General Impressions: Yes, good, it holds up, thank god.
I want to write ten thousand words of meta about how this movie redefined the superhero genre of its day. I had to cut this post down SO MUCH, guys, you don't even know.
Not only is it still really entertaining, there is enough in this movie to be really worth picking apart. It's a fascinating entrant into this whole marathon, because as the first movie, it doesn't have anything else in the franchise to fall back on. This was a standalone shot in the dark, an attempt to make a blockbuster out of a superhero nobody had heard of and a washed-up actor who'd last been notable as a random love interest on Ally McBeal. It had to stand on its own merits, no greater universe to buoy it up, and it did.
I am going to have to write a separate post about the things that Iron Man promised us for this franchise, and how the rest of the MCU did or did not deliver. Damnit.
The Hero: Tony Stark is a fascinating guy.
Iron Man does a really good job of embracing him as a flawed disaster of a man who's a victim of his own good fortune: this guy is both the smartest and the richest man in very nearly every room he's ever been in, and it has made him a mess.
His emotional journey is believable and clearly shown. Tony flips his entire life upside down to go from arms dealer to superhero, except the whole movie makes it very clear that literally every step of the way he's being impossibly, inescapably himself with it. The man who doesn't give a shit about his very prestigious award is the same man who doesn't give a shit about his stock prices tanking or weapons dev being the entire foundation of his company. Part of why it works so well for Tony to out himself as Iron Man at the end of the movie is because in every possible way, they're the same guy -- ostentatious, flamboyant, dramatic, incredibly intense about some things and super blase about others, obsessive, superhuman on the skin and very human underneath.
Compared to brooding Christopher Nolan Batman or the pressures and anxieties of Sam Raimi Spiderman, both of whom are constantly preoccupied with questions of Good and Evil, Tony feels like a creature from a completely different genre. It's effective, unique, and well-carried by the movie.
The Villain: Pretty solid!
Obadiah Stane is a well-executed foil to Tony, which is exactly what this movie needs. He's contained and responsible where Tony's wild. He's respectable. And yet, so much of this movie is about complacency. Tony was too busy being a playboy bouncing off the walls to pay attention to who his fortune and his company hurt. Obie paid attention to all of it, and decided he didn't care. The movie ends up saying some interesting things, this way, about carelessness vs. callousness. Tony and Obie working together destroyed a lot of lives, but carelessness can be fixed, if you're smacked in the face with what you've done. Obie looked the man he half-raised in the face and tried to murder him in person when the hands off method failed.
The bit where this sixty-something-year-old multimillionaire businessman decided that what he really needed to do to secure his fortune and future, was personally get in the robotic suit and try to kill Tony himself? That's definitely leaning into genre conventions at the expense of logic. But hey, it's a superhero movie. Sometimes you have to let these things go.
The Ensemble: Thematic and relevant.
There are really only three other characters who matter in the movie: Yinsin, Pepper, and Rhodey. Yinsen is a pretty standard 'older mentor who dies to set the hero off on his journey,' and he fulfills his extremely classic role suitably. Pepper's an intelligent, competent love interest whose emotions towards her boss and friend are believably complex. Both good!
Rhodey is so interesting to me, on this rewatch. He's the one person who's put forth as Tony's actual friend, rather than a coworker, although they both occupy a similar professional space. He tries hard to be a good friend! But Rhodey is a part of the military-industrial complex, and when Tony comes back from the desert and starts to rock the boat -- when he stops playing along, stops wanting to build weapons, stops playing the game -- then Rhodey is there to try and nudge him back. You must have PTSD, Rhodey and Pepper think. You're making strange decisions. We've all been living in and benefiting from this system forever, what's wrong with you that it's suddenly a problem now? It was understated, but well done for what it was.
The Plot: Reasonably sensical!
The plot of Iron Man is easy to follow, maintains good tension throughout, and ties well together beginning to end. I don't have a lot to say about this one that I didn't already cover above, I'm just prepared for a slog through movies where "this plot makes sense" is a sky-high bar, so the fact that Iron Man not only clears that but does so enjoyably and well is pretty great.
The Franchise: It's hard to talk about how Iron Man relates to the movies that came before it when there are none, and talking about how it inspires the movies that come next is a WHOLE separate essay. Skip this one.
VERDICT: A solid 8/10
I know that for the MCU, this is pretty high on the list of movies that manage to be good at all, but I'm entering into this experience with an open mind and a willingness to discover that many of these movies are better than I actually expect. Iron Man is a very good superhero movie. I will probably watch it again someday, and I am not sad I watched it again now.
I would love to hear more mike wheeler - Steve Harrington masculinity thoughts (also whatever happened to Hopper to make him action guy my beloathed)! Also will we get a mike chapter for and they were married?
Okay yes! I am fascinated by Mike and Steve as narrative contrasts, and I always find myself looking for fic where the two of them meaningfully interact, and I keep meaning to write about them.
(Also: Mike deserves his own chapter of that fic, but he's getting folded into Dustin's. What Mike really deserves is his own fic that takes place in that universe, because I know what his deal is there and it's a doozy, but that is a very different post.)
Anyway! For starters, I don't think that Steve and Mike are intentionally meant to be foils. There's an element of it in the first season, where Steve exists to support Nancy's character, and Nancy and Mike are meant to be foils -- Steve is the Popular Kid, the antithesis of Mike and his friends' little group of nerds, he and Tommy and Carol are written into the same category as Troy but older and less actively murderous, and the fact that Nancy's dating him says things about her -- but they end up occupying oddly similar spaces and cool parallels come out of that anyway.
A core thing about it is that Steve and Mike are both the guy in their respective age group casts on the show. The Guy. The central one, the normal one, the presumed-to-be-straight one -- and yes, this is fandom and we have Opinions about that, but the Duffer brothers think they're both straight, and that matters here. They're white, they're able-bodied, they have money. They are, in a sense, normal.
Narratively, they very often act as central/POV character for scenes they're in, at least once Steve gets past the fistfight in S1 and awakens to the fact that he's a person who can make decisions. And that makes sense, because being The Guy also means they're the closest to the classic TV protagonist archetype, the guy who does the hero shit and gets the girl in the end. Hopper is also The Guy, and always has been: in S1 it's just him and Joyce, but even as we add more adults, the only real challenge to his The Guy status is Bob (which is of course why Bob had to die). Murray is a bizarre conspiracy nut, and queer-coded besides that. Owens is an affable bad guy. Alexei and Dmitri and Yuri are all Russian.
Being The Guy comes with a certain amount of baggage. All three of them have to be romantic leads, and have to be crossed in love about it. All three of them are protectors in one way or another. And all three of them are on occasion assholes who have one hell of a time with sincerity and affection.
And this is where we get into Toxic Masculinity, because again, while I don't think the Duffers intended a pile of parallels between these three guys, well. Firstly, The Guy as an archetype is built on a pile of toxic masculine stereotypes, so that's often there to begin with. Secondly, it's the same writers, so certain themes rhyme whether they're intended to or not.
In particular, one of the core tenets of toxic masculinity, not just in ST but as a thing in the world, is when and where it's acceptable to experience soft emotions of affection, care, and vulnerability. The first rule of toxic masculinity is don't. The second rule, the caveat rule, is a little asterisk saying 'except, occasionally, with a female romantic partner, if you absolutely must.'
And so we actually see a lot of unfolding of this in Steve! One thing we know about Steve, without precisely being told, is that he's deeply lonely -- for a popular kid he sure seems to only have two Actual Friends when the show starts and they hardly seem to even like each other. He has a new Favorite Person every season, and he clings to them with the joy of a devoted golden retriever. His mental image of happily-ever-after is a house full of kids with enough siblings to never get lonely, family vacations about close quarters and spending time together. We never see his parents. For all a lot of the 'horrible abuse' fanon is very much fanon, Steve is inarguably a lonely kid. And where do we see him reaching out for affection?
It's not Tommy and Carol, although until they break up he's constantly in their company unless he's alone with Nancy. They hardly even seem to like each other very much, and yet they've stayed at his empty house enough for Tommy to know about his mother's fireplace and Steve to insist he do laundry while he's here. No, the person who Steve is allowed to feel things with and for is Nancy, because she's the caveat, she's the exception. This is why Steve is consistently focused on getting Nancy back, getting a new girlfriend, getting a date. That's the rule!!!
The really fabulous thing about Steve's arc across the first three seasons, and even into S4, is that this quest for romantic affection and vulnerability is both thwarted and rewarded again and again. He tries to apologize to Nancy, to win her back: by the time he sees her again, Nancy's got a new boyfriend, but Steve has a new brother. Dustin is Steve's favorite person by the start of S3; he gets Steve's haircare secrets, he gets Steve's loyalty, he gets Steve's joy. In S3, Steve tries to pour his whole heart into a different girlfriend, and Robin turns him down flat while also simultaneously opening herself up with such vulnerability that they instantly become best friends. Robin is S4's Favorite Person, but the great thing about these relationships being platonic is that Steve gets to have more than one! He gets to have both Dustin and Robin in his life! He gets the other kids as part of the package! Bit by bit, instead of a girlfriend who Steve is "allowed" to be soft with, Steve gains actual friends who he gets to be real with whether it's allowed or not.
And the really tragic thing about Mike Wheeler is that he's doing the opposite. Mike starts out with three friends, three best friends, absolutely devoted to one another. As kids, they're young enough to be free of most of the stranglehold of toxic masculinity yet, although of course it's starting. And then there's El.
