#tm9 speculation

[gayz0mb]

very important we establish beau is into big muscular ladies…yes yes very important….

[lostsometime]

also i'm going to need a minute to ponder the implications of Nydas Okiro having had a compass capable of magically pointing to Aeor, considering that both Aeor and his own city used to move around, and that Avalir seemed pretty worried about war with Aeor being imminent, shortly before its destruction.

Because even thought the tunnels seemed to indicate that most of that treasure was from his pre-Avalir pirate days, the presence of the big automatons suggests that at least some stuff in there was from after he had the resources of Avalir at his disposal, and a magic compass that can zero in on the location of your enemies' flying city and present a real-time topographical display of it? seems.... interesting.

[casuallightprincess]

So in the trailer we saw Jester hugging Caleb in that old farmhouse and I really hope they didn't cut the reaction from the Nein to Caleb's story. I especially want Nott's and Beau's reaction so bad, so I'm being delusional and hoping that Trent tries to lure Caleb back to him, telling him that no one would ever accept him for what he did and then he remembers the groups reaction and resists him....

[oksneasnake]

At this point, we have to consider the very real possibility of Yasha meeting the Mighty Nein in the baths 🤣

[aeoris4lovers]

major spoilers ahead for show-only watchers. stop reading now. do not pass go, do not collect $200. this post is not a place of honor.

i’ve being thinking about how they’re going to handle yasha joining the team as well as molly’s run-in with the iron shepherds, and i’ve seen a lot of people worried that yasha is going to be the one who replaces them in his story but honestly, with the way they’ve set everything up, i don’t think they’re going to go that route.

first of all, i agree with everyone who’s said we’re probably going to get another season with molly. maybe it’s just wishful thinking, but i really don’t think it’s going to happen this early. i mean, in the campaign he doesn’t even touch his backstory at all — why bother starting to set that up more with him in the show if he’s just going to get killed one episode later? i think they know molly is a beloved character and honestly, this would feel very early at least to me (even if it technically matches when it happened in the campaign based on how many seasons they’re expecting the story to take, the pace of the show is much faster so it would be surprisingly soon) so i’m hoping they recognize that a lot of people would feel cheated if after getting so little time with molly, we get even less here.

that being said, i know i could be wrong about that, but i still don’t think it’ll be yasha who does it whenever it happens.

they’ve been setting up yasha as a big fight, yes, but they’ve also set up not just that she’s being controlled but the specific way she’s being controlled — the rune/sigil on the back of her neck. my guess is that while fighting her, one of them will hit it and break obann’s control over her, and she’ll join the team once they realize she wasn’t doing any of that willingly. OR they’ll get lucky and she’ll show up looking for the beacon right around the same time that they’re getting their asses kicked by volstruckers while trying to steal it, and she’ll be the reason they get out alive because she’s a damn killing machine. maybe both! maybe she’s fighting indiscriminately and helping them while also hurting them. or maybe they’ll succeed in stealing it and she’ll have to chase them down to get it, triggering the fight where they free her from obann’s control. i don’t know.

all we know is that (if i remember correctly) she’s about to meet them in zadash because she specifically asked where the beacon and the cerberus assembly are, which most likely means obann caught wind of a very powerful artifact switching hands and wants her to steal it for him. and i suspect that goal is going to make him the villain of season 2. (i forget if she said the beacon or just the assembly, but even if it was just the assembly, i think that must be the reason she’s looking for them. the alternative of course is that she’s there for something related to vess and the book, which maybe is more likely now that i think about it, but i’m sure that’ll end up intersecting enough with the plot that it doesn’t really matter which one he’s interested in. surely if he’s chasing down vess, he’ll want to chase down molly too, right?)

if they go the route of making molly’s death early, which i hope they don’t, i think it’ll happen during the beacon heist, which i don’t hate outside of the timing because they’ve already set trent and the volstruckers up to be a solidly hateable alternative to the iron shepherds.

alternatively, if they give him another season, i think it’ll be obann that gets him in the end. hell, they could even go the route of actually calling the cult of the angel of irons “the iron shepherds” because they’re trying to shepherd the “angel of irons” into the world! it just seems like the perfect way to do it without having to introduce another set of villains. i don’t know how it’ll happen, but it seems to me like obann is both the most obvious choice for the villain of the next arc and the most obvious replacement for the iron shepherds.

maybe…maybe it’ll even be molly that leads them down into bazzoxan, or wherever they decide to set the confrontation. i mean, we know he’s more interested in knowing his past than he was in the campaign, even if he says he’s not, and i have a feeling his blood going into that stone wasn’t just for aesthetics. maybe he’ll start having dreams or just instincts about where they should go next, and they won’t know it’s tharizdun leading them into the same trap obann has been trying to chase them into until they get there, and it’ll be a confrontation with his own past that ends his part of the story.

honestly, i think that’s the best possible outcome, and it feels plausible given how everything has been set up. i think it would be a narratively satisfying way for him to go and work toward setting up the eventual confrontation with lucien, whereas yasha pulling the trigger would just make it make absolutely no sense for her to join the team after.

of course, essek will most likely be somehow involved in all of this too, since he’s also on his way to zadash to retrieve the beacon, but i’m not sure what role i think he’ll play. i do wonder if maybe he’ll end up running with the nein for a while, since pretty much the only other way for him to be involved would be working against them and i feel like that would make the whole trusting-him-and-then-being-betrayed-by-him thing much more complicated. maybe they say they’re also there to return it to the dynasty so he decides to work with them to do that? or if they do go the being-chased-down-by-obann route, maybe it’s more of a “yeah you’ll have this back but first we have to make sure we’re not leading this entity of death and destruction straight to your front door” and essek has to run with them because he doesn’t trust them and isn’t just going to leave the beacon in their hands and hope they’re really going to return it.

