still shadowgast trash

[ID: A digital drawing of Essek Thelyss and Caleb Widogast from Critical Role. Essek is wearing a simple purple robe and rimless blue sunglasses and Caleb is shirtless. Essek is holding a purple parasol over them both and fanning himself with a paper fan painted to look like the cross section of an orange. Caleb is eating a purple ice lolly and looking off to the right, Essek is glancing towards Caleb. End description.]

And when they finally meet up with him later, Matt verbally and clearly reminds them that Essek committed war crimes but they say 'yeah we all regret some of our actions' and proceed to tell him almost everything that's happened and ask for his help. I wonder if that's the moment Matt mentally threw his hands up and went 'okay so the war criminal is getting a redemption arc!' Its so obviously not what he intended for Essek and the players completely changed Essek’s trajectory.

But here's the thing, Matt made a hugely powerful and talented wizard who has been fooled into making terribly destructive choices. He has a fierce desire for knowledge and learning and he desperately needs actual genuine affection and people to help him learn how to have friends and how to be a friend. Matt made a Dynasty hot boi elf version of Caleb, who'd made a much more reprehensible choice about collateral, yes but of course the Nein were going to want to redeem him and remain friends with him. They know that like Caleb, he can make better choices and can become a better person. They've been doing this already with Caleb, and Caleb sees someone a few steps behind him on the same road, someone who he knows is therefore supremely dangerous but who can also start to leave the world a better place, like Caleb is.

It would fucking suck to live in the Marvel Universe as a non-superhero. You can identify with the protagonists, you can fantasize about being Tony Stark or whoever, but if you think about the civilians in those movies, the randos killed by the robot or sucked into the portal, it's hard to see the existence of superheroes as a net positive. They mostly seem to clean up problems that wouldn't have occurred in the first place without their egos and mistakes. Superman has a different emphasis though. The fantasy isn't just about having superpowers yourself, but about what if the natural disaster equivalent only did property damage, what if military aggression could be stopped in its tracks without a single civilian casualty, what if the evillest people in the world actually got their comeuppance.