thimble and julien I will always be obsessed with your dynamic. Weâre 31 episodes in, only like 9 of those feature them at the same table but oh my god. like the fact that they both clearly donât really like each other but are so deeply similar. Theyâre both lethal and sarcastic and vengeful and very shallowly beneath all that theyâre so hurt and so lost in the world left in the wake of some of the worst things that couldâve happened to both of them. And the fact of that both of them share the loss of and desire to save the Golden Orchard. Like sure you hate each other but when you imagine your childhood you run through the same gardens.Â
And the part that makes me the most buckwild is probably that theyâve also been uncommonly kind to one another at points. Like Julien spitting on the body of her best friend, grabbing her wings, and then also telling her that Twigâs okay. And Thimble shitting on julien every chance she gets, reminding him he isnât her better and is a piece of shit, and then bringing him his fatherâs blade. Also thimble thanking julien and him yelling FUCK like itâs the worst thing thatâs ever happened to him. Oh seekers table v2 Iâm so excited to see how their dynamic evolves more.Â
"Six weeks into the term, I assigned my rhetoric and writing students a 20-page article. It was the same length I had assigned for five years and the same length I had read without complaint as an undergraduate a decade ago. Not one student finished it.
When I asked why, a student answered honestly: It was too long, and she kept losing track of what the paper was about. This was not a remedial class: These were students who had cleared the admissions process and written essays good enough to get them here. Yet a routine academic reading assignment had defeated them.
Every generation of professors has complained that their students cannot read. The lament is usually overblown, but data have caught up to anecdote, and what I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch. There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires.
In February 2024, Adam Kotsko, who teaches in the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College, wrote in Slate that students who once handled 30 pages of reading per class meeting now seem âintimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.â Crucially, he added that this is ânot a matter of laziness on the part of the studentsâ but of underlying skills they were never given a chance to build.
The Chronicle of Higher Educationâs 2024 investigation found the same pattern across institutions as different as the Stevens Institute of Technology and Wellesley College, where the average SAT exceeds 1400. Nicholaus Gutierrez, an assistant professor at Wellesley, told The Chronicle that the baseline for what students consider a reasonable amount of work has dropped so noticeably that he has cut his readings accordingly; a 750-word essay now strikes many students as long. At Stevens, the science and technology studies associate professor Theresa MacPhail described following the mantra of âmeet your students where they areâ for so long that she has begun to feel âlike a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard.â
Worse, the national data tell the same story in colder language. On the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) writing assessment, which is the most recent comprehensive writing benchmark, only 24 percent of 12th graders reached the Proficient level, and just 3 percent reached Advanced; another 21 percent scored below Basic. The reading side of the ledger is worse, and getting worse fast: The 2024 NAEP results released in September 2025 show 12th-grade reading scores at the lowest level recorded since the assessment began in 1992. Thirty-two percent of 12th graders now score below NAEP Basic in reading, meaning that, in the assessmentâs own language, they likely âcannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.â And yet more than half of these same seniors reported being accepted to a four-year college. That last sentence is the whole problem in one line: We are admitting a cohort that cannot read at a college level and are pretending otherwise.
Why is this happening? One reason, of course, is smartphones.
I came into teaching as a skeptic of the anti-smartphone argument: I had a phone in my pocket throughout high school and college in the 2010s, and I read long books anyway. I now think I was wrong, because the neuroscience has caught up. In a 2017 paper, Adrian F. Ward and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austinâs McCombs School of Business showed that the mere presence of a participantâs smartphone â whether that be face down, powered off, untouched, or across the desk out of vision â measurably reduces available working memory and fluid intelligence on cognitive tests, with the largest effects on the most phone-dependent users. A 2022 study by Motoyasu Honma and colleagues at Japanâs Showa University used near-infrared spectroscopy to compare reading on a smartphone with reading the same passage on paper, and found that smartphone reading produced overactivity in the prefrontal cortex, suppressed sigh generation, and led to general lower comprehension scores; the authors argued that the sigh inhibition and prefrontal overload were causally linked to the comprehension decline.
