The concept of a "royal fandom" really began in the mid 20th century, after the end of World War II. Initially, the focus was on the two princesses - Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret. They were two young, attractive, fashionable women, who were different from the other celebrities of the day.
As Elizabeth and Margaret aged up, Elizabeth and Philip's children took centre stage. Charles, Anne and Andrew, in particular, were popular and well-liked. Anne was fashionable, Charles was powerful and Andrew was a dashing young soldier.
The biggest shift came in the 80s and 90s with "Dianamania". In terms of fandom, this eclipsed anything that came before or has come since and is on par with Beatlemania or the One Direction fandom. The passion and fervour people loved Diana with has never fully gone.
I think it says a lot about Crow that his deepest desire isn't actually to experience what life would have been like with his own parents, but that the orphans he used to look after had had the luxury of being with theirs.
The story creates the story tells itself. That's it, that's what this is, it's the thing I always end up saying when Critical Role hits me right in the solar plexus, because stories are how we make sense of events after they've already happened. The story is not a thing in the moment it is created, it is a thing you can only know the shape of once it's over with, and then you look at it and you say, yes, of COURSE, it only ever could have been this from the first, couldn't it?
Seven miserable loners and outcasts and reckless illegitimate rebels meet in a tavern with no desire whatsoever for heroism. Their morals are quickfire and slapdash, casual and arbitrary, we'll help out these people, those people aren't our problem, we dislike those fucks over there. There is a war brewing and they want nothing to do with it. Fuck fame, fuck fortune, we'll keep to ourselves and play fast and loose with crime and take care of our own and maybe some lucky randoms we meet along the way. We'll fight and scrap and tussle amongst ourselves because none of us even entirely understand our own morals, let alone how to reconcile them with any of these other half-assed motherfuckers we apparently have to care about now.
They fuck up. One of their own dies.
They drown in rage and fury for just long enough, until they can stop gasping and growling for vengeance to take a breath. Then they run.
They run, because they do not care to stand and fight: not against evil or dragons or tyrant kings, not against their own grief. They flee the country. Nobody is chasing them, but they flee anyway, to avoid shackles, to avoid control, to avoid being set to anyone else's purpose, to avoid their own loss and their own sins. They run to the sea. (They find danger, and shackles, and control, and somebody else's purpose there again. The world is full of shackles and those who would wield them.)
They grieve. They avoid their grief. They sanctify their fallen comrade. They do not aim to be anything, this ragtag group of miserable loners and outcasts. The only thing they know themselves to be is each other's. They do not know themselves at all, but this grief, this loss--they know it, at least, know it together, an iron band binding them all heart to heart. It is the first truth they have to hold on to, the thing that lets them see each other as the only thing that matters, the only thing that's really real.
They face down a cult and win, because the other option is shackles or death. They face a demigod and flee, again, again, again. Always they flee.
They flee towards home and home is burned. They have seen loss and they have seen death and it finds them no matter how they run away, so maybe it's time to change direction. Maybe it's time to run towards. It's still running, still half-mindless directionality, it's still familiar. They are not heroes, they are not somebodies, they have never wanted to be somebody. This group has never wanted to be anybody, not as a group, not when they're whole. They're nobodies, trying to take care of themselves, take care of their own, to grow past their grief that they pretend they're gone from now, mostly, most days, when they can. (Pretend it's not the grief that made them each other's in the first place, like none of the fighting and scrapping and scrabbling along beside one another ever had in the first place.)
They bulldoze and trip and stumble and run towards instead of away, for once, just this once, the very first time they've run towards a thing since that last time, the only time, when they temporarily lost three of their own and then broke themselves trying to chase them (trying to chase vengeance). Towards is so much more dangerous than away. Run towards something hard enough, you might actually find it. You might have to become somebody when you get there, instead of just not-being somebody else.
They're somebody now. This rag-tag, broken, mismatched knot of nobodies, not even mercenaries because they're too skittish to even really look for paid work, they're somebodies now, or so Someone Important says. It fits like an ill-tailored coat that they've been forced into without ever making a choice. Without ever realizing, entirely, how much they never made a choice. The world said congrats, you're heroes now, and these killers and thieves went, well, fuck.
And then they tried to be heroes anyway. Not because it fit, not because they knew what to do, but because the mess of them, the seven of them, barely knew who they were to begin with. If the world was shouting HEROES! YOU'RE HEROES! BE HEROES! at them this very loudly--then don't they have to wear the coat that's being given to them? Don't they have to be, have to find some way to become, the heroes they've tripped and stumbled into appearing?
