Milk

in the campaign, the reason molly’s death hits so hard is that it wasn’t supposed to happen. this is a trait very unique to liveplays, where no one can be sure of how something is going to go until it’s over. the lead up to 26 wasn’t particularly sinister, other than for half the group being missing, but the players and audience understood that necessity on a doyalist level. there was no impending sense of doom because the fight wasn’t meant to be deadly, or maybe it wasn’t supposed to happen at all. and i think that’s what makes it so impactful- you’re put in the mind of the characters and experience for yourself how shocking and off-beat a death like that is. and then you spend another hundred episodes coming to terms with it, not only because you miss the character, but because you understand that there was a version of the story where molly was with them during all of these arcs. molly could’ve been a pirate. he could’ve gotten a new xhorhas outfit. he could’ve met essek. and it’s that frustration at sheer bad luck that gets you. but when you introduce foreshadowing into the mix, as you have to do with a tv show, it takes away that aspect of the character that i’ve always found wholly unique to this specific campaign, because you understand that molly’s death is imperative for the narrative. but in the campaign, it wasn’t imperative right up until it happened, and then it became the most important, all-encompassing event of the story. his death genuinely alters the narrative- it changes the direction of character arcs, it gives it a new villain, it gives it overarching themes that weren’t there before, it gives them caduceus, who shifts the tone of it all by himself. there’s a version of the story where molly doesn’t die, but that version is completely unrecognizable from the one we know. and you can’t say that about the show, because he’s going to die from the very beginning, and so when it happens it’ll only cement everything that’s already been set up. it works, sure, in terms of general story beats, but i don’t think it works well, or at least, as well as it does in the campaign.

The trouble is that critical role has only developed very straightforward fantasies for its adaptations (bummer, especially as they exist in the world and compete with the likes of arcane [unbelievably well-funded passion project, world's most expensive and likely successful commercial] and now a knight of the seven kingdoms [unbelievably charming and earnestly emotional yet brutal, with an unusual perspective for televised fantasy with anachronistic creative touches]).

And the trouble with straightforward fantasies (swearing and referential joking aside), especially when the scaffolding for the narrative is a game where the point is to grow and develop, is that you cant have a renard the fox + chanticleer hybrid running around with the protagonists who have to do the growing and developing.

Mollymauk was self-actualized at the point we meet him (his being full of shit and an amnesiac unimportant to this, he's a poor, poor-man's robin hood in his origin comic, which is a buff and shine to the character but reads very much like the character he was Intended to be played as during the campaign). You can still be a fairy godmother figure even if you have amnesia amd dont care - the character his name is borrowed from very much is. But you really cant have that kind of guy running around with your protagonists - in a more typical structure, like the tv show, of course they have to lose that mentor/guidance figure (whether they saw him as that or not when he was around), otherwise his lessons are never going to sink in, and they dont heed the call.