#cr negative

(spoilers for c3 if you haven't seen it)

and apologies if I butcher some details here - the enormous grain of salt is that i have not finished c3 and dropped off around episode 90ish, so i only know this through fandom osmosis and clips.

in campaign 1, vaxleth undergo a tragic end wherein vax'ildan dies and goes on to fulfill his mission of serving the raven queen eternally, leaving kiki on exandria to live her, essentially endless life (elongated lifespan). it's a heartbreaking ending not only for vax & keyleth, but also for all of vox machina. this is a moment that is immortalized in fandom, constantly referenced, and continuously important in the canon of exandria. the final line of the campaign is "and every day, that raven comes to visit." scanlan uses his final wish to allow vax to walk vex down the aisle at her wedding.

the tragedy and drama of this moment can't be overstated, and matt mercer, a long-time vaxleth fanboy has often enthused about the emotional resonance of that story (he did so again in the interview i referenced when i mentioned disliking the fate of vaxleth).

now, in c3, the gods all die and are reborn as infants on exandria. vax, after many years being dead and gone, is returned to life to fulfill his mission of serving the raven queen by finding her reincarnation. this also has the handy dandy side effect that he um. he's alive again and he can just date keyleth.

there could have been a really interesting story to tell with keyleth about grief and love and loss and moving on, but instead her boyfriend magically comes back to life, undercutting many years worth of emotional resonance that comes with this moment. i made a previous post here about why this feels particularly egregious given that TLOVM is a story they are currently retelling and expect us to care about.

to liken the whole thing to something similar in campaign 2, i was not happy when molly came back to life in the c2 finale. campaign 2 is so shaped around molly's death and absence, i felt awful about the idea that he could be revived because it undercut the entire story. luckily, i think taliesin jaffe also knew this, because he went in my opinion in a brilliant direction and said "no, molly is still gone. this is a whole new guy." and that's how we got kingsley- molly is dead. lucien is dead. but kingsley lives on. this choice fit much better with the m9's narratives, with themes of grief, loss, moving on, and rebirth and renewal.

it just really sucks that the emotional impact of a campaign i love (C1) feels cheapened by the continued lore in a campaign i didn't love (C3).

this is all matter of opinion and i'm sure there are some people who loved the choice to bring vax back but i will never be one of those people. if vax coming back to life has no haters, i am dead.

so, it's no secret to anyone that has spent more than 5 seconds on my blog or spoken to me about cr that the women on the show and the relationships between them are what drew me in and has kept me as a viewer for over 7 years now. i literally started watching after seeing clips of marisha and ashley as beau and yasha. the friendships, romances and myriad of complex dynamics between the characters played by the women at the table are what i personally cherish most about critical role. this very reason is why c3 was so incredible to me, it was when we got the absolute most of this thing i love so much. ashley was there full time so we got even more intersecting dynamics with 3 women at the table. (this doesn't take away from the relationships in c1 or 2 of course, but im specifically talking about number of women and percentage of the campaign they're at the table).

obviously i was super excited when i heard they were adding 2 women to the cast for c4. i don't know much about whitney but i can't wait to get to know more and aabria is the #1 person i would've chosen to be added to the cast if i had my way. no matter what happens i'm very excited to see what both of them will bring to c4.

my hesitancy came when i heard about the 3 tables. and this is where i might be lacking information and would love to be filled in. i worry about how much overlap there will be with the 3 groups. will we be seeing them together every few episodes or just the first? the reason for this worry is that there are only 5 women on the cast, less than 40%. the percentage of women to men at the table has actually technically decreased by like 4%. with 3 tables, that means, assuming the tables are split as evenly as possible, there's only two possibilities. there's either at least one table with only 1 woman, or there's at least one table with no women. bummer.

of course, having more women in the cast and more women telling stories is always going to be good, but i kinda can't help but preemptively mourn the feeling of seeing more than 2 women on screen together at a time. i hope i'm wrong about this and there's plenty of cross over where we get to see rich dynamics grow between all 5 women.

Having the Volstruckers take the beacon makes for a fun setpiece, but...hm. I almost get the vibe that they're trying to keep Essek's hands clean(er), as opposed to the campaign, where it was at least implied that he stole, or at least handed off, the beacon himself. Here, from what we see, there's no reason to immediately assume the Volstruckers needed inside help.

Not sure how I feel about Beau's deal here.

I can appreciate wanting to tie everything together, but the Nein stumbling completely ass-fucking-backwards into the Kryn-Empire war and only really getting involved on a whim of vague anti-authoritarianism and then avoiding the finding out of their fucking around for as long as they can is really part of the charm of the early Nein.

Like, the only reason-literally the only reason-they get further involved with the geopolitics in the campaign is because *SPOILERS* was *SPOILERS* and they chased after him. Everything else was a snowball from that singular tipping point.