They don't know themselves. All they've done so far is run from themselves--from parents and children and their own crimes, from chains and challenges, limits and labels. They only barely know who they're not. They couldn't know who they are. How do they know they aren't heroes? The one thing they know, the only thing they have, the only thing they've ever run towards, is each other. The one thing they know for absolute sure and certain that defines and binds them is that steel band of grief, that first loss, the thing that broke and forged them to begin with.
So they look for answers in their grief, in what they've lost, because if it's the first true thing about them as a group, them as a whole, then it must be able to tell them who they have to be now. They sanctify their fallen, twist meaning and moral out of conversational confrontational casualness, make a mission statement out of leave every place better than you found it. They forget who he was, petty and venal and mortal and flawed. (They try to convince themselves that they don't have to be petty and venal and mortal and flawed.) They cling to what he meant.
And they fail. God, looking back on it all, with the shape of the story and the shape it's become, is it any wonder they failed? Petty and venal and moral and flawed, these rough-edged rabble-rousers, not even mercenaries because they don't even know how to take orders besides their own. Trying to be heroes. Trying to stop a war, because that's their job, right? It has to be. That's the shape of the coat they're trying to wear, that's the shape of leave every place better than you found it, that's the thing they crashed straight into while they were running, running, running the way they've always run, run, run. So they look for answers everywhere, because they have to have the answers to everything, and they scry and they spy and they play sides. They meet with queens. They turn to each other on the streets on the way out of the palace and ask in horror, "What did we just do?"
They run and they run and they trip and they fall and they unleash more evil than there was to start with. They lose one of their own, again. They sit in shattered shards, and what just happened? How could we have seen this coming? What did we just do?
They don't know themselves. They've been running from themselves, trying to run towards misty shapes they can't define in a too-big coat and too-small shoes, without any real practice in running towards to begin with. They don't know themselves, but they need to move forwards. They need to be whole again, the six, the seven (the eight, the nein). How can they do that if they don't know themselves?
And--finally, finally, they learn.
They learn. They throw a sword in a volcano and forge a sword anew. They rediscover their own mind, their own heart, covered in blood with each other's blood on their hands. They walk into their abusers' homes and then walk back out again alive and un-alone and unchained. They recover bodies. They recover families. They find themselves.
(And the selves they find are mortal and flawed, because they have always been mortal and flawed, because they are built to be mortal and flawed, because they are still the same misbegotten messes they have ever been. But they are stronger for having sought themselves out, for what they have found. They are the stronger for those threads of heroism they tried to, managed to keep.)
They stop a war, incidentally. In the end it's not even all that much due to them. They sit, nobodies on a ship in the middle of the ocean, and watch in silence. It chafes a little, not to be in the center of things, to be able to be the heroes it felt like the world told them they had to be. (It feels a little like relief.)
They find themselves. They find themselves, and they find another lost and broken man, miserable outcast loner, petty and venal and mortal and flawed. They only start to realize how they know themselves now when they see how much he doesn't.
(The peace treaty happens, happened, is/was/will be happening, because they tripped and trembled and tried their way into it, but in the end a thousand chess pieces moved to make it so, and it is signed on a boat where we do not even set foot. The culmination, the crowning glory, the true victory of that whole middle story, is a perfectly-dressed man in chains in the hold of a boat, admitting to his own sins. It is secret and it is individual, and it is the concrete proof above all proofs that our nobody unknowns are finally their own very-known selves. Because they were Essek, once--but know they know their own mirrors well enough to look at him and recognize that.)
They know so much, now, about who they are and who they are to become. They have looked at their pasts and, yes, flinched away, but they've seen, and they know, now, as much as they can handle. In the end, the one thing they don't know the true shape of, the one thing left to seek that must be sought, is of course (of course, of course) that very first thing they thought they knew to begin with. The one thing left to face is their grief. The one thing left to discover is what shaped it from the very start.
So they run, like they have always run. In amongst the snow it is the very distillation of running, towards and away, away and towards, chasing and fleeing and fleeing and chasing, are we in front or are they? It's every mistake they ever made all over again. It's every new lesson they've ever learned.
They don't ask any more, what's the right thing to do. They don't need to ask. They know, already, swift and sure and confident as they once stumbled and dodged. This is a thing that must be stopped. It is ours to stop it. Yes, it is a heavy, clumsy coat to wear, but it fits us out here in the snows where we're not trying to prove our heroism to anybody any more, for good or for evil. Yes, it weighs on our backs and tangles our legs, but it fits as well as any role we've ever tried to wear. It fits us more than it could ever fit anybody else. It's our role. It's our coat. It was forged of our choices, our pieces, our fights. It was forged of our grief.