So when a student tells me they âkept losing trackâ of a 20-page article, I have to acknowledge that they may be describing a measurable neurological condition. The neural pathways that support sustained attention are built by use, and they atrophy without it. Your body is a use-it-or-lose-it system, and the brain is no exception.
Another reason for the decline in student reading capability is increasing reliance on generative AI. In June 2025, Nataliya Kosmyna and colleagues at the MIT Media Lab released a preprint titled âYour Brain on ChatGPT.â They divided 54 participants into three groups writing SAT-style essays â one using ChatGPT, the second group using a search engine, the last group using nothing â and monitored brain activity with a 32-channel EEG. The ChatGPT group showed the lowest neural connectivity of the three, with up to 55 percent reduced connectivity compared with the brain-only group, and âconsistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.â Eighty-three percent of LLM users could not quote a single line from essays they had written minutes earlier. When the LLM group was forced to write without AI in a follow-up session, their brain activity did not bounce back to baseline; the researchers coined the term âcognitive debtâ for the lingering deficit.
This is the first neurophysiological evidence that early reliance on LLMs measurably alters the brainâs engagement with writing tasks, and it is consistent with what those of us in front of classrooms are watching happen in real time. When I assign analysis, I am not trying to extract a polished product; I am trying to put the studentâs mind through resistance in order to make it stronger. Offloading the struggle to a chatbot does not âfree students up for higher-order work.â It deprives them of building the strength to do any substantial cognitive work at all.
There is a final factor that is contributing to this decline in reading skills, and that is that the students arriving in my classroom today are the first cohort to have experienced Common Core-influenced reading instruction across the entirety of their Kâ12 schooling. Whatever the standardsâ original intent, the on-the-ground implementation in many districts replaced sustained reading with the practice of pulling âevidenceâ from disconnected short passages, the same format used on the standardized tests that increasingly determine school funding. The education scholar Natalie Wexler, among others, has documented this pivot in detail: Students drilled on âfinding the main ideaâ in two-paragraph excerpts never build the stamina or background knowledge that longform reading requires. The pandemic then added fuel to a fire that was already burning. NAEP scores for 13-year-olds dropped sharply in 2022 and have not recovered. A 2023 EdWeek survey found that 24 percent of secondary-school administrators described pandemic learning loss in English and language arts as âsevere or very severe.â
In July 2025, the journalist Mary Harrington argued in The New York Times that âthinking is becoming a luxury good.â The ability to read deeply and reason at length is fragmenting along class lines as ultra-processed digital media replaces text in everyday life, much as ultra-processed food has replaced cooking. Her longer treatment of the subject in First Things makes the more provocative case that we are witnessing the end of print culture itself, and with it the end of the cognitive substrate on which modern liberal democracy was built.
I see this stratification in the classroom and on the page every week. My students from districts that protected sustained reading through small class sizes, strict phone policies, and faculty who refused to teach to the test all arrive with their attention relatively intact. My students from districts that surrendered to devices and standardized testing arrive cognitively winded. A democracy that requires a literate electorate is now training one fraction of that electorate out of literacy while marketing to the other a âdeep workâ lifestyle as a luxury good. The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow.
I do what I can in my own classroom to address the problems. I break 20-page articles into two halves and assign the first half with explicit analytical tasks. I require exploratory writing before formal drafts. I model (visibly, on the board) how to track an argument across pages or distinguish a sourceâs claim from my own analysis. I make structured peer review explicit, because the workshop format I used to take for granted now collapses into âthis is goodâ and âmaybe add more detailsâ the moment I step back.
But I want to be plain about the limits of what an individual instructor can do, and all of these solutions have costs. Scaffolding a 20-page article into halves compromises the integrity of the argument I am asking students to engage, just as modeling note-taking in a credit-bearing rhetoric course is using a college slot to teach a middle-school skill. None of the syllabi I teach are designed to deliver this type of cognitive rehabilitation, and pretending otherwise has produced credential inflation. We cannot keep conferring degrees on students who cannot do what the degree is supposed to certify.
