Critical Role cast + commenting on their Campaign 4 Characters
Source: "What's Your Character's Vibe?"
transcription:
ASHLEY: Shocker to no one, she is extremely tall. (laughs) And her weapon of choice is a whip. How about you?
LUIS: I'm just going to describe his eyes. The bottom half of his iris is blue, like the ocean, and then the top half bursts out into the colors of the setting sun.
SAM: I'm excited to watch Liam play his character because it incorporates a lot of things that are very important to Liam O'Brien in real life. Theater, performance, ex-spouses. That's not a real thing from his real life.
LIAM: Family.
SAM: Family.
MATT: No one could kick open the door and be like, "Hey, ready to cry, motherfucker?" like Laura Bailey.
LAURA: She's a rogue, she's a stone-cold killer. She's had a history.
TALIESIN: I feel like you would start a bar fight.
LAURA: Oh yeah.
TALIESIN: Yeah.
AABRIA: I also love Alex's character.
MATT: Yes.
ALEXANDER: I think he's more of a dweeb than I initially intended him to be.
LAURA: Can't wait for more interactions with Whitney.
SAM: She is a wild card.
TRAVIS: I don't know what I was expecting from a devil, but you absolutely--
WHITNEY: She's a demon. People are going to get mad about that.
TRAVIS: Excuse me.
LIAM: I think you have, in the past, had a penchant for playing scamps, rascals.
This character is a little more earnest.
MATT: I'm going to corrupt the fuck out of Sam.
AABRIA: Yeah!
SAM: I'm going to stay true to myself and my beliefs.
LIAM: Uh-huh.
SAM: And there's nothing that you or Brennan can do to stop it.
TRAVIS: Robbie came out and said very little, but the second he spoke, I got pregnant.
ROBBIE: I wanted a mystery! A man of few words!
BRENNAN: But I'm saying Robbie is a loquacious gentleman, possessed of eloquence, vocabulary, and a social debonair unlike any I've seen before.
ROBBIE: I do good at stuff.
TALIESIN: I will be playing curator of a museum of antiquities that are magical and dangerous.
MATT: He's creepy.
AABRIA: He's so screepy.
TALIESIN: He is very social and bitchy is what I'll say.
LAURA: He's a c--[bleeps]. TALIESIN: Yep.
AABRIA: Travis wanted to play a furry and we had an intervention for him.
TRAVIS: I am playing the giant lion man and also a paladin.
MARISHA: She's like a good old rusted-out Chevy pickup truck that just won't quit.
MARISHA: She's basically my mom.
TALIESIN: Aabria is weirdly wholesome, but--
LAURA: As wholesome as Aabria can be.
TALIESIN: Yeah.
AABRIA: I was like, Thaisha's going to be so chill and so lovely, and everyone's going to think she's a really hippie granola mom. And then you walked in with your energy and I went: I'm going to kill one man. All right.
MATT: (laughs)
ALEXANDER: Matt was like: Oh, you love me for 10 years? Well, guess what? I'm going to be shitty.
MATT: It's a complicated and very tangled persona. You knew he was trouble when he walked in.
MATT and AABRIA: (laugh)
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You know the last few episodes of Critical Role have been good when it's monday and you are already vibrating in your seat about "Is it thursday yet". This next episode is going to be such a culmination of so much buildup and I genuinely haven't felt this excited about any new piece of media in ages. 14 people and 7 months of actual play and it does feel like they are going to land something incredible
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I feel like one thing about Pomni that seems neglected to a lot of people is the fact that, more often than not actually, she DOES NOT know the right thing to say and do to help someone else. It's why I don't really agree with the notion that she's just a therapist character.
My evidence to support my claim?
Episode 1-3 she is anything BUT a therapist character. She is a nervous wreck who is, for the most part, self serving. Because she wants to go 'home', doesn't want to be this jester, and she has an immense fear of death. She feels like she's nothing. The reason she turns to Gummigoo and helps him is because she could relate to him and the feeling that they're nothing, or their existence means nothing.
And in Episode 3 it's HER being the one getting therapised. And she's given the advice to cherish everyone around her because they could all be gone someday. It's fulfilling to build connections with people.
But that doesn't mean she's immediately perfect at being that 'pick everyone up' person, are you kidding me?
She doesn't know how to help Gangle. She invites Gangle to talk, but Gangle doesn't want to talk about it. She even offers Ragatha to talk to Gangle, probably because Pomni herself doesn't know what to say or do.