Mike charts a really interesting course over four seasons, and the shape of it is not a straight trajectory from 'Mike adores and is BFF with Will' to 'Mike thinks only about El.' Hell, from what we see of S1, the Party are all best friends pretty equally before Will goes missing -- Lucas is the one ready to break into a government lab for him, not Mike. Mike's trajectory is far more 'I derive the bulk of my personal self-worth from protecting other people, and as soon as somebody needs to be saved I go fully into Paladin Mode, making me feel worthwhile and important." It just so happens that the two people in Mike's field of vision who most generally need protection and saving are Will and El. Which leads to Mike's intense Will-focused devotion in S2 (El is gone but Will is also in really significant need, and Mike just straight-up activates, jumping immediately into solicitously taking care of his friend because Something Needs Doing And I Can Do It). And Mike's intense El-focused devotion in S4, where El needs a literal quest to come and rescue her. And just a lot of Mike in general.
The problem with all of that is the part where, unlike Steve who keeps forging new platonic relationships, Mike keeps neglecting his more and more. The S3 Will fight is so good at illustrating that, because look -- we all know Will has a crush on Mike, but at no point during that fight does Will ask, even subtextually, for romantic attention. He's asking for platonic attention, which Mike is absolutely failing to give. "Where's Dustin right now? You don't know, and you don't even care." But as Mike says, they're not kids any more -- and this is how growing up is supposed to work!
(Note: I don't want to say that it's toxic for Mike to be in love with El, or really caught up in that relationship -- he's fourteen! she's his first girlfriend! he thought she was dead! But Mike's an asshole in S3 because he's caught up enough to not notice his friend's feelings until they explode at him, and yeah, I do think part of that is because he knows he's Not Supposed To.)
S4 is a lot, because here's where we're really seeing the culmination of a lot of what Mike's been unfortunately moving towards. We've hit a point where those vulnerable feelings that Mike's allowed to share, at most, with his girlfriend, feel like too much to even share with his girlfriend. He can't say 'I love you'. He can't even talk to Will. The conversation he does have with Will is honestly mostly about Mike and his feelings of inadequacy, of not measuring up, not being special, but it has to be couched in the context of El. If there's a reverse-Bechdel test to be done on S4, past the very first episode I'm pretty sure Mike fails it -- I don't think he has a single conversation that isn't about his girlfriend in one capacity or another.
In contrast, S4 Steve is, yes, pretty focused on girls-in-general and Nancy-in-specific, and yeah, there's a little bit of backsliding going on there. But he's also having conversations with Robin about her fears and longings, having weird little interludes where Eddie's the one bringing up Nancy rather than Steve himself. He's hurt at the end when Nancy is clearly still with Jonathan, but he's able to move on, to go fold clothes and care about Robin's love life instead of his own -- his optimistic happy ending in S4 is that his best friend is going to get the girl, not him.
I think there's a lot more to say, which I only brushed on briefly here, about other aspects of Mike and Steve that work in parallel or contrast -- their protector thing, which feels very intrinsic but shows up very differently in both of them, the way Steve says 'I love you' so easily and Mike has trouble saying it at all, the way they are both very much extremely normal guys, at least on paper. There's so much to say. I think that has to be a different post.
I will say, in terms of Hopper: Jim Hopper is what it looks like when those pent-up feelings that you aren't allowed to express to anybody other than a romantic partner sit and fester for decades. Fuck, there were things about Vietnam he didn't even tell his wife, that sat like poison both emotional and biological between them. When we meet him in S1, he's processing grief with drugs and drinking and processing fear with rage. He has spent so much of the past four seasons processing fear as rage.
Of course Joyce is the one person he's allowed to, sometimes, on occasion, be soft with. Of course nearly his every interaction with Mike is macho dominance posturing. Of course the entire trajectory of his relationship with El is a push-pull of Hopper retreating into authoritarianism and anger instead of the terror of honesty, and then getting to see the consequences of that when his daughter pulls away. Every season has broken him down a little more that way, but then the yo-yo pulls back (Season 3 whyyyyyyyyy). By Season 4, he's been beaten and starved and frozen and shattered enough that we get maybe the most honest monologue of his life, to a Russian prison guard, because they're about to die so what do the rules matter any more. It's a clear window into an endless pit of self-loathing, because for twenty or thirty years Hopper's been letting those feelings eat in instead of out, and bit by bit they've been devouring him.
El is hope, for him, and Joyce is hope, and the cracks that broke open in Kamchatka to maybe let in a little more air that might not seal right back up again are hope. But it's hard. It's hard! It makes him an absolute asshole, including and especially towards the people he wants most to protect. (And there's that protector thing again.)
Anyway, I am on the record as liking Steve a lot and having very little patience for Mike and Hopper, but like. They're not that different, at their core. They just put the pieces together in a different order.
I'm doing it, I'm writing an overly-long post A WHOLE SERIES of overly-long posts about how the Stranger Things kids play D&D, and what exactly first edition and AD&D were for.
Source: I've been playing since 3rd ed/3.5 era, NOT AD&D, but I've had a lot of friends who've been in the game for much longer and I'm kind of a nerd for rulesets so I watch D&D bros go off on youtube sometimes for fun. Also, I've actually read the AD&D player's handbook, which is an experience let me tell you. If anyone who's played older editions wants to chip in, go for it!
I think I'm going to have to write a separate post (or posts...god hopefully not posts) about the kids' individual classes. So stay tuned for that. I'll link it from this one when it's done.
First, some history: The earliest editions of D&D are a little confused, numbering-wise, because they didn't know there were going to be numbered editions yet. Dungeons and Dragons debuted in 1974 as an offshoot of mini-based tabletop wargames that already existed at the time. These were mostly big games, where players controlled whole armies rather than creating individual characters, and set their forces against one another. (Not unlike very complicated games of chess, if you really think about it.) D&D was not, to my knowledge, the first individual-character-based ttrpg, but it became the biggest pretty readily.
Advanced Dungeons and dragons, or AD&D, came out in '77 or '78 (Wiki says '77, the publication date on the copy I've been using says '78), although they were still publishing Basic D&D as an alternate option, more or less until the mid-nineties. AD&D was a lot more rules-heavy and had a lot more intricacy going on (relatively speaking), and it's the game the ST kids play.
Compared to modern D&D, AD&D's basic rules feel both more and less. The mechanics themselves are often way more complex, and navigating your way through all of those percentage tables as a DM implies a pretty high level of math skill, worth noting for both an 11-year-old or a guy who failed senior year twice. The character options, on the other hand, feel slim. On first glance.
AD&D only has five classes -- ten if you count subclasses, which you probably should for AD&D. There's fighters, with special fighter subclasses ranger (Lucas's class) or paladin (Mike's class); clerics (Will's class, supposedly), with special cleric subclass druid; magic-users (or mages, theoretically El's class), with special mage subclass illusionist; thieves (NOT rogues! but this is definitely Lady Applejack's actual class, with some caveats), with special thief subclass assassin; and monks. You will note I did not mention bards. We will get to bards. (Probably in the character post, when I talk about Dustin. Bards are...special.)
AD&D had no barbarians, no warlocks, no sorcerers. No special, prescribed forked paths for a character to venture down. Subclasses functioned mostly like classes do nowadays -- you'd roll up a character and be a paladin from day one, simply lumped under fighter because many of the core mechanics were the same. And a significant percentage of text given to describing these classes seems full of really restrictive orders and conditions. Clerics are never allowed to use a bladed weapon? Druids refuse to touch metal? Assassins must engage the local guildmaster in a duel to the death in order to progress to level 14? Where's the creativity, asks the modern 5e D&D player? Where's the freedom?
And this highlights a really core, central thing about how AD&D works and what it was for, that I think modern audiences can very easily miss:
1st edition AD&D is a game about archetypes.
Modern D&D is a game played in a sandbox that's been dug up and worked over for the past fifty years, in a cultural landscape that values individuality and originality and sometimes pretends that daring to share a trope with anything that came before is somewhere between boring and a straight-up crime. Original D&D came with very different baggage, and while it was still very much a game about storytelling, the KINDS of stories being told were a little different.
Characters weren't intended to be highly specialized, granular creations with intricate backstories and complex individualized skill sets. This wasn't even because those kinds of character-driven games or narratives were seen as bad, necessarily -- it's simply not what the game was written for!
First edition D&D was designed for big, epic adventures, where players could embody their own personal instance of a specific stock character trope. It was written for "I want to be a knight!" and "I want to be the magician!". It was about getting to be YOUR VERSION of a very particular, already-existing idea that would have been familiar from fantasy fiction at the time.
So, when the AD&D rules say that druids hold oak and ash trees sacred, that they will never destroy woodland or crops under any circumstances, that they cannot and will not use metal weapons or armor, that there only exist nine Level 12 druids in the world and they form a council with students below them -- this isn't an attempt to micromanage players, to be arbitrarily pedantic or controlling. This is Gary Gygax attempting to present the archetype that 'druid' is meant to encompass. This is what a druid is, according to this ruleset: a priest of nature, part of an order with rules and loyalties, with these priorities and these ideals. Mechanics and personality are not divorced in AD&D as they are in 5e; they are written together, to outline a specific character concept, and that is what's presented for the players to get to play.
If this sounds like it leads to boring, formulaic stories -- well, it could. But archetype-based stories, particularly adventure stories, are by no means necessarily bad. A story about a mysterious and knowledgeable old wizard; a naive-but-determined farmboy full of destiny and potential; a reckless rogue, slick but sometimes bumbling, selfish but secretly loyal; a beautiful princess, charming and clever and sharp-tongued when she wishes to be -- it's a pulp novel full of stock characters and tropes. It's Star Wars. What makes Star Wars special is NOT that its characters are specific, convoluted, or entirely original. What makes it special is that the specific instantiation of these characters, the little things that make Luke Skywalker be Luke Skywalker and not any other callow farmboy. Star Wars uses these archetypes well, and that makes them deeply satisfying. THAT'S the kind of story ethic behind AD&D.