Iâm afraid I donât have answers. I do, however, have some questions that may point us in the right direction. If higher education is going to respond to the reading crisis as a structural problem rather than a private burden carried by composition instructors and adjuncts, it has to stop avoiding the following questions: If a majority of incoming students cannot read at a level the curriculum requires, are we admitting students we cannot serve, or offering a curriculum we cannot provide?
Why are first-year writing and reading-intensive general-education courses still the most adjunctified, lowest-paid, highest-load corner of the university, at the precise moment when their work has become the most important work the institution does? What is the responsible institutional response for AI usage: Is it a syllabus statement, or a sequencing principle that requires students to demonstrate the cognitive work themselves before AI assistance is permitted?
Why are most college classrooms still phone-permissive by default? Kâ12 districts from Florida to California are now banning phones bell to bell; higher education has somehow lagged behind the public schools. Universities benefit from a pipeline they did not build and refuse to repair. What would it mean for a university system to invest seriously in the reading instruction happening in the high schools that feed it, rather than treating remediation as something to be quietly outsourced to first-year composition instructors?
The thing I am no longer willing to do is pretend this is a temporary adjustment period, or that âstudents will adapt.â They will not adapt on their own. The conditions that produced this collapse are still in place: the phones, the algorithmic feeds, the test-prep excerpts, staffing models that load the reading-intensive work onto the most precarious faculty, and now the chatbots that finish studentsâ sentences before theyâve even begun to think of them. If we want literate citizens, we will have to rebuild the conditions for literacy deliberately, against the grain of every incentive currently pointed the other way. I know the academy has the will to do that. It also has the obligation."
â Tyler Jagt, 1 June 2026, "My Students Canât Read"
The generational collapse in literacy is measurable, persistent, and likely to get worse.
Azune Nayar is not someone who was failed in his youth by the adults around him.
Azune Nayar is someone whose childhood and youth were marked by adults who, faced with bad choices, made the less-worse one because they cared about him.
His parents starved themselves to give him and his sister the chance of being recruited as child soldiers by a mercenary group, because that was the only way to protect him from starvation.
Thjazi Fang saw a child abandoned by the roadside, desperately, determinedly, and implausibly claiming he could fight. Thazi Fang was in the middle of waging a rebellion against the powers of Araman. That rebellion wasnât the best place for a child of twelve. But it was a better place than abandoned by the roadside or picked up by another mercenary group, and Thjazi cared, so Thjazi took him in and assigned him to noncombat work away from the front lines.
By 15 Azune was fighting on the front lines. (In an earlier war, the same was true of Thazi at that age.)
Thjaziâs rebellion failed. He asked his brother Hal to look out for the teenage Azune. Hal did so, treating Azune as part of his family. Hal did the same for other people who needed it. Being like family wasnât the same as being Halâs kid.
The tragedy of Azune isnât that he was failed or abandoned or uncared for or used. The tragedy of Azune is that the best that people who cared about him could give him still wasnât the same as what he needed, because being an adult doesnât make you all-powerful. Azuneâs problems werenât created by those who loved him. They were created by the world he lives in.
Azune lived his adult life for the Torn Banner because it was the life he knew; or out of loyalty; or because they were the ones trying to change that world into something different.
He offers understanding and empathy to enemies (Julien) and strangers (Vaelus). He learned that somewhere.
He will self-immolate for a cause. He likely learned that from his parents, who did it for him, and from Thjazi, who did it for the same cause.
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Hannan & Vaelus, Hannan/Vaelus
Additional Tags: Angst, Intimacy that isn't necessarily sexual but could be, Character Study, Vaelus POV, Hannan the very wise druid TM, but also very cool, spoilers to ep 31, Non-Sexual Intimacy
Summary:
Vaelus and Hannan in the Tintazi Woods on that fateful evening.
