Lack of Life

[ID: Two digital drawings of Orym and Dorian Storm from Critical Role. On the left is a drawing of just Orym, smiling and looking pleased and flustered. He's poking the tips of his index fingers together. The drawing on the right is of Orym and Dorian together, kissing. Text above their heads reads "+3 hope". End description.]

This is not easy to do at all. It's very difficult to create characters that stand out as new. Fanfic writers borrow aspects of original characters and often create less complex versions of them in their own romance fics, but creating interesting original characters, suited especially for romance, takes incredible skill. You see a lot of this in shows like bridgerton, for example, where most of the characters in the show are derived from their originals and have the hallmarks of complexity but not the depth. Or After, where the characters are based on Harry Styles and come across as caricature-ish.

One of the reasons Heated Rivalry was famous even within the MM romance genre (and I've read a ton of books within this genre), is because of the characters. They're incredibly well constructed and their romance is very believable. This is a good romance novel; it fulfills it's intention. Everything else in this book is a prop for the romance, and, again, it's a romance book! It's not an academic textbook on gay sex and mental health disorders!

However people seem to treat it as such. Calling the books too trashy for their taste or that Jacob 'elevates' the books—Jacob's adaptation is successful because he stayed as true as he could to the source material, because, guess what, he is a romance reader and understands what makes a romance story work. The reason you like his show, additionally, is because it's beautiful to look at. The cinematographer and the editor did a wonderful job as well. And of course, the actors get all their flowers. But it's still romance! So you are consuming romance, and sneering at the creators for creating romance as a lesser artform?

I think it'd be really funny if Eric was actually a younger brother. So, like, maybe he's a duke, actually, but he still gets the title of Prince. Travels the sea a lot, unlike a more landlocked heir. Hanging out at this summer seaside palace while the rest of the family is elsewhere for some reason.

Like, everyone knew this was a political battle going in. That was the entire pretense, everyone knew it. This wasn't a dinner party, this was a battlefield

And Trent was very prepared. He had time to plan out his bullshit story to enact the most physic damage on his precious little boy. He has home team advantage. He has all his props and implied threats. He has his two henchman prepped and ready for this.

But dude is so used to fucking, respectable and hidden dagger type politics with people who have very set and conflicting goals and who battle by the very specific and unspoken rules of political engagement where breaking even one of these could result in social backlash by the most powerful mages in the world-

-Only to, immediately and suddenly discover that the Might Nein give negative shits about his political game because they brought their own card baby!

You lose control before anyone even takes a fucking seat. These people are too amazed by the concept of an elevator to even pick up on any of your actual threats or implications, play an extremely stressful game of musical chairs, before half of them start mean-girling your most trusted acolyte, and when you try and read the mind of the main mean girl literally all she is thinking about is how hot her friends tits are

Then when you start to say how you totally masterminded everything and planned all of this the dumb one is genuinely so confused about this entire thing that she makes you lay the entire thing out, which makes it very clear that the logic of this makes no sense, and yeah, sure, Caleb is shaken but its starting to be very clear that none of these other people are buying it, and they seem to know the backstory already so you can't actually pull your cards out because despite your prodding them seem to be a very united front. If anything you're people are significantly more shaken by this whole thing than they are, because they're mainly concerned with eating their meals before they get kicked out

Then when you go to leave the one guy who was actually trying to be cordial for this whole thing, thanks you for dinner, says you are a wizard of immense skill, and then completely calmly suggests that you should really try and find someone who will mourn you when you are gone, and you read his mind and he is being so deadass honest about that fact that it actually does physic damage

You follow the group out in the guise of an hour. The main mean girl one immediately flips you off and yells "Fuck you Professor Thadeus!"

The other, secondary mean girl is apologizing to your main henchman, saying her hair really is great, and that she's forgiven for all of the murders.

The Calamity finale:

Bonuses:

Lou — "[Brennan:] Zerxus, you pull the true heart of the Lord of the Hells into Exandria."

Marisha — "[Brennan:] This will be our final roll of this campaign."

Luis — Sam begins to describe Loquatius cycling through the faces of those he wronged or failed as he loses consciousness.

Sam — Marisha rolls two 10s on her Counterspell against Power Word Kill.

Aabria — "[Aabria:] Is this a spell effect?" // "[Travis:] No, this is physics."

Travis — "[Elias:] I don't know why I didn't send it. I don't know why I didn't—" // [Zerxus:] You don't need to explain yourself. I know why, and it's okay."

Bonuses:

Aabria — "[Luis:] I pull him." // "[Aabria:] Does the Time Stop stop?"

Marisha — "[Asmodeus:] Let's get ourselves cleaned up."