She gives outright flawed advice to Ragatha and she's not really the one who can help her in this situation. YES, SHE LIKES RAGATHA AND SHE ALWAYS HAS, sick of people pretending she 'willingly ditched Ragatha for Jax' or whatever (When she is literally shown inviting Ragatha to join her team in Episode 6. First person she turned to for that was Ragatha, not Jax. But I guess you're not allowed to have more than one friend??). But 'it's okay to be a jerk sometimes' was NOT Ragatha's problem. Ragatha's problem was her self loathing and need to be validated in a way that didn't alienate others.
Pomni flat out read Ragatha WRONG here. I don't see this getting talked about enough. She did not do a very good job diagnosing Ragatha here. But that doesn't mean she doesn't want to be friends with Ragatha and/or that Ragatha is not a close person for her, she's always been.
And let's also bring up that she literally got in a PHYSICAL FIGHT with Jax. Did he deserve it? Oh hell yes. The reason she fought him here was because he TRIGGERED her. He toyed with her insecurity about her identity as Pomni, and her fears of abstracting by saying he'd move on and forget about her. At the heat of the moment, ANYONE would punch Jax in the face here. And she is never invalidated for doing that.
Pomni isn't the heart of the group because she always knows the right thing to say and do. She's the heart of the group because she makes the choice to try and help because she experienced in the first episode what the stakes are if they are left at a breaking point. It's her fear. It would be a fear of hers to see it happen to them too.
And the thing is?
SPOILER after this:
She FAILS.
She outright FAILED to help Jax. Jax abstracted. Jax died. She couldn't help him and she couldn't get through to him. (Her?)
She only wanted to help... and she TECHNICALLY did. She overthrew the harmful system of the world itself by standing up to Caine. She made it possible for everyone to rebuild the world into one they want to live in.
But if we're talking practically, it came at the cost of Jax's one loose thread he had in his mind to live for getting cut.
WHICH IS NOT HER FAULT. NOT WHAT I'M SAYING. But you can't blame her for feeling like it is her fault that he died.
It's why she chooses to face Jax's abstraction head on to face him, even at the cost of IMMENSE PAIN. That feeling that she failed someone she could've saved the life of.
And though she can't undo it, and I don't think she went into that thinking she could, she believed that the noble thing to do was bring his soul to peace. And she cries about how he could've talked to her or opened up to her. Had she known how bad it was, she would've absolutely done that for him.
Which I think is one thing people tend to forget: Pomni did NOT know the extent of Jax's pain before Episode 9. She knew Jax PROBABLY had a dead friend, but who didn't in this circus? WE THE AUDIENCE witnessed Jax's close call to abstracting in Episode 7, WE THE AUDIENCE witnessed Jax's panic attack in Episode 6. POMNI DID NOT. He's purposefully masking that these things happened. She can't read his mind. (Not yet in the story anyway.) If TADC was a book, told first person POV from Pomniâs perspective, Jaxâs abstraction wouldâve been treated like an out of left field plot twist.
I feel like people hold her up to the standard that she should have known Jax was suicidal because the audience did, when literally the point was that she didn't and by the time she did it was too late. She is NOT perfect, and she CAN fail.
I don't really see her bringing Jax's soul to peace as Pomni absolving Jax or excusing him, she literally witnessed his intrusive thoughts and how badly he abused others after this psyche exploration. I see it as her mourning someone who COULD HAVE BEEN helped and guided to be better, but lost the opportunity. She doesn't say "I forgive you" she says "You could've talked to me".
I can absolutely see this as grief and trauma that Pomni has to carry with her for the rest of her life. Not that she was practically at fault for the death of someone who COULD HAVE BEEN her friend, but that she emotionally believes such.
Even if your goal is admirable to try and reach out and understand everyone, sometimes reality is cruel like that, and you can't save some people.
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Nintendo. If you didnât want them to be gay. WHY doesnât Sidon tell Link that Yuna is his fiancĂŠ if you run into him at shatterback point first. Why does he go down on one knee, take Linkâs hand, make a solemn vow to serve and protect him, and give him a glowing ring of power as proof?? NONE OF THE OTHER SAGES GO DOWN ON ONE KNEE FOR THAT NINTENDO.
like Murray couldn't have been more clear in her talk with Azune after the sewer fight that her protectiveness over Demodus has everything to do with that Demodus took a job through the school and ended up almost dying because of it. she wants the Penteveral to be a safe place for young arcanists like Demodus to learn magic, and within a day of the Sundered Houses' power grab, they exploited a financial aid student and framed him for theft, which directly led to him almost bleeding out in the sewers. making sure things like that don't happen is something Murray considers directly under her responsibility. this lines up with the fact that while she's less fond of him for being a rich boy, Murray also sprang into action to find Occtis when it became clear he was in danger from his father and literally performed a miracle to resurrect him. may I remind y'all, while it wasn't as explicitly about that, she also immediately stepped in when Azune suggested Occtis go in Demodus' place.
you can boohoo as much as you want about Azune but he's a grown ass man who isn't one of her active students. she's still pretty sympathetic to him, but he's a peer in her eyes because it's a whole ass different situation.