First edition D&D has a reputation of being all about combat, and not about story at all. And on the surface, it's somewhat true: AD&D's rules are also highly combat-based. This isn't because players were expected to only do combat and dungeon crawls, and never roleplay -- but it WAS expected that, by signing on to play D&D, players were most interested in a campaign of exploration and fighting towards some fanciful goal. There was an element of buy-in from the start. The game was (and still very much is), at its core, about going on a quest.
The thing to remember, though, is that a quest IS a story. It's not the psychological trauma-unburdening character-driven narrative that pop culture might tell you to expect in modern D&D, but AD&D was every inch as story-based as the game's ever been. The stories being told were a little different, but with a very similar root.
The 1979 Dungeon Master's Guide is actually full of information about how to set up a world and stock it with people, political factions, and socioeconomic logistics. There are extensive rules about how high-level adventurers become part of the political fabric of the realm, building forts and amassing followers and making names for themselves. (Here, again, we see echoes of AD&D's forebearers in war games, and certain elements of the game that are all but gone from modern D&D.)
What there AREN'T a lot of rules about, on the other hand, are things like skill checks. There's no "persuasion" or "investigation" in AD&D, no list of specific things players can do and how good they are at them. Aside from combat and a small handful of specific non-combat activities, discretion over the success or failure of just about anything was left up to the DM. A DM was always free to call for a dice roll, and could set an arbitrary target number for success at any activity, but the rules also don't say they have to. To see if the characters persuade the barmaid to give them a hand, the players would have to be persuasive. To find the hidden clue in the cluttered chamber, the players might have to describe themselves looking in the right place.
In other words, there are relatively few rules for activities outside of combat, not because those activities were expected to be absent, but because they were expected to be unpredictable. How much exploration, and what players had to explore; what NPCs to interact with, and how they might react to being spoken to; what factions might exist, what moral quandaries could unfold, even the goal and big bad guy of the whole campaign -- the original sourcebooks for AD&D offer at best some very general advice, and NO hard and fast rules. That was for players and DMs to decide.
Many players and DMs, I know, fell on the side of engaging in relatively little worldbuilding complexity outside of the very mechanically-crunchy dungeon crawl. What little we see from the campaigns in ST is certainly mostly combat-oriented. And yet there are also hints of storylines happening off camera. Season 1's one-day eight-hour adventure was probably mostly dungeon crawl. Season 4's campaign takes most of a school year, until the players recognize the members of the cult they've been chasing for months, and know Vecna lore that would only have been published in one or two places anywhere by then, which means they probably learned it in-game. We don't see a lot of evidence of specific character plotlines -- in fact, repeatedly we're shown that the Party's characters share names with their players, making the whole thing even more clearly a big kids' game of let's-pretend. But that doesn't mean there's not a story.
So in short, the original game of D&D is built for epic quests, founded in very specific archetypes, but with the space for just about infinite in variation within that framework. That's what the Stranger Things kids are playing.
(And with this posted, I can start writing about the individual classes these kids are playing and what that says about each of them.)
For a long, large part of my life, being queer in a media landscape--finding queerness in a media landscape--has meant theft.
I'm a Fandom Old, somehow, these days, older than most and younger than some, in that way that's grown associated with grumpy crotchetyness and shotguns on porches and back in my day, we had to wade through our Yahoo Groups mailing lists uphill both ways, boring and irrelevant anecdotes from Back In Those Days when homophobia clearly worked differently than it does now, probably because we weren't trying hard enough. I've seen a lot of stories through the years. I've read a lot of fanfic. (More days than not, for the past twenty years. I've read a lot of fanfic.)
When people my age start groaning and sighing at conversations about representation and queerbaiting, when we roll our eyes and drag all the old war stories out again in the face of AO3 is terrible and Not Good Enough, so often what we say is: you Young Folks Today have no idea how hard, how scary, how limiting it was to be queer anywhere Back In Those Days. Including online, maybe especially online, including in a media landscape that hated us so much more than any one you've ever known. And that is true. Always and everywhere, again and again, it's true, we remember, it's true.
We don't talk so much about the joy of it.
Online fan spaces were my very first queer communities, ever. I was thirteen, I was fourteen, I was fifteen--I was a lonely, over-precocious "gifted kid" two years too young for my grade level in an all-girls' Catholic school in the suburbs--I lived in a world where gay people were a rumor and an insult and a news story about murder. I was straight, of course, obviously, because real people were straight and anyway I was weird enough already--I couldn't be two things strange, couldn't be gay too, but--well, I could read the stories. I could feel things about that. I would have those stories to help me, a few years later, when I knew I couldn't call myself straight any more.
And those stories were theft. There was never any doubt about that. We wrote disclaimers at the top of every fic, with the specter of Anne Rice's lawyers around every corner. We hid in back-corners of the internet, places you could only find through a link from a link from a link on somebody else's recs page, being grateful for the tiny single-fandom archives when you found them, grateful for the webrings where they existed. It was theft, all of it, the stories about characters we did not own, the videotaped episodes on your best friend's VHS player, one single episode pulled off of Limewire over the course of three days.
It was theft, we knew, to even try and find ourselves in these stories to begin with. How many fics did I read in those days about two men who'd always been straight, except for each other, in this one case, when love was stronger than sexual orientation? We stole our characters away from the heterosexual lives they were destined to have. We stole them away from writers and producers and TV networks who work overtime to shower them in Babes of the Week, to pretend that queerness was never even an option. This wasn't given to us. This wasn't meant for us. This wasn't ours to have, ever, ever in the first place. But we took it anyway.
And oh, my friends, it was glorious.
We took it. We stole. And again and again, for years and years and years, we turned that theft into an art. We looked for every opening, every crack in every sidewalk where a little sprout of queerness might grow, and we claimed it for our own and we grew whole gardens. We grew so sly and so skilled with it, learning to spot the hints of oh, this could be slashy in every new show and movie to come our way. Do you see how they left these character dynamics here, unattended on the table? How ripe they are for the pocketing. Here, I'll help you carry them. We'll make off with these so-called straight boys, and we only have to look back if somebody sets out another scene we want for our own.
We were thieves, all of us, and that was fine and that was fair, because to exist as queer in the world was theft to begin with. Stolen time, stolen moments--grand larceny of the institution of marriage, breaking and entering to rob my mother's hopes for grandchildren. Every shoplifted glance at the wrong person in the locker room (and it didn't matter if we never peeked, never dared, they called us out on it anyway). Every character in every fic whose queerness became a crime against this ex-wife, that new love interest. Every time we dared steal ourselves away from the good straight partners we didn't want to date.
And: we built ourselves a den, we thieves, wallpapered in stolen images and filled to the brim with all the words we'd written ourselves. We built ourselves a home, and we filled it with joy. Every vid and art and fic, every ship, every squee. Over and over, every straight boy protagonist who abandoned all womankind for just this one exception with his straight boy protagonist partner found gay orgasms and true love at the end.
Over and over, we said: this isn't ours, this isn't meant to be ours, you did not give this to us--but we are taking it anyway. We will burglarize you for building blocks and build ourselves a palace. These stories and this place in the world is not for us, but we exist, and you can't stop us. It's ours now, full of color and noise, a thousand peoples' ideas mosaic'ed together in celebration. We made this, and it will never be just yours again. You won't ever truly get it back, no matter how many lawyers you send, not completely. We keep what we steal.
.
Things shifted over time, of course. That's good. That's to be celebrated. Nobody should have to steal to survive. It should not be a crime, should not feel like a crime, to find yourself and your space in the world.
There were always content creators who could slip a little wink in when they laid out their wares, oh what's this over here, silly me leaving this unattended where anybody could grab it, of course there might be more over by the side door if you come around the alleyway (but if anybody asks, you didn't get this from ME). We all watched Xena marry Gabrielle, in body language and between the lines. We sat around and traded theories and rumors about whether the people writing Due South knew what they were doing when they sent their buddy cops off into the frozen north alone together at the end of the show, if they'd done it on purpose, if they knew. But over the years, slowly, thankfully, the winks became less sly.
A teenage boy put his hand on another teenage boy's hand and said, you move me, and they kissed on network TV, in a prime-time show, on FOX, and the world didn't burn down. Here and there, where they wanted to, where they could without getting caught by their bosses and managers, content creators stopped subtly nudging people around the back door and started saying, "Here. This is on offer here too, on purpose. You get to have this, too."
And of course, of course that came with a whole host of problems too. Slide around to the back door but you didn't get this from me turned into it's an item on our special menu, totally legit, you've just got to ask because the boss throws a fit if we put it out front. Shopkeepers and content creators started advertising on the sly, come buy your fix here!, hiding the fine print that says you still have to take what you've purchased home and rebuild it with your semi-legal IKEA hacks. Maybe they'll consider listing that Destiel or Sterek as a full-service menu item next year. Is that Crowley/Aziraphale the real thing or is it lite?
And those problems are real and the conversations are worth having, and it's absolutely fair to be frustrated that you can't find the ship you want on sale in anything like your color and size in a vast media landscape packed full of discount hetships and fast-fashion m/f. It's fair to be angry. It's fair to be frustrated. Queerbait is a word that exists for a reason.
There's a part of me that hurts, though, every time the topic comes up. It's a confusing, bad-mannered part of me, but it's still very real. And it's not because I'm fawning for crumbs, trying to be the Good, Non-Threatening Gay. It's not that I'm scared and traumatized by the thought of what might happen if we dare raise our voices and ask for attention. (Well. Not mostly. I'll always remember being quiet and scared and fifteen, but it's been a long two decades since then. I know how to ask for a hell of a lot more now.)
