I saw this post of @teaboot with the addition of @theblogofaveryoddfellow and decided to make my own version of it with our favourite war criminal and his torturer/best friend Essek and Jester.
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"I am the parent--you do understand that, correct? I keep him safe, so he can get better and stronger and achieve great things. When I found him he was nothing, just a scared little boy in the corner of an alley. It's my job to protect him. I protect him. He's my boy, and he'll be a great man someday."
Fascinating that they kept Nott's parent speech from the campaign. It's almost verbatim, but where they've placed it in the events of the episode recontextualizes it.
Nott insists that he was a "scared little boy" while the audience is being shown that he is a full adult with incredible power and agency. He may have even been holding back during their friendship. Caleb's backstory in the animation also feels more brutal than I remember, with active missions instead of just trauma tests.
The new speech does more to reframe what we know about Nott, rather than Caleb. She needs to be a parent, and needs to see him as helpless and in want of a caretaker.
This crystallizes the relationship as something both characters need right now but will eventually have to change. Nott will someday have to admit that he's not her child, and more importantly that's not how she wants him to see her. Likewise, Caleb will lean into having a caretaker for now, but he'll eventually chafe against that and probably want the chance to protect and care for Nott in return. In the campaign, they grew out of that dynamic gradually over about 50 episodes, but didn't address the shift.
How the writers placed this moment in the story sets us up to have a more direct arc for their relationship. We the audience can see already that Nott means well but that her view of Caleb is more about her own needs than she's willing to admit. It also seems shockingly rushed for such an early friendship--Nott got SUPER attached to Caleb super quickly. It's been, what, a week? Two weeks they've known each other? Nott, you're in trouble girl. ((Edit: maybe several weeks per Beau's comment))
I'm quite happy; this feels like an intelligent adaptation choice that still keeps a beloved moment from the original show.
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about Trent’s shocked expression when he realized that Essek was the leader of the Kryn attack, and I think what it boils down to is that he thought his hold on Essek was a lot stronger than it was, and that’s a very scary thought for him.
Trent’s skill at manipulation is something he relies heavily on, and for good reason. He couldn’t have magicked his way out of prison, but one conversation with the king fixed everything, and got one of his rivals executed in his place.
He surrounds himself with highly trained assassins, who could very easily kill him if they wanted to, but they’re so brainwashed that they wouldn’t dream of it.
He lost control of Bren, sure, but he knew that was a problem as soon as Bren escaped from the sanitarium, and he’s confident that if he can have one uninterrupted conversation with Bren, he could get him back under control.
But if Essek could turn on him with no warning, due to a chain of events Trent had no knowledge of, then maybe Trent’s manipulation skills aren’t all-powerful. Maybe the king has no use for him now that he’s lost the Beacon. Maybe Bren can’t be dragged back into the cult. Maybe one of these days Astrid is going to poison his coffee, or Eadwulf will shove him down the stairs.
So what does this mean for Essek, now that he’s been captured? Trent could easily kill him, but Trent probably feels like that’s admitting defeat, that his manipulation of Essek failed so spectacularly that there’s no hope of reestablishing control.
I think instead, he’s going to double down on the manipulation, and try to figure out why Essek tried to steal the Beacon back, and how he can convince Essek to continue working with him.
And lucky for him, the Beacon going missing is the perfect opening for that. It not in his or Essek’s best interests to have the Beacon in the hands of an unknown third party, so clearly they have to work together to find it, no matter how much they were just trying to kill each other.
major spoilers ahead for show-only watchers. stop reading now. do not pass go, do not collect $200. this post is not a place of honor.
i’ve being thinking about how they’re going to handle yasha joining the team as well as molly’s run-in with the iron shepherds, and i’ve seen a lot of people worried that yasha is going to be the one who replaces them in his story but honestly, with the way they’ve set everything up, i don’t think they’re going to go that route.