I know some of y'all zone out and go into selective hearing mode when a woman is talking, but if you pay attention to her personality and values, Murray has actually been remarkably consistent in the way she treats all three of these men. she puts in a sort of gruff tough love approach with all of them and is, unsurprisingly, the most protective of the financial aid student directly under what she considers her responsibility. any other interpretation is just woobie googles rotting your brain.
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best case scenario Digital Circus gets remembered in a similar way as Steven Universe: a show that was Really Fucking Good and had nuanced characters and interesting things to say, but the audience wasn't quite ready for it and it imploded into a discourse ball. four years from now I expect to see lesbians drawing Jax like she's a renaissance muse the same way people still draw Pearl or Lapis
âLife after menopause is exceptionally rare in animals. It can evolve only in creatures where grannies help younger family members survive. Only human, killer whale, and short-finned pilot whale females routinely live for substantial periods after they stop breeding. Like humans, killer and pilot whales have roughly twenty-five to thirty childbearing years, then can live another thirty or so. And as Kenâs just explained, some live a lot longer. Up to a quarter of the females in a group are postreproductive. These whales are not waiting to die; they are helping their children survive. As human children often benefit from their grandmothersâ attention, killer whale grandmothers boost their grandkidsâ survival. A rather bizarre twist of killer whale society is that killer whale mothers remain crucial to the survival of their adult children. When older killer whale females die, their adult children start dying at high rates, especially males. Male killer whales who are under thirty years old when their mothers die suffer a tripling of the annual mortality rate compared to males in their age group whose mothers are still alive. Male killer whales who are more than thirty years old when their mothers die face death rates more than eight times as high as males in their age group whose mothers are still living. Daughters under thirty show no mortality increase after their mothersâ death. But daughters older than thirty when their mothers die have more than two and a half times the death rate of same-age females whose mothers are alive. Malesâ handicaps of the extra drag of their huge dorsal and pectoral fins and the extra food required for their immense size (at around 20,000 pounds, males can be one-third more massive than females) seem to make them reliant on their working mothers for food. Females donât have the malesâ impediments, but while raising young, females may rely on food shared by their no-longer-breeding mothers. Adult females share essentially all the fish they catch, and more than half goes to their children. Adult males share their catch only about 15 percent of the timeâusually with their mothers. While no one fully understands their strange death pattern following the loss of a mother, extreme parental care is likely at the root. Toothed whales are the worldâs champion nursers. Short-finned pilot whales continue to produce milk for up to fifteen years after the birth of their last calf, likely nursing other femalesâ young. In bottlenose and Atlantic spotted dolphins (further study might reveal others), some females never give birth. Denise Herzing dubbed them âcareer females,â because their role in society does not include motherhood. They might be infertile. They might be gay. But their contribution is crucial: they do a lot of babysitting. When Herzing entered the ocean with a visiting nine-year-old girl, âWhite Patches, the eternal babysitter herself, had never seen me babysitting a young human before. Her excitement vocalizations were audible and electric and she continued to swim around us, eyeing the human youngster attached to me.â (Researchers sometimes call babysitters âaunts.â Thatâs precisely who they often are.)â
I just watched the TADC finale and I have a lot to say about it im ngl. (Specially with how twt and other socials were filled with discourse abt it) so I'm gonna scream to the void - spoilers ahead!!
Also i may be kinda blunt on this rant, so apologies LMAO
I think the discourse I saw the most around this ending was Jax related, and It truly just comes to show how fake a lot of people are about their support about mental health đ
Before watching this all I saw was people calling Jax horrible things and either saying he (she) had been babied and she should've been "punished" and acting like she is literally Satan on earth, and I honestly was expecting something way less real than we got in this episode
Her scenes were pretty well written, and as someone who has struggled a lot with self hatred and suicidal thoughts before it just hit really hard, I get it shes unlikable, but thats what mental illness does to you!! Being traumatized is not an excuse for acting like a dickhead, yes, but it is an explanation. Specially when in this case the show is not justifying her, it doesnt have to, what happened happened, shes fucking killed herself!!! Thats the consequence!!! ,not of her actions, but of the entire situation. Thats the final consequence of mental illness, of the refusal of helping and the refusal of getting help.