It's because I remember that cozy, plush-wallpapered den of joyful thieves. I remember you keep what you steal.
Every single time--every time--when a story I love sets a couple of characters out on a low, unguarded table, perfectly placed to be pilfered on the sly and taken home and smushed together like a couple of dolls, my very first thought is always, always joy. Always, that instinct says, yay! Says, this is ours now. As soon as I go home and crawl into that pillow-fort den, my instincts say, I will surely find people already at work combing through spoils and finding new ways to combine them, new ways to make them our own. I know there's fic for that. I've already seen fic for that, and I wasn't really interested last time, but the new store display's got my brain churning, and I can't wait to see what the crew back at the hideout does with this.
Every time, that's where my brain goes. And oh, when I realize the display's put out on purpose, that somebody snuck in a legitimate special menu item, when the proprietor gives me the nod and wink and says, you don't have to come around the side, I know it's not much but here--there is so much joy and relief and hope in me from that! Oh, what we can make with these beautiful building blocks. Oh what a story we can craft from the pieces. Oh, the things we can cobble together. Look at that, this one's a little skimpy on parts but we can supplement it, this one's got a whole outline we can fill in however we want. This one technically comes semi-preassembled, and that's boring as shit and a pain to take back apart, but that's fine, we'll manage. We're artists and thieves. I bet someone's pulling out the AU saw to cut it to pieces already.
And then I get back to our den, which has moved addresses a dozen times over the years and mostly hangs out on Tumblr now (and the roof leaks and the landlord's sketchy as fuck but at least they don't charge rent, and we've made worse places our own). And I show up, ready for joy--ready for a dozen other people who saw that low-hanging fruit on that unguarded table, who got the nod and wink about the special menu item, who're ready to get so excited about this newest haul. Did you see what we picked up? The theft was so easy, practically begging to be stolen. The last owner was an idiot with no idea what to do with it. The last owner knew exactly what it could become, bless their heart, under a craftsman with more time on their hands, so they looked away on purpose at just the right time to let me take it home. I show up every time ready for our space, the place that fed me on joy and self-confidence when I was fifteen and starving. The place that taught me, yes, we are thieves, because it is RIGHT to take what we need, and the beautiful things we create are their own justification. We are thieves, and that's wonderful, because nothing is handed to us and that means we get to build our own palaces. We get to keep everything we steal.
I go home, and even knowing the world is different, my instincts and heart are waiting for that. And I walk in the door, and I look at my dash, and I glance over at twitter, and--
And people are angry, again. Angry at the slim pickings from the hidden special menu. So, so tired and angry, at once again having to steal.
And they're right to be! Sometimes (often, maybe) I think they're angry at the wrong people--more angry with the shopkeeper who offers the bite-sized sampler platter of side characters or sneaks their queer content in on the special menu than the ones who don't include it at all. But it's not wrong to be mad that Disney's once again advertising their First Gay Character only to find out it's a tiny sprinkle of a one-line extra on an otherwise straight sundae. It's not wrong to be furious at the world because you've spent your whole life needing to be a thief to survive. It's far from wrong. I'm angry about it too.
But this was my den of thieves, my chop shop, my makerspace. Growing up in fandom, I learned to pick the locks on stories and crack the safes of subtext at the very same time I learned to create. They were the same thing, the same art. We are thieves, my heart says, we are thieves, and that's what makes us better than the people we steal from. We deconstruct every time we create. We build better things out of the pieces.
And people are angry that the pre-fab materials are too hard to find, the pickings too slim, the items on sale too limited? Yes, of course they are, of course they should be--but my heart. Oh, my heart. Every single time, just a little bit, it breaks.
Of course the stories are terrible (they have always been terrible). Of course they are, but we are thieves. We steal the best parts and cobble them back together and what we make is better than it was before. The craftsman's eye that cases a story for weak points, for blank spaces, for anywhere we can fit a crowbar and pry apart this casing--that's skill and art and joy. Of course we shouldn't have to, of course we shouldn't have to, but I still love it. I still want it, crave it. I still thrill every time I see it, a story with hairline cracks that we can work open with clever hands to let the queer in.
That used to be cause for celebration, around here. I ask him to go back to the ruins of Aeor with me, two men together alone on an expedition in the frozen north, it feels like a gift. And I understand why some people take it as an insult. I understand not good enough. I understand how something can feel like a few drops of water to someone dying of thirst, like a slap in the face. If it was so easy to sneak it hidden onto the special menu, to place it on the unguarded side table for someone else to run off to, why not let it sit out front and center in the first place? I know it's frustrating. It should be. We should fight. We should always fight. I know why.
But my heart, oh, my heart. My heart only knows what it's been taught. My heart sees, this thing right here, the proprietor left it there for you with a nod and a wink because they Get It. It's not put together yet, but it's better that way anyway. It's so full of pieces to pull apart and reassemble. I bet they've got a whole mosaic wall going up at home already. We can bring it home and make it OURS, more than it was ever theirs, forget half of what it came from and grow a new garden in what remains.
And I go home to find anger, and my heart breaks instead.
So somebody reblogged the last 'yes I need to talk about Jrusar's Secret Government' post with thoughts/questions about the Tal'dorei council, and it made me want to get in here and actually write the damn holy shit Matthew Mercer your city is run entirely by a SECRET SHADOW GOVERNMENT WHAT THE FUCK post, so here we go.
(I wrote a whole essay, and somehow I didn't even get into the rampant corruption, because there's so much to say even outside of that, but: minor spoilers for general worldbuilding throughout C1, C2, and C3, extremely minor plot spoilers I think for C1 and maybe C3 before episode 3.09? Mostly this is about worldbuilding.)
The thing is that, right, "who's on the Tal'dorei council?" was a long-running joke during Campaign 2, but, aside from some suggestion during EXU that there may be secret council members (and EXU is canon, but that doesn't mean it's explored canon), the Tal'dorei council isn't actually a secret. The Mighty Nein don't know who they are, and have absolutely zero in-universe reason to know who they are, because it's like knowing the entire slate of cabinet members of a foreign country where you've never been and also TV and airplanes don't exist, and like, I don't know about you but I can't even remember the new Chancellor of Germany who literally just got elected a few months ago. This is why Matt keeps giving the players shit for asking. Not because nobody knows.
The Tal'dorei Republic is the sort of confused confederacy you get when you start building a fictional government in bits and pieces without a big overarching plan, because this is a D&D game you play with your friends over brunch. It's also the sort of confused confederacy you get when there was an empire, except its borders had sort of stopped expanding a while back more or less, and then the king stepped down and then five minutes later there were dragons, and everyone's still sort of trying to figure out exactly how politics work again. Politics, on that level, were never really the point of Campaign 1, and they didn't get a ton of focus. There are probably really interesting things to explore there, but thematically, politics really started being a thing in Campaign 2, and oh boy howdy did they.
Campaign 2 is about fascist nationalism. Like, it is! It just is! That's it, that's -- well, not the whole thing, but a pretty central piece of the thing. The Somnovem are the Somnovem (and actually, hmm, I want to think about how Cognouza's backstory relates to C2's political themes), and they were important at the end, but the entire campaign held the running thread of Dwendalian Empire and Cerberus Assembly, and their manufactured war against the Krynn.
And we see a lot of what fascist nationalism looks like, in C2. We see intense propaganda machines full of fear of the Other, particularly aimed at riling people up against this very convenient scary enemy of ~dark elves~ and their ~strange dark magic~ and ~oooh, monsters~. We see tight governmental control over even personal aspects of everyday life. Certain religions are banned. Magic is highly regulated. Government is present everywhere -- even small towns have magistrates and Starostas and Crownsguard, generally according to the same system throughout the empire.
There's a strong central government that's generally not split between factions. No, really! The Cobalt Soul is a respected institution, but they're not so much a faction of government as they are an independent body with a lot of weight and respect. King Dwendal is relatively ineffective, but he's managed by the Cerberus Assembly, not in opposition to them. The Assembly itself is full of politics and backbiting and infighting, but by and large, to the country itself the Assembly presents a united front, and that front is united behind the crown. The horrifying back-alley secret spy work, torture, and assassinations are all run by the same people who run the government at large, who everyone knows run the government at large, in service to furthering the power of the government at large (and therefore their own power, of course, because one thing feeds the other.)
It's a power struggle, but it's not a class struggle, not really. The average citizens of the Dwendalian empire generally do pretty well, when they're not being targeted or scapegoated by some machination of the government itself. It's easy to be middle-class in the Empire, or to convince yourself that you're middle-class, to be a farmer who never has trouble putting food on the table, to be a merchant or a blacksmith or a winemaker or an artisan. It's easy to enjoy a fine standard of living even if you're not one of the people with power. So long as none of the people in power decide you're more useful in misery.
Jrusar is different.
The government of Jrusar is secret. Nobody knows who runs the city. People take it on faith, generally, that somebody runs the city -- infrastructure is maintained, cops get paid, there's no open warfare in the streets most days -- but this city is fucked up in ways that sometimes mirror the Dwendalian Empire, and sometimes are entirely new.
