements more easily demonstrated like aesthetics and mannerisms) is a necessary and powerful element of feminist practice and to pretend otherwise would be cutting off our nose to spite our face, and b) we have Thaisa representing the mirror of this subversion as a woman who has left her family, her kids, so that she can go off and fight to make the world a better place. That's a Dad-ass trope, that's every war movie side character who shows the protagonist a picture of his beautiful wife and kids and sighs into the middle distance about how he's doing it all for them right before he gets tragically gunned down in the second act. In any other media Thaisa would be hal and hal would be Thaisa. I really, really like how this simple switch can demonstrate so clearly and subvert so easily these value systems that even now, in this era of soft boy court romances and mighty sword lesbians, can sometimes feel inescapable.

[vault-of-amber]

okay yes the angel reveal was leagues crazier than any theory i could have had and wick’s grandmother is the craziest bitch in town. but honestly the thing that’s stuck with me most this episode is the profound cruelty of raising a child who’s entire life revolves around a religion you straight up made up. because you wanted a “pure” descendant. how sheltered must wick have been in his early years before he started to convince himself? he’s almost thirty years old. they waited until he spent THIRTY YEARS of his life following arbitrary rules and devoting every second of his day to the cause to tell him that sorry! i made that shit up lolll. yanessa halovar know that i admire your freak but i really hope your grandson kills you

[zemnian-nerd]

As much as we're joking about Aabria divorcing everyone and as fun as Laeryn and Loquacious's dynamic was, I genuinely really appreciate the portrayal of exes with children who are friends. Exes of the same person getting along well. Half-siblings who don't bother saying the "half" part out loud because really what does it matter?

Just - representation of different family models and people being adults about splitting up.

[zemnian-nerd]

In honor of this post reaching 400 notes (which is more than double of any of my other original posts) and because it came up in dms I want to elaborate a little because this is a particular pet peeve of mine.

As someone with a similar family, I often get tired of the portrayal of divorce and complex family trees in media. Divorcees hate each other and/or still have feelings for the other, children of divorce carry massive amounts of trauma and hold grudges against their parents, the current partner and ex of a person can't stand each other, etc.

And while all these things undoubtedly happen in real life, it feels reductive that that seems to be the only way these families are portrayed. And if there's a story in which, by the end, the family has reconciled and learned to live in this new way, it's almost certainly a story about this "weird" family.

So this is just very refreshing. The family dynamics will almost certainly play a role over the course of the campaign but right now at the start, everyone seems pretty content with things as they are (minus the dead family member of course).

Everyone comes to the wake because of course they do. They are happy to see each other because of course, it's been so long! Only when childhood living arrangements come up does Hal specify that he and Thjazi had different mothers because at no point before then does it matter.

And especially with the focus on Hal and Thaisha as PCs, having them be former lovers and parents that genuinely still care for each other allows them to have a relationship that is so much more complex than just "the exes".

[piratespencil]

Sooo curious about Thaisha and Occtis’s relationship. Occtis hardly seems to know anyone here except for her. She accidentally calls him her son when asking where he went. He disguises himself, very purposefully, as someone who looks almost exactly like her son. What is their deal???

[wizard-loving-wizard]

oh my god THE SWORDS ARE REAL???????

[olessan]

After scouring too many multiple sources (the burgeoning wiki pages, various articles, chatter, and the VOD itself), here is a chart of ALL the main player characters' relationships to Thjazi Fang, as best as I could determine them (so far).

Some of the NPCs, such as Wick's father or Uncle Emerald, are excluded for now. We have here the main PCs, their families as immediately relevant, and gradients for those who seem to have two major allegiances (one to Thjazi and one to their family) as of ep 1.

And also some lines for confirmed friendliness or beef lmao

[tarydarrington]

Critical Role Campaign 4, first lines of dialogue

[justalittlebluetiefling]

Wick's stats say Cleric but his wisdom is so low I don't believe him

[navpike]

brennan lee mulligan you are truly the greatest masterclass in developing a problematic character cause the last couple episodes have made me genuinely love comfrey macleod as an addition to the team so much. you can so clearly see how she assembled the wind riders and why they followed her and you can feel her magnetic personality through the screen and once the yelling from the initial interactions dies down, you love her.

you want her there, you want her as a part of the team. but then you start to remember the reality of it. what she’s said to monty, and how she’s responsible in some way for what happened to marya and ludmila and van and her family, and you remember how she wanted daisuke to change for her and how she left her son and left olethra.

and you know those things to be fact, she’s admitting to doing half of them on screen. she admits she got van’s family taken and that her actions in zood and zern lead in some way to ludmila being taken, and she’s mean to monty and she wanted daisuke to be an indoor dog. but at the same time, you love having her there! she’s fun, she’s spunky, she’s over ninety years old and still running around adventuring without slowing down. she apologizes to van and marya and she gets back out in the fray of a fight with monty and the first thing she does is kiss daisuke and celebrate olethra joining the crew! and olethra standing her ground in danger is still the first time she’s ever understood the gravity of her actions.

she’s dangerous and reckless and has insane main character syndrome and still you love her. what a fantastic character.

[bourbonandbiscuits]

Brennan spending the season jokingly describing how the PCs on the Zephyr are convinced once they make it to Zood that they are the main character and then finally introducing us to Comfrey MacLeod in the flesh and she's a 90 year old woman who is 1000% convinced that she's been the main character the whole time not just in Zood but in Gath as well and everyone around her are accessories to her narrative 🤌