âI feel like Iâm walking through a secret,â she murmurs, unsure if she will be heard; unsure if she wants to be heard.
But his footsteps slow to a stop and when his eyes smile at hers, something aches in her chest. There are too many unspoken questions caught in how he holds her gaze, too many answers in the tears that stain his cheeks. It would be so easy to reach out, trace the warmth of his lips, map the strange wooden unfamiliarity of his body. A worship that demands, for once, nothing in return.
Read more below, also on ao3!!
The scent of alpine loam blooms thick in Vaelusâ nostrils. Jasmine and honeysuckle carrying through the cooling air of the Tintazi wood. Hannan must smell it too with way his lungs expand as if to taste it, the way his footsteps land with quiet reverence on the forest floor.
He reaches to move aside a stray shoot of jasmine that had falling in their path, not unlike the one he had laced around her wrist some minutes earlier. Vaelus steps into the clearing.
Lake Nahami lies nestled in the towering pines, reflecting the sounds of all the tiny kingdoms that are slowly coming to life in the evening: the drone of crickets, the pale glow of fireflies, moonblossoms spreading their silvery faces. It feels almost like walking into a home she never knew about, the soft skirts of the earth opening to welcome them. Or perhaps it feels like trying to remember an enchantment poised on the tip of her tongue.
âI feel like Iâm walking through a secret,â she murmurs, unsure if she will be heard; unsure if she wants to be heard.
But his footsteps slow to a stop and when his eyes smile at hers, something aches in her chest. There are too many unspoken questions caught in how he holds her gaze, too many answers in the tears that stain his cheeks. It would be so easy to reach out, trace the warmth of his lips, map the strange wooden unfamiliarity of his body. A worship that demands, for once, nothing in return.
He is so close.
Physical contact among the sisters of Sylandri had been frequent, but clinical. They would braid one anotherâs hair. Bathe each other in deference to the bodies they had been gifted. Dirt scraped raw from beneath every fingernail. Skin scrubbed to an unmarred canvas of devotion. Cleansing, cold, clinical touch.
There is nothing clinical about the way Hannan shivers when Vaelus reaches a hand to his jaw. There is nothing clinical about how his tears, glistening with that same secret, slide freely over her thumb to pool in her palm.
Vaelus exhales wonder.
She is not touching a creation of Sylandri. She is not touching a body to be worshipped for its miraculous creation. No. This body belongs to a man, and his name is Hannan.Â
His name is Hannan, and Hannan is real.
âArenât you used to this?â Vaelus asks, tiny sparks alighting in her chest at the flutter of Hannanâs lashes against her fingers, the soft padded inside of his hand moving to cradle her own. His eyes burnish with such a rich, earthen hazel, that for a moment Vaelus thinks she could be looking at the fresh fall of autumn leaves or the dull brown of moss-riddled oak. Hannan smiles.
âUsed to the feeling of someoneâs touch for the first time?â He says softly, voice falling to a whisper. His lips part as she traces them. His breath hot and damp with humidity. âI hope I never grow used to that.
The ache in her chest twists when his fingers trace the chains of her veil, a question. She knows what it looks like when she removes it: the tiny criss-cross indents across her cheeks and nose that take hours to fade. The veil that tells the world that the Sisters will never smile again, the veil that keeps chains on their faces.
Hannan drops his hand from the veil to gather both of hers, the Stone of Nightsong wrapped carefully inside. A wisp of a thought crosses her mind: she cannot kiss with the veil still on her face, she cannot feel the texture of his skin on her lips. How will Hannan ever know that she is smiling, right now, right here, before him, for him?
âIf immortality can be given up for a child, do you think we could find a way?â Vaelus says. She isnât sure what she is asking, isnât sure what she means by âweâ. Only that the question makes her head spin, and that his answering grip around her fingers is painfully close to a promise.
âI would do it in a second,â he says, dropping his forehead to hers.
âA second,â she echoes.
