I've got a lot of thoughts on Session Eight that I'll probably have to chew on for a while and post about over time, but I'll leave you guys with this observation:
We saw in Session Seven that Max Blunder's story is about charting his own path and proving his strength apart from the circus that raised him. I think Impulse intended a similar trajectory for Bro Dude. The debrief at the end of his stream reveals a lot about his plans for this character; plans to have him prove he's not a weakling to the strict family that raised him. But the dice have a mind of their own and tell a different story, and I think the moral of Broghini's tale is actually this:
His strength is in his friends.
Think about it. How was he able to face his fears and defeat the monster that haunted his nightmares ever since he was a child? Not on his own. Not by soloing it in a blaze of glory. Not by cutting it to ribbons with a great axe. He actually missed a lot of his shots and dealt very little damage over the course of the encounter.
He won because he grabbed Max's spiritual weapon and took a swing at the Displacer Beast. He won because Mr. Wizard foretold his success. He won because Ruby kept throwing daggers to "loosen the lid on the jar", and Mr. Wizard pierced the worm creature with a Mind Spike, and Max cast Command and halted it in place.
This doesn't mean that Bro is weak. It means that his strength lies in a different place than his culture expected it to be.
Dwarven culture, as Impulse has established it, values physical strength and hardiness and combat prowess. All of those are good things, but that's not a complete picture of what strength is. It's overlooking strength of the spirit. Of connection. Of community. Of cooperation and togetherness. As a consequence of elevating the individual, it forgets the power of the collective. As a consequence of elevating the physical, it forgets the power of the soul.
Dwarven culture is, in a way, an exaggerated caricature of modern American expectations towards men and boys, especially at the time that Impulse was growing up. Now, I don't wanna psychoanalyze him too much here (she said, lying, because she loves to psychoanalyze him), but there's a non-zero chance in my mind that Impulse—gentle, sensitive, nerdy, and not always fitting perfectly into the stereotypical masculine mold—might be working through a little something here through this character, whether he realizes it or not.
The point of Bro's story is not to become strong in the way that his parents and his brother expected him to. The point of Bro's story is to realize he is already strong. It is to shed the myopic perception of a narrow-minded culture and realize that the value he brings to the world lies not in how much he can lift and the things he can kill, but in the connections he's forged and the good things he can cultivate.
In short, it's not the size of his biceps that counts. It's the strength of his heart.
(Is that cheesy? Yes. But let’s be honest, I’m talking about a character named Bro Dude. It’s been cheesy from the very beginning.)
He'll become physically strong and kill a lot of things along the way, of course. That's the way D&D goes. But it's not lost on me that the weapon he used to deal his first blow to his greatest fear was not one from his ancestral home, and not the one given to him by a fae king, but the one conjured by his friend and battle companion.
Symbolically, it is friendship that gave him strength. It is friendship that gave him clarity. It is friendship that destroyed fear.
There's something incredibly powerful about that.
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