Vox Machina’s story is a tragedy just as much as a happy ending.
Imagine: you’re the twin bastards of a wealthy man and a dead woman and all you have in the world is each other; you’re the prodigal heir of your people on the same quest that took your mother and the very concept of power terrifies you but you have to learn to wield it anyway; you’re the son of a deposed warlord left for dead by your uncle, brought into an unknown world of kindness and faith by another victim of your family of origin whose death you objected to against all your upbringing; you’re the good-hearted daughter of a family of crooks and you struggle to balance the love of your goddess with all the ugly feelings of anger and doubt that haunt you; you’re the lone survivor of a massacre, you fled the burning corpse of the city you love and your own sister’s bleeding body in the dirt, when you sleep you dream of forge fire and blood and you cling to your name even as you know you’re not worthy of it; you’re a bard haunted by the song of your mother’s dying screams and when you make people laugh you feel a little less helpless so you resign yourself to being comic relief and convince yourself that being needed is better than being wanted.
And then bit by bit you come together by chance, and suddenly you’re not just you anymore, you’re a group. You start testing the waters of friendship, of care, of love in many forms. You kill for each other; you die for each other. The world keeps trying to crush you but you keep fighting back, and together you start winning, together you stop being outcasts and screw-ups and start being heroes. People look to you for help, for guidance, for salvation. You’re terrified of it but you’re together so you muddle through, and all the losses pile up but the victories are so much greater. Guilt is easier to carry across many shoulders, and vengeance is a noble pursuit. You’re winning. You’re winning.
And then you lose. You lose and you keep losing and you thought the Dread Emperor, the Briarwoods, the dragons were all beyond you but you managed it, you saved the realm and each other, but suddenly you’re in the Shadowfell and your friends are dying and Vax is gone -
You win. But there’s finally a price that you don’t want to pay. You’re the most powerful group of people in the world, wielding god-forged remnants of divine war and too stubborn to do anything but fight until the fighting’s done, but you still lose. He leaves you, willingly and with a clean conscience and an awful, cruel faith that you’ll all be okay without him, and there’s nothing you can do.
In this moment, at the absolute height of your power, you are useless.
Vox Machina is a tragedy because they rallied the whole world behind them and they won every unwinnable fight and in between all that they figured out how to be people who love and dream and build and lead and open bakeries and have cannonball contests and start families, but there was always going to be a cost. There was always going to be an end. Even as they move forward and live their lives they’re still a little bit stuck in their grief because they’re not used to losing. They’re unstoppable forces of nature but they were always going to meet an immovable object and none of them are really capable of accepting that because why would they? They’re basically gods.