The forest breathes around them, the sound of muffled applause barely registering through the trees
The union of flesh had never been required to make an immortal child. It was all knees on cold stone floors and a series of prayers after a century of proving worthiness. Thinking on it now makes it seem almost silly.
Maybe she could take all the reverence she had given to a Shaper and turn it into a new worship, to the feeling of how her wrist tingles where his lips have pressed. Hannanâs body is solid before her, the lines of his collarbone alive with the movement of breath.
This body belongs to a man, his name is Hannan, and he is kin.
âYou are crying,â Hannan says, eyes gentle with curiosity. Heâs watching her carefully, every small thought on his own face unguarded, offered freely to her. Vaelus beats down the tightness that threatens to clamp her throat. âWhat is your heart saying to you, Vaelus?â
Vaelus looks down at their fingers tangling together around the Stone. A stone that she had held with such one-minded possessiveness for days, a stone she had been seeking for months for her own purpose. It is almost unbelievable that she is not snatching the Stone away to keep inside her coat. Something relaxes in Hannan when he follows her eyes downwards, and it takes her far too long to realise that is it trust he is gifting to her in this moment.
I donât deserve this trust, Hannan. I donât deserve your trust. Donât relax around me. Donât.
Then their fingers close simultaneously around the stone and the light sunders them apart.
Time blurs, slows, speeds.
Vaelus curses at the magic, hears the sounds of Azuneâs voice, and feels like she is drowning under the weight of the decision she must make. What is your heart saying? How is she supposed to choose? She had never given herself permission to be anything other than a devoted paladin, let alone answer the desires of her heart.
âDo what you heart tells you.â Hannanâs voice is impossibly calm, his eyes a steady hazel even as his body is suspended by magic.
An eternity to have all of your complexity, all of your possibility, all of your dreams folded into an idyllic paradise. Everything was hers. Our immortal lives given to us, and in exchange we gave up the ability to have freedom, to make our own families and our own stories.
These had been Hannanâs words to her, earlier. The ones that had left her with a kind of disorientation from having her foundations so thoroughly shaken. Centuries of purpose, sworn oaths of adorationâall rattling around inside like a loose pebble in an empty jar.
Hannan asks again if she is okay, but she cannot answer. Not with the possibility of her sister so close to her, her family, breathing and alive in AramĂĄn once again. She sees also, Occtis, and Julien. Thaisha.
The Stone is hot in her hands.
âIâm sorry I took so long!â She cries, unsure if she is saying it to the forest, to her family, to Hannan, to herself. But she is not speaking to Sylandri. No. Because the secret is not a secret anymore. Never had it been a secret. She had never loved Sylandri more than she had loved her sister and her family. And she had been a fool if she thought she would never love anyone else again like she did her family.
Nobody owns her love. Not Sylandri, not another person, not even the woods.
And perhaps the worst part is that, from the darkest corners of her mind, her decision still ends up being shamefully close to the flip of a coin. Her mind shudders between two alternative worlds, two entirely opposed futures. In the end it is Hannanâs face crystallising in her vision, the recent memory of the solidity of his body against hers. The first real thing in the midst of the maelstrom of magic. The first real person she has been able to see as something other than an obstacle in her path.
Her eyes squeeze close and she screams an apology into the forest, holding the imaginary body of her sister close to her chest and presses, presses, presses until she know she can press no further. I love you. Then her arms are released, and power unravels around her.
It is touch that anchors her back into the present. Two warm hands wrapped around her forearms, hazel eyes asking are you okay? And of course she is not okay, but she can see in the painful twist of Hannanâs lips, the tears not yet dry on his face, that he knows.