When I call C3 a class warfare campaign, what I mean is that it's been showing us economic stratification everywhere we look since day one. We have seen, thus far, no middle class in this city. We've seen astonishingly rich people, but mostly we've seen working-class people just about scraping by. We see aging artisans, those people who would have been comfortably middle class in Emon or Zadash, trying to make ends meet by letting out their spare room or breaking a werewolf out of jail for a job recommendation. We see bartenders and performers who never appear to be making enough to support a family (unless that family is part of the trade and performing too). We see warehouse and factory workers who go to those bars and performances and bars and bars and bars at the end of their workdays, and drink their dinner and eat their Meals. (People drink a lot, in Jrusar. People drink a lot in CR in general, but then, our parties have always been on the move and staying in inns and taverns to begin with, and when they had a place to sit and settle they'd inevitably find neighbors who did all sorts of things with their evenings that weren't 'go down to the local and get blitzed'.)
Nobody seems to have a spouse, a family, children. There really don't seem to be a lot of children in Jrusar.
Which isn't to say that all of Jrusar is like this! There are several spires we've never even visited, and plenty of places throughout this very big city that could be a world of experience away. There are plenty of places in Tal'dorei and the Empire, likewise, that might function like this. But that's why it's a campaign theme, not just a locational one -- because the places we're looking in C3, the things we've actually seen, all fall into this same pattern. And some of that is absolutely down to the way the government here functions.
The thing we keep hearing, over and over again, from all sorts of different corners in Jrusar, is 'the city's going to shit'. Nobody ever follows it up with a 'since'. It's never 'since that guy took power', or 'since the Natural Disaster', or 'since that new policy went into place' -- it's just going, going, gone towards some unspecified "shit". A gradual worsening of general affairs. A diffused, maybe even imaginary, decline.
This isn't an accident, either on Matt's part or on the part of the people in charge of the city. The interesting thing about 'the city's gone to shit' as a muttered refrain is that nobody necessarily agrees on what that means. (Who here has heard 'this country's gone to hell in a handbasket' before? Which hell? Which handbasket?) What was it like before that was so good, that we've lost now? Do people even know, do they have concrete things to point to, or is it just a sort of pervasive discontentment? Fear and insecurity because of violence, because of poverty, because of working too hard? And the violence has always been there (but maybe not in your neighborhood), and the poverty's always been a problem (but everything just keeps getting more crowded), and work is work (but there are more jobs in mining than in making things, and look I'm not saying Marxist concept of alienation of labor, but I'm also not NOT saying that ok).
People are unhappy, and they don't really have anything concrete they can point to as the source of their unhappiness. Not on any unified, structured basis, not as a movement rather than a couple of dozen people hidden in an attic.
And this? This is great for the people in power in Jrusar. Sure, everybody's unhappy -- what of it? Unhappiness is always rampant. The important thing is that nobody's directly unhappy with them.
Nobody can strike up a petition to demand that Bobby Treshi step down from the Chandai Quorum if nobody knows Bobby Treshi is on the Chandai Quorum. Nobody can show up at Suzie Lumas's office and make her pay attention to anything if she doesn't have an office. Nobody can influence, petition, persuade, bother, or cancel anybody in the Quorum if nobody knows who they even are.
What's more, this seems to be related to a general lack of transparency in governance in Jrusar in general. There's another essay I want to write about Rule of Law in C3 (which I was going to include here but holy shit this post is already REAL LONG), but basically what it sums up to is, I have no idea exactly what's legal or illegal here, and my guess is that much of the people who actually live in this city agree. Is murder legal? Okay, but what if a bounty hunter does it? How do bounty hunters work, exactly? Who pays the cops' salaries?
One important aspect of the Tal'dorei council is the simple fact that, not only are the names of the council public, so are their respective positions. We know that there's a Master of Development whose job is civil infrastructure, and a Master of Commerce whose job is the budget, and a Master of Law who runs the courts. We know what the jobs even are. We know their duties and responsibilities. We know how the republic is run.
We know none of that, here in Jrusar. Not only do we not know who's in charge of civil infrastructure relating to public transit, we don't know if anybody is. Do the sewage maintenance projects just get sort of shoved off onto the desk of whoever in the Secret Cabinet Meetings doesn't nose-goes fast enough? Is there some young mid-level civil servant somewhere who's running the entire cable car system single-handedly because his boss can't get an audience with her boss outside of a thirty-minute appointment slot booked two weeks in advance, and even then she's only talking to the Official Mouthpiece of the Council rather than the councilor themself? How the fuck does anybody get anything done???
And like, many of these are basic logistical questions that can get kind of smoothed over in a fictional universe and a D&D game, because mid-level government bureaucracy isn't nearly as sexy as secret conspiracies and elaborate heists. But we also see the results of these things manifest in the campaign itself. We see the wild, rampant stratification between people who definitely go to dinner parties with whoever's in charge of the government (even if you're not sure who at this dinner party it is), and the people who don't even have a name to call out. We see the no-oversight corruption endemic in the police system, which definitely appears to be the only way most people in the city interface with their government at all. We see citizens who want specific, targeted change trying to do it via flyers and petitions that maybe nobody will even see.
We see the way basic infrastructure amenities like the cable cars could be improved -- and this was sort of a joke, last Thursday, except that it's not. It came up because the players themselves are feeling the nickle-and-dime ding of having to pay the same toll that working-class citizens in Jrusar have to pay every day, unless they can afford to live in the same nice spire where they work, unless they can't afford to move out of the same shitty one. And there's nobody to tell, nobody in charge who would even know it was an issue.
Jrusar is a mess. And it's a mess in the way that a city-state with a government this utterly un-transparent should and would be a mess.
Oh wow I am not used to the 1 AM thing any more, I got so used to actually sleeping, wow.
Okay just rattling some thoughts off, here we go:
I love all four of our new characters so much? Like, so much that I almost regret the returning characters we also have, not because I don't also love them but because what if we had more of this. (But soon they'll all be this together, whatever this turns out to be.)
I am so serious about class as a major theme of this campaign. Like, obviously it's only episode one! who knows! But I'm feeling something-something-solidarity-something out of our new characters, and Bertrand Bell intersects with that in some really interesting ways, and I think I really want it?
Because right, you could tell from episode one of the last campaign that this was an outsider narrative! This overarching, constant theme that we carried through for a hundred and twenty-odd episodes was that this was a motley group of people who don't fit anywhere. The goblin in the mask, the cleric of a forbidden god, the traveling carnival that nobody trusts which can only stay so long and not longer -- it was about social isolation, about being alone, and having the chance to find a handful of other people to be weird outsiders with. (And yes, of course the final big bad at the end of the campaign was assimilation. Of course it was.)
And the thing is: that's not what we have, here.
(oh no, episode one meta got long, Read More after the cut)
Our characters starting out here -- and I'm leaving the EXU trio to the side for a moment, I'll get to them later -- are poor. And they're poor in a different way than newbie adventurers often are. They're not just temporarily strapped for cash until they take the next easy-to-come-by job that will set them up for life. They are poor in lifestyle, in resources, in connections, in socioeconomic power, and in a way that suggests this is and has been and, were it not for today's events, would continue to be a long-term thing.
And also: They are not wealthy, they are not important, they are not respected. But they are also, even outside their own party, not alone.
I love Imogen and Laudna so fucking much, already. Everything about their vibe speaks to long comfortable companionship, not of the 'we rely on each other for codependent survival' way (which, face it, is as much pre-game Vax and Vex as it is pre-game Nott and Caleb), but in a 'we know and share each other's problems' sort of way, a comfortable sort of way. They're not busy trying to caretake one another or step in front of each other's bullets, they're just on the same page about goals and steps to reach them.
They're not set up in opposition to the world. They're very much part of the world. They buy groceries for their landlady, they do her dishes, she knits them socks! They try so hard to go through official channels for these university resources. And yes, they're different, they're not from around here, they're a little weird, Imogen hears thoughts and Laudna looks like death, but. "We've done well for ourselves here," they say, and they mean it. And what that means to them is, we have a warm and comfortable place to call home, and a person who welcomes us there and doesn't charge more for rent than we can afford. We have enough to live on and we haven't been chased out of town on a rail.
And like, just that, just with that, we're already making class statements. We're already setting up a situation where these two ladies, who don't have money, who don't have influence or relations, who aren't important, can't get access to a resource they need (for whatever reason). (Which--it sure seems like the resource they're looking for is knowledge about their own magical powers, which, y'know, fun magic bonuses aside, sure seem to work a lot like disabilities for them in at least a couple of ways. Socioeconomic gatekeeping access to disability resources? In my fantasy fiction? It's more likely than you think.)
And then we get Ashton and FCG, and the fucking queer punk group house that is inhabited by too many people with not quite enough money to pay the cheap-ass rent that doesn't quite cover repair work for the holes in the walls, not really enough of anything to go around, but also someone found a half-broken robot in a pile of dead bodies and brought it home and now we have one more roommate because sure, why not, right? Ashton's all surface cynicism and sour bite, but they know people. They network! They live gig-economy style, one payday to the next, and they know who to talk to for the possibility of work, dozens of people know Ashton by name and general skill set. Ashton knows them all by name right back. And for all their cynicism and pretense of not caring, they've adopted FCG entirely: here, this is my new robot friend, this is the new guy, this is what they can do, this is what they're looking for. Here, let me show you around town, let me tell you what to expect, you're cool, I like you. (And right, part of this is Taliesin, who is literally incapable of creating a character that doesn't have a place and a community, family or otherwise, broken or otherwise, to belong to. But Percy's family was dead and Caduceus's family was gone, and Molly's circus broke and shattered and left him. Ashton's community is an entire neighborhood, is businesses and individuals and fundamental socioeconomics. He may have to leave it for a while, but it's going to still be there, unless the entire neighborhood burns. In which case we really are looking at total class warfare.)
And ok, let's talk about class warfare for a minute. Let's talk Bertrand Bell.
