I’m lolling at all the people acting like Scanlan did absolutely nothing wrong when he left and was 100% the victim and has nothing to apologize for.
Scanlan had every right to leave the party and frankly I’m glad he recognized that he needed to leave and he needed time to get his head on straight. I’m really glad he was aware of that.
That doesn’t excuse the fact that he left by burning every bridge he had access to and he did it by insulting them with shit that objectively wasn’t true (Scanlan reducing the Feywild arc to “Vex’s daddy issues” was a crueler thing to say than literally anything Saundor said to her, especially because it came from someone she saw as a surrogate father).
Did Vox Machina do Scanlan wrong? Absolutely. 100%. They hadn’t been listening to him, the prank was mean and inappropriate, and they did give up quite easily whenever he lied to them (I find it difficult to blame them for that, but I can see why Scanlan would be upset about it).
But you can’t pretend Scanlan is an innocent little puppy who is completely blameless in this entire thing and Scanlan has yet to apologize for that fucking garbage he spewed at them. He apologized for leaving which was never the problem.
And good god, “They brought Kaylie to see his dead body, which he didn’t want!” How the fuck would they have known that? He never said a goddamn word to any of them about Kaylie except that he was worried about her when she got out of Westruun and Pike knew he wanted her to take care of Kaylie in the event of his death. At what fucking point were they supposed to intuit that he would be ashamed for Kaylie to see him like that?
And as for Percy’s ice cold burn on Scanlan, I don’t know if you guys noticed but during Scanlan’s story, he was talking about how he told Kaylie all about himself. How he opened up more to her than anybody else. And that’s cool and great and all, but he never indicated that he asked Kaylie about herself.
You know. The thing Scanlan was mad at VM for. For focusing on themselves.
Percy’s point was that either Scanlan didn’t ask (which he didn’t have to, Kaylie had already told him) or that even if Scanlan had asked, he apparently didn’t care enough to remember. He care about Kaylie, definitely, but not about her mother, who was definitely important to her.
It was also in no small part a burn on Sam Riegel himself. Sam had Scanlan care enough about VM to remember the names of their family members, but only because Sam had a cheat sheet he printed up because Sam definitely wouldn’t have remembered them himself. Taliesin correctly guessed that Sam wouldn’t remember a name mentioned once by Matt more than a year ago and called him out for it (and in fairness, I don’t think Taliesin remembered it either - I spotted him on his phone before he said it.)
At any rate, the situation isn’t black and white. Vox Machina isn’t entirely in the right. Scanlan isn’t entirely in the right. Scanlan has so far only apologized for the things he didn’t need to apologize for.  The twins have waved off Scanlan apologizing for things he does need to apologize for, and Pike, Percy, and Grog just don’t want to fucking hear it either way.
It’s going to take more than one episode for this to get smoothed over, assuming it ever does. I for one am excited to see where it goes.
jbbartram-illu
origamiaround