âYou have done something so selfless, and I will promise you this,â Hannan says, breathless with a vibrant energy. âI will join your fight: the home that you have bought for themââ He points to the city, to Dol-Makjar ââWe will buy for yours. And it will be done the longer and harder way, yes. But I will relish that journey with you.â
Thereâs a brick crushing her heart with a terrible grief, but the gratitude she feels in that moment is immense. âThank you,â she says, too stunned to respond with anything more coherent. He understands. In this moment, she doesnât care for being praised for her selfless decision, or to hear about all the good she has done. She just needs someone to understand what she has given up, and how lonely her decision feels. Hannan understands this. âYou willââ she swallowsâ âgo with me on this journey?â
His laughter like leaf-fall in a harmless breeze. âDid I not just say I would?â
Vaelus wants to kiss him. Or yell at the trees. Or screamed in grief. Throw her censor. Something, anything to reconcile the guilt with the relief.
So when name Mara is spoken, and his voice borders too close to accusation, the chaotic whirl of her emotions spill over. She doesnât mean to yell at him, not really. She tells herself she had been so caught up in her single-minded journey that she hadnât paid enough attention to the people who were alive, living, in trouble, in pain.
âI donât know you, I meanâIâm sorry, but I donât!â Vaelus yells to him. The words sound heartless and clunky as they leave her mouth, more so for the confusion that gathers in the corners of his eyes.
Vaelusâ minds spins.
Failure had never been allowed among the Sisters of Sylandri. It would be punished severely and the consequences frequently lasted for decades. Her body tenses with the memory of it, of all the times she had been disrespectful. And so she is afraid to look back at him. To see the promise he had started to give her snatched away before it could take its first step.
I shouldâve told himâwhat was I thinkingâI shouldâve told him.
Since when has hope ever needed more than half a seed of her own stupid mouth to dash itself into oblivion?
And yet.
Hannan stands firm in a bed of lightning, the air crackling around him, his hair a wild flame in the wind. These is still confusion in his eyes, impatience, a touch of lonely angerâbut his body remains open to her. A steady horizon she could tread towards. There will be no punishment. There will be no consequences. His response is so practical and measured that Vaelus relaxes all at once.
âDo you want me to go with you?â She asks, stupidly. There is no reason he would want her to follow him, especially now, with her clunky mouth. No reason.
Hannan studies her for a beat too long. âOnce again you will make a choice,â he says, firm. âGo where you heart tells you.â
Her throat is dry and thick, her breath shallow. Dolls are not suppose to have senses, but her heart might just burst through her ribs. Dolls are not suppose to feel, but she has to wipe the tears from her cheeks again. Hannanâs face softens.
âBe safe,â she manages, tearing her eyes away from him to the direction of the theatre through the woods. She has already committed to helping Thaisha. This is where trust begins, doesnât it? With commitment to someone because of a promise, not because of worship. And there is no reason he would want her to follow him.
He nods once. Thereâs something there, a small hesitation that briefly touches his brow, before he disappears in a flash of lightning.
It takes a long time to remember to breathe again.
Gradually the forest settles down until the crickets are loud enough to compete with her thoughts. Vaelus clamps down on the uncertainty that threatens to crawl out of her throat.
She will change. This much she promises to herself as she follows Azune back. She will learn how to accept trust that is solely given to her, and not given to a dead Shaper. Learn how to give trust to someone who follows their heart, and not their prayer.
And later, she will take these new memories and lock them inside a bracelet of jasmine. Later, she will take down the veil from her face and restitch the threads into something she can wind around Hannanâs wrist. Maybe then he will look up and see something on her face that is no longer a secret.
a reminder for everyone, since one of the toughest things about writing posts about CritRole campaigns is checking when and what specifically happened, but there's tools to quickly search transcripts for all episodes so far.
there's a transcript search by Stuart Langridge. allows for filtering by speaker, shows each instance as its own result, and has timestamps to videos.
I prefer the Langridge search, but if you're having trouble with the search result limit on it, you can search the transcripts on Encyclopedia Exandria. hosting them in their own namespace allows for limiting search terms to transcripts only, and results can be filtered further down using categories (example searching for "Lana Strossa" in "Campaign 4 transcripts"). downside is it does not show each instance within an episode, only brings up each episode once, and has no timestamps, but it doesn't have a limit on the number of results and it includes transcripts for more one-shots than Langridge covers.
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romaincrisis
