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@theartofmadeline
Xuebing Du
Jar Jar Binks Fan Club
we're not kids anymore.
YOU ARE THE REASON
Misplaced Lens Cap
roma★
bliss lane
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
titsay
Cosmic Funnies
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
almost home
Fai_Ryy
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I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
🪼
Cosimo Galluzzi
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@dew--dr0ps
sometimes you see Takes™ that make you go "mmmhmmm okay yeah i see we both interpreted that differently based on what the show gave us, but i see how you arrived at your ideas even if they're different from mine," and then sometimes you see Takes™ that make you go "brother what show did you even fucking watch"
Dinner party! Everyone disliked that. [ id: illustration of the dinner scene from critical role episode 110, camera view over the shoulder of Trent Ikithon. You can see his wrinkly old hands and shoulder in green mantle. Mighty Nein, Astrid and Eodwulf are sitting around the table with lit candles. M9 looks at him with various expressions of disgust, Astrid’s expression is covered by her fringe, and Eodwulf is drinking water. end id ]
*guy who hasnt watched projekt funball or 90% of the post-canon content yet* and another thing i think is interesting re: liam's distinction of "bren and caleb" "nott and veth" is that with nott i think caleb was able to feel more fully caleb and with veth i think there is a part of him that is always going to be bren. the initial unit of caleb and nott was two people who felt so fully divorced from the structures of society - they were both unhoused, starving, escaped from jail, with no institutional or familial ties they would speak of. both of them felt they would never be able to return to the rest of society. they could move from town to town and be the only real person in the other's world. it's the kind of partnership that is divorced from the structures of family, from the worlds they came from, that doesn't feel fully discernable to either of them and never can be because to name it would be to accept that both of them have something they don't feel like they deserve
with veth, with her clear family ties to a husband and a son, this changes. against the clear structures of the nuclear family unit, that crucial ambiguity is gone. their inability to name what they had suddenly threatens to render it meaningless. veth struggles to conceive how she can exist in both worlds as once (even worrying that finally reinhabiting her body as veth will change her feelings for caleb!) and caleb tries to find a clear role for himself alongside her family unit to justify his existence there, in the process constantly relitigating the family he once destroyed. caleb will never marry essek, he will never have children of his own. caleb's only future relationship to the nuclear family structure is his love for veth, is his idolization of the family unit he feels he will never deserve again and his desire to play a real role in her life. and in the process he will always be remaking and relitigating bren. he remade bren once when he asked to teach luc magic, trying to be the benevolent mentor figure that he wished that trent had been. and he remade bren again in the very literal form of bren brenatto, who will always be a reminder of who he was, but perhaps more importantly, what that past resurfacing, his own desires and anguish and loneliness, would lead him to do to yet another person he loves
character who thinks they’re unloveable x character who finds loving them as easy as breathing (sometimes easier)
In the wake of Darktow I am once again thinking about the Dwendalian family, specifically with respect to Caleb. Rather than actually breaking free from Volstrucker conditioning, which frames family as an effectively Volstrucker-Empire concept, Caleb tries to reenact an idealized version of the family through the Brenattos. This leads to him being upset and uneasy whenever that structure is threatened - especially by his own potential inclusion and Veth’s attempts to not be defined solely in the “mother” role. The rhetoric of the Volstrucker - and of Ikithon - is based around the Dwendalian nuclear family as the correct and integral unit of society, phrased most clearly by Astrid in c2e89:
But I also know the reason that we get to sleep, every night, in a comfortable inn bed, or in a manor, as do the many families and children just like we were, just like the families we once had that don't have to make the choices we did. They still get to live, happily and comfortably, because the few, the chosen few, made the hard choice, and do what few have the will to do.
The nuclear family is framed as the natural unit of society: mother, father, their children.* The Volstrucker, in order to become Volstrucker, must cut themselves out of their family units (quite literally) and become the "chosen few," forever isolated from those structures in order to protect them; and they do so specifically to protect and reify those structures.
They do it in order to serve Civil Influence - and we know that the role of Civil Influence is to stabilize Dwendalian society, keep down rebellion, and protect the Crown and Assembly from populist uprisings. They kill traitors, but they also enact this through the rhetoric of the nuclear family. "Do you have the strength to protect your homes? Your families? Your country?" (See Caleb's Origins comic.) Ikithon frames the Volstrucker as a barrier between "civilization and chaos" in the same breath that he invokes the family as the base unit of that civilization. It is their will that preserves the country through preserving the family: even as they destroy their own to better serve. They don't have their own nuclear families anymore, so they spend the rest of their lives enforcing that structure on the people of the Empire.