I am so fucking fascinated by the choice to revive Bertrand Bell, of all characters, for this campaign. And I love the role he's playing here.
Bertrand Bell is a con man. He's a charlatan. He once got dragged through literal Pandemonium and back because he bragged too much and got called out on it. He has always pretended to know more than he really knows, to be able to do more than he really can, getting by on bluff and swagger and a very impressive sword. But now? Well, he's older, now. He's not level 18 any more. He's a level 5 fighter. He's got to work to stay up with the lifestyle to which he's accustomed, let alone grind towards the lifestyle to which he's always aspired to become accustomed.
So he drops names, he makes deals, he tries so damn hard to ingratiate himself to the upper class, the people he wants to be with. And they don't respect him at all, because of course they don't, because they're elderly in secure luxury and he's elderly but still on that hustle, because he doesn't have the resources to put it down. And his solution to his dilemma, very pertinently, is to prey on people with even fewer resources than himself.
I absolutely believe the aspersions cast on 'did Bertrand Bell set up the whole animated-objects debacle to try and lure some promising adventurers'. One hundred percent, I believe it. He jumped on them the instant the fight was over. He was obviously desperate, given his reception at Lord E's manor. It is painfully transparent how much he thinks he needs this, and it doesn't even seem to be a case of blackmail or gambling debts or threats hanging over him or any of that. Lord E would've been happy enough to never see him again. The only bad thing that happens to Bertrand Bell if he doesn't summon up this group of baby adventurers to sacrifice on the altar of upward mobility is that...he doesn't get what he wants. Doesn't get the resources he thinks he needs, the money, the clout, the status, the attention.
And that's an interesting story! That's a really interesting force to be putting up alongside a team of people who, for the most part, largely just seem to be trying to get by. I can't wait to see where they go with it.
I did promise to come back around to our EXU trio, too, so let's get into that. They've got a lot of interesting potential here, maybe especially Dorian, though we'll see how long he's sticking around for. (He's a born-and-raised very rich kid, from this general region of the globe, who left his family for Complicated Reasons and clearly has unresolved feelings about the wealth he came from. Interesting.) Mostly, though, what we see from Fearne and Orym is an outsider perspective on the entire system. Fearne and Orym aren't part of the class structure of this city. They're tourists. Foreigners. Adventurers, and if we've seen anything over on Tal'dorei, it's that "adventurer" is its own socioeconomic class entirely. (The details of which I think are due when it's not two in the morning.)
Adventurers don't worry about the day-to-day basic economics of survival -- there's always another monster to kill if you need cash, or a wealthy patron to spot you an airship or an inn, or a vault to loot, or something. Fearne steals a man's earring for fun and shinies, not money. An adventurer doesn't have to rely on the goodwill of one city's community just to live in, because they can travel anywhere. They bring their own community in the form of their party, and never leave home without it.
Orym and Fearne especially don't come from socioeconomic backgrounds that look anything like this city even before they became adventurers. Druid communes or feywild villages don't have a lot in common with urban class stratification! Which means that they're going to be learning a lot of this stuff for the very first time, seeing some of it reflecting on their fellow party members, and building their relationships with it anew. How do tourists fit in with a local socioeconomic system? Either they fund it from the outside with their presence, or they assimilate.
.
.
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Anyway. Maybe I'm wrong! Maybe none of these themes or ideas will ever come back again. But I'm feeling very 2021 right now, with all that entails, and it's making me think that maybe-just-maybe this story's feeling it too. Why not tell a story about eating the rich before the rich can devour the poor? I'd be up for that. I'd be up for watching CR do that.
(Of course, given that it's a quarter after two in the morning and I still care enough to finish this post, I'd be up for watching CR do a lot of things. Still. The point stands.)
As promised: let's talk Hades, and how acts of abuse can create toxic environments for everyone around them, and also how people react to those environments--and to them being disrupted.
(For reference, I have just kicked Theseus's ass for the first time, it was exactly as satisfying as it was intended to be, and then I got predictably slaughtered a couple of chambers into Styx. Spoilers for everything through that point, but please no spoilers in reblogs/comments for anything after that!) Also, TW for a whole lot of discussion of abuse, particularly verbal and emotional abuse, and abusive familyworkplace dynamics.
Okay, so. To start out with, Hades is an abusive parent. He engages in innumerable acts of verbal and emotional abuse towards his son, because yep, that's what you call it when a parent constantly berates and belittles their kid for every perceived failure, including the ones the parent themselves could have prevented. Sometimes especially the ones the parent could have prevented. Zagreus failed at his office clerk job because Hades refused to teach him how to do it and then blamed him for not already knowing how. Cerberus tore up the lounge because Hades, who was actually there, chose not to stop him. Hades created, possibly deliberately, and then took full advantage of every opportunity he saw to insult and demean his kid, and the clerk job flashback shows us that he was doing so even before the escape attempts started. I'm pretty sure we're all on the same page here, but: yep, that all constitutes abuse, even if they're gods. Even if Hades has reasons for Being Like That. Even if you think Zagreus seems okay and unharmed by it (which: repeatedly throwing yourself into a gauntlet of violence that inevitably ends in your own pain and death because you're so desperate to escape home, not actually an indicator of someone who's okay). We all good on that?
Cool. Because I'm not really here to talk about how Hades' abuse directly impacts Zagreus right now (although there's for sure an essay in that too). I'm thinking about how it impacts everybody else.
Hades isn't as obviously unreasonable with anybody else in his kingdom the way he is with his kid. When we see him lecture somebody else, it's usually for an actual failure to do their job: Hypnos for literally falling asleep on the job and not doing anything that was assigned to him, Megaera for letting us past her so many time, Orpheus for being a court bard who refuses to sing. His attitude is super confrontational and unpleasant, but on the surface it doesn't necessarily look as fucked-up. Thing is, though, whether any individual act of aggression towards an employee/family member is justified or not (I would generally argue 'not', because aggression towards employees/family members is, y'know, not justifiable)--it's not about the individual acts. It's about the entire cultivated atmosphere of toxicity and abuse.
One of the very first things Meg ever says to us is, "I'd rather be on your bad side than his." Up until that point, we've got no reason to believe Meg has any history whatsoever of fucking up at her job. In fact, we've got plenty of reason to believe she's good at it. She's fiercely proud of it, she's frequently Employee Of The [Time Period], and we've apparently never even met her sisters because she handles her shit herself. But she's still scared of Hades. Dusa, who is an anxious wreck at all times because oh god what if she gets fired what if she gets fired what if she gets fired, in spite of apparently being absolutely exemplary at her job, is scared of Hades. Every single shade in the Hall is clearly terrified of Hades, and it's not because of what he's done to each of them. It's what they've seen him do to other people.
Which is how toxic environments work, whether they're work environments or families. The Court of Hades is of course both, always, with the bonus hell layer of you can't quit even if you DIE. An abuser in authority doesn't have to target you in order to make you feel scared, cowed, and desperate to please them. Humans (and gods who are basically extra-powerful humans) are good at learning by example. The residents of the Court get the picture.
So this Court is a minefield--and everyone except Zagreus is very good at tiptoeing around mines. We see it in Meg, so desperate to do her job well. We see that Hypnos very clearly does not give a shit about anything, but he still makes sure to have a list of excuses ready if/when Hades ever confronts him about failure to do his job, just in case. We see it when Achilles tells us that my ability to help you is constrained by the authority your father gives me, or whatever the line was sixty runs ago when he couldn't let me into locked chambers. The system, such as it is, works, and if Nyx talks to Hades as little as possible, if Thanatos avoids the Court entirely, if Achilles treads very carefully and knows how to keep his head down--well that's just the system, right? That's just how things are.
Even Zagreus seems to have had a role in that system as the court fuckup. He's the kid who didn't have a real job or purpose. He could take the focus of Hades' generalized, day-to-day ire off of everyone else, without triggering some of the more direct and violent ire because the work he was doing didn't really matter (a LOT of Hades' rage-triggers seem to be related to job performance, which means that the people with real jobs are of course the most at risk). And he could do so "safely" (big emphasis on the quotation marks there) because he alone of the court is Hades' actual kid, who's Prince of the Underworld no matter how much he fucks up. If one of Nyx's other kids gets something really really wrong, she might be able to protect them from some consequences, but Hades doesn't have any layer of supposed parental affection holding him back from getting violently furious about it. Zagreus gets a nice bedroom and the abuse is limited to words rather than divine power, and Hades is a dick to everyone but he only occasionally condemns people to eternities of torture, and only for good reasons like refusing to sing when your job is to be court bard, so it's fine, everybody's fine, everything's totally fine, right?
Except it's not fine when everybody is so clearly worried about anything going wrong. And it's especially not fine for Zagreus, who's the person to finally say no. He's leaving, for his own sake, because he deserves better and he's finally convinced he can have it. And that turns the whole system into disarray.
I am endlessly fascinated by the ways this game portrays different characters reacting to this upheaval in their carefully-mapped minefield. It's different for authority figures and peers and servants, different based on how people are positioned in the house under Hades' rule, and it's so spot-on and I love it.
Nyx, for instance, is absolutely calm about the whole thing, because Nyx has power. Hades can't hurt her. Hades can't even really do much against her children, not when Hypnos and Thanatos are gods in their own right. Yes, Hades rules the kingdom, but Nyx owns the land, and she gives no shits about his rages. And it's interesting, too, to see the lines she doesn't draw. The deal seems to be that Hades doesn't fuck with her, and doesn't outright threaten her kids (because Hypnos is bad at his job, demonstrably so, and Hades hasn't ruined him yet), and she doesn't interfere with the way he treats the people around him. She gives Zagreus advice and support and the mirror, but she also doesn't take a direct stand against Hades. He can't hurt her, but he could make life...difficult. She's protected, her position in the minefield is more of a safe viewing platform than slogging through the middle of it, but the mines are still there.