first of all, i agree with everyone who’s said we’re probably going to get another season with molly. maybe it’s just wishful thinking, but i really don’t think it’s going to happen this early. i mean, in the campaign he doesn’t even touch his backstory at all — why bother starting to set that up more with him in the show if he’s just going to get killed one episode later? i think they know molly is a beloved character and honestly, this would feel very early at least to me (even if it technically matches when it happened in the campaign based on how many seasons they’re expecting the story to take, the pace of the show is much faster so it would be surprisingly soon) so i’m hoping they recognize that a lot of people would feel cheated if after getting so little time with molly, we get even less here.
that being said, i know i could be wrong about that, but i still don’t think it’ll be yasha who does it whenever it happens.
they’ve been setting up yasha as a big fight, yes, but they’ve also set up not just that she’s being controlled but the specific way she’s being controlled — the rune/sigil on the back of her neck. my guess is that while fighting her, one of them will hit it and break obann’s control over her, and she’ll join the team once they realize she wasn’t doing any of that willingly. OR they’ll get lucky and she’ll show up looking for the beacon right around the same time that they’re getting their asses kicked by volstruckers while trying to steal it, and she’ll be the reason they get out alive because she’s a damn killing machine. maybe both! maybe she’s fighting indiscriminately and helping them while also hurting them. or maybe they’ll succeed in stealing it and she’ll have to chase them down to get it, triggering the fight where they free her from obann’s control. i don’t know.
all we know is that (if i remember correctly) she’s about to meet them in zadash because she specifically asked where the beacon and the cerberus assembly are, which most likely means obann caught wind of a very powerful artifact switching hands and wants her to steal it for him. and i suspect that goal is going to make him the villain of season 2. (i forget if she said the beacon or just the assembly, but even if it was just the assembly, i think that must be the reason she’s looking for them. the alternative of course is that she’s there for something related to vess and the book, which maybe is more likely now that i think about it, but i’m sure that’ll end up intersecting enough with the plot that it doesn’t really matter which one he’s interested in. surely if he’s chasing down vess, he’ll want to chase down molly too, right?)
if they go the route of making molly’s death early, which i hope they don’t, i think it’ll happen during the beacon heist, which i don’t hate outside of the timing because they’ve already set trent and the volstruckers up to be a solidly hateable alternative to the iron shepherds.
alternatively, if they give him another season, i think it’ll be obann that gets him in the end. hell, they could even go the route of actually calling the cult of the angel of irons “the iron shepherds” because they’re trying to shepherd the “angel of irons” into the world! it just seems like the perfect way to do it without having to introduce another set of villains. i don’t know how it’ll happen, but it seems to me like obann is both the most obvious choice for the villain of the next arc and the most obvious replacement for the iron shepherds.
maybe…maybe it’ll even be molly that leads them down into bazzoxan, or wherever they decide to set the confrontation. i mean, we know he’s more interested in knowing his past than he was in the campaign, even if he says he’s not, and i have a feeling his blood going into that stone wasn’t just for aesthetics. maybe he’ll start having dreams or just instincts about where they should go next, and they won’t know it’s tharizdun leading them into the same trap obann has been trying to chase them into until they get there, and it’ll be a confrontation with his own past that ends his part of the story.
honestly, i think that’s the best possible outcome, and it feels plausible given how everything has been set up. i think it would be a narratively satisfying way for him to go and work toward setting up the eventual confrontation with lucien, whereas yasha pulling the trigger would just make it make absolutely no sense for her to join the team after.
of course, essek will most likely be somehow involved in all of this too, since he’s also on his way to zadash to retrieve the beacon, but i’m not sure what role i think he’ll play. i do wonder if maybe he’ll end up running with the nein for a while, since pretty much the only other way for him to be involved would be working against them and i feel like that would make the whole trusting-him-and-then-being-betrayed-by-him thing much more complicated. maybe they say they’re also there to return it to the dynasty so he decides to work with them to do that? or if they do go the being-chased-down-by-obann route, maybe it’s more of a “yeah you’ll have this back but first we have to make sure we’re not leading this entity of death and destruction straight to your front door” and essek has to run with them because he doesn’t trust them and isn’t just going to leave the beacon in their hands and hope they’re really going to return it.