personally i hope they’ll still end up going to bazzoxan at some point in the process because i NEED to see my boy verin, but that’s neither here nor there. (godddd can you imagine how delicious it would be to get a confrontation between essek and verin, if verin knows their mom died or if essek tells him? and for verin to see just how cold and cruel he’s becoming as he’s shutting down? that’s definitely just wishful thinking but i will be thinking about it forever.)

so that’s my best guess: everything will converge during the beacon heist, they’ll end up with obann on their tail, and molly will unwittingly be the reason they run right to him, leading to the confrontation where he dies. maybe it’s even obann who’s the reason molly is resurrected again as lucien, bringing one of tharizdun’s chosen back into the fold.

as far as the pirate arc, i have no doubt we’re going to get it, but i think it inevitably has to be later because in campaign time, fjord had lots of time to be haunted by the eldritch horrors before we got to that point, but in show time it’s still pretty early in his personal horror show. i bet we’re going to see more of that warlock and patron back-and-forth before they set sail. that just feels like a plotline that’s so directly tied to his backstory and i don’t think he’s ready for it yet, so i think it’ll be a later-season arc.

hell, it could really even be a season 3 arc if we get the obann stuff and more dynasty stuff in season 2, which is definitely possible — maybe they do actually succeed in bringing the beacon back with essek’s help and then something with molly or yasha pulls them back out into the wastes to have that confrontation with obann. maybe obann regains control of yasha and they could even work the whole kidnapping arc into it as something yasha does before running back to obann, leading molly to him because if obann is potentially curious about vess he’s definitely dying to know what the fuck is going on with molly.

anyway, i think that’s enough speculation for one day. point is, i hope they’re going to give molly another season, but whenever he dies, i don’t think it’ll be yasha who pulls the trigger. that’s just a bad way to introduce a character we’re supposed to like and root for, honestly. it’s much easier to get attached to a character who’s done awful things to npcs than it is to root for one who personally killed a beloved main character, and there are much more narratively satisfying ways for him to go, so i doubt they’d put that on yasha. i just hope they do give molly that one more season so we can really start chewing on those backstory tidbits, and so we can see some of his friendship with yasha before he’s gone.

[kateeorg]

Predicting which tm9 animated characters my mom will vibe with

Caleb: The long haired cat lover voiced by Vax? Oh, absolutely.

Nott: Already found her funny in the preview clip. I think the more she learns the more she’ll like.

Beau: She’s a smart badass, what’s not to love?

Fjord: With him being the voice of reason and the show letting us see him learn magic, I think she’ll like him.

Jester: Jester is so energetic and positive I want to say she will, but I’m not sure about the dick jokes

Molly: This is where I’m really not sure. I didn’t watch much of the campaign pre-episode 26, so I don’t have strong opinions on Molly. And my mom had carnies in her family that she didn’t like, so that could color her opinion of Molly. But the show seems to be setting Molly up as the one to bring the group together, which might make him more sympathetic. We’ll see!

Yasha: Yasha’s start is looking to be the most different from the campaign, but I think Mom will like who she becomes? So it depends.

[lostsometime]

it is unfortunate that verrat was the only person who seemed to be beginning to put together the signs that leylas is having symptoms of typhros, especially now that we know for certain she recognizes it and is consciously and deliberately hiding it

and unfortunate that verrat was never more explicit with essek about what he'd noticed, beyond just "she's getting more aggressive" or whatever it was he said about her. i just think essek deserves to know and he's now had one of the best possible avenues for this information killed!

more than anything, I think I want essek to learn that leylas has typhros once he's certain he's found a cure for it, so he has to decide whether to offer it to help her and thereby stabilize their entire country and culture, or whether to out her and let her be killed like deirta, knowing how ruinous that would be for the entire krynn dynasty. i just think it would be a fun little complication for essek! because a desire to watch leylas either be killed according to her own laws and religion, for having this same illness, or to simply watch her suffer from it and decline the same way his mother did, is entirely reasonable and understandable. i don't know that i would be able to resist a temptation like that! to know that simply by not doing anything, by following the rules and letting things happen, you could have a deeply satisfying vengeance on the entire system that let you and your family down? that you could prove, just by doing nothing, that the religion of the luxon is just as corrupt and hypocritical as any other, and watch it all come crashing down?

versus the knowledge that the krynn dynasty as he knows it would not survive the political and social aftermath of the downfall of leylas krynn? the knowledge that his people would undoubtedly suffer terribly, if he let leylas get what would be coming to her? to know, from a position inside the queen's inner circle, just how vulnerable they would be to outside invasion, and to know, from his experience with trent, exactly how dangerous and cruel that invasion would be? to have to balance "there's so many innocent people here who don't deserve this" against "but none of them cared enough to help my mother, none of them protested against the executions of their own faithful, nobody here helped me when I needed it"? and against the potential danger his brother might be in, and against the fact that the well-being of their people and the preservation of the souls in the beacon was more important to his mother than her own life? to have all of that on his understandably overburdened shoulders?

i just think it would be fun to watch.

[lostsometime]

additional worldbuilding questions!!! since it's made clear that at least some couples remain together across lifetimes, basically doing that very popular "i will find you in every lifetime" fic premise??? what happens if one lifetime makes them siblings, or some other close blood relation? like, if you and your spouse die together and the nearest pregnant person just happens to be pregnant with twins - now your many-lifetimes-long soulmate is your twin sibling. what do you do with that????