The thing is that the Briarwood arc is, just, a MASTERFUL example of Gothic horror.
And I'm going to say something potentially divisive here but: The reason the Briarwood arc works so well, hits so hard, and became such a touchstone of why people get INVESTED in Critical Role, is that it doesn't flinch away from the staples of that genre and what they mean.
By which I mean: The Briarwood arc hits so hard because it uses vampirism as a metaphor for incestous abuse, for more than just shock value.
Like. Incest and sexual abuse are a cornerstone of the gothic horror genre, but a lot of the time it's used as essentially a scare chord. Or in the laziest cases, a way of avoiding actually having to do any real thematic work--you can go "okay, I see how you might think that this person's argument makes sense or at least how their worldview might not deserve to be wiped out of existence with fire, but uuuuuuh.....hey! hey look! INCEST! And a SCARY CONGENITAL BIRTH DEFECT! NOW they're evil, right?"
You uh. You don't need to pull that kind of thing to show why the Briarwoods are evil.
Like. Delilah is VILE. She's vile in a way that starts out fun and campy because her PERSONALITY is fun and campy! But then as it goes on, as you see what she thinks is funny, what she thinks is important (her own personal feelings), who she considers a real person (herself and Sylas and literally no one else), what she is willing to do...oh, suddenly I don't support women's wrongs, actually. Suddenly this isn't funny anymore. And I do absolutely think that leaning into the THEMES, not just the shock value, of gothic horror tropes is what makes that happen.
And by vampirism as incestuous abuse, I mean--well, jesus. That shot of the ragged overlapping puncture wounds on Cass' neck says it all. What I mean is:
They make a show of Cass as their daughter. Of being a normal nuclear family who love their daughter and she loves them, obviously! But the show is a lie.
I mean: Behind closed doors, they hurt their 'daughter' in a way that inherently cannot be known to the public, because if the world knew--not suspected, not turned uncomfortably away from, KNEW--what the Briarwoods are, they would be hunted down as unnatural abominations.
I mean that they're planning to literally drain the life and agency from her and create an empty void--because she is not a person to them, she is a body and her worth is bound entirely to what benefits they can get from it--blood, a mindless thrall, amusement.
I mean that vampiric feeding as a literary stand-in for rape is, like, as old as vampire mythology, I don't think I need to explain that one.
I mean EVERYTHING in this post about the fact that Cassandra cannot save herself, that this is not that story, that they used the myth of The Family to control her, that she is entangled and conditioned to accept it, conditioned to believe that this is love, that it is not fair to expect her to be able to overcome it on her own because she was a child and they were her guardians and it is not her fault that she needed to be rescued.
I mean: The fact that she was also conditioned to believe that being subjected to the Briarwoods' abuse would make the people of Whitestone look at her differently. That it was shameful. That it tainted her and no one would ever respect her again.
I mean the fact that their madness mantra is "We are His blood," I mean, fucking hell.
And of course, I also very much mean that she was wrong. And the world was kinder than that, and her brother refused to join that cycle and did step in to protect her--that the family who truly loved her was willing to maim himself rather than touch her. And that's why Whitestone lives.
Everything we see onscreen or on the page is allegorical, of course--and especially on stream, where Matt strongly prefers to draw a veil across sexual abuse for the sake of not just the audience but the table and, equally important, himself as the DM having to paint those pictures and inhabit those villains, which is absolutely healthy and 100% his prerogative. I just think that it makes it really telling how, the further an adaptation gets from Matt having to sit in front of a live camera and talk about the horrors in visceral immediacy, the more the adaptation has explored the gothic-horror and incestous-abuse-allegory aspects.
Because vampirism has always been a metaphor for sexual abuse. You can't escape that! And you don't have to portray the literalization of it onscreen if you don't want to--engaging with the themes is enough. (Though exploring that literalization in fic and/or meta has a lot of value, I think, and I also think that "the metaphorical sexual abuse was also literal" is a COMPLETELY supported and legitimate reading of the text.)
It's just--there. And instead of being in-your-face and shlocky about it, Matt and Marisha and the LOVM team gave the Briarwoods' victims dignity and compassion, and told a high-octane incredibly dark Gothic horror story that treated them as people who deserved support rather than scare chords to shock the reader into setting the house on fire with everyone inside because clearly death would be kinder.
Laudna and Cassandra are both prime examples of their genre, and genre-defying twists that get the compassion they deserve in a kind of story that often reduces them to shock value. The fact that they exist in a TTRPG and--rather than a single author making a point--their fates were actually changed by real choices and real compassion only makes that sweeter, I think.
Like. Fuck, right? Suck eggs, Delilah. This isn't your story.