Nobody else is here with us, to watch, to know. Just like when we were seven shiftless, aimless, worthless nobodies wandering through a circus tent on the way to nowhere (everywhere) else. There's us and the demon born from our grief, the demon who sprang up and died and is the only reason we any of us ever met. Just us, just the nine of us, three and three and three. The three who were dragged off in chains and gave us something to run towards, that very first time. The three who chased, and watched their companion fall, and faced their grief head on, and ran. And Lucien, and Caduceus, and Essek, beginning and middle and end: The man whose demise allowed us to come together, reborn from the loss that bound us. The man who found us and told us that grief is inevitable and passing, that we must continue with it, that we still had such a long way to go. The man who we found like a reflection in an aging mirror, reflecting our own progress back at us, showing us how far we've come and what we've learned how to be.
Of course it had to end this way. (There were so very many other ways it could have ended, once. Of course there were none at all.) Of course it would be nine and nine in the end. Of course it would be this final perfect marriage of heroism and anonymity, for this group that's finally figured out their selves, past and future and right-the-fuck-now, saviors and heroes and petty nobody fucks. Of course it would be this.
And of course, of course, of course it had to go like this. Of course, after everything, the first six of them would try to reverse that grief that forged and tied them. Of course they couldn't. Of course they couldn't, of course, of course--(and was it fate, that 1-in-20 chance, that 5% chance, that 1 on a die? was it fate like the dice are always fate in every game, rolling out poetry with every throw, because all the rolls that aren't quite poetic enough get forgotten?) Of course it was a 1, not some other number, not some sheepish failure of a 4. Of course the universe itself would speak to say no.
No, says the universe, that is not how this story goes--because the road is full of shattered shards, and our heroes only learned to be heroes by discovering how bloodily bad at it they were, by nearly causing the apocalypse before wrestling it back again. Of course the universe itself says that after all this time, after changing so far and discovering so much, this the inciting thing from the very beginning that bound this group in steel must not be changed. Of course, with all their pleas, the six people who knew him cannot bring him back.
Of course that's how the story would go. And of course there's Essek, the man who met this party so long after their throes of mourning that it had sunk into their bones and grown quiet before they ever knew him, who cannot accept this outcome. Of course it's Essek, who never met and has barely heard of this man, this grief--Essek who has not yet grown into the quiet acceptance of his own grief, who does not yet know his own mirror, who has only just barely begun to understand running to instead of from and still doesn't know the shape of what he might eventually choose to chase--who seethes in rage. Who cries about not fair.
Of course it's Caduceus who takes the inspiration of that anger, that grief, and changes it all. Of course it's Caduceus, who the group only even found out of their grief. (They tracked him down to beg to know if he could raise the dead in the first place. Do you remember? One, two, three, Caleb and Beau and Nott, finding him in his graveyard to beg him to help.) Of course it's Caduceus, created to serve and to heal and to make so, so very sure that everyone understood that death could be necessary and final. Of course it's Caduceus, who stood over Mollymauk's grave by the roadside and put a hand in the dirt and cast decompose, because what is dead should be allowed to stay that way until it grows into something else. Of course it is. Because Caduceus has learned his own shape by now, too--and it is still full of devotion, of dedication to the dead remaining dead, but it is steadfast and selfish sometimes too, forged in friendship, full enough of love to try, just this once.
Of course Caduceus gave the diamond but didn't try to perform the ritual, at first, at first. Of course he's spent so very long so very gently urging his friends to reconcile themselves to their loss, to letting their loved one sleep. Of course, in the end, in the very end, he weighed all his faith that once held so firm and final and without exceptions, with this grief before him, and found just this once, maybe, within it.
Of course when he tried, the man who lives to put things in the ground (to put Molly in the ground), even after the fates and the gods and the universe had spoken--when, just this once, against the will of the natural order and the universe and the power of destiny, he asked, just once, for the path of things to reverse--of course. Of course he was the voice that needed to speak for the story to listen.
Of course Molly would end the campaign. Of course this had to be the finale of it all. Of course this ritual--not this fight, not this mission, not even this apocalypse, but this ritual, this resurrection--must be the end of things. Of course it's the end of the story. You can't go any farther than this.
There can never be nine of us. It won't be ironic any more. But irony, after all, is just a way of running from sincerity, sometimes running away from sincerity so hard and fast you crash back into it from the other side. Like running from being a person, from being that person, from letting things matter, from mattering. Like running so far and fast from being found that eventually you have no choice but to find yourself. Irony's a shield against having to know the truth.
There's nine of them. It's not ironic. It's perfect, but it's not ironic. It's just the truth. They know who they are, now. Not who they were running away from being. Not who they tried to be for the sake of anyone else. Who they always are. Always were.
This story could have been a hundred thousand different things, when it started. Of course it was always fated to end with nine.