And then we have Achilles, who is one of my favorite characters in the whole game because of how he reacts to this whole situation. Achilles, like Nyx, is so supportive. Every single time you see him he has something encouraging to say. He gives us his Codex, secretly finds us weapons, trained us for years, clearly wants us to succeed. And still he's limited, not necessarily out of fear for himself (though he has to be scared for himself, he knows what Hades does to people who anger him), but out of concern that if he gives Zagreus too much help in one way, he won't be able to provide help at all later. He's still so careful.
Achilles and Nyx are so fucking important to this story because they're the only authority figures Zagreus really has in his life except for his father, and they are so supportive. They're what keep this story from being a nightmare of psychological horror and depression. They can't stop the pressure from Hades and this life in his house being miserable for Zag, but they can give us hope, remind us that Zagreus is still loved. And they have such an incredibly important role when it comes to guilt, which is one of the biggest ways toxic systems maintain themselves.
If Zagreus leaves, what happens to everybody else? Who takes Hades' wrath then? Who becomes court scapegoat if he's not there, and also, who gets punished for his escape? These questions matter, and we see him worry about it! He asks Nyx and Achilles both, is it going to be okay that you're helping me, are you going to be alright, will my father hurt you for this? And they are both so firm about telling him no. No, I will be fine. See, here's the list of reasons about why I'm going to be fine, why my position in this minefield is secure. They make a point of telling us that it's fine, that we do not need to hold ourself back from getting out of this abusive situation for their sake. That is instrumental in Zagreus's ability to keep making these escape attempts without feeling too guilty and worried and selfish to go on. (Another thing that's actually really important in setting up that dynamic--we see that Hades cares about Cerberus, even if he's using him as a pawn against us, and Cerberus seems to be the one figure in court who Hades doesn't get mad at. The dog isn't at risk, and that is really essential in keeping the story from getting too grim.) These people who we care about refuse to let themselves be held hostage to secure our good behavior.
It's also really useful for raising the stakes later in the story--we see Hades arguing with Nyx once or twice, and we see Zagreus feeling guilty about it, but it's also a sign that we're making enough progress to piss him off. After I finally made it out of Elysium on my last run, I came home to find him furious with Achilles in a way that actually makes me nervous, because Achilles does not have nearly as much security in his position as he says he does. (Achilles is such a good teacher/authority figure, because he knows goddamn well what Hades could do to him, and still refuses to let fear for his own situation stop him from helping the abused kid under his care escape his. And no, not everybody has the capacity to do that, but it matters so much coming from the guy who helped raise us. It matters so much. I do not even have the words for how much.)
It's also no mistake that many of the people we find supporting us along our journey are either the people with the most power in their immediate environment, or the least. Sisyphus helps us because what more could they do to me than this? Orpheus is a little wild around the eyes and somewhat disconnected from reality, and he wishes us the best because someone should get what they want and also he no longer gives a single fuck what happens to him. Eurydice has her own cozy little corner of Asphodel, as safe from Hades' rage as anybody anywhere in his realm because she's tucked in such an out-of-the-way middle place she's outside his notice. Dusa is so scared of everything anyway that, crush aside, she isn't any more threatened by us escaping than she is just by her everyday life here. Charon is unfathomable and unstoppable; Skelly literally exists to be a punching bag, and yet he also seems basically immune to pain, no matter what we do to him. There's no threat from Hades there.
So the people most at risk when I flip the world on its ear are the ones who have so much standing that they have something to lose, but not enough to protect them from losing it. Which of course brings us to Than and Meg--who are, of course, the two people who also seem by far the most upset by my attempts to leave.
As authority figures, Nyx and Achilles are constantly reinforcing the message that it's Hades' fault, not ours, if they or anybody else get caught in the crossfire of his wrath. I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing, and it's not my guilt to bear. From Megaera and Thanatos, we get the opposite message--I am fucking with things, I am hurting people, and I need to stop. Zagreus isn't just abandoning them, as a friend or brother or lover or all of the above they're Greek gods who even knows. He's betraying them. They were in this together, as friends or lovers or whatever, but now Zagreus is sending earthquakes through the minefield they both still have to stand in. He is about to capsize this boat in the middle of a thunderstorm, he is fucking with the system, and they're the ones who are going to get most hurt.
I'm so curious how this is going to work for Than, who out of everyone we meet holds the closest role to Nyx's in terms of being sheltered from Hades' wrath. He's the guy who gets to leave, after all, even though he always has to come back. I've seen the least of him out of anybody so far because it took forever for me to get to Elysium, but two things really stand out and I'm so interested to see where they go. One, he really genuinely does care about Zagreus. He wants us safe, he wants us unhurt, the accessory he gives us only grants its bonus if we clear a room without taking injury, he keeps showing up to help. And two, he wants us to give up and go back and recognize how good we had it. Which is SO fucking interesting, considering how miserable Zagreus so clearly was, and how legitimate his reasons for being miserable were.
It makes me wonder so much about Than's standards for comparison. Does he know something we don't about what's waiting for us on the surface, something that might theoretically hurt Zagreus even more than staying down below? Has his life, which apparently allows him more freedom than anybody else in the Court, sucked horribly in ways we haven't seen, and that's why he spends so little time there in the first place? Either of those things is plausible, both of those things are plausible, and yet either one leads to this sense of patronizing, because he refuses to simply tell us. If something terrible is awaiting us, don't give us vague warnings, tell us what it is and let us decide for ourself! If you're fucking jealous because we might get out entirely and you're still stuck coming back here, say so. If you're worried about your mom--and he does bring her up, how could Zagreus turn his back on her like that, does seem to worry for her--then let's have an actual conversation about how many times she has insisted I do this and also how much I love her.
And, right, it's clear that a lot of Thanatos being upset is simply, you were going to leave me without even saying goodbye, you want to leave ME, which is understandable! But, like, he is demonstrably the one god who gets to visit the surface. He's the one person we actually COULD expect to see again. And he is absolutely also upset because there's an Order To Things, and we're fucking it up. We used to be his careless callow reckless friend who could talk back to Hades and get away with it, and now we're not, and everything is changing and we might leave him altogether, and we might leave him alone in that court without us, and he hates it.
Is it a short-sighted, selfish fear on his part? Yes, absolutely. Even if he's not scared of Hades on his own behalf, he is still frightened by what happens if we upset this system--and maybe it's the sanctity of a much bigger system than the Underworld that he's worried about! Maybe it's the whole divine and cosmic order. Whatever system he wants so badly to protect is enabling the abuse Zagreus has been dealing with for however-long he's been alive. Whatever system he wants so badly to protect OUGHT to be overturned, or at least shaken up. But this is what toxic systems DO. They convince the people within them that they have to be maintained, that a broken system that hurts the people within it is far better than no system at all, that changing the world is too scary and too dangerous. And Thanatos wants his whatever-Zagreus-is-to-him to be there, because he loves him and also because that's how the world works, and those things are all tangled up in one another, and that is how relationships are in a messed-up family like this so therefore I love it.
And Meg. Meg, the best for last, my dear, beautiful, furious, bitter, scared angry tired girl. I adore her. I am absolutely never going to date her, because the thing Zagreus needs most in his life hurts her, more directly than anybody else in the story, and that sucks, and it's not Zag's fault but they still shouldn't be together. Meg has taken more injury from this situation than anyone, quite literally as well as metaphorically, and it's not her fault any more than it's ours, but oh boy it has made her lash out and it's awful and it's perfect.
Meg's place in the Court of Hades is unique because she's not dead, not a mortal, not anything other than a god--but she's also not family. Nyx is not her mother. She's very much part of this system, she and her two sisters belong to Hades-the-realm and therefore also Hades-the-king, she can't leave, but she also doesn't have that protection of Nyx watching out for her in the same way. She's not royalty. She and her sisters (if you ask Hesiod instead of Virgil, which seems to be the interpretation the game's going with here) sprang from the blood of maimed Uranus at the same time as Aphrodite, but fuck knows Aphrodite isn't claiming them as siblings. And she can't be fired, exactly, but she sure can be demoted, and she sure can be made miserable in her job. Meg is vulnerable in a way very few people in Hades' employ are. She's a lot harder to do away with than any one random shade, but she's also a lot harder to miss blending in with a crowd.
What's more, she's the one person in this whole mess who is specifically tasked with stopping us from leaving. Hypnos isn't ordered to put us to sleep and keep us in our room. Thanatos can't be compelled or punished if he doesn't hunt us down. Achilles isn't told to lock us up and keep the keys. Meg is the one stationed at the doorway to Tartarus to keep us in. Meg is the one who gets in trouble when we leave. Meg (who Hades knows goddamn well Zagreus cares for, or cared for, who he absolutely knows we used to date) is the one who has to fight us again and again and again. And she's the one who keeps dying.
Again, it's this incredibly fucked-up guilt/hostage situation deliberately designed to keep people from fleeing abusive situations. Meg's insistence on fighting us now puts Zagreus in the position of having to hurt her himself again and again. Now suddenly we're the ones sticking a sword in our ex-girlfriend. Now suddenly someone can point to our desire to leave, to flee, to escape, and say, how selfish. How cruel. How terrible of us to want to go, when we're even willing to hurt the people we love to do it.