Mental illness is not pretty, its not cute crying to yourself with sad music and staring at the window on rainy days. Mental illness is visceral, it's treating others like garbage cause you do not have the energy to care about how your actions affect others when you dont even care about yourself, its a pain so profound it eventually starts seeping from your fingertips and staining everything around you.
And not only does this show depicts that in a very real way, but it shows you why, Jax was terrible cause she didnt wanted people to care about her, she hated herself so much that she pushed anyone that treated her as a real person worthy of love away because she couldn't handle that.
And theres also the other elephant in the room, which is Jax being obviously transfem and how much her internalized transphobia and misoginy dictates her actions. I cannot speak for other trans people, but I can speak of my experiences and how much a non-supportive environment can lead you to internalize A LOT of harmful beliefs. I myself struggled with internalized transphobia for many years, and it is something that took so much self reflection to not only notice but change about msyself. Yes, Jax is a misogynist (or in this case has internalized misoginy) but what people dont seem to understand these emotions come from a lot of trauma, it doesnt make it okay of course, but the thing is characters dont have to always be perfect. Real people are messy, they contradict themselves, they're cruel sometimes and thats okay, that doesnt mean they deserve to die or to feel like theyre not worth it.
People were talking about the plot points of this finale in such a disingenuous way, and honestly kinda doing what Jax is shown to do, exaggerating and taking shit to the extreme just to make it as ridiculous as possible and not deal with it LMAO. They were calling Jax a woman abuser for... pushing her mother and thinking she may have seriously hurt her, when her mother was abusive to her in a vulnerable moment such as trying to come out, and honestly a very real moment too as someone whos coming out was a complete and utter disaster and who is in a place that is NOT supportive.
I think the line that hit me the most was when Pomni is hugging her and she simply whispers she doesn't wanna go... The realization that you didnt want to die, you just wanted things to stop hurting so much...
And then theres Caine (im really glad hes back, he may be my favorite character simply cause hes cute and i like robots that try so hard to understand humanity, yall know this) who even after hurting everyone so much, self reflects and decides hell change for the better. The complete opposite, he doesnt shut himself in and instead decides to try and trust that they will at least hear him out, kinda like a different ending of what Jax could've done if things didnt snowball into something so big.
I feel a lot of people missed the point of the show, they were expecting some sort of epic mystery with likable little blorbos or whatever, when this is just a sweet condensed message about mental health, and how even in the worst situations theres ways to move forward; that you gotta try your best to be there for the people around you and in turn trust they will be there for you too.
I dont think it was a perfect episode tho, the pacing was a little weird specially at the start and end, then there was this montage abt Jax with a song, and I get what they were going for but it kinda took you out of a really emotional moment. I feel this could've benefited of being 2 episodes honestly, one for this Jax plot line and another for the Caine plotline, cause even tho i get why theyre just one episode it feels kinda abrupt (?) im not sure. And i do wish we had seen more of other characters (Pomni specially!!)
But overall it was a pretty nice (albeit expected) ending, that i feel it wouldn't been such a disaster if it hadnt been released on theaters, it really has the vibe of an internet series ending, so seeing it be broadcasted to such a wide audience (who a lot are like 8 year olds) is kinda bizarre, specially considering how explicit a lot of this episode is.
Theres also the fact i keep seeing people saying how Jax is "not trans" and that "It isnt confirmed" and I just wanna say, some of you fake allies cannot handle seeing a trans person pre-transition and during their transition and it shows. God forbid an actual trans storyline happens cause some of you will not respect a trans character unless youve already perceived them as that gender since the start, so keep hcing a bunch of normative characters as trans just so you dont have to see the ugly/real side of trans experiences and still feel woke (okay sorry random tangent, but like some people gotta start thinking)
Anyways, good shit the internet is stupid as hell, but nothing new.
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While I really enjoyed the ending, I think the best part of seeing tadc in theaters is Caineâs crashout. You see every detail, every expression so clearly. The music is so loud surrounding you on every side, and the size of the screen makes it feel so much more intense than seeing it on a screen at home. If I hadnât already watched the episode at home so much, it honestly couldâve been a little scary in the moment