personally i hope they’ll still end up going to bazzoxan at some point in the process because i NEED to see my boy verin, but that’s neither here nor there. (godddd can you imagine how delicious it would be to get a confrontation between essek and verin, if verin knows their mom died or if essek tells him? and for verin to see just how cold and cruel he’s becoming as he’s shutting down? that’s definitely just wishful thinking but i will be thinking about it forever.)
so that’s my best guess: everything will converge during the beacon heist, they’ll end up with obann on their tail, and molly will unwittingly be the reason they run right to him, leading to the confrontation where he dies. maybe it’s even obann who’s the reason molly is resurrected again as lucien, bringing one of tharizdun’s chosen back into the fold.
as far as the pirate arc, i have no doubt we’re going to get it, but i think it inevitably has to be later because in campaign time, fjord had lots of time to be haunted by the eldritch horrors before we got to that point, but in show time it’s still pretty early in his personal horror show. i bet we’re going to see more of that warlock and patron back-and-forth before they set sail. that just feels like a plotline that’s so directly tied to his backstory and i don’t think he’s ready for it yet, so i think it’ll be a later-season arc.
hell, it could really even be a season 3 arc if we get the obann stuff and more dynasty stuff in season 2, which is definitely possible — maybe they do actually succeed in bringing the beacon back with essek’s help and then something with molly or yasha pulls them back out into the wastes to have that confrontation with obann. maybe obann regains control of yasha and they could even work the whole kidnapping arc into it as something yasha does before running back to obann, leading molly to him because if obann is potentially curious about vess he’s definitely dying to know what the fuck is going on with molly.
anyway, i think that’s enough speculation for one day. point is, i hope they’re going to give molly another season, but whenever he dies, i don’t think it’ll be yasha who pulls the trigger. that’s just a bad way to introduce a character we’re supposed to like and root for, honestly. it’s much easier to get attached to a character who’s done awful things to npcs than it is to root for one who personally killed a beloved main character, and there are much more narratively satisfying ways for him to go, so i doubt they’d put that on yasha. i just hope they do give molly that one more season so we can really start chewing on those backstory tidbits, and so we can see some of his friendship with yasha before he’s gone.
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So i've been thinking about Nott and how being a goblin is treated in the Mighty Nein, and I wonder if maybe in the original campaign, the seemingly good empire's fantasy racism was just, like, standard dnd this is what monster races are like as background fantasy racism?
So maybe in the show, now that the same cast is getting a second crack at it, the seemingly good empire being fantasy racist is a deliberate sign that they're not on the up and up.
Like, because maybe there isn't actually anything wrong with being a goblin, it's this empire demonizing the monster races that's what's wrong.
So with the trailer dropping today, I’m curious: how many episodes long will a season of The Mighty Nein be?
Points to consider:
The wga directory lists the season as being 8 episodes long, but says the runtime for each episode is 30 minutes so the information isn’t 100% accurate.
Most shows with longer episodes have shorter seasons (Invincible is also a prime show and has 8 episodes, as does Creature Commandos).
No mention of season length being different, only episode length, with extra emphasis on TMN being longer than TLOVM. If the season is eight episodes long that’s only equal to an hour or hour and a half of extra runtime. Twelve episodes would double the screentime.
According to one interview, Travis & Sam wrote the episode where the Nein first come together as a team. The wga directory has them credited on the fourth episode, meaning that if the season is eight episodes long, they won’t meet until halfway through the season (I’m including this because I do feel that it has bearing on expectations regarding the story).
With that in mind, how many episodes do you think there will be?
But speaking of campaign spoilers, I’m obsessed with the fact that Astrid already knows Bren is back in town, and has decided not to tell anyone. Because when the beacon goes missing, she’s going to know exactly who stole it.
Obviously, right? A rogue volstrucker, who’s been completely MIA for five years, shows up in Zadash immediately after killing the Volstrucker responsible for cleaning up loose ends about the beacon heist, and days later the beacon itself goes missing. Obviously he’s the one who stole it!
So what’s Astrid going to do? Tell Trent? Tell Eadwulf? Try to track down Bren herself? Just sit there pretending she doesn’t know anything while everything devolves into chaos?
That note put her in such an awkward position, and I’m very excited to see how that works out for her.