Their function is to reinforce the very unit that they are forbidden access to. It positions Volstrucker as individually worthless (because they cannot participate) but societally necessary for the continuation of the Empire - in its base unit formed around the nuclear family. The family is the Empire, in microcosm. And yes, Caleb leaves, helps tear Ikithon down. But he never gets rid of that construct of society and of his role in it in his head. He's done something - he's part of a (damned) chosen few - who can and will never be able to participate in society because it is structured around family; and, having murdered his own, he acts as though he is obligated to protect the nuclear families of others. Specifically? Veth Brenatto's. I'm eliding a lot here. There's great meta on the topic. Suffice to say, Caleb is obviously and repeatedly torn between wanting Veth to stay with him and protecting her nuclear family of her, Yeza, and Luc throughout the campaign and post-campaign. Liam has said this is at least in part due to seeing Luc as like a younger Caleb/Bren ("that's me, that's a little boy in the Empire" - Talks Machina 157); he acts as though, by keeping Luc's family together, he can rehabilitate his own relationship with his broken, dead family. So we come to the Brenattos in Darktow - and specifically, his automatic rejection of Veth including him as a parent, even jokingly, when speaking about her new son Bren-Bren. She jokes that he's like a first time parent, and then amends to STEP-parent. It's Caleb who cuts her off and offers godfather in exchange. A stepparent is a parent - having one would mean Bren-Bren has three parents, who are at the time of writing living together and sharing full-time care for a child. A godfather is a trusted outsider to the family unit - and the person a child would go to, if their parents were both to die.
Caleb rejects the label that would imply any kind of aberrant nuclear family structure: no additional parents, no marrying in, no significance beyond "teacher" or "godfather." Even if he is acting as a parent, he cannot be one - in the same way that, despite his clear desire to remain with Veth, he gives up and resolves to content himself with the "memory of being partners at a certain time of [his] life." (Beau, c2e68). But he also won't leave! He can't detach himself from the family, but he also can't allow himself to be a part of it. It remains incredibly significant to him, while being forever and definitionally beyond his reach - because to accept that label would mean both integration into a fold he believes he has lost the right to access, AND it would destroy the image of Veth's nuclear family (mama, papa, son, baby. No wizard; no third parent; no Volstrucker).** Even when she's the one who offers.
He also panics over the idea that Veth might disrupt the structure of her family herself. Veth struggles with this herself - her persistent desire to adventure, steal, and otherwise cause chaos is strongly at odds with the obligation she feels to her family.*** In the Darktow show, when she expresses a desire to adventure, he asks if she's sure, because "a boy needs his mother - Bren-Bren needs his mother in his life." He wants Veth with him; but he can't stop objecting to her joining him because of the danger it would put her in, and thus specifically her child at risk of growing up without her. The perceived risk is of the disruption of the family that he actively cares for and tries to protect just as much as it is to Veth's own life. Caleb regards her as a dear friend and a life partner, and respects her choices - but he also can't quite shake that her role in the nuclear family is "mother," and his own complicated beliefs tied up in that.
And to add to all that, Veth named the kid after the version of Caleb he believes in as an innocent child. Surely that won’t cause any more problems.
tl:dr: Caleb defines himself out of nuclear family structures (specifically: the Brenattos') while simultaneously holding them up as both meaningful and idealized due to the indoctrination around "family" he received as a youth equating it to the basic unit of societal good. Rather than break the conditioning, his guilt causes him to try and re-enact a "healthy" version of a structure that does not benefit the people who live within it.
teamwork makes the dream work
like it is just so fascinating how much caleb cares about veth's family, making sure it remains safe and whole, ("keeping families together" as he told her during the campaign), but he is also completely incapable of walking away from her to the point that he almost bullishly insinuates himself into her family even when he could never admit to himself that his actions interfere with the family he idolizes and attempts to maintain at all costs! makes me crazy!
veth's journey is so much about discovering who she is outside of the small town world she grew up in, where the most important things she could be were a wife and a mother, finding freedom in breaking out of those titles and becoming something truer to herself, but caleb can and does pigeonhole her into those roles himself, even when he doesn't mean to, even when he wishes they could go back to the days when he didn't have to feel guilty for ripping her away from her family, because of HIS hangups about what family is and how you should protect it. makes me crazy!!
The Brenatto-Widogast dynamic after the Echoes of Exandria shows.
i made a post like this before but I can't find it now. so. I'll just redo it.
What's the first "big news story" you remember from when you were a kid?
It's something I love to ask mixed-aged groups sometimes because I think it's really interesting to see the responses. I've gotten answers from the Olympics of [whatever year] to Watergate to more recent stuff from my niblings.
My first news thing I remember is the OJ Simpson trial. I vaguely remember watching the news with my grandparents before that, but that's the first story I remember, in part because my second grade teacher had us go play so she could watch the verdict 😂
Marylanders don’t say hi hello how are you my name is they just try to kill you with their car. which is of course a great honor in their culture
In Northern Virginia the country of my birth people kill you with their car because you deserve it. sic semper tyrannis
actually annoyed by long distance friends again. i want to go for a walk i want to get drinks i want to sit in the grass and write i want to go to the fucking store together
Megan Thee Fury
fave dynamic is platonic but somethings weird with it (the weird part is an insanely deep level of devotion, trust and understanding, as well as narrative importance that is not typically allowed for platonic relationships in media, making the portrayal feel unique and queer in nature. typically best served as m+f)
gathering around the wise seers of my dashboard as they peer into the beacon and deliver messages from the future.... yeah theyre saying calebs being weird again
i love that the only point of disagreement in the veth stan community i can remember was whether you thought veth and yeza should get a divorce, but with each subsequent liveshow that comes out more and more people are just like. yeza get out of there. This Needs To End.
hold up ✋ caleb made a permanent teleportation circle in veth's house. that means he went there and worked on it every single day for a year
@extreme-technicality it's canon
i have tested positive for tzatziki