Also...Zeenoth being in the pocket of the Volstruckers, and Beau finding that out independently, feels...weird. In the campaign we're led to believe he's more or less just a hardass until Yudala reveals that Dairon had heard her complaints about Zeenoth kidnapping her and taken them seriously, and investigated independently. That whole thing about the fantasy of institutions doing what they're supposed to without the victims having to do all or most of the legwork to bring their abusers to justice. It kinda feels like it's missing the point of that a bit? I'm really hoping they're not gonna pull a repeat of TLoVM and overcompensate for the misogynistic hate Marisha got.

The Soul as a whole is compromised? That's a bit...much, honestly. The Assembly felt like more than enough of a serious threat and corrupting influence without having neutered their only real obstacle. The lack of politicking between them is gonna be weird, and have implications. Also, the Soul is only, like, the Wildemount branch of the Cobalt network, right? Surely they'd have cross-examining accountability checks or whatever. Also, frankly, the Nein have enough on their plate without having to also purge the Soul of corruption.

Also, is it weird that I feel like Sam's shrieking was more convincing as a feminine voice than the audio manipulation they've done? That being said, I can get why he wouldn't want to shriek like that for extended recording sessions, versus at the table where there's frequent breaks where he isn't talking in character.

what. the Beacon's reincarnation doesn't require consecution? Why? They already showed the beacon absorbing a soul from someone who could have been consecuted, so it wasn't just to show it. This has so many implications. Unless they're implying that the Volstrucker was a consecuted soul-wait, no they've only just taken the beacon, that can't be right. There must be a reason for this, but for the life of me I can't fathom what it might be. Are they reversing the intentionality of consecution, where an unborn child needs to be blessed for a soul to pass to them? Again, why?

Obann-controlled Yasha is also pursuing the beacon? What on earth could he want it for?

Let's see. Images in the beacon include Trent having killed Bertrand and taken his crown(the only one of these images I'm near-certain is a future that won't come to pass, unless they change a whole lot more than I'm expecting), a shot of what I think is Molly, ooof, I think that's Yasha stabbing Beau(something related to the Chantry fight, I assume), what I assume is the ruins of Aeor, given the architecture, glowing runes, and ice, and what seems to be the Nein facing off against the Somnovum.

Overall, not a bad episode, though. My main issue is that they seem to be, once again, overcompensating for the hate Marisha got by making Beau much more central to everything, though admittedly, some of this might just be a result of trying to tie everything to the beacon and the Assembly this early, and my interpretation is overly influenced by what they did with Keyleth in TLoVM S3. I'm also not a fan of the tying together, honestly, at least to this extent. Half the fun of early/mid C2, as mentioned, was these chucklefucks bumbling ass-backwards into becoming some of the most influential people on the continent and not, at any point, meaning to, and oftentimes actively avoiding it as much as they could. A whole Refusal of the Call thing. It worked, and it worked well.

It’s the moment where Taliesin upon hearing about Asmodeus asks Matt if Ashton would know of him and then states in character that this would be something they were into.

And that, in and of itself, broke me because no matter what anyone interprets Ashton as, I think we can all agree that punk and anti-authority is supposed to be the crux and core of the character. There’s nothing that has happened to indicate that this is some persona Ashton is putting on, that their hatred for authority is just some front.

So why the approval of Asmodeus? Asmodeus, to be clear, is the Devil. The blueprint of all other devils who are lawful evil as a whole. Devils embody all the social ills and structural corruption that Ashton should be entirely opposed to. The Hells are not just a fascist state, they are the Platonic IDEAL of a fascist state and they exist in that form through Asmodeus’ command and rule.

If Ashton knows about Asmodeus, as Matt indicates and makes no moves to correct the assumptions of, he should be aware this is the embodiment of everything he despises. But instead, they express their support. Why?

I’m not going to beat around the bush and pretend there is an in world explanation for it. We can bandy about imagined scenarios where this is actually Taliesin working through three layers of character vs player knowledge to distill down the exact reaction Ashton would have but I think it’s much cleaner to just say the image of Lucifer just supplant Asmodeus in the group’s interpretation and they moved forward if that was the case.

And so much of the gripes and complaints about this god plot goes back to this point: the players are speaking through the characters not to the NPCs but to a representational point behind them. This isn’t the characters in the story grappling with questions of divinity, it is the players of the game projecting their own world’s struggles and critiques of religion into the game world.

So all this arguing, all the irritation, all the questions are in the service of a faulty metaphor and it makes the whole matter exhausting to listen to. It’s why I cannot accept any of the story as nuanced because the players have refused to buy into the demands of the story. The Exandrian Prime Deities do not possess the power, knowledge, or inherent benevolence of the Abrahamic Omni-God so philosophical arguments against that Omni-God towards the Prime Deities is a mismatch. It’s built on faulty logic and presumptions that a regular listener could easily point out.