Shaun Gilmore seems larger-than-life and over the top, but in the glimpses we get of him, he’s also just so complex and amazing and god I love him so much that it was inevitable I’d eventually write 1000+ words of meta about him and why he’s such a cool character.
So here it goes: Shaun Geddmore is a boy from a tiny town in the desert. His parents are sweet and loving, but perhaps don’t understand him the way he’d like — they know him as “brave” but don’t believe that he would singlehandedly protect a city. Shaun cryptically suggests that it’s “taken a while” for them to be proud of him. At some point in his young adulthood, he has a boyfriend (as shown by the letters under his bed), but this does nothing to deter him from leaving as “soon as [he] had the opportunity to leave,” called to the big cities of Tal’dorei.
At some point, before or after he leaves, he discovers his strange powers, finding runes appearing on his skin and fantastic power running through his veins. We have no idea where he learns what this rare condition means, or how he learns to keep it carefully hidden even while making his livelihood from his arcane powers. Presumably, it’s around the same time where he learned the basics of his craft, including how to fight.
Regardless, though, Shaun leaves for a different continent. A big city, with different languages spoken on the streets, with people of much lighter skin than him, and so much colder than his homeland. He changes his name to fit in, and opens up his shop. And he loves it — seems to love flirting with his clients and making money. Single items probably sell for more than his parents made in their entire lives. And maybe he forgets his parents a little; we know that he barely comes to visit, despite the ease at which he could teleport there. Maybe it’s hard to find the time or the energy when he works so hard. Maybe he finds the difference between his life in Emon and his life back in Shandal too jolting; they wouldn’t understand what he does or why it makes him so happy. Maybe he wants to live in the moment and visiting home feels like returning to his past.
Because if nothing else, Shaun takes life as it comes. He sees Emon destroyed — this beautiful town where he’s started a life he couldn’t have imagined as a child — and he immediately fights, taking on a one-on-one dragon just to rescue people, stumbling back to his shop, his beautiful shop reduced to rubble, with Salda and her children in tow. He spends months in Whitestone single-handedly maintaining the barrier in a state of half-exhaustion, and still fights alongside Vox Machina to defeat Thordak.
All this time, he watches Vax, the man with whom he’s flirted, who kissed him once, who said they couldn’t be together, struggle with mortality and fear and the uncertainty of his new love. And Shaun supports him and loves him and helps him discover his wings so that he might fly away from him. He does it all with a smile and a laugh because “the heart wants what it wants,” because of his endless belief that life will be okay. Vox Machina will kill the dragons, they’ll come back, he’ll set up shop again, and they’ll keep “pimping out [his] name.” He refuses to let Vax leave his side before the Thordak fight without a “til next time” and even at the campaign’s end, when we see him in 113, he’s still reassuring Vax that “it’ll be an honour knowing you still.”
And certainly, some of this optimism is a mask, a refusal to acknowledge or admit his own feelings. Shaun values his appearance, both physically in his dress and makeup, and emotionally in his semblance of optimism, control, and happiness. He doesn’t let many people close to him; Matt jokes, when we first see Gilmore on-stream, that “no one’s on a first-name basis with Gilmore,” and, true to this, it takes dozens of episodes for Vox Machina to start calling him Shaun. Within minutes of Pike bringing him back from the brink of death after he fights Thordak, he attempts to cast Prestidigitation to clean himself up; he does the same after learning of Vax’s death in the Search for Grog. Throughout the Chroma Conclave arc, he adamantly denies his exhaustion, despite the worries of his friends. He only jokes that he wants the “dragon business” to end so that he can return to his shop, that he’s been keeping a tab for how much Vox Machina owes him.
This is another mask he seems to put on, that of a hardnosed shopkeeper who puts money over sentimentality. But a shopkeeper like that wouldn’t sponsor a “bunch of bumblefucks” who constantly forget their promise to advertise his brand, or let them haggle him down in prices just because he finds Vax pretty.
I’d go so far to say that in the background of Vox Machina’s adventures is a small character arc in which Shaun acknowledges that he loves helping people. Despite his bravery in the initial dragon attack, he doesn’t admit how altruistic he was; in response to Vax’s praise, he responds only “I could have saved more.” It takes his service towards Whitestone to acknowledge that it “feels nice to be helping others”; he explains: “it’s been a long time since I put my energy and talents towards anything beyond making shiny things.” His appearance in the Search for Grog provides a sort of conclusion of this arc. Vox Machina find Shaun using his magic to provide entertainment for children, to help people who “have lost far more” than him. And even if he still hides his grief (he has “an audience to perform for,” after all), his open desire to help others, to travel even further than Tal’dorei to take care of people who are suffering, to use his endless charm for unabashed good — that shows real growth in character.
Anyways, that’s why I love him. Because in addition to being fabulous, funny, and powerful, he’s a dynamic, flawed, and interesting character. He gets to grow, to change, to deny his emotions, to resent his parents, to love, to be sad, and to learn. He gets to have traits that come into conflict with each other: his love for Vax and his belief that love takes its own course; his pride in his powers and the necessity of hiding their origins; his money-making ambitions and his desire to help others. And he gets to do all of this while being a “camp” gay man who wears eyeshadow and who flirts unashamedly.
And that’s why they call him glorious.
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