#possibly overthinking things

So, I recently binged my way through VoicePlay’s music videos on YouTube. (Hello, latest hyperfixation.) And I couldn’t help but notice that there was a period of a year or so when they were being particularly deliberate about some of their staging to ensure that their incredible tenor / short king, Eli, was boosted up to be closer to the other guys' heights. Specifically, during the era when both Earl and J.None were full-time members of the band, so everyone else was a fair bit taller than him.

(Side note: As someone of about the same height and prone to perching myself, I can totally understand if being up higher was at least partly his own preference. Shout out to my fellow kitchen counter and furniture arm sitters.)

Do I think it's necessary to hide the group's height differences? Absolutely not. And clearly neither do they, because there are plenty of videos where they don't do it. (Or just pop him on an apple box for closer-framed shots.) Which is part of why it caught my eye when it did happen. But it's interesting to look at their methods and degrees of adjusting as additional aspects of their creativity.

From a production standpoint, it makes a lot of sense to have everyone’s heads at roughly the same level in the visual frame. It can make camera and lighting setups simpler. Especially since they’re singing together, so we want to see their faces. But the deliberateness in some of the blocking is more successful than in others.

In my opinion, it seems most natural when the guys are in more varied positions that feel motivated by the set dressing. For example, in their videos for Tennessee Whiskey and Sh-Boom, they have someone standing / leaning and the rest seated on slightly staggered levels to create a line that arcs a bit, both vertically as well as away from the camera at the center. They also all have at least one foot off the floor. So Eli being on the highest seat with both feet up stands out less. It seems more like casual happenstance.

screencap from VoicePlay’s video for Tennessee Whiskey

promo image from VoicePlay’s video for Sh-Boom (Life Could Be a Dream)

Honorable mention to the Candy Girl section of their Boy Bands in 5 Minutes medley, which gives Eli a brief respite from being towered over, and gives all the guys a break from the dance choreography. It's a cluster rather than a line, but it has a similar effect as the other two examples.

screencap from VoicePlay’s video for their Boy Bands in 5 Minutes medley

It’s a bit more obvious when Eli’s the only one on a different level. I think they made it work fairly well in their video for Bridge Over Troubled Water, because he’s at the end of the row on a piano bench. So it feels like there’s a plausible meta-narrative reason for him to be there, maybe playing notes on the piano for pitch adjustments or warm-ups. But everyone else gets comfy armchairs, which feels a bit unfair.

promo image from VoicePlay’s video for Bridge Over Troubled Water

I also noticed it in their Thinkin Bout You video. Because the other four are in (different) upholstered armchairs, but Eli’s tucked between Geoff and J on a plain, armless wooden chair. To their credit, they did their best to adjust the spacing and camera angles to make it look like maybe there just wasn’t enough room in the three-walled set for a fifth wide seat. Honestly, I might have spotted this one only because I was looking for it by the time I watched that video, but now I can’t unsee it.

promo image from VoicePlay’s video for Thinkin Bout You

“Do you have a point in all of this?” I hear you asking. Well, kind of. It’s this:

[image description]

[tweet from Liam O’Brien (@VoiceOfOBrien) posted following the March 26th episode of Talks Machina]

@TalksMachina B side. Caleb has never asked for praise. If anything, he seeks out scorn?

I myself am fascinated at his attempts to help and their occasional adverse effects. I think I built him to be strange. Definitely been interesting to noodle with.

D&D

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MINOR SPOILERS through Critcal Role, Campaign 2, Episode 56 ‘The Favor’

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I think this is where a lot of the conflict between Caleb and Beau stems from. Because she does seek praise (e.g. Dairon), and she projects that behavior onto him, which causes her to misinterpret his actions. And he is both terrible at communicating his thoughts to the rest of the group – which leaves his actions too open to interpretation – and believes that they are right to be angry with him most of the time.

Beau, like most of us, has a desire to be recognized when she does a good thing. She has also been told that blatantly seeking praise is bad – first by her parents, then by the Cobalt Soul generally, and most recently by Dairon in Asarius – so she has internalized that judgment. When looking inward at her own behavior, she frequently reacts by downplaying the actions she actually does want acknowledged, which makes her seem more mature and magnanimous and feels good in its own right. When looking outward, she tends to go on the attack (”Real cool, Caleb!”) and enforce the rules that were drummed into her against others, often in ways that come across as mean or abrasive. Beau is deeply uncomfortable (though slowly getting better) with expressing herself sincerely, so she relies on snark and anger.

Meanwhile, Caleb, in his perpetual state of self-loathing, is made deeply uncomfortable by praise. He doesn’t trust it. The last person who heaped praise on him tricked him into murdering his own parents. (He blames himself both for the killing, and for not seeing through the brainwashing. It’s a self-imposed no-win scenario.) Caleb sees himself as so fundamentally awful that anyone who sees good in him must be ignorant or delusional. So even though he’s not actually asking for a pat on the head, when Beau yells at him for doing so, he can at least agree with her that he deserves to be yelled at for something. After all, she is one of two people in all of Exandria who actually know the most about his past. He thinks that she sees him most clearly because of it. The others’ positive perceptions of him feel nice sometimes, but he doesn’t accept them as being based in reality. Beau is the one who tends to reinforce his own negative self-image and give him the scorn he believes everyone else would share if they knew the full truth.