Except, right: Hades is the one who demands Meg stand there and stop us. Hades is the one who puts both of us in that position. Meg is also in an abusive situation, and she's willing to hurt us to protect herself. "I'd rather be on your bad side than your father's." It's easy to blame her at the start for being complicit, for being a tool of our father's abuse, for being on his side. It gets harder as the game goes on. I've killed her so many times. There's no way for her to beat me. She knows at this point that she can't beat me. She still fights, every single time, still throws herself upon that spike, not because she thinks she has any chance of stopping me but because she is so damn scared of what will happen if she doesn't try.
In fact, Meg's the one person we have actually seen face consequences for our actions so far, instead of just facing the threat of them. Her sisters are here. Her sisters, who she clearly does not want here, who are wild and violent and who she does not want in her life or anywhere near her, let alone near the job she takes so much pride in. She gets to deal with them now. (Hades doesn't have to deal with them. They're still not allowed in his court. But Meg does.) She gets stabbed, and bludgeoned, and shot, and lightning-struck, and poisoned, and every other thing we do to her. Thanatos doesn't. Nyx and Achilles and Hypnos don't. Bug Meg? Oh yes. Meg pays.
And yes, ok, she is complicit in this system. Everybody is complicit in this system. Zagreus who's trying to escape on his own behalf instead of overthrowing his father for the sake of everyone he'd otherwise be leaving behind is complicit in this system. Pointing fingers and pulling strings of who's more at fault? and who do we blame for this? is exactly how this sort of system perpetuates itself. Your sister always talked back at the dinner table and put everyone in an even worse and more violent mood. Your coworker refuses to work more than forty hours a week so now you have to take overtime to pick up their slack. You're enabling your dad by asking your sister to shut up, you're enabling your employer by working as hard as you do so you don't get fired, everyone's at fault, everyone's to blame, everyone is--
It's not everyone. It's Hades. It's Hades at the root of everything, and probably something big and institutional and fucked-up even beyond him. But even if everyone down in this Underworld does have to be trapped here forever, even if he's trapped here forever, Hades is neither challenging the system that put them here nor trying to make that fate better for anyone else stuck with him. He's just created an entire kingdom of backbiting and misery and people who can either go along with his whims or suffer the consequences.
At this point in the game, Meg is so fucking tired. Every time we run into her in the lounge, hunched over a table, the venom in her voice when she tells us "Do I look like I have anything to say to you?" is so bitter and so exhausted. There was a system, and she knew her place in the system, and it was a system divinely ordered by the gods themselves, and sure it was cruel but that's the literal will of the universe as far as she knows it. She had a role, and her role was vengeance and punishment and violence against those who'd committed the most egregious of sins in life, and there was a point to it, she was the divine deterrent to convince people not to do those things, and that was just, and that was right. The GODS THEMSELVES said so. How do you argue with that? You can't possibly argue with that!
And Zagreus is arguing with that. In trying to leave, he's questioning the unbreakable rule that nothing in the Underworld ever gets to leave it. In disobeying his father to do so, he's questioning the unbreakable rule that what the gods say is LAW. He's breaking everything.
And of course he's not trying to do any of that. He's not trying to destabilize the system at all. He's just trying to get himself out of it, to a place where he feels like he belongs and maybe a parent who's slightly nicer to him than this one. But toxic systems like this one break when the people within them have access to another option. When the kids find a way to actually leave, and not answer the phone, and not come home for holidays, and not deal with it any more. When the employees have the economic freedom to quit. When opportunities granted by education, money, social support, etc etc etc, show up and give people a choice. Even if the option is only ever for Zagreus--he's demonstrating that an option exists. Which is, of course, the one thing the system cannot ever allow.
The Mighty Nein have exactly three ways of dealing with enemies, and that is so fascinating to me.
Befriend. Between Essek and Isharnai, this has been pretty front-and-center lately, but it’s not actually a recent development. The M9 have been cozying up to potential threats and making nice as far back as Zadash, when they first discovered the Gentleman’s operations and then promptly decided to go to work for him. It happens in Hupperdook, when they spend all day swearing bloody murder and hunting down the pickpockets who robbed them, and then promptly adopt four more children and nearly die getting their parents out of prison. It happens in the Bright Queen’s throne room, when they walk into the innermost heart of the nation they’ve been told for fifty sessions is their enemy, and become heroes of the Dynasty. There’s a tribe of giants who owe them their home and their gratitude and a band of no-longer-bandits who owe them their lives and their pants-wetting terror, because sometimes that is just how the M9 roll.
There are so few people this party actually has a stake in killing. Monsters, whatever, needs must, but like--who the hell are they to judge? (The first monsters and enemies they ever made friends with, after all, were each other.)
All-out slaughter. When the Nein do decide they really want to kill someone, they fucking go for the jugular. True, murder is pretty standard in D&D, but the Nein often throw both caution and reason out the window when something hits their kill button. This is almost everything about the pirate arc, starting that day in Nicodranas where they tried to talk threateningly to two guys and ended up committing domestic terrorism and then also murdering their way into ownership of a ship, ending that time they got kicked off Pirate Island in less than 24 hours because they decided to rend Avantika asunder the first instant they had the chance. It’s their entire brief enmity with Lorenzo--they would not wait, they would not plan, they would not stop, and they would not under any circumstances, no matter what Matt wanted of planned, let him go.
Hell, this is how ‘prank call Essek in the middle of a dinner party’ turned into ‘paralyze, kidnap, and interrogate’ in the first place. This group does not do long games if they can possibly help it.
Absolute avoidance. There are, sometimes, enemies the Nein dislike too much to befriend and aren’t strong enough to kill. U’kotoa. Trent Ikithon. These opponents are relatively rare, because the Nein do absolutely everything player-ly possible to distance themselves from them at every opportunity. Don’t want to unleash an immense immortal sea serpent? Fuck just saying ‘no’, we’re headed to the opposite side of the continent from the ocean, and then we’re going to yeet that magic sword directly into a volcano for good measure. You can’t threaten or blackmail me.
This party is very, very good at avoidance on both a personal and collective level. So much of the early game was built around getting the fuck away from the entire concept of war and law in general, once upon a time. They have all of them stayed away from their own families, steering clear around Felderwin and Kamordah until they couldn’t any more, putting off visiting the Menagerie, sleeping on the boat instead of going back to Marion’s for one more night. They run away from their own pasts and selves and inner demons. They are not all entirely fond of mirrors.
The thing is, I’m always so fascinated by the moments when the party seems to surprise or vex Matt by derailing his plans, and while he’s generally so proud of them for it, what I’m thinking about tonight is his endless, futile attempts to give them a fucking nemesis already. I’m thinking about why it just keeps not working. And I think it’s this!
This three-pronged approach to dealing with enemies, avoid-befriend-destroy, is basically a three-step guide to making sure you don’t have enemies any more. In fact, I would say not-having-enemies-anymore is one of the highest priorities the M9 hold, and it has been, almost accidentally, since before the game even started. The M9 have since the very beginning played what I can only describe as an extraordinarily defensive game. They don’t go looking for trouble unless it’s specifically connected to some immediate threat to themselves or someone else. The handful of mercenary contracts they’ve taken have almost universally been about, “hey, let’s do this thing for the Gentleman so he doesn’t decide to mistrust and kill us,” or, “let’s do this thing for the Gentleman so we can get the fuck out of town before they start conscripting to fight the Krynn Dynasty,” or, “hey, let’s do this thing for the Krynn Dynasty so they don’t decide to mistrust and kill us.”
And it’s not about trying to thwart Matt! It’s about a party of characters who are all extremely defensive and avoidant in their own ways. Some of it’s about the sheer trauma of everything to do with Molly, and some of it’s probably about the sheer trauma of everything to do with Vax and Raishan and Anna Ripley and every C1 mistake or villain that ever came back to haunt them, and some of it’s just baked into these new characters. Everyone in this party is so fucking hurt and defensive before they even start. The only thing that’s changed so far is the bit-by-bit careful broadening of their circle of ‘who to protect’ to include each other, and their friends, and maybe more or less half the world.
The one exception here is, of course, Obann, who has them on the ropes for almost 20 episodes--who they could not kill, and tried, and he had Yasha and they could not possibly join or befriend him, and he had Yasha and they could never forgive or ignore him, and he had Yasha and they could not kill him. And the thing is, all I can remember right now is how painful so much of that arc was. Everybody was so desperate. Everybody was so miserable. And still, and still, they could not think how to go around this problem any back way, could not recruit allies or head it off. They could only just distract themselves with brief side quests in hopes that it might help them next time they hurled themselves head-first into trying all-out slaughter again, and again, and again. It wasn’t like the Chroma Conclave. They didn’t back out of the first desperate battle and decide to take the long way around on purpose, to measure and trick and evaluate and gather specific resources and plan. They were so utterly lost. They were so desperate.
I think that probably, Matt’s hope for Essek was indeed that he’d become the party’s long-term nemesis that Lorenzo and Avantika didn’t have the chance to be. I think he was hoping the other night for Essek to get away and leave them all feeling suspicious and betrayed. I think he was hoping a month or two ago that the M9 would head off away from the peace talks and never even find out about Essek until he tried to call in some of those favors for increasingly suspicious things or it all came back around to bite them in the ass. I think he hoped for a very long time, maybe even a year ago when they met Essek in the first place, that this traitorous mole would become their Anna Ripley--the cold dark super-intelligent mirror to their own broken super-intelligent knifeblade of a friend, someone they could loathe and fear and despise and eventually, eventually destroy.
But the M9 don’t do nemeses if they have any way whatsoever to help it. Good luck, Matt. Pretty sure for this crew it is Trent Ikithon and U’kotoa and Tharizdun himself, and absolutely nobody else is big or bad enough for them to actually run up against for more than a single rematch, unless you get real fucking creative.
