i might not have explained it very well in my last post.
I know people aren’t simply good or bad. But the last ep hit me really hard when it comes to Caleb.
In the earlier episodes, I was deeply moved by him desperately trying to revive a cat, holding it in his arms and crying like his whole world was collapsing. I thought whatever led to his family’s loss must have been due to what he went through at academy because of the teacher.
And then this week you suddenly tell me he killed that cat with his own hands???
And burned his parents too???
I knew tm9 through the animation, so afterward I went to check the wiki and also watched Critical Role 2, ep 18. tbh the original story is slightly more acceptable… but not by much.
If you say Caleb was brainwashed, I assumed it meant the kind of brainwashing where you can’t even recognize your own family anymore. But in the show, he walks home completely lucid. He sees his mom, his dad, and the cat. Then he blocks the door with magic and sets the fire, with no hesitation, no confusion, not even a moment of struggle. Nothing.
He only breaks down after the flames rise and he hears his parents screaming.
That’s a totally different level from killing monks during a mission.
This doesn’t feel like a controlled victim. It feels like someone who consciously chose to carry out what he believed was the right thing for the Empire. He chose to kill his own family.
It’s not that I can’t handle a character with a dark past, it’s that the contrast between what he did then and the fragile, soft, desperate version of him we see now is so violently extreme that it feels almost impossible to reconcile.
I keep thinking that if the animation had given more buildup, like more details about the indoctrination, more signs of his mental state falling apart, even a bit of hesitation at the door, or if the other two who did the same horrible thing and still work for Trent had been the ones to actually carry out the final act, it would’ve been so much easier to process.
But instead they chose the coldest, harshest way to show it, like it’s deliberately choosing the hardest version to forgive, with zero psychological buffer for the audience.
I do kinda like Caleb. I still want to.
But now I genuinely dunno how to look at him after this.