I know why Liam / Caleb started the new campaign at level 2 along with the other players / characters from an external perspective. It wouldn’t be fair for Liam to have a huge head-start over the other players. Wizards get powerful pretty quickly at higher levels. But why – within the narrative – was Caleb at such a low level?

I know that Liam said on Talks that Caleb wasn’t that powerful to begin with – and out of practice to boot – but that doesn’t sit right with me. Even if they were only 17 years old at the time of their graduation test, presumably Caleb, Astrid, and Eodwulf would have been more powerful than what we saw from our resident hobo wizard in the first few episodes. The Empire wouldn’t have spent two years preparing their shiny new elite anti-treason force just to have them taken out by a low-level magic user – or a single gnoll – on their first real assignment.

I have a few theories of various likelihood…

1 – Caleb’s powers have atrophied from disuse.

Spending more than a decade in a stupor within an asylum and another five years in hiding from the imperial authorities has caused his once finely honed abilities to fade. A year in the regular Soltryce Academy and another in Ikithon’s evil Gifted and Talented program would have taught him a lot, but it’s been literally half his life since then. I don’t know if that kind of dwindling mechanic exists in the standard D&D rules, but it seems like Matt and Liam have decided that it’s a thing because it’s a cool narrative element. I agree. I just think it must have been a bigger loss than has been revealed to us so far.

2 – Whatever was done to Caleb to put him in the asylum stripped his magical abilities.

The most apparent chain of events – based on Liam / Caleb’s descriptions of his tragic backstory – is that Ikithon used Modify Memory on Caleb before his final exam as motivation, and Feeblemind after he “failed” as punishment / a means of disposal. When the woman in the asylum “cured” Caleb (presumably using Greater Restoration), she removed the effects of both spells.

That doesn’t necessarily preclude the possibility that Ikithon used an additional spell or two to further hobble him as a contingency plan. I don’t know of any spells with such an effect as written, particularly ones that would persist despite the use of Greater Restoration or have the blowback effect that Caleb described to Nott and Beau. But I can see Matt homebrewing something that nasty for narrative purposes. Maybe a variant of Imprisonment, which can only be ended by a 9th-level Dispel Magic or a circumstance set by the caster.

3 – Caleb has inadvertently hindered himself.

Everything Caleb has been through has taken a severe psychological toll on him. He might still be as powerful as Ikithon trained him to be, but have a psychosomatic block that prevents him from accessing those abilities until he unlocks them by relearning them from a different source. This would also be in keeping with his bouts of dissociation after he kills with fire magic.

4 – Caleb has deliberately hindered himself.

Because he learned all of his magic from imperial instructors – and Ikithon in particular – whom he no longer trusts, he doesn’t trust their teachings either. Caleb still technically has access to everything he could do before the asylum, but refuses to use any magic until he can (re)learn it “the right way”, i.e. on his own from sources other than the Soltryce Academy. Using questionable methods to achieve his goals could endanger the whole plan, so he has decided to start from scratch. Given what Liam has said regarding Caleb’s own view of himself and his past, I can certainly see him following that narrative path.

(And since, mechanically, wizards have to prepare a limited number of spells each day, it would be simple enough for Liam to just never prepare the spells Caleb has decided are off-limits.)

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Matt: Keyleth, you are swallowed by the kraken.

Laura: (to Marisha) You can do something from the inside.

Taliesin: Whoever actually succeeded in changing anything from the inside? Let’s be honest here.

Laura: Aww.

Taliesin: You become part of it.

Sam: Part of the system?

Taliesin: Just know somehow that this is a metaphor.

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I’ve just (finally) seen Guillermo del Toro’s latest movie and I have some thoughts. They aren’t well organized.

Spoilers below the cut. Apologies to those on mobile.

Well, okay, it's more of a "guesstimate". Since the show hasn't stated it explicitly, I've been trying to suss out when exactly the Queen's Gambit sank. There's some extraneous / redundant information in here just to illustrate my thought process.

I started with 'lesbian or bi women', and as of like a minute ago, I have replaced that with 'f/f shippy stuff', 'm/m shippy stuff' and 'shippy stuff' - but 'shipping' is a fandom concept and doesn't apply so well to stories in which l/g/b/p/q characters and relationships are explicitly canonical and uncontentious (e.g. TJ and Amal). Not sure whether to lean towards more distinctions - tags for the genders of the characters (e.g. 'f/f','m/m','genderfluid/agender'), tags for romantic vs. sexual relationships, tags for explicit canon vs. interpretation - or few.

Also funny tags are better than long-winded and dry tags iff they don't cause harm. Unusual tags that won't draw unwanted creepy attention are also welcome.

I've seen a lot of Pemberlings say really eloquent things about Caroline, our other "villain", and her motivations, but where George is concerned it's been pretty much wall-to-wall condemnation. (Not that I think what he did is in any way justifiable, but I do wonder what led him to a place where he thought to do it at all.) So...

[nerdy speculative ramblings with footnotes under the cut]